The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
SAM HARRISIt is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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Theology is ignorance with wings.
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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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Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
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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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Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
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We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
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We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
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Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
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A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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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.
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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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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.
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An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).
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When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.
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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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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.
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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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Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
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False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
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Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I’m simply worried.
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It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
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The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
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We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
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Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.
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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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