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OverviewThis important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion—an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris also draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need. He calls on us to invoke that need in taking a secular humanistic approach to solving the problems of this world. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Sam HarrisPublisher: WW Norton & Co Imprint: WW Norton & Co Dimensions: Width: 15.00cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 21.80cm Weight: 0.566kg ISBN: 9780393035155ISBN 10: 0393035158 Pages: 338 Publication Date: 03 September 2004 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsReviewsIn a debut certain to anger anyone who is not an atheist, the author argues that religious faith is the root of all evil. Sacred books, Harris declares, are either sacred or not; religious adherents must therefore either believe everything in them or question everything. People cannot, he continues, assert that the virgin birth is true because it is in the Bible and simultaneously decline to murder their children for apostasy, as Deuteronomy prescribes. Harris believes the most dangerous religion today is Islam and quotes several pages of passages from the Koran to illustrate his contention that it is manifestly not a religion of peace and tolerance. But he is an equal-opportunity opponent, so he also assails, in phrases that coruscate with sarcasm, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and by extension all the world's religions. They are medieval at best, he declares. And anti-intellectual, requiring believers to accept without question notions that they would summarily reject in all other arenas of life. How would we react, he wonders, if President Bush replaced the word God with Apollo in his public comments? There really is no difference, states Harris. He begins his treatise by showing how religious faith trumps rationality, proceeds to a disquisition on belief itself, glances at the Inquisition and the Holocaust (to show religion run amok), gnaws on the problems in the Middle East, attacks religious objections to stem-cell research, drug use, and sexual privacy, considers how ethics may thrive in a nonreligious world, and ends with a dense discussion of consciousness, much of which he ought to have consigned to the lengthy and often discursive endnotes. In many ways this is a courageous analysis whose theses will deeply trouble readers who choose to think about them rather than summarily reject them. But Harris's discussion of ethics sometimes reads like an undergraduate essay-the probable parent of his arguments. Provocative is too pale a word. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationSam Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |