"The End of Faith" by Sam Harris

• A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.
• Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.
• A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.
• Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility.
• While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed.
• Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.
• Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.
• Of course, people of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused.
• One of the central themes of this book is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.
• I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance--born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God--is one of the principal forces driving us towards the abyss.
• Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures--forces like greed, hatred, and fear--for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy.
• In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould’s notion of a “loving concordat” between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.
• There is a clearly sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions--Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God--for us to do this.
• The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained--as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography or each of our religions attest to centuries of cross pollination among them.
• Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simple ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world.
• The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to accept as written.
• In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged.
• This is a problem for “moderation” in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law.
• The moderation we see among non fundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.
• Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago--and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture.
• Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.
• So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time (they haven’t); it is just that they have been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their passages.
• From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist.
• Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance--and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.
• Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world.
• Finding ourselves in a universe that seems bent upon destroying us, we quickly discover, both as individuals and as societies, that it is a good thing to understand the forces arrayed against us. And so it is that every human being comes to desire genuine knowledge about the world. This has always posed a special problem for religion, because every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable.
• The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
• Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity--a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
• Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
• Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past.
• If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us.
• The response of the Muslim world to the events of September 11, 2001, leaves no doubt that a significant number of human beings in the twenty-first century believe in the possibility of martyrdom. We have, in response to this improbable fact, declared a war on “terrorism.” This is rather like declaring war on “murder”; it is a category error that obscures the true cause of our troubles.
• Terrorism is not a source of human violence, but merely one of its inflections.
• To see that our problem is with Islam itself, and not merely with “terrorism,” we need only ask ourselves why Muslim terrorists do what they do.
• The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran.
• The concessions we have made to religious faith--to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence--have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world.
• Most Muslims who commit atrocities are explicit about their desire to get to paradise.
• The reality that the West currently enjoys far more wealth and temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical perversity, and this situation will always stand as an open invitation for jihad.
• The problem is not that some Muslims neglect to notice the few references to non aggression that can be found in the Koran, and that this leads them to do terrible things to innocent unbelievers; the problem is that most Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God.
• The appropriate response to the bin Ladens of the world is to correct everyone’s reading of these texts by making the same evidentiary demands in religious matters that we make in all others.
• How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.
• The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself) leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.
• We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change.
• This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss.
• Doesn’t life itself have all the properties of our hypothetical virus? You could die at any moment. You might not even live to see the end of this paragraph. Not only that, you will definitely die at some moment in the future.
• If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be prepared.
• We love our family and friends, are terrified of losing them, and yet are not in the least free merely to love them while our short lives coincide.
• While we try not to think about it, nearly the only thing we can be certain of in this life is that we will one day die and leave everything behind; and yet, paradoxically, it seems almost impossible to believe that this is so.
• There’s no denying that a person’s conception of the afterlife has direct consequences for his view of the world.
• Religious moderation still represents a failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) certainty of others.
• In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs?
• Clearly, the fact of death is intolerable to us, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave.
• The basis of our spirituality surely consists in this: the range of possible human experience far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity.
• Every spiritual tradition rests on the insight that how we use our attention, from moment to moment, largely determines the quality of our lives.
• Many of the results of spiritual practice are genuinely desirable, and we owe it to ourselves to seek them out.
• A variety of technologies, ranging from the practice of meditation to the use of psychedelic drugs, attest to the scope and plasticity of human experience.
• It is important to realize that a healthy, scientific skepticism is compatible with a fundamental openness of mind.
• Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently.
• At the level of the brain, the laws that underwrite human happiness are unlikely to vary widely from person to person.
• We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives.
• It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.
• It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.
• As a man believes, so he will act.
• If follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.
• It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe.
• We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
• Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.
• To see how much our culture currently partakes of the irrationality of our enemies, just substitute the name of your favorite Olympian for “God” wherever this word appears in public discourse.
• We are fast approaching a time when the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking; the requisite information and technology are now seeping into every corner of our world.
• It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
• This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis of religious faith.
• Our primary task in our discourse with one another should be to identify those beliefs that seem least likely to survive another thousand years of human inquiry, or most likely to prevent it, and subject them to sustained criticism.
• It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.
