Sam Harris Quotes

I am certainly not an intellectual relativist, nor a moral relativist.

Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics'; such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.

Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

Secularism has no central goal, it's just promoting endless relativism. That's why there is a huge moral drift in the country. Everybody is infallible except the Pope, if you like.

They want to wipe - in fact, the Democrat Party in their own platform last year wiped even - any reference to God completely from their platform.

My faith dictates a whole lot of what I'll do.

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.

In fact, because people are religious, they think they can do bad things.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

I think science and religion should be separate.

God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.

Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.

There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair.

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.