The End of Faith (3 page)

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other
than that it was thought sacred yester- day. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of orga- nizing our lives around
untestable propositions found in ancient literatureto say nothing of killing and dying for
themwould be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?

Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities
(at least those united under a single faith)

to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much
for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern worlda world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political,
and epidemiological necessityreligious ideology is dangerously retro- grade. Our past is
not sacred for being past, and there is much that is behind us that we are struggling to keep behind us, and to which, it is to be hoped, we could never return with a clear conscience:
the divine right of kings, feudalism, the caste system, slavery, political executions,
forced castration, vivisection, bearbaiting, honorable duels, chastity belts, trial by
ordeal, child labor, human and animal sacrifice, the stoning of heretics, cannibalism,
sodomy laws, taboos against contraception, human radiation experimentsthe list is nearly
endless, and if it were extended indefinitely, the proportion of abuses for which religion
could be found directly responsible is likely to remain undiminished. In fact, almost
every indignity just men- tioned can be attributed to an insufficient taste for evidence,
to an uncritical faith in one dogma or another. The idea, therefore, that reli- gious
faith is somehow a sacred human conventiondistinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the
paucity of its evidenceis really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its
glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds
that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural sin- gularitya vanishing point beyond which
rational discourse proves impossible. When foisted upon each generation anew, it renders
us incapable of realizing just how much of our world has been unneces- sarily ceded to a
dark and barbarous past.

The Burden of Paradise

Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future
of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education. That so
many of us are still

dying on account of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible, and our own
attachment to these myths, whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face of
developments that could ultimately destroy us. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring
of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine
(Jews v. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians
v. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir
(Muslims v. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v.
Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims v. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists
v. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox
Russians v. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis v. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are
merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally mil- lions of deaths in the last ten years. These events should strike
us like psychological experiments run amok, for that is what they are. Give people
divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then
oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an
unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is
that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons
of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall
of civilization.

What can be said of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan if their divergent
religious beliefs are to be “respected”? There is nothing for religious pluralists to
criticize but each coun- try's poor diplomacywhile, in truth, the entire conflict is born
of an irrational embrace of myth. Over one million people died in the orgy of religious
killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since
fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and
are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons sim- ply because they
disagree about “facts” that are every bit as fanciful

as the names of Santa's reindeer. And their discourse is such that they are capable of
mustering a suicidal level of enthusiasm for these subjects without evidence. Their conflict is only nominally about land, because their incompatible claims
upon the territory of Kashmir are a direct consequence of their religious differences.
Indeed, the only reason India and Pakistan are different countries is that the beliefs of
Islam cannot be reconciled with those of Hin- duism. From the point of view of Islam, it
would be scarcely possi- ble to conceive a way of scandalizing Allah that is not
perpetrated, each morning, by some observant Hindu. The “land” these people are actually
fighting over is not to be found in this world. When will we realize that the concessions
we have made to faith in our politi- cal discourse have prevented us from even speaking
about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?

Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched. Young women were stripped and
raped in broad daylight, then ... set on fire. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her
fetus raised skyward on the tip of sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed
across the city.8

This is not an account of the Middle Ages, nor is it a tale from Mid- dle Earth. This is our world. The cause of this behavior was not eco- nomic, it was not racial, and it was not
political. The above passage describes the violence that erupted between Hindus and
Muslims in India in the winter of 2002. The only difference between these groups consists
in what they believe about God. Over one thousand people died in this monthlong series of
riotsnearly half as many as have died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in more than a
decade. And these are tiny numbers, considering the possibilities. A nuclear war between
India and Pakistan seems almost inevitable, given what most Indians and Pakistanis believe
about the afterlife. Arundhati Roy has said that Western concern over this situation is
just a mat- ter of white imperialists believing that "blacks cannot be trusted

with the Bomb.“9 This is a grotesque charge. One might argue that no group of people can quite be ”trusted"
with the bomb, but to ignore the destabilizing role that religion plays on the
subcontinent is both reckless and disingenuous. We can only hope that the forces of
secularism and rationality will keep the missiles in their silos for a while yet, until
the deeper reasons for this conflict can be finally addressed.

While I do not mean to single out the doctrine of Islam for spe- cial abuse, there is no
question that, at this point in history, it repre- sents a unique danger to all of us,
Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Needless to say, many Muslims are basically rational and
tolerant of others. As we will see, however, these modern virtues are not likely to be
products of their faith. In chapter 4, I will argue that insofar as a person is observant of the doctrine of Islamthat is, insofar as he really believes ithe will pose a problem for us. Indeed, it has grown rather obvious that the
liabilities of the Muslim faith are by no means confined to the beliefs of Muslim
“extremists.” The response of the Muslim world to the events of September 11, 2001, leaves
no doubt that a significant number of human beings in the twenty-first century believe in
the possibility of martyrdom. We have, in response to this improbable fact, declared a war
on “terror- ism.” This is rather like declaring war on “murder”; it is a category error
that obscures the true cause of our troubles. Terrorism is not a source of human violence, but merely one its inflections. If Osama bin Laden were the leader of a
nation, and the World Trade Center had been brought down with missiles, the atrocities of
September 11 would have been acts of war. It should go without saying that we would have
resisted the temptation to declare a war on “war” in response.

