The End Of Faith
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Sam Harris
August, 2004
WINNER OF THE 2005 PEN AWARD FOR NONFICTION
From W.W. Norton:
This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in the modern world. The End of Faith provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favour of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Sam Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he maintains that “moderation” in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism in an attempt to provide a truly modern foundation for our ethics and our search for spiritual experience.
Some of the arguments presented in The End Of Faith have inspired considerable controversy. Sam offers further comments in his post, Response to Controversy.
Richard Dawkins
The Guardian
The End of Faith by Sam Harris is a genuinely frightening book about terrorism, and the central role played by religion in justifying and rewarding it. Others blame “extremists” who “distort” the “true” message of religion. Harris goes to the root of the problem: religion itself. Even moderate religion is a menace, because it leads us to respect and “cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence”. Why do men like Bin Laden commit their hideous cruelties? The answer is that they “actually believe what they say they believe”. Read Sam Harris and wake up.
Natalie Angier
The New York Times Book Review
The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood… Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America… This is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason.
New Scientist
Do we need another book on the conflict between reason and faith? Yes, if it is as well-written as Sam Harris’s The End of Faith.
The Independent (U.K.)
Sam Harris launches a sustained nuclear assault… A bold and exhilarating thesis… The End of Faith is a brave, pugilistic attempt to demolish the walls that currently insulate religious people from criticism… The End of Faith is badly needed…
The Economist
This book will strike a chord with anyone who has ever pondered the irrationality of religious faith… Even Mr. Harris’s critics will have to concede the force of an analysis which roams so far and wide, from the persecution of the Cathars to the composition of George Bush’s cabinet.
The San Francisco Chronicle
[Harris] writes with such verve and frequent insight that even skeptical readers will find it hard to put down.
The Observer (U.K.)
A radical attack on the most sacred of liberal precepts—the notion of tolerance… [The End of Faith] is an eminently sensible rallying cry for a more ruthless secularisation of society.
Joseph C. Hough, Jr.
President of Union Theological Seminary, New York
Here is a ringing challenge to all Americans who recognize the danger to American democracy posed by the political alliance of right wing religion and politics and the failure of the tepid and tentative responses by liberal persons of faith. While one might dispute some of the claims and arguments presented by the author, the need for a wake up call to religious liberals is right on the mark.
Peter Singer
Professor of philosophy at Princeton and author of The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush
At last we have a book that focuses on the common thread that links Islamic terrorism with the irrationality of all religious faith. THE END OF FAITH will challenge not only Muslims but Hindus, Jews and Christians as well
The Los Angeles Times
Harris, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience, has written an unabashed antireligious polemic — so unabashed and so antireligious that one wonders how he found a mainstream publisher when, as he astutely observes, “criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture.
The Chicago Tribune
Now, in “The End of Faith,” a young philosopher named Sam Harris makes the least modest proposal of all, maintaining that weapons of mass destruction require humans to give up, or grow out of, religion.
The Globe and Mail
Harris does a muscular job as a warrior against religious authoritarianism.
The New York Sun
What shall we do to be saved? Well, we could try … appeals to logic, science, and common humanity, raising anew the banner of reason, exposing the cruelty and absurdity of taking the supernatural on faith. Like chicken soup, it can’t hurt.
Sam Harris is just the man to do it.