If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
SAM HARRISIf premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
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.
SAM HARRISIt 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 HARRISAn 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).
SAM HARRISWe will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
SAM HARRISIt 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.
SAM HARRISYou can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
SAM HARRISWords like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.
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 HARRISFalse encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
SAM HARRISFrom my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
SAM HARRISWhat we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
SAM HARRISAtheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
SAM HARRISAtheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
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 HARRISTheology is ignorance with wings.
SAM HARRIS