Reason in Exile
THE young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets
are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison.
The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The
young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait
for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be
shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model,
but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates
another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop
comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the
model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath
their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats
and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young
man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple
at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings,
and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the
surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.
The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened
to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment.
They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the
way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity.
It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause
for celebration and honor the young man's parents by giving them
gifts of food and money.
These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the
11
1 2 THE E N D OF F A I TH
young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on
the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich
or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions
leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have
a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply
mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them.1 Why is it
so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-onit
easy—to guess the young man's religion?2
A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else
in a person's life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are
merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of
the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional
responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider
how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe
one of the following propositions:
1. You have only two weeks to live.
2. You've just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars.
3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating
your thoughts.
These are mere words—until you believe them. Once believed, they
become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your
desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior.
There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most
cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to
kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper,
reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from
another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots
in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through
war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it
was written in our books; it is what we do with words like "God" and
"paradise" and "sin" in the present that will determine our future.
REASON IN EXILE 13
Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that
the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune
of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive
claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into
factions according to which of these incompatible claims they
accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of
birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges
its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which
are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on
one point of fundamental importance, however: "respect" for other
faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God
endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the
spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition
is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously
incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once
a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to
eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility
that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments
of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply
incompatible with tolerance in this one.
Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however,
because criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every
corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives
have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond
the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God
and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing
his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a
Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of
innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his
actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political,
economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people
would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere,
exonerated.
But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives.
Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our
14 THE END OF FAITH
religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical
to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our
neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal
truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical
notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia—
because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark
the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah"
must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our
world.
A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests
that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case
of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years,
and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist
today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility
in our society Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide
into obsolescence.
What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out,
this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an "alternative"
to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its
most rococo for genuine knowledge.3 We will find that, as with
alchemy, to speak of "alternatives" to religious faith is to miss
the point.
OF COURSE, people of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace
and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain
fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn
the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in
other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their
various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the
central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are
themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the
path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect
REASON IN EXILE 15
the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal
of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being
should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of
the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious
faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising,
since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of
human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational
criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious
moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things
that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical
behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2)
many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes
done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but
of our baser natures—forces like greed, hatred, and fear—for which
religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy.
Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity
to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of
pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so
they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of
each. 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, for he knows that the flames of hell have been
stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims
and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own
enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the
errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival
belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
And yet, intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein,
Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have
declared the war between reason and faith to be long over. On this
view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe
cohere. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a
l 6 THE END OF FAITH
working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to
account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head
while he slept. He can, as it were, have his reason and eat it too. As
the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only because the
church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can
afford to think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned
to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a
"loving concordat" between faith and reason would be perfectly
delusional.4
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful,
whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There
is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs
that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price—
by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding
of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill.
There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to
terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But
we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions—
Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to
do this.
The Myth of "Moderation" in Religion
The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word
of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history,
mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals,
and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of crosspollination
among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines
of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for
lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia
ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal
existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus
perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.
REASON IN EXILE 17
According to Gallup, 35 percent of Americans believe that the
Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe.5
Another 48 percent believe that it is the "inspired" word of the
same—still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted
symbolically before their truth can be brought to light. Only
17 percent of us remain to doubt that a personal God, in his infinite
wisdom, is likely to have authored this text—or, for that matter, to
have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46
percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation (40 percent
believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of
years). This means that 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500
years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If
our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that
a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was
authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A
survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely
yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown
almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one
area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about
the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?
It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that
we must decide what it means to be a religious "moderate" in the
twenty-first century. Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely
interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of
living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics
is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive
whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and
begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing
to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is
that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural
developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult
to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further
enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read
the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how
l8 THE END OF FAITH
vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look
at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific
in mind should your son or daughter return from yoga class
advocating the worship of Krishna:
If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your
son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most
intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, "Let us go and
serve other gods," unknown to you or your ancestors before you,
gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far
away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you
must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not
spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand
must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands
of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death,
since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. . . .
