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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. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

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
United
Degrees
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School
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Evolution
Belly
States
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Federal
Lumbering
Government
Ignorance
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Ascendant
Believe
Americans
Satan
Unreason
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Percent
Schools
Superpower
Head
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Concentrated

More quotes by Sam Harris

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As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
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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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Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem
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Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
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The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.
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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.
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You don't get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don't know.
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An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
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Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
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Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
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Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
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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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[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
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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.
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Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
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We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas
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Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.
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The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
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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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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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