The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

by Sam Harris

hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

The way Sam phrases this sentence seem to suggest that we should not have the freedom to believe in whatever we choose.

Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire.

Muslim faith are by no means confined to the beliefs of Muslim “extremists.” The response of the Muslim world to the events of September 11, 2001, leaves no doubt that a significant number of human beings in the twenty-first century believe in the possibility of martyrdom.

Was the celebration due to religious faith or from the perspective that the United States is an enemy and they were possibly witnessing the beginning of it's downfall?

As has been widely noted, they are also consumed by feelings of “humiliation”—humiliation over the fact that while their civilization has foundered, they have watched a godless, sin-loving people become the masters of everything they touch.

hmm... how does he know exactly the source of the humiliation?

Earlier in the year, the religious police in Mecca prevented paramedics and firefighters from rescuing scores of teenage girls trapped in a burning building.23 Why? Because the girls were not wearing the traditional head covering that Koranic law requires. Fourteen girls died in the fire; fifty were injured.

Wow, that is truly fucked up.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

I remember Sam getting a lot of flack of this statement.

Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old friends. You leave the table briefly to use the restroom, and upon your return you hear one of your friends whisper, “Just be quiet. He can’t know about any of this.”

I was reading this book and was convinced that these anecdotes were going to unfold into a sub-conscious confession that Sam murdered his wife and her lover and buried there bodies in his backyard.

You will study your friends’ faces. Are their expressions compatible with the more nefarious interpretations of this statement that are now occurring to you? Has one of your friends just confessed to sleeping with your wife? When could this have happened? There has always been a certain chemistry between them….

if your child comes to you in the middle of the night saying, “Daddy, there’s an elephant in the hall,” you might escort him back to bed toting an imaginary gun; if he had said, “Daddy, there’s a man in the hall,” you would probably be inclined to carry a real one.

This is when the wife's lover is trying to escape from the closet he was hiding in when Sam came home a little too early.

Let’s say that I want to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in my yard that is the size of a refrigerator.

He has something, or someone, buried in his yard

I feel a certain, rather thrilling “conviction” that Nicole Kidman is in love with me. As we have never met, my feeling is my only evidence of her infatuation. I reason thus: my feelings suggest that Nicole and I must have a special, even metaphysical, connection—otherwise, how could I have this feeling in the first place? I decide to set up camp outside her house to make the necessary introductions; clearly, this sort of faith is a tricky business.

With his wife out of the picture, Sam begins new and creepy pursuits.

We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.

Huntington observed that wherever Muslims and non-Muslims share a border, armed conflict tends to arise.

As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents.

Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary underpinnings of a civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century. There are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and enough blame to go around, but we should not ignore the fact that we must now confront whole societies whose moral and political development—in their treatment of women and children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty—lags behind our own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist thing to say, but it is neither.

Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields?

Sam mentions that Saddam's regime was notably secular. Do these tactics really have anything to do with faith?

What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily?

This is just a horrible example. Can we honestly say this would not happen? This is just dehumanizing Iraqis

We are now living in a world that can no longer tolerate well-armed, malevolent regimes. Without perfect weapons, collateral damage—the maiming and killing of innocent people—is unavoidable.

So military action is the only option? This whole chapter is turning to shit.

According to Zakaria, “if there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.”49 Perhaps. But “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism” is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem.

But we should still recognize what a fathomless sink for human resources (both financial and attentional) organized religion is.

We cannot wait for weapons of mass destruction to dribble out of the former Soviet Union—to pick only one horrible possibility—and into the hands of fanatics.

The developed world must, somehow, come to their rescue.

We can say it even more simply: we need a world government.

why is this suggestion in a book on ending faith?

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 “moderate” Muslims. Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an ideology that is basically benign—or outgrow it altogether—it is difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual state of war, and on innumerable fronts. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented.