“Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.” Sam Harris
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“The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece.” Sam Harris
“Man is manifestly not the measure of al things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us itself central to this mystery and ground for any experience we may wish to call "spiritual.” No myth needs to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need to be worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need to be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather to much, on how soon we realize.“ Sam Harris
“Whatever is true spiritually and ethically about our circumstances… there is no doubt there are spiritual truths… there are spiritual experiences human beings can have…and there are ethical truths. Whatever is true about that has to transcend culture; it has to transcend our cultural differences.
Consequently, it makes no sense at all to have one’s spiritual life pegged to rumors of ancient miracles. What we need is a discourse about ethics and spiritual experience that is as unconstrained by ancient ignorance as the discourse of science already is. Science really does transcend the vagaries of culture.
There’s a reason why we don’t talk about Christian physics and Muslim mathematics. It’s because an experiment run here and in Baghdad actually works in both places if it’s teasing out something fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true ethically; that is true spiritually." Sam Harris
“Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.” Sam Harris
“Losing a belief in free will has not made me a fatalist - in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on a basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system - learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention - may radically transform one’s life. Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one’s thoughts and feelings can -paradoxically- allow for greater creative control over one’s life. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings.” Sam Harris