Belief Watch: The Atheist

Beliefwatch: The Atheist

Newsweek, Oct. 30, 2006 issue - At lunch with Sam Harris, one is struck by how personable, how familiar he seems—a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with pleasant manners, a man who wrote two best-selling books while pursuing a degree in neuroscience. He is, in other words, an unlikely infidel. But as infidels go, Harris is an astonishingly successful one. The son of a Jewish mother and a Quaker father, he has written one of two books currently on The New York Times best-seller list that debunk belief in God, any belief in God, as irrational at best and destructive to human society at worst. This week “Letter to a Christian Nation” sits at 6 on the hard-cover nonfiction list, up from 11 from last week; the other, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” is number 8, up from 12. In spite of his appearance, Harris is very angry, and “Letter” is a readable, exhortatory screed, a response to all the Scripture-quoting e-mail he received from Christians who read his first book. Religion, he writes in “Letter,” is “obscene”—not just repellent, but “utterly repellent.”

Has he ever converted a believer into an unbeliever? “I may have been a proximate cause,” he says. “People really do move from being fundamentalists to atheists; I can attest to that because I get a lot of e-mails from them.” One writer, he says, was a minister who lost his faith but continued to lead his church because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Reading Harris is bracing, and, even for the most thoughtful believers, infuriating. Meeting him is easier, and he speaks almost lovingly of religion’s cultural legacy. “I see nothing wrong with our churches and synagogues and religious music and festivals,” he says later, by phone. “I love Christmas and stained glass.” As a child, he declined to be bar mitzvahed, but he did not call himself an atheist until after the 2005 publication of “The End of Faith,” his first book. And Harris defies expectations when he says he doesn’t know what happens after death. “On top of that, I don’t think anyone else does, either. I think the people who are certain on both sides of that question are not entirely reasonable.” Don’t get too comfortable, though. His next work, he says, will be a “proper work of neuroscience,” in which he debunks such unreasonable concepts as free will.

—Lisa Miller

« Back