Atheist evangelist preaches from bully pulpit*

Theologians dismiss Sam Harris' arguments against religion as crude,
oversimplified

In His Bully Pulpit, Sam Harris Devoutly Believes That Religion Is the
Root of All Evil

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
 October 28, 2006; C01

NEW YORK There are really just two possibilities for Sam Harris. Either
he is right and millions of Christians, Muslims and Jews are wrong. Or
Sam Harris is wrong and he is so going to hell.

This seems obvious whenever Harris opens what he calls "my big mouth,"
and it is glaringly clear one recent evening at the New York Public
Library, where he is debating a former priest before a packed
auditorium. In less than an hour, Harris condemns the God of the Old
Testament for a host of sins, including support for slavery. He
drop-kicks the New Testament, likening the story of Jesus to a fairy
tale. He savages the Koran, calling it "a manifesto for religious
divisiveness."

Nobody has ever accused the man of being subtle. Harris is straight out
of the stun grenade school of public rhetoric, and his arguments are far
more likely to offend the faithful than they are to coax them out of
their faith. And he doesn't target just the devout. Religious moderates,
Harris says in his patient and imperturbable style, have immunized
religion from rational discussion by nurturing the idea that faith is so
personal and private that it is beyond criticism, even when horrific
crimes are committed in its name.

"There is this multicultural, apologetic machinery that keeps telling us
that we can't attack people's religious sensibility," Harris says in an
interview. "That is so wrong and so suicidal."

This is Harris at full throttle, the Evel Knievel of ideas, a daredevil
of the mind. You listen to him and think, "Well, that is going to land
him in the hospital."

Instead, it has landed him on the bestseller list. His first book, "The
End of Faith," won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First
Nonfiction and sold more than 270,000 copies, making Harris a very
high-profile voice of the godless. Now there is a follow-up, "Letter to
a Christian Nation," a 96-page shiv inspired by the reaction to his
first book, which apparently included a heap of hate mail.

"Letter," which is No. 11 on the New York Times bestseller list, doesn't
drill many new theological wells. Harris is the first, though, to
retrofit the case against "Old Book" religions in readable form for the
post-Sept. 11 world. He is also among the first to indict religious
liberals, and he might be the first man to be anointed "Hot Atheist" in
Rolling Stone magazine.

The un-gospel according to Sam has found a huge audience, but every bit
as striking is the counter-reaction to Harris among religious scholars.
Mention his name to academics of just about every religious persuasion
and you can almost see their eyes roll. Oh, that guy.

Harris has grossly oversimplified scripture, they say. He has drawn
far-reaching conclusions based on the beliefs of radicals. As bad, his
stand against organized religion is so unconditional that it's akin to
the intolerance he claims he is fighting. If there is such a thing as a
secular fundamentalist, they contend, Harris is it. Even some who agree
with his conclusions about the dangers of fanaticism find his argument
ham-handed.

"I think this country needs a sophisticated attack on religion," says
Van Harvey, a retired professor of religious studies at Stanford
University. "But pushing moderates into the same camp as fanatics, that
seems like a very crude mistake."

According to Harvey, not only has Harris picked a fight with those who
could be on his side, but his solution -- let's all ditch God -- is
laughable given the role that religion plays in so many lives. Others
say that he has taken these "Old Books" at their literal word, instead
of studying the way that the faithful actually engage the scriptures.
Put more simply, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

"Religion doesn't make people bigots," says Reza Aslan, author of "No
God but God," a history of Islam. "People are bigots and they use
religion to justify their ideology."

It doesn't help that Harris lacks a marquee academic credential, though
he is working on a PhD in neuroscience. But because Harris's work has
caught on, his ideas have been debated in symposiums at a number of
campuses, and Harris has gone toe-to-toe with some of the best and the
brightest of the believers.

He seems to relish the experience, and so do his fans. At the New York
Public Library debate, the crowd had obviously come to hear him, and
when he was interrupted by his opponent a few times, his supporters were
angry enough to hiss a little. ("We love you, Sam!" one attendee shouted
early on.) Dressed in a dark suit, Harris never raised his voice. He
just laid out the anti-catechism matter-of-factly:

"If the Koran were exactly the same," he said, toward the end of the
night, "and there were just one line added to it, and the line said, 'If
you see a red-haired woman on your lawn at sunset, kill her,' I can tell
you what kind of world we'd live in. We'd live in a world where
red-haired women would be killed often. We'd live in a world where
people like yourself" -- and here Harris gestures to his opponent,
Oliver McTernan -- "would say, 'That's not the true Islam.' Twenty women
in Baghdad would have their heads cut off and someone would come forward
and say, 'This has nothing to do with Islam. Some of them were
strawberry blond. Some of them were strangled."
A Dropout for 11 Years

Over lunch the day before the debate, Harris seems utterly placid, which
is a surprise. Reading his book, you envision a firebrand in a
hair-pulling panic. To find religion so scary is like being terrified of
cellphones -- there is no end to the potential for fright. But Harris
speaks methodically, in fully formed paragraphs and without much emotion.

