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

by Sam Harris

The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness. It can be quite possible, even reasonable, to risk one’s life to save others without believing any incredible ideas about the nature of the universe.

By contrast, the most monstrous crimes against humanity have invariably been inspired by unjustified belief.

Even where such crimes have been secular, they have required the egregious credulity of entire societies to be brought off. Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.36 At the heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid ideology, to which generations of men and women were sacrificed.

we will examine two of the darkest episodes in the history of faith: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is relevant here because it is generally considered to have been an entirely secular phenomenon. It was not. The anti-Semitism that built the crematoria brick by brick—and that still thrives today—comes to us by way of Christian theology. Knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.

THE medieval church was quick to observe that the Good Book was good enough to suggest a variety of means for eradicating heresy, ranging from a communal volley of stones to cremation while alive.4 A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to death.

Deuteronomy was the preeminent text in every inquisitor’s canon, for it explicitly enjoins the faithful to murder anyone in their midst, even members of their own families, who profess a sympathy for foreign gods.

the author of this document demands that anyone too squeamish to take part in such religious killing must be killed as well (Deuteronomy 17:12–13).

In addition to demanding that we fulfill every “jot” and “tittle” of Old Testament law,7 Jesus seems to have suggested, in John 15:6, further refinements to the practice of killing heretics and unbelievers: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius III, to crush the popular movement of Catharism.

There seems, in fact, to have been nothing wrong with these people apart from their attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs about the creation of the world. But heresy is heresy. Any person who believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will understand why these people had to be put to death.

It is important to remember, lest the general barbarity of time inure us to the horror of these historical accounts, that the perpetrators of the Inquisition—the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions—were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God—popes, bishops, friars, and priests.

The question of how the church managed to transform Jesus’ principal message of loving one’s neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder and rapine seems to promise a harrowing mystery; but it is no mystery at all.

the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence—that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of anything.

The justification for this behavior came straight from Saint Augustine, who reasoned that if torture was appropriate for those who broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the laws of God.13 As practiced by medieval Christians, judicial torture was merely a final, mad inflection of their faith.

The condemned are then immediately carried to the Riberia, the place of execution, where there are as many stakes set up as there are prisoners to be burnt.

On this a great shout is raised, and the cry is, “Let the dogs’ beards be made”; which is done by thrusting flaming bunches of furze, fastened to long poles, against their beards, till their faces are burnt black, the surrounding populace rending the air with the loudest acclamations of joy. At last fire is set to the furze at the bottom of the stake, over which the victims are chained, so high that the flame seldom reaches higher than the seat they sit on, and thus they are rather roasted than burnt.

Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm.

The basic lesson to be drawn from all this was summed up nicely by Will Durant: “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”

Witches, in all likelihood, did not even exist, and those murdered in their stead numbered perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over three hundred years of persecution;

THE accounts of witch hunts resemble, in most respects, the more widespread persecution of heretics throughout the Inquisition: imprisonment on the basis of accusations alone, torture to extract confession, confessions deemed unacceptable until accomplices were named, death by slow fire, and the rounding up of the freshly accused.

Among the many disasters that could befall a person over the course of a short and difficult life, medieval Christians seemed especially concerned that a neighbor might cast a spell and thereby undermine their health or good fortune. Only the advent of science could successfully undercut such an idea,

We must remember that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the germ theory of disease emerged, laying to rest much superstition about the causes of illness.

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was perfectly apparent that disease could be inflicted by demons and black magic.

Even the relentless torture of the accused was given a perverse rationale: the devil, it was believed, made his charges insensible to pain, despite their cries for mercy. And so it was that, for centuries, men and women who were guilty of little more than being ugly, old, widowed, or mentally ill were convicted of impossible crimes and then murdered for God’s sake.

The church did not officially condemn the use of torture until the bull of Pope Pius VII in 1816.

Anti-Semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God’s initial revelation. Christians generally also believe that the Jews murdered Christ, and their continued existence as Jews constitutes a perverse denial of his status as the Messiah.

Contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism is heavily indebted to its Christian counterpart. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian anti-Semitic forgery that is the source of most conspiracy theories relating to the Jews, is now considered an authoritative text in the Arab-speaking world.

Prior to the rise of the church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional persecution for their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture—that is, for the content of their own unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of a “chosen people,” while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world.

And while their explicit demonization as a people required the mad work of the Christian church, the ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day.

Christianity and Islam both acknowledge the sanctity of the Old Testament and offer easy conversion to their faiths. Islam honors Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as forerunners of Muhammad.

Judaism alone finds itself surrounded by unmitigated errors. It seems little wonder, therefore, that it has drawn so much sectarian fire. Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe that they are bearers of a unique covenant with God.

Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.

There is no evidence whatsoever, apart from the tendentious writings of the later church, that Jesus ever conceived of himself as anything other than a Jew among Jews, seeking the fulfillment of Judaism—and, likely, the return of Jewish sovereignty in a Roman world.

Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary’s virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means “young woman,” without any implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church’s resulting anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from the Hebrew.

Another strike against the doctrine of the virgin birth is that the other evangelists, Mark and John, seem to know nothing about it—though

Mary’s virginity has always been suggestive of God’s attitude toward sex: it is intrinsically sinful, being the mechanism through which original sin was bequeathed to the generations after Adam.

It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew.

We should note that the emphasis on miracles in the New Testament, along with the attempts to make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy, reveal the first Christians’ commitment, however faltering, to making their faith seem rational.

Even today, the apparent confirmation of prophecy detailed in the New Testament is offered as the chief reason to accept Jesus as the messiah.

The explicit demonization of the Jews appears in the Gospel of John: Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.

With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Christians—gentile and Jew alike—felt that they were witnessing the fulfillment of prophecy, imagining that the Roman legions were meting out God’s punishment to the betrayers of Christ.

Anti-Semitism soon acquired a triumphal smugness, and with the ascension of Christianity as the state religion in 312 CE, with the conversion of Constantine, Christians began openly to relish and engineer the degradation of world Jewry.

Jews were excluded from the military and from holding high office and were forbidden to proselytize or to have sexual relations with Christian women (both under penalty of death).

The Justinian Code, in the sixth century, essentially declared the legal status of the Jews null and void—outlawing the Mishnah (the codification of Jewish oral law) and making disbelief in the Resurrection and the Last Judgment a capital offense.

Like witches, the Jews of Europe were often accused of incredible crimes, the most prevalent of which has come to be known as the “blood libel”—born of the belief that Jews require the blood of Christians (generally newborn) for use in a variety of rituals.

But for sheer gothic absurdity nothing surpasses the medieval concern over host desecration, the punishment of which preoccupied pious Christians for centuries.

The doctrine of transubstantiation was formally established in 1252 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and prohibited Jews from owning land or embarking upon civil or military careers), and thereafter became the centerpiece of the Christian (now Catholic) faith.

Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime. The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries.

It is out of this history of theologically mandated persecution that secular anti-Semitism emerged.