False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
SAM HARRISFalse encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
SAM HARRISThe fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
SAM HARRISThe 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 HARRISMan 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.
SAM HARRISReligious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.
SAM HARRISThe 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 HARRISIt is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
SAM HARRISChristians 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 HARRISReligious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
SAM HARRISThe habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell.
SAM HARRISThe science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.
SAM HARRISIt is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
SAM HARRISThe moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
SAM HARRISThe only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
SAM HARRISDespite 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 HARRISYou 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