The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
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List Price: ££7.99
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Manufacturer: Free Press
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780743268097
ISBN: 0743268091
Label: Free Press
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2006-02-06
Publisher: Free Press
Studio: Free Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fashionable Atheism: well written but one-sided and sensationalised
Comment: This book is among the more disturbing and sensattionalist of the current fashion for anti-religious discussion.
What began (I believe) with Richard Dawkins and continued with Christopher Hitchens and others is being taken a step further here by Sam Harris. As happens when you want to be heard, you have to shout a little louder than the last person to be heard and Sam Harris does just that.
Rather than simply proposing that religion and God are superstitious nonsense and proposing coherent arguments against them, Harris uses tabloid-journalism tactics and the current climate of fear to claim that religion is a breeding ground for hatred, terrorism and so on.
Of course, there are terrorists and religious belief is one (but by no means the only) handy way to recruit them, but that's not a good reason to rage against religion as a whole. Christianity and Islam receive the harshest treatment as you might expect. Judaism gets off quite lightly, although it's not not clear why.
Harris's book, in spite of its failings, is at least in the main lucid and clearly written, hence 2 stars rather than 1, but the arguments are almost entirely one sided and read more like a personal vendetta rather than a properly researched proposition. Cynically, I would suggest the sensationalism and the concentration on Christianity and Islam rather than Judaism and others, are deliberately designed to sell more books. This is how it felt to me, like a newspaper editor squeezing in as much controversy as possible to flog more copies.
I imagine the book will appeal to the already converted and put off most others. If you believe, or want to believe that religion is a threat to society then this may well be the book for you. If you prefer a balanced examination of the good and bad that religion offers then I would look elsewhere.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Neo-conservative apology
Comment: As an atheist, I was drawn to this book through the endorsement of Richard Dawkins - an endorsement I find baffling. As a number of reviewers have noted this book does not remotely deserve to be bracketed with The God Delusion and other sober critiques of religious faith.
The biggest clues to Harris' agenda are revealed by the 'authorities' he invokes to buttress his opinions: the discredited pro-Israeli 'scholar' Daniel Goldhagen; the tub-thumping neo-conservative Thomas Friedman; the Zionist Alan Dershovitz (a man demonstrably shown to have manipulated historical sources in constructing a fervent defence of Israel), and Samauel Huttington.
It is not suprising given these bed-fellows that Harris allows himself to entertain the most bellicose, 'intolerant', indeed genocidal excursions in order to deal with the 'menance' of Islam. This includes - I kid you not - a pre-emptive nuclear strike against an un-named Islamic country with designs on the bomb. (Iran, presumably).
Neither is it surprising that Harris rejects outright ANY attempt to explain the rise of political Islam by reference to political factors - such as Western imperialism, the illegal war on Iraq and the West's uncritical support for Israel. (At the same time Israel is commended for its uniquely high moral standards and remarkable restraint. Harris also brushes over Bush and Blair's disastrous attempt to re-make the Middle East by casually noting "our (sic) adventures in Iraq".)
Leaving his ideological agenda aside the work is just plain badly written. It is FULL of non-sequiturs. One notable one is his insistence that we should understand Islam through scripture alone as this unambigiuously reveals its pernicious nature. This is quickly followed by a dismissal of more benign and contradictory passages in the Koran as they offer no guide to the actual practice of Islam by Muslim governments. An under-graduate essay would be rightly pulled up for this fundamental lack of internal consistency - and disingenuity.
There ARE legitimate questions to be raised about the compatability of Islam with liberal-democratic values. Given the all-encompassing nature of Islam as a mode of living, and its prescriptive character with respect to matters such as jurisprudence, it is evidently right to ask questions of liberals who would rather avoid thorny debates in the name of 'tolerance'. However, this is not a book which attempts to address such questions with any sophistication. Instead, we are offered a polemic which completely fails to engage with the complexities of the modern world and the inter-play of religious ideology and politics.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The End of Faith is Nothing But a Mirage
Comment: To no one's surprise, Mr. Harris trashes religion and faith as effortlessly and effectively as a tornado renders a cow weightless. "The End of Faith", however, comes across more as a divisive and apocalyptic rhetoric than anything else.
Mr. Harris implicates religious dogma for most of the death and destruction that has gripped this world in the past and the present, when in fact, 500 ng/dl or more of the hormone testosterone is probably responsible for most of the ill effects in almost all societies, past and present. As long as there is a propensity to compare p*nis size, and there are excesses to be had, there will be blood. Granted, religion probably provides an extra kick to compel a nutjob to walk into a crowd and blow himself up. But even if all religions of the world were to be eradicated, there are a plethora of other excuses to wreak hovac, e.g. tribalism, nationalism.
For there to be world peace, Islam must undergo a radical transformation, asserts Mr. Harris. Yet, he almost completely ignores the West's meddling in the internal affairs of many Middle Eastern countries to suit their selfish needs.
