If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
SAM HARRISAs an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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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.
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The core of science is not a mathematical modeling–it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
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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?
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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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Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
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We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
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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.
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Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
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Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I’m simply worried.
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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.
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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.
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It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potential.
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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.
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How we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.
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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.
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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.
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I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
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You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.
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Theology is ignorance with wings.
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Everyone 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.
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The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
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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.
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Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
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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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It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
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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