American - Author | April 9, 1967 -
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Sam Harris
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Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.
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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.
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The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
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We should reserve the notion of 'morality' for the ways in which we can affect one another's experience for better or worse. Some people use the term 'morality' differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful.
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You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.
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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.
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Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.
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There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.
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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.
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