Sam Harris’ The End of Faith is a remarkable book in this age of political correctness. It is an open appeal for religious intolerance. Harris’ target is religious belief in general, which he sees as irrational and divisive, but he is also happy to attack particular religions, especially ones that “believe that the creator of the universe has written a book.” Muslims are his favorite target. Nearly one-fourth of the book is devoted specifically to an attack on the Islamic faith, but his contempt for Christianity, especially Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, is close behind. Hindus and Jews also are subject to their share of ridicule. Only Buddhism is treated kindly, perhaps because Harris practices meditation himself.

Harris’ anger is primarily directed towards monotheistic faiths. “[O]ur religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous.” Religious beliefs are not open to empirical verification, as scientific ones are, and theology does not progress over time. He marvels that in religious matters most of the world’s population is still enthralled to “Iron Age philosophy.” “[T]he Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish.” According to Harris, we are “organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature.” And Harris is just getting warmed up. His conclusion: “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.” Unfortunately, Harris’ anger at the perceived irrationality of religion limits his own quite considerable powers of rational thought. After reading his book, one would never suspect that most of the world’s great geniuses, including such thinkers of the modern age as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal, have been serious religious believers, and that many of them have offered formidable rational defenses of their faith. Harris shows no signs of having engaged these defenses.

Harris’ anger begins with the perceived irrationality of religion, but his deepest concern, especially in the post-9/11 context, is ethical. “[T]echnology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical to our survival.” He tells us, “intolerance is...intrinsic to every creed....Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.” “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.” Similarly, “our problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with ‘terrorism.’” “Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal,’ or they will unmake our world.”

Just what Harris wants to do about religion is not entirely clear. Frequently he calls for open and vigorous criticism of religious belief, and at times he seems satisfied. At one point he says that chemistry replaced alchemy without any conflict, as knowledge replaced ignorance, and expresses the hope that “faith-based religion” will “suffer the same slide into obsolescence.” He writes elsewhere that “the appropriate response to the bin Ladens of the world is to correct everyone’s reading of [Koranic] texts by making the same evidentiary demands in religious matters that we make in all others.” It is hard to believe, however, that the bin Ladens of the world can be put down for long simply by powerful textual criticism. Harris never confronts a serious problem: if religious believers are as irrational as he thinks, why expect appeals to reason to help? If they are half so bloodthirsty, how can a more aggressive secularism calm the situation? In any case, at other places Harris goes well beyond evidentiary demands to state openly and plainly his opposition to religious freedom.

“I hope,” he writes, “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.” Elsewhere he describes a deadly riot at the 2002 Miss World Pageant in Nigeria and asks, “Should Muslims really be free to believe that the Creator of the universe is concerned about hemlines?” Again, he writes, “we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs of epidemiology and basic hygiene.” And he adds, “it is not difficult to imagine a culture whose beliefs relative to epidemiology could systematically impose unacceptable risks on the rest of us. There is little doubt that we would ultimately quarantine, invade, or otherwise subjugate such a society.”

These views are alarming. The twentieth century saw enormous misery caused by the fanatical secularism of communism. In Harris’ remarks on freedom of thought, might we be seeing the seeds of a new fanaticism? Does Harris really want it to be illegal for a Muslim simply to think that God wishes women to dress modestly? And yet, in spite of these most illiberal attitudes, Harris’ book has been cheered in some surprising corners. The End of Faith has won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, which is, “given for a distinguished first book of general nonfiction by an American writer.” And it is lionized on the cover as a “tour de force” by famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Just what do Dershowitz and the judges at PEN find so attractive?

Harris paints with an enormously wide brush, tarring all religion for the violent acts of some. Though there are hundreds of millions of peaceful believers in the world, he holds all belief suspect. One should question his basic method of argument, which is to look for examples of particularly violent or evil behavior by religious believers and then blame it on their faith. The vast majority of people throughout history have been religious believers, and when clever people do evil things they often construct clever justifications for it. Those who are theologically clever will construct clever theological justifications. So we should not be surprised when some of the world’s evil comes from the religious. All we can conclude from this, as far as I can see, is that God does not immediately free religious believers from temptations to sin.