Sam Harris: The Truthdig Interview

Illustration by Karen Spector

Posted on Apr 3, 2006

By Blair Golson

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060403_sam_harris_interview/

With the publication of his 2004 New York Times bestseller, “The End of Faith,”
a full-throttle attack on religion, Sam Harris became the most prominent atheist
in America.

For many, that would be a profoundly dubious honor. A recent national study
by University of Minnesota researchers found that atheists are America’s least
trusted minority group—trusted less than Muslims, recent immigrants and
homosexuals. Americans are also least willing to approve of their children
marrying atheists, according to the study.

But Harris, a Stanford graduate in philosophy who is now completing his

doctorate in neuroscience, wasn’t trying to win a popularity contest. Far from it.
In his book, Harris sets out to shame, embarrass, stun and reason the religious-
minded people of the world into abandoning faith-based belief systems, which
he argues could soon lead us to apocalypse. He writes:

We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the
metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation, or any of the
other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia—
because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
Distilling 20 years of study of both Eastern and Western religious disciplines,
along with the blood-soaked lessons of thousands of years of religious violence,
Harris aims to incite a reason-based revolution in the minds of the faithful
everywhere. And indeed, his criticism extends far beyond fundamentalists.
Harris also makes life very uncomfortable for religious moderates, who, he
argues, pave the way for fundamentalism by their insistence on tolerance and
respect for all religious beliefs—no matter their implications. To wit:

To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world--to say, for instance, that
the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish--is
antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford
the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are
paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

For someone who’s lodging an indictment against roughly 97% of America—

the other 3% being atheists—Harris might be expected to come off like a crank.
But his writing style draws rhetorical power from its colloquial style—which is
heavy on caustic sarcasm and irony. From his first chapter:

...120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians
learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe
that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an
omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

The winner of the 2005 PEN / Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, Harris’
book has garnered passionate reviews from figures as varied as Harvard Law
Professor Alan Dershowitz and Joseph Hough Jr., president of Union
Theological Seminary, who wrote that Harris’ “wake-up call to religious liberals
is right on the mark.”

Late last year, Harris adapted and extended some of the arguments of his book
in an essay for Truthdig, entitled “An Atheist Manifesto”--which continues to
inspire spirited commentary nearly four months after its publication. In light of
some of those comments, Truthdig Managing Editor Blair Golson recently sat
down with Harris to ask him to defend his arguments, and to apply them to the
religious-inspired conflicts now raging in Iraq and beyond.

In the discussion, Harris spoke publicly for the first time about a foundation he
is creating to promote secular values worldwide; about his new book, “Letter to
a Christian Nation,” to be published by Knopf around Thanksgiving; about
how he navigates dinner parties without coming off as the Antichrist; and
about the “Salman Rushdie effect” that accompanies his newfound celebrity as
an atheist.
Blair Golson: What prompted you to write “The End of Faith" ?

Sam Harris: It was my immediate reaction to Sept. 11—the moment it became

clear that we were meandering into a global, theologically-inspired conflict with
the Muslim world, and were going to tell ourselves otherwise, based on the
respect we pay to faith.

The last thing we were going to admit was that people were flying planes into
our buildings because of what they believed about God. We came up with
euphemisms about this being a war on terror, and Islam being a religion of
peace, and we were pushed even further into our own religiosity as a nation. At
the moment that this dynamic became clear—and it became clear within about
24 hours—I started writing the book.

Within 24 hours?

In the first few days there were some people who were willing to call a spade a
spade and speak critically about Islam, but very quickly we began to talk about
Osama Bin Laden and the extremists of the Muslim world as being the
exceptions—people who had hijacked a peaceful religion and utterly distorted
it. Many people compared Osama Bin Laden to the Reverend Jim Jones, David
Koresh, or some other marginal figure, and all of that is completely untrue.
Osama Bin Laden’s version of Islam is a much more central, plausible version of
Islam than people tend to acknowledge. My discussion of Islam in the book is a
response to this sort of denial.

