Missions Resources - Bibliography
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Authors: Sam Harris
ISBN: 0393327655
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Number of pages: 224
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
by Paul Grant
We've been lulled to sleep, but the danger of Christianity is lurking beneath the surface. Our only hope, says the author of this book, is that most Christians don't act on what they believe.
Nobody talks like this anymore. It’s not cultured to level blows at other religions – not anymore at least. Back in the seventies, when evangelicals first began crawling out of our self-imposed cultural exile, and real debate over real issues was standard fare on campus, evangelicals expected to have to account for their faith. Thinkers like Francis Schaeffer led the way, commenting on Ingmar Bergman films at a time when most evangelicals wouldn’t publicly admit going to the movies at all.
Back in college in the late nineties, I used to be assaulted – intellectually speaking – at all hours of the day, in my room, in the lounge, in classrooms. I had to be ready to defend my beliefs, and be willing to change them if proven wrong. Those days are now long-gone. People are terrified of confronting wrong ideas, lest we appear bigoted. In today’s academy, people think talking about intellectual errors is the same as racism or worse.
What a shame! I may be an evangelical Christian, but I am still an American, and miss good old debates. So although I should be offended or grieved by much of what Sam Harris says in The End of Faith, I am not. Most of what he says is correct; there are a few mistakes – including some damning ones for his case against Christianity – but all Christians need to account for the travesties detailed in this book. These are mostly crimes of violence we (the Church) have committed specifically in the name of our faith.
The End of Faith is really refreshing, in an old-fashioned sort of way. It’s a full-tilt, bare-knuckled blast at religions in general, and revealed religions in particular. What makes this book so delightful is the sheer bombast of it all. These literary grenades are a great mixture of offense, mockery and verbal humor.
Congratulations, Mr. Harris: you understood much (not all) of the heart of Christianity, especially the fact that American Christians mostly choose to resolve the contradictions between their faith and the secular society by ignoring them, or wishing them away. You have understood how formidable a challenge Christianity could pose to the secular world, if Christians actually acted on their beliefs.
Fortunately
for Mr. Harris, we're lukewarm in our faith (for the most part). From the opposite
end of the belief spectrum, Ron Sider has come to similar conclusions in his The
Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. Sorry, Mr. Harris. The in-house
discussion was well under way before you noticed the situation.
Why write a book like this exactly at a time like this, when the world stands at the brink of a worldwide religious conflagration? In order to stop the insanity. Sam Harris believes religions in general are irrational and unreasonable. They always have been and always will be. But in today’s age of weapons of mass destruction, we are in greater danger of self-annihilation than ever before in history. Harris believes that the only salvation for humanity is reason, and in his view, no revealed religion comes even close to reasonability.
In the end, Sam Harris is not so much angry as desperately terrified. Millions of people are going to die in the very near future, because we have nothing stopping us from blowing each other to atom-dust, especially people who don’t believe as we do. Most of Harris’ critique is reserved for Christians and Muslims. I cannot vouch for the strength of his analysis regarding the Muslim world, but I have two comments regarding his critique of Christianity.
First of all, he has chosen the wrong target for undermining the Christian case. It’s not the Bible, but Jesus and the Church. The Bible is not analogous to the Koran. Christians believe that Jesus is the "word made flesh," so if one wishes to undermine Christianity, start with Jesus – and the church. It’s not that the Bible isn’t important. But the church is where to start.
Since Jesus told his disciples that they (the church) were representing him to the world, the greatest proof against the truth of Christianity is the behavior of the church; specifically our failure to live in unity. It’s far easier to answer Harris' list of alleged contradictions in the Bible than account for the disunity of Jesus' Bride.
Harris' other important mistake is his conflation of Christianity and Western civilization. The majority of today's Christians are Asians and Africans, a majority that will only increase in the coming years. These Christians merit a footnote and nothing more in these pages. But in a book so deeply concerned with religious conflict on a global level, this oversight is unforgivable to the point of ruining his analysis.
A few other mistakes: Sam Harris breezily dismisses the murderous (and secular) totalitarian rampages of German Nazism, Russian Stalinism and Chinese Maoism as religion: “Although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.” p. 79 Sorry, Mr. Harris. Such casual sweeps of the hand will not do, especially by hiding Nazism under the skirts of Christian anti-Semitism.
What was spectacular about Nazi violence, and Stalinist and Maoist violence was the cool rationality of it all. Mid-century Germans were the most-educated people in the entire world. The Nazi movement was a rational movement drawn from the granddaddy of God-killers himself, Frederick Nietzsche. Totalitarian movements have not been religions. Unless we're defining religions differently - perhaps in a circular manner. Aha. More on this below.
It
gets worse: compare the French revolution with that of the British, or the
Americans. Remember the guillotine? The reign of terror was nothing if not
a rational movement. Grounded in the enlightenment - indeed, grounded in the
thought of the very same Voltaire, whose memory the French recently invoked
in defending their publication of anti-Islamic cartoons. Check your history,
Mr. Harris. Charles Dickens' description of London and Paris during the reign
of terror, in A Tale of
Two Cities, might be a good start.
Is this discussion of misbehaved unbelievers just a little petty? Far from it: it touches the very core of Sam Harris' error. The problem is individualism more than actual beliefs. But Harris has a soft spot for individualism. Eastern mysticism is good; religion is bad. The difference: revealed religions, with their historical orientations, reveal a social order, with claims over the individual's behavior. The reason Harris lumps Stalinism, Maoism and Nazism in with religion is because he is defining religions as inherently social. But he flips the script, finding any movement that is inherently social (including atheistic totalitarian regimes) as religions.
And so we have arrived at the crux of the matter. The worldview behind The End of Faith is intensely individualistic. Harris acknowledges the spiritual longings inside human hearts, even as the dismisses the whole "God-shaped hole" idea. But enlightenment is individual, not social.
We've
seen this before. In Dreamcatchers:
How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality, Philip Jenkins
has discussed the emerging new age faiths, created in the image of tribal
religions, but which are, ultimately non-tribal individualism. Practitioners
can catch a plane out to the reservation on Friday, bang drums and be spiritual
all
weekend, and go home again on Sunday night, without ever submitting to
the authority of a tribal elder. This is a new, antisocial religion, with
feathers
in the hair.
The key to healthy and rational spirituality, according to Sam Harris, is meditation along the lines of eastern mysticism. The primary value of a faith, according to Harris, is a faith's ability to accurately describe reality, and speak into an individual's experience of the world. Buddhist-style meditation, he claims, bridges the gap between self-awareness and awareness of the sufferings of other sentient creatures (which awareness forms the basis of his social vision).
We're on thin ice now. After asserting a self-evident principle as a starting place, and by putting individuals at the center of the cosmos, Harris is going to have to work doubly hard to create a social vision. It is the conviction of this reviewer that he fails in making me care sufficiently about others, after starting out from my own navel. Love doesn't follow from acknowledgement of others' suffering, any more than karmic merit motivates a person to wash the feet of the untouchables.
By the end of the book, the heavy artillery, the mockery and the sarcasm start to get boring. For example:
The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself) leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.
Well, that was fun, and must have felt great to write down, but Harris simply can’t sustain the throttle. It gets boring after a while, or maybe shrill, which diminishes the emotional quality of his call to arms.
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