The End of Faith (2004) (edit title/settings)

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Muslims: People who believe in 'Allah' as their god, and prophet 'Mohammed' as Allah's final messenger.
• Noam Chomsky: Add a description of this character.
• Fareed Zakaria
• Paul Berman
• Adolf Hitler
• Osama Bin Laden
• Scalia
• Gandhi
• Saddam Hussein
• Descartes
• Mary
• Muhammad
• Saint Augustine
• Alan Dershowitz
• Bertrand Russell
• Edward Said
• Jim Jones
• Daniel Goldhagen
• Kenneth Pollack
• Paul
• Stalin
• Dominic
• Frederick Spee
• Lewis
• George W. Bush
• Charles Darwin
• Kant
• Matthew
• Tillich
• Roy Moore
• Abraham
• Richard Rorty
• Jonathan Glover

Quotes edit see section history

• “Secular Westerners often underestimate the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as they are in otherworldliness, look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly rational.”

  Sam Harris

• “A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.”

  Sam Harris

• “Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.”

  Sam Harris

• “A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.”

  Sam Harris

• “Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.”

  Sam Harris

• “It is important to realize that a healthy, scientific skepticism is compatible with a fundamental openness of mind.”

  Sam Harris

• “It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.”

  Sam Harris

• “Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.”

  Sam Harris

• “Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.”

  Sam Harris

• “Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences.”

  Sam Harris

• “It is natural to hope that our descendants will look upon us with gratitude. But we should also hope that they look upon us with pity and disgust, just as we view the slaveholders of our all-too-recent past.”

  Sam Harris

• “The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest reason to believe that one exists.”

  Sam Harris

• “The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”

  Sam Harris

• “Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence—that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of anything.”

  Sam Harris

• ““Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.””

  Sam Harris

• “Although not a single leader of the Third Reich—not even Hitler himself—was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.”

  Sam Harris

• “The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture.”

  Sam Harris

• “It is clear that we have arrived at a period in our history where civil society, on a global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential for the maintenance of civilization.”

  Sam Harris

• “IT is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others.”

  Sam Harris

• ““Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind,””

  Albert Einstein

• “We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives.”

  Sam Harris

• “People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.”

  Sam Harris

• “The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love.The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece.”

  Sam Harris

• “The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both—and mixes explosively with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. “All is changed, changed utterly.””

  Richard Dawkins

• “" It is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others. This impulse has less to do with the history of religion and more to do with its logic, because the very idea of privacy is incompatible with the existence of God. If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalized by certain sexual behaviors or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the slightest implication for their behavior in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith.”

  Sam Harris

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

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• By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

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• Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.

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• We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them “religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad,” “psychotic,” or “delusional.”

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• The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

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• As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.

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• Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

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• The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?

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• One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

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• Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• United States
• Middle East
• Iraq
• Europe
• Germany
• Sudan
• Afghanistan
• Paris
• Colorado
• Huntington
• India
• America
• Pakistan
• Egypt
• Israel
• Vatican

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Religion: Describe this theme.
• Islam

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Sam Harris (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Brian Emerson (Narrator)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: BL2775.3 .H37 2005
• Dewey: 200

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Movements › Rationalism
• Books › Nonfiction › Politics › Freedom & Security › International Security
• Books › Nonfiction › Politics › International › Relations
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Religious Studies › Comparative Religion
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Religious Studies › Sociology
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Religious Studies › Psychology
• Books › Nonfiction › Current Events › Terrorism
• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Good & Evil

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