Brooks Buford

“It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.”
― Sam Harris

“The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self. We see the signal of consciousness in a gleaming eye and imagine some ethereal space beneath the vault of the skull, lit by shifting patterns of feeling and thought, charged with intention. An essence. But what do we find in that space behind the face, when we look? The brute fact is there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain…You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There’s no one there.”
― Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity

“It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“Evolution can even explain how our behaviors interact. Remember how the amygdala can suppress higher brain functions—for example, in the expression “His mind was clouded by fear.” This is manifestly irrational behavior, but it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Strong emotions like fear are an immediate call-to-arms to survive, selected by evolution over millions of generations of life in hostile environments. Our more recently evolved cognitive functions, such as language and logical reasoning, are suppressed until the perceived threat to our survival is over, that is, until our emotional reaction subsides. The universality of this fear response means that fear has been so useful in past environments that it has evolved to override all other neural components under sufficient threat.”
― Andrew W. Lo, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought