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The End of Faith is a book that puts to words many of the feelings that I've had about god and religion but says it in a much better and much braver way than I ever could. Harris has written a book that you have to marvel at how it even got published in this day of media conglomerates that cower in fear of conservative Christians. He is very harsh on Christianity, Islam and to a lesser extent Judaism (he gives a glowing review to Buddhism though in the book's least interesting chapter) but his arguement isn't the typical rant against extremism and fundamentalism. He argues that it is the moderates that actually are the enablers for all the fundamentalist violence in the world. By looking the other way in the face of reason, moderate believers are setting back human progress for the sake of myths and fairy tales. Harris warns that a war between Christianity, Islam and Judaism is coming and will most likely end civilization as we know it all over "a myth as silly as Batman".

Harris is equally hard on both Christianity and Islam noting that a lot of the problems in the two religions stem from vague ancient writings by "ignorant people" that are misinterpreted and rarely updated to accomodate modern thinking. He muses that if religion was not in the way, man kind might have invented the internet in the 14th century. At no point in history has religion ever stimulated progressive thought or invention. The whole idea of Jesus' virgin birth seems to have come about from a poor translation of a Hebrew word that means "young girl" but was taken to mean "virgin" and as a result for the next two thousand years Christians have had an uncomfortable relationship with sex. Meanwhile, Harris attempts to dispel the aguement that Islam is a religion of peace by pulling out a series of 1-2 line excerpts from the Koran that call for the killing or eternal suffering of non-believers. These collection of excerpts fill 6 1/2 pages in End of Faith and the fact that they are spread throughout the Koran is hard to rectify with the protestations that Islam is not at least partly responsible for middle east terrorism.

This is really an amazing book that is founded on reason, the opposite of faith, and it gives a very compelling reason why mankind needs to abandon religion even on a moderate level. Not that it's ever going to happen of course.

Posted at September 17, 2006 03:44 PM