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.
If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.
What can be said of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan if their divergent religious beliefs are to be "respected"? There is nothing for religious pluralists to criticize but each coun- try's poor diplomacy—while, in truth, the entire conflict is born of an irrational embrace of myth. Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan.
And their discourse is such that they are capable of mustering a suicidal level of enthusiasm for these subjects without evidence. Their conflict is only nominally about land, because their incompatible claims upon the territory of Kashmir are a direct consequence of their religious differences. Indeed, the only reason India and Pakistan are different countries is that the beliefs of Islam cannot be reconciled with those of Hin- duism.
From the point of view of Islam, it would be scarcely possi- ble to conceive a way of scandalizing Allah that is not perpetrated, each morning, by some observant Hindu. The "land" these people are actually fighting over is not to be found in this world. When will we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our politi- cal discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?
Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched. Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city. This is our world. The cause of this behavior was not eco- nomic, it was not racial, and it was not political.
The above passage describes the violence that erupted between Hindus and Muslims in India in the winter of The only difference between these groups consists in what they believe about God.
Over one thousand people died in this monthlong series of riots—nearly half as many as have died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in more than a decade. And these are tiny numbers, considering the possibilities. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan seems almost inevitable, given what most Indians and Pakistanis believe about the afterlife. One might argue that no group of people can quite be "trusted" with the bomb, but to ignore the destabilizing role that religion plays on the subcontinent is both reckless and disingenuous.
We can only hope that the forces of secularism and rationality will keep the missiles in their silos for a while yet, until the deeper reasons for this conflict can be finally addressed. While I do not mean to single out the doctrine of Islam for spe- cial abuse, there is no question that, at this point in history, it repre- sents a unique danger to all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
Needless to say, many Muslims are basically rational and tolerant of others. As we will see, however, these modern virtues are not likely to be products of their faith. In chapter 4,1 will argue that insofar as a person is observant of the doctrine of Islam—that is, insofar as he really believes it—he will pose a problem for us.
Indeed, it has grown rather obvious that the liabilities of the Muslim faith are by no means confined to the beliefs of Muslim "extremists. We have, in response to this improbable fact, declared a war on "terror- ism. Terrorism is not a source of human violence, but merely one its inflections. If Osama bin Laden were the leader of a nation, and the World Trade Center had been brought down with missiles, the atrocities of September 11 would have been acts of war.
It should go without saying that we would have resisted the temptation to declare a war on "war" in response. To see that our problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with "terrorism," we need only ask ourselves why Muslim terrorists do what they do. The answer to this question is obvious—if only because it has been patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden himself.
The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors?
Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of human beings so fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been reluctant to accept this explanation? As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the nineteen hijackers, and much of the Mus- lim world.
We, too, cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence. Such heroic acts of credulity are thought not only acceptable but redeeming—even necessary. This is a problem that is considerably deeper and more troubling than the problem of anthrax in the mail.
The concessions we have made to religious faith—to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence—have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world. Muslim Extremism It is important to specify the dimension in which Muslim "extrem- ists" are actually extreme. They are extreme in their faith.
They are extreme in their devotion to the literal word of the Koran and the hadith the literature recounting the sayings and actions of the Prophet , and this leads them to be extreme in the degree to which they believe that modernity and secular culture are incompatible with moral and spiritual health.
They also consider our unbelief to be a sin so grave that it merits death whenever it becomes an impediment to the spread of Islam, These sundry passions are not reducible to "hatred" in any ordinary sense. Most Muslim extremists have never been to America or even met an American. And they have far fewer grievances with Western imperialism than is the norm around the globe.
As has been widely noted, they are also con- sumed by feelings of "humiliation"—humiliation over the fact that while their civilization has foundered, they have watched a godless, sin-loving people become the masters of everything they touch. This feeling is also a product of their faith. Muslims do not merely feel the outrage of the poor who are deprived of the necessities of life. They feel the outrage of a chosen people who have been subju- gated by barbarians.
