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 … - Sam Harris

We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?

Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

God visits suffering on innocent people of scope and scale that would even embarrass the most ambitious psychopath