Sam Harris on The Sacrifice of Reason

Awhile back I said that I wanted to throw out some ideas about Sam Harris's op-ed "The Sacrifice of Reason." Well, here goes:

First, I'm not religious, as many of you well know. And I've been fairly anti-religion for most of my life, and strongly anti-religion for long stretches of it. I'm afraid I'm rather contrarian, though, so maybe it's the fact that atheism is suddenly a little bit chic that's giving me the urge to defend religion. But let's ignore the boring psychological stuff and go right for the logic of the matter: essays like Harris's--that is, essays in which stupid, evil, and vicious religious practices are cited as evidence--make me wonder what conclusion is being argued for.

Harris cites, for example, vakatoga, a Fijian sacrament that required that the victim's limbs be cut off and consumed in his presence. And he asserts that "It is essential to realize that such impossibly stupid misuses of human life have always been explicitly religious." I'm a little unclear on two things here: first, whether that assertion is true and, second, what is supposed to follow from it.

As for the first point: people have done countless stupid and brutal things for non-religious reasons. The Nazis and Japanese conducted "experiments" on innocent prisoners of war during WWII, the Khmer Rouge invented many ingenious types of mental and physical torture, and so forth. Some torture and murder has been given a religious spin, just as some has been given a scientific or political one. What's unclear is whether religious evil differs from other kinds merely in something like degree, but not in kind. My guess, for what it's worth, is that such evil is largely a product of an innate human capacity for or inclination toward brutality (innate, that is, in some people, though not in all). It finds a religious expression, but it's largely there already. I find it, for example, hard to believe that vakatoga or Aztec mass murders were the result of good people simply being misguided by crazy religious theories. That there was some of that is beyond doubt; but my guess is that the causal arrow often points strongly in the other direction. Religion is a handy outlet for brutality, and it can amplify it and generate some of its own--but it's unlikely to be solely responsible for all exotic forms of brutality, contra Harris. That is: I expect that people with torturous inclinations were eager to promote and engage in vakatoga, and I'm sure many less evil people went along with it because of its religions overtones...but I suspect that the evil inclinations would have largely come out in other ways if nobody had thought of vakatoga. Religion is as often an excuse for evil, not the sole creator of it.

I have another guess, too, for what it's worth, and that's that religion is also responsible for a lot of good in the world. As with the evil it precipitates, religion probably serves more to focus and direct the good that's already present in people than to create it ex nihilo. Some humans have an inclination to seek supernatural justifications for their good impulses just as they seek supernatural excuses for their evil ones.

And that brings us to the question: what conclusion is Harris arguing for? If it is, as I suspect, the conclusion that religion is an irredeemably bad thing, or a bad thing overall, I doubt that he can get there using the premises and arguments he provides. Even if it turns out to be true that there are some uniquely religious evils, it doesn't follow that religion can't be improved, nor that it's overall a bad thing. What follows is something more like: it needs to be abandoned or reformed. But I think most sensible parties to the debate recognize that.

So, anyway, though I'm basically on the side of the New Pop Atheists, I've got my differences with them too.