“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”
— Christopher Hitchens
— Hitch 22
“A man’s faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world: beliefs about matters of ultimate concern that we, as a culture, have told him he need not justify in the present. It is time we recognized just how maladaptive this Balkanization of our discourse has become. All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts–of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener–inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. In fact, we should take the perspective of thousands of such men, women, and children who were robbed of life, far sooner than they imagined possible, in absolute terror and confusion. The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith–perfect faith, as it turns out–and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.”
— Sam Harris
— The End of Faith
“The most charitable thing we can say about faith, the most charitable thing, is that it is likely to be false. Faith does not make you a better person. My lack of faith in Jesus does not make me a bad person. It doesn’t make me a good person, either. Your faith in Jesus does not make you a good person or a bad person. Faith does not make you a better person. Faith is just an unreliable process, that’s all it is.”
— Dr. Peter Boghossian
— Professor of Philosophy, Portland State University
