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Letter to a Christian Nation QUOTES

Letter to a Christian Nation QUOTES

41 " People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

42 " Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

43 " [...] 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). "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

44 " 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. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

45 " Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

46 " One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religious faith. Consequently, faith inspires violence in at least two ways. First, people often kill other human beings because they believe that the creator of the universe wants them to do it. Islamist terrorism is a recent example of this sort of behavior. Second, far greater numbers of people fall into conflict with one another because they define their moral community on the basis of the religious affiliation: Muslims side with other Muslims, Protestants with Protestants, Catholics with Catholics. These conflicts are not always explicitly religious. But the bigotry and hatred that divide one community from another are often the products of their religious identities. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

47 " One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be appreciated in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. 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 the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…. An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

48 " 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. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

49 " God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern Himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. There "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

50 " Examples of unintelligent design in nature are so numerous that an entire book could be written simply listing them. I will permit myself just one more example. The human respiratory and digestive tracts share a little plumbing at the pharynx. In the United States alone, this intelligent design feature lands tens of thousands of children in the emergency room each year. Some hundreds choke to death. Many others suffer irreparable brain injury. What compassionate purpose does this serve? Of course, we can imagine a compassionate purpose: perhaps the parents of these children needed to be taught a lesson; perhaps God has prepared a special reward in heaven for every child who chokes to death on a bottle cap. The problem, however, is that such imaginings are compatible with any state of the world. What horrendous mishap could not be rationalized in this way? And why would you be inclined to think like this? How is it moral to think like this? "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

51 " More than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

52 " While political affiliation in the united States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the 'red [Republican] states' are primarily red due to 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. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in 'blue' [Democrat] states, and 38 percent are in 'red' [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest reated or murder, seventeen are red. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

53 " People who hold strong convictions without evidence, belong at the margins of our society, not in our halls of power. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

54 " 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? Mother "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

55 " Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world’s suffering 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 abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

56 " Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.*3 And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz, "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

57 " Atheism is nothing more than noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

58 " Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

59 " ONE OF THE most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation

60 " In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data are unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance. "

― Sam Harris , Letter to a Christian Nation