BOOK REVIEW
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris 2005
About the Author
Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz), The Four Horseman (with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens), and Making Sense. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The Annals of Neurology, among others. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.
Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up Course for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.
About the Book
“The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated….Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say.”―Natalie Angier, New York Times
In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs―even when these beliefs inspire the worst human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic. Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.
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Endorsements
“A genuinely frightening book…. Read Sam Harris and wake up.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Guardian
“Sam Harris launches a sustained nuclear assault…. A brave, pugilistic attempt to demolish the walls that currently insulate religious people from criticism…. Badly needed.”
― Johann Hari, The Independent
“A radical attack on the most sacred of liberal precepts―the notion of tolerance…. An eminently sensible rallying cry for a more ruthless secularisation of society.”
― Stephanie Merritt, The Observer
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