The exile of reason. A chapter from the book Mahomet God - religion, terrorism and the future of reason

The book was published by Hebrew Publishing in cooperation with Keter

Sam Harris, from English: Yael Sela-Shapiro

Chapter 1 - The Exile of Reason
A young man gets on the bus just before it leaves the station. He wears a thick coat. Under his jacket, an explosive belt is attached to his body. His pockets are full of nails, metal balls and rat poison.

The crowded bus makes its way to the city center. The young man sits down next to a middle-aged couple. He is waiting for the bus to arrive at the next stop. It seems that the couple sitting next to him is going to buy a new refrigerator. The wife has already chosen a model, but her husband is worried about its high price. The husband points to another model in the brochure spread on her lap. The bus is approaching the station. The wife comments that the model her husband chose will not fit the space between their kitchen cabinets. More passengers occupy the last seats, and others stand in the aisle. The bus is full now. The young man is smiling. He presses a button and eliminates himself, the couple sitting next to him, and twenty other bus passengers. The nails, metal balls and rat poison increase the number of casualties on the street and in nearby cars. Everything worked as planned.

The young man's parents found out what happened to him. They are sorry for the son they lost, but they are very proud of him. They know that he has reached heaven and paved the way for them too. His victims were sent forever to hell, so the victory is double. In the eyes of their neighbors, the event is a reason for a party, and they give the parents food and money as a sign of recognition and appreciation.

These are the facts. These are all the details we know for sure about the man. Does his behavior allow us to draw any conclusions about him? Can we, for example, know if he was accepted by his friends at school? Was he rich or poor? Was his IQ high? Did he have a higher education? Did he have a bright future as an engineer? His behavior does not answer such questions and hundreds of others of their kind.

So, why is it so easy to guess - why is it so obvious - what the young man's religion was?

Faith is like a marionette's strings: when pulled, they move almost every aspect of a person's life. are you a scientist are you liberal are you racist All these are expressions of different kinds of beliefs. The beliefs we hold define our worldview; they dictate our behavior; They determine what our emotional reactions will be towards others. If you doubt this, try to imagine how much your life will change if you suddenly start believing one of the following claims:

1. You only have two weeks left to live.

2. You just won a hundred million dollars in the lottery.

3. Aliens implanted a receiver in your skull that allows them to control your behavior.

These are just words - until you believe them. If you believe in them, they will become an integral part of your consciousness, determine your desires, fears and expectations, and all the actions that result from them.

But some of our most cherished beliefs are probably somewhat problematic: they lead us, inevitably, to kill each other. A glance at history, or any newspaper, reveals that ideas that separate people, and unite them with others only for the purposes of slaughter, are usually drawn from religion. It seems that if the human race ever destroys itself in war, it will happen not because it says so in its horoscope, but because it says so in its books. The use we make in the present of words like "God", "heaven" and "sin" will determine our future.

The situation is as follows: most people in this world believe that the creator of the universe composed a book. Unfortunately for us, there are quite a few such books circulating in the market, each of which claims to exclusively represent the truth. People are usually divided into groups according to their belief in one of these contradictory truths - more than on the basis of language, skin color, place of birth or any other tribal criteria. Each and every one of these books implores its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are harmless but most of which certainly are. Among all these beliefs there is a strange unanimity regarding one fundamental and important principle: God does not support an attitude of respect towards other beliefs or towards those who do not believe in his existence.

Every religion has periods when it cooperates with other religious currents. But the mainstay of any religious tradition is the belief that all other traditions are a collection of errors, or at least dangerously partial. This intolerance is embedded in the principles of every religion. A person who believes - truly believes - that certain ideas can bring eternal happiness or the torments of hell, cannot bear the possibility that people dear to his heart will be led astray by the temptations of infidels. Certainty about our fate in the next world is simply incompatible with tolerance in this world.

But such positions present us with a problem: criticism of a person's religion is taboo in Western culture. Liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus on this issue: religious beliefs are left outside the limits of rational discourse. One should not criticize a person's perception of God and the next world, unlike his perception of physics or history, for example. As a result, when a Muslim suicide bomber kills himself and twenty innocent people in the streets of Jerusalem, the role played by his religious faith in his actions is ignored, claiming that his motives were political, economic or personal. Because even without faith, desperate people do terrible things. Faith itself is always justified from all guilt.

However, technology creates new moral imperatives. Because of our technological advances in the art of war, our religious disputes - and as a result our religious beliefs - have become a threat to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in "martyrdom", or that they hold the concept that the "Book of Revelation" is literally true, or any other imaginary concept - because our neighbors are currently armed with chemical, biological and atomic weapons. There is no doubt that these technological developments herald the end of our age of innocence. If words such as "God" and "Allah" do not take their rightful place next to "Apollo" or "Baal", they will destroy our world.