What kind of fears did you have before writing such a book, and putting
your name and picture on it?

There are security concerns, obviously. The Salman Rushdie effect was not
totally distant from my imagination as I was writing the book, but at a certain
point you just have to speak honestly about these things, and I’ve taken
reasonable steps to ensure my security.

Can you elaborate?

I don’t make my whereabouts particularly well known and I have security

whenever I do an event—bodyguards and other precautions that are probably
best not publicized.

Have any of those fears been realized?

I’ve had some reasonably scary e-mails, but nothing that has risen to the level of
a death threat.
How do most people react when you explain to them the thesis of your book?
You meet someone at a dinner party, let’s say.

It depends where the conversation begins. If I begin with my criticism of Islam,

anyone on the conservative side of the spectrum will tend to understand it, and
liberals will find it to be a taboo-breaking repudiation of their political
correctness and their multi-culturalism.

Conversely, if I start talking about my concerns about the intrusions of religion

into our own public policy, liberals will tend to love this, as they share these
concerns, but Christian conservatives will begin to protest. So I can establish
rapport, or not, depending on what I emphasize in my argument.

But perhaps the most central thesis of your book, the attack on irrational faith
itself, doesn’t that offend people on both sides of the political spectrum?

The most controversial aspect of my book has been this criticism I make of
religious moderates. Most people think that while religious extremism is
problematic and polarizing, religious tolerance is entirely blameless and is the
remedy for all that ails us on this front.

But religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the

respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation
doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject
stupidity of religious fundamentalism. And as a result, it keeps fundamentalism
in play, and fundamentalists make very cynical and artful use of the cover
they’re getting by the political correctness in our discourse.

You also say religious moderation closes the door to more sophisticated
approaches to spirituality, ethics and the building of strong communities.
What did you mean by that?

Religious moderation is just a cherry-picking of scripture, ultimately. It is just

diluted Iron Age philosophy. It isn’t a 21st century approach to talking about
the contemplative life, or spiritual experience, or ethical norms, or those
features that keep communities strong and healthy.

Religious moderation is a relaxation of the standards of adherence to ancient

taboos and superstitions. That’s really all it is. Moderate Christians have agreed
not to read the bible literally, and not read certain sections of it at all, and then
they come away with a much more progressive, tolerant and ecumenical
version of Christianity. They just pay attention to Jesus when he’s sermonizing
on the Mount, and claim that is the true Christianity. Well that’s not the true
Christianity. It’s a selective reading of certain aspects of Christianity. The other
face of Christianity is always waiting in the book to be resurrected. You can find
the Jesus of Second Thessalonians who’s going to come back and hurl sinners
into the pit. This is the Jesus being celebrated in the Left Behind novels. This is
the Jesus that half the American population is expecting to see come down out
of the clouds.

Switching gears: to what extent do you see religion—as opposed to tribalism

or just a plain desire to avenge past wrongs—responsible for the sectarian
violence destabilizing Iraq?

I don’t think you can necessarily draw a neat line of separation here, because
clearly the Shia and the Sunni, for instance, have defined their moral
communities in terms of their religious affiliation. These communities have a
long history of victimizing one another on that basis, so their conflict does have
the character of a tribal feud. But the only difference between these two groups,
really, is their religious identity—and it’s a marginal difference at best. These
are two groups who really do worship the same god. They just can’t agree to
worship him in the same way, and for this they’ve been killing each other for
centuries.

To what extent will America be responsible if a theocracy takes over in Iraq?

Many people draw a lesson from the chaos in Iraq now—a lesson which
suggests that we were rapacious, oil-greedy colonialists who ineptly wandered
into a sectarian hell-realm and have inflamed the place. But I think it’s worth
stepping back to ask what would be the best-case scenario—had we gone in
purely for altruistic motives, to liberate 25 million people from Saddam Hussein
and his diabolical sons.

I think it’s quite possible that we would see precisely the same chaos. Now, this
is not to deny that we did many things terribly and ineptly, and Abu Ghraib
cost us dearly. But it’s likely that we would still have some significant
percentage of Muslims who would be ready to fight to the death simply to eject
the infidels from Babylon, no matter how altruistic the infidels’ motives.

