The End of Faith (The most important book no one is reading)

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris embodies the true fundamental nature of ‘why the world is in conflict’. Based on sound logic and penetrating reason Sam Harris asks the questions no one else seems to bother with or discuss. The book is critical for anyone interested in finding a true and complete solution to terrorism, extremism and religious fascism in the world.

The culprit is faith. Yes, religious faith, according to Harris, is the belief system in which men and women become "suicide bombs" thinking that this action will bring everlasting life. Yes, faith is the underlining notion that this life is just a repository for greater things to come. A belief system which can not be questioned for it is mired in a world of ‘religious explanation’. For example, if one does something in the name of God then we can not discredit the belief only the action. In other words, we see the terrorists deed as horrific and unthinkable, but we fail to blame the faith which inspired the action, and centrally caused the destruction in the first place.

The seed of most destruction and suffering in this world derives from faith. Ironically, each religion has it own faithful warriors willing to lay down the gauntlet in the name of God, Yahweh or Allah. Thus each religion is pitted against one another, for each religion, at its core, must be intolerant of the other. Each religion is the ‘only true’ religion. This creates a faith based paradox where we live with groups that are doomed to hell however we must tolerate these infidels until such time. Or, as history has shown and Harris’s examples of the Spanish Inquisition, Holocaust and Islamic Jihad remind us that faith has decimated more lives than it has claimed to save. This book must be read by all, even though 90% of Americans believe in some form of God and thus have faith in this God, the facts remain that faith is the root of ignorance and war in this world.

The following quotes are just a sample of the logic and reason placed at your feet when reading this work:

• “Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world.” 14
• “This means (creationism or intelligent design) that 120 million of us (Americans) place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity.” 17
• “Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance – and it has no bona fides, in religion terms, to put it on par with fundamentalism.” 21
• “Moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.” 21
• “Religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one of discourse that does not admit progress…if religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine.” 22
• “The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason then that it was thought sacred yesterday.” 24
• “Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.” 25
• “Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire.” 26
• “… there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Muslim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence.” 29
• “Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.” 31
• “We live in an age which most people believe that mere words – “Jesus,” “Allah,” “Ram” – can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting.” 35
• “If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.”36 (Bold Added)
• “... religious moderation still represents a failure to criticize, the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others…we live in a country in which a person cannot get elected president if he openly doubts the existence of heaven and hell…no other body of “knowledge” (is) require(d) (of) our political leaders to master.” 39
• “…faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave.” 39
• “Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.” 45
• “Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like “God” and “crusade” and “wonder-working power” mean to him.” 47
• “…we are conservative in our beliefs in the sense that we do not add or subtract from our store of them without reason.” 61
• “But the fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at all about their validity.” 64
• “It (faith) is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right.” 66
• “The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith – perfect faith, as it turns out – and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.” 67 (Bold Added)
• “It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human begins) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind.” 72
• “…while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.” 72
• “The dangers of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human begins to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.” 73
• “Apart from the Bible’s heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and irreconcilable aims, the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself.” 85
• “Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary’s virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means “young woman,’ without any implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church’s resulting anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from the Hebrew.” 95
• “The doctrine of transubstantiation was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and prohibited Jews from owning land or embarking upon civil or military careers), and thereafter became the centerpiece of the Christian (now Catholic) faith.” 99
• “But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its willingness to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby enable them to trace the extent of a person’s Jewish ancestry.” 103
• “The fact that people are sometimes inspired to heroic acts of kindness by the teaching of Christ says nothing about the wisdom or necessity of believing that he, exclusively, was the Son of God.” 106
• “The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture.” 109
• “In Islam, it is the “moderate” who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.” 113
• “It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.” 131 (Bold Added)
• “40 percent of those who eventually voted for Bush were white evangelicals.” 155
• “Tom Delay, is given to profundities like “Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity.”… he (Tom Delay) attributed the shootings at the Columbine High School in Colorado to the fact that our schools teach the theory of evolution.” 156
• “The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.” 159
• “When one looks at our drug laws – indeed, at our vice laws altogether – the only organizing principle that appears to make sense of them is that anything which might radically eclipse prayer or procreative sexuality as a source of pleasure has been outlawed.” 160
• “…that the Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions – jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow – capricious, petulant, and cruel – and one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness.” 173
• “That our Paleolithic genes now have chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons at their disposal is, from the point of view of our evolution, little different from having delivered this technology into the hands of chimps. The difference between killing one man and killing a thousand just doesn’t seem as salient to us as it should.” 195
• “Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial – at once full of hope and full of fear – of the vastitude of human ignorance.” 221
• “In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.” 223