Osama bin Laden wants for nothing. What, then, does he want? He has not called for the equal distribution of wealth around the globe. Even his demand for Palestinian statehood seems an afterthought, stemming as much from his anti-Semitism as from any solidarity he feels with the Palestinians needless to say, such anti-Semitism and solidarity are also products of his faithj.
He seems most exercised over the presence of unbelievers American troops and Jews in the Muslim holy land and over what he imagines to be the territorial ambitions of Zionists. These are purely theological grievances. It would be much better, for all con- cerned, if he merely hated us. To be sure, hatred is an eminently human emotion, and it is obvi- ous that many Muslim extremists feel it. But faith is still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people define their moral identities in religious terms.
The only salient difference between Muslims and non-Muslims is that the latter have not proclaimed their faith in Allah, and in Mohammed as his prophet. Islam is a missionary reli- gion: there is not likely to be an underlying doctrine of racism, or even nationalism, animating the militant Muslim world. One failed Palestinian suicide bomber described being "pushed" to attack Israelis by "the love of martyr- dom. I just wanted to be a martyr.
Zaydan, the would-be martyr, conceded that his Jewish captors were "better than many, many Arabs. He would have been sure to invite his family along.
But I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran,13 or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe.
Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.
If we would speak of the baseness of our natures, our willingness to live, kill, and die on account of propositions for which we have no evi- dence should be among the first topics of discussion. Most people in positions of leadership in our country will say that there is no direct link between the Muslim faith and "terrorism. It is widely claimed by "moderate" Muslims that the Koran mandates nothing of the kind and that Islam is a "religion of peace. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate.
Koran Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous.
Koran Religious Muslims cannot help but disdain a culture that, to the degree that it is secular, is a culture of infidels; to the degree that it is religious, our culture is the product of a partial revelation that of Christians and Jews , inferior in every respect to the revelation of Islam.
The reality that the West currently enjoys far more wealth ; and temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical perversity, and this situation will ; always stand as an open invitation for jihad. Insofar as a person is Muslim—that is, insofar as he believes that Islam constitutes the ; only viable path to God and that the Koran enunciates it perfectly— he will feel contempt for any man or woman who doubts the truth of his beliefs.
What is more, he will feel that the eternal happiness of his children is put in peril by the mere presence of such unbelievers in the world. If such people happen to be making the policies under which he and his children must live, the potential for violence imposed by his beliefs seems unlikely to dissipate.
This is why eco- nomic advantages and education, in and of themselves, are insuffi- cient remedies for the causes of religious violence. There is no doubt that many well-educated, middle-class fundamentalists are ready to kill and die for God. As Samuel Huntington 14 and others have observed, religious fundamentalism in the developing world is not, principally, a movement of the poor and uneducated.
To see the role that faith plays in propagating Muslim violence, we need only ask why so many Muslims are eager to turn them- selves into bombs these days. The answer: because the Koran makes this activity seem like a career opportunity. Sub- tract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible, as does the spec- tacle of public jubilation that invariably follows their deaths; insert these peculiar beliefs, and one can only marvel that suicide bombing is not more widespread.
Anyone who says that the doctrines of Islam have "nothing to do with terrorism"—and our airways have been filled with apologists for Islam making this claim—is just play- ing a game with words. The believers who stay at home—apart from those that suffer from a grave impediment—are not the equal of those who fight for the cause of God with their goods and their persons.
God has given those that fight with their goods and their persons a higher rank than those who stay at home. God has promised all a good reward; but far richer is the recompense of those who fight for Him He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and His apos- tle and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God. The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies.
Koran Outright prestidigitation with the articles of faith regularly pro- duces utterances of this sort: "Islam is a religion of peace. So there is no scriptural basis whatsoever for the actions of these terrorists. The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan Say: "Tri- fling are the pleasures of this life. The hereafter is better for those who would keep from evil. Rather than spend centuries moldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's Garden, where a flock of "dark-eyed" virgins awaits him.
Because they are believed to be nothing less than verbatim tran- scripts of God's utterances, texts like the Koran and the Bible must be appreciated, and criticized, for any possible interpretations to which they are susceptible—and to which they will be subjected, with varying emphases and elisions, throughout the religious world. The problem is not that some Muslims neglect to notice the few ref- erences to nonaggression that can be found in the Koran, and that this leads them to do terrible things to innocent unbelievers; the problem is that most Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God.
