An Atheist Manifesto
An Atheist Manifesto
by Sam Harris
Sam Harris argues against irrational faith and its adherents
Originally posted at Truthdig
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a
little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If
an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it
will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the
confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives
of six billion human beings.
The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe -- at
this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching
over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it
good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is
not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a
refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in
which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The
obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is
a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and
insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not
want.
It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a
non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have
words for people who deny the validity of these
pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, "atheism" is a term that should not
even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable
people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist
is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans
(eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to "never doubt the
existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his
existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless
destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each
day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation
is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the
gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications,
can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be
certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public
policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions
appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject,
indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes
were not so high.
We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally
destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children
their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant,
never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without
knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when
surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast
spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine
that there is a cure for this. If we live rightly... not
necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient
beliefs and stereotyped behaviors..we will get everything we want after
we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our
corporeal ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with
everyone we loved while alive. Of course, overly rational people
and other rabble will be kept out of this happy place, and those who
suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy themselves
for all eternity.
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises--from the fusion energy
that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of
this lights dancing for eons upon the Earth--and yet Paradise conforms
to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean
cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know
better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he
loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own
image.
Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New
Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost
all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were
displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in
New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent,
omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a
hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of
those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety
of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were
people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed
throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit
the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.
Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm of biblical
proportions would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the
ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by
the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina's path was
wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite
imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of
New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they
wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them
until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces.
Nevertheless, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80% of
Katrina's survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their
faith in God.
As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand
Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There
can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the
Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his
existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly
murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It
would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his
faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared
through God's grace.
Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of
the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it
is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a
loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs.
Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world's suffering in a
cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just
how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions
of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their
happiness for no good reason at all.
One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be
to shake the world's faith. The Holocaust did not do it.
Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests
among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of
smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants. God's ways
are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how
infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In
matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the Earth.
Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not
responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand
the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other
way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This
is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider
it solved. If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the
most egregious calamities or he does not care to. God, therefore,
is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the
following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of
morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are
precisely what the faithful use to establish God's goodness in the
first place. And any God who could concern himself with something
as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in
prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If he exists, the God
of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is
unworthy even of man.
There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most
reasonable and least odious: The biblical God is a fiction. As
Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus
and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is
no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate
enough to take the profundity of the world's suffering at face
value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we
love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly
while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly
attributed to religion--to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious
delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources--is what makes
atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity,
however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The
atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out
of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
The Nature of Belief
According to several recent polls, 22% of Americans are certain that
Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years. Another
22% believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same
44% who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God
literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews and who want to stop
teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution. As
President Bush is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the
most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate.
Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every
decision of national importance. Political liberals seem to have
drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing
Scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions
of men and women in our country who vote largely on the basis of
religious dogma. More than 50% of Americans have a "negative" or
"highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70% think
it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious."
Unreason is now ascendant in the United States--in our schools, in our
courts and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28% of
Americans believe in evolution; 68% believe in Satan. Ignorance
in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering
superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.
Although it is easy enough for smart people to criticize religious
fundamentalism, something called "religious moderation" still enjoys
immense prestige in our society, even in the ivory tower. This is
ironic, as fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their
brains than "moderates" do. While fundamentalists justify their
religious beliefs with extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, at
least they make an attempt at rational justification. Moderates,
on the other hand, generally do nothing more than cite the good
consequences of religious belief. Rather than say that they
believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have come true,
moderates will say that they believe in God because this belief "gives
their lives meaning." When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand
people on the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted
this cataclysm as evidence of God's wrath. As it turns out, God
was sending humanity another oblique message about the evils of
abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this
interpretation of events is actually reasonable, given certain
(ludicrous) assumptions. Moderates, on the other hand, refuse to
draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his works. God
remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is
compatible with the most desolating evil. In the face of
disasters like the Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the
most unctuous and stupefying nonsense imaginable. And yet, men
and women of goodwill naturally prefer such vacuities to the odious
moralizing and prophesizing of true believers. Between
catastrophes, it is surely a virtue of liberal theology that it
emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that it
is human mercy on display--not God's--when the bloated bodies of the
dead are pulled from the sea. On days when thousands of children
are simultaneously torn from their mothers' arms and casually drowned,
liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is--the sheerest of
mortal pretenses. Even the theology of wrath has more
intellectual merit. If God exists, his will is not
inscrutable. The only thing inscrutable in these terrible events
is that so many neurologically healthy men and women can believe the
unbelievable and think this the height of moral wisdom.
It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a
rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief
makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life
meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the
notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for
instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried
somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No
doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine
what would happen if he then followed the example of religious
moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked
why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of
times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, "This belief
gives my life meaning," or "My family and I enjoy digging for it on
Sundays," or "I wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't
a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator."
Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than
that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.
Here we can see why Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of faith and
other epistemological Ponzi schemes won't do. To believe that God
exists is to believe that one stands in some relation to his existence
such that his existence is itself the reason for one's belief.
There must be some causal connection, or an appearance thereof, between
the fact in question and a person's acceptance of it. In this
way, we can see that religious beliefs, to be beliefs about the way the
world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit as any other. For all
their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists understand this;
moderates--almost by definition--do not.
The incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature
of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either a
person has good reasons for what he strongly believes or he does
not. People of all creeds naturally recognize the primacy of
reasons and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they possibly
can. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is always
championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided; sometimes in the
same sentence. Only when the evidence for a religious doctrine is
thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, do its
adherents invoke "faith." Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for
their beliefs (e.g. "the New Testament confirms Old Testament
prophecy," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," "We prayed, and our
daughter's cancer went into remission"). Such reasons are
generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all.
Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves
to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been
shattered by mutually incompatible religious beliefs, in a nation that
is growing increasingly beholden to Iron Age conceptions of God, the
end of history and the immortality of the soul, this lazy partitioning
of our discourse into matters of reason and matters of faith is now
unconscionable.
Faith and the Good Society
People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of
the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is
true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were
irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially
rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more
than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national
identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of
intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable
even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built
the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from
medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had
viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every
societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful.
While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately
secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe
continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its
newspapers as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what
happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the
contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking
critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to
say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for
the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the
atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of
which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no
society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people
became too reasonable.
While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an
impossible goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished
it. Any account of a "god gene" that causes the majority of
Americans to helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of
religious fiction must explain why so many inhabitants of other First
World societies apparently lack such a gene. The level of atheism
throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that
religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway,
Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the
Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least
religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nations'
Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as
indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita
income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and
infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in
terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. Other
analyses paint the same picture: The United States is unique among
wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and opposition
to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates
of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant
mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United
States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the
highest levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary
theory, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal
dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast
conform to European norms. Of course, correlational data of this
sort do not resolve questions of causality--belief in God may lead to
societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God;
each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper
source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect,
these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic
aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that
religious faith does nothing to ensure a society's health.
Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in
terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious
link between Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied
by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries
between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24
to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83%
of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it
is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze
easily through the eye of a needle.
Religion as a Source of Violence
One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the 21st century
is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal
concerns--about ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of
human suffering--in ways that are not flagrantly irrational.
Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we
accord religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have
balkanized our world into separate moral communities--Christians,
Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.--and these divisions have become a
continuous source of human conflict. 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 versus Muslims),
the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox
Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland
(Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan
(Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus
Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri
Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims
versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni
Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims;
Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely
a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the
explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.
In a world riven by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the
obvious: Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing
degree. Religion inspires violence in at least two senses: (1)
People often kill other human beings because they believe that the
creator of the universe wants them to do it (the inevitable
psychopathic corollary being that the act will ensure them an eternity
of happiness after death). Examples of this sort of behavior are
practically innumerable, jihadist suicide bombing being the most
prominent. (2) Larger numbers of people are inclined toward
religious conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core
of their moral identities. One of the enduring pathologies of
human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize
other human beings on the basis of religion. Many religious
conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial concerns, therefore, are
religious in origin. (Just ask the Irish.)
These facts notwithstanding, religious moderates tend to imagine that
human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, to poverty
or to political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of
liberal piety. To dispel it, we need only reflect on the fact
that the Sept. 11 hijackers were college educated and middle
class and had no discernable history of political oppression.
They did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time at their local
mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures
that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and
mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we
admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not a matter of education,
poverty or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: A person
can be so well educated that he can build a nuclear bomb while still
believing that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Such is the
ease with which the human mind can be partitioned by faith, and such is
the degree to which our intellectual discourse still patiently
accommodates religious delusion. Only the atheist has observed
what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: If we want to
uproot the causes of religious violence we must uproot the false
certainties of religion.
Why is religion such a potent source
of human violence?
* Our religions are
intrinsically incompatible with one another. Either Jesus rose
from the dead and will be returning to Earth like a superhero or not;
either the Koran is the infallible word of God or it isn't. Every
religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the
sheer profusion of these incompatible claims creates an enduring basis
for conflict. * There is no other
sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their
differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of
everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor
in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance.
If a person really believes that calling God by the right name can
spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering,
then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers
rather badly. It may even be reasonable to kill them. If a
person thinks there is something that another person can say to his
children that could put their souls in jeopardy for all eternity, then
the heretic next door is actually far more dangerous than the child
molester. The stakes of our religious differences are
immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism or
politics. * Religious faith is a
conversation-stopper. Religion is only area of our discourse in
which people are systematically protected from the demand to give
evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these
beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for,
and--all too often--what they will kill for. This is a problem,
because when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice
between conversation and violence. Only a fundamental willingness
to be reasonable--to have our beliefs about the world revised by new
evidence and new arguments--can guarantee that we will keep talking to
one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive
and dehumanizing. While there is no guarantee that rational
people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by
their dogmas.
It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our
world simply by multiplying the opportunities for interfaith
dialogue. The endgame for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance
of patent irrationality. While all parties to liberal religious
discourse have agreed to tread lightly over those points where their
worldviews would otherwise collide, these very points remain perpetual
sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political
correctness, therefore, does not offer an enduring basis for human
cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for
us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be
a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.
When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith;
when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to
the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a
commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One's
convictions should be proportional to one's evidence. Pretending
to be certain when one isn't--indeed, pretending to be certain about
propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable--is both an
intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized
this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies
of religion and refused to make them his own.
Copyright
2009
Alexplorer.
