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.
Interpretation
Faith allows individuals to continue believing despite a lack of rational justification.
In this quote, Sam Harris suggests that faith is essentially a social construct that provides permission for individuals to maintain their beliefs even when logical reasoning does not support them. By characterizing faith in this way, Harris invites us to question the validity of religious experiences and beliefs, positioning faith as a crutch that can impede critical thinking and rational discourse.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of faith in modern society.
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 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.
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.
With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?
Do we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, so as to be an active part of our communities, or do we close in on ourselves, saying 'I have so many things to do, that's not my job'?
There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please.
I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.
All our actions, as well as our thoughts and words, should praise Him who always blesses us.
The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.
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