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon—because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.
We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words— "Jesus," "Allah," "Ram"—can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books.
How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world. There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books.
But words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered strangers by the thousands because of the inspiration he found there.
The belief that certain books were written by God who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shake- speare a far better writer than himself leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.
It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.
Could anything—anything—be more ridicu- lous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in. Death: The Fount of Illusions We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. The world sustains us, it would seem, only to devour us at its leisure. Parents lose their children and children their parents.
Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss.
But it seems that there is a cure for all this. If we live rightly—not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors—we will get everything we want after we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our corpo- real ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with everyone we loved while alive. Of course, overly rational people and other rab- ble will be kept out of this happy place, and those who suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy themselves for all eternity.
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises—from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary conse- quences of this light's dancing for eons upon the earth—and yet par- adise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know bet- ter, 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.
The virus mutates so often that its course is totally unpredictable. It can lie dormant for many years, even decades, or it can kill you outright in an hour. It can lead to heart attack, stroke, myriad forms of cancer, dementia, even suicide; in fact, there seems to be no constraints upon what its terminal stages might be. As for strategies of avoidance—diet and health regimes, sequestration to one's bed—nothing avails. You can be cer- tain that even if you live with no other purpose than to keep the progress of this virus in check, you will die, for there is no cure for it in sight, and the corruption of your body has already begun.
Surely, most people would consider this report to be terrible news indeed—but would it be news, in fact? Isn't the inevitability of death just such a prognosis?
Doesn't life itself have all the properties of our hypothetical virus? You could die at any moment. You might not even live to see the end of this paragraph. Not only that, you will definitely die at some moment in the future. If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be pre- pared. Not only are you bound to die and leave this world; you are bound to leave it in such a precipitate fashion that the present sig- nificance of anything—your relationships, your plans for the future, your hobbies, your possessions—will appear to have been totally illusory.
While all such things, when projected across an indefinite future, seem to be acquisitions of a kind, death proves that they are nothing of the sort. When the stopper on this life is pulled by an unseen hand, there will have been, in the final reckoning, no acqui- sition of anything at all. And as if this were not insult enough, most of us suffer the quiet discomposure, if not frank unhappiness, of our neuroses in the meantime. We love our family and friends, are terrified of losing them, and yet are not in the least free merely to love them while our short lives coincide.
We have, after all, our selves to worry about. Either impulse, taken to its extreme, seems to condemn us to unhappiness. We are terrified of our creaturely insignificance, and much of what we do with our lives is a rather transparent attempt to keep this fear at bay. While we try not to think about it, nearly the only thing we can be certain of in this life is that we will one day die and leave everything behind; and yet, paradoxically, it seems almost impossible to believe that this is so.
Our felt sense of what is real seems not to include our own death. We doubt the one thing that is not open to any doubt at all. What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presum- ing to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power.
A single proposi- tion—you will not die—once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable. Imagine how you would feel if your only child suddenly died of pneumonia.
Your reaction to this tragedy will be largely determined by what you think happens to human beings after they die. It would undoubtedly be comforting to believe something like: "He was God's little angel, and God took hirn back early because he wanted hirn close to Jesus. He'll be waiting for us when we get to heaven. Or consider how you would feel if you learned that a nuclear war had erupted between Israel and its neighbors over the ownership of the Temple Mount.
If you were a millennium-minded Christian, you would undoubtedly view this as a sign of Christ's imminent return to earth. This would be nothing if not good news, no matter what the death toll.
There's no denying that a person's conception of the afterlife has direct consequences for his view of the world. Of course, religious moderation consists in not being too sure about what happens after death. But religious moderation still represents a failure to criticize the unreasonable and dangerous cer- tainty of others.
This is truly remark- able, given that there is no other body of "knowledge" that we require our political leaders to master. Even a hairstylist must pass a licensing exam before plying his trade in the United States, and yet those given the power to make war and national policy—those whose decisions will inevitably affect human life for generations—are not expected to know anything in particular before setting to work.
