Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2008, Page 12

fears of many in western culture. The suicide attacks by Islamic fanatics
on the World Trade Center in New York and elsewhere, now universally
referred to as “9/11”, are seen as a surefire demonstration of the intrinsic
evil of religion. Lurking within every religious believer lies a potential
terrorist. Get rid of religion, and the world will be a safer place.
Generalizations like this are found throughout Richard Dawkins’ God
Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, and Sam Harris’ End
of Reasond Harris offers his own readings of central religious texts - such
as the Bible and the Qu’ran — to demonstrate that they possess an innate
propensity to generate violence. Yet there is no attempt to analyse how
these texts are interpreted and applied within their respective religious
communities. Dawkins tells us that to take the Bible seriously is to “strictly
observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anyone who
chose not to.” Or to “execute disobedient children.”3 4 5
Dawkins clearly assumes that his readers know so little about Christianity
that they would believe that Christians are in the habit of stoning people to
death. A reality check is clearly in order. As the cultural and literary critic
Terry Eagleton pointed out in his withering review of The God Delusion:
“Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost
four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single
human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori
improbable as it is empirically false.”^
Furthermore, Harris assumes, without any serious argumentation
or appeal to evidence, that the naturalistic worldview he proposes as a
replacement for religion will generate more happiness, compassion or peace
than religion can. His work bristles with the curious and highly problematic
idea that scientists have a keener or deeper appreciation than religious
people of how to deal with personal or moral problems. Yet such is the
force of his rhetoric that such evidential deficits are airbrushed out of the
3 Sam Harris, The Etid ofFaith: Religion, Terror, and the Future ofReason. New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 2004. A fourth work is sometime mentioned in this context: Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking
the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking Penguin, 2006.
4 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 249.
5 Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: A Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God
Delusion." Lotidon Review ofBooks, 19 October 2006.
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