FEAR

  



Sam Harris began writing his first book [The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason] almost immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was dismayed by how quickly public discussion turned from pointing the finger at Islamic fundamentalism to calling for religious tolerance. As he saw it, 9/11 should have exposed the dangerous irrationality of religious belief, but instead it pushed the United States even deeper into its own religiosity. And so he began work on The End of Faith, whose central tenet is that religion – and religious tolerance – perpetuates and protects unjustifiable (not to mention just plain silly) beliefs. In an age of nuclear proliferation and jihad, Harris says, religion paves the way for violent destruction on a terrifying scale.

Q: How do you work with your own fear, so that it doesn’t turn into the kind of fear that’s creating all of this division?

That’s just the moment-to-moment practice of noticing when you’re out of balance, and releasing that feeling, ceasing to recoil from other human beings, or from the circumstances. That’s what, at one level, meditation is: noticing suffering and letting go of it. And to the degree that you can do that, you can cease to be motivated by your anxieties, your fear, your anger, and so on. But obviously I’m a work in progress.

And it’s not as if the enlightened mind were always this pacifistic, smiling, nonconfrontational acceptance of whatever’s going on. Not all fear or all anger is unwarranted, or even counterproductive. It’s clear to me that there are certain practices in this world that we cannot accept. And that if we accept them, we’re accepting them out of idiot compassion, and not actual compassion. You can be informed about what you’re afraid of, or you can be delusionally afraid of something. We are wise to be afraid of jihadists acquiring nuclear weapons. How much we should fear this is open to debate, but there’s no question that this should concern us. It’s just a question of what the actual risk is of any specific threat coming to pass.

-- Sam Harris, interviewed by Bethany Saltman in The Sun, September 2006