So, I'm reading Sam Harris' new book, "The Moral Landscape". I've bookmarked so many sections in it for sharing with friends, that I decided it might be easier to just post the segments HERE as I come across them: only the passages that make a bold statement, mind you.
I'll start with the chapter "Good & Evil",
Page 63:
"Because most religions conceive of morality as a matter of being obedient to the word of God (generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward), their precepts often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in this world. Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm".
Page 74-75:
"The peculiar concerns of Islam have created communities in almost every society on earth that grow so unhinged in the face of criticism that they will reliably riot, burn embassies, and seek to kill peaceful people, over cartoons. This is something they will not do, incidentally, in protest over the continuous atrocities committed against them by their fellow Muslims. The reasons why such a terrifying inversion of priorities does not tend to maximize human happiness are susceptible to many levels of analysis---ranging from biochemistry to economics. But do we need further information in this case? It seems to me that we already know enough about the human condition to know that killing cartoonists for blasphemy does not lead anywhere worth going on the moral landscape".
Page 78:
"My reasons for dismissing revealed religion as a source of moral guidance have been spelled out elsewhere, so I will not ride this hobbyhorse here, apart from pointing out the obvious: (1) there are many revealed religions available to us, and they offer mutually incompatible doctrines; (2) the scriptures of many religions, including the most well subscribed (i.e., Christianity and Islam), countenance patently unethical practices like slavery; (3) the faculty we use to validate religious precepts, judging the Golden Rule to be wise and the murder of apostates to be foolish, is something we bring to scripture; it does not, therefore, come from scripture; (4) the reasons for believing that any of the world's religions were "revealed" to our ancestors (rather than merely invented by men and women who did not have the benefit of a twenty-first-century education) are either risible or nonexistent---and the idea that each of these mutually contradictory doctrines is inerrant remains a logical impossibility. Here we can take refuge in Bertrand Russell's famous remark that even if we could be certain that one of the world's religions was perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability".
Since my posting of these passages is merely out of desire to share the common sense and insight that are so abundant in this book, I will not be participating in discussions with people who may disagree with anything they read here. You should take your frustrations out on the author himself, as these are his words, not mine.
