The End of Faith (28 page)

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations,
and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.
Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to bothand mixes explosively with both. Only the
willfully blind could fail to implicate the divi- sive force of religion in most, if not
all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime
aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our
contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out.
Things are different now. “All is changed, changed utterly.” RICHARDDAWKINS

IT HAS BEEN nearly a year since The End of Faith was first published in the United States. In response, I have received a continuous cor-
respondence from readers and nonreaders alike, expressing every- thing from ecstatic
support to nearly homicidal condemnation. Many thousands of people have apparently read
the book, and mil- lions more have heard its contents discussed in the media. In response,
letters and e-mails have come to me from scientists and physicians at every stage of their
careers, from soldiers fighting in Iraq, from Christian ministers who have lost their
faith (and from those who haven't), from Muslims who agree with my general dis- paragement
of their religion, and from others who would have me meet them at a local mosque so that I
might better learn the will of God. I have also heard from hundreds of embattled
freethinkers liv-

ing in “red state” America. Judging from this last group of corre- spondents, the American
heartland is fast becoming as blinkered as the wilds of Afghanistan. It may be too much to
hope that the efforts of reasonable people will yet turn the tide.

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are cer- tain that Jesus will
return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will
probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more,
who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to
stop teaching children about the biological fact of evo- lution. Believers of this sort
constitute the most cohesive and moti- vated segment of the American electorate.
Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national
importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments
and are now thumbing scripture, wonder- ing how best to ingratiate themselves to the
legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.
More than 50 percent of Americans have a “negative” or “highly negative” view of people
who do not believe in God; 70 per- cent think it important for presidential candidates to
be “strongly religious.” Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs,
political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of
assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally
gets framed in terms appropri- ate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United
States in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only
28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 72 percent believe in angels. Ignorance in
this degree, concentrated in both the head and the belly of a lumbering superpower, is now
a problem for the entire world.

HAVING seen my argument against faith discussed, attacked, cele- brated, and misconstrued in
blogs and book reviews throughout the

world, I would like to take the occasion of its release in paperback as an opportunity to
respond to the most common criticisms and mis- conceptions. These are by no means
straw-man arguments; these are what real people (and the occasional book reviewer) believe
to be devastating retorts to my basic thesis:

1. Yes, religion occasionally causes violence, but the greatest crimes of the twentieth
century were perpetrated by atheists. Godlessness as witnessed by the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong-Ilis the most
dangerous condition of all.

This is one of the most common criticisms I encounter. It is also the most depressing, as
I anticipate and answer it early in the book (p. 79). While some of the most despicable
political movements in human history have been explicitly irreligious, they were not espe-
cially rational. The public pronouncements of these regimes have been mere litanies of
delusionabout race, economics, national identity, the march of history, or the moral
dangers of intellectual- ism. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields are not
examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough
about specific secular ideologies. Need- less to say, my argument against religious faith
is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem I raise in the book is none other than the problem of dogma itselfof which
every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society in human history that
ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

As I argue throughout the book, certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and
dehumanizing. In fact, respect for evidence and rational argument is what makes peaceful
cooperation possible. As human beings, we live in a perpetual choice between conversa-
tion and violence; what, apart from a fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can
guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?

2. We need faith to do almost anything. It is absurd to think that we could ever do
without it.

One e-mail I received on this subject began: “I like your writing style but you are an
idiot.” Fair enough. My correspondent then went on to point out, as many have, that each
of us has to get out of bed in the morning and live his life, and we do this in a context
of uncertainty, and in the context of terrible certainties, like the certainty of death.
This positive disposition, this willingness to set a course in life with- out any
assurance that things will go one's way, is occasionally called “faith.” Thus, one may
prop up a disconsolate friend with the words “have faith in yourself.” Such words are
almost never facetious, even on the forked tongue of an atheist. Let me state for the
record that I see nothing wrong with this kind of “faith.”

But this is not the faith that has given us religion. It would be rather remarkable if a
positive attitude in the face of uncertainty led inevitably to ludicrous convictions about
the divine origin of certain books, to bizarre cultural taboos, to the abject hatred of
homosexu- als, and to the diminished status of women. Adopt too positive an outlook, and
the next thing you know architects and engineers may start flying planes into buildings.

