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The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
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Rating:  - God is Dead (Again)
Often bracketed with "The God Delusion", this is a better book, though fuzzy, loosely argued and (I'm guessing) hastily written. At least Harris is intelligent and open-minded enough to see the rationale of Buddhist spiritual practice: one more intuitive leap and he might understand what religion, the Sacred, has meant to the majority of the human race.
Shame he wastes so much space on fashionable but silly anti-Muslim tirades. The reader should try going through and replacing the word "Muslim" with "Jew", and "Islam" with "Judaism", and see if it still looks acceptable, or even printable. Yet the Hebrew Bible contains at least as many exhortations to violence as the Qur`an; and Jews were "terrorists" too until they achieved their political objectives (anyone remember?) Harris never stops to wonder Why people adopt extreme beliefs: dismissing your opponents as stupid or brainwashed is a game anyone can play, and too easy to be much fun.
Harris should devote a couple of months to reading the Muslim saints and sages: Rûmî, `Attâr, Sanâ'î, Sa`dî, Jâmî, Suhrawardî, Shabistarî, `Irâqî, Ibn `Arabî, Ibn al-Fârid, al-Hallâj, al-Makkî, Ibn `Ata'illâh, etc, etc, etc. The Islamic tradition is second to none, its spiritual writings astonishing in quantity and quality, uniquely poetic and life-affirming.
But Buddhism should already have taught him that beliefs based on fear and hatred are always wrong.
Rating:  - Anti-theism without explicit atheism plus 9/11 causation revealed
Although he doesn't say so, Harris appears to be an atheist, most certainly in the sense that he does not believe in any traditional gods although towards the end of this book he seems to ascribe to the mysticism of consciousness in a manner consistent with eastern Buddhism. However Harris seems to assert a physical understanding of that phenomenon but maybe open to a naturalistic possibility of something more than just this life. What he is vehemently opposed to is the idea that ancient religions of the monotheistic persuasion have any clue about... well anything. Moreover he thinks them extremely dangerous to the point that they could well be the downfall of Homo sapiens.
This book is a response from secularism to the events of 9/11 and then some more. Harris identifies that the war is not a war on terror but a war of belief. Lots of people still don't realize that the reasons why the terrorists did what they did, is because of their belief of going to heaven while everyone else they kill goes to hell. He shows why some Muslims think this is a blessed thing (suicide bombings are called sacred bombings by the news media of some Muslims nations) and how the extremism coupled with nuclear weapons is our worst nightmare and their dream.
Harris looks at religions in terms of people acting on what they believe. He shows why religions are logically incoherent and the detrimental effects this has on otherwise rational people. He goes out of his way to show that education (lots of terrorists have attended university) does not solve this problem. He sees the trouble of extremism as religion manipulating sanity to produce insane people. Harris thinks that even moderates need to abandon religion because they just fuel fundamentalism by even being there.
He goes through the history of the inquisition, witch hunts and anti-Semiticism. He then turns to Islam and offers a very brave critique of it. People should support Sam Harris for that chapter alone. Not since Rushdie has there been anything even remotely like it. He surprisingly does a criticism of Chomsky that will have many people thinking if the great Chomsky has his causations in order.
After this Harris begins to deal with the problem of ethics and morality without traditional religion, what it means and fairly outlines the problems secularism is faced with on this issue. He uncovers that victimless crimes have a religious bases, not a logical one. Some American members of the government and judiciary are revealed as very irrational fundamentalists.
Harris presents us with dilemmas that face us today such as pacifism in the face of terrorist threats, torture and collateral damage. This again deals with ethics but from a political moral perspective absent of religion. He ends the book with an outlook to the explanation of consciousness for a better world.
With The End of Faith Harris takes the idea that anti-theism is always liberal and shoves it out the airlock. You could mistake him for George Bush if it wasn't for his passages on victimless crimes like homosexuality, recreational drug use and stem-cell research. He reveals the causation of 9/11 without the political correctness. Islam is clearly defined as a dangerous enemy to humanity. There is no cooperative deal in the offering between religion and secularism. Religion must go at all costs. He makes lots of suggestions from philosophy and couples them with political energy.
