God Is Dead: He Was Killed by These 6 Sam Harris Quotes

Hedonism didn't kill God, rationality did; and there are few more rational thinkers in this galaxy than the author Sam Harris.

For 20 years, Sam Harris has been launching truth-seeking missiles into the heart of humanity's most cherished traditions.

I first heard Sam Harris on a Tim Ferriss podcast in 2014 and remember thinking, "this is the most rational and articulate person I have ever listened to."

Since then, I've read every one of his books, watched just about every YouTube video he's in, and even hung out with him a couple of times at TED.

But after years of following Harris, I still think some of his best insights are in his first book The End of Faith -- an unrelentingly rational book that fundamentally shaped how I think about religion.

Here are six mind-stretching Sam Harris quotes from The End of Faith that deleted the space previously reserved in my mind for "God":

“The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still being besieged by the armies of the preposterous.

We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature.

Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.

Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

“Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

“The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside.

The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

“It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe.

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.

To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview, however heroic the efforts of redactors, is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

“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.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Oh, and here's a bonus quote from Sam Harris' Letter To A Christian Nation:

"The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."

- Sam Harris, Letter To A Christian Nation

Question everything, people... especially claims about the universe made before the invention of the telescope.