Making Sense with Sam Harris - #35 — The End Of Faith Sessions 1

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

Sam Harris reads and discusses the first chapter of "The End of Faith." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm going to be starting today a series entitled The End of Faith Sessions. This is inspired by two things. The first is that I've always heard that the audiobook edition of The End of Faith is deeply unsatisfying. I actually haven't heard it myself, but rumor has it that the voice actor who read it didn't do a good job, and in places even seemed to disagree with me and give a deliberately

infelicitous reading of the text. And it's also the case that the most controversial things I've ever written are in that book and continue to come back to haunt me. So I'm going to read much of the book, most of the book, perhaps all of the book, in a series of podcasts, and then elaborate on what I wrote there, issuing any caveats as needed. And I may in fact not read certain sections of it, but this is me jailbreaking the audio, for better or worse. Chapter One. Reason in Exile. The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison.

The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets.

New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a button, he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan. The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment.

They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared a way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man's parents by giving them gifts of food and money. These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior. Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy then, so trivially easy, you could almost

bet your life on it easy, to guess the young man's religion? Okay, so that's how I started the book, and this opening has been quite controversial for reasons that make no sense. Many people who object to this beginning, which is a fictionalized account in its details, are merely imagining what a prototypical suicide bombing on a bus might be like. Many have objected that there's something unrealistic about this, or that these kinds of events don't happen, this, or that these kinds of events don't happen, that this is a falsehood to put this forward as somehow indicative of the kind of thing that is happening in our world that has been happening for decades. Well, that claim is simply false. This is a prototypical case for a reason. The details I've given here, apart from the fictionalized couple shopping for a refrigerator, are well

attested to. This is precisely the sort of thing that Muslim suicide bombers have done and continue to do. And I believe that every detail here is factual, including the penultimate gesture of smiling at the victims. That is also well attested to by those who have survived suicide attacks. And while there are others who have committed suicide bombings, and for quite some time the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were the most prolific suicide bombers, it was the case when I wrote this, and it is even more true now, that when you hear about a suicide bombing, there is one thing you can be virtually certain of, and that is that it was carried out by a believer in Islam, someone who believes in paradise, someone who believes that he was going to paradise because of his martyrdom. Someone who believed that he was sending infidels to hell where they will burn for eternity.

Someone who is in touch with a community of people who believe the same things. That's not to say that a non-Muslim suicide bomber is impossible, but you can know these things about any suicide bomber today with a high order of confidence. And that is a claim about which I think no honest person can pretend to be in doubt at this moment in history. If you tell me that an airplane has been hijacked, or that a pilot of a plane has intentionally flown it into a building or into the ground, killing himself

and everyone else on board, and you stipulate that this person was not mentally ill or suicidally depressed, as has happened on occasion, I can tell you what you will hear on the black box if that black box gets recovered. I can tell you the pilot's or hijacker's last words. Now, how can I do that? Is it because I'm psychic? No. But I will take this bet every time. Why do I know that if you recover that black box,

you will hear someone screaming Allahu Akbar? Because only one ideology on earth is producing this behavior reliably at this point. And that ideology, which I would call jihadism or Islamism now, depending on the context, comes directly out of the religion of Islam. And no other religion is producing an analogous death cult at this moment. And as I will make very clear in this book, there are theological reasons for this. And while I will go on to criticize Christianity and other religions for their specific problems, their problems are different. And the problem of suicidal jihad is not something that all religions are culpable for.

And if you're going to be in the business of criticizing religion or even maintaining the security of your own society, it's only decent to acknowledge that difference. So if you're one of those people who think I have stacked the deck against Islam by providing this generic example of a suicide bombing, I think you're quite clearly fooling yourself. Back to the book. A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action.

Your beliefs define your vision of the world. They dictate your behavior. They determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions. 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You've just won a lottery prize of 100 million dollars. Three, aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts. These are mere words until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very

apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior. There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world. They are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. Now here I should say, I think the word generally here is inaccurate. I should have said often have their roots in religion. I don't think most wars have been religious in origin. A significant subset have been. And certainly when societies break down along tribal lines, breaking down along confessional lines into religious camps is a very common phenomenon. And this is not to say

that people are motivated by theology in their subsequent conflict, but they're motivated by religious tribalism. But I wouldn't say that most wars have been religious, though I think some of the scariest divisions in our world now are explicitly religious. Back to the text. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars, but because it was written in our books, is what we do with words like God and Paradise and Sin in the present that will determine our future. Our situation is this. Most of the people in this world believe that the creator of the universe has written a

book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept, rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however. Quote, respect for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched here and there by the spirit of ecumenicalism,

the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error, or at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes, really believes, that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one. And I certainly stand by this claim. I'm sure I'll revisit this at some point in the book, but just imagine what it would be like, some of you might in fact know what it's like,

to be certain that the difference between spending eternity in heaven or eternity in hell turns on whether you believe the right things about a book or about the origin of the universe. Now many people pretend to believe these things or believe it to some degree, but if you are certain of this, if you are certain that someone with the wrong ideas, by persuading your child to doubt the truth of your religion, has thereby prepared an eternity of suffering for the person you care about most in this world, well, if anything is intolerable, that is. That is worse than your neighbor kidnapping your child and torturing him or her in his basement for a decade.