"My writing is angrier than I am," he says, smiling a little and sipping
a Coke. "The maniac comes out a bit when I get behind the keyboard."

Harris is 39 and looks uncannily like Ben Stiller. He grew up in Los
Angeles, in a home he describes as non-religious. (For the record, his
mother is Jewish and his father, now deceased, was a Quaker.) Harris
asked that all but the most basic biographical details be omitted from
this article, even where he lives and where he studies. Nobody has
threatened his life, but he thinks you can't be too careful. Plus, a
movie deal is in the works that could make him the focus of a
documentary about atheism. He would like to minimize his tracks sooner
rather than later.

What he'll say is this: At age 19, he and a college friend tried MDMA,
better known as ecstasy, and the experience altered his view of the role
that love could play in the world. ("I realized that it was possible to
be a human being who wished others well all the time, reflexively.") He
dropped out of Stanford, where he was an English major, in his sophomore
year and started to study Buddhism and meditation. He flew around the
country and around the world, to places such as India and Nepal, often
for silent retreats that went on for months. One of his teachers was
Sharon Salzberg, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in
Barre, Mass. Harris stood out, she recalls, not just because of his
relative youth -- everyone else was a generation older -- but because of
his intensity.

"His passion was for deep philosophical questions, and he could talk for
hours and hours," Salzberg recalls. "Sometimes you'd want to say to him,
'What about the Yankees?' or 'Look at the leaves, they're changing
color!' " At the time, he was supported financially by his mother,
though he did work for one memorable three-week stint in the security
detail assigned to the Dalai Lama.

"You walk into a room and everyone is beaming good vibes," he recalls,
"and I'm looking for dangerous lunatics. I wouldn't recommend it."

During his 11-year dropout phase, Harris read hundreds of books on
religion, many of which are listed in the lengthy bibliography of "The
End of Faith." His interests eventually turned to philosophy of the
mind, which led him to re-enroll at Stanford in 1997, this time to study
philosophy. He wrote a lot before and after he got his diploma, but
nothing was published.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001.

"I could have told you what is wrong with religious dogmatism on
September 10th," he says. "But after 9/11, I realized the role that
religious moderation played in providing cover for fundamentalism."

Harris started writing "The End of Faith" on Sept. 12. Fifteen
publishers would reject the book. Norton said yes after a torturous
internal debate.

The reluctance of all these publishers hardly seems surprising. There
are surely atheists in the ranks of politicians, op-ed writers and TV
talk-show hosts, but can you name one? (Fellow religion critic and
Oxford luminary Richard Dawkins says that atheists are the new gays --
in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office.) But to
Harris, the Bible would seem just a poorly constructed fable with a few
useful metaphors if he didn't consider it so dangerous. Without the Old
and New Testaments, he states, there is no way to understand opposition
to stem cell research, or the notorious laws in El Salvador that
criminalize abortion, even in the event of rape.

The worst part, Harris says, is this: Because Christians and Jews cling
to their "delusions," they are in no position to criticize Muslims for
theirs. And, as he italicizes it in his new book for maximum effect, "
most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith. "

Which gets us to another problem with Harris's work often cited by
critics: He can preach only to those who have left the choir. As a
critique of faith, "You people are nuts" isn't likely to change a lot of
minds. There is the broader question, too, of whether religious
moderates really are enablers for extremists. Maybe moderates are a
bulwark against fanatics. If this is really a war of ideas, it is
probably not a war between no religion (which is what Harris would like)
and extremism. It's a war between moderation and extremism, which is a
war one needs moderates to fight.

"You're not going to convert everyone to atheism," says Harvey, the
retired Stanford professor. "Secular humanists like Harris ought to be
concerned with allies, to win fights on questions like the separation of
church and state. But Harris isn't concerned about the political
implications of his arguments, because he thinks that anything
supernatural is evil."