They do not have to be political scientists, economists, or even lawyers; they need not have studied international relations, military history, resource management, civil engineering, or any other field of knowl- edge that might be brought to bear in the governance of a modern superpower; they need only be expert fund-raisers, comport them- selves well on television, and be indulgent of certain myths.
In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldli- ness to govern our affairs? Without death, the influence of faith-based religion would be unthinkable.
Clearly, the fact of death is intolerable to us, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave. But nothing about these experiences justifies arro- gant and exclusionary claims about the unique sanctity of any text. There is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all.
The basis of our spirituality surely consists in this: the range of possible human experience far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity. Clearly, some experiences can utterly transform a per- son's vision of the world. Every spiritual tradition rests on the insight that how we use our attention, from moment to moment, largely determines the quality of our lives.
Many of the results of spiritual practice are genuinely desirable, and we owe it to ourselves to seek them out. It is important to note that these changes are not merely emotional but cognitive and conceptual as well. Just as it is possible for us to have insights in fields like mathematics or biology, it is possible for us to have insights about the very nature of our own subjectivity. A variety of techniques, ranging from the practice of meditation to the use of psychedelic drugs, attest to the scope and plasticity of human experience.
This phenomenon, which has been reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is supported by a wealth of evidence—neuroscientific, philosophical, and intro- spective. Such experiences are "spiritual" or "mystical," for want of better words, in that they are relatively rare unnecessarily so , sig- nificant in that they uncover genuine facts about the world , and personally transformative.
They also reveal a far deeper connection between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity.
There is no doubt that experiences of this sort are worth seeking, just as there is no doubt that the popular religious ideas that have grown up around them, especially in the West, are as dangerous as they are incredible. There also seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by main- stream science. It is important to realize that a healthy, scien- tific skepticism is compatible with a fundamental openness of mind.
The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute. No human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all. You are, at this moment, having a visionary experience. The world that you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness, the physical status of which remains a mystery. Your nervous system sections the undifferentiated buzz of the universe into separate channels of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, as well as other senses of lesser renown—proprioception, kinesthesia, enteroreception, and even echolocation.
We really are such stuff as dreams are made of. Our waking and dreaming brains are engaged in substantially the same activity; it is just that while dreaming, our brains are far less constrained by sensory information or by the fact-checkers who appear to live somewhere in our frontal lobes. This is not to say that sensory experience offers us no indica- tion of reality at large; it is merely that, as a matter of experience, nothing arises in consciousness that has not first been structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system.
While this gives rise to a few philosophical problems concerning the foundations of our knowledge, it also offers us a remarkable opportunity to deliberately transform the character of our experience. For every neuron that receives its input from the outside world, there are ten to a hundred others that do not. There are always one or two breaks in the c i r c u i t - synapses—giving the neurons in question the opportunity to inte- grate feedback information, or information from other regions of the brain.
Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently. It is also true, however, that people occasionally have experiences that are rightly characterized as psychotic. As it turns out, there are many ways to deconstruct a self, to extract apparent meaningful- ness from the deliverances of one's senses, and to believe that one knows how the world is.
Not all visionary experiences are created equal, to say nothing of the worldviews derived from them. As in all things, some differences here make all the difference; these differ- ences, moreover, can be rationally discussed. As we will see, there is an intimate connection between spiritual- ity, ethics, and positive emotions. Although a scientific approach to these subjects is still struggling to be born, it is probably no more mysterious that most of us prefer love to fear, or regard cruelty as wrong, than that we agree in our judgments about the relative size of objects or about the gender of faces.
At the level of the brain, the laws that underwrite human happiness are unlikely to vary widely from person to person. In the later chapters of this book, we will see that much can be made of this fact, long before the scientific details ever become available to us. This will require that we marshal insights from our growing understanding of the human brain, our genetic conti- nuity with the rest of life, and the history of our religious ideas.
In the chapters that follow, I will try to reconcile the bewildering jux- taposition of two facts: i our religious traditions attest to a range of spiritual experiences that are real and significant and entirely worthy of our investigation, both personally and scientifically; 2 many of the beliefs that have grown up around these experiences now threaten to destroy us.