(Deuteronomy 13:7-11)
While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in
our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing
for a "symbolic" reading of passages of this sort. (In fact, one seems
to be explicitly blocked by God himself in Deuteronomy 13:1—
"Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe,
adding nothing to it, taking nothing away") The above passage is as
canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms
that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern
world. This is a problem for "moderation" in religion: it has
nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of
the letter of the divine law.
The only reason anyone is "moderate" in matters of faith these
days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two
thousand years of human thought (democratic politics,6 scientific
advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to
cultural and geographic isolation, etc). The doors leading out of
R E A S O N IN EXILE 19
scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we
see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has
evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of
modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the
least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency
to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the
degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live
by the lights of reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem
to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims
of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on
him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely
to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only
to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his
bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire
for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the
universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least
educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters
than anyone did two thousand years ago—and much of this knowledge
is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about
the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no
longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession.
Having learned about the known distances between objects in our
universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the
whole works was created six thousand years ago (with light from
distant stars already in transit toward the earth) impossible to take
seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest
that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions
are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of
ignoring (or "reinterpreting") certain articles of faith is now overwhelming.
Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass
surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few
things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since
the time of Moses.
2 0 THE E N D OF F A I TH
So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over
time (they haven't); it is just that they have been effectively edited
by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains—
the "good parts"—has been spared the same winnowing because we
do not yet have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions
and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood
the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly
discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our
modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What
makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive
to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty
to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and
laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people
closer together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so, what implications
does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are
ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever
develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more
useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to
stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about
the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and
religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by
the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a
failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in
hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious
moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything
very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that
fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their
freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in
religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally
unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't
like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture
imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species
of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of
R E A S O N IN E X I L E 21
all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with
God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and
scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to
put it on a par with fundamentalism.7 The texts themselves are
unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious
moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness
to fully submit to God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the
texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious
moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas
of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God,
and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation
will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that
religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage
of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible
price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings
with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents
an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox
religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality,
ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates
seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and
innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.
Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality
to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even
spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards
of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise
maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from
men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic
ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience
to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even
politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking
about ethical values and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the
fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus,
2 2 THE E N D OF F A I TH
except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy,
and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more
or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be
considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos, or
that trepanning* constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious
ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for
this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a
millennium ago—while our knowledge on all other fronts was still
hopelessly inchoate—or religion, being the mere maintenance of
dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We
will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more
and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a
genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it
should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more
useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would
have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of
past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and
describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of
what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project
of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes
that have come over us—culturally, technologically, and even ethically.
Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive
it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but
they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what
we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical
said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers,
because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly
* Trepanning (or trephining) is the practice of boring holes in the human skull.
Archaeological evidence suggests that it is one of the oldest surgical procedures. It
was presumably performed on epileptics and the mentally ill as an attempt at exorcism.
While there are still many reasons to open a person's skull nowadays, the hope
that an evil spirit will use the hole as a point of egress is not among them.
REASON IN EXILE 23
and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that
the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying
gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive
it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political
correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to
maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
The Shadow of the Past
Finding ourselves in a universe that seems bent upon destroying us,
we quickly discover, both as individuals and as societies, that it is a
good thing to understand the forces arrayed against us. And so it is
that every human being comes to desire genuine knowledge about
the world. This has always posed a special problem for religion,
because every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which
it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of
propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This put the
"leap" in Kierkegaard's leap of faith.
What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear?
Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in
a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers
are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We
have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What
knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business
about growing food and building shelter that we would want to
get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and
repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and
written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills
are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of
reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was
born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we
relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible?
Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity—
2 4 THE E N D OF F A I TH
like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive
pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries
a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a
dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our
resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to
relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be
stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment
of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who
begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in
that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?
