Quote #13

We are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or history, or free to mean whatever we want when using words like 'poison' or 'north' or 'zero.'[2]

More from Sam Harris

  1. To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my…
  2. Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the worl…
  3. Beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.[2]
  4. Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.[2]
  5. A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life.[2]
  6. The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention-distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its cla…
  7. The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.[2]
  8. Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were pri…

All Sam Harris quotes