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Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

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
Product
Atheism
Products
Ignorance
Religious
Scriptural
Knowledge
Moderation
Secular
Atheist

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The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
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What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
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Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.
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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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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.
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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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You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
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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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The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
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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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How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
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When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
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It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.
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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.
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You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
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A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
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It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
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People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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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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