geo wrote:
As others have said, Harris assumes that people actually believe these things, but as a recent religious survey shows, almost no one really does. Most folks aren't even aware that the Catholic Church claims that at mass the wafer actually becomes Jesus' body, and the wine actually becomes Jesus' blood. So what Harris has failed to account for (so far) is our amazing ability to "believe" the tenets of religion to a very marginal degree. He does say that the terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were not cowards or lunatics—"they were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be." (67)
Perhaps these people ignorant of basic tenets are the moderates Harris speaks of (and disparages). I can see how, if I liked going to Catholic Mass for the ritual, the music, the bonding, the positive message I've distilled from the Bible, I would just be uninterested in the hard core and would appear to be ignorant about that when questioned. That appears to me, personally, as a type of obliviousness, and I can't bring myself to approve of it, but I can understand it.
What Sam Harris does unequivocally argue is that faith should not be taught as a virtue. "Religious unreason should acquire an even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principal causes of armed conflict in our world." (77)
Thanks for emphasizing this. Harris isn't condemning "religion," because that is too nonspecific a target. Faith is what has become outmoded and, he strongly believes, dangerous in this age of WMD. To those who say that faith is a natural inheritance of humans, as anthropology attests, and that therefore we have to live with it, I would suggest that before we had the means to explain phenomena naturalistically, we had much less need to exercise faith. Belief in supernatural causes came naturally and was, by the light of those times, reasonable. Faith only came about as the nature of God began to change to something less blatantly anthropomorphic and more centered on the life afterwards. Also, the slow dawning of science created a counterforce that faith stepped up to resist. As science continued its development, the unreason of faith, and the effort needed to maintain it, became ever greater. (You said much the same thing in your following paragraph.)
In this chapter, Harris says there is a very thin line between faith and madness. Harris asks: what's the difference between a man who believes that God will reward him with 72 virgins if he kills a score of Jewish teenagers and someone who believes that creatures from Alpha Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace through his hair dryer? The difference is that the second guy is the only one who believes it. So he's crazy. But the first guy's beliefs are shared by an entire culture. And if your delusions are shared by others it's sign of faith, and that's a good thing.
Being in the mental health field, I've been tantalized by the religiosity/madness relationship. On the one hand, mental health clients can be just like the healthier population in receiving a benefit from their participation in religion, a benefit that has no obvious downside. This is all from the purely practical point of view of keeping people out of trouble. On the other hand, we commonly take certain reports of religious beliefs as indications that clients are becoming symptomatic. The striking thing about these reports is their similarity to various figures in the Bible who have visions of God and regular communication with him. These are the revered figures of the faith, but I question whether these days even the devout would not look with suspicion on any contemporary who claimed to have a direct link with God, saw him or Jesus, or whatever. So there is a disconnect between what is approved in the old days versus what is approved now. I think this shows an unacknowledged acceptance that those supposed events are not real. They don't conform to the light of modern reason, which people may do all they can to avoid but really can't escape from.
The classic episode of madness or psychosis in the Bible is Abraham's taking orders from Yahweh to kill his son Isaac. This is clearly,
clearly, something right out of the pages of DSM-IV. In the days when this story was written down, there was still a respect for visions of this kind, showing that the person was specially singled out by the god to be his instrument. It was a remnant from the times of the shaman, the role that the priest inherited.