• Not only are our long-term and short-term memories the products of distinct and dissimilar neural circuits; they have themselves been divided into multiple subsystems.
• Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.
• The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others.
• There is, in fact, no talking to some people.
• We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.
• To know what a given belief is about, I must know what my words mean; to know what my words mean, my beliefs must be generally consistent. There is just no escaping the fact that there is a tight relationship between the words we use, the type of thoughts we can think, and what we can believe to be true about the world.
• Personal identity itself requires such consistency: unless a person’s beliefs are highly coherent, he will have as many identities as there are mutually incompatible sets of beliefs careening around his brain.
• If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical contradictions.
• Studies of “change blindness,” for instance, have revealed that we do not perceive nearly as much of the world as we think we do, since a large percentage of the visual scene can be suddenly altered without our noticing.
• It does not require any special knowledge of psychology or neuroscience to observe that human beings are generally reluctant to change their minds.
• Because evidence is simple an account of the causal linkage between states of the world and our beliefs about them.
• We can believe a proposition to be true only because something in our experience, or in our reasoning about the world, actually speaks to the truth of the proposition in question.
• The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me the slightest reason to believe that one exists.
• To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my belief.
• The moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in the right relation to the world to be valid.
• Those who are destined to suffer terribly throughout their lives, or upon the threshold of death, often find consolation in one unfounded proposition or another. Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
• But the fact that religious beliefs have a great influence on human life says nothing at all about their validity.
• The truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern--specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death.
• There is no way around the fact that we crave justification for our core beliefs and believe them only because we think such justification is, at the very least, in the offing.
• If a little supportive evidence emerges, however, the faithful prove as attentive to data as the damned. This demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence--be it the Day of Judgement or some other downpour of corroboration.
• A man’s faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world: beliefs about matters of ultimate concern that we, as a culture, have told him he need not justify in the present.
• The fact that unjustified beliefs can have a consoling influence on the human mind is no argument in their favor.
• Where faith really pays its dividends, however, is in the conviction that the future will be better than the past, or at least not worse.
• The allure of most religious doctrines is nothing more sublime or inscrutable than this: things will turn out well in the end.
• Our “freedom of belief,” if it exists at all, is minimal.
• Is a person really free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No. Evidence (whether sensory or logical) is the only thing that suggests that a given belief is really about the world in the first place.
• It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes.
• To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind.
• And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.
• The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
• Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous.
• We believe most of what we believe about the world because others have told us to. Reliance upon the authority of experts, and upon the testimony of ordinary people, is the stuff of which worldviews are made.
• In fact, the more educated we become, the more our beliefs come to us as second hand.
• A person who believes only those propositions for which he can provide full sensory or theoretical justification will know almost nothing about the world; that is, if he is not swiftly killed by his own ignorance.
• Life is too short, and the world too complex, for any of us to go it alone in epistemological terms.
• This does not suggest, however, that all forms of authority are valid; nor does it suggest that even the best authorities will always prove reliable. There are good arguments and bad ones, precise observations and imprecise ones; and each of us has to be the final judge of whether or not it is reasonable to adopt a given belief about the world.
• There’s no telling which of our current theories will be proved wrong tomorrow, so how much confidence can we have in them? Many unwary consumers of these ideas have concluded that science is just another area of human discourse and, as such, is no more anchored to the facts of this world than literature or religion are. All truths are up for grabs.
• Science is science because it represents our most committed effort to verify that our statements about the world are true (or at least not false). We do this by observation and experiment within the context of a theory.
• Visionary experiences, in and of themselves, can never be sufficient to answer questions of historical fact.
• Religious unreason should acquire an even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principal causes of armed conflict in our world.
• Perhaps it is time we demanded that our fellow human beings had better reasons for maintaining their religious differences, if such reasons even exist.
• The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness. It can be quite possible, even reasonable, to risk one’s life to save others without believing any incredible ideas about the nature of the universe.
• A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to death.
• The problem with scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations (including most of the literal ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith.
• The practice for which the Inquisition is duly infamous, and the innovation that secured it a steady stream of both suspects and guilty verdicts, was its use of torture to extract confessions from the accused, to force a witness to testify, and to persuade a confessing heretic to name those with whom he had collaborated in sin.
