"Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris

• The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.
• As is well known, the beliefs of conservative Christians now exert an extraordinary influence over our national discourse--in our courts, in our schools, and in every branch of government.
• Even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world.
• Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one’s friends.
• Forty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years.
• Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending what be glorious.
• Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn’t
• Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you have for being a Christian. And yet you do not find their reasons compelling.
• The burden is upon them to prove that their beliefs about God and Muhammad are valid. They have not done this. They cannot do this.
• The truth is, you know exactly what it is like to be an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims.
• Understand that the way you view Islam is precisely the way devout Muslims view Christianity. And it is the way I view all religions.
• Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering. This is why you and I do not have moral obligations towards rocks. To the degree that our actions can affect the experience of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality apply.
• The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding, given the contents of the book.
• Many Christians believe that Jesus did away with all this barbarism in the clearest terms imaginable and delivered a doctrine of pure love and toleration. He didn’t. In fact, at several points in the New Testament, Jesus can be read to endorse the entirety of the Old Testament law.
• The Golden Rule really is a wonderful moral precept. But numerous teachers offered the same instruction centuries before Jesus (Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Epictetus, …) and countless scriptures discuss the importance of self-transcending love more articulately than the Bible does, while being unblemished by the obscene celebrations of violence that we find throughout the Old and New Testaments.
• If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world’s other religions.
• You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the “true” spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries.
• You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently--though isn’t it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?
• If you think that Jesus taught only the Golden Rule and love of one’s neighbor, you should reread the New Testament.
• Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas about either guidance or morality.
• In assessing the moral wisdom of the Bible, it is useful to consider moral questions that have been solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Consider the question of slavery. The entire civilized world now agrees that slavery is an abomination. What moral instruction do we get from the God of Abraham on this subject? Consult the Bible, and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves.
• The Bible also makes it clear that every man is free to sell his daughter into sexual slavery.
• The only real restraint God counsels on the subject of slavery is that we not beat our slaves so severely that we injure their eyes or their teeth (Exodus 21).
• There is no place in the New Testament where Jesus objects to the practice of slavery.
• People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.
• The moment a person recognizes that slaves are human beings like himself, enjoying the same capacity for suffering and happiness, he will understand that it is patently evil to own them and treat them like farm equipment.
• While the U.S. Constitution does not contain a single mention of God, and was widely decried at the time of its composition as an irreligious document, many Christians believe that our nation was founded on “Judeo-Christian principles.”
• The first four of these injunctions [10 commandments] have nothing whatsoever to do with morality. As stated, they forbid the practice of any non-Judeo-Christian faith (like Hinduism), most religious art, utterances like “God damn it!,” and all ordinary work on the Sabbath--all under penalty of death. We might well wonder how vital these precepts are to the maintenance of civilization.
• There are obvious biological reasons why people tend to treat their parents well, and to think badly of murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars. It is a scientific fact that moral emotions--like a sense of fair play or an abhorrence of cruelty--precede any exposure to scripture.
• All of our primate cousins are partial to their own kin and generally intolerant of murder and theft. They tend not to like deception or sexual betrayal much, either.
• If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures.
• Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.”
• Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.
• For there to be objective moral truths worth knowing, there need only be better and worse ways to seek happiness in this world.
• Everything about human experience suggests that love is more conducive to happiness than hate is.
• At various points in the Gospels, Jesus clearly tells us that love can transform human life. We need not believe that he was born of a virgin or will be returning to earth as a superhero to take these teaching to heart.
• Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.
• Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.
• There is nothing wrong with encouraging teens to abstain from having se. But we know, beyond any doubt, that teaching abstinence alone is not a good way to curb teen pregnancy or the spread of sexually transmitted disease.
• The problem is that Christians like yourself are not principally concerned about teen pregnancy and the spread of disease. That is, you are not worried about the suffering caused by sex; you are worried about sex.
• Here are the facts: stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine.
• It is true, of course, that research on embryonic stem cells entails the destruction of three-day-old human embryos.
• A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all.
• It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person’s brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such.
• If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.
• Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter’s potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering.
• The argument from a cell’s potential gets you absolutely nowhere.
• But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
• We should throw immense resources into stem-cell research, and we should do so immediately.
• The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
• Missionaries in the developing world waste a lot of time and money (not to mention the goodwill of non-Christians) proselytizing to the needy; they spread inaccurate information about contraception and sexually transmitted disease, and they withhold accurate information.
