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

by Sam Harris

The problem seems to have been located everywhere except at the core of the Muslim faith—but faith is precisely what differentiates every Muslim from every infidel.

If Baudrillard had been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban, would he have thought that the horrible abridgments of his freedom were a matter of the United States’s “effort always to be the unique world model”?

Would the peculiar halftime entertainment at every soccer match—where suspected fornicators, adulterers, and thieves were regularly butchered in the dirt at centerfield—have struck him as the first rumblings of a “terroristic situational transfer”?

And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy. Perhaps the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky.

To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste,

We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent.

We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

But we are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and Roy, fail to see this.

What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology.

I will say a few things about pacifism in a later chapter—for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism—but most of us are not pacifists.

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources.

Is there any doubt that many New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present standards? To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we’ve come in that time. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the developing world.

Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, at My Lai:

They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps. Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machine-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.

This is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving. But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us. The massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the American military.

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.

Wherever there are facts of any kind to be known, one thing is certain: not all people will discover them at the same time or understand them equally well.

But given the inescapable specificity of our world, the range of optimal solutions to any problem will generally be quite limited.

It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of “better” we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness.

This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist thing to say, but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here,

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? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers?

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.

If we want to draw conclusions about ethics—as well as make predictions about what a given person or society will do in the future—we cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

But “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism” is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem. A rise of Jain fundamentalism would endanger no one. In fact, the uncontrollable spread of Jainism throughout the world would improve our situation immensely.

According to Zakaria, the key to Arab redemption is to modernize politically, economically, and socially—and this will force Islam to follow along the path to liberalism, as Christianity has in the West.

If, as I contend throughout this book, 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.

How many hours of human labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation’s phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millennia.

even the most docile forms of Christianity currently present insuperable obstacles to AIDS prevention and family planning in the developing world, to medical research, and to the development of a rational drug policy—and these contributions to human misery alone constitute some of the most appalling failures of reasonableness in any age.

In thinking about Islam, and about the risk it now poses to the West, we should imagine what it would take to live peacefully with the Christians of the fourteenth century—Christians who were still eager to prosecute people for crimes like host desecration and witchcraft.

What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society.

We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises. Kim Jong Il has thirty million hostages. Saddam Hussein had twenty-five million. The clerics in Iran have seventy million more. It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed that they will fight their would-be liberators to the death.

Jonathan Glover seems right to suggest that we need “something along the lines of a strong and properly funded permanent UN force, together with clear criteria for intervention and an international court to authorize it.”53 We can say it even more simply: we need a world government. How else will a war between the United States and China ever become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont?

Given what most of us believe about God, it is at present unthinkable that human beings will ever identify themselves merely as human beings, disavowing all lesser affiliations.

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.

Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented. As Martin Rees points out, there is no reason to expect that we will be any more successful at stopping their proliferation, in small quantities, than we have been with respect to illegal drugs.54 If this is true, weapons of mass destruction will soon be available to anyone who wants them.

If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun. Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects.

The degree to which religious ideas still determine government policies—especially those of the United States—presents a grave danger to everyone.

For many years U.S. policy in the Middle East has been shaped, at least in part, by the interests that fundamentalist Christians have in the future of a Jewish state. Christian “support for Israel” is, in fact, an example of religious cynicism so transcendental as to go almost unnoticed in our political discourse.

Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land—specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple—will usher in both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.

Millions of Christians and Muslims now organize their lives around prophetic traditions that will only find fulfillment once rivers of blood begin flowing from Jerusalem.

Many members of the U.S. government currently view their professional responsibilities in religious terms. Consider the case of Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Finding himself confronted by the sixth-highest murder rate in the nation, Justice Moore thought it expedient to install a two-and-a-half-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state courthouse in Montgomery.

What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:16). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 31:15). What is the punishment for cursing one’s father or mother? Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery? You’re catching on (Leviticus 20:10).

Many prominent Republicans belong to the Council for National Policy, a secretive Christian pressure group founded by the fundamentalist Tim LaHaye (coauthor of the apocalyptic "Left Behind" series of novels).

In his “faith-based initiative” Bush has managed to funnel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars directly to church groups, to be used more or less however they see fit.10 One of his appointments to the Food and Drug Administration was Dr. W. David Hager, a pro-life obstetrician who has declared publicly that premarital sex is a sin and that any attempt to separate “Christian truth” and “secular truth” is “dangerous.”

65 percent of us are quite certain that Satan exists.

Men eager to do the Lord’s work have been elected to other branches of the federal government as well. The House majority leader, Tom DeLay, is given to profundities like “Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity.” He claims to have gone into politics “to promote a Biblical worldview.”

he attributed the shootings at the Columbine High School in Colorado to the fact that our schools teach the theory of evolution.

In January of 2002, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a devout Catholic, delivered a speech at the University of Chicago Divinity School on the subject of the death penalty. I quote Scalia at some length, because his remarks reveal just how close we are to living in a theocracy:

This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul…. [T]he core of his message is that government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God…. Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral…. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal.

The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible.