A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that while religion may hold some truths regarding human happiness, its traditional forms are outdated and can be harmful.
Sam Harris argues that although religion can provide valuable aspects like spiritual experiences and community support that contribute to human happiness, the traditional religious systems are problematic and often lack intellectual rigor. He emphasizes the importance of relying on evidence and reason rather than blind faith to foster genuine spiritual fulfillment.
In practice
In a presentation on the role of community in personal fulfillment.
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.
I believe in life and in people. I feel obliged to advocate their highest ideals as long as I believe them to be true. I also see myself compelled to revolt against ideals I believe to be false, since recoiling from rebellion would be a form of treason
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. ... The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
An open society calls itself open to improvement. It is based on the recognition that people have divergent views and interests, and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.
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