You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
SAM HARRISDespite 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.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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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.
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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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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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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
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Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow ones own advice.
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The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
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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.
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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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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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Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
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An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).
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The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
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Theology is ignorance with wings.
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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
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Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.
SAM HARRIS