Given that fact, I think our culpability is somewhat mitigated, because I think
there was a very good argument for trying to create a model democracy in the
heart of the Muslim world, and Iraq was a plausible place to do that. But none
of what I just said should be construed as a denial of the fact that we have done
it horribly, or that we’re paying a terrible price for our failures. We are likely to
pay for these failures long into the future.

Many people fear that Iraq will adopt Sharia [the Islamic fundamentalist
legal code]. Is that preferable to a secular totalitarian regime?

No, I don’t think it is at all. They’re two evils. But if you get a truly ethical
despot in charge—a benevolent despot—that may be the necessary transitional
mechanism to democracy.
It should be pretty clear that much of the Muslim world is not ready for
democracy, and we have to confront that reality. Many Muslims are prepared
to tear out their freedoms by the root the moment they are given a chance to
decide their destiny.

How we transition to a democracy in the Middle East—a true democracy—is a

very difficult problem. We should consider the examples of Muslim
communities living in Western Europe, and their failure to assimilate
democratic values. If ever there were a test case for how immune a community
can be to the charms of democracy, just look at the Muslim communities in
Holland or France or Denmark. Look at the crowds of people who want
newspaper editors and cartoonists decapitated. These are people who are living
in Western Europe. Many of them have lived their whole lives there.

So you really think Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democracy?

For the most part, yes. Just look at the case of the apostate in Afghanistan who
converted to Christianity and who was up for a death sentence. Then, after all
the nations of the earth applied pressure on Hamid Karzai, he got spirited away.
This is the reality under Islam: you take your life in your hands for criticizing
the faith. A Muslim is simply not free to wake up in the morning and decide he
no longer wants to be a Muslim. Such a change of mind is really punishable by
death. So unless Muslims reform this feature of their religion, at a minimum,
there is not much hope for Muslim democracy.

We’re not tending to talk about all of the deal-breakers that lurk in the
mainstream theology of Islam. We’re pretending as though they’re not there,
and we’re invading countries and creating constitutional democracies,
apparently in ignorance of the fact that a majority of the people still want their
neighbors killed for thought crimes. Until you change peoples’ minds on this
subject—until you get them to run a different moral calculus, where cartoons
cease to be the thing that most animates them, and a genuine compassion for
other peoples’ suffering is the real gold standard of their morality—I don’t see
how putting the structures of democracy in place will help anyone. You need a
civil society before you have a democracy.

In your book, you write that when a suicide bomber blows himself up, the
role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives
must have been “political, economical, or entirely personal.” Why does faith
get a free pass?

This is one of the interesting things about our discourse right now. Our own
religious demagogues, the fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson,
will call a spade a spade and observe that there is a link between Islam and the
kind of violence we see in the Muslim world. While I don’t agree with these
people on anything else, they are actually offering a much more candid and
accurate diagnosis of the problem, vis a vis Islam, than anything that’s coming
from the Left.

Leftists, secularists, religious moderates, and religious liberals tend to be very

poorly placed to recognize that when somebody looks into a video camera and
says, “I love death more than the infidel loves life,” and then blows himself up,
he’s actually being honest about his state of mind.

This is not propaganda, this is not politics and economic desperation

masquerading as religion. People are really being motivated by the content of
religious beliefs, and there are people who are really willing and eager to blow
themselves up because they think they’re going to get to paradise.

Religious moderates and secularists don’t understand that because they don’t
really know what it’s like to believe in God. They don’t know what it’s like to
be sure God is there to hear their prayers , that He has dictated a book, and that
the book is perfect in every syllable, and it’s a roadmap to paradise. And
fundamentalists understand what it’s like to believe these preposterous things.

You assert that Islamic suicide bombers aren’t using religion as a pretext for
political or economic grievances. But how do you know?

