Sam Harris

Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?

In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.

According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

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__ 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__ doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).

The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.

I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I don__ wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences - but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature. There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality. You are, of course, right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure and contents of the universe. But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about its structure and contents any more respectable.

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic__n 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__ draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn__ do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system__earning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention__ay radically transform one__ life.

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.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheism' is a term that should not even exist. No one needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.

There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. If I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that.

There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. The way he talks about himself; if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of the in The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that. - Sam Harris

There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. The way he talks about himself; if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of the in The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as __piritual but not religious._ Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a __piritual practice,_ I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error.The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning __reath._ Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things __piritual_ to be contaminated by medieval superstition.I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any __piritual_ bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term__part from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative__ith which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

The realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.

Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can__ distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas__ike a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male __onor_ that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls__ou are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine. And, again, I have always emphasized that its primary victims are innocent Muslims__specially women and girls.