My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
Interpretation
The quote critiques religion for enabling irrational beliefs among many people.
Sam Harris expresses concern that religion can lead large numbers of people to adopt beliefs that, without the influence of faith, would seem irrational or nonsensical. He clarifies that this does not imply that all religious individuals are irrational; instead, he suggests that dogmatic belief systems can foster uncritical thinking on a massive scale, allowing ideas that would otherwise be rejected to thrive.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about the role of religion in society.
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.
Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.
Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)
The madness of mobs or the insolence of soldiers, or both, when too near to each other, occasion some mischief.
Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
Once the light of our awareness is cast on any darkness, then it cannot hide and it cannot remain. Such is the law of consciousness.
If you meet with a system of theology which magnifies man, flee from it as far as you can.
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