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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. By Sam Harris Time Realize Belief Private Matter

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience - self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light - constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work. By Sam Harris Christian Muslim Ecstasy Bliss Hindu

Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition - and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. Prophecy is also a very strong indication of chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students. One can extrapolate from scientific data or technological trends (climate models, Moore's law), but most detailed predictions about the future lead to embarrassment right on schedule. By Sam Harris Clear Worth Paying Attention Gurdjieff

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic - 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 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 - learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention - may radically transform one's life. By Sam Harris Losing Fatalistic Fact Freedom Belief

It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been "hijacked" by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet. By Sam Harris War Hijacked Extremists Peaceful Religion

Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one's thoughts and feelings can - paradoxically - allow for greater creative control over one's life. It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bit of food may be all that your personality requires. Getting behind our concious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered). By Sam Harris Paradoxically Life Feelings Sensitive Background

have never come across a coherent notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable that did not depend upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures. It is not always easy to nail down what we mean by "good" and "bad" - and their definitions may remain perpetually open to revision - but such judgments seem to require, in every instance, that some difference register at the level of experience. Why would it be wrong to murder a billion human beings? Because so much pain and suffering would result. Why would it be wrong to painlessly kill every man, woman, and child in their sleep? Because of all the possibilities for future happiness that would be foreclosed. If you think such actions are wrong primarily because they would anger God or would lead to your punishment after death, you are still worried about perturbations of consciousness - albeit ones that stand a good chance of being wholly imaginary. By Sam Harris Wrong Good Desirable Creatures Bad

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. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages - but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out. By Sam Harris Search Spend Time Seeking Happiness

Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs. By Sam Harris Area Religious Noble Change World

Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal. By Sam Harris Buddhism Western Basic Human Sanity

Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. "Islamophobia" is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it. By Sam Harris Critiquing Islam Bigotry Islamophobia Idea

We Muslims must get used to the fact that people will criticize our religion, just as we criticize everyone else's religion for not being "true." Some people will choose to leave the faith, and we Muslims will need to come to terms with this, and to understand how to treat ex-Muslims not just with civility but with the utmost respect. Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. "Islamophobia" is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it. So I'm not one to try to avoid these issues. We have to address them head-on. By Sam Harris Muslims Criticize Religion Islam People

The promise of spiritual life - indeed, the very thing that makes it "spiritual" in the sense I invoke throughout this book - is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are. By Sam Harris Spiritual Life Book Knowing Promise

Not even in the right ballpark"? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. By Sam Harris Ballpark Dmt Ball Experience Sounds

Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious. By Sam Harris Religious Life Ideas Good Evil

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling "I," and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness - free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents. By Sam Harris Experience Free Undivided Consciousness Calling

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime - as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day - but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe By Sam Harris Islamists Needless Crime Day Unthinkable

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people. By Sam Harris Chance Life Fail Connect Constantly

We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. By Sam Harris Reasons Beliefs Respect People Evaluate

It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution. By Sam Harris Bible Worth Noting Obtain Branch

If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them2 - and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking By Sam Harris Responsibilities Law Position Affect Happiness

In my experience, some Dzogchen masters are better teachers than others. I have been in the presence of several of the most revered Tibetan lamas of our time while they were ostensibly teaching Dzogchen, and most of them simply described this view of consciousness without giving clear instructions on how to glimpse it. The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self. There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available - and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. By Sam Harris Dzogchen Tulku Urgyen Masters Teachers

It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It's not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different.11 But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth - overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain - and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. By Sam Harris Matter Happy Truth True Trite

Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance. By Sam Harris Muslims Societies Tolerance Learn Make

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. By Sam Harris Earth Ago Thousand Years Full

Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them. By Sam Harris Unacceptable Death Die World Astonishing

For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religionthat great engine of ignorance and bigotrya nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on early spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools. By Sam Harris Moral Century Wisdom Relativism Science

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence. By Sam Harris Evidence Faith Religion Belief Insufficient

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence. By Sam Harris Problem Tonight Belief Talk Personally

The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation. By Sam Harris Thing Guarantees Openended Conversation Collaboration

To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is Islam. By Sam Harris Muslim Religion World Civilizations Euphemisms

The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be "fundamental-ist" in the Western sense of the word - in that even "moderate"approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal andinerrant word of the one true God. The difference between funda-mentalists and moderates - and certainly the difference between all"extremists" and moderates - is the degree to which they see politicaland military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith. In anycase, people who believe that Islam must inform every dimension ofhuman existence, including politics and law, are now generally callednot "fundamentalists" or "extremists" but, rather, "Islamists. By Sam Harris God Word Moderates Muslims Western

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 responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23,2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. By Sam Harris Men Motives Soul Conscious Atom

In such cases, each hemisphere might well have its own beliefs. Consider what this says about the dogma - widely held under Christianity and Islam - that a person's salvation depends upon her believing the right doctrine about God. If a split-brain patient's left hemisphere accepts the divinity of Jesus, but the right doesn't, are we to imagine that she now harbors two immortal souls, one destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity in hellfire? By Sam Harris Cases Beliefs Hemisphere Islam God

In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief - but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy. By Sam Harris God Case Notions Relief Supremacy

Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. By Sam Harris Soul Remains Psychopath Human Harbors

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin - which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us. Viewing By Sam Harris Influences Ranging Systems Concepts Offered

The writers of Luke and Matthew, for instance, in seeking to make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy, insist that Mary conceived as a virgin (Greek parthenos), harking to the Greek rendering of Isaiah 7:14. Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary's virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means "young woman," without any implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church's resulting anxiety about sex, was the By Sam Harris Greek Matthew Mary Luke Jesus

Psychopaths can assume the burden of mental accounting without any obvious distress. That is no accident: They are psychopaths. They do not care about others and are quite happy to sever relationships whenever the need arises. Some people are monsters of egocentricity. But lying unquestionably comes at a psychological cost for the rest of us. By Sam Harris Distress Psychopaths Assume Burden Mental