• From the perspective of Christian teaching, Jews are even worse than run-of-the-mill heretics; they are heretics who explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ.
• Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was perfectly apparent that disease could be inflicted by demons and black magic.
• Anti-semitism is as integral to church doctrine as the flying buttress is to a Gothic cathedral, and this terrible truth has been published in Jewish blood since the first centuries of the common era.
• Anti-Semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God’s initial revelation.
• Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe that they are bearers of a unique covenant with God. As a consequence, they have spent the last two thousand years collaborating with those who see them as different by seeing themselves as irretrievably so. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.
• It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church’s resulting anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from the Hebrew.
• Mary’s virginity has always been suggestive of God’s attitude toward sex: it is intrinsically sinful, being the mechanism through which original sin was bequeathed to the generations after Adam.
• We should note that the emphasis on miracles in the New Testament, along with the attempts to make the life of Jesus conform to the Old Testament prophecy, reveal the first Christians’ commitment, however faltering, to making their faith seem rational.
• Even today, the apparent confirmation of prophecy detailed in the New Testament is offered as the chief reason to accept Jesus as the messiah.
• Like witches, the Jews of Europe were often accused of incredible crimes, the most prevalent of which has come to be known as the “blood libel”--born of the belief that Jews require the blood of Christians (generally newborn) for use in a variety of rituals.
• The doctrine of transubstantiation was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and prohibited Jews from owning land or embarking upon civil or military careers), and thereafter became the centerpiece of the Christian (now Catholic) faith.
• Astonishingly, ideas as spurious as the blood libel are still very much with us, having found a large cult of believers in the Muslim world.
• At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish dogmas, poorly arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some ludicrous instrument of death.
• At the end of the nineteenth century, the Vatican attempted to combat the unorthodox conclusions of modern Bible commentators with its own rigorous scholarship. Catholic scholars were urged to adopt the techniques of modern criticism, to demonstrate that the results of a meticulous and dispassionate study of the Bible could be compatible with church doctrine. The movement was known as “modernism,” and soon occasioned considerable embarrassment, as many of the finest Catholic scholars found that they, too, were becoming skeptical about the literal truth of scripture.
• The fact that people are sometimes inspired to heroic acts of kindness by the teaching of Christ says nothing about the wisdom or necessity of believing that he, exclusively, was the Son of God.
• Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm.
• By any measure of normativity we might wish to adopt (ethical, practical, epistemological, economic, etc.), there are good beliefs and there are bad ones--and it should now be obvious to everyone that Muslims have more than their fair share of the latter.
• The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture.
• We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so.
• Many authors have pointed out that it is problematic to speak of Muslim “fundamentalism” because it suggests that there are large doctrinal differences between fundamentalist Muslims and the mainstream. The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be “fundamentalist” in the Western sense of the word--in that even “moderate” approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and inerrant word of the one true God.
• While there are undoubtedly some “moderate” Muslims who have decided to overlook the irrescindable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest.
• The feature of Islam that is most troubling to non-Muslims, and which apologists for Islam do much to obfuscate, is the principle of jihad. Literally, the term can be translated as “struggle” or “striving,” but it is generally rendered in English as “holy war,” and this is no accident. While Muslims are quick to observe that there is an inner (or “greater”) jihad, which involves waging war against one’s own sinfulness, no amount of casuistry can disguise the fact that the outer (or “lesser”) jihad--war against infidels and apostates--is a central feature of the faith.
• Armed conflict in “defense of Islam” is a religious obligation for every Muslim man.
• Given the long history of conflict between Islam and the West, almost any act of violence against infidels can now be plausibly construed as an action in defense of the faith.
• In Islam, it is the “moderate” who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.
• In the Muslim perception, conversion to Islam is a benefit to the convert and a merit in those who convert him. In Islamic law, conversion from Islam is apostasy--a capital offense for both the one who is misled and the one who misleads him. On this question, the law is clear and unequivocal. If a Muslim renounces Islam, even if a new convert reverts to his previous faith, the penalty is death.
• As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword.
• We should not mistake the “tolerance” of political, economic, and numerical weakness for genuine liberalism.
• Within the House of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world--so as to call the tenets of the faith into question--is death.
• Given the fact that the Hadith is often used as the lens through which to interpret the Koran, many Muslim jurists consider it to be an even greater authority on the practice of Islam.
• There is no substitute for confronting the text itself.
• On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise nonbelievers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict.
• The bottom line for the aspiring martyr seems to be this: as long as you are killing infidels or apostates “in defense of Islam,” Allah doesn’t care whether you kill yourself in the process or not.
• We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world’s Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God, amid “rivers of purest water, and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of wine delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clearest honey.”
• For devout Muslims, religious identity seems to trump all others.
• There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death.
• That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen.
• Western leaders who insist that our conflict is not with Islam are mistaken; but, as I argue throughout this book, we have a problem with Christianity and Judaism as well.
• Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.
• At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root.
• There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it.
• The Arab world is now economically and intellectually stagnant to a degree that few could have thought possible, given its historical role in advancing and preserving human knowledge.
• The leaders of Hamas are all college graduates, and some have master’s degrees.
• If Muslim orthodoxy were as economically and technologically viable as Western liberalism, we would probably be doomed to witness the Islamification of the earth.
• As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.
• The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today,
• A lever works only if it is attached to something. Someone, after all, must believe in God, for talk of God to be politically efficacious.
• Nothing explains the actions of Muslims extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.
• With respect to Islam, the liberal tendency is to blame the West for raising the ire of the Muslim world, through centuries of self-serving conquest and meddling, while conservatives tend to blame other contingent features of Middle East, Arab, or Muslim history.
• What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imaging how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons--weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property.
• It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources.
• Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and better or worse ways to put them to use.
• There are undoubtedly both good and bad answers to questions of this sort, and not all belief systems and cultural practices will be equally suited to bringing the good ones to light.
• Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”).
• Without perfect weapons, collateral damage--the maiming and killing of innocent people--is unavoidable.
• The ability to pull money straight out of the ground has led Arab governments to be entirely unresponsive to the concerns of their people.
• But “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism” is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem.
• How many hours of human labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation’s phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millennia.
• We should still recognize what a fathomless sink for human resources (both financial and attentional) organized religion is.
• If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society.
• Given what most of us believe about God, it is at present unthinkable that human beings will ever identify themselves merely as human beings, disavowing all lesser affiliations.
• If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation.
• Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented.
• If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun.
• The degree to which religious ideas still determine government policies--especially those of the United States--presents a grave danger to everyone.
• Many members of the U.S. government currently view their professional responsibilities in religious terms.
• Scalia is right to observe that what a person believes happens after death determines his view of it--and, therefore, his ethics.
• In the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, it is currently illegal to seek certain experiences of pleasure. Seek pleasure by a forbidden means, even in the privacy of your own home, and men with guns may kick in the door and carry you away to prison for it.
• Society as a whole has an interest in how its children develop, and the private behavior of parents, along with the contents of our media, clearly play a role in this.
• Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it.
• The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin. It is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others. This impulse has less to do with the history of religion and more to do with its logic, because the very idea of privacy is incompatible with the existence of God. If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalized by certain sexual behaviors or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the slightest implication for their behavior in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith.
• To see that our laws against “vice” have actually nothing to do with keeping people from coming to physical or psychological harm, and everything to do with not angering God, we need only consider that oral or anal sex between consenting adults remains a criminal offense in thirteen states.
• One does not have to be a demographer to grasp that the impulse to prosecute consenting adults for non procreative sexual behavior will correlate rather strongly with religious faith.
• When one looks at our drug laws--indeed, at our vice laws altogether--the only organizing principle that appears to make sense of them is that anything which might radically eclipse prayer or procreative sexuality as a source of pleasure has been outlawed.
• Concerns about the health of our citizens, or about their productivity, are red herrings in this debate, as the legality of alcohol and cigarettes attests.
• As a drug, marijuana is nearly unique in having several medical applications and no known lethal dose.
• In fact, nearly everything human beings do--driving cars, flying planes, hitting golf balls--is more dangerous than smoking marijuana in the privacy of one’s own home.
• Under our current laws, it is safe to say, if a drug were invented that posed no risk of physical harm or addiction to its users but produced a brief feeling of spiritual bliss and epiphany in 100 percent of those who tried it, this drug would be illegal, and people would be punished mercilessly for its use.
