Across the world, religion is at the root of violent confrontations. Here at home,
religious dogma threatens vital stem-cell research and the teaching of
evolution in schools.
A
new wave of atheists — including biologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher
Daniel Dennett — has emerged to champion rationalism. Leading the charge, in
books and lectures, is Sam Harris.
Harris,
who is pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience (“when,” he says, “I can step away
from my day job as an infidel”) is putting a fresh, positive face on atheism.
His first book, “The End of Faith,” has reclaimed a spot on the New York Times’
paperback best-seller list, while his new book, “Letter to a Christian Nation,”
is on the hardcover Top 10.
In
contrast to screaming television antagonists, Harris is disarmingly polite as
he lays out his case. He’s so reasonable that on Fox News Bill O’Reilly ends an
interview with him by instructing viewers: “Buy the book.”
If
they do, they will find a clear, concise, and logical argument — and it may
clash with everything they hold sacred.
Scrutinizing
the Bible or the Koran, Harris doesn’t pull punches. He believes we can do a
lot better than to live our lives according to the wisdom of men who thought
the world was flat. And he doesn’t gloss over the violent passages of either
book.
Harris
believes we waste a great deal of human energy on what he believes issupernatural
nonsense. Beyond that, he warns, in an age of chemical weapons and suicide
bombers, blind adherence to ancient mythologies could bring the end of
civilization.
He
finds “elements of reasonableness” in the Bush administration’s “war on
terror,” and while he has harsh criticism of the president, he says that
liberals need to recognize the danger posed by Muslim extremists.
In
a recent interview, Harris discussed all that. The following is an edited
version of our conversation.
City:
How does your study of neuroscience inform your views about religion?
Harris: If you want
to understand the human mind, you have to know something about the brain.
There’s no question that religion emerges from deeply ingrained cognitive
traits: a desire to understand our circumstance, a desire to predict the future
and to have our belief order our experience in a way that is useful and confers
emotional, behavioral, and ultimately adaptive advantages for the species.
There
is clearly an evolutionary explanation for the tools we have cognitively, and
this is being studied at the level of the brain. You could certainly argue in
evolutionary terms that religion has served an important purpose, if not for
ourselves in the immediate past, for our distant ancestors. It probably allowed
large groups of people, larger than kin, to cohere. It does not seem
far-fetched to say that any group tightly bound by its religious dogmas would
have had advantages over groups that were not.
But you can’t move from an evolutionary
explanation like that to argue that religion is useful now. In fact, I think
it’s one of the principal impediments to developing a genuinely sustainable
global civilization at this point.
What
do you hope to accomplish with your new book?
I
think it’s worth focusing on our indigenous problem of right-wing Christianity.
I couldn’t let Islam go unmentioned, and my criticism is against religious
faith in principle, but I think some emphasis on the problems posed by the
political empowerment of the religious right in our country is definitely
warranted. It also reflects the response I got to “The End of Faith.” It was
not a surprise that most of the criticism I got was from rather committed
Christians.
You
point out that everyone is already an atheist in one way or another; no one
believes in Poseidon anymore. Do all Christians understand this?
Amazingly,
they don’t. It strikes them as utterly preposterous that anyone could compare
the God of Abraham to a dead god of Greece or Rome or any other
god. What seems an apt, accurate, and devastating analogy to secular people
seems like a non sequitur to Christians. It’s also strange that I now get hate
mail from people who actually believe in Poseidon.
Christians
think there’s something about the Christian tradition and the contents of the
Bible that puts the God of Abraham on a completely different footing
epistemologically. It’s a sign that it’s very difficult to see your
circumstance with fresh eyes when you’ve been taught from the moment you
acquired language that the word “god” means something robust, intelligible, and
beyond criticism and these other words are names of mythical figures.
For
many people, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina — not to mention the Holocaust
— raise the question of what difference God makes.
In
terms of the obvious examples of God’s failure to protect good human beings,
moderates basically respond that they would never expect God to make decisions
of that scale. They don’t have an interventionist God in mind. Then they resort
to notions of mystery and the inscrutability of God’s will. It’s almost a kind
of agnosticism.
Fundamentalists
bite the bullet and tell you why they think God is angry and victimizing these
specific people. Occasionally they’ll resort to notions of God’s inscrutability
when the evil being done is so patently at odds with the notion of a benign and
omnipotent God.