There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to
relearn—once we manage to feed and clothe ourselves—and these
are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present state.
How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inwardness
and simply love other human beings? Assume, for the moment,
that such a process of personal transformation exists and that there
is something worth knowing about it; there is, in other words, some
skill, or discipline, or conceptual understanding, or dietary supplement
that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful,
or indifferent persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively
desperate to know about it. There may even be a few biblical passages
that would be useful in this regard—but as for whole rafts of
untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to
take them up again. The Bible and Koran, it seems certain, would
find themselves respectfully shelved next to Ovid's Metamorphoses
and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not
sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing
our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient
literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be
impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?
Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human
life, permits communities (at least those united under a single faith)
REASON IN EXILE 25
to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be
credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly
love. But in its effect upon the modern world—a world already
united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and
epidemiological necessity—religious ideology is dangerously retrograde.
Our past is not sacred for being past, and there is much that is
behind us that we are struggling to keep behind us, and to which, it
is to be hoped, we could never return with a clear conscience: the
divine right of kings, feudalism, the caste system, slavery, political
executions, forced castration, vivisection, bearbaiting, honorable
duels, chastity belts, trial by ordeal, child labor, human and animal
sacrifice, the stoning of heretics, cannibalism, sodomy laws, taboos
against contraception, human radiation experiments—the list is
nearly endless, and if it were extended indefinitely, the proportion of
abuses for which religion could be found directly responsible is likely
to remain undiminished. In fact, almost every indignity just mentioned
can be attributed to an insufficient taste for evidence, to an
uncritical faith in one dogma or another. The idea, therefore, that religious
faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished,
as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of
its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all
its glory. 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. When foisted upon each generation anew, it renders us
incapable of realizing just how much of our world has been unnecessarily
ceded to a dark and barbarous past.
The Burden of Paradise
Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women
who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not
survive an elementary school education. That so many of us are still
26 THE END OF FAITH
dying on account of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible,
and our own attachment to these myths, whether moderate or
extreme, has kept us silent in the face of developments that could
ultimately destroy us. 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 v. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v.
Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v. Bosnian and Albanian
Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir
(Muslims v. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v. Christians and animists),
Nigeria (Muslims v. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims v.
Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists v. Tamil Hindus),
Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians), and the Caucasus
(Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis v.
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 ten years. These events should strike us
like psychological experiments run amok, for that is what they are.
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 country'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. The two countries have since fought three official wars,
suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are
now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply
because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful
REASON IN EXILE 27
as the names of Santa's reindeer. 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 Hinduism.
From the point of view of Islam, it would be scarcely possible
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 political
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 . ..
set on fire. 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.8
This is not an account of the Middle Ages, nor is it a tale from Middle
Earth. This is our world. The cause of this behavior was not economic,
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 2002. 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. Arundhati
Roy has said that Western concern over this situation is just a matter
of white imperialists believing that "blacks cannot be trusted
28 THE END OF FAITH
with the Bomb."9 This is a grotesque charge. 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 special
abuse, there is no question that, at this point in history, it represents
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, I 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." The
response of the Muslim world to the events of September 11, 2001,
leaves no doubt that a significant number of human beings in the
twenty-first century believe in the possibility of martyrdom. We
have, in response to this improbable fact, declared a war on "terrorism."
This is rather like declaring war on "murder"; it is a category
error that obscures the true cause of our troubles. 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. Why would someone as conspicuously devoid of personal
grievances or psychological dysfunction as Osama bin Laden—
who is neither poor, uneducated, delusional, nor a prior victim of
REASON IN EXILE 29
Western aggression—devote himself to cave-dwelling machinations
with the intention of killing innumerable men, women, and children
he has never met? 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 Muslim
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 "extremists"
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. Muslim extremists are certain that
the exports of Western culture are leading their wives and children
30 THE END OF FAITH
away from God. 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.10 Above all, they appear to be suffering from a
fear of contamination. As has been widely noted, they are also consumed
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 subjugated
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
faith). 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 concerned,
if he merely hated us.