First of all, the 9/11 hijackers showed no evidence whatsoever of being people
who were concerned with poverty or the plight of the Palestinians—that’s just
not where their heads were at. They were talking about the evils of infidel
culture, and the pleasures that await martyrs in paradise.

When you read about what they were doing with their lives, these people did
not seem to have a political bone in their bodies. And they were not people who
personally suffered oppression under the U.S. , the British, or the Israelis.

Osama Bin Laden is another example of this. He is not somebody who himself
had been victimized, and he’s not somebody who, if you read his diatribes,
spends a lot of time thinking about the poor. In fact, he only added the
Palestinians to his list of woes as an afterthought. Originally, he was really
concerned about theological offenses, about the fact that there were infidel
boots on the ground near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.

So we have people who are unambiguously well off, unambiguously well

educated, willing to hit the wall at 400 miles-per-hour. And they spend a lot of
time talking about paradise and virgins.

So it seems like a case of really tortured reasoning that somehow religion is not
the motive for their actions—that their motives are economic or political—even
though they are saying it is, and doing things that are only rational in light of
these religious beliefs, and when they themselves have no economic or political
grievances.
You spend a long chapter writing about beliefs as “principles of action”—
that, given the right set of beliefs, a person will almost inexorably act in a
certain way. Applying this to Islam, you say that given the tenets of a religion
that guarantees a place in heaven for martyrs, it’s no wonder we see so many
Islamic suicide bombers. However, if the connection between belief and
action were this absolute, then how do you explain that all Moslems aren’t
suicide bombers?

There’s always the question of whether you really believe what you say you
believe. We have gradations of belief and certainty. Clearly if you were certain
that paradise existed, and if you were certain that death in defense of the faith
got you and everyone you loved into heaven for eternity, it would only be
rational to die in those circumstances.

What we are finding is that there are people who really are certain, or at least
are functionally certain of these propositions, and are eager to blow themselves
up in the process of killing infidels, because they’re quite sure that the creator of
the universe wants infidels to burn in fire for eternity. Of course, any Muslims
they happen to kill in the process will go to paradise as well, and will be quite
grateful to have been sent there.

Once you imagine what it would actually be like to believe these things, this
behavior becomes totally reasonable. You find mothers of suicide bombers
literally celebrating the deaths of their children, who have blown themselves up
in crowds of other children at discotheques. This is the most obscene and
inexplicable human behavior—and yet, it is totally reasonable, given what
many Muslims say they believe about martyrdom.

What do you mean when you say that intolerance is intrinsic to every creed?
And what are the implications of that?

The core claim of every creed is that it, alone, is true. The truth is, if you’re a
Christian, Jesus really was the son of God, and was really resurrected, and he’s
really coming back to judge the living and the dead. This is a fact. It is
metaphysically true, it is physically true, it is historically true; if you’re standing
on the right spot at the right time, you’re going to see Jesus come back with a
host of angels.

This description of the world is either right or wrong. If it’s right, only the
Christians are right, and only the Christians are going to heaven. So this
doctrine, by definition, excludes the truth-claims of every other religion .
Muslims claim that Jesus, while he was a prophet, was not divine, and that
anyone who thinks he is divine is going to go to hell. This is explicitly spelled
out in the Koran. These are mutually incompatible claims about the way the
world works. They’re worse than that. They’re incompatible claims that are
extremely motivating, because their adherents think that the difference between
believing the right thing and the wrong thing is the difference between
spending eternity in hell, or eternity in paradise. And that’s a very big
difference.

What is it about the tenets of Islam that present a greater danger to the
survival of our species, than, say, the tenets of Christianty?

The doctrine of martyrdom and Jihad is more explicit and central to the Islamic
faith. There have obviously been martyrs and a lot of killing that has been
reconciled with the doctrine of Christianity over the years, and it’s certainly
possible to read the Bible in a way that will justify the Inquisition and all of the
other things we’ve seen in the history of Christianity that seem every bit as bad
as what we’re seeing in the Muslim world now, but there are a few unique
features of Islam that are problematic.

