Is religion the cause of human conflict?

Religion, claims Sam Harris, backed up by weapons of mass destruction, will destroy human civilization unless it is erased.

This stark, frightening claim is made repeatedly in the opening chapter of The End of Faith. If humanity ‘eradicates itself through war’ it will be because of religion (p.12). Unless we get rid of ideas like ‘God and ‘Allah', ‘they will unmake our world’ (p.14). Mixing weapons of mass destruction with religion is ‘a recipe for the fall of civilization’ (p.26). If people believe their holy texts, then ‘we need only count the days to Armageddon’ (p.35). If we have not ‘killed ourselves ten times over’ in two hundred years’ time, it will only be because religion has been extinguished.

Harris argues that it is wrong to absolve religion of its responsibility and instead to point the finger of blame at other factors. For both liberals and conservatives, he argues, when a suicide bomber blows himself up, ‘the role that faith played is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic or entirely personal […] Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated’ (p. 13).

But is it really possible to isolate religion from all other factors and identify it as the cause of all conflict? Harris appears to be confident that it is, but he unwittingly provides evidence which seems to suggest that reality is far more complex.

Take, for example, his position on Muslim suicide bombers. He claims Muslim terrorists are driven to violence by their Islamic beliefs and their hatred of the secular West, along with the inferior religions of Christianity and Judaism. Their hatred is derived directly from their belief that Koran is the perfect word of Allah, and not from any economic disadvantage. 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).

Harris’s ‘evidence’ here turns out to indicate that religion cannot be isolated from other factors, even with suicide bombers. If religious fundamentalism is predominantly a movement of the educated and middle class, then this indicates that social and economic factors play a part in religious fundamentalism in the developing world (just not necessarily that they are correlated with economic disadvantage). We could add to this the fact that suicide bombers are overwhelmingly male and in their late teens and early twenties – indicating gender and age factors as well.

Harris also tries to make a direct link between Islamic terrorism and the contents of the Koran. The Koran mandates violence, he claims, citing this line ‘Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.’ Of course there are many similarly appalling sections in the Bible, and yet he acknowledges that Christianity is currently less of a concern than Islam, saying that 'at this point in history, it represents a unique danger to all of us' (p.28, emphasis added). No doubt Harris recognises that people have not adhered to religious texts in a uniform way througout history, but his simplistic understanding of religion as being derived from scriptural literalism cannot be squared with the admission that people have re-interpreted and effectively re-edited their holy texts in very different ways in different historical periods.

Rather than Harris demonstrating that suicide bombing is a direct result of Islamic beliefs, he in fact raises the question, why, in this historical moment, are some Muslims currently acting on the basis of particular violent edicts in their holy text? And, by extension, why has suicide bombing become a method of attack only in relatively recent times? We might also ask, why are Islamic fundamentalists adhering to violent edicts in their texts while Christian fundamentalists in America are not stoning homosexuals to death as the Old Testament requires? If religion is defined so narrowly as literal belief in a text, we cannot answer these questions - we have to ask historical, cultural, social, economic, and other extra-religious questions.

But even if we accept that religious moderates do not adhere literally to a text, the claim that fundaentalists do seems equally problematic. What seems to me rather weak (though I am no expert on the Koran) is the evidence Harris offers for a connection between Islam and suicide attacks. The quote Harris offers to prove this connection goes: ‘Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God.’ This appears to be a call to go to battle, knowing that there is a possibility that you may die – not a call to actively pursue your own death. In the seventh century when Mohammad was supposedly writing this, he presumably didn’t have the technology to create bombs. What method of suicide would have been available that would also have killed many others? It seems far more likely that connection between this passage in the Koran and suicide bombings was made by contemporary Islamic fundamentalists – an interpretative leap is required to understand it as a command for suicide attacks, not a literal reading.

What I am trying to show here is that you do not have to query your atheist credentials to be critical of what the New Atheists claim. Harris comes across not as any expert on religion, but like an over-confident intellectual teenager - he is intelligent, writes good prose, and is able to construct what seems like a logical argument. He just doesn't seem to know very much about how religion works.