Sam Harris

“It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism". We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us.”

“The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.”

“The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable.”

“As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn't also happen to have the Qur'an.”

“The Bible … does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.”

“The dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.”
[Sam Harris, "The End of Liberalism?", Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2006.]

“No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs.”

“It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.”

“If religion were the only durable foundation for morality you would suspect atheists to be really badly behaved. You would go to a group like the National Academy of Sciences. These are the most elite scientists, 93 percent of whom reject the idea of God. You would expect these guys to be raping and killing and stealing with abandon.”

“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.”

“Let’s just grant the possibility that there is a Creator God, who’s omniscient, who occasionally authors books. And he’s gonna give us a book – the most useful book. He’s a loving God, he’s a compassionate God, and he’s gonna give us a guide to life. He’s got a scribe, the scribe’s gonna write it down. What’s gonna be in that book? I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity. I mean, there is not a single line in the Bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a first century person. There is not one reference to anything – there are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why. There’s nothing about electricity, there’s nothing about DNA, there’s nothing about infectious disease, the principles of infectious disease. There’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of iron age barbarism in there, and superstition. This is not a candidate book.”

“If God loves us and wanted to guide us with a book of morality, it’s very strange to have given us a book that supports slavery, that demands that we murder people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft. The true basis for hope in our world is open-ended conversation, and religion has shattered our world into competing moral comunities.”

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

“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.”

“If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.”

“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice.”

“Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

“Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective... The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?" is generally a scientific one.”

“Lying is the royal road to chaos...To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication...Every lie haunts our future.”

“Whatever its imagined virtues, faith is the enemy of open and honest inquiry. Remaining open to the powers of conversation - to new evidence and better arguments - is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.”

“If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?”

“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.”

“While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.”

“When children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parent's arms and drowned, we are told that god is mysterious. And I want to suggest to you it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith is really the perfection of narcissism. Given all that this god of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others. Given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. To think this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings.”

“Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about.”

[[Mr. Harris's quotes are included here for his excellent criticism of religious immorality. But, nobody is perfect -- we all occasionally speak some total nonsense. In his book, The Moral Landscape, Mr. Harris succumbs to a well known fallacy of modal logic when he contends that scientists can discover our moral obligations:
“The split between facts and values—and, therefore, between science and morality—is an illusion.”
H. Allen Orr:
“Of course science can help us reach some end once we’ve decided what that end is. That’s why we have medicine, engineering, economics, and all the other applied sciences in the first place. But this has nothing to do with blurring the is/ought distinction or overcoming traditional qualms about a science of morality. If you’ve decided that the ultimate value is living a long life (“one ought to live as long as possible”), medical science can help (“you ought to exercise”). But medical science can’t show that the ultimate value is living a long life. Much of The Moral Landscape is an extended exercise in confusing these two senses of ought.”
     H. Allen Orr
The New York Review of Books, “The Science of Right and Wrong,” MAY 12, 2011

Mr. Harris seems to think that the ultimate moral purpose is the infinite survival of the human race. To me this precept has almost no application for ordinary people who aren't politicians or World leaders.]]

A speech from a debate with William Lane Craig: (see the video)
   “Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell? Well, I’m told it’s rather hot there, for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now, happily, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Christian Hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.
   “Alright, nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture, an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004, that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. That’s 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. But according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God’s plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.
   “And worse than that, on Dr. Craig’s view, most of these people—–many of these people, certainly—–will be going to Hell because they’re praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation. There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr. Craig’s universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the Monkey God Hanuman, you are doomed. You’ll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, and Matthew 13, and Revelation 14.
   “So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. On the other hand, on Dr. Craig’s account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he’s going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death. One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.
   “And please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil. We’re told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good; but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people, of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that God is mysterious. “Who can understand God’s will?” and yet, this is precisely—this, this “merely human” understanding of God’s will, is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we’re told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents’ arms and drowned, we’re told that God is mysterious. This is how you play tennis without the net.
   “And I want to suggest to you, that it is not only tiresome when otherwise-intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith is really the perfection of narcissism. “God loves me, dontcha know. He, he cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church, and, and just when we had given up hope, we found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother’s mortgage.”
   “Given all the good—all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given, given the, the misery that’s being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings. And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes, like witchcraft. Now, of course, there is a way of not taking these questions to heart. According to Dr. Craig’s Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t have to be good. Whatever he commands is good, so when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.
   “Well here we’re being offered—I’m glad he raised the issue of psychopathy—we are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. But it is, it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings. This so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God’s will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they’re praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.
   “Now, I’m obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.
   “And, I’m not the first person to notice that it’s a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. If you lived 2,000 years ago, there was evidence galore, he was just performing miracles. But apparently, he got tired of being so helpful. And so now, we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine’s implausibility. And, the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all-too-human origins of Scripture becomes more and more difficult. And it’s not just the generic God that Dr. Craig is recommending; it is God the Father and Jesus the Son. Christianity, on Dr. Craig’s account, is the true moral wealth of the world.
   “Well, I hate to break it to you, here at Notre Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice. It is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” John 3:16. Okay, the idea is that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none need suffer Hell—except those billions in India, and billions like them throughout history. This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Just think about that. There, in vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes–—people like ourselves—–thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible. If there is a less moral, moral framework than the one Dr. Craig is proposing, I haven’t heard of it.”

“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.”

“This is a uni-directional conquest of territory; so you never see a point about which science was once the authority, but now the best answer is religious. But you always see the reverse of that.”

“Then there's the inconvenient fact that our religions allow for and support some of the most barbaric practices we have ever perpetrated on one another. Therefore the creator of the universe has failed to answer the easiest moral questions. In this case slavery. I mean slavery! Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy was right to say that slavery is supported in the Bible. There's just no question it is. There's no honest reading of the Bible that can say this is the most articulate condemnation of slavery ever written. It would take a paragraph to perfectly express what is wrong with slavery; and it's not in the Bible! God clearly expects us to keep slaves! So that, to my mind, should just end the argument about whether we get our, or should be getting our morality out of religion. Even fundamentalists have to edit the books. I mean you come to the Golden Rule and you say well this is truly wise; that's why I'm reading the Bible. But then you come to Something in Deuteronomy, like if a woman's not a virgin on her wedding night she must be stoned to death on her father's doorstep. Thee not every fundamentalist Christian and Orthodox Jew, and there are probably a few exceptions, but basically every sane one has figured out some way to ignore that. So what does that mean? That proves! That proves that the guarantor of the wisdom found in scripture is not in scripture! It's in us! It's in a larger conversation about what it constitutes to live a good life. We have a human conversation which has evolved over thousands of years of recorded history, and we can either locate ourselves in the 21st century, availing ourselves of all of the tools that we've acquired, all of the brilliant insights, some of which come from our religious traditions. But I think the golden rule is almost as good as we have as a moral algorithm. It's not original to Jesus but it's perhaps best expressed in the Bible. It captures our intuitions of what it is to be ethical in so many respects. And so, we can; one thing to point out is that how is it that we find wisdom in scripture? We find it based on our own ethical intuitions. I mean you go to the Bible, you read in Deuteronomy, it says, if your bride is not a virgin on on your wedding night you should stone her to death on her father's doorstep. You recognize that's, at best, the very least impractical, probably wrong, doesn't feel good. So you you flip the page and then you find something like the Beatitudes and that strikes you as, "ah this is the wisdom" of Christianity say that is something you are the guarantor of the morality you are finding in scripture!”


Sam Harris 2:06:54


Sam Harris videos on youTube