Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.
Interpretation
Religion often shifts focus from immediate suffering to abstract concerns about divine will and the afterlife.
In this quote, Sam Harris argues that religion tends to divert our attention from the pressing issues of human suffering to more abstract concepts such as divine expectations and afterlife consequences. This suggests that religious beliefs can lead to a neglect of our current challenges and suffering, as people become preoccupied with understanding and fulfilling what they perceive to be the desires of God, rather than addressing the tangible sufferings that exist in the world.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of faith on social issues, one could use this quote to highlight the need for action on suffering.
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 look at anything in nature and how things work - the stars, the pyramids - and I can't imagine that there's not some kind of design to it all. There's got to be something big that we don't understand. I do believe in Jesus. I believe in being good to one another. Life is about spending our time here contributing and not taking away. That's my faith.
Is discord going to show itself while we are still fighting, is the Jew once again worth less than another? Oh, it is sad, very sad, that once more, for the umpteenth time, the old truth is confirmed: What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews.
The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating thet God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven." "The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.
It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo.
They assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their love to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue- 'know thyselP and 'Nothing overmuch.'
The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.
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