Theology is ignorance with wings.
SAM HARRISIt is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
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Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
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People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
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Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
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We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
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Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
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If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
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From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
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Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
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We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
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As a man believes, so he will act.
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I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
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The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
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The perpetrators of the Inquisition – the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions – were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God – popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
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You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
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Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
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The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.
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The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
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The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
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If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.
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Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
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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.
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What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
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Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.
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As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
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The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.
SAM HARRIS