Recently I was forced to reconsider self-knowledge practice in the
attempt to get to the bottom of my son’s passion for atheism. He’s very fond of Sam Harris and he asked
me to read his best sellers, The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape, so I patiently
submitted myself to the task.
Harris praises meditation and the Buddhist wisdom. Buddhism stemmed
from Hinduism and they share the same doctrine of reincarnation. Buddhists don’t believe
in God or in the afterlife.The original teaching
of the Buddha implies that we have no soul. What is it, then, that according to him is going to
reincarnate? The patterns that we create during our lives, namely our karma.
There is no Self
involved in the concept of karma. Many Buddhists believe that we are like a stellar constellation:
From our planet we see it as a whole, whereas it is just an agglomerate of stars. In the same way, we perceive ourselves
as whole beings, but our Self is an illusion. The enlightened ones will annihilate
their “patterns” when they reach Nirvana. Today I find this ordeal quite
depressing.
Harris insists that mysticism is a rational enterprise which requires
explicit instructions, similar to those, and I quote, for operating a lawn mower. It doesn’t occur to
him that some of us might not be inclined towards this kind of spiritual search. I tried it and I
found it ineffective. Maybe I couldn’t reach the point where all dualism and self-centeredness
disappear. Maybe I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to appreciate the wonders of a
teaching that can be compared to the instructions for operating a lawn mower.
Jesus came for those like me, who need emotional involvement. The
awareness that he died for us brings our affection to its climax. This awareness is the byproduct of a rational
reflection on his life, actions and motives. Paradoxically as it may sound, the belief in
his resurrection, which was a supra-natural event, is also the product of a rational study of
early Christianity.
However, Harris is witty and argumentative and I agree with many of his
ideas. But when it comes to the analysis of
religious beliefs he misses the point. If only one person in a
given social context, he says, would maintain that a certain Palestinian was born
from a virgin and came back to life after being crucified, this person would certainly be labeled
as crazy. For Harris, the only reason why these beliefs are considered acceptable
is that they are so widespread. He doesn’t even try to articulate an explanation for why
billions of people believe in Jesus’ story, not to mention why ninety percent of the
world’s population believes in
some form of deity. For him, we are all victims of our illusions.
True, the number of people of faith says nothing about the existence of
God but, to the atheist, it says a lot about himself,
namely that he’s one of the few enlightened ones who understand what faith is all about. But what if these very smart
people have gone lost in rationality? They have shut their brains to the perception of the
divine, overloading them with the concept of “evidence”. Without evidence, nothing is worthy of
consideration. Yet, in every religious tradition, God is spirit. He transcends nature, so why should
we find proofs of His existence in nature?
According to my husband, there is a philosophical quasi fallacy in Harris’
argument against faith. Harris thinks that ancient men turned to religion to explain phenomena that were later adequately accounted for by modern science, therefore, in the twenty-first
century, we should give up the obsolete beliefs in the supra-natural. Harris also thinks
that the desire for happiness is innate to the human being, as it is the awareness that it can be
achieved only through a peaceful, civilized behavior. For him, the moral sense doesn’t come from God but
stems from the ultimately selfish attempt to live a well-balanced life. Therefore,
Harris builds his philosophy around the idea that the human kind possesses an innate quality, namely
the desire for happiness.
Now, if religions were largely generated by independent cultures with
no interaction with one another, and today 90% of the
world population still tends to believe in God (or something equivalent) in spite of the discoveries of modern science, this
tendency may also be investigated as an innate quality on a par with the desire for happiness. But if
this is the case, Harris’ founding ethics on one innate trait and disregarding the other as
obsolete, is a judgment of value.
Future investigation into the
biology of happiness and religion may reveal that the two notions are connected in such a way that
happiness may be achieved only through the fulfillment of a religious project.
Harris trivializes Christianity,
reducing it to a number of supernatural events. But there is a lot more to it than that. After all, only the gospels of Luke and
Matthew celebrate his virginal birth. If one day it was discovered that this is just a myth, the
Christian belief would have to adjust but wouldn’t die. However, all the four canonical gospels narrate
about Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection, and it’s there that our faith is founded.
