The disbeliever

Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith," on why religious moderates are worse than fundamentalists, 9/11 led us into a deranged holy war, and believers should be treated like alien-abduction kooks.

By Steve Paulson

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July 7, 2006 | Three-quarters of all Americans believe the Bible is God's word, according to a recent Pew poll. Numbers like that make an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris seem either foolhardy or uncommonly brave.

Two years ago, when the 39-year-old launched a full-scale attack on religious belief in his provocative book "The End of Faith," he was an unknown. That changed overnight when his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list and later went on to win the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Since then, "The End of Faith" has earned an avid following among atheists and lapsed churchgoers; it's the kind of book that gets passed around from one friend to another to another. Here, finally, was someone willing to do the unthinkable: to denounce religious faith as irrational -- murderous, even.

The heart of Harris' book is a frontal assault on Islam and Christianity, carrying both pages and pages of quotations from the Quran imploring the faithful to kill infidels, and a chilling history of how Christian leaders have brutally punished heretics. Harris argues that much of the violence in today's world stems directly from people willing to live and die by these sacred texts.

In perhaps his most daring rhetorical gambit, Harris seeks to undermine religion by denouncing not just jihadis and fundamentalists, but moderates. "Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world," he writes, "because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed." Harris especially chastises moderates for refusing to criticize scripture-quoting extremists; for him, they are basically guilty of legitimizing fundamentalism.

All this would seem to make Harris a hero among atheists. And, to a large degree, it has. Yet some atheists can't stomach the end of Harris' book, where he plays up the virtues of spirituality and mysticism, as well as serious meditation. Harris is a longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation -- an outgrowth of the many years he spent studying the contemplative traditions of both the East and West. So while he's scathing about monotheism, he's far gentler in his assessment of Eastern religions. And for all his insistence on reason and scientific study, Harris is surprisingly open -- as I discovered in my interview -- to paranormal experiences like telepathy, and even to the possibility of consciousness existing outside the human brain.

Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief and disbelief. He keeps most of the details of his personal life vague. When I asked about his doctorate, he said he prefers not to say where he's working on it "to keep the scary people away from the lab." Now, it appears that Harris' academic future will have to compete with his writing career. In September, Knopf will publish his next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation" -- Harris' response to the thousands of angry letters he received from devout Christians about his last book. We spoke by phone about the dangers of religion and his own search for the sacred.

Well, I did not embrace it consciously. In fact, it's ironic that some of the most vituperative criticism I've gotten has come from atheists because, in the last chapter of my book, I talk about meditation and mystical experience. While I'm a very strident critic of religious faith, my argument doesn't totally line up with the biases that atheists tend to have.

No, it was not in any sense strategic. It was really my immediate response to the events of Sept. 11 -- the moment it became apparent to me that we were meandering into a religious war with the Muslim world and were not going to call it as such, and paradoxically, in our efforts to console ourselves, we were becoming increasingly deranged by our own religious certainty. We have a society in which 44 percent of the people claim to be either certain or confident that Jesus is going to come back out of the clouds and judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years. It just seems to me transparently obvious that this is a belief that will do nothing to create a durable civilization. And I think it's time someone spoke about it.

My concern can be parsed out on many levels. The most basic is that our world has really been shattered unnecessarily by competing religious certainties. People who believe their religious propositions strongly are doing so for bad reasons and on insufficient evidence. There's just nothing that a fundamentalist Christian and a fundamentalist Muslim can say to one other to revise their mutual understanding of the world because they do not have a mutual understanding of the world. Their core beliefs have been taken off the table and have become resistant to conversation. So now we have Muslims tending to side with other Muslims in geopolitical conflicts, and Christians tending to side with other Christians. And this breeds conflict that would not otherwise occur. I think it is a profoundly widespread and disempowering myth, particularly among secularists and religious moderates, that these people would be killing each other anyway. They're killing each other over land or scarce resources.

I think that's misreading the situation. When you ask why these people cannot live happily together on the same piece of land, the answer is a religious one. Muslims and Jews see the world differently because of their incompatible religious claims -- literally, claims upon certain real estate. And they view the disposition of this real estate in biblical or Quranic terms. That's a deal breaker. More specifically, when you look at the style of violence on the Muslim side -- the suicide bombing -- that can really only be made sense of in religious terms. Once you accept some of the core propositions of Islam -- once you accept the metaphysics of martyrdom and the principle of jihad -- then it becomes perfectly reasonable that a mother could celebrate the suicidal atrocities committed by her son because she thinks he's gone to paradise and he's killed infidels in the process. And he's paved the way for the whole family to get to paradise. If you actually believe these things, this behavior becomes quite understandable.

Next page: "It really is punishable by death to wake up one morning and decide you no longer want to be a Muslim"