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About this quote

What does it mean?
Many core religious beliefs resemble symptoms that would suggest mental illness in other contexts.
In plain terms
Religious beliefs can look like signs of mental illness.
What can you take from it?
Evaluate religious beliefs critically.

Where it applies

  • philosophy
  • psychology
  • faith debates

Putting it to work

  • assess origins
  • challenge dogmas
  • compare examples

Questions to consider

  • How are beliefs judged as mad?
  • Where is the line?

Another view

Most believers do not meet clinical criteria for illness.

More from Sam Harris

  1. It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is …

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  2. Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.[2]

    Permalink to quote #8
  3. The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.[2]

    Permalink to quote #9

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  2. Besides, God isn't dead / He's in your head / Right where he ought to be.

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  3. I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.

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