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.
Violence is a symptom of impotence.
Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it. Believe me, my friend.
The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed.
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
I have no doubt that for some to become a Christian may involve an experience of ecstasy. Yet I do not think such an experience is necessary for someone to be a Christian.
Humankind can't stand too much reality.
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