In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.
Interpretation
The most provocative statements often stem from personal conviction and are worth defending.
Sam Harris emphasizes the idea that the most inflammatory or controversial statements he has made are those he has composed himself, highlighting a deep connection between personal beliefs and the willingness to stand behind one's written words. This suggests that true conviction can sometimes provoke strong reactions and that engaging with such thoughts can be an important part of intellectual discourse.
In practice
In a debate about freedom of speech, I quoted Sam Harris to illustrate that personal beliefs often provoke strong reactions.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
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.
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.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the World.
I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.
For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
The Bourne Underneath the growing grass, Underneath the living flowers, Deeper than the sound of showers: There we shall not count the hours By the shadows as they pass. Youth and health will be but vain, Beauty reckoned of no worth: There a very little girth Can hold round what once the earth Seemed too narrow to contain.
Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
There are certain things that we can deal with by following the rules. But at times, we find the rules restrict you from doing the right things. On such occasions, we have to rethink - either you change the rules or break the rules.
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