Why I liked The End of Faith

I've just completed reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris. I agreed wholeheartedly with most of it (see my next post for my disagreements), particularly his skewering of religious dogma and the sad affect it has had on human progress. Here's a sampling of my favorite passages, with the money quotes in bold.


pp18-19

The only reason anyone is "moderate" in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside.

This is something I've thought for a while, but never articulated it as well as Harris has. I don't see how religious institutions can take credit for their progress. From Galileo to Darwin to birth control, the church has pretty much always been dragged kicking and screaming into modern thought.


pp21-22

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God.

This really hit home with me, as it was something that I struggled with when I was a Christian. How can a belief system based on scripture ever be expected to make progress? And if scripture is simply an imperfect reflection of truth requiring constant interpretation, why have scripture at all? Pythagoras was a smart dude, but it would be ludicrous to use his writings as a textbook for a modern Geometry class.


p95 (referring to this mistranslation)

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

Mostly I just found this one funny, but it does point out the absurdity of it all.


p131

Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for a radical (and reasonable) adaptation to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revive itself, peacefully or otherwise. What this will mean is not at all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must either win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage.

I agree with this assessment. I don't see any path to "winning the argument" when our identity as a nation is so strongly tied to our Christian heritage, and I don't see that identity changing any time soon. And "winning the war" will have to be ugly, and we'll wind up taking actions for which future generations will be ashamed.

So far, my thought processes beginning here lead me nowhere but to despair.


p215

Jared Diamond's fascinating thesis, to sum it up in a line, is that advances civilization did not arise in sub-Saharan Africa, because one can't saddle a rhinoceros and ride it into battle. ... Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.

Another funny one. Despite the heavy nature of the subject matter, Harris offers several biting one-liners that gave me a hearty laugh.


I learned some things about the Catholic Church's behavior surrounding the Holocaust.

1. As late as 1914, a Vatican newspaper published a story accusing Jews of human sacrifice.
2. The Catholic Church opened its genealogical records to the Nazis to help them track down German Jews.
3. No German Catholic was ever excommunicated for actions related to the holocaust (yet Galileo remained so until 1992).
   

I continue to be sadly amazed that anyone looks to the Catholic Church for moral guidance.

In summary, it's a very well written book, and I would recommend it to anyone. I think he offers a load of compelling evidence for the dangers that religious thought has for our world. As he points out many times, people with 11th century motivations soon will have 21st century weapons, and that should give us all reason enough to examine our values and dispense with blind respect for the pious.