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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.

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
Universe
Morality
Experience
Minds
Facts
Conscious
Form
Depends
Wells
Existence
Specifically
Well
Suffering
Depend
Mind
Values
Forms
Fact
Various

More quotes by Sam Harris

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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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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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It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.
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This is how you play tennis without the net
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As a man believes, so he will act.
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There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.
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It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
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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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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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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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It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).
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We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.
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If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.
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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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The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
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If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
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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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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).
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The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
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From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
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