• Our prohibitions of certain substances has led thousands of otherwise productive and law-abiding men and women to be locked away for decades at a stretch, sometimes for life.
• Our war on drugs consumes an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our courts and the full-time energies of over 400,000 police officers.
• The problem with the prohibition of any desirable commodity is money.
• Prohibition itself is what makes the manufacture and sale of drugs so extraordinarily profitable.
• Every relevant indicator of the drug trade--rates of drug use and interdiction, estimates of the production, the purity of drugs on the street, etc.--shows that the government can do nothing to stop it as long as such profits exist (indeed, these profits are highly corrupting of law enforcement in any case).
• From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behavior of one’s ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.
• There are sources of irrationality other than religious faith, of course, but none of them are celebrated for their role in shaping public policy.
• By the measure of a cell’s potential, whenever the president scratches his nose he is now engaged in a diabolical culling of souls.
• Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.
• Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society.
• Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.
• Many people appear to believe that ethical truths are culturally contingent in a way that scientific truths are not.
• A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures.
• Taking happiness and suffering as our starting point, we can see that much of what people worry about under the guise of morality has nothing to do with the subject.
• It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.
• The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd.
• Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.
• It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis.
• Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.
• It seems that until we more fully understand the relationship between brains and minds, our judgments about the possible scope of animal suffering will remain relatively blind and relatively dogmatic.
• If there are truths to be known about how human beings conspire to make one another happy or miserable, there are truths to be known about ethics.
• Most of our religions have been no more supportive of genuine moral inquiry than of scientific inquiry generally.
• As we have seen, religion is one of the great limiters of moral identity, since most believers differentiate themselves, in moral terms, from those who do not share their faith. No other ideology is so eloquent on the subject of what divides one moral community from another.
• The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals--intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on--will equally differentiate between human beings themselves.
• If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren’t more articulate people more important still?
• For our beliefs to function logically--indeed, for them to be beliefs at all--we must also believe that they faithfully represent states of the world.
• Beliefs are simply tools for making one’s way in the world.
• To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered--and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.
• Relativists and pragmatists believe that truth is just a matter of consensus.
• If we’ve learned anything in the last two thousand years, it is that a person’s sense of what is reasonable sometimes needs a little help finding its feet.
• For ethics to matter to us, the happiness and suffering of others must matter to us.
• To say that something is “natural,” or that it has conferred an adaptive advantage upon our species, is not to say that it is “good” in the required sense of contributing to human happiness in the present.
• From the point of view of evolution, the best thing a person can do with his life is have as many children as possible.
• To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.
• The fact that we want the people we love to be happy, and are made happy by love in turn, is an empirical observation.
• Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls, rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love.
• Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. It is a failure of ethics.
• Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
• It is generally thought that the gravest ethical problem we face in resorting to torture is that we would be bound to torture some number of innocent men and women.
• Whenever we consent to drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them.
• It seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage.
• Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world.
• Killing people at a distance is easier, but perhaps it should not be that much easier.
• There is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.
• Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.
• Pacifism is generally considered to be a morally unassailable position to take with respect to human violence. The worst that is said of it, generally, is that it is a difficult position to maintain in practice.
• While it can seem noble enough when the stakes are low, pacifism is ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world’s thugs.
• Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.
• At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed.
• The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.
• According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. One can only enumerate one’s sin, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.
• It is difficult to find a word for that human enterprise which aims at happiness directly--at happiness of a sort that can survive the frustration of all conventional desires.
• Most spiritual teachings agree that there is more to happiness than becoming a productive member of society, a cheerful consumer of every licit pleasure, and an enthusiastic bearer of children disposed to do the same. Indeed, many suggest that it is our search for happiness--our craving for knowledge and new experience, our desire for recognition, our efforts to find the right romantic partner, even our yearning for spiritual experience itself--that causes us to overlook a form of well-being that is intrinsic to consciousness in every present moment.
• While many of us go for decades without experiencing a full day of solitude, we live every moment in the solitude of our own minds. However close we may be to others, our pleasures and pains are ours alone.
• Most scientists consider themselves physicalists; this means, among other things, that they believe that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of our brains. On this account, when the brain dies, the stream of our being must come to an end.
• But the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
• The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it. Inevitably, scientists treat consciousness as a mere attribute of certain large-brained animals.
