The End of Faith

I have read Sam Harris’ Letter To a Christian Nation and while a part of me felt like he was just trying to get a rise out of people, he made some great points just as he did in the lecture regarding The End of Faith. He reasoned that hoping that something happened and believing that it happened are two different things. The difference is that believing that your thought, your proposition held in mind actually fits in to reality. Beliefs are machinery for guiding our behavior. Unfortunately, beliefs vary from person to person and from culture to culture and difference in beliefs tends to be the source of conflict for a lot of issues in the world today. Morality was intended to minimize real human suffering and instead religious dogma falsifies morality and separates questions regarding morality from those concerning suffering.
It was interesting how Harris noted that it is fundamentally taboo to criticize someone’s beliefs. I wonder how this is the only area of life that we propose go unexamined. Reasons are contagious, which is why we are built to be rational human beings. We are supposed to question people’s beliefs to evaluate their reasoning. Instead religious people are free to submit to the moral demands of an invisible super-intelligence and say anything they want in the name of their Higher Power evading rational explanation because we insist that religious beliefs shouldn’t be questioned. We expect logical arguments in every other field of study, that is why we do not have Christian Physics or Hindu Science or American Geometry, because there are certain fundamental truths to the nature of the universe that everyone can agree on. We are not meant to be overly politically correct or to tolerate all of the absurdity in the world, we are meant to reason and to be reasonable and open to evidence.