The End of Faith (2 page)

vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy
reveals that he has something very spe- cific in mind should your son or daughter return
from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna:

If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the
spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you,
saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you or your ancestors before you,
gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the
world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you
must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the
first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You
must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. . . .
(Deuteronomy 13:7-11)

While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you
will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a “symbolic” reading of passages of
this sort. (In fact, one seems to be explicitly blocked by God himself in Deuteronomy 13:1
“Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking
nothing away”) The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by
ignoring such bar- barisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the mod- ern
world. This is a problem for “moderation” in religion: it has nothing underwriting it
other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law.

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,6 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. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has
evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have
exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been
the emergence of our ten- dency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to
the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of
reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to
accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his
wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely
to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that
you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity
who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible
claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us
simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years agoand much of this knowl-
edge is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries
of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or
demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our
universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the whole works was
created six thousand years ago (with light from distant stars already in transit toward
the earth) impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least
suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in
principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of ignoring (or
“reinterpreting”) certain articles of faith is now over- whelming. Anyone being flown to a
distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned
a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.

So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time (they haven't); it
is just that they have been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their
passages. Most of what remains the “good parts”has been spared the same winnowing because
we do not yet have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intu- itions and our
capacity for spiritual experience. If we better under- stood the workings of the human
brain, we would undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of
consciousness, our modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What makes
one person happier than another? Why is love more con- ducive to happiness than hate? Why
do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to
smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer
together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human
life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of
the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more
useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all
that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against
religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live
by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed
fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the
unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not
permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that
fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we
cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as
religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full
embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species
of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of

all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious
moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignoranceand it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.7 The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light,
reli- gious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to
God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the
irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless
the core dogmas of faith are called into questioni.e., that we know there is a God, and
that we know what he wants from usreligious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of
the wilderness.

The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is
anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it
guarantee that there is not a ter- rible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason
in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it repre- sents
an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door
to more sophisticated approaches to spiritu- ality, ethics, and the building of strong
communities. Religious mod- erates seem to believe that what we need is not radical
insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philoso- phy. Rather
than bring the full force of our creativity and rational- ity to bear on the problems of
ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax
our stan- dards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while other- wise
maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were
simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is
such sub- servience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics
suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and
spiritual experience.

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. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the
cosmos, or that trepanning* constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas
would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected
our religious understanding of the world a millennium agowhile our knowledge on all other
fronts was still hopelessly inchoateor religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is
one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to
recommend the latter view.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of
human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human
necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in
other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know
about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward.
It cannot survive the changes that have come over usculturally, technologically, and even
ethi- cally. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will sur- vive it.

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using
the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything
too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred.
To speak plainly

*Trepanning (or trephining) is the practice of boring holes in the human skull.
Archaeological evidence suggests that it is one of the oldest surgical procedures. It was
presumably performed on epileptics and the mentally ill as an attempt at exor- cism. While
there are still many reasons to open a person's skull nowadays, the hope that an evil
spirit will use the hole as a point of egress is not among them.

and truthfully about the state of our worldto say, for instance, that the Bible and the
Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberishis antithetical to tolerance as
moderates currently con- ceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such
political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the
iconography of our ignorance.

The Shadow of the Past

Finding ourselves in a universe that seems bent upon destroying us, we quickly discover,
both as individuals and as societies, that it is a good thing to understand the forces
arrayed against us. And so it is that every human being comes to desire genuine knowledge
about the world. This has always posed a special problem for religion, because every
religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every
religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This put the “leap” in Kierkegaard's leap of faith.

What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to dis- appear? Imagine that six
billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our
books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We
have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we
want to reclaim first? Well, there's that busi- ness about growing food and building
shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use
and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would
also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others.
When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus
was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths,
if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity

like the “fact” that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow
horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk's sacred
animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top
billing in our resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that
premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death? Or that the soul
enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious
people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in that it
was actually written by the Creator of the universe?

There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to relearnonce we manage to feed
and clothe ourselvesand these are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present
state. How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inward- ness and
simply love other human beings? Assume, for the moment, that such a process of personal
transformation exists and that there is something worth knowing about it; there is, in
other words, some skill, or discipline, or conceptual understanding, or dietary supple-
ment that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful, or indifferent
persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively desperate to know about it. There
may even be a few biblical pas- sages that would be useful in this regardbut as for whole
rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up
again. The Bible and Koran, it seems certain, would find themselves respectfully shelved
next to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.