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title: "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason"
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# 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award winner Ranked #3 in Comparative Religion Neuroscience & philosophy-backed analysis The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

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## Summary

> 📚 Dare to question everything — join the intellectual revolution with Sam Harris!

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- **What is this?** The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
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## Key Features

- • **Timely & Provocative:** A bold critique of religion’s role in modern politics and terrorism that sparks essential conversations.
- • **Top-Ranked Authority:** Ranks #3 in Comparative Religion and #14 in Rationalist Philosophy, making it a must-read for intellectual leaders.
- • **Award-Winning Insight:** Winner of the prestigious 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, setting a gold standard in critical thought.
- • **Cutting-Edge Analysis:** Combines neuroscience, philosophy, and mysticism to challenge religious dogma with fearless clarity.
- • **Future-Forward Ethics:** Pioneers a secular, science-based approach to morality and spirituality, perfect for the modern rationalist.

## Overview

The End of Faith is a groundbreaking nonfiction work by Sam Harris that critically examines the clash between religion and reason in the modern world. Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, it blends neuroscience, philosophy, and mysticism to challenge religious dogma and advocate for a secular, science-based foundation for ethics and spirituality. Highly ranked in Comparative Religion and Rationalist Philosophy, this book is essential for those seeking a fearless, intellectual critique of faith’s impact on society and politics.

## Description

" 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.

