I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of questioning one's beliefs and seeking evidence rather than blindly accepting them.
Sam Harris suggests that a society does not suffer from an excessive desire for evidence to support its core beliefs. Instead, it points to the potential harm of adhering to beliefs without scrutiny, implying that critical thinking and validation are essential for societal progress and well-being.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of science in education.
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.
Nothing leads to good that is not natural.
If there's one thing that really annoys a god, it's not knowing something.
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Jesus resolved the false opposition between obedience and freedom and opened the path to freedom
So act that anything you do may become universal law.
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