Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing peop… - Sam Harris

As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now.

One can traverse the Eastern paths simply by becoming interested in the nature of one’s own mind — especially in the immediate causes of psychological suffering — and by paying closer attention to one’s experience in every present moment. There is, in truth, nothing one need believe.

... if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.