One is that it is a much more coherent doctrine, which is to say that the Koran is
a much shorter, more coherent book, and there is no sermon on the Mount in
there that you can fixate on and use as a bulwark against the rest of the
dangerous gibberish in the book in the way that you can with the Bible.

The basic message of the Koran really is hatred of the infidels. The infidel is fit
only for the fires of hell; the creator of the universe is in the process of mocking
and cursing and shaming and destroying and not forgiving and not reprieving
the infidel.

Your job is to ignore the infidel, by all means do not befriend the infidel. When
you get the power: subjugate, convert, or kill the infidel. And those are really
the only three choices.

Devout Muslims take the Koran and the Haddith seriously because there is no
other brand of Islam. There is no moderate school of Islam that suggests the
Koran was really just written by men and may not be the word of god, or has to
be interpreted very, very loosely. Most Muslims are what we would call
“fundamentalists” in the Christian world.

But what about the tradition in Islamic societies of consulting with Mullahs
or Imams before acting on a directive in the Koran? Don’t those people tend
to moderate the harshest edicts of Islamic law?

It’s not that there’s not a wealth of discourse about what the Koran actually says.
There is a lot of Muslim scholarship out there. The problem is that there really is
no basis for what we would call a moderate and genuinely pluralistic
worldview to be pulled out of Islam. You really need to do some seriously
acrobatic theology to get an Islam that is compatible with 21st century civil
society. This is witnessed virtually every day we open the newspaper now, the
latest case being the apostate in Afghanistan who converted to Christianity. The
basic message of this episode should be clear: this is a government that we came
in and reformulated and propped up, and the fact that it had to have a
constitution that was in conformity to Islam, opened the door to the true face of
Islam, which is: apostasy is punishable by death. That is a fact that no liberal
exegesis of Islam is going to change. We have to find some way to change it, of
course. Islam needs a reformation. But at present, it’s true to say that the real
word of God in Islam is that if you change your religion, you should die for it.

Isn’t that also the case in the Bible? Don’t we see similar edicts and
punishments for apostasy?

Yes. There’s nothing worse than the first books of the Hebrew bible: Leviticus
and Deuteronomy and Exodus, these are the most barbaric, most totalitarian,
most Taliban-like documents we can find. But there are a few loopholes, and
these loopholes don’t exist in Islam, to my knowledge. One loophole for
Christians is that most Christians think that Jesus brought us the doctrine of
grace, and therefore you don’t have to follow the law. While it’s true that there
are other moments in the New Testament when Jesus can be read as saying that
you have to fulfill every “jot and tittle” of the law (this is in Matthew)—and
therefore you can get a rationale for killing people for adultery out of the New
Testament—most Christians, most of the time, don’t see it that way.

The Bible is a fundamentally self-contradictory document. You can cherry-pick

it in a way that you really can’t the Koran, even though there are a few lines in
the Koran that say, “Allah does not love aggressors”—if you hew to just those
few lines, you can say things like, “Osama Bin Laden is distorting the true
teachings of a peaceful religion.” But the basic fact is that Osama Bin Laden is
giving a very plausible reading of Islam. You have to split hairs to find a basis
for what we would recognize as real moderation in Islam.

Then by that logic, why aren’t we worried that Jews, for instance, who aren’t
necessarily following Jesus’ doctrine of grace, why aren’t we worried that
they are also directed to kill for apostasy? Why are we only so focused on the
Muslims when the edicts are the same in both books?

Again, the details really matter. It really matters what people specifically
believe. And with Jews, you don’t have this idea of martyrdom, you don’t have
this explicit promise of paradise, the after-death state is not spelled out with
any kind of specificity in Judaism, and Judaism is very much a religion of this
world. Also, the Jews are massively outnumbered. There are something like 15
million Jews on the planet, and they have tended to be the most beleaguered
population historically, so they have not been in a position to demand that
people observe their law and to threaten death to infidels.
But is it really your position that were they in the majority, they would
follow edicts of killing heretics in the same way that Muslims seem to in
higher numbers?

