An Illumination of My End of Faith

Yesterday, I finished keying in the notes I took while reading Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. The relevance of the book’s content to me can be judged by the fact that my notes ran to 17 single-spaced pages.

I found the book to be one of those rare occasions where the author is expanding and completing my own half-formed thoughts. I found the book to be a tutorial that illuminated my shadowy views of religious beliefs in today’s world, bringing my own beliefs into sharp focus and answering all the many questions I had but had never gotten around to resolving.

As an undergraduate, I wondered how it came about that Christ and Mohammad came to replace Zeus and why the Bible and the Koran were both believed to contain God’s words. God wrote two books? I resolved these questions by realizing that ancient peoples emotional needs were so great that they hungered after assurance that a better life awaited them after death. Christianity and Islam provided books that contained roadmaps to heaven and, since they were God’s own words, arrival was guaranteed.

More recently, I have often wondered why religious faith has not faded in the face of modern knowledge of the universe and vast improvement of the quality of life for most peoples that technology has brought.

Harris argues that “we cannot live by reason alone” (page 43). That is, humans are both rational and emotional. “Death is intolerable to us” so we create a “better life beyond the grave.” This belief is not rational, but it solves one fundamental emotional need.

I think that a second fundamental emotional need that supports religious faith arises from the fact that each human unconsciously realizes that he or she is ultimately alone in the vast universe. To believe there is a God looking out for your personal welfare and to whom you can appeal for help is very comforting.

Religious belief persists because, ultimately, neither knowledge of the nature of things nor technology can address these deepest emotional needs of humans.

Thus, Harris’s appeal to reason will fail and religious beliefs will endure along with their threat to civilization.

Possibly, Harris’s most lasting contribution is that he is one of the very few thinkers who clearly state that Islam and Western liberalism are irreconcilable. That we are at this moment at war with Islam.

“On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers.” That “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death” (page123).

In this view, Harris is entirely correct, and the sooner all Western governments realize this the better.

What Do We Do Now?

I felt so strongly about my last posting that I sent a slightly different version to my entire e-mail address book. As a result, I received several replies asking what do we do now?

Well my view is that after the first of the year, the House and Senate should hold hearings in which the Bush administration and the DOD explain their mission in Iraq. That is explain what they are trying to accomplish by endangering the lives of our 133,000 troops. Their most probable response will be along the lines that their mission is to prevent civil war, train Iraqi military and police units, and support the Iraqi government.

The Congress should then simply tell them, that they are mistaken. Their mission was to get rid of Saddam and they have successfully accomplished that mission. They have no further mission. The Congress should then schedule the stoppage of the funds needed to support the current occupation. The Bush Administration controls the military and military operations, but not the money to pay for it. Without funding, the troops will have to leave.

Believe it or not, it’s that simple.

Of course, none of this will happen unless the nation first faces up to the true situation in which we find ourselves. Bush has sold the nation on the idea that Iraq and terrorism are closely linked one to the other. If we don’t “win” in Iraq we will seriously damage our effort to combat terrorism.

Not true.

The fact of the matter is that there are very few, if any, known terrorists in Iraq that are threatening U. S. citizens. The attacks on U.S. citizens in Iraq are mostly made by Iraqi patriots who are commanded by the Koran to kill unbelievers who threaten the Islamic religion and its mandated culture.

The true situation is just the opposite of what we are told. Iran and Syria are most likely sending in Hezbollah terrorists for training in Iraq, since it is the perfect place to gain combat experience. Under guise of being insurgent patriots, they can move about without fear of detection and be supported by Muslim clerics. So that rather than fighting terrorism, our occupation is creating more and better terrorists.

Thus, once again, the key to resolving the Iraq mess the Bush administration has got us into, is to force recognition, nation-wide, that the mission of our military intervention in Iraq has been successfully accomplished.

Thoughts on Our Mission in Iraq

There has been a lot of discussion by various government officials of having to complete our mission in Iraq before we can pull our military forces out of the country.

Personally, I find the discussion to be pure crap without substance.

As I see it, we invaded Iraq to get rid of Saddam because we believed Saddam presented a threat to our security. Well now that Saddam is soon to be history, our mission is accomplished.

Ayatollah Bush, with his usual sloppy thinking, expanded the original Iraq mission to one of nation-building. Which is not only puerile, it is impossible. Now that they are out from under the iron fist of Saddam, the different Muslim sects in Iraq are eager to kill each other because, as Sam Harris points out in The End of Faith: “they disagree about ‘facts’ that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa’s reindeer” (Page 26).

The administration believes our troops are needed to prevent all out civil war in Iraq. Well the term “civil’ war historically is used to describe a struggle for supremacy of political power in a nation. (Merriam Webster defines the word "civil" as referring to those affairs of a nation's citizens that are distinct from those that are religious.) Thus, the current struggle in Iraq is not civil war but religious war. And solviIraq's Iraqui-war problem begrecognizingniziung that simple fact.

For what possible obligation can the United States have toward the Iraqi people to protect them, as Muslims, from religious war? The simple fact is we have neither a duty nor a right to even try to mediate a purely Islamic religious issue.

Our troops can leave anytime now. The Muslims of Iraq no longer need us. Why should our troops suffer wounds and death for Islam? Whatever happens in Iraq after the departure of our troops is none of our affair. We came to take care of a U.S. national security problem; we took care of it. Our job is done and now we must leave.

Hopefully, the new Democratic majority will be able to impose this view of reality dysfunctional Bush administration.