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.
When you have increasing power of religious groups, oppression of women increases. Women are oppressed in all religions.
God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you.
Value is the most invincible and impalpable of ghosts, and comes and goes unthought of, while the visible and dense matter remains as it was.
I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.
These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here
Tests and trials are given to all of us. These mortal challenges allow us and our Heavenly Father to see whether we will exercise our agency to follow His Son. He already knows, and we have the opportunity to learn, that no matter how difficult our circumstances, all these things shall be for our experience, and our good.
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