Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well establi… - Sam Harris

We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

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.

Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.