By Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, in “Imagine There’s No Heaven: An Atheist Manifesto,” on the Web site TruthDig (www.truthdig.com), reproduced in today’s NY Times:
Religion is only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs.
And yet these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and – all too often – what they will kill for. This is a problem, because when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and violence.
Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable – to have our beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments – can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing.
While there is no guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by their dogmas.
From Where’s the Evidence? – New York Times (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).
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