The End of Faith
Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
By Sam Harris, W.W. Norton & Co. 2004
Review by Erik Moore
This strong analysis of dogmatic faith shows the great dangers
that it imposes on our society.  With the advent of nuclear
weapons, believing in a magical afterlife that one can attain by
being on the “right” side of a war is an inappropriate self-
indulgence of ignorance when coupled with politics.  Sam Harris
goes way beyond simply making this point clear.  He takes us on
an analysis of the history of dogma-driven religions and a tour
through their texts, which are both self-contradictory at best.  Many
passages considered sacred are consistent provocateurs of
ignorant violence.  Harris argues that in the west it is rational
thinking, secular thinking, that is the great restraint on dogmatic
movements that has allowed modern societies to develop and
competing religions to co-exist non-violently.  Further, he
discusses the way that the  Buddhist-centric communities in the
east have used reason to develop a rational and detailed
exploration of the human psyche in ways that dogmatic faith is
obliged to suppress in order to be self-sustaining as a tool of
power.  Harris shows how dogmatic faith is really a valuation of
ignorant allegiance masquerading as if it were knowledge capable
of sustaining ethical choice.  He analyzes how it impairs our
judgment so poorly that as our war technologies evolve it puts the
entire human population in peril.  His work is a great read for
anyone questioning the urgency inherent in the activities of Mission
of Reason, an organization that hopes to put rational thinking
ahead of dogmatic fundamentalism as the medium of both
societal discourse and neighborhood socialization.  If I found
anything to quibble with in the book, it was his use of the term
“spiritual” when referring to the more rigorous mental practices of
Buddhism.  I believe he did this both because of the historical use
of the term, and to put it on equal moral footing in the minds of
western religious readers, but it is misleading in that it implies a
validation of a magical approach that derails sound inquiry.  My
own perspective is that we should label it “meditative tradition” or
“mental discipline” so as not to imply association with the type of
spiritual fundamentalism prevalent in the west.  That’s because
the set of Buddhist meditative traditions I am referring to are
generally highly specific and technical disciplines that explore,
generate, and analyze states of consciousness in sustained and
skeptical communities of inquiry, somewhat like science
communities that originated in the west.  At the core of practice
they are generally not flights of fancy about magic spirit beings and
places.  But this quibbling over labeling should not dissuade any
reader from scouring this text for many gems of modern wisdom,
including great resources in the footnotes.
Review © Erik Moore, all rights reserved

The World is Flat
by Thomas L Friedman,
2005 Farrar Straus & Giraux
Review by David F. Shever
Thomas L. Friedman, helps clarify and make sense of the impact
across the globe that the convergence of technology is making on
our lives, our communities, and our planet in The World is Flat. It is
a book that paints a broad perspective composed of specifics
about how the world is getting flatter and flatter as communication
and international collaboration are breaking down frictions and
barriers and opening doors of opportunity for people all over the
planet. This information all comes from Friedman’s numerous
interviews -- with people as varied as the executives of India’s
outsourcing companies to Bill Gates to people in India
running a school for untouchables. Much of the first part of the
book includes an abundant amount of information that shows just
how the global landscape has changed and continues to change.
But it is in the second half that Friedman, very candidly, links the
positive effect that all of this has had on different societies and
cultures. He also keeps a balanced view, and reasonably shows
us what people must be cautious about. Readers begin to see
how it is not the technology but rather the dreamers and people
that use or abuse the technology that will be the key to the kind of
environment humankind will create. Terrorists have demonstrated
the negative use of  technology through collaborative, destructive
schemes. Friedman shows just how the terrorists us technology
through the example of their ‘virtual supply chain’ where they
produce ‘suicide bombers’. Al Qaeda gets contrasted in one place
with the operations of popular businesses to show just how both
operations use similar technology to get what they want done
efficiently. Change is taking place quickly. People can and do get
left behind.  He also shows how the countries, cultures, and
individuals who are forward looking, who embrace technology are
also in many ways becoming more and more open due to
international collaboration. According to Friedman, if we fail to use
technology with compassionate goals and ignore failing societies,
we’ll be left with more people that feel a loss of dignity, and
therefore, a more dangerous world. It is from these failed
societies, that terrorism breeds.

