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

by Sam Harris

Astonishingly, ideas as spurious as the blood libel are still very much with us, having found a large cult of believers in the Muslim world.

We believe that the Führer is obeying a higher call to fashion German history. There can be no criticism of this belief. Rudolf Hess, in a speech, June 1934.

The rise of Nazism in Germany required much in the way of “uncritical loyalty.” Beyond the abject (and religious) loyalty to Hitler, the Holocaust emerged out of people’s acceptance of some very implausible ideas.

Himmler was an extreme case: the picture is perhaps one of someone quite mad. But one of his characteristics was much more widely shared—his mind had not been encouraged to grow. Filled with information and opinion, he had no critical powers.

Nazism evolved out of a variety of economic and political factors, of course, but it was held together by a belief in the racial purity and superiority of the German people. The obverse of this fascination with race was the certainty that all impure elements—homosexuals, invalids, Gypsies, and, above all, Jews—posed a threat to the fatherland.

And while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful.

Ironically, the very fact that Jews had been mistreated in Germany (and elsewhere) since time immemorial—by being confined to ghettos and deprived of civic status—gave rise to the modern, secular strand of anti-Semitism,

An analysis of prominent anti-Semitic writers and publications from 1861 to 1895 reveals just how murderous the German anti-Semites were inclined to be: fully two-thirds of those that purported to offer “solutions” to the “Jewish problem” openly advocated the physical extermination of the Jews—and

Genocidal anti-Semitism had been in the air for some time, particularly in Eastern Europe. In the year 1919, for instance, sixty-thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine alone.48 Once the Third Reich began its overt persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic pogroms erupted in Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and elsewhere.

With passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 the transformation of German anti-Semitism was complete. The Jews were to be considered a race, one that was inimical to a healthy Germany in principle. As such, they were fundamentally irredeemable, for while one can cast away one’s religious ideology, and even accept baptism into the church, one cannot cease to be what one is.

That a person’s race could not be rescinded was underscored as early as 1880, in a Vatican-approved paper: “Oh how wrong and deluded are those who think Judaism is just a religion, like Catholicism, Paganism, Protestantism, and not in fact a race, a people, and a nation!…For the Jews are not only Jews because of their religion…they are Jews also and especially because of their race.”

Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, “after committing crimes as great as any in human history.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Vatican attempted to combat the unorthodox conclusions of modern Bible commentators with its own rigorous scholarship. Catholic scholars were urged to adopt the techniques of modern criticism,

The movement was known as “modernism,” and soon occasioned considerable embarrassment, as many of the finest Catholic scholars found that they, too, were becoming skeptical about the literal truth of scripture.

In 1907, Pope Pius X declared modernism a heresy, had its exponents within the church excommunicated,

Although not a single leader of the Third Reich—not even Hitler himself—was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.

While the rise and fall of modernism in the church can hardly be considered a victory for the forces of rationality, it illustrates an important point: wanting to know how the world is leaves one vulnerable to new evidence. It is no accident that religious doctrine and honest inquiry are so rarely juxtaposed in our world.

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, we will find that we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to feel compassion for the suffering of others. Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm.

Whenever you hear that people have begun killing noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these freshly minted killers believe? You will find that it is always—always—preposterous.

There is a reason, after all, why we must now confront Muslim, rather than Jain terrorists, in every corner of the world. Jains do not believe anything that is remotely likely to inspire them to commit acts of suicidal violence against unbelievers.

By any measure of normativity we might wish to adopt (ethical, practical, epistemological, economic, etc.), there are good beliefs and there are bad ones—and it should now be obvious to everyone that Muslims have more than their fair share of the latter.

It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost everything of value in our world, because nearly every person who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do the job.

