2 posts tagged “religion”

I haven't been doing as much reading as I should in the past couple of weeks, having been experiencing an unusual amount of drama for my sensibly-shod life.  Finally, I finished The End of Faith, Sam Harris's provocative argument

against religion.  Faithful readers (Jenny? Daphne?) will recall that I didn't care for Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, finding it simplistic and needlessly pugnacious.  Well, this full-length work is considerably more sophisticated, of course. The primary argument is that religious faith -- and that includes religious moderates -- is a force for evil in the world.  His most frightening scenarios involve Islam, but he certainly slams the predominantly Christian culture of the west, as well.   I won't rehash the arguments here; I'm convinced, and the faithful will probably not be.  Most interesting to me were the later chapters outlining the case for ethics without faith and even spirituality without faith.  He presents the atheistic spirituality of Buddhism as something that is not predicated on faith and could be a valuable way for human beings to connect with something larger than themselves.

This little essay argues that all religion belief is irrational and dangerous.  He discusses the conflict between religion and science, the many instances of cruelty in the Bible, and the religious right's crusade against stem cell research, among other things.  As in his previous book, The End of Faith, Harris argues that religious liberals and moderates are every bit as irrational as the fundamentalists it's so easy to deride.

No argument from me on the basic premise.  I'm an atheist myself, and conscious of the need to stay fairly closeted in my provincial town.  But the tone of the book put me off a little.  I don't mind that it's deliberately provocative; we need some of that.  I just felt like he was talking down to the reader, as if the Christian Nation he is addressing is a really simple-minded child. I wonder if The End of Faith, which I didn't read,  presents a more sophisticated argument.