Problems With Sam Harris's The End of Faith

I have started a careful re-reading of Sam Harris's The End of Faith and will be writing a longer critique as soon as I have time; for now I just wanted to give one example of the many problems with his work.

And I will just emphasise again that my problem with what he says has nothing to do with his atheism - it is with his 'analysis' of the effects of religious belief.

In his opening chapter, he claims that religious belief results in tribalism and human conflict, and therefore cannot be sustained at a point in history when humans have developed weapons of mass destruction. Others blame violent acts such as suicide bombings on other factors such as politics, economics or personal circumstances, but Harris claims that religion can be isolated and identified as the principal cause of their actions.

He later offers some evidence for this claim - but it is contradictory. We cannot blame acts of violence on economic definciency, he writes, because most suicide bombers tend to be from middle class backgrounds. He writes 'There is no doubt that many well-educated, middle-class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God. As Samuel Huntington and others have observed, religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not, principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated' (p. 32).

If it was true that religion can be isolated from other factors as the cause of human conflict, why, as he acknowledges, is there a correlation between Islamic fundamentalism and middle class men of a particular age group? This observation alone brings in several other criteria - class, gender and age - into the mix as well. There are undoubtedly others. Harris's book contains many clear but unacknowledged contradictions such as this which undermine his central arguments.

This is just one that I have picked up on - and I will address some of the other problems with his book as I go along.