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Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.

Sam Harris

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.
SAM HARRIS

Direction Human Perfection Religious Result Serious
Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker
SAM HARRIS

Born Eat Food God Heaven Virgin
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.
SAM HARRIS

Angry Confusion Depression Enjoyment Life Success Yourself
This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Ourselves Perfection Religion True
To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.
SAM HARRIS

Different Live Myself Simplicity Universe
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
It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
SAM HARRIS

Open Ourselves Time World
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
SAM HARRIS

Freedom Himself Love
It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
SAM HARRIS

Belief Difficult Heart Imagination Lying Mental Religious Tradition
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
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.
SAM HARRIS

Bad Ethics Evil Freedom God Philosophy Problem
As a man believes, so he will act.
SAM HARRIS

Act Believe Himself Man
The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
SAM HARRIS

Death Philosophy Simplicity Truth
Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Dangerous Ethics People Yourself
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
When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
SAM HARRIS

Honesty Imagination Integrity Intellectual Religion Standard Truth Yourself

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.

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Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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