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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
Society
Skepticism
Faith
Suffered
History
Beliefs
Ever
Core
Human
Became
Humans
Evidence
People
Support
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Desirous

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Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
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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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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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In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
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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.
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It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we're not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.
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Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
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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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In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.
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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.
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The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
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If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
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Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.
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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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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.
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Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
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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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All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.
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Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem
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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
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