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 to society in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills - and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these ways - except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren't good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the stress of life continues. By Sam Harris Happy Happiness Wrong Day Limits

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 and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. By Sam Harris Mystery Universe Shot Fact Absolute

What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life - the only life of which any of us can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidels. We should not teach our sons to consider women their future property or convince our daughters that they are property even now. And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest. By Sam Harris Life Meaning Bloody Children Magic

Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain from cosmology to psychology to economics has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. By Sam Harris Great World Cosmos Utterly Trivializes

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. By Sam Harris Christian Muslim Discourse Conversation Render

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all - and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors - such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia - that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I'm wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us? By Sam Harris Harris Trivers Fact Selfdeception Paid

In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering. By Sam Harris East Buddhism Suffering Contemplative Traditions

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad ... To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone. By Sam Harris United States Abroad Add Doubt

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. By Sam Harris God Unjust Psychopath Points Obvious

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse - constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. However By Sam Harris Civility Faith Discourse Reasonableness Internal

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. By Sam Harris Reasons Faith Lost Connection World

Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self - the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience - is an illusion. 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. Consider By Sam Harris Sense Long Meditation Experience Illusion

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. By Sam Harris Man Things Manifestly Measure Mystery

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 obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world. By Sam Harris Preposterous Time Learned Meet Emotional

Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply. By Sam Harris Human Phenomenon Random Wellbeing Factors

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. By Sam Harris God Wanted Written Books Secular

I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. By Sam Harris Ted Bundy Theory String

The truth, however, is that the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. By Sam Harris Science Truth Unavoidable Expense Religious

I have a friend who is a very successful writer. Early in his career, he wrote a script that I thought was terrible, and I told him so. That was not easy to do, because he had spent the better part of a year working on it - but it was the truth (as I saw it). Now, when I tell him that I love something he has written, he knows that I love it. He also knows that I respect his talent enough to tell him when I don't. I am sure there are people in his life he can't say that about. Why would I want to be one of them? Secrets By Sam Harris Writer Friend Successful Love Early

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else - not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness - one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. By Sam Harris Reading Time Speaking Writing Effort

In my experience with print journalists, the distinction between remarks being uttered on- or off-the-record is held sacrosanct, but the distinction between truth and falsity sometimes isn't. By Sam Harris Distinction Journalists Sacrosanct Experience Print

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility. By Sam Harris Substitute Functions Wisdom Concept Wins

The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment - the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists - perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein - you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found - and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears. By Sam Harris Moment Experience Body Head Vehicle

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. By Sam Harris Moment Attention Largely Question Determines

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do. By Sam Harris Positive Social Emotions Compassion Empathy

The bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself - not Islamism - is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities. By Sam Harris Islamist Variety Bigots Essentially Matters

By lying, we deny our friends access to reality9 - and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information. Rather often, to lie is to infringe on the freedom of those we care about. By Sam Harris Lying Anticipate Friends Deny Access

I want to be clear that when I used terms such as "pretense" and "intellectual dishonesty" when we first met, I wasn't casting judgment on you personally. Simply living with the moderate's dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I'm not such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interests of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it's an excruciating problem for Muslims. By Sam Harris Pretense Dishonesty Met Personally Clear

A review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders. Unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with increased subjective well-being.13 By Sam Harris Depression Neuroticism Health Function Blood

Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of His plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence ofGod,they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event only strengthened their faith in God. By Sam Harris Nature Katrina Advance Imagery Warning

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have ... a recipe for the fall of civilization. By Sam Harris Truth History Reveals Categorical Insufficient

The reality that the West currently enjoys far more wealth and temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical perversity, and this situation will always stand as an open invitation for jihad. Insofar as a person is Muslim - that is, insofar as he believes that Islam constitutes the only viable path to God and that the Koran enunciates it perfectly - he will feel contempt for any man or woman who doubts the truth of his beliefs. What is more, he will feel that the eternal happiness of his children is put in peril by the mere presence of such unbelievers in the world. If such people happen to be making the policies under which he and his children must live, the potential for violence imposed by his beliefs seems unlikely to dissipate. By Sam Harris Islam West Perversity Jihad Muslims

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. By Sam Harris Vatican Reich Mother Raping Life

The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today. Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suicidal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad's flying to heaven on a winged horse.35 By Sam Harris Israelis Nazis Muslim Restraint Jews

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime - by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? By Sam Harris Occur Birth Context Decision Pick

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse. By Sam Harris Lucky Liberals Success Tend Understand

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. By Sam Harris Education World Fast Succumbing Activities

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y. By Sam Harris Christianity Judaism Islam Buddhism Unlike

People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs - that is, the more a person's well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people's opinions - the more consequential the lie. By Sam Harris True People Lie Beliefs Consequential

The difference between killing one man and killing a thousand just doesn't seem as salient to us as it should. And, as Glover observes, in many cases we will find the former far more disturbing. Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world. By Sam Harris Killing Difference Man Thousand Salient

Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified, in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death? By Sam Harris Disease Gratified Difficulties Pain Age

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. By Sam Harris Facts Time Recognized Thing Permits

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. By Sam Harris Creator Admitted Universe Time Kings

We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude ... it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s - can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.Now, I'm obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. By Sam Harris God Psychopathic Attitude Craig Offered

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we've been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars - deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields - who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. By Sam Harris Muslim Islamic Correctness Public Conversation

On some occasions the only people making accurate claims about the motivations of Islamists and jihadists are themselves dangerous bigots. That's terrifying. By Sam Harris Islamists Bigots Occasions People Making

Perhaps one day we will do "everything that we can to protect our people and the timeless values that we stand for." But today, we won't even honestly describe the motivations of our enemies. And in the act of lying to ourselves, we continue to pay lip service to the very delusions that empower them. By Sam Harris Day Protect People Timeless Stand