I enjoyed this book very much and appreciate Friedman’s analysis
and arguments. I believe he is justified in encouraging strategic
optimists, ‘with more dreams than memories’ who say, ‘yes’ to the
flattening (read the book for his explanation of flattening) of the
world and who imagine that things can be better, and are
motivated to make it happen.
Review © David F Shever, All Rights Reserved


The Open Society and Its Enemies
Vol. I   The Spell of Plato
Vol. II   The High Tide of Prophecy:  Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath
Karl Raimund Popper
1962 Princeton University Press
This is a great work uncovering many of the thought patterns and
arguments that create confusion and poor judgment in philosophy,
politics, and social sciences to the present day.  Popper exposes
the lineage of essentialism and historicism that pave pervaded
much of mystic-oriented philosophies.  I'll mention two of the most
significant ideas Popper approaches that cause many problems in
social and personal decision-making.  1) We must make sure that
the terms we use are merely abbreviations of descriptions of real
things rather than what the essentialists do in looking to the
"essence" of things supposedly found in speculating about terms
as though there were some special magical "essence" defining
words, often in contradiction to reality.  The essentialist approach
results in ideologies that fly in the face of sensible understanding
of reality and often glosses over the inhumane practices and anti-
rational persuasive techniques that essentialism breeds.  2) When
people say things like "Grand trends of history make our actions
inevitable", "Let history be the judge," or "History will prove that we
are on the right side" what they are doing is asking us to renounce
our own immediate responsibility to judge situations rationally and
act accordingly.  History is written by people with their own biases,
not in some mythical past of perfect insight or some future age
where biases don't exist.   To take responsibility for our actions
and judge those we politically empower, we need to stop thinking
of history as an inevitability because this often resigns us to letting
terrible deeds take place that could be averted if we simply
responded rationally and directly with personal responsibility.  This
Popper illustrates in many examples.  If there is one  weak point in
Poppers great work it is the way in which he pleads to Christian
identity, while defining that identity in a non-descriptive and
romantic way that contradicts his best arguments.  Yet it can be
understood why Popper felt a need to do this, fleeing the Nazi's
and seeking to convince nations of predominantly Christians that
Facism, Naziism, and any inhumane government that arises  is
something that we must all take personal responsibility for in the
present.  We must describe what is going on directly and not get
caught up in semantic plays of words that could allow us to
rationalize inaction or resign ourselves to complicity with cruelty
and anti-rational thinking.  There are many great gems here, even
to the very last page of his end notes.
Review © Erik Moore, all rights reserved

The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers, et. al.
1991 Anchor (reissue)
This classic work, based on the PBS series of the same name
hosted by Bill Moyers, presents a way to view the myth tradition of
our globe with coherence, rational consideration, and a sense of
enrichment.  Campbell recounts his own strong interactions with
many myth traditions, and properly includes in that category
contemporary religions.  Viewing myth stories and metaphysics as
metaphors, properly places them in a nurturing tradition of lore,
where they can fairly exist in a coherent reality with science,
reasoned thinking, artistic exploration, and... just good storytelling.  
The book and the video series make a nurturing and rational
introduction to our global myth heritage and can gently help to
properly put religious traditions into a reasonable perspective,
even for those still living inside the bubble of belief.
Review © Erik Moore, all rights reserved


The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
by Richard P. Feynman & Jeffry Robbins
2000 Perseus Book Group
This work is classic Feynmam shares the joys of finding things
out, offering keen insights on the attraction of the scientific method
from an emotional point of view.  This book both nurtures the
emotions and offers practical advice on maintaining a perspective
where discoveries can abound.  One key section includes an
analysis of how religious believers squelch their own possibilities
for understanding by defending certain areas for inquiry.  He
illustrates, through the "miraculous" cures of Lourdes, that if
people who claim to be believers actually understood the
"miracles" to be fact, they would be much more practical about it,
and begin performing tests to determine the exact focus of the
healing power of this place, mapping its effect in detail, and
performing statistical studies on populations to determine its
actual effect.  Instead, religious authorities and followers alike
irrationally neglect such investigation that would clearly validate,
precisely describe, or debunk their claims of miracles.
Review © Erik Moore, all rights reserved

The Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection
First Edition
By Charles Darwin 1859
As read in the Barnes and Noble Classic version
The first thing I notice upon reading Darwin’s “The Origin of
Species” was the lack of information, the vagueness of data upon
which Darwin based his work when I contrasted it with science
here at the dawn of the third millennium.  The strata of the earth
had just been meaningfully categorized in a preliminary form just a
generation earlier by Sir Charles Lyell and others; the DNA
revolution and the source of mutation in DNA copy-errors was
unthinkable; calculating the age of rocks by radioactive isotope
decay was not even on the horizon, and so many other key
technologies and discoveries that we think of as integral to
modern evolutionary theory were not possible in Darwin’s time.  
Yet Darwin accomplished a feat that was inconceivable before his
time, before an empire had stretched all the way around the world
and cast the net of science across the globe to take a close look at
the world we live in.  The range of people Darwin corresponded
with in far-flung parts of the world is truly astounding, each
performing their own extensive research on geological or
biological phenomena.  Today, we rely on the luxury of libraries
and the Internet to make instant contact with extensive bodies of
research and theories.  Darwin maintained this contact though
scientific institutions, yes, but often the immediate research he
needed was done by himself, or was requested of people around
the globe through his letter writing.  It becomes obvious that
previous societies, even the Mongolian, Ashoka, and Roman
empires could not amass such a detailed and accurate view of the
Earth that would have been possible to formulate and support a
theory of evolution.  The main reason is perhaps that they lacked
enough far-flung data to see the trends, like comparing American
living and fossilized creatures with Eurasian living and Fossilized
creatures.  Darwin also  used his own in-depth scientific familiarity
of local creatures such as the common bred pigeon and barnacles
in balance with his observations in the Galapagos and other exotic
spots on his journey aboard the HMS Beagle.

His broad evidence-based perspective was not the only thing that
created Darwin’s insights.  Throughout his work, Darwin
emphasizes a method of approaching our understanding that is
key to many discoveries in science.  It includes the demand that
theories help make things explicable instead of magically
mysterious, that theories should be based on what we do know
rather than speculation in areas of ignorance or self-confirming
thinking, and that we should demand theories about the natural
world be based on and in accordance with the natural world itself.  
As one reads through the first few chapters one moves from
observing evident change in varieties of a living type to the natural
progression of those varieties into generally separate species.  
One moves from a limited sense of time that apparently requires
magical intervention to achieve complexity, to seeing the grand
time-scale of geology that can accumulate complexity over millions
of years through various processes.

As one works towards the back of the book, Darwin confronts the
common European notions of his day, that every species was
independently created magically.  The controversy is not in his
movement of natural observation into theory.  The conflict came
when Darwin pointed out that observations of the natural world
(with the broad observation, detailed records, and scientific rigor of
the British Empire available as never before) did not support the
origin stories in the popular myths of his day.  Every church-going
naturalist felt obliged to combat Darwin, who well understood that
it would likely be only the younger generation of naturalists that
would have the perspective with which to really consider his
writings.  Yet stories of creation from any myth (while they appear
to end questions of origin with absolute authority of one type or
another) leave so much of the natural world inexplicable, leave
relationships unresolved, leave complex processes wholly
unmentioned, and leave the believer with a sense of allegiance
that forces denial in the face of contradicting facts.  Darwin in
Origin presents us not with an alternative answer, but with a road
map for discovery, for making thing intelligible.  He provides a
framework for increasing our understanding of diversity and
change in the fossil record, in breeds of domesticated animals, in
the varieties of wild species for which there is no magical
boundary preventing their natural change into separate species,
genus’, families, orders, classes, Phylums, and Kingdoms.  He
helps us overcome not only our tribal stories of origin in light of
natural evidence, but also to avoid the misconception that naming
any one type of living thing in the world does not imbue upon it
some separate and independent magical origin or supposed
intended essence that maintains its identity.  Instead, he shows us
the interdependence of life on Earth.  He helped point the way for
exploring our common natural origin.

To insist on the beginnings of credibility, it would be easy to
demand that all those who criticize evolutionary theories at least
read The Origin of Species.  But it would be just the beginning to a
new awareness of the development of the scientific perspective.  
So many of the common arguments one still hears against Darwin
were adequately countered in the book by Darwin himself in 1859.  
Since then, scientific observation and theory has come so far,
covered so much ground, gained so much validation, that myth-
driven critics of any culture would do better to spend more time
learning what we know now about the natural world than standing
with incredulity in the face of nature.
It's available at Project Gutenberg  in text and also as an audio file
set.
Review © Erik Moore, all rights reserved
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