There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if… - Sam Harris

I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know — it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

You have not built your mind. And in moments in which you seem to build it — when you make an effort to change yourself, to acquire knowledge, or to perfect a skill — the only tools at your disposal are those that you have inherited from moments past.

Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior — but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter — and there are paths toward making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do — for instance, after going back and forth between two options — I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable.

He prolongs their life and prosperity so that they may continue heaping sin upon sin and all the more richly deserve the torments that await them beyond the grave.

I would argue that no approach to a text is without method — even what you would call literalism and what I call “vacuous literalism.” (In