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. By Sam Harris God Ideas Criticizing Person Afterlife

While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a "symbolic" reading of passages of this sort. [ ... ] it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for "moderation" in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law. By Sam Harris Christian Jew Symbolic Country Reading

Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself. By Sam Harris Life System Justice Reflect Understanding

Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences - the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they're going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion. By Sam Harris Experiences Parent Instance Death Story

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever. By Sam Harris Christian Require Invisible Evidence Devout

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. Dogmatism By Sam Harris Open Arguments Established Understand World

That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else. By Sam Harris Aware Sad Sadness Fearful Fear

A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying. By Sam Harris Elvis Person Society Alive Promoted

No doubt, most Muslims are horrified by this, but the truth is that in the very week that the Islamic State was taking its barbarism to new heights, we saw a much larger outcry in the Muslim world over the killing of three college students in North Carolina, amid circumstances that made it very likely to have been an ordinary triple murder (as opposed to a hate crime indicating some wave of anti-Muslim bigotry in the US). This By Sam Harris Carolina Islamic State North Muslims

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 coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions - Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God - for us to do this. By Sam Harris Faithful Extreme Misguided Deepest Concerns

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.The only sense to make of tragedies like this is that terrible things can happen to perfectly innocent people. This understanding inspires compassion.Religious faith, on the other hand, erodes compassion. Thoughts like, 'this might be all part of God's plan,' or 'there are no accidents in life,' or 'everyone on some level gets what he or she deserves' - these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break at moments like this. By Sam Harris God Exist Stop Catastrophes Care

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. By Sam Harris Goals Maintaining Health Fed Search

Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.*3 And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz, By Sam Harris Jews Holocaust Christianity Nazi Antisemitism

There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. By Sam Harris Mindfulness Spooky Nonjudgmental Clear Consciousness

The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as "mindfulness," and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.12 By Sam Harris Mindfulness Substantial Cultivated Vipassana Referred

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. By Sam Harris Babylonians Sumerians Million Bang Years

About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity. By Sam Harris Babylonians Sumerians Million Bang Years

While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane. By Sam Harris God Considered Area Strongly Evidence

You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults - and even to discourage your own sons and daughters from having premarital sex - are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering. By Sam Harris Sex Immensity Morality Religious Concerns

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 Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle. By Sam Harris Percentage Christian Social Countries World

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos. By Sam Harris Unhappy Behave Guaranteed Make Regret

It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world. By Sam Harris Christians Opened Century World Portal

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship. By Sam Harris Lying Definition Refusal Cooperate Act

In the face of God's obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This argument loses its force the moment we notice that the Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions - jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow - capricious, petulant, and cruel - and one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness. If these are the characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created far more in his image than we ever could have hoped. By Sam Harris Creator God Inadequacies Universe Face

Despite how impressive many of my teachers were, they were undoubtedly human and susceptible to the same cultural biases and physical infirmities that define the lives of ordinary people. By Sam Harris People Impressive Teachers Undoubtedly Human

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. By Sam Harris Unlike Fact Part Lies Reality

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. By Sam Harris Pakistan India Million People Died

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality. By Sam Harris Relate Level Creatures Morality Wellbeing

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty - and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally. By Sam Harris Ideas Thrive Entertained Honesty Arguing

Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. By Sam Harris Happiness Suffering Extreme Events Mental

As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another? By Sam Harris Violence Reasonable Conversation Human Live

As a parent, it's my responsibility to equip my child to do this - to grieve when grief is necessary and to realize that life is still profoundly beautiful and worth living despite the fact that we inevitably lose one another and that life ends, and we don't know what happens after death. By Sam Harris Life Parent Ends Death Responsibility

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. By Sam Harris Goldstein Joseph Likens Wall Friend

Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention. By Sam Harris Faith Rhinoceros Fact Attention Real

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. By Sam Harris Lives Reputations World Presume Lie

You are not in control of your mind - because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. By Sam Harris Mind Agent Living Control Conscious

The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. By Sam Harris Reality Life Liberating Fact World

The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law, distinct from "a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system" (United States v. Grayson, 1978). By Sam Harris Supreme United Grayson Court States

The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves. By Sam Harris Past Paradox Wiser Compassionate Fulfilling

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs. By Sam Harris Beliefs Society Human History Suffered

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. By Sam Harris Revised Predecessors Religions Offer Valid

It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. By Sam Harris Orleans Hurricane Omniscient Katrina God

Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as wellby your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. By Sam Harris Muslim Nonbelievers Living Dumbstruck Stand

The all-or-nothing quality of Poonja-ji's teaching obliged him to acknowledge the full enlightenment of any person who was grandiose or manic enough to claim it. Thus, I repeatedly witnessed fellow students declare their complete and undying freedom, all the while appearing quite ordinary - or worse. In certain cases, these people had clearly had some sort of breakthrough, but Poonja-ji's insistence upon the finality of every legitimate insight led many of them to delude themselves about their spiritual attainments. Some left India and became gurus. From what I could tell, Poonja-ji gave everyone his blessing to spread his teachings in this way. By Sam Harris Poonjaji Quality Obliged Acknowledge Full

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next. By Sam Harris People Societies Power Harbor Strong

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 states, could not be more distinct ... For Chomsky, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all. By Sam Harris Call Child Terrorism Kill Chomsky

A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. By Sam Harris Religion Ethical Behavior Happiness Spiritual

Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of scripture is more accurate than God's literal words. Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. 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. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth. By Sam Harris God Conversely Words Moderate Interpretation

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery. By Sam Harris Events World Misery Wellbeing Depends

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? By Sam Harris Wanting Lurch Feel Arises Question

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. By Sam Harris Assumptions Past Present Popular Conception

