Excerpt of an interview with Sam Harris, author of
The End of FaithGod Wrote a Book You make a distinction between “religion,” which you basically define as the belief that a certain ancient book is the literal word of an omnipotent God, and something called “spirituality” or “mysticism,” of which you approve. What is the difference?Sam Harris: There really is a distinction between faith-based religion—believing propositions on insufficient evidence and living by the logic of those propositions—and engaging in any one of a variety of methods of introspection, seeing where that introspection takes you and making empirical claims on that basis.
These methods, in and of themselves, don’t require the adoption of any unjustified belief. For instance, it is perfectly reasonable to cross your legs and sit in meditation and see what comes of it. If something good does come of it, it’s perfectly reasonable to make a habit of that practice. Nothing preposterous has to be accepted in order to do that. It can even be reasonable to spend years, even decades, doing that if it becomes deeply fulfilling and links up with other interests, for instance, ethical interests. None of that requires that certain books were written by the creator of the universe, or a belief in anything else that can’t be proven.
So you can get mysticism off the ground without believing something on insufficient evidence, but you really can’t get religion off the ground that way. Religion is nothing more than a tissue of such propositions, most especially the proposition that a certain book has unique status because it was dictated or inspired by a supernatural intelligence.
You argue that we can no longer afford to view people’s beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, as purely a private matter. You argue they are now of great social and political importance. Why?Belief distinguishes itself from other states of mind, like hope, because it is a representation of the world that we accept as true. This is why beliefs are not merely private, because how we think the world is can’t help but influence our behavior. If you really think it is true, down to your toes, that you can get to paradise by dying under the right circumstances, then you will be predisposed to die under those circumstances. You’ll be predisposed to the extent you believe this metaphysical proposition. This is why we have architects and mechanical engineers flying planes into buildings at four hundred miles an hour. It’s not a mystery that they do so; given the content of their beliefs, it’s a perfectly rational thing to do. And it’s rational to hope for Armageddon if you think Jesus is going to come down out of the clouds and kill all the bad people and save the day. This is rational once you buy into the underlying beliefs.
