41 Sam Harris Quotes on Religion

Sam Harris quotes on religion

5. The End of Faith (2004), page 225[2]

6. 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]

7. 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]

8. 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]

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

12. 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]

21. It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.[2]

22. The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained.... Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.

24. 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]

25. 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]

27. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it.[2]

29. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews. They're making incompatible claims on real estate in the Middle East as though God were some kind of omniscient real estate broker parsing out parcels of land to his chosen flock. People are literally dying over ancient literature.

31. A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.[2]

36. Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal,' or they will unmake our world.

38. Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.[2]

40. The penalty for apostasy is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest.[2]

41. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?[2]

42. [M]uch of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman.[2]

46. We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.

49. 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.

51. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.[2]

52. Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.

54. There are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison.

56. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it.

58. I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, 'You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.'

60. 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]

68. 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.

70. 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.

71. 'Science Must Destroy Religion' (2006)[11]

72. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan.

73. 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

75. 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]

79. The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.

87. A significant percentage of the world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God.[2]

88. 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.

89. 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]

90. Millions of Christians and Muslims now organize their lives around prophetic traditions that will only find fulfillment once rivers of blood begin flowing from Jerusalem.[2]

91. 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]

92. 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.

100. 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.

102. The End of Faith is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land.