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.
Interpretation
We can lead ethical lives without needing to believe in things without evidence.
Sam Harris suggests that one's ethical and spiritual life does not depend on beliefs that lack evidence. Instead, he advocates for a worldview grounded in rationality and a commitment to evidence-based understanding, which can facilitate a meaningful existence without resorting to unfounded beliefs.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing the nature of belief and ethics.
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.
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.
It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
What is there unreasonable in admitting the intervention of a supernatural power in the most ordinary circumstances of life?
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
Laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence more cosmic than going to a church.
To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus. It's - I think they might use too much oil in their hummus - but it's the wrong question.
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.
Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.