This idea that without religion something fundamental would be lost to us in moral terms – this really is questionable. ibid.
No-one ever says this is immoral. ibid.
You have effectively immunised yourself against the power of human conversation. ibid.
We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘psychotic’ or ’delusional’. Sam Harris, The End of Faith
The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. ibid.
This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed – however obliquely and at a terrible price – by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfil. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions – Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God – for us to do this. ibid.
The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention – distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence – is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible. ibid.
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. ibid.
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 Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral – that is, when pressing these concerns inflict unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more ‘moral’ energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. ibid.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more that the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. ibid.
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
A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Sam Harris
Every one of the world’s ‘great’ religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain – from cosmology to psychology to economics – has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Sam Harris
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. Sam Harris
This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favourite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: on its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine. Sam Harris
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavour in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn’t perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point – these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by – what, religion? No, by good science. Sam Harris
Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and Animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades. Sam Harris
Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavour in which ‘Us v Them’ thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics. Sam Harris
All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty – and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally. Sam Harris
America is now a nation of 300 million souls ... 240 million of these souls believe that Jesus is going to return and orchestrate the end of human history with his magic powers. Sam Harris, lecture AAI 2007
Atheism would seem to be the only sensible position. ibid.
Our use of the term atheism is a mistake and it’s a mistake of some consequence ... It is a word we fundamentally do not need ... Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities especially when the thing you are naming isn’t a thing at all ... It is not a philosophy ... It is not a worldview ... We are collaborating in this misunderstanding ... We are consenting to be thought of as a marginal interest group ... We should not call ourselves atheists. We should not call ourselves secularists. ibid.
Religion has more than its fair share of bad ideas. ibid.
Religion ... is the only form of thinking in which bad ideas are held in perpetual immunity from criticism. ibid.
We should simply advocate intellectual honesty and reason. ibid.
These differences are actually a matter between life and death. ibid.
Atheism is too blunt an instrument. ibid.
Religion is the most device and dangerous ideology that we have ever produced. What’s more, it’s the only ideology that is systematically protected from criticism both from within and without. It remains taboo. Sam Harris, lecture Aspen Ideas Festival 2007, ‘Believing the Unbelievable’
Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with twentieth-century efficiency. ibid.
Religion: they can’t all be true. ibid.
People who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes. ibid.
Religion gives people bad reasons to be good. ibid.
Religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes towards women. ibid.
The basic claim that we get our morality from religion is clearly false. ibid.
The guarantor of our morality is in our brains. ibid.
Atheism is a term we do not need. ibid.