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5f8fe4f
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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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Sam Harris |
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bfda08d
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If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.
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Sam Harris |
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d9aa299
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People of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. But, I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe.
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Sam Harris |
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6ad5790
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We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light's dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with it..
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Sam Harris |
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ad9d8f0
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The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time."
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Sam Harris |
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5b9c7d3
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Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibi..
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Sam Harris |
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56a5fbe
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It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.
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Sam Harris |
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0782a9c
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It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-minded way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts.
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Sam Harris |
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3a0224b
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One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.
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Sam Harris |
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b6be4fe
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This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed--however obliquely and at a terrible price--by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and co..
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Sam Harris |
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b6f54a9
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Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural l..
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Sam Harris |
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793ff1a
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The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained--as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of crosspollination among them.
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Sam Harris |
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c06dd0b
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Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. [...] By failing to live by the letter of the texts [scripture], while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
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Sam Harris |
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bee95af
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My choices matter--and there are paths towards making wiser ones--but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do--for instance, after going back between two options--I do not to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.
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Sam Harris |
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f944422
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A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.
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Sam Harris |
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4b58ede
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Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity.
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Sam Harris |
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bdc51ce
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Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.
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Sam Harris |
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56db2cb
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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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Sam Harris |
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efca4fb
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The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking."
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Sam Harris |
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db2e013
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The year was 1987, but it might as well have been the Summer of Love: I was twenty, had hair down to my shoulders, and was dressed like an Indian rickshaw driver. For those charged with enforcing our nation's drug laws, it would have been only prudent to subject my luggage to special scrutiny. Happily, I had nothing to hide. "Where are you coming from?" the officer asked, glancing skeptically at my backpack. "India, Nepal, Thailand..." I sa..
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Sam Harris |
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df620d2
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While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.
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Sam Harris |
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b0b8f90
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Losing a belief in free will has not made me a fatalist - in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn't draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn't do so on a basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past..
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Sam Harris |
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74178d2
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Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.
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Sam Harris |
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9f350ba
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we do our friends no favors by pretending not to notice flaws in their work, especially when those who are not their friends are bound to notice these same flaws.
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Sam Harris |
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9365ffa
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Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and ground for any experience we may wish to call "spiritual." No myth needs to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be..
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Sam Harris |
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a662e32
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Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer. And their discourse is such that they..
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Sam Harris |
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f9c2b76
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Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.
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Sam Harris |
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582c535
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It is time we realize that belief is not a private matter. As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels--and flying a plane into a building is only a matter of being asked to do it.
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Sam Harris |
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7d9eb6f
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One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one's own group are behaving like psychopaths.
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Sam Harris |
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ff688bf
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The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.
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Sam Harris |
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3c5da7f
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We are not self-caused little gods.
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Sam Harris |
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40777be
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It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion--to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources--is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity. Unfortunately, expressing such criticism p..
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Sam Harris |
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0a98969
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What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
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evolution
inheritance
natural-selection
science
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Sam Harris |
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079d7d3
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Each of us is looking for a path back to the present:
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Sam Harris |
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7be300d
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What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an "alternative" to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of "alternatives" to religious faith is to miss the point."
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Sam Harris |
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60f3904
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As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.
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Sam Harris |
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c61f0c4
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Why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to me. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.
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Sam Harris |
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5373167
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The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.
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Sam Harris |
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c830267
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Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this "terrorism"), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this "collateral damage"). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or state..
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collateral-damage
moral-equivalence
noam-chomsky
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Sam Harris |
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ada84af
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Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.
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Sam Harris |
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6d9e21b
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When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives--about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.
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Sam Harris |
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d1d588c
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How to Meditate 1. Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion. 2. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting--feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc. 3. Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distin..
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Sam Harris |
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f939ec6
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There is nothing novel about trying to become happy. And one can become happy, within certain limits, without any recourse to the practice of meditation. But conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute..
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Sam Harris |
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e05b882
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Every moment of the day--indeed, every moment throughout one's life--offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.
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Sam Harris |