Sam Harris

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Once you start invoking religious claims we change the rules. And we're paying a terrible price for changing these rules because now we have people constraining our social policy, deciding what kinds of medical research we do and don't do, deciding the sexual ethics of their neighbours, deciding what kinds of wars we wage and don't wage, on the basis of ideas that are every bit as vacuous and preposterous as beliefs in witchcraft and beliefs in Zeus and Poseidon and the thousands of other dead gods who nobody worships.
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There's something kind of mesmerizing about this, how common this invocation of god is that people don't really realize how strange it is to have the leader of the free world stand up and talk about god and him being behind the American people and about consulting a higher father when deciding whether or not to go to war, in this case in Iraq. It would seem like a plunge into just the frankest psychopathology if he were invoking any other god like Apollo or Isis - I mean this would be a national emergency. And yet it's the same emergency. We have a man in the oval office who's making perhaps the most consequential decisions any person has made in human history who thinks at some level that his intuitions are being vetted by the creator of the universe.