• While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.
• We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?
• Needless to say, if Church doctrine changes as a result of these pious deliberations, it will be a sign, not that faith is wise, but that one of its dogmas has grown untenable.
• While abortion is an ugly reality, and we should all hope for breakthroughs in contraception that reduce the need for it, one can reasonably wonder whether most aborted fetuses suffer their destruction on any level.
• If you are worried about human suffering, abortion should rank very low on your list of concerns.
• It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a women even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgement: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.
• Atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States. Polls indicate that being an atheist is a perfect impediment to running for high office in our country (while being black, Muslim, or homosexual is not).
• When was the last atheist riot? Is there a newspaper anywhere on this earth that would hesitate to print cartoons about atheism for fear that its editors would be kidnapped or killed in reprisal?
• The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance.
• Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism.
• The “blood libel” (with respect to the Jews) consists of the false claim that Jews murder non-Jews in order to obtain their blood for use in religious rituals. This allegation is still widely believed throughout the Muslim world.
• It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma.
• I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
• Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality.
• Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations’ human development index are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique in its level of religious adherence; it is also unique beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the “red states” are primarily red because of the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians.
• If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t.
• Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world.
• Even if a belief in God had a reliable, positive effect upon human behavior, this would not offer a reason to believe in God.
• Even if atheism led straight to moral chaos, this would not suggest that the doctrine of Christianity is true.
• We decide what is good in the Good Book.
• The belief that the Bible is the word of God is of no help to us whatsoever.
• The choice before us is simple: we can either have a twenty first century conversation about morality and human well-being--a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse--or we can confine ourselves to a first century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible. Why would anyone want to take the latter approach?
• The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simple a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence--and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day.
• Examples of God’s failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen.
• It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved.
• It is time we acknowledged how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs.
• Once you stop swaddling in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgments of their happiness for no good reason at all.
• It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith.
• If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregarious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.
• That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion--to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources--is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity. Unfortunately, expressing such criticism places the nonbeliever at the margins of society. By merely being in touch with reality, he appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
• If is often said that it is reasonable to believe that the Bible is the word of God because many of the events recounted in the New Testament confirm Old Testament prophecy.
• Wouldn’t it have been within the power of any mortal to write a book that confirms the predictions of a previous book? In fact, we know on the basis of textual evidence that this is what the Gospel writers did.
• It seems all but certain that the dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the Christian world’s resulting anxiety about sex, was a product of a mistranslation from the Hebrew.
• Another strike against the doctrine of the virgin birth is that the other evangelists have not heard of it.
• The Gospels also contradict one another outright. John tells us that Jesus was crucified the day before the Passover meal was eaten; Mark says it happened the day after. In light of such discrepancies, how is it possible for you to believe that the Bible is perfect in all its parts?
• Christians regularly assert that the Bible predicts future historical events.
• But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy would be, if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make perfectly accurate predictions about human events.
• The Bible contains nothing like this [accurate predictions of the future]. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.
• A book written by an omniscient being could contain a chapter on mathematics that, that after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight humanity has ever known. Instead, the Bible contains no formal discussion of mathematics and some obvious mathematical errors.
• In two places, for instance, the Good Book states that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3:1 (I Kings 7:23-26 and II Chronicles 4:2-5). As an approximation of the constant pi, this is not impressive.
• But the Egyptians and Babylonians both approximated pi to a few decimal places several centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written. The Bible offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world.
• To one who stands outside the Christian faith, it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
• Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.
• The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
• Like science, every religion makes specific claims about the way the word is. These claims purport to be about facts--the creator of the universe can hear (and will occasionally answer) your prayers; the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception; if you do not believe the right things about God, you will suffer terribly after death. Such claims are intrinsically in conflict with the claims of science, because they are claims made on terrible evidence.
• In the broadest sense, “science” (from the Latin scire, “to know”) represents our best efforts to know what is true about our world.
• The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty.
• It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is the one area of our lives where pole imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
• Though limbo had no real foundation in scripture, and was never official Church doctrine, it has been a major part of the Catholic tradition for centuries.
• The conflict between science and religion is reducible to a simple fact of human cognition and discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not.
• Everyone recognizes that to rely upon “faith” to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous--that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad’s conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma.
