Way of the Mind

I’m halfway through the book, right now. It’s a relatively quick read, though it’s annoying to always have to go to the appendix to check notes, when they could be at the bottom of the relevant page instead.

This well-known book is, of course, a criticism of religion - not just organized religion, but of faith itself. The book is very un-PC; I’m sure that even some atheists and agnostics will dislike Harris’ tone and some of his opinions.

One of the author’s main points is something I’ve written about, here, several times. It goes like this: in any religion (let’s say Christiany and Islam, they’re the most troublesome ones), there are both moderates and fundamentalists (or “extremists”). Whenever there’s some act of violence by the fundamentalists, everyone - even those not belonging to that faith - says that the extremists aren’t really representative of their religion, that they deviate from the religion and from its basic tenets, and so on. They say that the extremists are “distorting” their faith, that either they’re simply insane, or they’re using religion as an excuse for their violence.

Harris says - and I fully agree, as you know - that such a view has no support from the holy books. It’s not that the extremists are “distorting” their religion; much the opposite. They’re the only ones who really believe in it, in all of it. They’re the only ones who are “true believers”, who go all the way. The “moderates”, for convenience - or simply because they don’t want to die, or be arrested -, ignore most of their religion, and most of their holy books. And they, probably, feel a little ashamed of doing so.

Any Christian who is not stoning unbelievers to death is disobeying the Bible. Any Muslim who doesn’t become a martyr, sacrificing himself to take some “enemies of the faith” with him, is disobeying the Koran. Are fundamentalists - including terrorists - “fringe lunatics”? Or devout believers?

Another of Harris’ points is this: not all tolerance is good or desirable. Quoting from Wikipedia, here’s a great summary of this point:

Harris freely admits that he is advocating a form of intolerance, but not, as he puts it, the kind of intolerance that led to the Gulag. Rather he is arguing for a conversational intolerance, one in which we require in our everyday discourse that people’s convictions really scale with the available evidence. He feels that the time has come to demand intellectual honesty right across the board, and ignore the prevailing taboos and political correctness which, in his view, appear to prevent us from openly criticising religion.

Harris observes that these are the rules which seem to apply to every other field of knowledge. He notes that we are rarely admonished simply to respect someone’s views on, say, physics or history; instead, we both demand reasons and expect evidence.

The book goes on in more detail about what are the main problems with the 2 most common faiths, Christianity and Islam. The chapter on Islam is especially strong in its criticism: according to Harris, Islam is at the same level of cultural and ethical development as 14th century Christianity, when the Inquisition ran rampant, people burned “witches” and “heretics” everywhere, and women were seen as inferior, sinful beings. In other words, most Christians have learned to ignore most of the Bible these days (which is a good thing), but Muslims still don’t do it; they haven’t grown as a culture since the middle ages, and believe absolutely and completely in an ancient book whose author couldn’t conceive of a greater reward in the entire universe than “seventy-two virgins”.

I don’t agree with all of the book; Harris seems to have a view on “spirituality” that is a bit too “new age” for my tastes, and he seems not to believe in reason as an absolute. I’ve read that there is a final chapter about “spirituality”, which many readers, who agreed with the rest of the book, disliked, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Still, I think that it’s a great read, and it would be great if, someday, criticizing religion or beliefs stopped being “taboo”.