So, if there were going to be a state organized around protecting members of a single religion, it certainly should be a Jewish state. Now, friends of Israel might consider this a rather tepid defense, but it's the strongest one I've got. I think the idea of a religious state is ultimately untenable. Harris has been referred to, along with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, as one of the "new atheists", but he considers the term "atheist" to be problematic. He said, "while I am now one of the public voices of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being inducted to speak as one [ Harris holds that there is "nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions.
Compassion, awe, devotion, and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have. Harris rejects the dichotomy between religious spirituality on the one hand and scientific rationality on the other, and favors a middle path that preserves spirituality and science, but does not involve religion. A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion , Harris describes his experience with Dzogchen , a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, and recommends it to his readers. In his third book, The Moral Landscape: It depends on many factors—ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics.
He believes that once scientists begin proposing moral norms in papers, supernatural moral systems will join " astrology , witchcraft and Greek mythology on the scrapheap". Harris says the idea of free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and is incoherent. These choices we make are determined by those causes, and are therefore not really choices at all.
Nevertheless Harris maintains that the absence of freewill does not erode the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, arguing that intentions tell a lot about the global attributes of a person's brain. Harris argues that this realization about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. Harris describes himself as a liberal, and states that he supports raising taxes on the very wealthy, the decriminalizing of drugs and same-sex marriage.
He was critical of the Bush administration 's war in Iraq , fiscal policy, and treatment of science. During the United States presidential election , Harris supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primaries against Bernie Sanders , [49] and despite calling her "a terribly flawed candidate for the presidency," he favored her in the general election and came out strongly in opposition to Donald Trump 's candidacy.
Harris's writing focuses on neuroscience and criticism of religion , for which he is best known. Harris was a featured speaker at the conference Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival. He made two presentations and participated in the ensuing panel discussions. Harris has also appeared a number of times on the Point of Inquiry radio podcast.
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Harris engaged in a lengthy debate with Andrew Sullivan on the internet forum Beliefnet. In September , Harris began the Waking Up podcast, in which he discusses his views, responds to critics, and interviews guests. The podcasts vary greatly in length, anywhere from 8 minutes to over 4 hours.
The podcast has no regular release schedule, although the frequency of releases has increased over time. After discussing Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment and the philosophy of effective altruism with William MacAskill on the podcast, Harris pledged to donate several thousand dollars of the revenue generated by each new podcast episode to effective charitable organizations.
In another study, Harris and colleagues examined the neural basis of religious and non-religious belief using fMRI. For both groups, statements of belief sentences judged as either true or false were associated with increased activation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex , a region of the brain involved in emotional judgment, processing uncertainty, assessing rewards and thinking about oneself.
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The regions associated with increased activation in response to religious stimuli included the anterior insula , the ventral striatum , the anterior cingulate cortex , and the posterior medial cortex. In another study published in , Harris and his team probed the neural systems involved in maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of opposing evidence.
Harris is a proponent of secular meditation practices. He states that the key aim of meditation is to enable its practitioners to see that the feeling of self is an illusion. He is currently developing a meditation app for smartphones called the Waking Up app. Harris is a student of the martial arts and practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Harris has been reluctant to discuss personal details such as where he now lives, citing security reasons. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other people with the same name, see Sam Harris disambiguation. Retrieved April 17, Why science should shape morality. Retrieved 15 August Retrieved 16 August Retrieved 26 August Chicago Tribune TV Week. Retrieved September 18, My mother is Jewish, so for some people I count as a Jew. But for me, being Jewish amounts to little more than just getting all the jokes in a Woody Allen movie. So, for the people for whom my Judaism is relevant, those people tend to be either overtly anti-Semitic or concerned about crazy conspiracies.
The YouTube comments that reference my Judaism are completely crazy.
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For the most part, for anyone who is seriously engaging with my ideas, the fact that I was born to a Jewish woman who herself was not religious nor were her parents religious is completely irrelevant. Retrieved April 23, I had a totally secular upbringing and was just encouraged to explore things as I saw fit. I was never raised an atheist as opposed to religious. It just was not an issue.
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In my teens I just got interested in spiritual experience and what happens after death and just began to see that religion is really the discourse that treats these phenomena and started exploring meditation and other specifically Eastern brands of religious thinking, but I have studied Western religion as well and have been interested in religion for decades.
Retrieved November 14, Sam Harris wants believers to stop believing". Retrieved April 30, Retrieved October 28, The heart believes what it will, but the brain behaves the same either way". Archived from the original on January 24, Retrieved October 17, Retrieved June 5, Retrieved December 6, Event occurs at 1: Archived from the original on May 20, Retrieved May 20, The God Who Wasn't There , extended interviews. Retrieved October 23, Liberals like Greenwald and Aslan support the 'thuggish ultimatum' of radical Islam". Read more Read less. Add both to Cart Add both to List.
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But the forgotten gods in this other world were from a bunch of different cultures: Ayiyi, a spider trickster god from Ghana. Gu, the Fon Benin and Togo god of iron and war. Priparchis, the Baltic Lithuania, Latvia, and Prussia god of piglets. Yes, I had to look them up to determine where they were from. There are so many amazing unknown pantheons out there. Besides exposure to fresh gods, this book was fun from the get-go.