The End of Faith
A little while back I decided that I ought to read more books that present views with which I disagree; it just seemed fair. After all, I spend a lot of time encouraging non-believers to read Christian books and it seemed that I ought to return the favor. With this in mind I picked up a copy of Sam Harris’ bestselling The End of Faith.
In this book Harris outlines, in great clarity, some of the dangers that attend religious faith and does so primarily by highlighting the lowlights of the world’s most widely received “Western” religions: Christianity and Islam. Of course, I’m no fan of Islam and I don’t really want to spend a great deal of time defending it; sufficed to say that the Koran does indeed advocate an often violent antagonism between Muslims and everyone else; whether we should simply exterminate sincere Muslims for the good of the world, as Harris advocates (page 53), is, I think, another matter. But when it comes to Christianity it seems that Harris makes a very obvious blunder, so much so that I wonder whether he is being intentionally misleading so as to advance his own argument.
Harris contends that when religious people do terrible things it’s because they are religious, not, that is, because they’re people. As Harris notes, religious people tend to argue the latter: that people, even religious people, sometimes do terrible things because there is something dangerous and devious inherent in all humanity–Christianity calls it “sin”. Of course, Harris dismisses this possibility as self-serving and evasive. Indeed, to him all really evil things seem to be inherently motivated by religion. But what of the great philosophically and functionally atheistic regimes of the 20th century? Don’t these show that even irreligious people can do horrible things and that thus the fault, to quote Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser, “is not with our stars but with our selves?” Sorry, no dice. These too are examples of religion. The devotion of the Germans to Hitler? Religious! (page 100) The programs of Stalin and Mao? Religious! (page 79) In fact, at one point Harris goes so far as to say that everyone is a product of religion, presumably making all atrocities, no matter how removed from explicitly creedal motivations, the fault of faith (page 108). By this point it should be fairly obvious that Harris is playing a rather sloppy and dishonest shell game: people do terrible things, no person is really that far removed from religion, therefore religion is to blame for the world’s ills. Hmm.
Harris himself provides an excellent exception that seems to disprove his rule. The Inquisition happened; it was bad. But what led to it being as bad as it was? For Harris the answer is obvious: religion, specifically the Christian religion. If it wasn’t for Christianity the Inquisition never would have been instituted in the first place, never would have spiraled out of control, and never would have claimed the lives of so many. But as Harris himself points out, there were massive disparities between the way that the Inquisition operated and the procedures outlined in the passages of the Hebrew Bible that were pressed into service to justify the proceedings. Whereas Harris notes that the Inquisition accepted individual, uncorroborated accusations as evidence, confiscated the property of the accused and gave some to the accuser as a reward, and allowed the accuser to remain anonymous and uninvolved in the trial, every single one of these things was prohibited in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is very clear that anyone accused of metaphysical “weirdness” can only be condemned on the testimony of at least two people (Deuteronomy 17:6), that the accused’s property must be totally destroyed (Deuteronomy 13:16-27), and that the ones making the accusations must themselves personally participate in the “wet work” of the execution (Deuteronomy 17:7). Considering that Harris himself believes that people may justifiably be executed for holding the wrong religious beliefs (again, page 53) and that phenomena akin to witchcraft may indeed be real (see the article on AlterNet), the only charge that he can lay at the Inquisition’s feet without hypocrisy is that its methods were unsound and encouraged false convictions. But as we’ve seen, its methods encouraged these false convictions precisely because they ignored the very verses they claimed to be applying. Thus, in a very real way, it seems that the Inquisition became the monstrosity that it was precisely because the Inquisitors were inadequately religious, not excessively so. Of course, one might think that Harris would at least mention Jesus’ preemptive prohibition of exactly this sort of thing in Matthew 13, but, rather unsurprisingly, he doesn’t.
It’s clear that Harris is far from an unbiased observer of the misadventures of religion. Indeed, he seems more like a zealous hater of monotheistic faith who earnestly desires to rip it up, root and branch, honesty and integrity be damned.
(The page numbers given in this article refer to the hardcover version of the book.)
Tags: End of Faith, Inquisition, Sam Harris