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Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.

Sam Harris

You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRIS

Pretend Worth Yourself
The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
SAM HARRIS

Argument Difference Evidence Passionate Willing
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
SAM HARRIS

Argument Civilization Production Representation Tradition
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Noise Reason Religion
The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
SAM HARRIS

Freedom Hide Kill Lost Thinking
What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Deep Entertainment Ethics Live Spiritual
Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
SAM HARRIS

Conscious Freedom Ourselves Simplicity Thinking Willing
You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.
SAM HARRIS

Argument Change Happiness Privacy Yourself
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
SAM HARRIS

Intellectual Public Reason Science Time
The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
SAM HARRIS

Alone Believe Criticism People Problem Religion
When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that? God is mysterious.
SAM HARRIS

Cruelty Evidence God Innocent Mystery Suffering Visit
In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Build Heaven Intellectual Person
Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
SAM HARRIS

Difficult Endurance Faith Life Reason
If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
SAM HARRIS

Sex Victim
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
SAM HARRIS

Goodness Imporatant Lose World Worry
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Creation Earth Invention Science

Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.

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Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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