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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.

Sam Harris

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.
SAM HARRIS

Health Moral Science Social
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

Habit Mercy Moments Ourselves Wake Up
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.
SAM HARRIS

Current Hold Holy Thinking
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
Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.
SAM HARRIS

God Ourselves Word World
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

Abusive God Kill People Name Oppression Reading
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
The 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 HARRIS

Collaboration End Evidence Human Open Ourselves Security World
The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
SAM HARRIS

Death Philosophy Simplicity Truth
Man 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 HARRIS

Man Measurement Miracle Mystery Name Worth
How we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.
SAM HARRIS

Attention Live Moments Ourselves Pay Present Quality
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
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
SAM HARRIS

Faith Ourselves People Reason Religious Time
The power of psychedelics is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.
SAM HARRIS

Life Power Reveal Science Time Understand
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
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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