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by
Sam Harris
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March 29 - April 9, 2021
Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago—and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture.
Because they are believed to be nothing less than verbatim transcripts of God’s utterances, texts like the Koran and the Bible must be appreciated, and criticized, for any possible interpretations to which they are susceptible—and
In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs?
This is not to say that sensory experience offers us no indication of reality at large; it is merely that, as a matter of experience, nothing arises in consciousness that has not first been structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system.
For every neuron that receives its input from the outside world, there are ten to a hundred others that do not. The brain is therefore talking mostly to itself, and no information from the world (with the exception of olfaction) runs directly from a sensory receptor to the cortex, where the contents of consciousness appear to be sequestered.
belief in the full efficacy of prayer, for instance, becomes an emphatically public concern the moment it is actually put into practice: the moment a surgeon lays aside his worldly instruments and attempts to suture his patients with prayer, or a pilot tries to land a passenger jet with nothing but repetitions of the word “Hallelujah” applied to the controls, we are swiftly delivered from the provinces of private faith to those of a criminal court.
Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene. There are still a number of cultures in which the germ theory of disease has yet to put in an appearance, where people suffer from a debilitating ignorance on most matters relevant to their physical health. Do we “tolerate” these beliefs? Not if they put our own health in jeopardy.22
Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.4
As long as religious propositions purport to be about the way the world is—God can actually hear your prayers, If you take his name in vain bad things will happen to you, etc.—they must stand in relation to the world, and to our other beliefs about it.
This does not suggest, however, that all forms of authority are valid; nor does it suggest that even the best authorities will always prove reliable. There are good arguments and bad ones, precise observations and imprecise ones; and each of us has to be the final judge of whether or not it is reasonable to adopt a given belief about the world.
The problem with scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations (including most of the literal ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith.
When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years. Indeed, it is also well known that certain Vatican officials (the most notorious of whom was Bishop Alois Hudal) helped members of the SS like Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Mueller, Franz
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like every religion, Islam has had its moments. Muslim scholars invented algebra, translated the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and made important contributions to a variety of nascent sciences at a time when European Christians were luxuriating in the most abysmal ignorance. It was only through the Muslim conquest of Spain that classical Greek texts found their way into Latin translation and seeded the Renaissance in western Europe. Thousands of pages could be written cataloging facts of this sort for every religion, but to what end? Would it suggest that religious faith is good, or even
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most Muslims appear to be “fundamentalist” in the Western sense of the word—in that even “moderate” approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and inerrant word of the one true God. The difference between fundamentalists and moderates—and certainly the difference between all “extremists” and moderates—is the degree to which they see political and military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith.
Western imperialism has offended their dignity, their pride, and their honor.
even if every Muslim enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that of the average middle-class American, the West might still be in profound danger of colliding with Islam.
Given what many Muslims believe, is genuine peace in this world possible? Is the relative weakness of Muslim states the only thing that prevents outright war between Islam and the West?
imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons—weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with such technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters currently loose in the world:
As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not.
Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct.
all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy.
Is Islam compatible with a civil society? Is it possible to believe what you must believe to be a good Muslim, to have military and economic power, and to not pose an unconscionable threat to the civil societies of others? I believe that the answer to this question is no. If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation. This transformation, to be palatable to Muslims, must also appear to come from Muslims themselves. It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of
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While there is surely an opposition between reason and faith, we will see that there is none between reason and love or reason and spirituality. The basis for this claim is simple. Every experience that a human being can have admits of rational discussion about its causes and consequences (or about our ignorance thereof).
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely
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Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet. The fact that our ethical intuitions have their roots in biology reveals that our efforts to ground ethics in religious conceptions of “moral duty” are misguided.
We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives. Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.
The perverse wonder of evolution is this: the very mechanisms that create the incredible beauty and diversity of the living world guarantee monstrosity and death. The child born without limbs, the sightless fly, the vanished species—these are nothing less than Mother Nature caught in the act of throwing her clay. No perfect God could maintain such incongruities. It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such horrors upon the earth would be ground to dust for his crimes.
That most of us feel no ethical obligations toward rocks—to treat them with kindness, to make sure they do not suffer unduly—can be derived from the fact that most of us do not believe that there is anything that it is like to be a rock.
The scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling.
Cognitive chauvinism of this sort has not merely been a problem for animals. The doubt, on the part of Spanish explorers, about whether or not South American Indians had “souls” surely contributed to the callousness with which they treated them during their conquest of the New World. Admittedly, it is difficult to say just how far down the phylogenic tree our ethical responsibilities run.
“what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
How is it, after all, that a Nazi guard could return each day from his labors at the crematoria and be a loving father to his children? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: the Jews he spent the day torturing and killing were not objects of his moral concern. Not only were they outside his moral community; they were antithetical to it. His beliefs about Jews inured him to the natural human sympathies that might have otherwise prevented such behavior.
most believers differentiate themselves, in moral terms, from those who do not share their faith.
If certain people can’t see the unique wisdom and sanctity of my religion, if their hearts are so beclouded by sin, what concern is it of mine if others mistreat them?
the traditional opposition between reason and intuition is a false one: reason is itself intuitive to the core, as any judgment that a proposition is “reasonable” or “logical” relies on intuition to find its feet.
male beliefs about “honor” have made it a brilliant instrument of psychological and cultural oppression. Rape has become a means through which the taboos of a community can be used to rend it from within.
What is love? Few of us will be tempted to consult a dictionary on the subject. We know that we want those we love to be happy. We feel compassion for their suffering. When love is really effective—that is, really felt, rather than merely imagined—we cannot help sharing in the joy of those we love, and in their anguish as well.
To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. Indeed, we seem to know, intuitively, that it would take a different kind of person to perpetrate violence of the latter sort.
it is not enough that Jesus was a man who transformed himself to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart’s confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory.
There is clearly no greater obstacle to a truly empirical approach to spiritual experience than our current beliefs about God.
the failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, moment after moment, is what gives each of us the feeling that we call “I,” and this is the string upon which all our states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.17
Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.
We live in societies that are still constrained by religious laws and threatened by religious violence.
The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another.
There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece.
No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.
The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.
one may prop up a disconsolate friend with the words “have faith in yourself.”
How do I know that other human beings are conscious like myself? Philosophers call this the problem of “other minds,” and it is generally acknowledged to be one of reason’s many cul de sacs, for it has long been observed that this problem, once taken seriously, admits of no satisfactory exit.
the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma.