To be sure, hatred is an eminently human emotion, and it is obvious
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 religion:
there is not likely to be an underlying doctrine of racism, or
even nationalism, animating the militant Muslim world. Muslims
can be both racist and nationalistic, of course, but it seems all but
R E A S O N IN EXILE 31
certain that if the West underwent a massive conversion to Islam—
and, perforce, repudiated all Jewish interests in the Holy Land—the
basis for Muslim "hatred" would simply disappear.11
Most Muslims who commit atrocities are explicit about their
desire to get to paradise. One failed Palestinian suicide bomber
described being "pushed" to attack Israelis by "the love of martyrdom."
He added, "I didn't want revenge for anything. I just wanted
to be a martyr." Mr. Zaydan, the would-be martyr, conceded that his
Jewish captors were "better than many, many Arabs." With regard
to the suffering that his death would have inflicted upon his family,
he reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick seventy people
to join him in paradise. He would have been sure to invite his
family along.12
As I HAVE SAID, people of faith tend to argue that it is not faith
itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. 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 evidence
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 clear, however, that Muslims hate the West in the very terms of
their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred. It is widely
claimed by "moderate" Muslims that the Koran mandates nothing
of the kind and that Islam is a "religion of peace." But one need only
read the Koran itself to see that this is untrue:
32 THE END OF FAITH
Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal
rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate.
(Koran 9:73)
Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal
firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous. (Koran
9:123)
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 economic
advantages and education, in and of themselves, are insufficient
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 Huntington14 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 themselves
into bombs these days. The answer: because the Koran makes
this activity seem like a career opportunity. Nothing in the history
REASON IN EXILE 33
of Western colonialism explains this behavior (though we can certainly
concede that this history offers us much to atone for). Subtract
the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of
suicide bombers become completely unintelligible, as does the spectacle
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 playing
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 apostle
and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God. . . .
The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies. (Koran 4:95-101)
Outright prestidigitation with the articles of faith regularly produces
utterances of this sort: "Islam is a religion of peace. The very
word 'Islam,' after all, means 'peace.' And suicide is forbidden in the
Koran. So there is no scriptural basis whatsoever for the actions of
these terrorists." To such magician's patter, we might add that the
phrase "dirty bomb" does not appear anywhere in the text of the
Koran. Yes, the Koran seems to say something that can be construed
as a prohibition against suicide—"Do not destroy yourselves"
(4:29)—but it leaves many loopholes large enough to fly a 767
through:
Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter,
fight for the cause of God; whoever fights for the cause of
34 THE END OF FAITH
God, whether he dies or triumphs, We shall richly reward him
The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight
for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan.... Say: "Trifling
are the pleasures of this life. The hereafter is better for those
who would keep from evil. . . ." (Koran 4:74-78)
When the above invitations to martyrdom are considered in light
of the fact that Islam does not distinguish between religious and civil
authority,15 the twin terrors of Koranic literalism spring into view:
on the level of the state, a Muslim aspiration for world domination
is explicitly enjoined by God; on the level of the individual, the
metaphysics of martyrdom provides a rationale for ultimate selfsacrifice
toward this end. As Bernard Lewis observes, since the time
of the Prophet, Islam has been "associated in the minds and memories
of Muslims with the exercise of political and military power."16
The metaphysics of Islam are particularly inauspicious where tolerance
and religious diversity are concerned, for martyrdom is the
only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits
us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to paradise.
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 transcripts
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 references
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. The corrective to the worldview of Osama bin Laden is
not to point out the single line in the Koran that condemns suicide,
R E A S O N IN EXILE 35
because this ambiguous statement is set in a thicket of other passages
that can be read only as direct summons to war against the
"friends of Satan." The appropriate response to the bin Ladens of
the world is to correct everyone's reading of these texts by making
the same evidentiary demands in religious matters that we make in
all others. 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 Shakespeare
a far better writer than himself) leaves us powerless to
address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.17
How is it that the absurdity of this idea does not bring us, hourly, to
our knees? 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. Imagine a future in which millions of
36 THE END OF FAITH
our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star
Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous?
