God wars

To get to this interesting proposition about the likelihood of our eventually finding empirical support for the claims of "spirituality," however, Harris first insists on cataloging every abomination committed in the name of faith. There are, of course, many, and Harris maintains that religiously motivated violence is not an exception to the prevailing monotheisms of our time, but the logical result of the bloodthirsty "barbarism" of the texts on which they are based. Not only do the Bible and the Koran excuse such crimes, they actually incite them, by urging the faithful to kill unbelievers with impunity. Furthermore, people willing to believe crazy things on the basis of no evidence, Harris says, are capable of any enormity, from burning witches to suicide bombings.

While it's true that religion often plays a role in humanity's wars, Harris' political naiveté gravely undermines a book that, at heart, makes a political argument, however weakly supported. Throughout our history, human beings have fought each other over land and resources and who gets to tell whom what to do. Because most of the people who do the fighting won't actually enjoy the spoils, leaders have concocted all kinds of emotionally persuasive justifications for hating the enemy enough to kill him. Those reasons include tribal affiliation, skin color, cultural practices, class and religion, among others.

Harris is correct that you can only get someone to kill in God's name if they already believe in God, and so religion has long been a useful tool for the world's tyrants and demagogues. But that's not the same as saying that religion causes such conflicts as the Troubles of Northern Ireland, which are actually rooted in a struggle for sovereignty and the centuries-old dominance of Irish Catholics by Protestants backed (or at least tolerated) by the British government. People far more knowledgeable about Middle East history than Harris have persuasively demonstrated that militant Islam is the ideology that the discontented lower middle class turned to only when Arab nationalism failed to rescue the region's peoples from "humiliation" at the hands of the West. (And in those rare cases where fundamentalists have actually seized control -- in Iran, for example -- the general disillusionment soon centers on them, as well.)

Closer to the truth would be the dismal notion that human beings don't need particularly compelling reasons to butcher other human beings, even their neighbors and friends. The genocide in Rwanda, whipped up out of ethnically based class tensions by a mass media motivated by heaven knows what malevolent impulses, had no religious dimension. It's almost as if we're looking for an excuse to single out some members of our population for persecution, and only the thinnest of justifications need be provided. (Interestingly, these two authors see the Ur-genocide in Nazi Germany in entirely different lights; for McGrath it's a secular phenomenon because of the Nazis' relative irreligiosity, while Harris sees its roots in a religious, rather than ethnic, anti-Semitism.)

Harris is on solid footing as long as he confines himself to philosophy and neuroscience, fields he has studied at the doctorate level. "The End of Faith" provides an illuminating introduction to the distinctions between such philosophical approaches as pragmatism, realism and utilitarianism, and some followable arguments about the nature of belief and reality. Unfortunately, Harris also makes claims to political relevance, and when it comes to real-world application of his ideas, he is nearly as wild-eyed as the zealots he fears, and certainly as impractical.

Next Page: Harris reserves particular venom for religious moderates -- but the fundamentalists hate them too

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