| Sam Harris talks about the importance
of openly debating and discussing religious views as the most
important means to affect a positive impact on the world. Considering
all of the ways in which religion negatively affects us, if
we could change our religious beliefs, it would have the most
far-reaching impact on humanity of anything we could do. He
posits that religious moderation is a roadblock to progress,
and recommends reason and intellectual honesty as the best guide
for religious discussion.
"Whatever is true spiritually and ethically about our
circumstance...there is no doubt there are spiritual truths...there
are spiritual experiences human beings can have...and there
are ethical truths. Whatever is true about that has to transcend
culture; it has to transcend our cultural differences. There's
a reason why we don't talk about Christian physics and Muslim
mathematics. It's because an experiment run here and in Bagdad
actually works in both places if it's teasing out something
fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true
ethically; that is true spiritually." -- Sam Harris
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