When
you talk about little girls getting crushed by farm equipment, they tend not to
say God is punishing us for supporting gay marriage and abortion. Even they are
somewhat chastised by how ludicrous it is to suppose that a good God was
overseeing accidents of that sort. It’s odd. It seems to me to be utter
disproof of the notion of an omnipotent, loving, and moral God.
The
standard line is that religious extremists cause problems. You believe
religious moderates are also problematic. Why?
Religious
moderates insist that we respect people’s religious beliefs no matter how
unreasonable and divisive they are. We respect this basic claim that it’s
legitimate to organize your life around the contents of a single book. This
mode of discourse gives immense cover to fundamentalists.
We
really can’t call a spade a spade when it’s religious dogma getting people
killed, because moderates want their faith claims off the table of criticism. And
they also want raising their children to believe they are Christians, Muslims,
or Jews to remain off the table. The other problem is, by virtue of being
moderates, they don’t understand the degree to which fundamentalists and
extremists are moved by their theology.
They
don’t take their theology seriously; therefore they’re rather perversely the
least able to understand that people really do fly planes into buildings because
they think they’re going to paradise. People really do live in the Christian
West with this expectation that Jesus is going to come down and Rapture them
and their families into the sky in a few years.
I
know many good people who say religion gives structure to their lives and links
them to generations past.
We
can get our structure without pretending to know things we don’t know. If false
certainty were a good principle of structuring one’s life, it would take five
minutes to conjure a religion better than Christianity or Islam in terms of
structuring lives and creating happy, non-neurotic, peaceful people. You could
simply take the best things from these religions and jettison the rest. You’d
have a better dogmatism to live by, but it wouldn’t suggest that this dogmatism
were true.
What
if a religion said: “Treat everyone well, don’t lie, raise your children to
excel in science and mathematics and if you don’t do that, you’re going to be
tortured for eternity by a green-headed demon”? This would be a benign religion
to spread when you compare it to the jihadist lunacy that goes on under the
name of Islam or many of these end-time beliefs that animate Christianity at
the moment.
This
would be a good religion, yet it wouldn’t lend the slightest bit of credence to
the claim that there’s a demon who’s going to enforce its precepts. People
would recognize that immediately. It’s based on this false notion that you can
believe things simply because they’re useful. You should only be able to
believe things because you have reason to believe that they’re true. Usefulness
and truth are quite distinct. We can get our useful structures without deluding
ourselves about the nature of the universe.
Some
say religion supplies a moral foundation. Religious groups are at the center of
charities, soup kitchens, and other good causes.
Even
if religion made people good, it would not provide the slightest evidence for
the specific claims of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. It’s a non sequitur to
say this grants some credence to the claims of religious people.
But
I think you can argue that it’s not as useful as is being alleged. It’s not a
good basis for morality, because real moral concerns have to be focused on
questions of the suffering of conscious beings. The moment you focus on
suffering, you see that many of the moral concerns religious people press have
nothing to do with morality.
Christians
debate gay marriage as though it were the question upon which the greatest
swing in human suffering is going to turn. But they’re arguing based on a
conception of morality born of religious dogmatism. It’s not born of a real
concern for the living reality of human suffering.
Is
there any place for spiritualism in the world?
There’s
no question that people have real experiences that we can call spiritual or
mystical, and there are ways to have these experiences. What should be open to
debate is what is reasonable to conclude about the universe on the basis of
these experiences. If you go into a cave and spend a year praying to Jesus,
there’s no question that there’s a way of doing that that will radically change
your experience of the world. You could come out the most loving and
compassionate and well-adjusted person around.
But
it’s also true that a Hindu could go into a cave and achieve the same thing
thinking about Krishna. On the basis of those two
experiments, you have to admit that the claims of Christianity or Hinduism are
not really the best interpretations of the data. There are deeper principles of
human psychology and our potential to transform our experience that we have to
talk about rationally, in the spirit of science.
If
it’s done in that spirit, there will be disagreements but always with respect
to evidence and argument. The conversation remains open. That’s precisely what
does not characterize religion. In religion, we have absurd claims to certainty
married to incredible passions that get people killed and leave us in a world
where if you draw a cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad, you can get crowds
100,000 strong seething with rage and calling for the deaths of newspaper
editors. It’s time we noticed the difference between that mode of discourse and
the discourse we demand of every other area of our lives.
