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.

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'.

New Atheism Blog - Intro: Working Out What the Hell I'm Doing

Welcome to the latest of my many attempts to start blogging regularly!

This blog is mainly intended to be an outlet for ideas related to what will hopefully end up as a PhD project, though I will undoubtedly stray into other territory, be it personal, political or pointless. Feel free to post comments and I'll do my best to respond! Just an intro for now to help people (including myself) work out what I'm talking about.

I'm interested in taking a critical look at the public debate about atheism and the role of religion in contemporary society - not adopting a simplistic stance on whether religion is 'good' or 'bad', but, rather, to trace the roots of this debate and ask why it has become such an urgent issue in our culture. It is often seen as a straightforward response to Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, but I think there is a more complex and interesting story to tell about where it originates from - and it has its roots in a crisis of moral legitimacy within liberalism itself.

A point to make early on about my stance on Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others associated with 'New Atheism' - I am an atheist myself, and I have no time for for the crazier 'scientific' arguments supporting the existence of God. While I share this position with the New Atheists, I also understand that many people who believe in God don't base their belief on 'scientific' claims anyway, and not all religious people hold irrational moral positions based on dogma. I feel that there is much to be regretted about 'New Atheism', which has had an unnecessarily divisive impact on public debate and has created a crude and over-simplified picture of the role that religion plays in many people's lives.

I also think that there has been a failure on the part of the New Atheists and their supporters to reflect on the foundations of their own intellectual positions. For me, New Atheism is not only responding to an attack on secular liberal democracies by religious fundamentalism, but also to a crisis of moral legitimacy within liberalism itself. The flawed attempts by Harris and Dawkins in particular to claim a 'scientific' basis for their values reflect this, and I think that their focus on attacking religion distracts liberals from examining problems within their own ideologies.

That probably doesn't clarify very much but it will hopefully start to make sense as I slowly work out what the hell I'm talking about. Feel free to argue - I'm open to revising my ideas, though I won't necessarily admit that I was ever wrong about anything.

Follow me on Twitter @Steverini.