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I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

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
History
Beliefs
Ever
Core
Human
Became
Humans
Evidence
People
Support
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Desirous
Society
Skepticism
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How we pay attention to the present moment...determin es the character of our experience and...the quality of our lives.
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You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
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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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We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
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Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
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False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
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The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
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Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God.
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It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
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What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
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The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not cowards, as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
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We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
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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.
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It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes.
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Meditation puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness - a more refined version of the problem you already have.
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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
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Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.
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It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
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Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot?
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What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
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