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 HARRISEveryone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath–and the God of Nature too. If you can’t see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.
More Sam Harris Quotes
-
-
How we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.
SAM HARRIS -
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
SAM HARRIS -
I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
SAM HARRIS -
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
SAM HARRIS -
The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
SAM HARRIS -
The 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 HARRIS -
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
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 -
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 -
Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
SAM HARRIS -
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 -
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 -
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.
SAM HARRIS -
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
SAM HARRIS -
We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
SAM HARRIS