Transcribed from a recent Point of Inquiry broadcast:

Interviewer: “Do you really think secular, skeptical people should be more intolerant of religion?”

Harris: “yeah, I do - but I think we should be clear about what intolerance can mean. I do not mean we should be intolerant in the sense the Stalinist were in intolerant, sending people to the gulag. I don’t believe we should pass laws against religious belief. I don’t think there is any interolance necessary beyond the intolerance we show to irrationaly in every other area of our lives. We haven’t passed laws against believing that Elvis is still alive or believing aliens are abducting ranchers & molesting them. When someone claims to be sure Elvis is still alive, for instance, that claim is met with chuckles and derision and the whole armamentarium of conversational pressure that really excludes a person making that claim from holding positions of responsibility in our society. Thats a good thing - thats the way it should be and yet there is no formal mechinism for this. It is just what I call conversational intolerance.”

Interviewer: “And you think we should have more conversational intolerance or intellectual intolerance for religious belief. You kind of equate, at some points, religious belief with being insane. But isn’t the difference between beleiving in God or believing in a 300 pound Easter bunny in your back yard… isn’t the difference that we have an explanation for religious beliefs… that we are incolcated culturally in these beliefs and it is not the same as being insane. In the case of insane people we have no other explanation then that there mind has somehow gone wrong. We don’t say that just because you believe in god it is a function of insanity.”

Harris: “Yeah, and that really is a function of how many people subscribe to these beliefs and the taboo in the culture around criticizing these beliefs… what I say in my book at one point is that religion allows people by the millions to believe things that only a crazy person could believe on his own. So I agree with you that religious people do not tend to be insane… they tend to be as sane as anyone else, but if anyone woke up tomorrow morning thinking that a cracker turned into the body of Jesus (if he said the right Latin words over it), and he was the first person to think this - he didn’t have millions of other catholics supporting him in this idea - that would be a belief sunonomous with schizophrenia very likely. I think the thing to point out is that we have beliefs every bit as crazy and unsupportable as they would be in the minds of lunatics and they are massively well subscribed in our culture because we have created this system of inheritance and no cultural pressure to resist this inheritance… we have every person on mommies knee deranged by the myths of our ancestors.”