Quotations from "Letter to a Christian Nation"

Questions of morality are about happiness and suffering.

The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding given the content of the book.

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.

If we take Jesus in half his moods, we can easily justify the actions of St. Francis of Assisi or Martin Luther King Jr. Taking the other half, we can justify the Inquisition.

Consider the question of slavery. Consult the Bible and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves. The fact that abolitionists used parts of scripture to repudiate other parts does not indicate that the Bible is a good guide to morality.

[Of the Ten Commandments] Commandments 5 through 9 are found in virtually every culture. There are obvious biological reasons why people tend to treat their parents well, and to think badly of murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars.

God never gives us the freedom to follow the commandments we like best and neglect the rest.

If you think 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.

Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theological defensible reading of the Bible.

It is clearly possible to say that someone like Hitler was wrong in moral terms without reference to scripture.

Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral... Your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering.

If compassion were really dependent upon religious dogmatism, how could we explain the work of secular doctors in the most war-ravaged regions of the developing world?

While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.

We might wonder, 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?

One can reasonably wonder whether most aborted fetuses suffer their destruction... One cannot reasonably wonder this about the millions of men, women, and children who must endure the torments of war, famine, political torture, or mental illness.

The compassion of human beings is often hobbled by preposterous ideas about sin and salvation. If you are worried about human suffering, abortion should rank very low on your list of concerns.

50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant. In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage... If God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.

If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers...they should be utterly immoral.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths.

No society in human history ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

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.

Widespread belief in God does not ensure a society’s health.

You feel that you are in a position to judge that the Golden Rule is the height of moral wisdom...and then you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world...we must depend on the Bible.We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. If we are civilized, we will reject this as the vilest lunacy imaginable. Doing so requires that we exercise our own moral intuitions.

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and human well-being, or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million American claiming to ‘never doubt the existence of God’ should be obliged to present evidence for his existence—and, indeed, for his benevolence.

An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a little girl—even once in a million years—casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God.

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 survivor of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while the same God drowned infants in their cribs.

People of all faiths regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering... If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop calamities, or He does not care to.

So much suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources.

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 does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.

Why doesn’t the Bible say anything about electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer? God had room to instruct us in great detail about how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals.

The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma: the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.

Every religion makes specific claims about the way the world is... Such claims conflict with the claims of science, because they are claims made on terrible evidence.

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.

The core of science is controlled by intellectual honesty.

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 possibly be certain about.

Evolution is a theory. In science, facts must be explained with reference to other facts. These larger explanatory models are ‘theories’. Theories make predictions and can be tested. The phrase ‘the theory of evolution’ does not in the least suggest that evolution is not a fact. One can speak about ‘the theory of gravitation’ without casting doubt upon gravity as a fact of nature.

[Christians] are simply not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe.

An honest reading of the biblical account of creation suggests that God created all animals and plants as we now see them.

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.

Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists.

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 non-believers for their intellectual arrogance.

When we look at the natural world, we do not see optimal design... We see flightless birds and snakes with pelvises. We see species of fish, salamanders, and crustaceans that have non-functional eyes. We see whales that produce teeth during fetal development, only to reabsorb them as adults. As embryos, we produce tales, gill sacs, and a full coat of apelike hair. The human respiratory and digestive tracts share a little plumbing at the pharynx.

There are now around three hundred and fifty thousand known species of beetles.

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 is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the difference between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.

The bigotry and hatred that divide one community from another are often the products of their religious identities.

We do not all worship the same God, and nothing attests to this fact more eloquently than our history of religious bloodshed.

Devout Muslims are as convinced as you are that their religion is perfect and that any deviation leads directly to hell... A person’s religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like ‘compassion.’ There are millions of Muslims who would be willing to die before they would allow your version of compassion to gain a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula.

How can interfaith dialogue reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and immune to revision?

We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty.

It is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous.

There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences... But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims any more respectable.

Any genuine exploration of ethics or the contemplative life demands the same standards of reasonableness and self-criticism that animate all intellectual discourse.

That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.



SamHarris.org