There is no telling what our world would now be like had some great kingdom of Reason emerged at the time of the Crusades and pacified the credulous multitudes of Europe and the Middle East. We might have had modern democracy and the Internet by the year 1600.

the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism, indeed who would never commit terrorism of the sort that has become so commonplace among Muslims; and the Muslim world has no shortage of educated and prosperous men and women, suffering little more than their infatuation with Koranic eschatology, who are eager to murder infidels for God’s sake.

We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet.

A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do.

people who believe that Islam must inform every dimension of human existence, including politics and law, are now generally called not “fundamentalists” or “extremists” but, rather, “Islamists.”

Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the “enemies of God.”

Muslims are quick to observe that there is an inner (or “greater”) jihad, which involves waging war against one’s own sinfulness, no amount of casuistry can disguise the fact that the outer (or “lesser”) jihad—war against infidels and apostates—is a central feature of the faith.

the duty of jihad is an unambiguous call to world conquest. As Bernard Lewis writes, “the presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule.”

While the Koran is more than sufficient to establish these themes, the literature of the hadith elaborates: Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be he godly or wicked. A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it. A day and a night fighting on the frontier is better than a month of fasting and prayer. Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and get killed again (in Allah’s Cause).

Many hadiths of this sort can be found, and Islamists regularly invoke them as a justification for attacks upon infidels and apostates.

Given the long history of conflict between Islam and the West, almost any act of violence against infidels can now be plausibly construed as an action in defense of the faith.

In Islam, it is the “moderate” who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.

On this question, the law is clear and unequivocal. If a Muslim renounces Islam, even if a new convert reverts to his previous faith, the penalty is death.

It is true that the Koran provides a handbrake, of sorts, for Muslim “moderates”—“There shall be no compulsion in religion” (Koran 2:256)—but a glance at the rest of the Koran, and at Muslim history, reveals that we should not expect too much from its use.

Even People of the Book must keep to themselves and “humbly” tithe (pay the jizya) to their Muslim rulers.

The truth is that life for Jews within the House of Islam has been characterized by ceaseless humiliation and regular pogroms.

As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword. The fact that the Muslim world has not been united under a single government for most of its history, and may never be again, is immaterial where this aspiration for hegemony is concerned.

While the Koran merely describes the punishments that await the apostate in the next world (Koran 3:86–91), the hadith is emphatic about the justice that must be meted out in this one: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” No metaphor hides this directive,

Given the fact that the hadith is often used as the lens through which to interpret the Koran, many Muslim jurists consider it to be an even greater authority on the practice of Islam.

The justice of killing apostates is a matter of mainstream acceptance, if not practice. This explains why there did not appear to be a single reasonable Muslim living on earth when the Ayatollah Khomeini put a bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie.

As we have seen, Christianity and Judaism can be made to sound the same, intolerant note—but it has been a few centuries since either has done so.

The prohibitions against “suicidal terrorism” are not nearly as numerous as Pollack suggests. The Koran contains a single ambiguous line, “Do not destroy yourselves” (4:29).

Open the Koran, which is perfect in its every syllable, and simply read it with the eyes of faith. You will see how little compassion need be wasted on those whom God himself is in the process of “mocking,” “cursing,” “shaming,” “punishing,” “scourging,” “judging,” “burning,” “annihilating,” “not forgiving,” and “not reprieving.” God, who is infinitely wise, has cursed the infidels with their doubts.

To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the text of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in order of their appearance in the text. This is what the Creator of the universe apparently has on his mind

“God will mock them and keep them long in sin, blundering blindly along” (2:15). A fire “whose fuel is men and stones” awaits them (2:24). They will be “rewarded with disgrace in this world and with grievous punishment on the Day of Resurrection” (2:85). “God’s curse be upon the infidels!” (2:89). “They have incurred God’s most inexorable wrath. An ignominious punishment awaits [them]” (2:90).

We] shall let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate” (2:126).

“The unbelievers are like beasts which, call out to them as one may, can hear nothing but a shout and a cry. Deaf, dumb, and blind, they understand nothing” (2:172). “Theirs shall be a woeful punishment” (2:175).