The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.

This remark comes from Sam Harris’s early critique of religious belief in public life, written in the mid-2000s amid U.S. political debates over faith and governance during the George W. Bush presidency. Harris is responding to the cultural acceptability of leaders claiming divine guidance—language Bush was widely reported to use—while similar claims framed in overtly “irrational” terms (e.g., mediated by an everyday appliance) would be treated as evidence of instability. The hairdryer example is a reductio ad absurdum meant to highlight how social norms, rather than evidential standards, determine which supernatural claims are considered respectable in politics.

Harris is criticizing the cultural double standard by which explicitly religious claims are treated as respectable while structurally similar claims would be labeled delusional. By swapping “prayer” or “God told me” for an absurd-seeming medium (a hairdryer), he argues that the perceived credibility of “dialogue with God” rests on social convention rather than evidence. The point is not that hairdryers are uniquely silly, but that adding any concrete mechanism exposes how strange the underlying claim is: that an invisible deity is communicating with a political leader. The quote also underscores Harris’s broader concern about religion’s influence on public life—especially when leaders invoke divine guidance to justify policy.