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 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 light's 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 didn't 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.
IMAGINE that you have gone to your doctor for a routine checkup,
and he gives you terrible news: you have contracted a virus that kills
R E A S O N IN EXILE 37
100 percent of those it infects. 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 certain
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 prepared.
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 significance
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 acquisition
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. As
Freud and his descendants never tired of pointing out, each of us is
dragged and sundered by diametrical urges: to merge with the world
38 THE END OF FAITH
and disappear, or to retreat within the citadel of our apparent separateness.
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 presuming
to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such
heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition—
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 him back early because he wanted
him close to Jesus. He'll be waiting for us when we get to heaven."
If your beliefs are those of a Christian Scientist, obliging you to
forgo all medical interventions, you may even have collaborated
with God by refusing to give your child antibiotics.
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. This is a reasonable attitude, given
REASON IN EXILE 39
the paucity of evidence on the subject. But religious moderation still
represents a failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty
of others. As a consequence of our silence on these matters, we
live in a country in which a person cannot get elected president if he
openly doubts the existence of heaven and hell. This is truly remarkable,
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 knowledge
that might be brought to bear in the governance of a modern
superpower; they need only be expert fund-raisers, comport themselves
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 otherworldliness
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.
The World beyond Reason
As we will see in the last chapter of this book, there is little doubt
that a certain range of human experience can be appropriately
described as "spiritual" or "mystical"—experiences of meaningfulness,
selflessness, and heightened emotion that surpass our narrow
identities as "selves" and escape our current understanding of the
4 0 THE E N D OF F A I TH
mind and brain. But nothing about these experiences justifies arrogant
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 person'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. For millennia, contemplatives have
known that ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling that
they call "I" and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate
from the rest of the universe. This phenomenon, which has been
reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is supported
by a wealth of evidence—neuroscientific, philosophical, and introspective.
Such experiences are "spiritual" or "mystical," for want of
better words, in that they are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant
(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. A
truly rational approach to this dimension of our lives would allow us
R E A S O N IN EXILE 41
to explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while
shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions
in favor of free and rigorous inquiry.
There also seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of
psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by mainstream
science.18 The dictum that "extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence" remains a reasonable guide in these areas,
but this does not mean that the universe isn't far stranger than
many of us suppose. It is important to realize that a healthy, scientific
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.19 The sights and sounds and
pulsings that you experience at this moment are like different spectra
of light thrown forth by the prism of the brain. 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 indication
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. The brain is therefore
42 THE END OF FAITH
talking mostly to itself, and no information from the world (with
the exception of olfaction) runs directly from a sensory receptor to
the cortex, where the contents of consciousness appear to be
sequestered. There are always one or two breaks in the circuit—
synapses—giving the neurons in question the opportunity to integrate
feedback information, or information from other regions of
the brain. This sort of integration/contamination of signal explains
how certain drugs, emotional states, or even conceptual insights can
radically alter the character of our experience. 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) meaningfulness
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 differences,
moreover, can be rationally discussed.
As we will see, there is an intimate connection between spirituality,
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.
ONCE we have examined the problems inherent to faith, and the
threat that even "moderate" religious faith, however inadvertently,
REASON IN EXILE 43
now poses to our survival, we can begin to situate our ethical intuitions
and our capacity for spiritual experience within the context of
a rational worldview. This will require that we marshal insights from
our growing understanding of the human brain, our genetic continuity
with the rest of life, and the history of our religious ideas. In
the chapters that follow, I will try to reconcile the bewildering juxtaposition
of two facts: (1) 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 reason,
applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once
the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives.20 Your child
has died, or your wife has acquired a horrible illness that no doctor
can cure, or your own body has suddenly begun striding toward the
grave—and reason, no matter how broad its compass, will begin to
smell distinctly of formaldehyde. This has led many of us to conclude,
wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in certain
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.
44 THE END OF FAITH
In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to make both the conceptual
and the experiential bases for these claims explicit.