Review: Beyond Atheism - I like this book a lot. I think I should first give all the reasons I like it. 1. There has never been a book like this. It is one of the most original I have come across. I don't believe anyone has ever written a book attacking monotheism before that wasn't written from an apologetic point of view. If I had to compare it to something, it would be "Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell, or even "Meditations" by Descartes. The book is extremely well ordered. You can't tell this from the table of contents because the chapter titles are poetic, but it can be broken down as follows with his titles in parenthesis. Chapter 1. Political position regarding monotheism (Reason in Exile) Chapter 2. Philosophical position (The Nature of Belief) Chapter 3. Problematic of Christian History (In the Shadow of God) Chapter 4. (The Problem with Islam) Chapter 5. Christianity and U.S. Politics (West of Eden) Chapter 6. Ethics (A Science of Good and Evil) Chapter 7. Mysticism (Experiments in Consciousness) Harris avoids the kind of Christian discourse known as Apologetics, preferring to get right down to the truth about what religions claim and what that means to the rest of us in light of the dictums of the books cited as infallible by their adherents, especially the Bible and the Koran. Philosophically, the focus of his attack is on religious moderates and the idea that Religions are actually good, and ultimately even help us get along together. It is this focus that makes this book immortal in my estimation. It will be on "Need to Read" lists for many years. Besides being enchanted with the freshness, intelligence and originality of the book, let me mention a couple of omissions which I consider significant. First, there is no discussion of life and death, or a philosophy of life and death. This will have to come from other sources. Since this book is meant to be primarily a wake-up call to atheists, I guess he didn't feel that it was necessary. I'm not talking about proselytization, which this book isn't, anyone shedding the religion of their ancestors will need to confront this question, and a little help may not hurt. Second, he goes light on Judaism. Whether this is due to "Holocaust Guilt" or with being too close to his own background, it does not coincide with the facts. In my own analysis of religion it has been quite clear that the moral turpitude so obvious in the Christian churches (and the reasons why the Christian ideas gained hegemony in Rome so easily, for example) cuts deep into Jewish history and culture as well, and it seems strange that Judaism has been so completely spared by his knife as to be almost beyond mentioning. The second strangeness is his call for a science of mysticism. He's not concerned with New Age mysticism in general as one reader has claimed, he's interested in Tibetan Buddhism, which he feels is the best popular exposition available on "Scientific" Phenomenology. I admit that this idea is not foreign to me. I've often thought of low Buddhism and Zen Buddhism as enlightened philosophies that get to the point a lot faster than most western philosophers, while avoiding dogma. So I naturally feel very comfortable for his call to explore alternatives to religion, what he calls "Scientific Mysticism". Thirdly, after criticizing the Torquemada with all the appropriate harshness you would expect, he goes on to present an argument for reviving torture in order to deal with the contingency of Terroristic Religion. His justification comes from "Collateral Damage", how you would weigh the destructiveness of torturing an innocent person against the destruction caused by firebombing a city, for example. This reasoning is not easy to agree with. Finally, with Samuel Huntington, he is against Islamic Civilization. He buys Huntington's whole argument and sincerely believes we are locked in a fight to the death with Islamicists and the "Islamic Civilization" that nutures them. How this is any any different from an Islamic person viewing Western soldiers as Crusaders nurtured by our "Christian" civilization somehow escapes me. In what way is this any different from the "fight to the death" we just completed with "Godless Communism"? To some of us, it seems a little too convenient that the weapons ovens are now blazing up again just after the Cold War is finally over. His attacks on Relativism and modern Pragmaticism in Chapter 6 are very well reasoned. Personally, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he calls himself a "Realist", since this is how I present myself. So all of this isn't for everyone, and some of this is for someone, etc. Each will have something to dislike, but it will be very hard to find a book as spiritually uplifting as this, which also has been banned at church.
Review: Beyond Religion - It is ironic that Sam Harris begins his book with a description of a young man bombing a bus in the heart of a city. Though published in 2004, the description appears to fit very well the recent London transit bombings. And this is precisely why this book demands our attention in this time of growing radical, religious fundamentalism of whatever variety. Sam Harris presents as a quiet, thoughtful, reflective person in television interviews and public presentations. His background is in philosophy and he is now completing his doctorate in neuro-science. He presents his analysis of religion in a deliberate, careful, rational manner. Yet the result is powerful. The book his two major themes. The first part is comprised of a critique of the irrational basis of religious faith and the often terrible consequences of these beliefs. This is not a tentative or hesitating criticism. At a time when the negative effects of religion and religious thinking are becoming increasingly visible, this book serves notice that making accommodations to religious thinking serves only to allow it to perpetuate its destructive influence. A belief that killing innocent people is responding to the will of one's God is not an idea to be given credence. And yet it flows directly from religious ideology and scripture. After surveying the current effects of religious beliefs, Harris then explores the nature of belief and how it relates to reason by providing an excellent review of the criteria and process of determining truth--or what in philosophy is called epistemology. Building on this analysis, he then reviews the effect of irrational belief in the history of Christianity with the Inquisition, the Cathar persecution, the witch hunts and finally the Holocaust. His point is that the moderation and toleration that is generally accepted today is not a result of the religious belief itself, but the modulating influence of the Enlightenment and the political separation of church and state that followed. This is followed by a detailed chapter analyzing the rise of radical and violent Islam. But lest we think we are immune from the effect of religious fundamentalism, he points out its current effect over issues such as the Ten Commandments controversy, the role of "faith-based" legislative efforts, the attempt to legislate what had previously been areas of private freedom, the movement to control embryonic stem cell research, and, of course, the abortion debate. Harris is particularly critical of what he calls the "myth of moderation" which flows from the postmodern viewpoint that all ideas are relative and none can be held truer or better than others. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we know what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of the world--to say, for instance, that the Bible and Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish--is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. The second part of the book is what makes it so significant This is not just another attack on the irrationality of religious faith. Harris acknowledges the legitimacy of the issues that religion attempts to address. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego and illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they are now to astronomers. First he addresses ethics. What kind of ethics is possible without a faith in a supernatural God? One based in reason and that incorporates our growing knowledge of ourselves at the level of the brain. Where currently there is little consensus on moral issues, a sustained inquiry will force the convergence of various belief systems as it has done in other sciences. Moral relativism will no longer make sense ("we can't really judge the suicide bomber") because we will have developed verifiable criteria for moral and ethical behavior. Harris explores a number of contemporary issues from this perspective including terrorism, torture and pacifism. Furthermore, ethics is intimately connected with spirituality. In the next chapter he reframes the entire arena of spirituality from the religious to the scientific in the newly emerging field of consciousness studies. He is hesitant to use the words spirituality or mysticism because "neither word captures the reasonableness and profundity of the possibility that we must now consider: that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that transcends the vagaries of experience itself". Specifically he refers to those traditions that identify spirituality with consciousness itself--with the observer of content rather than the content itself, which frees us from the vicissitudes of experience. Our spiritual traditions suggest that we have considerable room here to change our relationship to the contents of consciousness, and thereby to transform our experience of the world. Indeed, a vast literature on human spirituality attests to this. It is also clear that nothing need be believed on insufficient evidence for us to look in this possibility with an open mind. It is tempting to quote whole sections of this final chapter in which Harris rescues spirituality from religion. He explores the nature of consciousness and the various efforts within traditional religions to change the nature of consciousness through sustained introspection and the refinement of attention. He applies this to an analysis of the nature of the self--how it arises, what sustains it and how it can be transcended. He compares Eastern to Western philosophy and religion and questions why the Eastern analysis appears to be so much more sophisticated. And finally he describes meditation as a form of introspection in a section which can serve as a primer to meditative practice. All of this is done from an empirical perspective informed by modern studies of consciousness rather than from religious doctrine. The only lack in this book is the omission of the psychodynamic explanation for faith as originally proposed by Freud and more recently in the book The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief by M.D. Faber. Harris takes a more cultural and societal perspective. Few books describe more clearly the transition to a post-religious era and establish so clearly why it is of such importance. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of our civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.

