Book notes: The End of Faith

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

• To my thought that people just use religion as a justification to commit violence that they wanted to do anyway, Harris says, that "ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe."
• Relious moderates are, in large part, responisble for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptual literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.
• Our waking and dreaming brains are engaged in substantially the same activity; it is just that while dreaming, our brains are far less constrained by sensory information.
• Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence -- that unbelievers will go to Hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants -- he becomes capable of anything.
• On almost every page the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious war.
• Spain translates more foreign books into Spanish in one year than have been translated into Arabic since the Ninth Century.
• Religious violence is with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith.
• The litmus test for reasonableness should be obvious: anyone who wants to know how the world is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be open to new evidence.