Right? And we're talking about an eternity of hellfire. That is the worst possible fate. sight of is that some people really believe that this fate awaits you if you think the wrong things about the origin of a book or about the invisible being who is imagined to have dictated it. And it's only in so far as people are uncertain about these claims. It's only insofar as they doubt these doctrines that they otherwise pay lip service to, that they are capable of behaving themselves in a condition of epistemological pluralism, in a condition of rival truth claims, in a condition where teachers and camp counselors and new friends may lead their children to doubt the truth of their religion.

Otherwise, the need to resort to violence is absolutely imperative. What would you do if you knew someone was about to inflict an eternity of misery on your child? You would do whatever it took to stop them. And if you couldn't pass the requisite laws, you would become a law unto yourself. This leaves aside, of course, the curious morality of a god who would do such a thing. God, the omniscient sociopath, who has rigged the game this way, who has condemned to eternal torment people who, by mere accident of birth, by the sheer fact that they have the wrong nouns and verbs in their heads, they will spend eternity

being tortured. That is the source of morality on offer in Abrahamic religion. But of that, more later. In closing, I'll just say that what we are seeing more and more, especially in the Muslim world, are the antisocial consequences of religious certainty. We see what should otherwise be an unthinkable psychological reality. We see well-educated people with other opportunities, often with families, willing to blow themselves up and go into their deaths in a spirit of jubilation. Watch some of these videos. See the smiles on the faces of people who are about to blow themselves up. Nothing in your life has made you this enthusiastic in recent memory. And this, once again, is the power of

belief. You might call it the power of brainwashing if you think that these people are on some level victims of propaganda. Fine. But to doubt that they believe what they say they believe makes absolutely no sense in these cases. Back to the book. Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus. Religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to

be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that his faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always and everywhere exonerated. But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences, and hence our religious beliefs, antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation,

or in any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia, because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark a terminal phase of our credulity. Words like God and Allah must go the way of Apollo and Ball, or they will unmake our world. A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy. It fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself from most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into

obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an alternative to alchemy. It was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of alternatives to religious faith is to miss the point. Of course, people of faith fall on a continuum. Some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy.

There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma. They imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance, born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God, is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. And this is where I introduce what is perhaps the most controversial point in the book.

This is where I implicate so-called religious moderates in the ongoing problem of religious intolerance and religious violence. Needless to say, moderates are better than fundamentalists. If we could turn all fundamentalists into moderates, that would be great. But moderates, because of the respect they demand for religion, and because of their own confusion about what it is that fundamentalists believe, they prevent us from criticizing fundamentalism, or even noticing its consequences in the way that we must. And this is something that I spell out at greater length soon. We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not

surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally. One, most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith, for example, strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience, that cannot be had elsewhere. Two, many of us also believe that the terrible things sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se, but of our baser natures, forces like greed, hatred, and fear, for which religious beliefs are themselves the best or even the only remedy.

Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse. Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so, they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the day of judgment, he cannot possibly respect the beliefs of others, for he knows that the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas, and await their adherence even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises, and have

spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence. And yet intellectuals as diverse as H.G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be long over. On this view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe cohere. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept. He can, as it were, have his reason and eat it too.

As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only because the church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can afford to think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Quran, Gould's notion of a loving concordat between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional. This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed, however obliquely and at a terrible price, by mainstream religion.

And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions. Jesus was born of a virgin. The Quran is the word of God for us to do this. And so here I begin to touch on a theme which is brought out more later in the book, but also most fully in my recent book, Waking Up,

that there are rational approaches to, quote, spiritual experience. I do think finding a rational basis for ethics and finding a rational basis for a contemplative life is an extremely important project, and on many levels, the most important project for any individual to engage. The myth of moderation in religion. The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the one true God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art to even be entertained, as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of cross-pollination among them.

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherence, were cast upon the scrapheap of mythology millennia ago. For there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas. of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne,

or Poseidon churning the seas. According to Gallup, 35% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the creator of the universe. Another 48% believe that it is the inspired word of the same, still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before their truth can be brought to light. Only 17% of us remain to doubt that a personal God, in his infinite wisdom, is likely to have authored this text, or, for that matter, to have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46% of Americans take a literalist view of creation,

and 40% believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years. This means that 120 million of us 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. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we as a species have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths.