## Features

- Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #74,164 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #3 in Comparative Religion (Books) #14 in Rationalist Philosophy #36 in Philosophy of Good & Evil |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,440 Reviews |

## Images

![The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/7130aG2XcSL.jpg)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Beyond Atheism
*by J***K on September 30, 2005*

I like this book a lot. I think I should first give all the reasons I like it. 1. There has never been a book like this. It is one of the most original I have come across. I don't believe anyone has ever written a book attacking monotheism before that wasn't written from an apologetic point of view. If I had to compare it to something, it would be "Why I am not a Christian" by Bertrand Russell, or even "Meditations" by Descartes. The book is extremely well ordered. You can't tell this from the table of contents because the chapter titles are poetic, but it can be broken down as follows with his titles in parenthesis. Chapter 1. Political position regarding monotheism (Reason in Exile) Chapter 2. Philosophical position (The Nature of Belief) Chapter 3. Problematic of Christian History (In the Shadow of God) Chapter 4. (The Problem with Islam) Chapter 5. Christianity and U.S. Politics (West of Eden) Chapter 6. Ethics (A Science of Good and Evil) Chapter 7. Mysticism (Experiments in Consciousness) Harris avoids the kind of Christian discourse known as Apologetics, preferring to get right down to the truth about what religions claim and what that means to the rest of us in light of the dictums of the books cited as infallible by their adherents, especially the Bible and the Koran. Philosophically, the focus of his attack is on religious moderates and the idea that Religions are actually good, and ultimately even help us get along together. It is this focus that makes this book immortal in my estimation. It will be on "Need to Read" lists for many years. Besides being enchanted with the freshness, intelligence and originality of the book, let me mention a couple of omissions which I consider significant. First, there is no discussion of life and death, or a philosophy of life and death. This will have to come from other sources. Since this book is meant to be primarily a wake-up call to atheists, I guess he didn't feel that it was necessary. I'm not talking about proselytization, which this book isn't, anyone shedding the religion of their ancestors will need to confront this question, and a little help may not hurt. Second, he goes light on Judaism. Whether this is due to "Holocaust Guilt" or with being too close to his own background, it does not coincide with the facts. In my own analysis of religion it has been quite clear that the moral turpitude so obvious in the Christian churches (and the reasons why the Christian ideas gained hegemony in Rome so easily, for example) cuts deep into Jewish history and culture as well, and it seems strange that Judaism has been so completely spared by his knife as to be almost beyond mentioning. The second strangeness is his call for a science of mysticism. He's not concerned with New Age mysticism in general as one reader has claimed, he's interested in Tibetan Buddhism, which he feels is the best popular exposition available on "Scientific" Phenomenology. I admit that this idea is not foreign to me. I've often thought of low Buddhism and Zen Buddhism as enlightened philosophies that get to the point a lot faster than most western philosophers, while avoiding dogma. So I naturally feel very comfortable for his call to explore alternatives to religion, what he calls "Scientific Mysticism". Thirdly, after criticizing the Torquemada with all the appropriate harshness you would expect, he goes on to present an argument for reviving torture in order to deal with the contingency of Terroristic Religion. His justification comes from "Collateral Damage", how you would weigh the destructiveness of torturing an innocent person against the destruction caused by firebombing a city, for example. This reasoning is not easy to agree with. Finally, with Samuel Huntington, he is against Islamic Civilization. He buys Huntington's whole argument and sincerely believes we are locked in a fight to the death with Islamicists and the "Islamic Civilization" that nutures them. How this is any any different from an Islamic person viewing Western soldiers as Crusaders nurtured by our "Christian" civilization somehow escapes me. In what way is this any different from the "fight to the death" we just completed with "Godless Communism"? To some of us, it seems a little too convenient that the weapons ovens are now blazing up again just after the Cold War is finally over. His attacks on Relativism and modern Pragmaticism in Chapter 6 are very well reasoned. Personally, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he calls himself a "Realist", since this is how I present myself. So all of this isn't for everyone, and some of this is for someone, etc. Each will have something to dislike, but it will be very hard to find a book as spiritually uplifting as this, which also has been banned at church.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Beyond Religion
*by J***R on May 25, 2011*

