(Atheism, Harris, Sam
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
A
N
A
THEIST
M
ANIFESTO
By Sam
Harris
Dec. 7, 2005
E
DITOR
’
S
N
OTE
:
A
T A TIME WHEN FUNDAMENTALIST
RELIGION HAS AN UNPARALLELED INFLUENCE IN THE
HIGHEST GOVERNMENT LEVELS IN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
,
AND RELIGION
-
BASED TERROR DOMINATES THE WORLD
STAGE
,
S
AM
H
ARRIS ARGUES THAT PROGRESSIVE
TOLERANCE OF FAITH
-
BASED UNREASON IS AS GREAT A
MENACE AS RELIGION ITSELF
.
H
ARRIS
,
A PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE OF
S
TANFORD WHO HAS STUDIED EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS
,
WON THE
2004
PEN
A
WARD FOR NONFICTION FOR
T
HE
E
ND OF
F
AITH
,
WHICH POWERFULLY
EXAMINES AND EXPLODES THE ABSURDITIES OF ORGANIZED RELIGION
.
T
RUTHDIG ASKED
H
ARRIS TO WRITE A CHARTER DOCUMENT FOR HIS THESIS THAT BELIEF IN
G
OD
,
AND
APPEASEMENT OF RELIGIOUS EXTREMISTS OF ALL FAITHS BY MODERATES
,
HAS BEEN AND
CONTINUES TO BE THE GREATEST THREAT TO WORLD PEACE AND A SUSTAINED ASSAULT ON
REASON
.
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/
An Atheist Manifesto
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 6 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 needs to 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 (87% of
the population) who claim to
hould 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
id not do it. Neither did the
ven
with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of
n 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
f 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. A
as 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
f 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 no
ondering 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
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
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 wh
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.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]