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

Rating: - perfect and stunning
This is a fantastic read. I am buying more copies as gifts for those I know will appreciate the quality of writing and focus. I applaud the author for having the guts to make such needed arguments against brainless following. I also love his use of English in such eloquent writing.

---

Rating: - The best-written and most tightly-argued of the recent spate of atheist polemics
The best-written and most tightly-argued of the recent spate of atheist polemics. The main thrust of Harris's argument is the surely incontrovertible point that "faith" makes a virtue of believing something to be true without having demonstrable evidence - and we don't find belief without evidence acceptable in, say, physics or history, so why do we find it not only acceptable but uncriticizable in polite society when it comes to matters of religion? As Harris puts it: "Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilisation is still beseiged by armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?"

Harris argues, counter-intuitively but convincingly, that we should be no more accepting of religious moderates than we should of fundamentalist extremists. To be a religious moderate is merely to interpret loosely or ignore altogether the parts of scripture that are inconvenient for modern daily existence. Therefore, as Harris points out, moderate religion offers no firm ground from which to criticise fundamentalists for taking the same scripts literally: "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."

One feature of Harris's book that makes me value it more than other similar efforts - most noticeably The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, for whom any suggestion of tolerating spirituality is anathema - is Harris's readiness to concede that there is "clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life". There follows a fascinating discussion of Buddhism and what seems to be a suggestive correlation between spirituality, ethics and positive emotions. Harris argues that a rational approach to exploring spirituality will pay dividends in creating a mature science of the mind, which will one day have more precise things to say about these matters.

The book has one great flaw, in that Harris thinks himself into justifying torture through an analogy with the collateral damage we reluctantly accept during warfare. I believe this analogy breaks down because we accept collateral damage only because, and to the extent that, our most sophisticated weapons are imperfect. That is, every time someone invents more accurate weapons, we tolerate less collateral damage as a result. The logical conclusion of Harris's position, then, is that the acceptability of torture must somehow depend on the sophistication of our current weapons technology. This can't be right, can it?

---

Rating: - Excellent, if imperfect, critique of religion's dangers
Anyone who doesn't read this book is missing out. The End of Faith won the PEN award for nonfiction and deserved it. This is a devastating indictment of religion and the harm it causes. Just the chapter on Islam was worth the price of the book.

Harris ranges far and wide, from the Inquistion's horrors to honor killings in the Arab/ Muslim world. He mercilessly attacks dogmatism, from the moral equivalence of the pacifist left to the insane attacks on birth control on the right. The part where he skewers the drug war was terrific. The book isn't perfect; Harris endorses unscientific paranormal beliefs (e.g. reincarnation and ESP). I also don't understand his argument that Communism is a "political religion." But,overall, it's still well worth reading.

---

Rating: - Read "Letter To A Christian Nation" instead.
Sam Harris, the spiritual anti-theist, doesn't know where human perception ends and reality begins, or vice versa. A shame, too, for I had gotten this book after reading his Letter, which is a much more concise and agreeable work.

---

Rating: - He goes a little twinkle ding dong at the end
I bought this at the airport on a whim and read it before I returned home. Most of the book is an intelligent argument about the dangers of faith, how it can lead people to do unspeakable things. For example, if you have total faith that if you blow yourself up killing infidels you and your entire family will go to heaven, then to do so would be completely rational. Obviously, Islam isn't the only religion subject to this critique. The end of the book gets a little mystical for me though. While the author is still grounded (sort of) in science, he just goes on and on about a few twinkle ding dong ideas that end up as a boring digression.