We've come a long way since the barbaric eras in our collective histories, and we still have a ways to go before civility is pervasive. Islam and WMD will not spell the end of the world. The end of faith is as illusive an idea as the paperless office. Faith will persevere, life will go on, and Mr. Harris will greatly benefit from a chill pill.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but Dangerous
Comment: The thesis of Sam Harris's book is that, once any group of people believe that they have a monopoly on moral truth, they are capable of perpetrating the most enormous crimes against humanity in the firm conviction that they have a duty to stamp out evil (Satan) in the name of good (God). His book illustrates this with numerous examples of the intolerance of Judaism, Christianity and Islam not only towards each other but towards heretics and unbelievers - those who do not cloak their ideas of good and evil in the guise of supernatural personae.
Unfortunately, Sam Harris falls into two traps. First, he fails to see the huge irony of his own moral position - he castigates mediaeval Christians for torturing and extorting confessions from heretics and witches, who were seen as agents of Satan, yet creates his own Satan in the form of `terrorists' who apparently, for no reason other than their blind obedience to Islamic teaching, would choose to die just for the sake of killing people who do not share their world-view (pages 28-29). He thus argues (page 199): "Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary". Substitute the word `Satan' for `terrorism' and Sam Harris is in the same moral position as the Pope who sanctioned the Holy Inquisition.
Second, like many atheist writers, Harris fails to understand that people do not necessarily come to believe in a particular brand of moral teaching merely because they are told it is the word of some supernatural entity. They do so because the messages of these great religions chime with something within their humanity that addresses their deeply-held sense of injustice and suffering. Such messages provide hope. Secular political and moral philosophies can be attractive for just the same reasons, albeit that they are more firmly rooted in achieving change in this world rather than the next. Politics has therefore frequently hijacked religion, and vice-versa, to serve a common purpose: that of helping people to fight oppression, and to counter threats they perceive to their morally superior (as they see it) way of life.
By failing to understand this, Harris significantly underplays the extent to which the perceived intolerance of one moral framework for another is rooted in, and can be fomented by appeal to, political grievances (page 109). Unless these are tackled, the threat of Islam to Western secular moral values (which is his main concern) would not disappear even if every Moslem gave up their belief in Allah and the Prophet tomorrow. His attack on religious faith and belief is therefore misguided. Furthermore, his Crusade of intolerance against infidels who do not share his particular moral stance knows no bounds in the evils it might unleash against humanity. On pages 52-53 he argues: "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them... This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan and is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas".
In my view, the answer to the problems Harris identifies is not to demonise all believers, but to recognise and support all those people of all professed faiths (and none) who already subscribe to moderate beliefs and who already understand the dangers of accepting ancient teachings as ossified absolutist moral frameworks. The enemy is not faith per se, but a heady mixture of fundamentalist beliefs that are impervious to reason with a wide sense of global social injustice which oppressed peoples are now learning to address through suicide bombings or the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. To win this war, we need to tackle social injustice and to reach out to others in a way which shows that we occupy a moral position that is truly worthy of universal respect. It is by no means apparent that we occupy such a position nor yet fully understand what it might look like, but it first requires us to understand how others perceive us. Sadly, Harris seems to lack this insight.
We also need to do more to educate people and promote a greater understanding of what people believe and why, including the atheist standpoint. We should teach young people more about the role of religion in history. Although we should not declare war on faith, it seems to me not unreasonable to insist that children are not indoctrinated into any particular religion, any more than that they should be indoctrinated into any particular political philosophy. Moral teaching should be based on principles of mutual respect - the rules of behaviour that are expected if society is to operate fairly and efficiently in the interests of all its members.
Yet there remains a moral dilemma here that Harris is right to flag up (page 129): "what will we do if an Islamist regime... ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?" His answer is again revealing: "...the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first-strike of our own... it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day but it may be the only course of action open to us, given what Islamists believe". To be fair, Harris struggles with the morality of such an action, but the fact that he can entertain such ideas at all undermines much of his argument against the world-view of his perceived enemies. A better answer might be that if we ever find we need to use violent means to prevent an even worse evil, let us be first cast-iron in our certainty that the evil we fear is a real one and not a symptom of our paranoia, that all other methods have been tried and failed, and that our actions are targeted only at the perpetrators of the evil, and not at the innocent. And let us not kid ourselves that, if we ever commit violence that does not meet these standards, yet believe we were justified, we may be acting the way our ancestors did in the name of their God. It may be hypocritical to blame them.
All this said, Harris does a masterful job of rallying the arguments and pointing up the dangers that the West now faces from one ingredient in the potentially explosive mixture mentioned above. His diagnosis is incomplete and his prescription may be flawed, but his book provides ample food for thought. I would recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Disappointing - an undergraduate thesis
Comment: Apart from Chapters 3, 4 and 5, this book reads like an undergraduate thesis. It is overlong, confusing (seemingly for the sake of it) and a poor companion to Dawkins' The God Delusion, Hitchens' God Is Not Great and Harris' own Letters to A Christian Nation.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 actually deal with the relevant subjects - and are excellent, compulsive reading. The rest is, frankly, dross with little meaning or clarity. For example, Dawkins writes very lucidly about very difficult and complex subjects, making them accessible. In this book, Harris mostly confuses and writes with a staggering lack of clarity.
I wholeheartedly recommend the three other books mentioned above. This one, you can take it or leave it.
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