If you just focus on the trees swaying outside the window without distraction, you will see your true face. By Sam Harris Distraction Face Focus Trees Swaying

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. By Sam Harris Claim Moment Illusion Empirical Closely

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). By Sam Harris Golden Rule Impulses Deuteronomy Read

I think when you say to someone You are fool not to believe in evolution or a fool to believe the universe is 6000 years old. I think that gets translated as You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with god. By Sam Harris Fool Years Evolution Universe God

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 literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written. By Sam Harris Interpret Ignore World Faith Obliged

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? By Sam Harris Person Met Family Suffer Loss

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's (Christian) universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison. By Sam Harris Hindus India Doomed People Billion

It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend - about what, I don't recall - and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes. By Sam Harris Life Strong Felt Sane Time

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand - that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment - is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself. By Sam Harris Mystery Stand Moment Exceeded Place

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 absurd could be possible? By Sam Harris Holy Religious Danger Faith Normal

It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all. By Sam Harris Percent Abortion Pregnant End Estimated

Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and actions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion. By Sam Harris Attention Sense Freedom Results Paying

Now, as to the view that this is how anyone who had suffered imperialism or colonialism would behave: no, it's not. Entire countries such as India, were colonized. There's a difference between what's happening in Iraq with the so-called Islamic State's attempted genocide of the Yazidi community and how Gandhi acted in India. Let's take Iraq as a case study and think about it: What does killing the Yazidi population on Mount Sinjar have to do with US foreign policy? What does enforcing headscarves (tents, in fact) on women in Waziristan and Afghanistan, and lashing them, forcing men to grow beards under threat of a whip, chopping off hands, and so forth, have to do with US foreign policy? By Sam Harris India Behave Yazidi Iraq Policy

I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea - sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have "changed my mind" and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn't it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness - rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. By Sam Harris Coffee Tea Wanted Generally Start

When you open it up like that, you're effectively saying there is no right answer. And in the absence of a right answer, pluralism is the only option. And pluralism will lead to secularism, and to democracy, and to human rights. We must all focus on those values without worrying about whether atheism is the most intellectually pure approach. I genuinely believe that if we focus on the pluralistic nature of interpretation and on democracy, human rights, and secularism - on these values - we'll get to a time of peace and stability in Muslim-majority countries that then allows for conversations like this. Questioning whether God really exists would become a choice, open to all. By Sam Harris Answer Effectively Secularism Democracy Pluralism

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry. By Sam Harris Making Circles Kind Distinctions Deeply

Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin - which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. By Sam Harris Punishment Framework Sin Religious Belief

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty ... exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the ... false to achieve primacy over the facts. By Sam Harris Uncertainty Religious Faith Obscures Exists

Muslim moderates, wherever they are, must be given every tool necessary to win a war of ideas with their co-religionists. Otherwise, we will have to win some very terrible wars in the future. By Sam Harris Muslim Moderates Coreligionists Win Tool

Worrying about inciting racial hatred in cartoons is legitimate, so that no group is racially targeted. It is why we don't like anti-Semitic cartoons. This is entirely distinct from a "blasphemy" motivation for censorship, which aims to silence scrutiny of a powerful idea and its founder, inspiring to billions. We must not confuse these two different concerns. This is the core of what most of us, especially Muslims, must reflect on in the wake of the tragedy in France. By Sam Harris Worrying Legitimate Targeted Cartoons Inciting

Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is myticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial-at once full of hope and full of fear-of the vastitude of human ignorance. By Sam Harris Mysticism Enterprise Religion Rational Concepts

While liberals are leery of religious fundamentalism in general, they consistently imagine that all religions at their core teach the same thing and teach it equally well. This is one of the many delusions borne of political correctness. By Sam Harris Teach General Liberals Leery Religious

By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning. By Sam Harris Wearing Cosmetics Woman Seeks Younger

Am I identical to my skin? If not - and the answer is clearly no - why should the frontier between my outside and my inside be drawn at the skin? If not at the skin, then where does the outside of me stop and the inside of me begin? At my skull? Am I my skull? Am I inside my skull? Let's say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I'm up there in my head, how is the rest of me me (let alone the inside of me)? By Sam Harris Skin Inside Skull Identical Answer

Our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy. By Sam Harris Moral Illusion Reasoning Dog Called

I want to maximize my happiness, but I am generally not moved to do what I believe will make me happier than I now am. By Sam Harris Happiness Maximize Generally Moved Make

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible. By Sam Harris Bible Ten Commandments Morality Scriptures

Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, for instance, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want - and to be spared offensive cartoons in the meantime. By Sam Harris Western Support Slaves Instance Meantime

early stress increases the size of the amygdalae. One study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a subjective decrease in stress. By Sam Harris Early Amygdalae Stress Increases Size

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 few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade. By Sam Harris Muslims Orthodox Serbians Christians Past

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. By Sam Harris People Worst Things Breaking Puts

Science has long been in the values business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best effort to value priinciples of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. By Sam Harris Scientific Science Business Validity Result

In Islam, it is the "moderate" who is left to split hairs,because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world. By Sam Harris Islam Moderate Convert Subjugate Kill

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for. By Sam Harris Domain Abilities True Competent Person

Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories. By Sam Harris Theories Public Discourse Permanently Riven

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion - a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one's mind or body - thoughts, sensations, moods - without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. By Sam Harris Passive Passion Mindfulness Thoughts Moment

Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history-when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world-not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors. By Sam Harris Center South Tower World Trade

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 outright (Aquinas). By Sam Harris Aquinas Church Augustine Thomas Tortured

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. By Sam Harris Distracted Petty Lazy Easily Anger

I'm well aware that millions of nominally Muslim freethinkers are in hiding out of necessity. This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam - especially the pernicious meme "Islamophobia," by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot. What worries me is that so many moderate Muslims believe that "Islamophobia" is a bigger problem than literalist Islam is. They seem more outraged that someone like me would equate jihad with holy war than that millions of their co-religionists do this and commit atrocities as a result. By Sam Harris Islamophobia Islam Necessity Millions Aware

