A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about happiness and suffering o… - Sam Harris

He goes so far as to suggest that we were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us:

I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention — distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence — is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity — a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.