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An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

Sam Harris

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.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Build Heaven Intellectual Person
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

Believe Deep Entertainment Ethics Live Spiritual
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
What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
SAM HARRIS

Belief Live Ourselves Place Reason Religion Respect
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
SAM HARRIS

Argument Civilization Production Representation Tradition
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.
SAM HARRIS

Belief Believe Difference God Impossible Name Respect Right Suffering
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

Choice Conversation Faith Human Option Violence
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Live Philosophy Principle Unfortunate World
You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRIS

Pretend Worth Yourself
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.
SAM HARRIS

Action God Information Man Oneself Torture
Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Better Conversation Space
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
SAM HARRIS

Friendship Love Oneself Person Suffering Time World
We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
SAM HARRIS

Ourselves Prison Thinking
Despite 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 HARRIS

Believe Creation Earth Invention Science
An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
SAM HARRIS

Arrogance Church
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
SAM HARRIS

Intellectual Public Reason Science Time
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
SAM HARRIS

Knowledge Ourselves Reason Science
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Noise Reason Religion
As a man believes, so he will act.
SAM HARRIS

Act Believe Himself Man
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.
SAM HARRIS

Alone Believe Criticism People Problem Religion
Theology is ignorance with wings.
SAM HARRIS

Ignorance One Liner Wings
Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.
SAM HARRIS

Achievement Fact Faith Fake Religious Uncertain
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
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 HARRIS

Abandonment Desert Ethics Question
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.
SAM HARRIS

Boundary Human Ourselves Politics Science Thinking Transcendence
If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
SAM HARRIS

Sex Victim
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
SAM HARRIS

Goodness Imporatant Lose World Worry

An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

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An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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