Sam HarrisThinkers

Atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a 'non-astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist'.

Atheism is not a philosophy... it is not even a view of the world... it is simply an admission of the obvious. It is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified beliefs.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

The Bible is a pretty bad candidate for the word of an all-knowing God in that although it has room to instruct us in great detail about how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals, it has nothing to say about the actual age or size of the universe, or pi, or a cure for cancer.

The Bible is in favor of slavery and makes it clear that every man is free to sell his daughter into sexual slavery.

The Bible is curious in that one would think - if it were the work of God - it would have gone beyond slavery, but instead it contains rules for buying, selling, and bequeathing slaves.

The Bible is supposed to be the word of an omniscient God and yet contains not a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.

Christianity is after disasters, reflective of a boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved, who disgracefully believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs.

Christianity is based on circular reasoning whereby one uses one's own moral intuitions as the primary means of authenticating the wisdom of the Bible (i.e. Jesus is the son of God, the golden rule is the height of wisdom) in order to decide that the Bible is the appropriate guarantor of moral intuitions.

Christianity is dangerous because the teachings of the Bible are so muddled that, in contrast to the utter non-violence of a religion like Jainism, even Christianity's greatest minds (augustine, aquinas, luther) have supported burning heretics alive and torturing and killing apostates, jews, and witches.

Christianity is not the source of our morality, rather it is we ourselves that, on the one hand, find value in the golden rule and on the other, overlook the God's teaching to stone your bride to death on her father's doorstep if you discover on your wedding night that she is not a virgin.

Christianity is a cruel belief system where children who die without having undergone baptism (or without having ever been exposed to Christianity) are thought to spend eternity in hell.

Christianity is a religion that often holds up Martin Luther King Jr. as an exemplar despite the fact that his non-violence practices were in fact adopted from ghandi's jainism.