"I view religions as essentially failed sciences. I mean religion was the discourse that we had when all causes in the universe were opaque. We didn’t know . . . We didn’t know the basis of anything. We didn’t know why we were here. We didn’t know how diseases spread, or what disease was. We didn’t know how people . . . why people died early, and why others flourished. We don’t know what’s causing thunderstorms, or what’s causing crops to fail. And we very naturally . . . As a cognitive and behavioral imperative, we formed descriptions of the world, and we tried to figure out what’s going on. We tell ourselves stories about our origins, and about where we’re going, and about causes in the world. And those stories, given our just pervasive ignorance and our disposition to see agency in the world . . . to see, you know . . . to feel ourselves in relationship to the world, these stories entail being in relation to invisible friends and enemies. And so we have this parent figure in the sky who’s gonna take care of things if you live rightly. And we have other demonic presences that we should be really worried about. And gradually, what you see happening is that religion . . . As rationality and dozens of specific sciences were birthed in the human conversation, you see religion on a hundred fronts losing the argument with science. And then we see it on the front of human health and disease. Religion . . . You know, it used to be that you could get a diagnosis of demonic possession. That was a, you know, a reasonable thing to believe you had if you were having seizures. You know, but now we have a science of neurology, and we have a science of epilepsy."
"Science" is from the Latin for "Knowledge." Knowledge has greatly expanded since the world's major religions began and evolved. Why would anyone accept the claims from such an ignorant period of time in humanity's history over present-day science findings? Sam Harris clearly and succinctly exposes the truth about religion.
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