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 member
of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture
that is turning your children away from God, believe that you
will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing
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 discourse,
so that they might endure for thousands of years, unperturbed
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.
REASON IN EXILE 45
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that
there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator
of the universe. 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 repudiate
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 confronting
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, responsible
for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide
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 transcend
national, religious, and ethnic boundaries. There is, after all, no
such thing as an inherently American (or Christian, or Caucasian)
physics.21 Even spirituality and ethics meet this criterion of universality
because human beings, whatever their background, seem to
converge on similar spiritual experiences and ethical insights when
given the same methods of inquiry. Such is not the case with the
"truths" of religion, however. Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim
can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable
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. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an imped46
THE END OF FAITH
iment to further inquiry. And yet, the fact that we are no longer
killing people for heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, however
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 number
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.22
Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to
intolerable consequences. Many Muslims, for instance, are convinced
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 2002 Miss World Pageant claimed over two hundred lives; innocent
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 burning
building.23 Why? Because the girls were not wearing the traditional
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 current
of unreason in our national discourse. To see how much our culture
currently partakes of the irrationality of our enemies, just
substitute the name of your favorite Olympian for "God" wherever
this word appears in public discourse. Imagine President Bush
REASON IN EXILE 47
addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all
of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the
hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress
(September 20, 2001) containing the sentence "Freedom and fear,
justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that
Apollo is not neutral between them." Clearly, the commonplaces of
language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs.
Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth
century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words
like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to
him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are
positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White
House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible
study cells, like a whited monastery."24 This should trouble us as
much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world. We should be
humbled, perhaps to the point of spontaneous genuflection, by the
knowledge that the ancient Greeks began to lay their Olympian
myths to rest several hundred years before the birth of Christ,
whereas we have the likes of Bill Moyers convening earnest gatherings
of scholars for the high purpose of determining just how the
book of Genesis can be reconciled with life in the modern world. As
we stride boldly into the Middle Ages, it does not seem out of place
to wonder whether the myths that now saturate our discourse will
wind up killing many of us, as the myths of others already have.
Two hundred years from now, when we are a thriving global civilization
beginning to colonize space, something about us will have
changed: it must have; otherwise, we would have killed ourselves ten
times over before this day ever dawned. We are fast approaching a
time when the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be
a trivial undertaking; the requisite information and technology are
now seeping into every corner of our world. As the physicist Martin
Rees points out, "We are entering an era where a single person can,
by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city
uninhabitable for years. . . ."25 Given the power of our technology,
48 THE END OF FAITH
we can see at a glance that aspiring martyrs will not make good
neighbors in the future. We have simply lost the right to our myths,
and to our mythic identities.
It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human
beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is
their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only
openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for
us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about
everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided
by their dogmas. This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis
of religious faith.
While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it
seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon
many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.
Our primary task in our discourse with one another should be to
identify those beliefs that seem least likely to survive another thousand
years of human inquiry, or most likely to prevent it, and subject
them to sustained criticism. Which of our present practices will
appear most ridiculous from the point of view of those future generations
that might yet survive the folly of the present? It is hard to
imagine that our religious preoccupations will not top the list.26 It is
natural to hope that our descendants will look upon us with gratitude.
But we should also hope that they look upon us with pity and
disgust, just as we view the slaveholders of our all-too-recent past.
Rather than congratulate ourselves for the state of our civilization,
we should consider how, in the fullness of time, we will seem hopelessly
backward, and work to lay a foundation for such refinements
in the present. We must find our way to a time when faith, without
evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present
state of our world, there appears to be no other future worth
wanting.
It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity
of most of our religious beliefs. I fear, however, that the time has
not yet arrived. In this sense, what follows is written very much in
R E A S O N IN EXILE 49
the spirit of a prayer. I pray that we may one day think clearly
enough about these matters to render our children incapable of
killing themselves over their books. If not our children, then I suspect
it could well be too late for us, because while it has never been
difficult to meet your maker, in fifty years it will simply be too easy
to drag everyone else along to meet him with you.27
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