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Sam Harris Sam Harris is an American author with an interest in neuroscience, neurotheology, and religion. His book The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and his essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, Free Inquiry magazine, and Playboy – as well as here and here. He also appeared in the 2005 documentary film, The God Who Wasn't There. A philosophy graduate from Stanford University, Harris has made a long study of both Eastern and Western religious traditions. Harris's basic theme, which he sets out in his book The End of Faith, is that he considers the time has come to speak openly and unambiguously about the dangers posed to society by religious belief. While highlighting what he sees as a problem posed by Islam at this moment in respect of international terrorism, Harris makes an outspoken attack on religion of all styles and persuasions. Harris freely admits that he is advocating a form of intolerance, but not, as he says, the kind of intolerance that gave us the Gulag. Rather he is arguing for a conversational intolerance, one in which we simply require in our everyday discourse that people's convictions really scale with the available evidence. He feels that we ought to be able to demand intellectual honesty right across the board, and ignore the prevailing taboos and political correctness which seem to prevent us from openly criticising religion. In his most recent book, Letter to a Christian Nation, Mr. Harris begins with the words: "Thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.”
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Harris' official website
Sam Harris Quotes Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love. Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse. 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. 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. It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. 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. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity. The very ideal of religious tolerance – born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about god – is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. 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. Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed. It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. 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. 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high. Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society. All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts – of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener – inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction. Every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. 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. Spirituality can be – indeed, must be – deeply rational. Mysticism, to be viable, requires explicit instructions, which need suffer no more ambiguity or artifice in their exposition than we find in a manual for operating a lawn mower. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith. 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. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world. 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. Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land – specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon's temple – will usher in both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia – because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
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