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

Sam Harris

You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRIS

Pretend Worth Yourself
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
Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
SAM HARRIS

Belief Faith Link Strong World
You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
SAM HARRIS

Decision Word Yourself
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
Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
SAM HARRIS

Conscious Freedom Ourselves Simplicity Thinking Willing
The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
SAM HARRIS

Death Philosophy Simplicity Truth
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
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
SAM HARRIS

Encouragement Fake Motivational Person Purpose
Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
SAM HARRIS

Difficult Endurance Faith Life Reason
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
SAM HARRIS

Knowledge Ourselves Reason Science
The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.
SAM HARRIS

Character Explanation Islam Truth Violence
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
Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker
SAM HARRIS

Born Eat Food God Heaven Virgin
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
George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
SAM HARRIS

Failure Religion

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

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

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