Sam Harris (author) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Samuel B. "Sam" Harris (born April 9, 1967)[2] is an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason.[3] He is the author of The End of Faith, which was published in 2004 and appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks. The book also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005.[4] In 2006, Harris published the book Letter to a Christian Nation as a response to criticism of The End of Faith. This work was followed by The Moral Landscape, published in 2010, his long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014.
Harris is a contemporary critic of religion and proponent of scientific skepticism and the "New Atheism".[5] He is also an advocate for the separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and the liberty to criticize religion.[6] Harris has written numerous articles for The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, and the journal Nature. His articles touch upon a diversity of topics including religion, morality, neuroscience, free will, terrorism, and self-defense.[7]
In his 2010 book The Moral Landscape, Harris argues that science can help answer moral problems and can aid the facilitation of human well-being.[6]
Harris grew up in a secular home in Los Angeles, son of actor Berkeley Harris[9] and The Golden Girls creator and TV producer Susan Harris.[10] His father came from a Quaker background and his mother is Jewish.[11] His parents rarely discussed religion, though it was always a subject which interested him.[12][13]
In 1986, as a young student at Stanford University, Harris experimented with the drug ecstasy, and has spoken about the powerful insights he felt psychologically.[15][16] Harris was a serious student of the martial arts and taught ninjutsu in college.
Harris became interested in spiritual and philosophical questions when he studied at Stanford University. He was fascinated by the idea that he might be able to achieve spiritual insights without the use of drugs.[19] Leaving Stanford in his second year, he went to India, where he studied meditation with Hindu and Buddhist religious teachers,[19][20] including Dilgo Khyentse.[21] Eleven years later, in 1997, he returned to Stanford, completing a B.A. degree in philosophy in 2000.[13][22] Harris began writing his first book, The End of Faith, immediately after the September 11 attacks.[13]
He received a Ph.D. degree in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at the University of California, Los Angeles,[13][23][24] using functional magnetic resonance imaging to conduct research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty.[13][24] His thesis was titled "The moral landscape: How science could determine human values", and his advisor was Mark S. Cohen.[25]
Harris's basic message is that the time has come to freely question the idea of religious faith.[27]p. 13–15 Harris consistently criticizes Islam, Christianity, and Judaism which he says tend to be monolithic and ready to harm others only for their religion. He feels that the survival of civilization is in danger because of a taboo against questioning religious beliefs, and that this taboo impedes progress toward more enlightened approaches to spirituality and ethics.
Although an atheist, Harris avoids using the term, arguing that the label is both unnecessary and a liability.[28] His position is that "atheism" is not in itself a worldview or a philosophy. He believes atheists "should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, honest people, who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them".[28]
Harris argues that religion is especially rife with bad ideas, calling it "one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised."[29] He compares modern religious beliefs to the myths of the Ancient Greeks, which were once accepted as fact but which are obsolete today. In a January 2007 interview with PBS, Harris said, "We don't have a word for not believing in Zeus, which is to say we are all atheists in respect to Zeus. And we don't have a word for not being an astrologer". He goes on to say that the term will be retired only when "we all just achieve a level of intellectual honesty where we are no longer going to pretend to be certain about things we are not certain about".[30]
Harris states that he advocates a benign, noncoercive, corrective form of intolerance, distinguishing it from historic religious persecution. He promotes a conversational intolerance, in which personal convictions are scaled against evidence, and where intellectual honesty is demanded equally in religious views and non-religious views. He suggests that, just as a person declaring a belief that Elvis is still alive would immediately make his every statement suspect in the eyes of those he was conversing with, asserting a similarly non-evidentiary point on a religious doctrine ought to be met with similar disrespect.[35] He also believes there is a need to counter inhibitions that prevent the open critique of religious ideas, beliefs, and practices under the auspices of "tolerance".[36]
Harris maintains that such conversation and investigation are essential to progress in every other field of knowledge. As one example, he suggests that few would require "respect" for radically differing views on physics or history; instead, he notes, societies expect and demand logical reasons and valid evidence for such claims, while those who fail to provide valid support are quickly marginalized on those topics. Thus, Harris suggests that the routine deference accorded to religious ideologies constitutes a double standard, which, following the events of September 11, 2001 attacks, has become too great a risk.[36]
In the 2007 PBS interview, Harris said,
| "The usefulness of religion, the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe. You can only believe those things or you should only be able to believe those things if you think there are good reasons to believe those things." |
Harris also says that moderation is bad theology because the extremists are, in a sense, right: he thinks that, if one reads the texts literally, God wants to put homosexuals to death or destroy infidels. Harris claims that religious moderates appear to be blinded to the reality of what fundamentalists truly believe. Moderates tend to argue that suicide attacks can be attributed to a range of social, political, and economic factors. Harris counters by noting that many suicide bombers come not from poverty but from mainstream Muslim society. He points to the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were "college-educated" and "middle-class" and suffered "no discernible experience of political oppression". Harris thus asserts that religion is a significant cause of terrorism.[47]
| "How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: They don't know what it is like to really believe in God." |
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