This character appears in 68 books.
-
The End of Faith
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
Memorable Quotes by Sam Harris:
“Secular Westerners often underestimate the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as they are in otherworldliness, look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly rational.”
“A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.”
“Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.”
“A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.”
“Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.”
“It is important to realize that a healthy, scientific skepticism is compatible with a fundamental openness of mind.”
“It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.”
“Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.”
“Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.”
“Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences.”
“It is natural to hope that our descendants will look upon us with gratitude. But we should also hope that they look upon us with pity and disgust, just as we view the slaveholders of our all-too-recent past.”
“The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest reason to believe that one exists.”
“The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.”
“Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence—that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of anything.”
““Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.””
“Although not a single leader of the Third Reich—not even Hitler himself—was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.”
“The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture.”
“It is clear that we have arrived at a period in our history where civil society, on a global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential for the maintenance of civilization.”
“IT is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others.”
“We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives.”
“People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.”
“The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love.The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece.”
“" It is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others. This impulse has less to do with the history of religion and more to do with its logic, because the very idea of privacy is incompatible with the existence of God. If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalized by certain sexual behaviors or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the slightest implication for their behavior in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith.”
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Letter from a Christian Citizen - A Response to "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris
by Douglas Wilson
Sam Harris: Atheist
Do you know another book that mentions this character?
To add a book to this page, search for it and add “Sam Harris” to its characters section.