Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the blind faith people can have in narratives and creations, suggesting it leads to division and absurdity.
Sam Harris challenges the reader to reflect on the absurdity of human belief systems and the consequences they can have on society. He uses the examples of films and software to illustrate how easily people can attribute divine or sacred significance to human creations, leading to conflict and division similar to that seen in religious ideologies. This quote serves as a warning about the dangers of our uncritical acceptance of ideas and the potential for those ideas to incite violence and strife among differing groups.
In practice
During a debate on the influence of technology on society, one might quote this to caution against blind faith in digital creations.
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.
I want everybody to understand that I am an American Negro first before I am a member of any political party.
Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don't somehow con- struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don't construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don't construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
And as for the Jews, who since the emancipation of their sect have everywhere put themselves, at least in the person of their eminent representatives, at the head of the counter-revolution -- what awaits them?
If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.
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