Harris isn't against all religion. He endorses Jainism, a
religion-philosophy from India that finds God in the unchanging traits
of the human soul. But everyone who organizes his or her life around an
ancient text that purports to convey the words and sentiments of God --
Harris would like you to surrender your prayers, history and traditions.
You are welcome to check out Jainism, but Harris recommends that you
accept his conclusion, which is that we live in a universe without God.
Deal with it.

How exactly the faithful will transition to a godless, Good Book-less
cosmology is not exactly clear. Harris isn't sure it will ever happen.
But he is heartened by countries such as Sweden, where he claims 80
percent of the populace do not believe in God.

"Massive social change is clearly possible," he says in an interview.
"Look at the way we have transformed our attitudes about race. There's
still racism in this country, but it's profoundly disreputable."
'A Failed Science'

"The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" contain plenty to
outrage just about everyone. Harris assails political correctness,
evangelicals, liberals, right-wingers and even Judaism, which often gets
a pass in such debates. (Harris charges that Jews have been complicit in
their centuries-long persecution because they have insisted on setting
themselves apart from the rest of the world.) The one constant in these
books is Harris's absolutism about reason. If an idea can't survive
rigorous testing and scrutiny, he thinks it ought to be tossed.

To Miroslav Volf, a Yale professor of theology, that is Harris's first
mistake.

"All of reason is informed by some faith, and there is no mature faith
that hasn't been coupled with and enlightened by some reason," he says.
It's also wrong for Harris to assume that Christians consider the Bible
the direct word of God, Volf says. Most don't, so combing the scriptures
for the fingerprints of fallible authors, and then declaring victory
once you find them, is silly.

"Most Christians believe that while the Bible was inspired by God, it is
not free-floating, megaphone pronouncements out of nowhere by God. It
was given through the medium of a culturally situated people, with the
limitations of their knowledge at the time. And it's our task to ask,
'What does this mean to me today?' "

Islamic scholars say that Harris has committed an equally egregious
blunder with the Koran. He fails to understand the book in its
historical context, and he cherry-picks the text for its most merciless
verses.

"He couldn't be more wrong about the Koran," says Reza Aslan, the "No
God but God" author. "In the history of the prophetic biblical canon
that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the
views of other religions."

It is true, Aslan says, that the Koran is brutal on polytheists, but
there aren't a lot of those around these days. Harris, he claims, is
making the same mistake that Muslims in Arab countries make when they
locate the soul of Christianity with evangelicals who speak in tongues.

He has confused the outermost for the core. And ironically, Aslan notes,
Harris is making the same mistake as fundamentalists, by taking the
scripture at its literal word.

Harris says that even if everyone decided that none of these texts is
divine, it would still make sense to ditch them, since it would only be
a matter of time before someone picked one up and said, "Hey, the
creator of the universe hates homosexuals."

"We have to start seeing religion for what it is," he says, "a failed
science, a failed description of the world, a holdover of discourse by
our ancestors, who had no basis to demand good evidence and good argument."

Of course, if religion were merely failed science, it would have been
supplanted by real science centuries ago. But it has survived and
thrived through a revolution in our understanding of the solar system as
well as our bodies and our minds, which suggests that it offers
something that deduction, data points and reason do not.

"Religion is never going to go away," says Aslan, "and anyone who thinks
it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to
describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people
struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made
language to express those feelings."

Praise and Pans

After the debate at the New York Public Library there is a
question-and-answer session, then Harris heads to a table, sits down and
starts signing books. A line forms. You get the sense that many here
feel like they are about to meet a celebrity. One of them is Michael
Galinsky, who has a copy of "Letter" in his hand.

He sounds thoroughly unimpressed.

"I'm an agnostic," he says, after getting an autograph, "but I found
what Harris said kind of juvenile. By discounting all religion the way
he does, that's basically like saying, 'All of you are idiots.' I feel
like he ought to extend some kind of olive branch. Otherwise there is
nothing to talk about."

Behind him is Louis Perry, a 61-year-old with a Southern drawl. As he
hands Harris a copy of "Letter to a Christian Nation," Perry gushes
about how the book changed his life. In a brief chat on his way out the
door, Perry explains why.

Thanks to Sam Harris, he had a religious epiphany in reverse. He was
raised a Southern Baptist but never really connected to any of the
doctrine. Everyone around felt a deep spiritual nourishment from church
services, and Perry always left feeling as though he'd missed the point.

"For years, I thought there was something wrong with me," he says. "I
was always asking 'Why don't I get this? Why don't I get this?' And then
last year I read 'The End of Faith,' and Sam basically explained it to
me -- there is nothing to get."