Provocations. Commentary and Conversation from the Trinity Forum

Provocation 8. November 2006. The Trinity Forum

~~~

A recent book by a militant anti-theist helps to clarify the true sources of attack on our civilization.

~~~

David Aikman

A 2004 New York Times best-seller by Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason placed its author, a graduate in philosophy from Stanford, in the forefront of the forefront of anti-theists in America. In his latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation, published in September 2006, Harris brings his heavy artillery as close as he can to the walls of the church. His intention, he writes, is "to destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms." Welcome to the tradition of Voltaire, Engels, and an eccentric Soviet magazine founded under Lenin called The Godless.

The Christian faith has survived more learned and eloquent assaults than those of Sam Harris, and will doubtless continue to do so.

Harris does trigger some alarms, however, in considering religious thought not harmless but dangerous, and by advocating nothing less than its suppression, presumably, in the end, by the deployment of state power. If that ever becomes reality in the U.S., American society will quickly resemble the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao Zedong.

Harris ignores altogether the fact that America's Founders, although sometimes openly skeptical of Christian orthodoxy, saw political liberty itself as indissolubly linked to the virtues deemed to be rooted in Christian ethics. As Thomas Jefferson himself, who said that he could not find in orthodox Christianity "one redeeming feature," put it, "God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?" Perhaps the Founders, who had studied the constitutions of dozens of previous attempted republics, knew a truth about theism when they saw it.

Harris, however, though a hard-core secular anti-theist, is by no means himself an orthodox political liberal. In fact, on a blog site one day before the publication of his Letter to a Christian Nation, he wrote that he is frankly as "wary" of his fellow liberals as he is of "demagogues on the Christian right." He goes on, "This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that 'liberals are soft on terrorism,' and they are." He adds, "A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world-for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a 'war on terror.' We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise."

If these were the words of a recognized neo-con or religious conservative, they might be considered by liberal readers typical and even predictable. But coming from an atheist they are striking and sobering, a tocsin warning of an enemy at our very gates. A healthy civilization, after all, ought to have room for people of multitudinous faiths and non-faiths. It may take an atheist to recognize the point when the very notion of civilization is under attack from those who hate the very idea of freedom of conscience.

~~~

Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is http://www.davidaikman.com.

Letter to A Christian Nation

In response to The End of Faith, Sam Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in God. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. Using rational argument, Harris offers a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. In the course of his argument, he addresses current topics ranging from intelligent design and stem-cell research to the connections between religion and violence. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris boldly challenges the influence that faith has on public life in our nation. In his "Note to the Reader," he writes:

Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen-the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves-socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.The book you are about to read is my response to this emergency...

BLOG RESPONSE

Letter to a Christian Nation is a mixture of anger and despair. It goes over the top at the end, but before that, Harris says exactly what I feel about religion.

Harris sets it out hard and fast in the introduction: "I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms". And this, he believes, is necessary because, for instance, only 12% of Americans believe that life on earth evolved through a natural process without the interference of a deity; in a free vote, notions of "intelligent design" would defeat the science of biology by nearly three to one; 53% of Americans are creationists. America is unique in these attitudes and for Harris, "Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant. Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one's friends".

Harris rejects the link between morality and religion, arguing that you can lead a moral life without religious adherence, buttressing his argument with statistics showing that areas with higher percentages of non-religious adherents have crime and social problem measurements as good as, or better than, areas with high levels of religious commitments. In fact, in his view, "One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not-that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation". It is, as Harris argues, "time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous". While the USA is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence, it is uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. And one does not have to look very hard through history to see that religion in its many forms is responsible for horrendous cruelty and death.

I agree entirely that there is no more compelling reason to believe in the existence of a Christian god than there is to believe that Zeus and his cohorts are directing our lives and should be propitiated with sacrifices. Belief in something, however widespread and however adhered to by good people doing good deeds, does not make that something real. People talk about the violence of Islam and quote from the Koran to this effect; the Old and New Testaments match the bloodthirstiness very well, thank you very much.

Harris, not surprisingly, has no time for those who reject the facts of evolution. Such a position, in the face of incontrovertible facts and proven projections is akin, he maintains tongue-in-cheek, to arguing that the sun is not really a star because it doesn't look like one. He is distressed that a survey of 34 countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution (2005), the USA ranked 33rd, just ahead of Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the USA test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math: "These data are unequivocal: we are building a nation of ignorance".

I think Harris is right in saying:

"Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religious faith."

Where I think Harris does go over the top is in his tirade against Islam and Muslims and the threat of the Islamization of Europe. He rejects the notion that Islam is a peaceful religion hijacked by extremists; he believes that the danger is inherent in Islam itself. But, he ignores socio-economic factors that have more to do with alienation that provides fertile ground for extreme ideologues whether fascism in the 1930s or some extreme religious bent in the 21st century. Harris pillories Christianity and the Bible for their bloodthirstiness and intolerance and violence, but even those who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of god are not out on a daily basis stoning people to death for working on a Sunday. There are few monoliths, and Harris is wrong to attribute that characteristic to Islam and Muslims.

However, as the final word, I do agree that:

"One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns - about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering-in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith." John (Oct 30, 2006)