Ann
Coulter’s recent bestseller was titled “Godless,” as if that’s the ultimate
insult. Why do people hate atheists?
I
can count on one hand the memes that define this animosity toward atheism. One
is they think atheism brought us the Nazis and the Communists and the Killing Fields
of Pol Pot. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that atheism is
responsible for the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Auschwitz was an
expression of reason run amuck. This is where they think these events came
from: a lack of faith in God.
There
is not the slightest sense in which those events were born of people thinking
too clearly about the nature of the universe. People also suggest that atheism
is itself a faith, the least reasonable faith: “You can’t prove that God’s not
there, so atheists are making the most outrageous claim.”
You
write that political correctness has helped to allow forced marriages, honor
killings, and loathing of homosexuals to take place in Europe.
It’s
been disastrous, and this recent canceling of the German opera is another example.
It’s easy to see why they canceled it. Who wants to sit in the audience
wondering whether a bomb will go off? But this kind of capitulation is a bad
strategy, given the pretensions to power so many Muslims have in Europe. There’s got
to be some unified front that all civilized people present.
Essentially
it’s the Salman Rushdie dilemma. He wrote his book and was hung out to dry by
liberal Europe. What there should have been the next
day is 100,000 Salman Rushdies. The fatwa would not have been a problem if
everyone stood shoulder to shoulder with him.
Given
your views about the threat of Muslim extremists, what are your thoughts on the
“war on terror”?
There
are elements of reasonableness to it, but it’s been executed so ineptly that
it’s almost the worst possible situation. What we’ve done is alienate — with
some exceptions — all of our necessary allies. We’ve allowed the Ahmadinejads
of the world to drive a wedge between us and our European allies.
We’re
doing everything possible, it seems, not to have the entire civilized world
form a united front against the genuine enemies of civilization who are, with
few exceptions, located in the Muslim world at the moment. I really think it is
in some significant sense civilization against the Islamists.
We
need to find some way of convincing hundreds of millions of Muslims that the
Osama bin Ladens of the world are their enemies. We have to break this
reflexive solidarity that many Muslims have simply because they’re Muslims.
This is really where my criticism is focused; this solidarity born of religious
ideology is intrinsically divisive and causing conflict that would not
otherwise occur.
So
you agree with George Bush about the enemy?
We’ve
elected a president who can’t speak, who is animated by his own religious
dogmas, who is beholden to genuine religious lunatics in our own culture, and
who has been almost perfectly designed to alienate our allies and enrage our
enemies. So it’s a bad situation. And yet to compound the problem, his critics
hate him with such fury that they manage to obscure how genuinely scary our
enemies in the Muslim world are.
Unless
liberals admit that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world
who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they’re going to disqualify themselves as
protectors of our society and of civilization. To keep harping on the fact that
there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a dead end
when it comes to dealing with the current reality, which is: we’re in Iraq, Iraq now is a
center of terrorism, and the fact that it wasn’t before we got there is truly
irrelevant at the moment. We all just have to get on the same page and realize
who the enemy is.
Your
books have sold well. Is atheism entering the mainstream?
The
idea that 50 years from now we are still going to be a society in which half
the people think Jesus is going to come back in their lifetime seems a recipe
for disaster geopolitically. Given how our world is shrinking in terms of the
scale of communication and the fact that religious provincialism is becoming
quickly untenable, I don’t think our view of religion can survive 50 more years
of modernity. Or we won’t survive our views of religion. Something’s got to
give.
Do
you really believe that we will someday look upon our early 21st-century
religious beliefs with the kind of horror with which we now look at slavery?
It’s
an apt analogy. Just look at the recent history of racism in America, the fact
that we were lynching people based on a completely un-self-critical embrace of
racist hatred. We had Southerners smugly defending their racism, resisting
integration, killing blacks, and openly wishing they’d won the Civil War.
It
seems to me the South still hasn’t come to terms with how they were on the
wrong side of that moral argument. But when you look back on our recent history
of racism, it seems impossible that we could be racist in quite that way again,
given popular culture. I think religion is up for the same transformation as
racism. I also think nationalism is going to have to go in pretty short order.
This article appears in Oct 18-24, 2006.
