Sam Harris
Sam Harris
Samuel Benjamin "Sam" Harrisis an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, a non-profit organization that promotes science and secularism, and host of the podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris. His book The End of Faith, a critique of organized religion, appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks and also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005. Letter to a Christian Nationwas a response...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionStage Actor
Date of Birth4 June 1961
CountryUnited States of America
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon-because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.
A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.
Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.
Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?
The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.
Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.