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19ce9c1
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To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
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Sam Harris |
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193bdeb
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Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.
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Sam Harris |
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6a6cbc8
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Countries with high levels of atheism are also 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. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms' average employees: in Britai..
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Sam Harris |
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6f2430b
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Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.
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Sam Harris |
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58322f6
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it seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.
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Sam Harris |
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1fbe22b
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We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of better) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change?
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Sam Harris |
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5c1ee2c
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None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
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Sam Harris |
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fa268d9
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What one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life, and this is why faith-based religion, in presuming to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the hereafter, does such heavy lifting for those who fall under its power. A single proposition - you will not die - once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.
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Sam Harris |
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765c9a0
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Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians) and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a..
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Sam Harris |
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fc5c6a1
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While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.
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Sam Harris |
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114425c
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Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find..
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Sam Harris |
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3266ae5
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Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation. Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry.
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Sam Harris |
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59307e6
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And yet, the fact that we are no longer killing people for heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, however sacred, cannot survive the company of good ones forever.
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Sam Harris |
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7f4c7e3
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Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each.
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Sam Harris |
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f2b284b
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There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds--and lives--are largely shaped by how we use them.
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Sam Harris |
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bd22f9f
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How is it that, in this one area of our lives [religion], we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?
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Sam Harris |
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abedc5c
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a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
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Sam Harris |
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cc151c2
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A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoidedby following a single precept in life: Do not lie
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Sam Harris |
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e304fa0
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Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality--in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish--should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. D..
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Sam Harris |
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51c8470
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Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.
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Sam Harris |
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bfab067
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We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it
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Sam Harris |
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61f5359
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Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.
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Sam Harris |
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19347ba
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Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity-- birth, marriage, death--without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous ob..
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Sam Harris |
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1fdc40a
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Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.
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Sam Harris |
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516ce17
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You can do what you decide to do--but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
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Sam Harris |
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c1c25ae
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if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.
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Sam Harris |
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74501f2
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We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?
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Sam Harris |
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ad7ac79
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It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery--you just put in a few lines like "Don't take sex slaves!" and "When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don't rape any of them!" And yet God couldn't seem to manage it." --
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Sam Harris |
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c031bda
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The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still being besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically..
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religious-faith
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Sam Harris |
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953b474
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Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.
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Sam Harris |
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52e150b
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Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God.
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Sam Harris |
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ab1786c
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the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests13 but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children.14 It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother's life--even if the mother is a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins15--but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide.
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Sam Harris |
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26af213
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One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unneces..
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god
morality
religion
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Sam Harris |
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774967f
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There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell....
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Sam Harris |
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f76dcb3
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Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity -- a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
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Sam Harris |
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ba2ecb7
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While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its problems. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.
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Sam Harris |
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fc83254
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The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present.
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Sam Harris |
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8fdeb1d
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I'm not denying the importance of achieving one's goals, maintaining one's health, or keeping one's children clothed and fed--but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
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Sam Harris |
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e316d32
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It is always now.
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Sam Harris |
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1dfb2e3
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Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
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lying
truthfulness
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Sam Harris |
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05a67fe
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Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness.... We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.
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Sam Harris |
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eb019e9
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Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. 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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Sam Harris |
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8e7cac9
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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 the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty..
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love
mystery
reason
religion
spirituality
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Sam Harris |
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3706be3
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Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.
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Sam Harris |