As I do my best to spell out over the course of the book, religious faith is the belief in
historical and metaphysical propositions with- out sufficient evidence. When the evidence
for a religious proposi- tion is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence
against it, people invoke faith. Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs
(e.g., “the New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy,” “I saw the face of Jesus in a
window,” “We prayed, and our daughter's cancer went into remission”). Such reasons are
gen- erally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. People of faith
naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to rea- soning whenever they
possibly can. Faith is simply the license they give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is championed; when it poses a threat,

it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks
in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole
terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

3. Islam is no more amenable to violence than any other religion is. The violence we see
in the Muslim world is the product of politics and economics, not faith.

The speciousness of this claim is best glimpsed by the bright light of bomb blasts. Where
are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? They, too, suffer the daily indignity of the Israeli occupation. Where,
for that matter, are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an
occupation far more cynical and repressive than any that the United States or Israel has
ever imposed upon the Muslim world. Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpe-
trate suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do not exist. What is the
difference that makes the difference? The dif- ference lies in the specific tenets of
Islam. This is not to say that Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can,
and it has (Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the apologists
for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard to justify such barbarism. One
need not work nearly so hard as a Muslim.

Recent events in Iraq offer further corroboration on this point. It is true, of course,
that the Iraqi people have been traumatized by decades of war and repression. But war and
repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United
Nations, foreign workers, and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted
an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. The
Iraqi insur- gents have not been motivated principally by political or economic
grievances. They have such grievances, of course, but politics and economics do not get a
man to intentionally blow himself up in a

crowd of children, or get his mother to sing his praises for it. Mira- cles of this order
generally require religious faith.

There are other confounding variables here, of coursestate sponsorship of terrorism, the
occasional coercion of reluctant suicide bombersbut we cannot let them blind us to the
pervasive and lunatic influence of religious belief. The truth that we must finally
confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that now
directly inspire Muslim terrorism. Unless the world's Muslims can find some way of
expunging a theology that is fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will
ultimately face the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the world.
Wherever these events occur, we will find Muslims tending to side with other Muslims, no
matter how sociopathic their behav- ior. This is the malignant solidarity that religion
breeds. It is time that sane human beings stopped making apologies for it. And it is time
for Muslimsespecially Muslim womento realize that nobody suffers the consequences of Islam
more than they do.

4. The End of Faith is not a truly atheistic book. It is really a stalk- ing horse for Buddhism, New-Age
mysticism, or some other form of irrationality.

As almost every page of my book is dedicated to exposing the prob- lems of religious
faith, it is ironic that some of the harshest criticism has come from atheists who feel
that I have betrayed their cause on peripheral issues. If there is a book that takes a
harder swing at reli- gion, I'm not aware of it. This is not to say that my book does not
have many shortcomingsbut appeasing religious irrationality is not among them.

Nevertheless, atheists have found much to complain about in the book, especially in the
last chapter where I attempt to put meditation and “spirituality” on a rational footing.
“Meditation,” in the sense that I use the term, merely requires that a person pay
extraordinar-

ily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the world. There is nothing
irrational about doing this. In fact, it consti- tutes the only rational basis for making
detailed claims about the nature of our subjectivity.

Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with
remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend
to find both intellectually credi- ble and personally transformative. As I discuss in the
final chapter of the book, one of these insights is that the feeling we call “I”the sense
that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our experiencescan disappear
when looked for in a rigorous way. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it
is an empirical obser- vation, analogous to the discovery of one's optic blind spots. Most
people never notice their blind spots (caused by the transit of the optic nerve through
the retina of each eye), but they can be pointed out to almost anyone with a little
effort. The absence of the “self” can also be pointed out with some effort, though this
discovery tends to require considerably more training on the part of both teacher and
student. The only faith required to get such a project off the ground is the faith of
scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is this: If I use my attention in a certain way, it
may have a specific, reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to hap-
pen) along any path of “spiritual” practice must be interpreted in light of some
conceptual scheme, and everything should be open to rational argument.

I have also taken considerable heat from atheists for a few remarks I made about the
nature of consciousness. Most atheists appear to be certain that consciousness is entirely
dependent on (and reducible to) the workings of the brain. In the last chapter of the
book, I briefly argue that this certainty is unwarranted. The fact is that scientists
still do not know what the relationship between con- sciousness and matter actually is. I
am not suggesting that we make a religion out of this uncertainty, or do anything else
with it. And,

needless to say, the mysteriousness of consciousness does nothing to make conventional
religious notions about God and paradise any more plausible.