As we have discussed, however, Islam is just a religion. Islamism is the ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society. Islamism is, therefore, theocratic extremism. Jihadism is the use of force to spread Islamism. Jihadist terrorism is the use of force that targets civilians to spread Islamism. The Islamic State is merely one jihadist terrorist group. The problem was never "al-Qaeda-inspired" extremism, because extremism itself inspired al-Qaeda, and then inspired the Islamic State. It is this extremism that must be named - as Islamism - and opposed. By Sam Harris Islamism Islam Extremism Islamic State

We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century. By Sam Harris Listen Barbarians Nonsense Holy Books

Take a moment to reflect upon the existence of the musical The Book of Mormon. Now imagine the security precautions that would be required to stage a similar production about Islam. The project is unimaginable - not only in Beirut, Baghdad, or Jerusalem, but in New York City. By Sam Harris Mormon Book Moment Reflect Existence

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. By Sam Harris Terms Adaptive Extraordinarily World Belief

And yet we are often tempted to encourage others with insincere praise. In this we treat them like children - while failing to help them prepare for encounters with those who will judge them like adults. I'm not saying that we need to go out of our way to criticize others. But when asked for an honest opinion, 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 the same flaws. Sparing others disappointment and embarrassment is a great kindness. And if we have a history of being honest, our praise and encouragement will actually mean something. I By Sam Harris Tempted Encourage Insincere Notice Praise

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement - when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it's the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life - you won't enjoy any of it. By Sam Harris Life Minds Obvious Improvement Unrealized

It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion. By Sam Harris Children Difficult Important Providing Education

And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful. Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm. By Sam Harris Protestant Rome Counts Disgraceful Reformers

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. By Sam Harris Creator Wrote Dictated Books People

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 ... . By Sam Harris Fact Believer Approves Loves Death

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 that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse. By Sam Harris Imagine Fall Civilization Descendants Experience

People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis. By Sam Harris People Cartoons Murdered End Analysis

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible. By Sam Harris Bible Conversation Human Wellbeing Discourse

Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world. By Sam Harris Faith Logic World Mortar Fills

Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. By Sam Harris Judging Time Millions Milkshake State

In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a genuine relationship with him to be nonexistent. By Sam Harris Lie Truth Circumstances Deem Generally

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is By Sam Harris Sense Speaking Experience Ethics Forgiveness

The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece. By Sam Harris Reason Honesty Nature Love Angels

It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. By Sam Harris Vast Differences Tolerate Spreads Airplanes

The opportunity to deceive others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross. Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars. And many of us will be unable to get safely into our beds tonight without having told several lies over the course of the day.What does this say about us and about the life we are making with one another? By Sam Harris Tempting Cross Opportunity Deceive Present

I consistently encounter people in academic settings and scientists and journalists who feel that you can't say that anyone is wrong in any deep sense about morality, or with regard to what they value in life. I think this doubt about the application of science and reason to questions of value is really quite dangerous. By Sam Harris Morality Life Consistently Encounter People

Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should By Sam Harris Problems Treatment Incarceration Abuse Addiction

But maintaining eye contact can also become a way of "acting spiritual" and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. There are also people who maintain rigid eye lock not from an attitude By Sam Harris Acting Spiritual Affectation Eye Maintaining

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. By Sam Harris American World Half Population Eagerly

If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon - because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek. By Sam Harris God Armageddon Books Cheek Find

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors. By Sam Harris Touch Atheist Reality Neighbors Shamefully

How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you? It is worth finding out. By Sam Harris Relationships Resolved Lie Change View

According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief.60 Are these people "morally motivated," in Haidt's sense, or just morally confused? And By Sam Harris Muslims British Haidt Morally Poll

Our habitual identification with thought - that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness - is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one's head. By Sam Harris Thoughts Consciousness Suffering Thought Habitual

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important? By Sam Harris Wrong Good Evil Wellbeing World

You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don't like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private. By Sam Harris Time Pleasure Won Argument Real

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. By Sam Harris Geography Engineering Moses Conceded Tacitly

We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here ... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present By Sam Harris Find Path Back Present Trick

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. By Sam Harris Islam Buddhism Christianity Reason Whatsoever

Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere. By Sam Harris Believing Function World Matter Faithfully

Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one's "set and setting," certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. By Sam Harris Ingesting System Powerful Dose Psychedelic

The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there. By Sam Harris Christianity Judaism Islam Truth Modern

But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we choose. By Sam Harris Good Satisfaction Choose Choice Generally

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love By Sam Harris Reason Love Guardian

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion - and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. By Sam Harris Illusion Moment Goal Chapter Convince

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. By Sam Harris Minds Morality Universe Depend Existence

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms. By Sam Harris Terms Moral Landscape Framework Thinking

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. By Sam Harris Science Wrong Answers Questions Morality

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. By Sam Harris Interests Moral Obvious Metaphysics Truth

Meditation ... puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness a more refined version of the problem you already have. By Sam Harris Meditation Happiness Puts Question Tend

But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is. By Sam Harris Compassion Love Moral Goodness Selftranscendence

Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as Alexander's campaign in India, where the young conqueror and his pet philosophers encountered naked ascetics whom they called "gymnosophists." It is often said that the thinking of these yogis greatly influenced the philosopher Pyrrho, the father of Greek skepticism. This seems a credible claim, because Pyrrho's teachings had much in common with Buddhism. But his contemplative insights and methods never became part of any system of thought in the West. By Sam Harris India Eastern Alexander Gymnosophists Western

These people say things like "If a liberal intellectual like you can't speak about the link between specific doctrines and violence without being defamed as a bigot, what hope is there for someone like me, who has to worry about being killed by her own family or village for merely expressing doubts about God?" So yes, I'm aware that one can't speak in Pakistan as I do here. By Sam Harris God Bigot Speak People Things

