ANACHROPHOBIA:

Among the Non-Believers: The tedium of dogmatic atheism: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris (Chris Lehmann, Reason)

For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition.

Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have furthered their cause—the Enlightenment and Darwinism—have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan. [...]

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris, a UCLA philosophy grad student, has seized on the all-too-real specter of Islamist terror as the occasion to revisit the village atheist waterfront, compulsively itemizing all the irrational, surly, atavistic features of faith. Never mind that, among the world’s one billion Islamic believers, the vast majority of clerics and lay Muslims renounce the politicized brand of Islamist dogma that extremists seek to inflict on Muslim and non-Muslim populations alike. Identifying all Islamic beliefs with extreme Islamist terror, as Harris does throughout the book, is a little like saying that the Maoist guerrillas of Peru’s Shining Path are cognate with the Democratic Leadership Council.

Never mind, as well, that militantly atheist movements like Soviet and Khmer Rouge communism—as well as volkish pagan ones like Nazism and Tutsi supremacy—stand behind some of the worst mass violence of the past century. Harris believes religious belief is the single greatest threat to the survival of the human species. Religious faith is not merely a maladaptive superstition, Harris writes; it is the “common enemy” for all reasonable people concerned with the preservation of the world as we know it. All extant religious traditions, to him, are without exception “intellectually defunct and politically ruinous.”

Harris’ stolid—dare one say dogmatic?—failure to see anything in contemporary religion other than the exclusive, world-conquering fantasizing of monotheism at its worst keeps his book mired squarely in a painfully anachronistic atheist’s bill of indictments, cribbed in most particulars from the heyday of Enlightenment skepticism.

Yeah, but without them the Albigenses would be forgotten.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2005 12:00 AM