It is ironic that Sam Harris begins his book with a description of a young man bombing a bus in the heart of a city. Though published in 2004, the description appears to fit very well the recent London transit bombings. And this is precisely why this book demands our attention in this time of growing radical, religious fundamentalism of whatever variety. Sam Harris presents as a quiet, thoughtful, reflective person in television interviews and public presentations. His background is in philosophy and he is now completing his doctorate in neuro-science. He presents his analysis of religion in a deliberate, careful, rational manner. Yet the result is powerful. The book his two major themes. The first part is comprised of a critique of the irrational basis of religious faith and the often terrible consequences of these beliefs. This is not a tentative or hesitating criticism. At a time when the negative effects of religion and religious thinking are becoming increasingly visible, this book serves notice that making accommodations to religious thinking serves only to allow it to perpetuate its destructive influence. A belief that killing innocent people is responding to the will of one's God is not an idea to be given credence. And yet it flows directly from religious ideology and scripture. After surveying the current effects of religious beliefs, Harris then explores the nature of belief and how it relates to reason by providing an excellent review of the criteria and process of determining truth--or what in philosophy is called epistemology. Building on this analysis, he then reviews the effect of irrational belief in the history of Christianity with the Inquisition, the Cathar persecution, the witch hunts and finally the Holocaust. His point is that the moderation and toleration that is generally accepted today is not a result of the religious belief itself, but the modulating influence of the Enlightenment and the political separation of church and state that followed. This is followed by a detailed chapter analyzing the rise of radical and violent Islam. But lest we think we are immune from the effect of religious fundamentalism, he points out its current effect over issues such as the Ten Commandments controversy, the role of "faith-based" legislative efforts, the attempt to legislate what had previously been areas of private freedom, the movement to control embryonic stem cell research, and, of course, the abortion debate. Harris is particularly critical of what he calls the "myth of moderation" which flows from the postmodern viewpoint that all ideas are relative and none can be held truer or better than others. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we know what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of the world--to say, for instance, that the Bible and Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish--is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. The second part of the book is what makes it so significant This is not just another attack on the irrationality of religious faith. Harris acknowledges the legitimacy of the issues that religion attempts to address. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego and illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they are now to astronomers. First he addresses ethics. What kind of ethics is possible without a faith in a supernatural God? One based in reason and that incorporates our growing knowledge of ourselves at the level of the brain. Where currently there is little consensus on moral issues, a sustained inquiry will force the convergence of various belief systems as it has done in other sciences. Moral relativism will no longer make sense ("we can't really judge the suicide bomber") because we will have developed verifiable criteria for moral and ethical behavior. Harris explores a number of contemporary issues from this perspective including terrorism, torture and pacifism. Furthermore, ethics is intimately connected with spirituality. In the next chapter he reframes the entire arena of spirituality from the religious to the scientific in the newly emerging field of consciousness studies. He is hesitant to use the words spirituality or mysticism because "neither word captures the reasonableness and profundity of the possibility that we must now consider: that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that transcends the vagaries of experience itself". Specifically he refers to those traditions that identify spirituality with consciousness itself--with the observer of content rather than the content itself, which frees us from the vicissitudes of experience. Our spiritual traditions suggest that we have considerable room here to change our relationship to the contents of consciousness, and thereby to transform our experience of the world. Indeed, a vast literature on human spirituality attests to this. It is also clear that nothing need be believed on insufficient evidence for us to look in this possibility with an open mind. It is tempting to quote whole sections of this final chapter in which Harris rescues spirituality from religion. He explores the nature of consciousness and the various efforts within traditional religions to change the nature of consciousness through sustained introspection and the refinement of attention. He applies this to an analysis of the nature of the self--how it arises, what sustains it and how it can be transcended. He compares Eastern to Western philosophy and religion and questions why the Eastern analysis appears to be so much more sophisticated. And finally he describes meditation as a form of introspection in a section which can serve as a primer to meditative practice. All of this is done from an empirical perspective informed by modern studies of consciousness rather than from religious doctrine. The only lack in this book is the omission of the psychodynamic explanation for faith as originally proposed by Freud and more recently in the book The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief by M.D. Faber. Harris takes a more cultural and societal perspective. Few books describe more clearly the transition to a post-religious era and establish so clearly why it is of such importance. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of our civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A well-focused thesis with slightly blurry edges
*by J***S on May 5, 2006*