• To define consciousness in terms of its outward signs, however, is a fallacy.
• Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice.
• The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants.
• Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.
• If the term “I” refers to anything at all, it does not refer simply to the body. After all, most of us feel individuated as a self within the body.
• Whatever the relationship between consciousness and the body actually is, in experiential terms the body is something to which the conscious self stands in relation.
• The sense of self seems to be the product of the brain’s representing its own acts of representation; its seeing of the world begets an image of a one who sees. It is important to realize that this feeling--the sense that each of us has of appropriating, rather than merely being, a sphere of experience--is not a necessary feature of consciousness.
• Like any other function that emerges from the activity of the brain, the feeling of self is best thought of as a process.
• As a mental phenomenon, loss of self is not as rare as our scholarly neglect of it suggests. This experience is characterized by a sudden loss of subject/object perception: the continuum of experience remains, but one no longer feels that there is a knower standing apart from the known.
• The contents of consciousness--sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, moods, etc.--whatever they are at the level of the brain, are merely expressions of consciousness at the level of our experience.
• It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the feeling that we call “I” is one of the most pervasive and salient features of human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion “selves” pursue diverse and often incompatible ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon in nature.
• Although we have no reason to be dogmatically attached to any one tradition of spiritual instruction, we should not imagine that they are all equally wise or equally sophisticated.
• Most techniques for introspection that aim at uncovering the intrinsic properties of consciousness are referred to as methods of meditation.
• Inevitably, the primary obstacle to meditation is thinking.
• It is true that some experiences entail the temporary cessation of thought, but meditation is less a matter of suppressing thoughts than of breaking our identification with them, so that we can recognize the condition in which thoughts themselves arise.
• The fundamental insight of most Eastern schools of spirituality, however, is that while thinking is a practical necessity, the failure to recognize thought as thoughts, moment after moment, is what gives each of us the feeling that we call “I,” and this is the string upon which all our states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.
• We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored.
• Once the selflessness of consciousness has been glimpsed, spiritual life can be viewed as a matter of freeing one’s attention more and more so that this recognition can become stabilized.
• Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time.
• While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.
• In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.
• This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas.
• If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.
• Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another.
• People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
• Nothing is more sacred than the facts.
• The litmus test for reasonableness should be obvious: anyone who wants to know how the world is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be open to new evidence.
• Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
• The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.
• Because it is taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy.
• I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
• Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing.
• Religious faith is the belief in historical and metaphysical propositions without sufficient evidence.
• People of faith naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning whenever they possible can. Faith is simply the license they give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail.
• Politics and economics do not get a man to intentionally blow himself up in a crowd of children, or get his mother to sing his praises for it. Miracles of this order generally require religious faith.
• The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that now directly inspire Muslim terrorism.
• Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible and personally transformative.
• Religion persuades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about questions of civilizational importance.
• Once we find ourselves believing anything (whether for good or bad reasons), our words and actions demand that we rectify inconsistency wherever we find it.
• Not all knowledge claims are on the same footing.
• There is, perhaps, no greater evidence for the imperfection of the Bible as an account of reality, divine or mundane, than such instances of self-refutation.
• Pape claims that “the most important goal that a community can have is the independence of its homeland (population, property, and way of life) from foreign influence or control.”
• Suicide bombing, in the Muslim world at least, is an explicitly religious phenomenon that is inextricable from notions of martyrdom and jihad, predictable on their basis, and sanctified by their logic.
• One of the concerns with giving federal funds to religious organizations is that these organizations are not bound by the same equal employment opportunity regulations that apply to the rest of the nonprofit world.
• When was the last time someone was killed over an alcohol or tobacco deal gone awry? We can be confident that the same normalcy would be achieved if drugs were regulated by the government.
• According to the U.S. government, twelve of the twenty-eight groups that have been officially classed as terrorist organizations finance their activities, in whole or in part, by the drug trade.
• Where drugs are a problem, they are a problem whose remedy is better education and better health care, not incarceration.
• There is a difference, after all, between intending to inflict suffering on an innocent person and inflicting it by accident.
• While Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense.
• Any person familiar with both literatures will know that the Bible does not contain a discernible fraction of the precise spiritual instructions that can be found in the Buddhist canon.