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We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.

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
Atheism
Evidence
Sensory
Faith
Context
Logical
Rely
Sufficient
Atheist
Claims

More quotes by Sam Harris

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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 is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska.
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We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
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There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.
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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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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?
Sam Harris
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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.
Sam Harris
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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.
Sam Harris
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Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.
Sam Harris
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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.
Sam Harris
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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
Sam Harris
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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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We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).
Sam Harris
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You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
Sam Harris
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The fact that one can lose one's sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one's consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe.
Sam Harris
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Hope is easy knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.
Sam Harris
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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.
Sam Harris
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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
Sam Harris
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I consistently encounter people in academic settings and scientists and journalists who feel that you can't say that anyone is wrong in any deep sense about morality, or with regard to what they value in life. I think this doubt about the application of science and reason to questions of value is really quite dangerous.
Sam Harris
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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.
Sam Harris