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

by Sam Harris

Above all, they appear to be suffering from a fear of contamination. 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.

it seems all but certain that if the West underwent a massive conversion to Islam—and, perforce, repudiated all Jewish interests in the Holy Land—the basis for Muslim “hatred” would simply disappear.

Most Muslims who commit atrocities are explicit about their desire to get to paradise. One failed Palestinian suicide bomber described being “pushed” to attack Israelis by “the love of martyrdom.” He added, “I didn’t want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a martyr.”

With regard to the suffering that his death would have inflicted upon his family, he reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick seventy people to join him in paradise. He would have been sure to invite his family along.

Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.

It is clear, however, that Muslims hate the West in the very terms of their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred. It is widely claimed by “moderate” Muslims that the Koran mandates nothing of the kind and that Islam is a “religion of peace.” But one need only read the Koran itself to see that this is untrue:

Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate. (Koran 9:73) Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous. (Koran 9:123)

This is why economic advantages and education, in and of themselves, are insufficient remedies for the causes of religious violence. There is no doubt that many well-educated, middle-class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God.

religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not, principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated.

Subtract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible, as does the spectacle of public jubilation that invariably follows their deaths; insert these peculiar beliefs, and one can only marvel that suicide bombing is not more widespread.

The believers who stay at home—apart from those that suffer from a grave impediment—are not the equal of those who fight for the cause of God with their goods and their persons. God has given those that fight with their goods and their persons a higher rank than those who stay at home. God has promised all a good reward; but far richer is the recompense of those who fight for Him…. He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and His apostle and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God…. The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies. (Koran 4:95–101)

Yes, the Koran seems to say something that can be construed as a prohibition against suicide—“Do not destroy yourselves” (4:29)—but it leaves many loopholes large enough to fly a 767 through:

Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of God, whether he dies or triumphs, We shall richly reward him…. The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan…. Say: “Tri-fling are the pleasures of this life. The hereafter is better for those who would keep from evil….” (Koran 4:74–78)

on the level of the state, a Muslim aspiration for world domination is explicitly enjoined by God; on the level of the individual, the metaphysics of martyrdom provides a rationale for ultimate self-sacrifice toward this end.

The metaphysics of Islam are particularly inauspicious where tolerance and religious diversity are concerned, for martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to paradise.

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

the problem is that most Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God. The corrective to the worldview of Osama bin Laden is not to point out the single line in the Koran that condemns suicide, because this ambiguous statement is set in a thicket of other passages that can be read only as direct summons to war against the “friends of Satan.”

If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon—because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.

There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books. But words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered strangers by the thousands because of the inspiration he found there.

Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change.

A single proposition—you will not die—once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.

There’s no denying that a person’s conception of the afterlife has direct consequences for his view of the world.

But religious moderation still represents a failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others. As a consequence of our silence on these matters, we live in a country in which a person cannot get elected president if he openly doubts the existence of heaven and hell.

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?

Without death, the influence of faith-based religion would be unthinkable. Clearly, the fact of death is intolerable to us, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave.

Every spiritual tradition rests on the insight that how we use our attention, from moment to moment, largely determines the quality of our lives. Many of the results of spiritual practice are genuinely desirable, and we owe it to ourselves to seek them out.

A variety of techniques, ranging from the practice of meditation to the use of psychedelic drugs, attest to the scope and plasticity of human experience.

For millennia, contemplatives have known that ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling that they call “I” and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe.

Such experiences are “spiritual” or “mystical,” for want of better words,

They also reveal a far deeper connection between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity.

A truly rational approach to this dimension of our lives would allow us to explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions in favor of free and rigorous inquiry.

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,

Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently.

We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives.

This has led many of us to conclude, wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in certain fantastical ideas can fulfill. It is nowhere written, however, that human beings must be irrational, or live in a perpetual state of siege, to enjoy an abiding sense of the sacred. On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational,

It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.

As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than a matter of being asked to do it. It follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.

It has long been obvious that the dogma of faith—particularly in a scheme in which the faithful are promised eternal salvation and doubters are damned—is nothing less than their perfect solution.

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.

Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.

It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry. And yet, the fact that we are no longer killing people for heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, however sacred, cannot survive the company of good ones forever.

Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences. Many Muslims, for instance, are convinced that God takes an active interest in women’s clothing. While it may seem harmless enough, the amount of suffering that this incredible idea has caused is astonishing.

Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: “Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus.”

the ancient Greeks began to lay their Olympian myths to rest several hundred years before the birth of Christ,

As the physicist Martin Rees points out, “We are entering an era where a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years….”

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis of religious faith.

Our primary task in our discourse with one another should be to identify those beliefs that seem least likely to survive another thousand years of human inquiry,

Which of our present practices will appear most ridiculous from the point of view of those future generations that might yet survive the folly of the present? It is hard to imagine that our religious preoccupations will not top the list.