By page 22 of "The End of Faith," the reader is aware that Sam Harris does not feel the least bit conciliatory toward religious worldviews. Moreover, he knows just how and where to insert an intellectual stiletto: "Whatever is true now should be discoverable now....By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward." Indeed, religious thinking does seem to have an uncanny knack for being not just wrong, but exactly wrong. For example, it credits the Old Testament god with being merciful, patient, forgiving and wise, although even a cursory reading of Genesis through Numbers shows him to be cruel, petty, vengeful, selfish and embarrassingly ignorant of the cosmos he supposedly designed and constructed. While highlighting this and many other faith-based nonsequiturs, Harris makes an eloquent case for the proposition that religious claims MUST compete with other knowledge about the world on a fair basis -- no automatic allowances for tradition, "sacredness," or other distractions having zero relevance to truth value. He further warns that given the clear and present dangers of fundamentalism, we risk far too much by sacrificing rationality on the altar of political correctness. The book's seven chapters cover the roots and dangers of religious irrationality, the perverseness of faith without reason, the history of religious persecution and internecine vendettas, the particular threat of Islam, the toxicity of church/government mixtures, a scientific approach to morality, and (rather surprisingly) the experimental side of consciousness. In the chapter on Islam, Harris begins with the obligatory mention of (long past) positive contributions from Muslim culture, notably the invention of algebra and translations of the Greek philosophers. But the next 40 pages are devoted to exposing the threatening side of Islamic beliefs and traditions -- even the "moderate" ones. Harris points out that the revered Koran and its lower-ranked companion the hadith (sayings of Muhammad) are liberally stocked with contempt for other religions, death sentences for apostates, eternal suffering for infidels, and the promotion of jihad (religious war) as a duty for all Muslims. He offers statistical evidence that suicide bombing in defense of Islam is endorsed in at least some circumstances by majorities or substantial portions of the populations of 11 of 12 Muslim countries (the lone exception is secular-governed Turkey). The author maintains, with ample evidence, that the usual characterization of radical Islamists as mere hijackers of a peaceful religion is grossly misleading. In fact, he says, "Nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists...better than the tenets of Islam." Harris's clear and forceful writing style bolsters his step-by-step case for rejecting the vacuous certainties of religious doctrine. In Chapter six he tackles the concept of atheistic morality, which seems to trouble so many people. He keys his outline for scientifically valid ethics to one simple but not widely recognized principle: "...questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures." By "sentient" he means conscious and able to comprehend different levels of well-being. This plausible and incisive idea immediately clarifies important issues to which religious morality is both dumb and blind: 1. All human and non-human animals have ethical rights. Sentience alone is sufficient to confer moral standing. 2. The objective of shared ethical standards is to improve the condition of living beings, not to avoid the wrath of an imaginary cosmic supervisor. 3. Harmless private behavior is not open to ethical dispute. Harris uses point 1. to illuminate the abortion issue. If sentience confers moral standing, then lack of sentience removes it. Hence it is not rational to equate the ethical rights of one, or two, or a hundred cells with those of a fully-developed person. There is of course a gray area, but it does not (by any sensible standard) reach back to conception. In his sharp (both senses of the word) critique of absolute pacifism, Harris offers on page 202 a very provocative and pithy admonition: "...when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand." Although I found much to admire in "End of Faith," there were some aspects of it that puzzled me. For instance, on page 16 the author claims that "there is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence." He goes on to say that exploring such a dimension shouldn't require untestable propositions, but the original appeal to sacredness still seems odd. In other places Harris tentatively supports the reality of psychic phenomena (p. 41), suggests a "deeply rational" basis for spirituality (p. 43), and states that his case against blind faith was "written very much in the spirit of a prayer" (pp 48-9). On page 192 he defines spirituality as cultivation of happiness, an interpretation very much at odds with any dictionaries I've encountered. Seventeen pages later he declares that spiritual practice is the investigation of consciousness through introspection. Will the real spirituality please stand up? Finally, on page 208, Harris expresses doubt that the brain produces consciousness, but fails to offer a plausible guess at what does produce it. Despite such reservations, I found "End of Faith" to be a thoughtful work with a cogent and worthwhile theme -- religious claims deserve no special or privileged status among the welter of competing ideas about the universe and our role in it.

## Frequently Bought Together

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