The End of Faith packs a whopping punch and maybe the hardest anti-theist book around. It is one of the most controversial books I have ever read and renders many contemporary books on atheism harmless in comparison. How it does this is by using the KISS principle. Bible like objects can cause people to murder others. There is no way around this for Harris, just turn the pages of any scripture, really believe it and you are a potential catalyst for an apocalypse walking on two legs. Do we disbelieve Harris at our peril? I think Harris has made an outstanding case for anti-theism and even a post 9/11 wakeup call for those who didn't get the message the first time around. Islam is at war with you.
Pros
Raw Anti-theism
Not since Rushdie...
Well edited, kept short and on topic
Demonstrates the problem of religion
Cons
Limited freedom of speech and thought as a solution to the problem of religious extremists
Really advocates circumstances for the use of torture (2005 Abu Ghraib shows the problem with this view and is the reason why this book gets docked a star)
The possibility of benign Monotheists are rejected
Rating: - From a former christian
What I liked most about this book was the discuss on religious moderates. I once was a devout believer who took serious everything in the bible , it was quite an experience. The deeper my devolution grew the more difficult it became to live in the real world. I began to see satan in everything; education was evil because they taught evolution which contracted the bible; pop culture values demeaned the traditionalist lifestyle and even my parents rejected strict conformity to christianity. I struggled mightily between rational understanding and religious practice, and I was going insane. I began judging others and myself in accordance to strict fundamentalist religiosity which caused difficulties in all my relationships and took me out of mainstream society. This lifestyle had an enormous emotional and mental cost however I eventually came to the understanding the any belief in the supernatural is ill-rational. The End of Faith makes the point that religious moderates ignores these realities of dogma and in doing so support fundamentalism. We now live in a time where radicals such as I was can access dangerous technologies to destroy cities for their apostasy, as a former militant evangelical I say this is something we all should be concern about. It is my hope that this book furthers that consideration.
Rating:  - It actually worked!
I had been a Christian for 20 years - the evangelical sort. When I ceased to believe that the bible was the word of God, I did not give up on the existence of God altogether. I checked out liberal Christianity, and still hoped to be some sort of theist. I read an awful lot, and most books do not change my mind on a subject single handedly. But Sam's book did, because it is thorough, and excellently argued. I admit that when I was an evangelical I probably would've been too close minded to consider what he had to say. I think you have to know that your fundamentist beliefs aren't as "clear and established" as you think before you can give Sam a fair hearing. But I could be wrong even about that. He is persuasive, compelling, and overall, I'd say, correct. So I would recommend this book to anyone, fundamentalist, theist, or atheist.
Michael Tenenbaum, Author - Blessed Assurance? A Demonstration that Christian Fundamentalism is Simply False. Expanded - Limited Edition.
Rating: - Well worth it - even after reading Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens
I wasn't sure that it would be worth my time to read the fourth recent book on atheism. I'm glad I did.
The End of Faith adds many ideas and nuances to the conversation. This is especially true in the last two chapters, which other reviewers have found controversial, rambling, or babble, but I found thought-provoking. Harris acknowledges that there are not many answers. However, just as the last 2000 years have seen astronomy develop from positing the earth being the center of the universe, rational experimentation and knowledge development can develop ethics and spiritualism into sound sciences.
Chapter 6 - A Science of Good and Evil - explores ethics from a starting point of zero faith. After making a case against relativism and pragmatism, Harris explores several interesting ethical questions. Like on abortion - Just because we can't determine exactly when humanity starts doesn't mean that you cannot make a moral judgement about a stem cell or a weeks-old fetus. Or a thought-provoking question on tortue that challenges moral intuition - is it really worse to tortue a known criminal for information that would save lives than it is to drop bombs from the air on potentially innocent civilians?
Chapter 7 - Experiments in Consciousness - acknowledges the human desire for spiritualism/mysticism and starts to explore how to grow in those directions in a mindset that does not include faith.
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