This is an interesting question. If you had an Orthodox Judaism that was truly
ascendant, then it would be problematic. The Jewish settlers are really deranged
by their theology, and I would argue that they are some of the most dangerous
and irresponsible people on earth right now. If anyone is going to push us to a
third world war, it’s going to be Jewish settlers doing something stupid like
tearing down the Dome of the Rock, or fighting to the death to assert their
claims on the West Bank. This expression of Judaism is problematical, without a
doubt. But the eschatology of Judaism is rather specific, and they’re waiting for
their messiah to come back, for the temple to be re-built, and for the Sanhedrin
to be reconvened. If you asked them what they will do once all this happens,
what law will we need to live by when the messiah comes back, I think you’ll
find the Orthodox Jews will be open-minded about killing people for adultery
or working on the Sabbath. I don’t know what argument they could find
against doing these things.

One of the most persistent criticisms of your theory is that the two largest
genocides of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges, were
explicitly irreligious. How do you respond to that?

The problem that I am confronting is the problem of dogma. What you have
just done is to point to political dogmatism, instead of religious dogmatism. The
argument against religious dogma is not an argument for atheist dogma. We
should be fundamentally hostile to claims to certainty that are not backed up by
evidence and argument. And what we find with Nazism is a kind of political
religion. We find this with Stalinism as well—where claims about racial purity
and the march of history and the dangers of intellectualism, are made in a
fanatical and rigid and indefensible way. The people at the top of these
hierarchies—Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung in North Korea—these were not the
kings of reason. These were highly peculiar individuals who had all kinds of
strange convictions. The upper echelons of the Third Reich were filled with
people who believed crazy things, like that the Aryans had been preserved in
ice since the beginning of the world. Heinrich Himmler created a
meteorological division of the Reich to test this ice theory. This is not what
people do when they reason too carefully, or become too unwilling to accept
mythology as fact. It’s another kind of mythology, and one that is no less
dangerous than religious mythology.

How do you define the differences between an atheist and an agnostic?

“Agnosticism” is a word that was brought into use by T.H. Huxley. I don’t
think it’s a particularly useful word. It tends to be defined as the belief that one
can’t know whether or not there is a god. An agnostic is someone who thinks
we don’t know and can’t know the truth of a position. So it’s a non-committal
attitude.

But it’s not an intellectually honest position, because everyone is walking

around presuming to know that there isn’t a Zeus, there isn’t a Poseidon, and
there isn’t a Thor. Can you prove that Thor with his hammer isn’t sending
down lightning bolts? No, you can’t prove it. But that’s not the right question.
The right question is, “Is there any reason whatsoever to think there’s a god
named Thor?” And of course there isn’t. There are many good reasons to think
that he was a fictional character. The Batman of Scandinavia.

The problem for religious people is that the god of the Bible is on no firmer
footing, epistemologically, than these dead gods. Which is to say that nobody
ever discovered that Thor doesn’t exist, but that the biblical god really does. So
we have learned to talk and use the word ‘god’ in a way so as not to notice that
we’re using a very strange word and evoking a very vacuous concept, like the
concept of Thor.

And therefore the definition of an atheist is?

And atheist is not someone who can prove that there is no Thor. An atheist is
simply someone who says, “show me the evidence,” and who is unconvinced
by evidence like:

“Here’s a book that was dictated by the creator of the universe, and in it, it
describes all kinds of miracles that people claim they witnessed, but these
people have been dead for 2,000 years, and in fact none of the authors of the
book are the people who claim to have witnessed these events, and they wrote
the book a hundred years after the events in question.”

This is not a story that anyone would find plausible except for the fact that it
was drummed into them by previous generations of people who were taught
not to think critically about it.

