Sam Harris Quotes on Belief
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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 demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.[2]
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It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.[2]
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The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.[2]
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A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life.[2]
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Beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.[2]
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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 belief.[2]
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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]
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Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.[2]
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It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.[2]
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Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial-at once full of hope and full of fear-of the vastitude of human ignorance.[2]
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Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.[2]
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Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it.[2]
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How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.[2]
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[M]uch of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman.[2]
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Jesus Christ-who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens-can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.[2]
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Mormonism, it seems to me, is-objectively-just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas.
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There are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison.
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[T]he very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
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The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
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Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan.
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120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
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Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.[2]
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Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society.[2]
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If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science. That will be the science of Christianity.
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Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land-specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon's temple-will usher in both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.[2]
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We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia-because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.[2]
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It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically.
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Spirituality can be-indeed, must be-deeply rational.[2]