The opportunity offered by debate may deepen our faith

Bestselling books on atheism, including The End of Faith and The God Delusion, have provoked an outpouring of responses. In the first book, Sam Harris, an American, relies on his knowledge of neuroscience and philosophy. In the second, Richard Dawkins, an Englishman, occasionally wordy and round-about, ranges across a wide landscape, and elsewhere refers to faith as "the great cop-out."

Harris's argument, the focus of these remarks, is that we must acknowledge "the end of faith," if we are to live — if we are to survive. He quotes widely from religious texts — Old and New Testaments, the Koran and papal encyclicals, and provides extensive, often useful exposition and annotations.

The violence and cruelty inherent in religious texts have mislead millions of "believers" for centuries, he argues, and have undermined religion's usefulness as a civilizing influence. With considerable justification, he adds: "All that is good in religion can be had elsewhere."

Cataloging the cruelties that believers have inflicted on "the other" — gypsies, Jews, gays, pagans, Protestants, Catholics, Sunnis, etc., Harris challenges believers to speak plainly about the absurdity of some religious teachings, and to provide useful strategies for confronting and correcting them.

Major religious figures in history offer strategies for enlightenment and holiness, in their commitment to do good and to avoid evil. For that reason, those of us drawn to religion rightfully question whether religion enhances our capacity to act in ways consistent with justice and peace. Do Christianity or Islam or Judaism, in other words, recommend themselves by their presence in the world?

The standard for evaluating organized religions should be not doctrines or dogmas laid down by hierarchies, but values embodied in the lives of great religious figures — the Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus, Mohammed, and their faithful disciplines, Francis of Assisi, Ramakrishna, and Dorothy Day.

All major religions espouse humane values, but all have subverted them when they got the upper hand. The Vatican consorted with the Roman Empire in undermining Jesus's teaching. Corpses and casualties from religious wars blanket the geographical area associated with Western civilization, as it extended its domination throughout Asia and Africa. Its fruits were the Inquisition, hatred of "the other," and pogroms against the Jews.

Threading our way through the conflicting and contradictory projections of organized religion is no easy task. Religious hucksters, like some used- car salesmen, brainwash and bamboozle the public, while atheists sometimes provide a valuable service to humanity by exposing religious absurdities and cruelties. In inter-religions dialogue, it's helpful to focus primarily on our commonality, rather than our differences; that is true for believers and atheists as well.

At the same time, Harris and Dawkins get as far off the track as religionists by focusing primarily on "belief," which they tend to regard as "a lever, that once pulled, moves almost everything in a person's life." But what about the influence of other cultural factors on religious experience and practice, such as climate, economics, history, linguistics?

Although Harris's argument has merit, his definitions of "religion" and "faith" seem narrow, disregarding correspondences between religion and culture emphasized by Wilfred Cantwell Smith decades ago. Similarly, is it accurate to dismiss "faith" as "little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave"?

Emphasizing the uselessness and danger of the religious tenets of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, Harris occasionally resorts to overstatement, as when he says that "the spirit of mutual inquiry is the antithesis of religious faith." Does he mean "much" or "most" religious faith, and is he confusing religious ideology with religious faith?

"Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything," Harris argues (as if intentions are more important than consequences). Confusing pacifism and nonviolence, he also ignores what nonviolent movements as well as conflict resolution have achieved since Gandhi. His plea for — one might say his faith in — "reason" raises other moral questions, as when he concludes that "the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own." Doesn't that "reasoned" policy threaten us as much as or more than our reliance on "faith"?

Non-theists and others regarded as atheists have often contributed to and even clarified our understanding of authentic religion. Thomas Paine was one of them, because he feared that false theology threatened a rise in superstition, as people "lost sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true." Theodore Roosevelt's labeling Paine a "filthy little atheist," in other words, was as mistaken as George Bush's labeling opponents of the Iraq war unpatriotic.

Each of us struggles to distinguish true from false belief, in thoughtfully discerning religion's usefulness in a violent culture. As with inter-religious engagement, the opportunity offered by the ensuing debate may actually deepen our faith.

"I hold that unbelief is in some shape unavoidable in an age of intellect and in a world like this," John Henry Newman wrote in 1864. And "it is one great advantage of an age in which unbelief speaks out, that faith can speak out, too." o

Michael True, whose books include People Power: Fifty Peacemakers and Their Communities (2007), lives in Worcester. Comments? E-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it