Ideas matter - and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible. By Sam Harris Ideas Matter Rigorously Philosophy Art

Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot? By Sam Harris Recently Muslim European Prophet Muhammad

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man. By Sam Harris God Abraham Unworthy Creation Man

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. By Sam Harris Islam Muslim Peace Position Community

It would seem that very few good things in life come from our accepting the present moment as it is. To become educated, we must be motivated to learn. To master a sport requires that we continually improve our performance and overcome our resistance to physical exertion. To By Sam Harris Good Things Life Accepting Present

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. By Sam Harris Religion Alchemy Alternative Turns Wrong

You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books. By Sam Harris World Society Books Develop Branches

Is true freedom even possible? It certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of meditation knows, and those moments can increase in both number and duration with practice. Therefore, I see no reason why a person couldn't perfectly banish the illusion of the self. However, just the ability to meditate - to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought - can offer a profound relief from mental suffering. By Sam Harris True Freedom Moments Sense Practice

Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable. By Sam Harris Behavior Unmistakable Perennial Bad Moral

Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. By Sam Harris Failure Advantage Enjoys Natural Wrong

If, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can't even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted. By Sam Harris People Time Tend Vaguely Unhappy

I want those in what I call the regressive left who are reading this exchange to understand that the first stage in the empowerment of any minority community is the liberation of reformist voices within that community so that its members can take responsibility for themselves and overcome the first hurdle to genuine empowerment: the victimhood mentality. This is what the American civil rights movement achieved, by shifting the debate. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders took responsibility for their own communities and acted in a positive and empowering way, instead of constantly playing the victim card or rioting in the streets. Perpetuating this groupthink mind-set is both extremely dangerous and in fact disempowering. By Sam Harris Empowerment Community Mentality Responsibility Call

Nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe - nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.10 By Sam Harris Brain System Suggests Experience Surveyed

To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. By Sam Harris Bible Koran World Instance Gibberish

There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality. By Sam Harris Morality Dogmas Double Standards Regrettable

No atrocity was ever committed because people were being too reasonable, too skeptical, or too independently minded. By Sam Harris Reasonable Skeptical Minded Atrocity Committed

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. By Sam Harris Atheism Philosophy World Obvious View

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. By Sam Harris Faith Violence People Nature Tend

Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying-and one's ignorance at every stage so consequential-that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I have never experienced anything quite like it. By Sam Harris Bjj Addictive Increment Knowledge Imparted

Remaining open to the powers of conversation - to new evidence and better arguments - is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love. By Sam Harris Remaining Conversation Arguments Rationality Essential

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. By Sam Harris Religious Ignorance Moderation Product Secular

In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life. By Sam Harris Fact Directly Experience Consciousness Improved

it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. By Sam Harris Soul Balance Body Compassion Dualism

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication. By Sam Harris Communication Lie Intentionally Mislead Expect

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe thatcertain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each otherover rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything anything be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculousthan the world we are living in. By Sam Harris Windows God Star Wars Imagine

Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret "kill list," President Obama's administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang - disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist "fellow-traveler" lobbies had been in influencing Obama's campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was "al-Qaeda inspired extremism," and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. By Sam Harris Gang President Alqaeda Bush Obama

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas. By Sam Harris Yahweh Satan Zeus Poseidon Source

Moderates want their faith respected. They don't want faith itself criticized, and yet faith itself is what is bringing us all this - this lunacy. By Sam Harris Faith Moderates Respected Criticized Lunacy

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. By Sam Harris West Ideas Sacred Forever Fact

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. By Sam Harris Bible Koran Understanding Useless Manuals

You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible - and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world. By Sam Harris Bible Intuitions Moment World Moral

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever 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 their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. By Sam Harris Fact Exist Atheism Term Nonastrologer

Some say while religious fundamentalists betray reason. Moderates betray faith and reason equally. -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion(Documentary) By Sam Harris Documentary Betray Reason Religious Fundamentalists

When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies. By Sam Harris Proposition Arguments Truth Engaged Honest

Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations. By Sam Harris Spiritual Arts Tested Ideas Empty

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution. By Sam Harris God Regress Critics Religion Pointed

If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process. By Sam Harris Efforts Life Choices Process Pay

Some people believe that mirror neurons are also central to our ability to empathize with others and may even account for the emergence of gestural communication and spoken language. What we do know is that certain neurons increase their firing rate when we perform object-oriented actions with our hands (grasping, manipulating) and communicative or ingestive actions with our mouths. These neurons also fire, albeit less rapidly, whenever we witness the same actions performed by other people. Research By Sam Harris Language Neurons Actions Mirror Central

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? By Sam Harris Jews Son God Knowing Crackers

If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim? By Sam Harris Sin Victim Premarital Sex

The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by [high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality], while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European standards. By Sam Harris States Southern Abortion United Midwestern

We are faced with the task of convincing a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient and you don't have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales. This is a monumental task. I don't think there is an intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts. By Sam Harris Iron Age Tales Task Faced

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. By Sam Harris Ethics Religious Moderation Religion Closes

Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science. By Sam Harris Science Thinking Surprised Endurance Wishful

Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery. By Sam Harris Openness People Tolerance Argument Selfdoubt

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. By Sam Harris United States God Claimed Occasion

We are free to burn the Qur'an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it. By Sam Harris Quran Muhammad Book Free Burn

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper. By Sam Harris Conversation Choice War Options Human

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence. By Sam Harris Evidence Rely Faith Context Claims

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do. By Sam Harris God Eternal High Suffering Stakes

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world. By Sam Harris Faith Fly Beliefs Wrong Large

It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith ... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization. By Sam Harris Religious Faith Killed Society Criticize

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world. By Sam Harris Faith World Offer Strong Link

There seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to others.30 Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. By Sam Harris Good Situation Reasons Doubt Love

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. By Sam Harris Atheist Offending Population Angry Live

Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. Scientists and skeptics generally By Sam Harris Danger World People Content Midst

But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. By Sam Harris Life Mind Circumstances Determines Quality

There is indeed something preposterous about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking education and economic opportunities. By Sam Harris Westerners East Easterners Opportunities Preposterous

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths. By Sam Harris Faiths Familiar Work Extremely Critical

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror. By Sam Harris Terror People Argued Print Torture

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. By Sam Harris Juice Decide Drink Glass Thought

Missionaries in the developing world waste a lot of time and money (not to mention the goodwill of non-Christians) proselytizing to the needy ... While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. By contrast, volunteers for secular organizations ... do not waste ... time telling people about the virgin birth of Jesus. Nor do they tell people in sub-Saharan Africa - where nearly four million people die from AIDS every year - that condom use is sinful. By Sam Harris Money Nonchristians Proselytizing Needy Missionaries

We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored. Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity of consciousness, prior to the arising of thought. By Sam Harris Future Unexplored Spend Telling Story

This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug. By Sam Harris Psychedelics Undoubtedly Dangers Tug Make

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. By Sam Harris Ease Reason Time True Spiritual

It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available. By Sam Harris Creator Universe People Noble Purely

... if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin. By Sam Harris Marquezlike Jesus Archives Morals Amnesia

[I]f the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and attentionoften with tragic results. Is this really a dichotomy about which science can claim to be neutral? By Sam Harris Basic Religion True Ridiculous False

Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. By Sam Harris Free Factors Actions Aware Determine

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. By Sam Harris Morality Racism Sexism Term Dogmatism

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. By Sam Harris Palin Sarah People Women Admire

We are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing experience. Whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. Our bodies age. Our relationships fall away. Even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments. And every morning, we are chased out of bed by our thoughts. By Sam Harris Experience Seeking Fulfillment Living Mercy

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. By Sam Harris Christian Imagine Century Revive Welleducated

The core of science is not a mathematical modelingit is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument. By Sam Harris Honesty Core Science Mathematical Modelingit

The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. By Sam Harris Modeling Honesty Core Science Controlled

It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of "better" we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness. By Sam Harris Economics Science Inevitable Politics Competitors

Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world. By Sam Harris Universe Mind Illusion Positive Emotions

As an undergraduate at Stanford, I took a seminar that profoundly changed my life. It was called "The Ethical Analyst," and it was conducted in the form of a Socratic dialogue by an extraordinarily gifted professor, Ronald A. Howard.1 Our discussion focused on a single question of practical ethics: Is it wrong to lie? By Sam Harris Stanford Life Undergraduate Seminar Profoundly

The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. By Sam Harris Weights Instance Illness Burn Lifting

Harris Very interesting. So when we talk about a phenomenon like honor killing, we're not just worried about Islamists; we're worried about how the average conservative Muslim man will treat his wife or daughter in light of his religious beliefs and cultural values. And yet many of these conservatives may be opponents of Islamism. Nawaz Yes. Conservative Muslims can be very useful as allies against Islamism and jihadism, but they may oppose you on gender rights and equality and, in some cases, honor killings. By Sam Harris Harris Interesting Islamism Worried Islamists

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. By Sam Harris Diversity Action Hygiene Beliefs Link

If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn't make sense - being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness By Sam Harris Tomorrow Paragraph Minds Brain Surgically

The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests. By Sam Harris Inquisition Informers Torturers Actions Perpetrators

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know. By Sam Harris False Certainty Dogmatism Religion Worries

One of the strengths of telling the truth is that it remains open for elaboration. If what you say in the heat of the moment isn't quite right, you can amend it. I have learned that I would rather be maladroit, or even rude, than dishonest. By Sam Harris Elaboration Strengths Telling Truth Remains

There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does. By Sam Harris Christianity Islam Reconcile Difference Opinion

But this is not the faith that has given us religion. It would be rather remarkable if a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty led inevitably to ludicrous convictions about the divine origin of certain books, to bizarre cultural taboos, to the abject hatred of homosexuals, and to the diminished status of women. Adopt too positive an outlook, and the next thing you know architects and engineers may start flying planes into buildings. By Sam Harris Religion Faith Positive Books Taboos

It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like 'God' and 'paradise' and 'sin' in the present that will determine our future. By Sam Harris God Written Paradise Sin War

Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. By Sam Harris Ethics Social Cohesion Experience Moderates

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction. By Sam Harris Religious Correction Faith Species Human

One of the greatest obstacles I see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious superstition and self-deception masquerade as science. By Sam Harris Science Greatest Obstacles Fashioning Rational

Well, that's a very interesting question," he said - to which he had no interesting or even sane answer. He simply conceded that if the Messiah came back and reconvened the Sanhedrin, well, then, yes - though mere mortals like ourselves might not see the wisdom of it - homosexuals, adulteresses, witches, and Sabbath breakers would be killed, and every other barbaric prescription found in the Old Testament would apply. As I was contemplating where on his person I should aim my vomit, he managed this final defense of his religion: "You just don't understand what an obscenity - what a sacrilege - these things would represent in the presence of the Messiah By Sam Harris Interesting Messiah Question Answer Sane

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one's beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one's beliefs about the world are true. By Sam Harris Beliefs Speak Truthfully Accurately Represent

If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem. By Sam Harris Truth Problem Kernel Religions Deploreand

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 . By Sam Harris United States Unreason Schools Courts

The point, of course, is that science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning - norms which, when made explicit, are generally acknowledged to be valid by all parties. By Sam Harris Norms Point Reasoning Explicit Parties

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. By Sam Harris Jesus Prophecy Awry Common Interpretation

My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again. By Sam Harris Game Intelligently Learning Round Monster

It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience. By Sam Harris Omniscience Utterly Astonishing Ordinary Book

