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 HARRISGeorge 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 HARRISScience, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
SAM HARRISAtheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
SAM HARRISWhen someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that? God is mysterious.
SAM HARRISThe 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 HARRISYou don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRISOne could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
SAM HARRISWe are all prisoners of our thoughts.
SAM HARRISIt’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
SAM HARRISThe difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
SAM HARRISThe 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.
SAM HARRISReligious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
SAM HARRISUnlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
SAM HARRISYou 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.
SAM HARRISYou are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
SAM HARRISThe 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.
SAM HARRIS