[Mb-hair] VERY CONTROVERSIAL-WORTH READING

[Michael Butler]

Truthdig

An Atheist Manifesto
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_an_atheist_manifesto
Posted on Dec. 7, 2005

By Sam Harris

Editor¹s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled
influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and
religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that
progressive tolerance of ³faith-based unreason² is as great a menace as
religion itself.  Harris, a philosophy graduate of Stanford who has studied
eastern and western religions, won the 2004 PEN Award for nonfiction for The
End of Faith, which powerfully examines and explodes the absurdities of
organized religion. Truthdig asked Harris to write a charter document for
his thesis that belief in God, and appeasement of religious extremists of
all faiths by moderates, has been‹and continues to be‹the greatest threat to
world peace and a sustained assault on reason.

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape,
torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at
precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such
is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the
lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this
girl¹s parents believe‹at this very moment‹that an all-powerful and
all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to
believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a
philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to
deny the obvious.  Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is
overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and
re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an
aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist
does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a
non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for
people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism
is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the
noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The
atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87%
of the population) who claim to ³never doubt the existence of God² should be
obliged to present evidence for his existence‹and, indeed, for his
benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we
witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny
our situation is: Most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious
as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications,
can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain
that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our
country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a
medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible and terrifying.
It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by
change. 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. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for
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
corporeal ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with everyone
we loved while alive. Of course, overly rational people and other rabble
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 consequences of this light¹s
dancing for eons upon the Earth‹and yet Paradise conforms to our most
superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is
wondrously strange. If one didn¹t know better, 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.

Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More
than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly
possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that
almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck
believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was
God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the
prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the
safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people
of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their
lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor
people died talking to an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm ³of biblical
proportions² would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing
disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of
science. Advance warning of Katrina¹s path was wrested from mute Nature by
meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his
plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the
beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn¹t have known that a killer hurricane
was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their
faces. Nevertheless, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80%
of Katrina¹s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their
faith in God.

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite
pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt
that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: Their lives
were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence; their women
walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over
rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single
survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine
that they were spared through God¹s grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the
saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for
survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God
while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to
cloak the reality of the world¹s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal
life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is‹and, indeed,
how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most
harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to
shake the world¹s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the
genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the
perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th
Century, many of them infants. God¹s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems
that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with
religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the
Earth.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not
responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim
that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is
time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of
theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either
he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities or he does not care
to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now
execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human
standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are
precisely what the faithful use to establish God¹s goodness in the first
place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as
gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as
inscrutable as all that. If he exists, the God of Abraham is not merely
unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable
and least odious: The biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has
observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the
atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently,
only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the
world¹s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose
everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer
needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly
attributed to religion‹to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious
delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources‹is what makes atheism
a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places
the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch
with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his
neighbors.

Continued: The Nature of Belief

The Nature of Belief
According to several recent polls, 22% of Americans are certain that Jesus
will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years. Another 22% believe that
he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44% who go to church once a
week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to
the Jews and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological
fact of evolution. As President Bush is well aware, believers of this sort
constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American
electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost
every decision of national importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn
the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing Scripture,
wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women
in our country who vote largely on the basis of religious dogma. More than
50% of Americans have a ³negative² or ³highly negative² view of people who
do not believe in God; 70% think it important for presidential candidates to
be ³strongly religious.² Unreason is now ascendant in the United States‹in
our schools, in our courts and in each branch of the federal government.
Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution; 68% believe in Satan. Ignorance
in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering
superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

Although it is easy enough for smart people to criticize religious
fundamentalism, something called ³religious moderation² still enjoys immense
prestige in our society, even in the ivory tower. This is ironic, as
fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their brains than
³moderates² do. While fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with
extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, they at least they make an
attempt at rational justification. Moderates, on the other hand, generally
do nothing more than cite the good consequences of religious belief. Rather
than say that they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have
come true, moderates will say that they believe in God because this belief
³gives their lives meaning.² When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand
people on the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this
cataclysm as evidence of God¹s wrath. As it turns out, God was sending
humanity another oblique message about the evils of abortion, idolatry and
homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is
actually reasonable, given certain (ludicrous) assumptions. Moderates, on
the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his
works. God remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is
compatible with the most desolating evil. In the face of disasters like the
Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the most unctuous and
stupefying nonsense imaginable. And yet, men and women of goodwill naturally
prefer such vacuities to the odious moralizing and prophesizing of true
believers. Between catastrophes, it is surely a virtue of liberal theology
that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that it is
human mercy on display‹not God¹s‹when the bloated bodies of the dead are
pulled from the sea. On days when thousands of children are simultaneously
torn from their mothers¹ arms and casually drowned, liberal theology must
stand revealed for what it is‹the sheerest of mortal pretenses. Even the
theology of wrath has more intellectual merit. If God exists, his will is
not inscrutable. The only thing inscrutable in these terrible events is that
so many neurologically healthy men and women can believe the unbelievable
and think this the height of moral wisdom.

It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational
human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy,
relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes
obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling
proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there
is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a
refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just
imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious
moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why
he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times
larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, ³This belief gives my
life meaning,² or ³My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays,² or ³I
wouldn¹t want to live in a universe where there wasn¹t a diamond buried in
my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator.² Clearly these responses are
inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman
or an idiot.

