Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: “what can be ass… - Sam Harris

what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”15

what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

"The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be "fundamental-
ist" 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. The difference between funda-
mentalists and moderates — and certainly the difference between all
"extremists" and moderates — is the degree to which they see political
and military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith. In any
case, people who believe that Islam must inform every dimension of
human existence, including politics and law, are now generally called
not "fundamentalists" or "extremists" but, rather, "Islamists.

Recent advances in experimental psychology and neuroimaging have allowed us to study the boundary between conscious and unconscious mental processes with increasing precision. We now know that at least two systems in the brain — often referred to as “dual processes” — govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. One is evolutionarily older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative. When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.