Chapter Eleven: Religion Is a Team Sport Summary and Analysis

When college students have tailgate parties, get drunk and attend football games to cheer their teams on to victory, they are not really rooting for the team. Their aim is to gain a feeling of community. Durkheim defines religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things which unite into a single moral community. The attacks of 9/11 fostered a lot of distrust about the Islamic religion and ultimately about religion in general. Some felt that religion created delusions that kept people from the realities of science and modernity. In his book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris criticizes faith because belief moves everything else in a person's life. It can make a faithful person bomb a building in...