• 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.
• Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possible be certain about.
• All complex life on earth has developed from simpler life forms over billions of years. This is a fact that no longer admits of intelligent dispute.
• In science, facts must be explained with reference to other facts. These larger explanatory models are “theories.” Theories make predictions and can, in principle, be tested.
• It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of the Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities.
• While such people are technically “scientists,” they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.
• Here is what we know. We know that the universe is far older than the Bible suggests. We know that all complex organisms on earth, including ourselves, evolved from earlier organisms over the course of billions of years. The evidence for this is utterly overwhelming. There is no question that the diverse life we see around us is the expression of a genetic code written in the molecule DNA, that DNA undergoes chance mutations, and the some mutations increase an organism’s odds of surviving and reproducing in a given environment. This process of mutation and natural selection has allowed isolated populations of individuals to interbreed and, over vast stretches of time, form new species. There is no question that human beings evolved from nonhuman ancestors in this way. We know, from genetic evidence, that we share an ancestor with apes and monkeys, and that this ancestor in turn shared an ancestor with bats and the flying lemurs. There is a widely branching tree of life whose basic shape and character is now very well understood. Consequently, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that individual species were created in their present forms.
• How the process of evolution got started is still a mystery, but that doesn't in the least suggest that a deity is likely to be lurking at the bottom of it all.
• The problem with ID [intelligent design] is that it is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.
• Even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be designed by a designer, this would not suggest that this designer is the biblical God, or that He approves of Christianity.
• As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God?
• The truth is that no one knows how or why the universe came into being.
• Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists. Scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not.
• There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell.
• Biologists estimate that there are at least ten strains of virus for every species of animal on earth.
• Our own bodies testify to the whimsy and incompetence of the creator. As embryos, we produce tails, gill sacs, and a full coat of apelike hair. Happily, most of us lose these charming accessories before birth. This bizarre sequence of morphology is readily interpreted in evolutionary and genetic terms; it is an utter mystery if we are the products of intelligent design.
• Examples of unintelligent design in nature are so numerous that an entire book could be written simply listing them.
• While many people of faith seem convinced that prayer can heal a wide variety of illnesses (despite what the best scientific research indicates), it is curious that prayer is only ever believed to work for illnesses and injuries that can be self-limiting. No one, for instance, ever seriously expects that prayer will cause an amputee to regrow a missing limb. Why not? Salamanders manage this routinely, presumably without prayer. If God answers prayers--ever--why wouldn’t He occasionally heal a deserving amputee? And why wouldn’t people of faith expect prayer to work in such cases?
• Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and the make incompatible claims about how we all must live.
• Competing religious doctrines have shattered our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continual source of human conflict.
• Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous.
• Our competing religious certainties are impeding the emergence of a viable, global civilization.
• Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.
• And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics.
• It is worth remembering that the September 11 hijackers were college educated, middle class people who had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and engineers must hit the wall at four hundred miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics?
• The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: in the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy two virgins in Paradise.
• The earth is now home to about 1.4 billion Muslims, many of whom believe that one day you and I will either convert to Islam, live in subjugation to a Muslim caliphate, or be put to death for our unbelief.
• Throughout the Muslim world, a woman who reports being raped runs the risk of being murdered as an “adulteress”: she has, after all, admitted to having sex outside of marriage.
• Political correctness and the fear of racism have made many Europeans reluctant to oppose the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst.
• The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a fantasy, and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.
• It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside.
• Muslims tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with Islam.
• Within Islam, the Shi’a and the Sunni can’t even agree to worship the same God in the same way, and over this they have been killing one another for centuries.
• It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world through inter-faith dialogue.
• Devout Muslims are as convinced as you are that their religion is perfect and that any deviation leads directly to hell.
• The truth is, it really matters what billions of human beings believe and why they believe it.
• One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns--about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering--in ways that are not flagrantly irrational.
• We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty.
• I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradication religion in our time do not seem good.
• If we ever do transcend our religious bewilderment, we will look back upon this period in human history with horror and amazement.
• The truth is, some of your most cherished beliefs are as embarrassing as those that sent the last slave ship sailing to America as late as 1859 (the same year the Darwin published The Origin of Species).
• Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous.
• We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity--birth, marriage, death--without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.
• There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality.
• It is import to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and spiritual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis.
• As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past.