2 of 3
Harris demonstrates a similar crudeness in his discussion of religious moderates. Given the fact, uncomfortable for him, that most believers are not murderous, he needs a reason to explain why all religion is bad, not just certain kinds of violent extremism. His answer is that moderates make life too easy for religious zealots. "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." This is nonsense. One need only think of Erasmus, a priest and Augustinian monk, who spent his life using religious arguments to make the case against religious fanaticism, to see that religious moderates can have a great many critical things to say about extremism.
In short, this line of argument purporting to show that religious belief is inherently violent is going nowhere. So, intentionally or not, Harris slides into a second position. He now says that religions are dangerous not so much because of what religious people believe, but because of how they believe it. Religious faith is dangerous, he says, because it doesn't conform to the standards of scientific rationality, and it therefore encourages credulity and stupidity. He finds this deeply irritating. "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." Religion is "the venom of unreason" loose in the world, and unreason, he believes, is a dangerous thing.
Briefly put, his view goes like this: 1) religious people are less rational than other people, 2) they are less rational because they are religious, and 3) this lack of rationality makes them dangerous. For myself, I can think of no reason to believe even one of these statements, and Harris doesn't offer much in the way of evidence except a few quotations by selected, dim people of faith. I suppose the first could be answered empirically, but he doesn't try. The second seems difficult to test. And the third is dubious in the extreme. To take an obvious example, two of the smartest people in Germany during Hitler's rise to power were the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, both of whom eagerly accepted Nazi patronage. I'll put my moral stock with the supposedly irrational Jews and Christians who worked against National Socialism
This last example, of course, draws attention to the pink elephant standing in the corner of Harris' room. If beliefs do in fact cause people to be violent, the beliefs that have killed more people than any other are Nazism and Communism, one of which was non-religious and the other explicitly atheistic. Harris' solution, as the reader may be able to guess, is to claim that National Socialism and Communism were in fact religions. But here the argument goes completely off the rails. Harris tries to prove that religion is the source of violence in the world by defining religion as any set of beliefs that causes people to be violent. This is an equivocation, followed by a tautology, masquerading as a demonstration.
The final premise of Harris' argument for the abolition of religion is that the prevention of violence is an overriding ethical imperative. While I myself find this quite agreeable, it gets him into a logical black hole from which no force can extract him. After all, people who do kill for religious reasons disagree with Harris about what is of ultimate ethical importance. They think that something else takes precedence over the prevention of physical harm: perhaps justice, or piety, or righteousness, or the enforcement of divine law is the overriding imperative, and these ends justify violent means. The question, then, is how does Harris defend his moral vision above theirs? The answer is that he doesn't.
share this page
RSS Feed
