Harris, Sam (born 1967), American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist
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.
Much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman.
A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.
Beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.
The problem with faith is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.
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.
Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It’s the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, “there’s nothing that you can do to change my mind and I’m taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe.”There’s nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.”
Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.
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.
Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.
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.
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.”
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.
Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.
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.
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.
The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man.
The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopaedic 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.
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.
It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.
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.
The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breath-taking example of emerging technology.
Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it.
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.
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.
The Bible … does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.
Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.
The Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions—jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate.
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.
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.
Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.
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.
The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviourally.
According to Zakaria, ‘if there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.’ Perhaps. But ‘the rise of Islamic fundamentalism’ is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem. A rise of Jain fundamentalism would endanger no one. In fact, the uncontrollable spread of Jainism throughout the world would improve our situation immensely. We would lose more of our crops to pests, perhaps (observant Jains generally will not kill anything, including insects), but we would not find ourselves surrounded by suicidal terrorists or by a civilization that widely condones their actions.
The God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world.
Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.
As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword.
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.
What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?
There are other ideologies with which to expunge the last vapours of reasonableness from a society’s discourse, but Islam is undoubtedly one of the best we’ve got.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently—though isn’t it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development.
