MODERN TIMES

Art Hobson

ahobson@uark.edu

NWA Times 16 Sep 2006

Fundamentalism and Middle-Eastern Wars

Four weeks ago I asked what’s going wrong in the Middle East. On one level, the answer is politics and foreign policy, especially U.S. On a deeper level the answer is the unreason of fundamentalist religious beliefs. Philosopher and neuroscience doctoral candidate Sam Harris has written a good book about this, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.” Here’s a review.

Harris argues that a world armed with nuclear weapons cannot long survive our religious irrationalities. The book’s last two chapters show him to be a deeply ethical person who supports spiritual values, but one who considers implausible religious dogma in the absence of evidence to be not only offensive but deadly. His analysis is especially tough on fundamentalists (those who believe in the literal truth of ancient religious books) of the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish persuasions, while also pointing to the harm done by religious moderates (those who interpret the ancient books metaphorically) by forming an accommodating bridge to fundamentalism and thus blinding us to the role of fundamentalism in perpetuating human misery.

The problem is that harmful beliefs are built into the religious foundations. Christian fundamentalists, for example, believe that only their baptized brethren will be saved on Judgment Day, and Muslims and Jews generally take a similar arrogant view. But then how can fundamentalists honestly respect non-believers, whom they know will be cast into hell? For example, the Book of Deuteronomy is quite clear that if your daughter (or anybody else) tries to talk with you about serving other gods, then you must not listen, you must show no pity, you must in fact kill her.

It’s the height of political incorrectness to say, as Harris does, that “the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish.” But, he believes, “we can no longer afford the luxury of political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography [conventional representations] of our ignorance.”

The list of wars that are primarily religious on at least one side is long and surely includes most of today’s wars. For example, India and Pakistan have raised their differences to the level of nuclear threats. But the only reason India and Pakistan are different countries is that the beliefs of Islam cannot be reconciled with those of Hinduism.

Although it’s widely claimed by moderate Muslims that Islam is a religion of peace, the Koran itself contradicts this. This book is full of stuff such as “Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home.” As for suicide bombers, “He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and His apostle and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God….The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies.” For Muslims, martyrdom (death in battle with infidels) is an especially fruitful way to expire, because it’s the only way to bypass purgatory and proceed directly to paradise.

Nonsense of this sort can be traced back to a simple fallacy that’s bedeviled humankind for millennia. Ask a fundamentalist why he/she presumes to know the way the universe works. The reply is some variation on “because it says so in our holy books.” But how, you ask, do we know that the holy books are free from error? The answer: “Because the holy books themselves say so” or, equivalently, “Because God says so.” If you believe this, you’ll believe anything.

Harris takes a broad view of “religious nonsense” by extending the honor to the political religions of people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Although Stalin and Mao paid lip service to rationality, their forms of communism were believed dogmatically, without evidence and without rational discussion. For example, Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko’s “socialist” biology was at least as irrational as the claims of Christian creationists. So the problem is not necessarily religious. The problem is the acceptance of implausible claims without evidence and rational consideration.

In one long chapter titled “In the Shadow of God,” Harris recounts Christianity’s two most indelible calamities: The inquisition and the holocaust.

The next chapter, “The Problem with Islam,” is more to the point of this column, namely the conflict in the Middle East. Harris begins with the politically incorrect observation that there’s a good reason why so many terrorists are Muslim while so few are, say, Buddhist or Jainist or Baha’i. The reason, he says, is that some beliefs are better than others, and Muslims have more than their fair share of bad ones. He shores up this view with such words of the Prophet Mohammed as “Paradise is in the shadow of swords,” and “A single endeavor of fighting in Allah’s Cause …is better than the world and whatever is in it.” He quotes a boringly long list of 58 passages from every portion of the Koran that call on Muslims to, for example, “Slay unbelievers wherever you find them. Idolatry is worse than carnage.”

Harris claims that “nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.”

I’ve focused here on the roots of Islamic terrorism, but there is plenty also to condemn in such deadly Christian fundamentalist beliefs as the rapture, and the return of Christ.

In my opinion, life has a spiritual side that we all should embrace, and belief in God can be part of that healthy spiritual side. However, healthy spiritual beliefs must remain rational; we dare not leave our brains at the church door.

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