The thing to reiterate is that every Christian knows exactly what it’s like to be
an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims, for instance. Muslims have the
same reasons for being Muslim as Christians have for being Christian. They
have a book they’re sure was written or dictated by the creator of the universe-
because the book says that it was written or dictated by the creator of the
universe. Christians look at Muslim discourse and find it fundamentally
unpersuasive. Christians aren’t lying awake at night worrying about whether
they should convert to Islam. Why not? Because Muslims can’t really back up
their claims. They are clearly engaged in a style of discourse that is just not
intellectually honest. It’s not purposed to genuine inquiry into the nature of the
world. It is a reiteration of dogma, and they are clearly committed to a massive
program of self-deception. Every Christian recognizes this about every religion
other than Christianity. So every Christian knows exactly what it is like to be
atheist. They just don’t turn the same candor and intellectual honesty on to their
own faith.

Liberals started calling themselves progressives when the term ‘liberal’

accumulated too much baggage and negative connotations. Is there an analog
for the term atheist?

I’m not a big fan of the term atheist. In my Atheist Manifesto, the first thing I
argue is that we really don’t need the word and probably shouldn’t use it. It has
the stigma of a term like “child molester” in the culture, for reasons that are not
good, but nevertheless worth taking into consideration. The term simply has a
massive P.R. problem.

But the word is also conceptually unnecessary. We don’t have words for people
who are not astrologers or alchemists; we don’t have words for people who
doubt that Elvis is still alive. It is sufficient to talk about reason and
commonsense in these circumstances.

You write passionately in your book about the spirituality of Buddhism.

How do you describe yourself in terms of your spirituality?

I don’t call myself a Buddhist. I recently wrote an article in the Shambhala Sun,
which is one of the more widely read Buddhist magazines, entitled “Killing the
Buddha.” I essentially argued that that the wisdom of the Buddha is trapped in
the religion of Buddhism. The teachings of the Buddha, taken as a whole,
probably represent the richest source of contemplative wisdom that we have,
but anyone who values these teachings should get out of the religion business.
It’s the wrong message. And, in any case, 99 percent of Buddhists practice
Buddhism as a religion, and therefore are part of the same egregious discourse.

I think there really is something worth extracting from our contemplative

traditions in general, and from Buddhism in particular. It’s a phenomenology of
meditative experience—what people do and realize when they go into a cave
for a year or 10 years and practice meditation. There really is a landscape there
that has been brilliantly articulated in Buddhism, and not so brilliantly
articulated in some of our other contemplative traditions. And so I think all of
this is worth talking about and studying.

But I don’t call myself a Buddhist. and yet, if you asked me how you should
learn to meditate, what books you should read, etc., I’d point you in the
direction of Buddhist techniques of meditation, and to the Buddhist literature
on the subject.

So you don’t need any recourse to the supernatural in Buddhism?

The core truths of Buddhism, the truth of selflessness, for instance. It’s simply a
fact that it is possible to realize that the ego, as you presently feel it and
conceive of it, is an illusion. You can experience the continuum of consciousness
without the sense of self. This experience can be had without believing
anything on insufficient evidence. You can simply be taught to look closely
enough at your experience, to de-construct the sense of self, and then discover
what the consequences are of that happening. And the consequences turn out to
be very positive. There’s a whole discourse in Buddhism about the relief of
psychological suffering, the transcendence of self, and the nature of positive
human emotions like compassion and loving kindness. These phenomena have
been mapped out with incredible rigor in Buddhism, and one doesn’t need to
swallow any mumbo jumbo to find this discourse useful.

And yet, much that people believe under the guise of Buddhism is dubious:
certainties about re-birth, the idea that one’s teacher in the Tibetan tradition is
absolutely the reincarnation of some previous historical personality—all of this
stuff is held rather dogmatically by most Buddhists, and I think we should be
skeptical of it. If people present evidence of it,—and there’s certainly been some
interesting studies on the subject of rebirth—we should look at the
evidence. As someone once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence.”

Are there any historical parallels that suggest it would be possible for people
en masse to abandon irrational faith?

There are societies that are profoundly irreligious by our standards. Australia,
Canada, and Japan, along with basically all of Western Europe—these are
places that have a very different relationship to religious faith. These are not
societies where you have people running for Congress or the presidency on the
basis of faith, and thanking god at every turn. These are not societies in which
you would destroy any chance you have of holding political office by claiming
to doubt the existence of god. It’s a completely different picture of what it is to
be reasonable and qualified to hold a position of responsibility in these societies.
We have a lot to learn from them.