How is it that in this one area of our lives we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence? Now, I should say that the numbers have grown slightly more favorable, at least in the U.S., in the intervening years. So I wrote this 13, 14 years ago. It was published 12 years ago in 2004. I would say that based on recent polls, we've gained about 10% in the direction of reason. But the general picture is the same, where you have vast numbers, literally more than 100 million, claiming to believe the unbelievable. Now, as to whether there's much distance between what people

claim and what they actually believe, that is a topic of real interest and consequence and genuine debate. Surely there is some difference there, but what is also clear is that even if we cut these numbers in half, we have vast numbers of people, even in the U.S. in the year 2016, believing patently absurd things about the origin of the Bible, and therefore about the moral order of the universe. Back to the book. It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it means to be a, quote, religious moderate in the 21st century. Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret, or simply ignore, much of their canons in the interest of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth

of economics is at work here. Societies become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the Moderates' retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture, but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety, and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific in

mind, should your son or daughter return from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna. And this is from Deuteronomy chapter 13, verses 7 through 11. If your brother, the son of your father, or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, let us go serve other gods, unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the people surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world. You must not consent. You must not listen to him. You must show him no pity. You must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him. Your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the

rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he is trying to divert you from Yahweh, your God. Okay, well that's about as clear an injunction as is possible to write. There is no metaphor there. This is not allegory. This is a direct command to kill people for any semblance of religious diversity. If someone suggests to you that you should be practicing a religion other than the one true one you happen to have in hand, in this case, Judaism or some variant of Christianity, you should kill him and you must be the first to kill him. And as it's spelled out elsewhere, if you're reluctant to do this, your neighbors should kill you. So this is the sort of behavior we're seeing among not Christians for the most part, though you can get

Christians in Africa at the moment killing homosexuals, very much in the spirit of this sort of text. But when you consider a group like the Islamic State, this is the sort of literalism to which they are committed. And analogous passages, obviously, exist in the Quran, as we will see. But as I've often said, the Old Testament of the Bible is the worst of the worst when it comes to precise injunctions to kill people for thought crimes. It's only by a loophole in Judaism that Jews don't consider this an actionable doctrine now. The Messiah has not yet returned. The temple has not been rebuilt. A Sanhedrin has not been reconvened, which is a body of elders that can judge cases of this kind, in this case, a case of heresy.

But once all that happens, the ultra-Orthodox believe that this is how we should live. And any Jew who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying to you. So, it is by theological and historical accident, not the internal moral resources of the tradition of Judaism, that we are not seeing barbaric Jews murdering their neighbors for religious offenses. And it is by extraordinarily unhappy accidents of theology

that we are seeing this among Muslims worldwide. And this is a difference, again, that we have to learn to talk about honestly. Back to the book. While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a, quote, symbolic reading of passages of this sort. In fact, one seems to be explicitly blocked by God himself in Deuteronomy 13, verse 1. Quote, whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away. End quote. The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible,

and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the good book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for moderation in religion. It has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of divine law. The only reason that anyone is, quote, moderate in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last 2,000 years of human thought. Democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc. The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside.

The moderation we see among non-fundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved. It is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason in this regard. It is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith.

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book that he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever. Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters

than anyone did 2,000 years ago, and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our universe, most of us, about half of us actually, find the idea that the whole works was created 6,000 years ago, with light from distant stars already in transit toward the Earth, impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religions are in principle open to new learning. It's just that the utility of ignoring, or reinterpreting certain articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone

being flown to a distant city for heart bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses. So it's not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time. They haven't. It's just that they've been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains, the quote, good parts, has been spared the same winnowing because we don't have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our modes of

conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh? And why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego an illusion? And if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.

And again, this is a claim that I stand behind. The only reason why these books have any integrity left in them, apart from the occasional example of good writing, is that we haven't had fundamental breakthroughs in a rational scientific context on ethics and spiritual experience. And insofar as we do, the change you will see in our conversation will be exactly analogous to what has happened in the area of medicine or to questions of cosmology. If you're an astronomer looking to the Bible or the Quran for guidance about how to think, in fact, you are not an astronomer. And the same will be true for what I'm calling here a mystic or a contemplative, someone who cares to explore in the laboratory of his own mind the deepest experiences available based on how he uses his attention. And the more we understand about the human mind, the more technology intrudes upon it, the less sane and rational people will fixate

