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Countries with high levels of atheism are . . . the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world.

Sam Harris

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Sam Harris
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 9
Author
Blogger
Neuroscientist
Philosopher
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LA
California
Samuel Benjamin Harris
Samuel Harris
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Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying-and one's ignorance at every stage so consequential-that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I have never experienced anything quite like it.
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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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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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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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When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.
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Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
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The second commandment is Thou shall not construct any graven images. Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?
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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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My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
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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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I think when you say to someone You are fool not to believe in evolution or a fool to believe the universe is 6000 years old. I think that gets translated as You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with god.
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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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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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Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
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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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When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious.
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The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.
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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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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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