To see that our problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with “terrorism,” we need
only ask ourselves why Muslim terrorists do what they do. Why would someone as conspicuously devoid of per- sonal
grievances or psychological dysfunction as Osama bin Laden who is neither poor,
uneducated, delusional, nor a prior victim of

Western aggressiondevote himself to cave-dwelling machinations with the intention of
killing innumerable men, women, and children he has never met? The answer to this question
is obviousif only because it has been patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden
himself. The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why
did nineteen well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the
privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors ? Because they believed that they would go
straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of human beings so
fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been reluctant to accept this explanation ?

As we have seen, there is something that most Americans share with Osama bin Laden, the
nineteen hijackers, and much of the Mus- lim world. We, too, cherish the idea that certain
fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence. Such heroic acts of credulity are
thought not only acceptable but redeemingeven necessary. This is a problem that is considerably deeper and more troubling than the problem of
anthrax in the mail. The concessions we have made to religious faithto the idea that
belief can be sanctified by something other than evidencehave rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of
conflict in our world.

Muslim Extremism

It is important to specify the dimension in which Muslim “extrem- ists” are actually
extreme. They are extreme in their faith. They are extreme in their devotion to the literal word of the Koran and the hadith (the
literature recounting the sayings and actions of the Prophet), and this leads them to be extreme in the degree to which they believe that modernity and secular
culture are incompatible with moral and spiritual health. Muslim extremists are certain
that the exports of Western culture are leading their wives and children

away from God. They also consider our unbelief to be a sin so grave that it merits death
whenever it becomes an impediment to the spread of Islam. These sundry passions are not
reducible to “hatred” in any ordinary sense. Most Muslim extremists have never been to
America or even met an American. And they have far fewer grievances with Western
imperialism than is the norm around the globe.10 Above all, they appear to be suffering from a fear of contamination. As has been widely
noted, they are also con- sumed by feelings of “humiliation”humiliation over the fact that
while their civilization has foundered, they have watched a godless, sin-loving people
become the masters of everything they touch. This feeling is also a product of their
faith. Muslims do not merely feel the outrage of the poor who are deprived of the
necessities of life. They feel the outrage of a chosen people who have been subju- gated
by barbarians. Osama bin Laden wants for nothing. What, then, does he want? He has not
called for the equal distribution of wealth around the globe. Even his demand for
Palestinian statehood seems an afterthought, stemming as much from his anti-Semitism as
from any solidarity he feels with the Palestinians (needless to say, such anti-Semitism
and solidarity are also products of his faith). He seems most exercised over the presence
of unbelievers (American troops and Jews) in the Muslim holy land and over what he
imagines to be the territorial ambitions of Zionists. These are purely theological
grievances. It would be much better, for all con- cerned, if he merely hated us.

To be sure, hatred is an eminently human emotion, and it is obvi- ous that many Muslim
extremists feel it. But faith is still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people
define their moral identities in religious terms. The only salient difference between
Muslims and non-Muslims is that the latter have not proclaimed their faith in Allah, and
in Mohammed as his prophet. Islam is a missionary reli- gion: there is not likely to be an
underlying doctrine of racism, or even nationalism, animating the militant Muslim world.
Muslims can be both racist and nationalistic, of course, but it seems all but

certain that if the West underwent a massive conversion to Islam and, perforce, repudiated
all Jewish interests in the Holy Landthe basis for Muslim “hatred” would simply disappear.11

Most Muslims who commit atrocities are explicit about their desire to get to paradise. One
failed Palestinian suicide bomber described being “pushed” to attack Israelis by “the love
of martyr- dom.” He added, “I didn't want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a
martyr.” Mr. Zaydan, the would-be martyr, conceded that his Jewish captors were “better
than many, many Arabs.” With regard to the suffering that his death would have inflicted
upon his family, he reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick seventy peo- ple
to join him in paradise. He would have been sure to invite his family along.12

As I HAVE SAID, people of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that
inspires such violence. But I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be
moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran,13 or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable
things about the nature of the universe. Because most religions offer no valid mechanism
by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is
condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors. If we would
speak of the baseness of our natures, our willingness to live, kill, and die on account of
propositions for which we have no evi- dence should be among the first topics of
discussion.