Why do you think Western Europe in particular is so much more of a secular

place than America?

It probably comes down to the difference between having a state religion and
having this thriving marketplace of ignorance we have here in America, where
so many sects and denominations compete for people’s attention. In Western
Europe, the state religions seem to have grown more ossified, and they lost
their subscribers.

There’s also the fact that the Enlightenment was taken perhaps a little more
seriously in Europe. And it was taken in light of the fact that so much religious
killing had occured on those very streets for centuries. I think the liability of
religious thinking is a little more keenly felt in Europe. But this is probably not
a full explanation. I don’t understand why we’re living in a society where 83
percent of people believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead, while the
Swedes are living in a society where basically that same percentage of people
are atheists.

What is the most likely way that American society, if not the rest of the world,
will eventually abandon irrational faith?

I think this is a war of ideas that has to be fought on a hundred fronts at once.
There’s not one piece that is going to trump all others.

But I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The

book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its
subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy,
almost single-handedly it seems, eroded the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan in the
1940s by joining them and then leaking all of their secret passwords and goofy
lingo to the people who were writing “The Adventures of Superman” radio
show. Week after week, there were episodes of Superman fighting the Klan,
and the real Klan’s mumbo jumbo was put out all over the airwaves for people
to laugh at. Kids were playing Superman vs. the Klan on their front lawns. The
Klan was humiliated by this, and was made to look foolish; and we went from a
world in which the Klan was a legitimate organization with tens of millions of
members—many of whom were senators, and even one president—to a world
in which there are now something like 5,000 Klansmen. It’s basically a defunct
organization.

So public embarrassment is one principle. Once you lift the taboo around
criticizing faith and demand that people start talking sense, then the capacity
for making religious certitude look stupid will be exploited, and we’ll start
laughing at people who believe the things that the Tom DeLays, the Pat
Robertsons of the world believe. We’ll laugh at them in a way that will be
synonymous with excluding them from our halls of power.

Are you interested in joining or leading organizations that push for this kind
of revolution of belief?

I’m actually in the process of creating a foundation for this purpose. It is going
to produce media events, documentaries, conferences, and other means of
waging this war of ideas. It’s not something I’ve formally announced yet, but
I’m going to look to bring in the most motivated and articulate scientists,
journalists, entertainers, and business people around the issue of eroding the
prestige of religious dogma in our world. We will be taking on specific projects:
for example, empowering secularists in the Muslim world, or empowering the
women of the Muslim world. To some degree the organization will take on
projects of its own, but it will also find projects that other people are doing that
are worth supporting. I think the time is right for it.
What stage are you at with that?

At the moment I’m just drawing up a prospectus, creating a 501c3, meeting

with people, and putting out feelers for who will be on the advisory board. So
it’s in the earliest stages. But I hope that by the end of the year, I will be in a
position to announce the birth of the organization.

What other projects are you working on?

I’ve got a book coming out around Thanksgiving, by Knopf, entitled “Letter to a
Christian Nation.” It’s going to be a short broadside against fundamentalist
Christianity. It’s a book that a person could simply hand to a member of the
religious Right and say, “What’s your answer to this?” It will be my best effort
to arm progressives and secularists against the religious certainties of Christian
fundamentalists—in about a hundred pages.

How about your doctoral studies?

My day job as a heretic still takes up most of my time. But I still have one foot—
or one toe—in the lab. I’m studying belief at the level of the brain with
functional magnetic resonance imaging. There’s a point of contact between my
academic research and my heresy, in that through neuroimaging, I’m trying to
understand what it is to believe something to be true. As an aspect of this
question, I’m looking at whether religious belief is different from ordinary
belief.

Do you have any preliminary findings you can talk about?

I really can’t talk much about them because they haven’t been published, and to
talk about them before they’re published in a scientific journal is considered—

Heresy?

Yeah. Some forms of heresy I endorse, and others I don’t, it seems.