The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Sam Harris

Sep 2005 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

"The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated....Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say."—Natalie Angier, New York Times In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs—even when these beliefs inspire the worst human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic. Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.

Ratings and reviews

My field of study is philosophy and psychology, and I write this review based on the knowledge that I have obtained from these fields. Harris claims his book is based on logic; it is a shame that he did not use logic to make his arguments, and his lack of knowledge of faith is astounding; a 10 year old possesses a better grasp. When he speaks as though he is informed on the subject of faith he gives us nothing more than straw man and red herring arguments. This book contains so many fallacies that it is hard to know where to start, a person with a simple grasp of logic can see right through his arguments. This book is a forgery of the truth, all of its arguments are based on some form of deception, which makes me wonder if he done this knowingly or in ignorance, but because they are so elaborate and deceptive I would say the former. Harris is not a philosopher but a sophist (obscurantist, “deceptionist”). It seems as though he is not concerned with the truthfulness of his conclusions but rather in hearing his own voice and making money. He talks of tolerance but yet he possesses none himself, and his tolerance only extends to those who think the same way he does, then by definition he is intolerant. Harris speaks of torture effortlessly and nonchalantly, and I get the sense that if he were to get his way, all who ascribe to faith would be in danger. Harris likes to think of himself belonging to a class of academia (Dawkins and Hitchens etc.) and he exhibits in his writing elitism, the belief that they know better and the masses need to be guided by “intellectuals”, willingly and by force, which also comes out in his writing, whereas he seems to be offended by peoples freedom to believe what they want. I wonder if he realizes that it is these very beliefs that give him the privilege of writing disparagingly about these beliefs. We have read and seen Harris’s kind of tolerance and musings in the past and oddly enough these same men also belong to the same class and/or embraced ideological stance. To name a few: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot. Etc. Harris’s writings sound eerily familiar to other so called philosophers and socialist thinkers of the past like Marx and Hegel. All of these men including Harris and Dawkins share one common ideology, a “Militant Atheism”, and an obsession that religion must be stamped out at any cost. Harris is an opportunistic pusillanimous writer, he focuses in on Christianity more than the other religions because it is an easier target, and it is politically incorrect to write harshly of Judaism and dangerous to write disparagingly against Islam, even though the vast percentage of terrorism today belongs in the latter’s camp. Harris squarely blames all of the atrocities inflicted upon the world squarely upon religion. But the documented fact is says differently. It is documented fact, that there were more people murdered and more atrocities committed in the 20th century by people who think the same way that Harris does (academia, elitists, and socialists) than in all of recorded history combined. Harris seems to shrug off recorded history as an irrelevant irritant. He is unable to see beyond himself and his own wants. Militant atheism seems to be the new flavour of the day amongst academia for the past decade or so, if one would critically look at the writings of these new atheists they all have the same thing in common, deceptive arguments for their positions. The terrible tragedy of those who think like Harris is that they are labouring to lay the groundwork for the very atrocities they think to permanently prevent in the name of Reason. Voltaire may have been correct to write that “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” but a more meaningfully rational statement would be to say: If you commit atrocities, then you believe absurdities. And the undeniable fact is that the absurdity most often believed by those who have committed Man’s greatest atrocities is that there is no God. In that, if man thinks that he will not

Everything Sam has said in this book is spot on, even time the ultimate test of our moral convictions, has its work ahead of it in attempting to erode or make false the statements made in this book. My only criticism is that sam , in my opinion does not elaborate enough on the specifics of our way out of this darkness other than to say we must be patient and open. fair enough, but I scarcely think words and conviction alone will save us from the jaws of religious fanaticism.

Mr. Harris does a wonderful job of framing the unreason and lunacy inherent in accepting stone-age ideas as divine and acknowledging the validity of an empirical approach to meditative states and their observations. One (false) critique of the "non-religious" is that their disbelief (or Athiest beliefs) leave no room for an inner or deeper experience, what Western religions label as "soul" or "spirit". Sam's openness on this topic is refreshing. A great read.

About the author

Sam Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University.