Ode to intolerance; Robert Hambourger reviews the End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

Sam Harris' The End of Faith is a remarkable book in this age of political correctness. It is an open appeal for religious intolerance. Harris' target is religious belief in general, which he sees as irrational and divisive, but he is also happy to attack particular religions, especially ones

that "believe that the creator of the universe has written a book." Muslims are his favorite target. Nearly one-fourth of the book is devoted specifically to an attack on the Islamic faith, but his contempt for Christianity, especially Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, is close behind. Hindus and Jews also are subject to their share of ridicule. Only Buddhism is treated kindly, perhaps because Harris practices meditation himself.

Harris' anger is primarily directed towards monotheistic faiths. "[O]ur religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous." Religious beliefs are not open to empirical verification, as scientific ones are, and theology does not progress over time. He marvels that in religious matters most of the world's population is still enthralled to "Iron Age philosophy." "[T]he Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish." According to Harris, we are "organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature." And Harris is just getting warmed up. His conclusion: "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." Unfortunately, Harris' anger at the perceived irrationality of religion limits his own quite considerable powers of rational thought. After reading his book, one would never suspect that most of the world's great geniuses, including such thinkers of the modern age as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal, have been serious religious believers, and that many of them have offered formidable rational defenses of their faith. Harris shows no signs of having engaged these defenses.

Harris' anger begins with the perceived irrationality of religion, but his deepest concern, especially in the post-9/11 context, is ethical. "[T]echnology 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." He tells us, "intolerance is ... intrinsic to every creed.... Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one." "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." Similarly, "our problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with 'terrorism.'" "Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal,' or they will unmake our world."