The End of Faith

Humanist, May-June, 2005 by David A. Niose

But it's doubtful that Harris' views will be welcomed in the mainstream of the freethought community, let alone the mainstream of society at large. As an evangelist he is unlikely to win many converts. Indeed, for starters, if Harris were trying to inject his daring ideas into any mainstream public dialogue, he could have found a title that would sound less like fingernails on a chalkboard to the average person. The End of Faith is unlikely to get a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas; the title alone is too extreme for the average person.

Much more importantly, Harris' exuberance sometimes results in his making statements that are just plain shocking. Humanists and Religionists alike might shudder with Harris' quip: "The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."

Ethical to kill people for their beliefs? In other words, Harris is suggesting scrapping the notion of freedom of conscience, which only happens to be one of the most fundamental tenets of Western democracy. This type of extremism, justified by the 9/11-changed-everything mentality, reflects either an ignorance of basic civics (in free countries, we punish actions, not beliefs and opinions) or a willingness to take a step in the direction of Orwellian thought police. To so casually suggest that killing people for their opinions is ethical deflates Harris' credibility.

As further proof of Harris' lack of ACLU credentials, he avidly argues in favor of torture. He backs the use of torture, he says, if the likelihood of getting useful information "is even one chance in a million." It isn't just Harris' support of torture that is unsettling but the ease with which he seems to approve of the tactic. "Why spare the rod with the suspected terrorists?" he offhandedly ponders. "If we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war," he declares, without explaining why.

Harris tries to justify his support of torture by claiming that it's no worse than the already accepted notion of collateral damage (the unintended killing of innocents in warfare, especially in bombings). Analytically, this argument is full of holes that Harris decides not to address. Even leaving aside the fact that torture and collateral damage bear no relation to one another except that they both involve violence toward human beings, Harris' argument breaks down at the elementary two-wrongs-don't-make-a-right stage.

If one ever needed proof that not all nontheists are Humanists, Harris has provided us with sufficient evidence. In eagerly supporting torture, he never considers the harm done not just to the victim of torture but to the culture that propagates such practices. What kind of a free, democratic society could so casually allow torture? Perhaps it is an overstatement to claim that "everything changed" after 9/11, because hopefully our definition of basic decency hasn't. Any public psyche that has room for torture as an acceptable practice would seem to be about one step away from 1933 Germany. What kind of men and women would be recruited to do the torturing? Are these folks tomorrow's political leaders? Harris obviously isn't troubled by such questions.