Here we can see why Pascal¹s wager, Kierkegaard¹s leap of faith and other
epistemological Ponzi schemes won¹t do. To believe that God exists is to
believe that one stands in some relation to his existence such that his
existence is itself the reason for one¹s belief. There must be some causal
connection, or an appearance thereof, between the fact in question and a
person¹s acceptance of it. In this way, we can see that religious beliefs,
to be beliefs about the way the world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit
as any other. For all their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists
understand this; moderates‹almost by definition‹do not.

The incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of
human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either a person has good
reasons for what he strongly believes or he does not. People of all creeds
naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning and
evidence wherever they possibly can. When rational inquiry supports the
creed it is always championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided;
sometimes in the same sentence. Only when the evidence for a religious
doctrine is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it,
do its adherents invoke ³faith.² Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for
their beliefs (e.g. ³the New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy,² ³I
saw the face of Jesus in a window,² ³We prayed, and our daughter¹s cancer
went into remission²). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are
better than no reasons at all. Faith is nothing more than the license
religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a
world that has been shattered by mutually incompatible religious beliefs, in
a nation that is growing increasingly beholden to Iron Age conceptions of
God, the end of history and the immortality of the soul, this lazy
partitioning of our discourse into matters of reason and matters of faith is
now unconscionable.

Continued: Faith and the Good Society

Faith and the Good Society
People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the
most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the
regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying
degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public
pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion‹delusions about
race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral
dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable
even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi
crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval
Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the
worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their
continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany
expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization
of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood
libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)

Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens
when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary,
these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about
specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against
religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a
dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem
of dogma itself‹of which every religion has more than its fair share. There
is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people
became too reasonable.

While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible
goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished it. Any account
of a ³god gene² that causes the majority of Americans to helplessly organize
their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so
many inhabitants of other First World societies apparently lack such a gene.
The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any
argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway,
Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the
Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious
societies on Earth. According to the United Nations¹ Human Development
Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life
expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment,
gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50
nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly
religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: The United States is
unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and
opposition to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high
rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant
mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself:
Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of
religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are especially
plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the
comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Of
course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of
causality‹belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal
dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or
both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue
of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible
with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove,
conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society¹s
health.

Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms
of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between
Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied by other indices of
charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their
average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1;
in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus
literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem,
expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle.

Continued: Religion as a Source of Violence

Religion as a Source of Violence
One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the 21st 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. Nothing stands in the
way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.
Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate
moral communities‹Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.‹and these
divisions have become a continuous source of human conflict. Indeed,
religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time
in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the
Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians
versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus
Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus
Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and
Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus
Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq
(Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus
Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians)
are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the
explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

In a world riven by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious:
Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing degree. Religion
inspires violence in at least two senses: (1) People often kill other human
beings because they believe that the creator of the universe wants them to
do it (the inevitable psychopathic corollary being that the act will ensure
them an eternity of happiness after death). Examples of this sort of
behavior are practically innumerable, jihadist suicide bombing being the
most prominent. (2) Larger numbers of people are inclined toward religious
conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core of their moral
identities. 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
religion. Many religious conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial concerns,
therefore, are religious in origin. (Just ask the Irish.)

These facts notwithstanding, religious moderates tend to imagine that human
conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, to poverty or to
political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety. To
dispel it, we need only reflect on the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers were
college educated and middle class and had no discernable history of
political oppression. They did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time
at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the
pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and
mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit
to ourselves that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, poverty or
politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: A person can be so well
educated that he can build a nuclear bomb while still believing that he will
get 72 virgins in Paradise. Such is the ease with which the human mind can
be partitioned by faith, and such is the degree to which our intellectual
discourse still patiently accommodates religious delusion. Only the atheist
has observed what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: If we
want to uproot the causes of religious violence we must uproot the false
certainties of religion.

Why is religion such a potent source of human violence?

    * Our religions are intrinsically incompatible with one another. Either
Jesus rose from the dead and will be returning to Earth like a superhero or
not; either the Koran is the infallible word of God or it isn¹t. Every
religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the sheer
profusion of these incompatible claims creates an enduring basis for
conflict.
    * There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully
articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in
terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor
in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If a person
really believes that calling God by the right name can spell the difference
between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite
reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. It may even be
reasonable to kill them. If a person thinks there is something that another
person can say to his children that could put their souls in jeopardy for
all eternity, then the heretic next door is actually far more dangerous than
the child molester. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably
higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.
    * Religious faith is a conversation-stopper. Religion is only area of
our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand
to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these
beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and‹all
too often‹what they will kill for. This is a problem, because when the
stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and
violence. Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable‹to have our
beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments‹can
guarantee that we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without
evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. While there is no
guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain
to be divided by their dogmas.


It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world
simply by multiplying the opportunities for interfaith dialogue. The endgame
for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance of patent irrationality. While
all parties to liberal religious discourse have agreed to tread lightly over
those points where their worldviews would otherwise collide, these very
points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists.
Political correctness, therefore, does not offer an enduring basis for human
cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the
way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our
having dispensed with the dogma of faith.

When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we
have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and
to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic
standard of intellectual honesty: One¹s convictions should be proportional
to one¹s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn¹t‹indeed,
pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even
conceivable‹is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist
has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies
of religion and refused to make them his own.
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