of branches and logs and bonfires of

Of branches and logs and bonfires of vanities....

Sam Harris has gone completely off the rails. Call it the curse of

writing a best-seller; but his fame has gone to his head:

You believe that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus is the

Son of God, and that only those who place their faith in Jesus will

find salvation after death. As a Christian, you believe these

propositions not because they make you feel good, but because you

think they are true. Before I point out some of the problems with

these beliefs, I would like to acknowledge that there are many

points on which you and I agree. We agree, for instance, that if

one of us is right, the other is wrong. The Bible is either the

word of God, or it isn't. Either Jesus offers humanity the one,

true path to salvation (John 14:6) or he does not. We agree that to

be a true Christian is to believe that all other faiths are

mistaken, and profoundly so....

I have written elsewhere about the problems I see with religious

liberalism and religious moderation. Here, we need only observe

that the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and

moderates generally admit. Either the Bible is just an ordinary

book, written by mortals, or it isn't. Either Christ was divine, or

he was not. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ was an

ordinary man, the history of Christian theology is the story of

bookish men parsing a collective delusion. If the basic tenets of

Christianity are true, then there are some very grim surprises in

store for nonbelievers like myself. You understand this....So let

us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is

really going to win this argument, and the other side is really

going to lose.

Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2006), pp. 3-5.

And if you think that is arrogant, you haven't read the foreword:

While this book is intended for people of all faiths, it has been

written in the form of a letter to a Christian....In Letter to a

Christian, I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral

pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms....I have

little doubt that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties

of the Christian Right to be as troubling as I do. It is my hope,

however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they

demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists

of all faiths....Even the most progressive faiths lend their tacit

support to the religious divisions in our world. (pp. vii-ix)

You have to let this sink in to truly appreciate it. There are two

kinds of people in Harris' world: those who believe in the cartoonish

version of Christianity he describes, and those who believe nothing at

all. The rest are just fools who delude themselves into thinking the

world doesn't cleave into such a simplistic dichotomy. It's a

weltanschaaung that can't even be labeled sophomoric. It's a thesis

that would get him dropped from Philosophy 101.

On the same day I saw that book, I shelved A Significant Life, a book

with a foreword by Joel Osteen. That should tell you all you need to

know about it. In a celebrity besotted culture, we all (presumably)

long for "a significant life." Many of the reports I hear about

mothers of suicide bombers indicate they are young men (mostly) who

want: yes, "a significant life." It's no accident Osteen's bestseller

was titled: Your Best Life Now. We no longer want to be just happy: we

want to be important. We want to matter. We want to be significant.

Kierkegaard saw this coming almost 200 years ago. He saw that we would

long for meaning, significance, importance, attached not to our lives,

but to our existence. Thoreau touched on it when he said "The mass of

men lead lives of quiet desperation." There is a spiritual hunger in

human beings, a need that is not satisfied by power or wealth or

comfort or even physical security. You don't need to agree with

Augustine that "our hearts are restless until they rest [in God]," to

agree that humans have restless spiritual hearts. So when Sam Harris

says he thinks he's got the answer, and yet he makes no reference to

Kierkegaard, or Sartre, or Henri Nouwen, or even the sociologist

Robert Wuthnow, excuse me if I'm lump him in with Richard Dawkins and

Daniel Dennett (company he would welcome; their recent books on

religion are the first two of his 10 books he recommends for further

reading), and dispense with the whole lot of them, none of whom seem

capable of forming a coherent argument. In fact, there's a parable

about that; about seeing the splinter in your brother's eye, and

ignoring the log in your own. As I've mentioned before, objects

reflected in a convex surface are much closer than they appear, and if

you are close enough to see a speck in someone else's eye, what you

are probably seeing is simply something in a very tiny mirror (Jesus

was a subtle one, wasn't he?).

So I discard them all. Hitler didn't kill 6 million Jews because he

was on a religious mission. He didn't turn Europe into hell and drive

Stalin's troops to the gates of Leningrad because God told him to, and

Rommel didn't drive deep in to Egypt in his zeal to make it Christian

again. Osama bin Laden doesn't urge his minions on with assurances

that he's just gotten the word from Allah on what their next mission

should be. He justifies his attacks as a defense of Islam, but in his

mind, he is reacting to injustices done against his beliefs and his

sense of right and wrong. That doesn't justify a thing he does, but he

doesn't act because he thinks God tells him to destroy the infidel

wherever the infidel might be, or because only Muslims who kill will

make it into the afterlife. And even George Bush didn't go to war so

he could destroy non-believers and non-Christians.

I know how Harris puts his theories together, but they are pasted

together with spit and short pieces of string. He takes the most

absurd and ridiculous positions possible, and then posits them as the

only ones either possible or viable. His ridiculous "either/or" about

the validity of Scripture and the consequences of Christian belief or

non-belief don't even pass the laugh test. It is a reductio ad

absurdum that is an insult to anyone with a passing knowledge of world

religions or just of Christianity or even simple logic. Like Dennett

and Dawkins, when it comes to the subject of religion Harris simply

seems incapable of applying the simplest principles of logic to his

reasoning. Worse, he ignores the real problems of modern life in favor

of advocating a solution that can never be imposed, and charging

entire nations with crimes simply for the way they think. He tries to

conflate the two subjects in his introduction, which makes the entire

argument even more farcical. Thomas Merton may have found profound

similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, but Sam Harris hasn't

even figured out what Christianity aspires to, much less does he

present credentials equivalent of Huston Smith's which make him

knowledgeable enough about world religions to generalize about them as

he does.

There are profound problems in the world, and many of those problems

are the result of modernity, especially of the philosophy of the

Enlightenment and the physical results of empiricism (technology prime

among them). But rather than address those very real human problems,

problems my Pastoral Care teacher reminded us were "messy," just as

human life is messy, he creates a straw man of his own delusions and

proceeds to beat it into fragments. It reminds me of another line from

Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one

who is striking at the root." Except Harris isn't even hitting the

branches; he's just flailing away madly at the air.

By the way, on p. 85, Harris asserts that all adherents to Islam are

dangerous, crazy, and violent. His support for this sweeping

generalization that encompasses over 1 billion people? I will quote

his explanation: "Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious

faith." The emphasis is in the original. Reflect on the fact that,

were this statement made about Jews, or African Americans, or even