On April 17,
I wrote that it might be time for me to re-read Chapter 7 of
The End of Faith. Today I'm finally doing it. If I understand William Pennell Rock's position on the question whether Jesus actually existed, then his and Sam Harris's views seem quite similar. Says Harris at the outset of his chapter, "Experiments in Consciousness":
At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one's experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work, we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.
The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason. Take Christianity as an example: it is not enough that Jesus was a man who transformed himself to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart's confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory. The effect of such dogma is to place the example of Jesus forever out of reach. His teaching ceases to be a set of empirical claims about the linkage between ethics and spiritual insight and instead becomes a gratuitous, and rather gruesome, fairy tale. According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. One can only enumerate one's sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.
But a more profound response to existence is possible for us, and the testimony of Jesus, as well as that of countless other men and women over the ages, attests to this. The challenge for us is to begin talking about this possibility in rational terms. [p. 204]
In his erotic way, Frank Harris attested to it in
the passage I quoted from his memoir the other day. And more than once in the two hundred pages of
My Life and Loves that I have read so far, he regrets that men made a religion of Jesus's teachings rather than simply followed them.
