Prelude to an Essay on Sam Harris's 'The End of Faith'

Sam Harris is a very frightened man. So would you be, if you realised how perilously we are teetering on the edge of world destruction. And there is no mistaking how we arrived at this historical juncture. With weapons of mass destruction increasingly finding their way into the hands of people who hold irrational beliefs about God, morality and the afterlife, Harris points the finger of blame for the impending apocalypse squarely at religion.

The End of Faith (first published August 2004) was the first of the books around which the term ‘New Atheism’ crystallised. It is very much bears the imprint of its time, begun, according to Harris, on 12^th September 2001 and developed during the height of the Bush era. Liberalism in America was being attacked by Islamic fundamentalism from without and by Christian fundamentalism from within. This raised a major question for political progressives who previously may have championed the equal validity of all cultures: how is it possible to be tolerant towards people who reject the very notion of our tolerance? Harris’s book signalled a possible new direction – a determination to stand up for the values of liberalism on its own terms, and to go on the attack against those alternative cultures which may have been afforded more respect in the postmodern era.

There was clearly a need to speak out about some of the more dangerous manifestations of religious belief, and this book performed a timely and important service in encouraging secularists, atheists and humanists to be openly critical of the excesses of religious irrationalism, be it Christian, Muslim or whatever. As an atheist who has very little sympathy for baseless religious beliefs, I read the book expecting to have my own attitudes confirmed. And yet there were many aspects of the book which I felt were just not right. None of my objections have anything to do with my non-belief in gods; the aspects of the book I had problems with were his depiction of the impacts of religion, and whether it was really possible to make a clear distinction between ‘irrational’ religious beliefs (more moderate ones, at least) and the beliefs of atheists – his claims were all over-simplified, over-generalised, and logically flawed. It was this initial reaction which has encouraged me to examine more closely the nature of religion, beliefs, values and how we make life meaningful.

In the ‘review’ that follows, I want to critically examine the claims that Harris makes – not the claims about whether or not God exists, or whether Jesus really was born of a virgin – but his claims about what religious belief means and its impacts in the real world. I’ll be looking at three aspects in turn: his understanding of religion itself, his attitude towards religious and cultural tolerance, and then Harris’s own belief system which he outlines toward the end of the book – and asking how it is possible to distinguish this from 'religion'.