Sam Harris Quotes
It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).
Harris, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 12.
There is of course no way to tell the sect of a Muslim by physique alone, although there are major behavioral differences. The reason the quotation was newsworthy was that it was amazing that a senior Senate leader was so ignorant of such a critical and problematical subset of the world.
This is the “logic” by which Islamic terrorists have justified murder of civilians. Just as all Muslim men are fighters for Allah, all infidels are fighters against Allah and thus should die.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation because it succinctly gives a history of the various horrors of religious strife in British history—a history that was very well known to the American Founding Fathers and the general American Colonial population. This history was the major driver behind the public insistence for the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment which erected a wall of separation between church and state with government never favoring or abetting any particular religion.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
This quotation illustrates that the Muslim conquest and attempt to destroy and desecrate the symbols of other religions was not limited to Christianity—it was ALL other religions. In that sense, Christianity and Islam of the period were very similar at the time—intolerance to the point of murder and destruction of any “heathen” religion.
He is a Greek Orthodox Christian, and he correctly observes that the Islamic world was considerably more tolerant than the Christian until the 18th century when Islam had become less tolerant in the Middle East while the Christians were modernizing and going through a cultural and intellectual enlightenment and societal modernization while the Muslims, became less tolerant than they were in earlier years leading to the modern situation.
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and Islam in particular, and is described as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse", along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
