I found another great section from Harris' "The End of Faith," in which he discusses the fact that many of our laws are nothing more than an attempt to punish "sin."
Excerpts (italics from Harris, boldface from me):
"In the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, it is currently illegal to seek certain experiences of pleasure. Seek pleasure by a forbidden means, even in the privacy of your own home, and men with guns may kick in the door and carry you away to prison for it. On of the most surprising things abut this situation is how unsurprising most of us find it.
Behaviours like drug use, prostitution, sodomy and the viewing of obscene materials have been categorized as "victimless crimes."
(omitted: his discussion of those cases where these things are not "victimless" and then asks us to focus on those cases where they truly are without victims)
"...we must ask ourselves, why would anyone want to punish people for engaging in behavior that brings no significant risk of harm to anyone. .... The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.
It is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others. This impulse has less to do with the history of religion and more to do with its logic, because the very idea of privacy is incompatible with the existence of God. If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalized by certain sexual behaviors or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the implication for their behavior in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith.
A variety of religious notions of wrongdoing can be seen converging here -- concerns over nonprocreative sexuality and idolatry especially -- and these seem to have given many of us the sense that it is ethical to punish people, often severely, for engaging in private behavior that harms no one."
...
"When one looks at our ... our vice laws the only organizing principle that appears to make sense of them is that anything which might radically eclipse prayer or procreative sexuality as a source of pleasure has been outlawed."
...
"Because we are a people of faith, taught to concern ourselves with the sinfulness of our neighbors, we have grown tolerant of irrational uses of state power."
