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.
Interpretation
The quote warns against the dangers of religious beliefs that may conflict with civil society, suggesting that such beliefs can lead to violence and division.
Sam Harris expresses deep concern over the societal taboos surrounding criticism of religious faiths. He argues that these taboos not only prevent open discourse but also pose a significant risk to civilization, as diverging religious doctrines can create conflict and lead to violence. Harris emphasizes that such divisions can endanger lives, making it crucial to address the incompatibilities that exist within these religious ideologies.
In practice
During a debate on religious tolerance, this quote can highlight the need for critical discussions.
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 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.
Money is far more persuasive than logical arguments.
It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human.
Mine alone is the country of my soul.
The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.
The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.
The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.
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