Most moral relativists believe that tolerance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory. By Sam Harris Sense Bigotry Tolerance Relativists Cultural

Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. By Sam Harris Experience Including Mindful Matter Thinking

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose. By Sam Harris Energy False Theft Time Purpose

It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles. There By Sam Harris Ancient Miracles Makes Sense Important

We're right to say that a culture that can't tolerate free speech is ... there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we're right to want those experiences. By Sam Harris Culture Tolerate Free Speech Experiences

This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam - especially the pernicious meme "Islamophobia," by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot. By Sam Harris Islamophobia Islam Meme Bigot Things

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. By Sam Harris Muslims Christians Jews Christian Jew

Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next - a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please - your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this "decision" and believe that you are in the process of making it. By Sam Harris Moments Aware Time Subjectively Complete

Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature - to say nothing of killing and dying for them - would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now? By Sam Harris Surely Anew Literature Justify Impossible

Every moment of the day - indeed, every moment throughout one's life - offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily. By Sam Harris Moment Day Life Offers Unnecessarily

Witnessing the misadventures of supposedly enlightened adepts and their devotees can be depressing. But it can also be amusing. By Sam Harris Witnessing Depressing Misadventures Supposedly Enlightened

You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace. By Sam Harris Peace Death Apostasy Working

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. By Sam Harris Honesty Gift Give Simplicity Source

Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all - and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. By Sam Harris Trivers Robert Argues Instance Nature

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. By Sam Harris Pluralism Asserting Faiths Religious Moderates

By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. By Sam Harris Texts Religious Equally Failing Live

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 its gatekeeper God, in his own image. By Sam Harris Caribbean Surprises Earth Cruise Lights

You don't choose to choose what you choose in life! By Sam Harris Choose 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. By Sam Harris Religion Criticism Isolation Problem Sheltered

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. By Sam Harris Religions Mythology Rituals True God

In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a paradox:we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the looking. Thousands of years of human experience suggests, however, that the paradox here is only apparent: it is not merely that the component of our experience that we call "I" cannot be found; it is that it actually disappears when looked for in a rigorous way. By Sam Harris Terms Paradox Subjective Search Entail

Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms. By Sam Harris Faith Terms Pickpocket Loans Person

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 delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources - is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. By Sam Harris Terrible Love Alive Religious Die

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics. By Sam Harris Middle East Ethics Deity Stalked

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 notthat 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 immoralthat is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. By Sam Harris Religion Concerns Suffering People Imagine

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. By Sam Harris God Insurmountable Problem Vindicating Omnipotent

Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like? By Sam Harris Sleep Unconscious Unable Remember

A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write. By Sam Harris Thought Selfscrutiny Write Moment Observe

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. By Sam Harris Fail Time Admitted Faith License

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. By Sam Harris Century Koran Books Including Reprisal

When we consider that so few generations had passed since thechurch left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of theirfamilies, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturingscholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about thenature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to thinkanything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years. By Sam Harris Germany Theirfamilies Burning Squares Stars

We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is a project, and progress is dificult. By Sam Harris Barbarism Barely Emerged Centuries World

The moment we realize that the only things we can intelligibly value are actual and potential changes in the experience of conscious beings, we can think about a landscape of such changes - where the peaks correspond to the greatest possible well-being and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering. By Sam Harris Correspond Suffering Moment Realize Things

To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful. By Sam Harris Sports Speak Generic Activity Makes

There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. By Sam Harris Existence Life Sacred Dimension Coming

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. By Sam Harris Efforts Moment Happening Realistic Goal

Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. By Sam Harris Concerns Explains Religion Immoral Moral

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. By Sam Harris Undetected Liar Imagines Harm Long

You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don't make a lot of sense, in the final analysis, but they weren't much fun anyway. By Sam Harris Matters Talents Credit Weaknesses Blamed

What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society. It By Sam Harris Society Civil Constitutes Live Torture

The usefulness of religion - the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good - is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe. By Sam Harris Argument Religion Meaning Good Doctrine

While the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. By Sam Harris Religious Selfevident Education Poverty Politics

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. By Sam Harris Faith Reason Enables Endure Life

A person could, for instance, distinguish his bodily movements from those of another person without feeling a sense of self at all, for to do so merely requires that he distinguish one body (as an object) from another. By Sam Harris Instance Body Object Person Distinguish

The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell. By Sam Harris Habit Spending Waking Moment Lost

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention - distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence - is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. 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. By Sam Harris Distinguished Religious Faith Idea Convention

There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. By Sam Harris Practice Question Religious Disciplines Produce

[ ... ] atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States. Polls indicate that being an atheist is a perfect impediment to running for high office in our country (while being black, Muslim, or homosexual is not). By Sam Harris States United Muslim Reviled Minority

Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science. By Sam Harris Science Circumstance Durable Nondivisive Thinking

I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble. By Sam Harris Ruins Maintained Cost Rubble Considered

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe. By Sam Harris Universe Wanted Simply Lived

In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. By Sam Harris Fact Beginning Object Breath Time

It should go without saying that these rival belief systems [Judaism, Islam, Christianity] are all equally uncontaminated by evidence. By Sam Harris Judaism Islam Christianity Systems Evidence

Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations. By Sam Harris Atheism Conversations Clearing Space

The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death. By Sam Harris Death Truth Simply

A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. By Sam Harris Mind Wandering Human Unhappy

Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact. By Sam Harris Psychopaths Contact Tend Make Exceptionally

But one need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self. Accomplishing this can be elusive enough. If I've met a person who has done so perfectly, I am unaware of it. By Sam Harris Psychic Powers Cut Illusion Accomplishing

Once a person believes - really believes - that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one. By Sam Harris Happiness Antithesis Unbelievers Person Ideas

The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons,and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death By Sam Harris People Time Death Problem Desperate

An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes). By Sam Harris