on these books. Now back to the book. While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out in light of all that we have and have not learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is in all likelihood going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. 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're merely practicing their freedom of belief. We cannot even say that they're mistaken in religious terms because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say as religious moderates is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of Scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis. It is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing in principle to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance, Perhaps I should say that again, because this is an important point.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. It is by knowing more and more about things beyond religion, and knowing less and less, ultimately, about the details of one's own religion, that one becomes a religious moderate. That, by definition, renders religious moderation unconvincing to a fundamentalist, and intellectually dishonest to an atheist. to a fundamentalist, and intellectually dishonest to an atheist. Because the moderate doesn't acknowledge the origins of this transformation in his or her thinking. The moderate pretends that this is somehow coming from the tradition itself, that it's the resources internal to Judaism or Christianity or Islam that have allowed for this moderation. No. Go back to Deuteronomy, now or a thousand years from now, and you will find that same passage demanding that you kill your daughter if she joins the Hare Krishnas. Back to the book. The texts themselves are

unequivocal. They are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question, that is, that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us, religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness. The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime

than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance. Nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in Orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas, but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on problems of ethics, social cohesion,

and even spiritual experience, 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. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine, engineering, not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience. And this is a point that I occasionally make, although perhaps not often enough, that one of the other costs to religious moderation is that it blocks the door to a truly rational, truly unembarrassing approach to ethics and spirituality. Moderates insist that we respect the notion of revelation because there's something so good in these books

that we couldn't possibly come up with it on our own, or couldn't view all books as the products of merely human minds, and then sample the best wisdom from each without regard for any tradition. This belief, in addition to maintaining the tribalism of separate religious communities in our world, this belief is not only obviously false, but profoundly unhelpful. Back to the text. Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the 14th century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would

know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos, or that trepanation constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. And for those of you who don't recognize the word trepanane or trepanation, or trephanine, it's the practice of boring holes in the human skull. It's the practice of boring holes in the human skull. Often it's imagined for the purpose of releasing a demon that has taken up residence there.

This has gone back thousands of years. I say in a footnote here that archaeological evidence suggests that it's one of the oldest surgical procedures, and it was presumably performed on epileptics and the mentally ill as an attempt at exorcism. Okay, back to the curious fact that a man from the 14th century would know everything there is to know about God. There are two explanations for this. Either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago, while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate. Or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view. With each passing year, do our religious beliefs

conserve more and more of the data of human experience? 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. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems

perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us, culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive it. The point I'm making here, and I believe I make it in these terms near the end of the book, is that I don't think there's any reason to believe that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely for thousands of years into the future. How is it that the most divisive ideology we have ever spawned will serve us well indefinitely. How is it a good idea, even now, to have humanity divided against itself in this way? Back to the book. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word

God as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don't want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers. Because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world, to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Quran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish, is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. The Shadow of the Past Finding ourselves in a universe that seems bent upon destroying us, we quickly discover, both as individuals and as societies, that it is a good thing to understand the forces arrayed

against us. And so it is that every human being comes to desire genuine knowledge about the world. This has always posed a special problem for religion, because every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This put the leap in Kierkegaard's leap of faith. What if all our knowledge about the world were to suddenly disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We've even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first?

Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if indeed they are true? By reading the Bible? A tour of our shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity, like the quote, fact, that Isis, the goddess of fertility,

sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer, and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yahweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin, or that adulteresses should be stoned to death, or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others and that it was actually written by the creator of the universe. There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to relearn

once we manage to feed and clothe ourselves. And these are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present state. How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inwardness and simply love other human beings? Assume for the moment that such a process of personal transformation exists and that there is something worth knowing about it. There is, in other words, some skill or discipline or conceptual understanding or dietary supplement

that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful, or indifferent persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively desperate to know about it. There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard. But as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up again. The Bible and the Quran, it seems certain, would find themselves respectfully shelved next to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than it was thought

sacred yesterday. Surely if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature to say nothing of killing and dying for them would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now? Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities, at least those united under a single faith, to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the

modern world, a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and epidemiological necessity, religious ideology is dangerously retrograde. Our past is not sacred for being past, and there is much that is behind us that we are struggling to keep behind us, and to which, it is to be hoped, we could never return with a clear conscience. The divine right of kings, feudalism, the caste system, slavery, political executions, forced castration, vivisection, bear-baiting, honorable duels, chastity belts, trial by ordeal, The list is nearly endless, and if it were extended indefinitely, the proportion of abuses for which religion could be found directly responsible is likely to remain undiminished.

In fact, almost every indignity just mentioned can be attributed to an insufficient taste for evidence, to an uncritical faith in one dogma or another. The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention, distinguished as it is both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence, is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. 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. When foisted upon each generation anew, it renders us incapable of realizing just how

much of our world has been unnecessarily ceded to a dark and barbarous past. The burden of paradise. Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of paradise. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs,

and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.