A brief stroll through the graveyard of bad ideas reveals that such perceptual revolutions are possible. Take alchemy for example: it has fascinated humans for over a thousand years, and yet today, a person who seriously claims to practice alchemy disqualifies himself from being in a responsible position. Similarly, religion based on faith must also plunge into the abyss of femininity.

If so, what is the alternative to religion? This is not the right question. Chemistry was not a "substitute" for alchemy; It marked a complete replacement of toy ignorance with real knowledge. Later we will discover that there is no point in looking for "substitutes" for religious belief, just as there is no point in looking for "substitutes" for alchemy.

It is understood that there is a broad spectrum of believers: some draw comfort and inspiration from some spiritual tradition and yet feel a strong commitment to tolerance and pluralism, while others are ready to burn the world to ashes to end heresy. In other words, there are moderate religious people and there are extreme religious people, and the feelings and actions of the different groups should not be confused. But one of the main claims of this book is that even the moderate religious advocate a terrible dogma: they think that each person must learn to respect the irrational beliefs of others, and that this tolerance will pave the way for a better world. I would like to prove that the very ideal of religious tolerance - which was born from the concept that every person has the right to believe what his heart desires about God - is one of the main forces pushing us to the mouth of the abyss.

We have been slow to recognize the central role of religious belief in perpetuating inhuman behavior. This is not surprising, because many of us still believe that faith is an essential element in human life. Two myths today protect the faith from rational criticism. One - most of us believe that religious belief has benefits that cannot be derived from another source, such as community life, moral behavior and spiritual experiences. And the other myth - many of us also believe that the terrible acts that are sometimes done in the name of religion are not the product of faith "in itself", but of our negative qualities - such as greed, hatred and fear - and that the best (and perhaps even the only) remedy against those qualities is religious faith itself. It seems that these two myths equally encourage both religious extremism and religious moderation. Their combination immunized the public discourse against logical thinking.

Many moderate religious people have chosen the high road of pluralism, which holds that all beliefs are equally valid. But in this way they turn a blind eye to the fact that each of the religions has a hopeless pretense of representing the only truth. As long as Christians believe that their baptized members of the religion are the only ones who will be saved on Judgment Day, they cannot "respect" the beliefs of others, because they know that these beliefs have fueled the flames of hell that await those who hold them even now. Muslims and Jews hold a similar sense of superiority towards other religions, and they return and passionately point out the errors in them. It goes without saying that all these rival belief systems do not bother to rely on evidence.

Still, a wide variety of thinkers, including H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson and Stephen J. Gould, declared that the war between reason and religion had long since ended. According to their view, there is no need for all our beliefs about the universe to be consistent with each other. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sundays and a scientist starting Monday morning, without having to account for the partition that seems to have built itself inside his head while he slept. You could say he can eat his logic and leave it intact. The first chapters of this book will illustrate that only the political weakness of the church in the West allows someone to continue to think this way. The concept of the "love contract" between faith and reason, which Gold mentions, is a complete illusion in places where scholars who dare to question the correctness of the Koran are stoned to death.1

I do not mean to say that the deepest feelings of believers, both moderate and extreme, are negligible or even misplaced. It cannot be denied that it is the mainstream religious currents that currently fulfill emotional and spiritual needs that most of us have - although they do so indirectly and at a terrible cost. These are needs that an understanding of the world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. It is clear that our existence has some sacred dimension, and it is quite possible that the supreme goal of human life is to get closer to it. But we will find that in order to do this it is not necessary to believe in claims that cannot be proven, such as that the mother of Jesus was a virgin or that the Koran is the word of God.

About the book: Chaos of God, Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by: Sam Harris

A provocative attack on the role of religion - and some secular beliefs - in our lives,

and their responsibility for global terrorism and irrational conduct in general.

A book that does not make concessions to bin Laden, George Bush and the Yesha rabbis, enters Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The book became a bestseller in the US and Europe and won the PEN Award for 2005.

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What do George Bush, Osama Bin-Laden and Yesha Rabbis have in common?

They all believe, really believe, in their scriptures.

And that's exactly what makes them so dangerous.

In the Confusion of God, a book that has already sparked a lasting controversy in the US and Europe, Sam Harris offers a sharp analysis: it is not a clash of civilizations, but a clash between religion, any religion, reason and progress. Mahomet God takes us on a fascinating historical, philosophical and scientific tour, where we watch again and again logic being pushed away from religious beliefs - also, and especially, when these beliefs bring out from us all the evil in us.

In the age of weapons of mass destruction, Harris argues, this tendency endangers the chances of survival for all of humanity. Furthermore: "moderate" religious and "enlightened" secularists also contribute to the danger of fundamentalism, in fact, by ignoring the deadly role that blind faith plays in the modern world.

Although he warns against the involvement of established religion in world politics, Harris acknowledges that it is also a source of inspiration, comfort and spiritual wealth - and offers a spiritual, secular and humanistic alternative based on ethical and mystical principles.

Author's home page (in English)
As mentioned, the book was published by a Hebrew publishing house in cooperation with Keter. * The chapter from the book, courtesy of the publisher