Sam Harris Quotes About Suffering

Quotes about: Suffering

• Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

  Sam Harris

  Loss, Suffering, Family And Friends

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.226, W. W. Norton & Company

• When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Believe, Differences

• Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. (25)

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Fighting, Condom Use

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

• Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.

  Sam Harris

  Character, Training, Suffering

• We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically-with a genuine concern for the happiness of other sentient beings-without presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant. Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

  Sam Harris

  Death, Loss, Genuine Concern

• Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

  Sam Harris

  Mind, Suffering, Facts

  Sam Harris (2011). “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”, p.195, Simon and Schuster

• Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment. . . . And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good. . . . This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Punishment, Suffering And Death

• To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.

  Sam Harris

  Suffering, Morality, Treats

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.186, W. W. Norton & Company

• One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns-about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering-in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Religious, Honesty

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

• When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious.

  Sam Harris

  People, Suffering, Religion

• Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Reality, Attachment

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

• It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.

  Sam Harris

  Helping Others, Thinking, People

  "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival" symposium, November 2006.

• The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are. ... Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

  Sam Harris

  Thinking, Suffering, Demand

• It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, War, Hatred

  "Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, www.theguardian.com. January 8, 2008.

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