Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident
Interpretation
Faith is often mistaken for certainty, but true understanding comes through evidence and reason, not chance.
In this quote, Sam Harris suggests that faith is not a reliable means of arriving at truth or correctness. Rather, he argues that any correct belief held by faith would be purely accidental, emphasizing the importance of rationality and empirical evidence over unsubstantiated belief. This perspective invites deeper reflection on the nature of belief systems and encourages a more skeptical approach to understanding the world.
In practice
In a debate about religious beliefs, one might use this quote to argue for the necessity of evidence-based reasoning.
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.
There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.
Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.
It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants slavery.
All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.
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