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.
When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.
Even the holy men who lived before the coming of Christ understood that God had in mind plans of peace for the human race.
Awareness isnβt something we own; awareness isnβt something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.
I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes ... Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organization and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.
Evey Hammond: Who are you? V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask. Evey Hammond: Well I can see that. V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is
Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.