Quotes from Sam Harris

In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a loving concordat between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.

a person who commits each of these sins with abandon.

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.

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.

many a brute appears to have seized Fortune herself by the skirts.

The point is that his authority would be derived in the only way that such authority ever is—by making claims about the world that can be corroborated by further observation

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.

If, as I contend throughout this book, all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy.

One need only read the Koran to know, with something approaching mathematical certainty, that all truly devout Muslims will be "convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power

Under the influence of Christian notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the U.S. government has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds allocated to Africa be squandered on teaching abstinence rather than condom use. It is no exaggeration to say that millions could die as a direct result of this single efflorescence of religious dogmatism.

why it is worse to lose something than not to gain it.

solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment inside a maximum-security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a room.

the fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor.

Christ died for your sins; He is the Son of God; All human beings have souls that will be subject to judgment after death.

For example, evangelicals' discomfort with condoms and sex education has led the administration to policies that are likely to lead to more people dying of AIDS at home and abroad, not to mention more pregnancies and abortions.

Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity.

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.

A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.

If you believe anything like what the Koran says you must believe in order to escape the fires of hell, you will, at the very least, be sympathetic with the actions of Osama bin Laden.

At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root.

Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it.

that paradise awaits

They believe in the literal truth of the Koran.

There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it. This is a terrible truth that we have to face: