Culture in the Blender

I finished Sam Harris’s The End of Faith yesterday. His central thesis is that faith itself – the practice of believing something without proof – is extremely dangerous and ought to end. It was piecewise an extremely scary book. The book emphasizes that it is only by reason and evaluation and discussion of facts that we can obtain knowledge of the world. I have been moving in the direction of these ideas before – as a scientist, of course I believe that reason and “experiment” is the best way to gain knowledge of the world – and my main reason for not being religious is the line of thought in the book. Harris argues that once the truth of a religious text that claims infallibility in all its parts, as they all do, it then follows that one must be a religious fundamentalist in order to follow the religion. In my brief stint with religion, that was what I felt as well – to be logically self-consistent, I would have to be a fundamentalist. At that point, religion conflicted with my sense of reason and ethics, and I considered being moderate.

Harris continues to argue that religious moderates “betray faith and reason equally,” in that they invoke secular knowledge as justification to ignore religious directives. As he puts it, religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and religious ignorance. Why don’t Christians actually kill everyone who “takes the Lord’s name in vain?” Well, because it seems so crazy, right? You can’t kill someone just for that, it’s very Middle Ages. It runs against our current sense of ethics. But the Bible explicitly instructs Christians to do so. Harris gives the Bible quotes for punishment for breaking the Ten Commandments, for example: Leviticus 24:16 mandates that the punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain is death. I say “Oh god” as an expression of surprise or disappointment fairly frequently. Therefore, under Christian theology, I should be killed. The punishment for working on the Sabbath is also death (Exodus 31:15). If the Bible is the infallible word of God, everyone who’s ever worked on a Friday night or a Saturday should be killed. Everyone who’s committed adultery should also be killed (Leviticus 20:10). I doubt that any Christian today would advocate actually doing this. (If there are, I am very afraid, give that there is a high likelihood they’re in the country that I currently live in.)

The intolerances built into Christianity, paralelled by intolerances in other religions, are to me ethically repulsive. Harris elaborates on this as a central part of showing why religious faith is dangerous. He does an excellent job of showing how beliefs lead to actions, and follows by showing that holding beliefs that compel people to commit murder and other atrocious acts of all magnitudes, which makes religious beliefs dangerous as they all contain ideas that encourage violence. As another example, the Bible also advocates having me killed for being an atheist. In medieval times, the Church logically noted that the Bible has several suggestions for eradicating heresy. Apparently, a literal reading (which is necessary if the Bible indeed is the infallible direct word of God) requires heretics to be killed. Even worse, Deuteronomy requires that anyone refusing to take part in such killings also be put to death. (Deuteronomy 17:12-13) These parts of the Bible caused the Inquisition, hardly a pinnacle of morality or good for either Christianity, Europe, or humanity at large. The wtich-hunts were caused and enacted similarly, along with persecution of Jews, and as we all know those were equally dark times for humankind.

He also delineates how similar problems plague Islam today. Harris goes through various demands that Islam makes of its adherents that make it virtually impossible for a Muslim who truly believes that the Koran is the infallible word of Allah to live in peace with non-Muslims, as well as that the acts of Muslim terrorists makes perfect sense if one accepts what the Koran and the Hadiths say: “Nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.” There is much to be said on that topic, but I don’t want to type out all of it here. Readers who are interested are recommended to read the book.

In addition to religions, he also takes a side-swipe at secular ideologies that demand the abandonment of critical reasoning and proof. National socialism and stalinism are use as examples of terrifying movements where a key part of the movement was unquestioning obedience to a leader and taking the leader’s word as truth.

I could not bring myself to accept large parts of Christianity on moral grounds, and as Harris points out, I was using secular ethics to reject it – and recognizing the strain on my psyche of accepting something without proof and the logical inconsistency in rejecting some religious teachings but not others on non-religious grounds, I could not bring myself to be religious on either ethical nor logical grounds.

Harris does not see religious moderates as benign, however. “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 unrivalled.” (p. 20, emphasis author’s)

Harris also anticipates some counter-arguments, many of which I would have used, in a section entitled The Danger of Wishful Thinking. He writes, “He [Paul Berman] notes that the twentieth century was a great incubator of “pathological mass movements” – political movements that “get drunk on the idea of slaughter”. He also points out that liberal thinkers are often unable to recognize these terrors for what they are. There is indeed a great tradition, in Berman’s phrase, of “liberalism as denial.” [...] Because they assume that people everywhere are animated by the same desires and fears, many Western liberals now blame their own governments for the excesses of Muslim terrorists. [...] Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians. Rather than being a simple expression of anti-Semitism (though it is surely this as well), this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are just people, so the thinking goes, and they do not behave that badly unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Palestinian suicide bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the Israeli occupation.” (pp134-135) I have to admit, I think like that. I haven’t considered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in those terms, but I definetly have considered Muslim terrorists in that light. Surely, they must be crazy in the medical sense, some chemical imbalance or something that makes them different from “regular” Muslims, who surely must be as secular-minded as European Christians.

And this brings me to my great mistake. For most of my life, I have been immersed in a secular environment where going to church other than perhaps midnight mass on Christmas because the candles are pretty, if you can be bothered to sit through a long mass just for pretty candles, is seen as a sign of serious and unusual religious commitment. The kind of religious commitment that might be viewed as a barrier to serving in public office or in the PTA. The kind of religious obsession that might cause people to go through life with a hidden agenda, trying to manipulate people. When I was a kid in the US, my parents went to significant efforts to keep me away from American Christians, despite that they are religious themselves. In Sweden, the Church is most appreciated for maintaining pretty graveyards. My parents are religious moderates, and I suspect rather typical of Nordic Christians. And here is the root of my mistake: Nordic Christians either have substituted large parts of the Bible and previous Church teachings with secular humanism or cede authority on actions to secular humanism. I am completely mystified, for that reason, by the idea that religious people might actually be religious, in the sense that they swallow religious teachings whole. I did not seriously entertain the idea, prior to reading this book, that millions of human beings, millions of educated, otherwise rational human beings, could suspend all rational judgement when it comes to right and wrong. I even found out that the United States is far more religious in the fundamentalist way than I had understood or perceived, again because I could especially not imagine that a well-off, well-educated country could suspend critical thinking when it comes to right and wrong. My lens of the world included – and probably still does a bit – that people are basically secular. I am clearly wrong.

This ties in with another book I read recently called “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” by Susan Moller Okin. The main thesis of the book is that granting group rights to minorities must be very carefully examined, as such rights run the risk of granting minorities rights to oppress women, effectively denying them their rights. That also relates to my experiences this past year with immigrants and expatriates from very sexist cultures in the West. Universal human rights supercede any religion and any cultural tradition. Religion is no excuse for oppression and immoral behavior, and neither is culture. My previous tolerance of intolerance can be dangerous. In protecting my rights as a human being and in being an ethical human being, I must judge faith and culture under the same criteria; neither can be worth respect unless they embrace peaceful, tolerant coexistence.