The God Who Wasn't There (2005)

Sam Harris: Self - Author, 'The End of Faith'

Quotes 

• Sam Harris : Our religions are the area in which we tolerate dogma with - completely uncritically. Uh, to deny that the Holocaust ever happened or to assert that you know you're in dialogue with extraterrestrials is pretty much synonymous with, with craziness in our culture. And it is so because we, we challenge people when they believe things strongly without evidence, or in, in contradiction to a mountain of evidence, um, except on matters of faith.

• Sam Harris : If you're trying to get a medical degree, and you have all kinds of ideas about human health that are, that cannot be substantiated by evidence, uh, and you talk about your own strong convictions and yet can't adduce any reasons for them, you are, you know, not only are you not getting a degree, you are just, you are essentially laughed out of the room. And there's nothing wrong with that. You know, lives depend on that being the case.

• [During the final credits] 

  Sam Harris : Because it is taboo to criticize religious faith and any convictions born of religious faith, we have the spectacle - really, the travesty - of college-educated politicians endorsing social policies; to take one example, blocking stem cell research. We're impeding it, impeding its funding, at least on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, on the basis of metaphysical dogmas. In this case, the dogma that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception. And this leads people, who should know better, to stand on the floor of the Senate or in the Oval Office and speak, uh, First Century platitudes which are meant to serve as ethical arguments against what is undoubtedly one of the most promising lines of research in biology: to remediate a host of, you know, scores, potentially, of terrible, debilitating diseases.

• Sam Harris : It really is not an exaggeration to say that there is some significant percentage of the American electorate which, if they turned on their television today and saw that a mushroom cloud had replaced Jerusalem, um, they would see a silver lining in that cloud.

• Sam Harris : Faith really is a conversation-stopper. If somebody says, "It's my faith that life is sacred and God creates life and man should not meddle in it," then that really stops the conversation. There's no - You can't challenge someone further and treat them as though they're drawing their ethics out of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which is really what I think we should be able to do. When the President of the United States says, "I, I plan to appoint common-sense judges who know that our rights are derived from God," I think someone in the White House Press Corps should be able to stand up and say, "How is that different from thinking you're going to appoint common-sense judges who think our rights are derived from Zeus?" And that's clearly an impertinent question, but it's a totally reasonable question.