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We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

Sam Harris

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Sam Harris
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 9
Author
Blogger
Neuroscientist
Philosopher
Podcaster
Writer
LA
California
Samuel Benjamin Harris
Samuel Harris
Greatest
Extremism
Religious
Confronting
Rather
Larger
Religion
Cultural
Faith
Atheist
Problem
Merely
Made
Intellectual
Civilization
Accommodations

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One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
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Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them.
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Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.
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The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
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We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
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To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.
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Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.
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Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
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We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.
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As a man believes, so he will act.
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The most transformative experiences people have - bliss, devotion, self transcendence - are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.
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As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
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Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
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It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
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An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart smart people do not make mistakes therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).
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There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.
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Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
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[I]t 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.
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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.
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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.
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