Sam Harris Quotes on Faith
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It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
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The End of Faith (2004), page 225[2]
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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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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 world and to one another.[2]
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Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.[2]
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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.
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Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.[2]
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We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.[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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Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.[2]
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The God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.[2]
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It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.[2]
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By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
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There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.
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A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept.
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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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In this area of public policy alone, the accommodations that we have made to faith will do nothing but enshrine a perfect immensity of human suffering for decades to come.[2]
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All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts-of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener-inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below.[2]
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The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not 'cowards,' as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith-perfect faith, as it turns out-and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.[2]
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Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.[2]
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Mr. Harris argues cogently, pithily, wittily, passionately, that religious 'faith' is leading humanity straight to a very earthly hell.
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In your zeal to end the harms caused by religion, don't be driven by blind faith down a course of intolerance. Sam, in the name of reason, please turn back.