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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

Sam Harris

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Ourselves Perfection Religion True
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?
SAM HARRIS

Goodness Imporatant Lose World Worry
The perpetrators of the Inquisition – the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions – were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God – popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
SAM HARRIS

Action God Information Man Oneself Torture
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.
SAM HARRIS

Health Moral Science Social
Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance.
SAM HARRIS

Freedom Learning Limitation Society Tolerance
When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
SAM HARRIS

Honesty Imagination Integrity Intellectual Religion Standard Truth Yourself
The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
SAM HARRIS

Bad Ethics Evil Freedom God Philosophy Problem
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Live Philosophy Principle Unfortunate World
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
SAM HARRIS

Difference Goodness Natural Ourselves Reminder
Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
SAM HARRIS

Bad Born Ideas Mom Moments Religion
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
SAM HARRIS

Friendship Love Oneself Person Suffering Time World
Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
SAM HARRIS

Belief Faith Link Strong World
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.
SAM HARRIS

Argument Change Happiness Privacy Yourself
An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
SAM HARRIS

Arrogance Church
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
SAM HARRIS

Ignorance Knowledge Production Religious Scripture Secularism
Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
SAM HARRIS

Creature Fact Reduce Value

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

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