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.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?
In Russia a man is called reactionary if he objects to having his property stolen and his wife and children murdered.
Sincerity is always subject to proof.
I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he canβt play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
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