Sam Harris - The End of Faith (2004)

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The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests.

Sam Harris
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon-because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.

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

Sam Harris
We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas

Sam Harris
Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment.... And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good.... This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.

Sam Harris
And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful. Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm.

Sam Harris
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. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

Sam Harris
Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.

Sam Harris
How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

Sam Harris
The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.

Sam Harris
It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

Sam Harris
If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have... a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Sam Harris
Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

Sam Harris
It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potential.

Sam Harris
Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

Sam Harris
The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

Sam Harris
Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe

Sam Harris
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

Sam Harris
The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.

Sam Harris
We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?

Sam Harris
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

Sam Harris
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.

Sam Harris
A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings." And a little later in the book, he wrote: "Every belief is a fount of action in potentia.

Sam Harris