The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
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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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.
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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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What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
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Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
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Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
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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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One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
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Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
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If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
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The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.
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Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
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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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It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
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How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
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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.
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