The Topography of Time:
Comments on The End of Faith

November 26, 2006

Tomorrow I will be leading a discussion on this book for a class in the philosophy department here at Lawrence University. I will be defending Islam from the charges of Sam Harris. It is the type of book I would never have chosen to read on my own, but which was nonetheless healthful to read.. so that I have a better sense of what people out there are saying. I happen to agree with Harris that religion should get a much more critical treatment than it currently does.. but at the same time Harris has only the most ham-fisted points to make about religion in general and Islam in particular.

Case in point the following passage about religious moderates:

The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written. [17]

So, moderates are those who, under the influence of their culture, allow themselves to overlook the tenets of their religion. Extremists meanwhile stay true to the clear (and often violent) tenets of their scripture.

This is an obviously fallacious way to approach religion. First, it lifts extremists out of any cultural context, making them some kind of pure and non-contextual beings. Everyone lives within a specific culture at a specific time, and why could not "cultural developments" partially explain extremism as much as they do moderation? The pull of hatred and violence could push moderate people toward extremism, just as much as it pulls them toward moderation. But that point would be crippling to Harris' argument since in his view religious extremists do bad things mainly because they are carrying out what they see written in scripture.

Second, some moderate positions are actually the result of religious extremism. Harris conflates the tepid believer with the believer who holds moderate opinions. But does the historical error there really need to be stated? From Quakers and their stance on peace, to Baptists and the early development of a doctrine of the separation of church and state.. all the way to Pentecostals and their allowance of women in ministry.. many religious groups have, out of religious zeal, found their way to what Harris would recognize as a moderate position. Religious zeal strikes me as a coin toss.. heads is bad things, tails is good things.

After the above passage, Harris goes on to quote a passage from the book of Deuteronomy in which a relative is to be put to death for following other gods. He then comments:

The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for "moderation" in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of divine law. [18]

Again you see his point about moderates. One can be a moderate only by strategic ignorance of what is really contained in scripture.. which the extremist embraces.

But it literalism really the only legitimate approach to scripture? Christianity is loaded with examples of sophisticated reading strategies that allow these kinds of passages to be enfolded into a broader canvas of religious belief. This process is one of the most fascinating parts of religion: the sense-making apparatus of interpretation. For Harris there is only literalism or evasion.

The same charge comes is leveled against Islam and the Qur'an. Several pages are devoted to Quranic passages that deal with Jihad and God's punishments. But there are interpretive mechanisms by which those passages can be understood, and Harris shows no interest in discovering what those might be. In his world one is forever damned by the literal statements of your scripture.. there is no way to break out.

My own view of religion is that societies and religions interact in complex ways. The words and concepts of a scriptural book such as the Qur'an go some way toward forming the parameters of a society, but then by means of interpretive strategies societies create the version of a religion that best suits them. Religion is a plastic thing.. able to be poured into any number of social molds and still be recognizably itself.

It is strange and difficult to think about a religion moving through time. Harris seems to view religion as a steel train moving from a beginning to our own time.. The train at the end must be a culmination of the train that began the journey. Thus Harris can judge Islam for the tactic of suicide bombing, which seems bizarre to me since it has only arisen in the last couple of decades and therefore hardly seems descriptive of Islam as a religion that has existed for around 1400 years. But if religion is a steel train, events at the end of the journey must be reflective of its character all along.

I like to think of a religion as it moves through time as a body of water. There is a spring and inevitably other contributors of water that get mixed up in the flow. Then the religion can pool out into a wide, calm lake.. only a little later to tumble out into a narrow little channel.. or maybe two channels.. And sometimes a religion hits a bog. In other words, there are lots of paths that the water can take, and one would hardly judge any particular stage as somehow "definitive" of that religion. The end result may even look a lot different than it did early on, and that is not so much a reflection of the quality of the water as the topography of time.