We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of rea- son, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives. This has led many of us to con- clude, wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in cer- tain fantastical ideas can fulfill.
It is nowhere written, however, that human beings must be irrational, or live in a perpetual state of siege, to enjoy an abiding sense of the sacred. On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. Seeing this, we can begin to divest ourselves of many of the reasons we currently have to kill one another.
Science will not remain mute on spiritual and ethical questions for long. Even now, we can see the first stirrings among psychologists and neuroscientists of what may one day become a genuinely rational approach to these matters—one that will bring even the most rarefied mystical experience within the purview of open, scientific inquiry.
It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason. Coming to Terms with Belief It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private.
In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia. The belief that it will rain puts an umbrella in the hand of every man or woman who owns one. It should be easy enough to see that belief in the full efficacy of prayer, for instance, becomes an emphatically public concern the moment it is actually put into practice: the moment a surgeon lays aside his worldly instruments and attempts to suture his patients with prayer, or a pilot tries to land a passenger jet with nothing but repetitions of the word "Hallelujah" applied to the controls, we are swiftly delivered from the provinces of private faith to those of a criminal court.
As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the mem- ber of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil cul- ture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by deal- ing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than a matter of being asked to do it.
It follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous. We all know that human beings are capable of incredible brutality, but we would do well to ask, What sort of ideology will make us most capable of it? And how can we place these beliefs beyond the fray of normal dis- course, so that they might endure for thousands of years, unper- turbed by the course of history or the conquests of reason?
These are problems of both cultural and psychological engineering. It has long been obvious that the dogma of faith—particularly in a scheme in which the faithful are promised eternal salvation and doubters are damned—is nothing less than their perfect solution. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.
To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview—however heroic the efforts of redactors—is to repu- diate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.
We will see that the greatest problem con- fronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. Religious moderates are, in large part, responsi- ble for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs pro- vide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed. EVERY sphere of genuine discourse must, at a minimum, admit of discourse—and hence the possibility that those standing on its fringe can come to understand the truths that it strives to articulate.
This is why any sustained exercise of reason must necessarily tran- scend national, religious, and ethnic boundaries. There is, after all, no such thing as an inherently American or Christian, or Caucasian physics. Such is not the case with the "truths" of religion, however. Nothing that a Christian and a Mus- lim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulner- able to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.
Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. And yet, the fact that we are no longer killing people for heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, how- ever sacred, cannot survive the company of good ones forever. Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.
There are still a num- ber of cultures in which the germ theory of disease has yet to put in an appearance, where people suffer from a debilitating ignorance on most matters relevant to their physical health. Do we "tolerate" these beliefs? Not if they put our own health in jeopardy. Many Muslims, for instance, are con- vinced that God takes an active interest in women's clothing. While it may seem harmless enough, the amount of suffering that this incredible idea has caused is astonishing.
The rioting in Nigeria over the Miss World Pageant claimed over two hundred lives; inno- cent men and women were butchered with machetes or burned alive simply to keep that troubled place free of women in bikinis.
Earlier in the year, the religious police in Mecca prevented paramedics and firefighters from rescuing scores of teenage girls trapped in a burn- ing building. Because the girls were not wearing the tradi- tional head covering that Koranic law requires.
Fourteen girls died in the fire; fifty were injured. Should Muslims really be free to believe that the Creator of the universe is concerned about hemlines? Gathering Our Wits Recent events have done more than expose our vulnerability to the militant discontents of the world: they have uncovered a dark cur- rent of unreason in our national discourse. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to religion, non fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Keller by Timothy J. By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy.
To browse Academia. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Harris Review Journal of Psychology and Christianity, Geoff W Sutton. A short summary of this paper. Harris Review. Sam Harris, NY: W.
He fol- W. Norton, Reviewed lows this litany with a list of massacres and by Geoffrey W. The world In West of Eden chapter 5 , the author chal- saw the lethiferous power of religious belief. We lenges the extant American Theocracy, which is witnessed the purpose driven death. Sam Harris primarily an attack on the two-term presidency pummels readers with invidious images of of George W.
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