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Sam Harris
Harris in March 2016
Born	Samuel Benjamin Harris[1] (1967-04-09) April 9, 1967 (age 51) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Author, philosopher
Citizenship	United States
Education	Philosophy (B.A. 2000), Neuroscience (Ph.D. 2009)
Alma mater	Stanford University UCLA
Genre	Non-fiction
Subject	Neuroscience, philosophy,[2]religion, ethics, spirituality
Notable awards	PEN/Martha Albrand Award, Webby Award
Spouse	Annaka Harris (m. 2004)
Children	2
Signature
Philosophy career
Era	Contemporary
Region	Western
School	New Atheism
Main interests	Neuroscience, religion, ethics, free will, spirituality, philosophy of mind
Website
samharris.org

Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, critic of religion,^[3] blogger, public intellectual, and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, Islamism, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. He is described as one of the atheistic "Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse", along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.^[4]

Harris's first book, The End of Faith (2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction^[5] and remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks.^[6] In The Moral Landscape (2010), he argues that science answers moral problems and can aid human well-being.^[3] He then published a longform essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014, and, with British writer Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015. Harris' work has been translated into over 20 languages.^[7] In September 2013, Harris began releasing the Waking Up podcast, in which he interviews guests, responds to critics, and discusses his views.

Early life and education

Harris was born on April 9, 1967, in Los Angeles,^[8] the son of actor Berkeley Harris and TV producer Susan Harris (née Spivak), who created The Golden Girls.^[9] His father came from a Quaker background and his mother is Jewish but is not practicing.^[10] He was raised by his mother following his parents' divorce when he was aged two.^[11] Harris has stated that his upbringing was entirely secular, and his parents rarely discussed religion, though it was always a subject that interested him.^[12] While a student at Stanford University, Harris experimented with MDMA, and has written and spoken about the insights he experienced under its influence.^[13][14]

Though his original major was in English, he became interested in philosophical questions while at Stanford University after an experience with the empathogen–entactogen MDMA.^[15] The experience led him to be interested in the idea that he might be able to achieve spiritual insights without the use of drugs.^[16] Leaving Stanford in his second year, a quarter after his psychedelic experience, he went to India and Nepal, where he studied meditation with Buddhist and Hindu religious teachers,^[16][17] including Dilgo Khyentse.^[18] Eleven years later, in 1997, he returned to Stanford, completing a B.A. degree in philosophy in 2000.^[19][20][21] Harris began writing his first book, The End of Faith, immediately after the September 11 attacks.^[19]

He received a Ph.D. degree in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles,^[19][22][23] using functional magnetic resonance imaging to conduct research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty.^[19][23] His thesis was titled "The moral landscape: How science could determine human values", and his advisor was Mark S. Cohen.^[24]

Views

Criticism of Abrahamic religions

Harris states that religion contains bad ideas, calling it "one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised".^[25] 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 atheist 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".^[26]

Harris 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.^[27] 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".^[28] He has stated that he has received death threats for some of his views on religion.^[29]

Islam

Harris speaking in 2010 at TED

Harris considers Islam to be "especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse", relative to other world religions. He asserts that the "dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one’s faith, both from within and without" to varying degrees, is a central Islamic doctrine that is found in few other religions to the same degree, and that "this difference has consequences in the real world."^[30]

In 2006, after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Harris wrote, "The idea that Islam is a 'peaceful religion hijacked by extremists' is a dangerous fantasy—and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It now appears to be a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so—it is so because the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism. In confronting the religious literalism and ignorance of the Muslim world, we must appreciate how terrifyingly isolated Muslims have become in intellectual terms."^{[31][32][33][34]} He states that his criticism of the religion is aimed not at Muslims as people, but at the doctrine of Islam.

Harris wrote a response to controversy over his criticism of Islam, which also aired on a debate hosted by The Huffington Post on whether critics of Islam are unfairly labeled as bigots:

Is it really true that the sins for which I hold Islam accountable are "committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially [my] own"? ... The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed [not by the First Amendment but] by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. ... Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play [to The Book of Mormon] about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else, in the year 2013? ... At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam—and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame.^[35][36]

Critics of the New Atheists such as Glenn Greenwald claim that "[Harris] and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism."^[37] Harris, however, has criticized the way in which the term "Islamophobia" is commonly used. "My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences," he wrote following a controversial clash with Ben Affleck in October 2014 on the show Real Time with Bill Maher, "but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people." During an email exchange with Greenwald, Harris argued that "Islamophobia is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it."^[31][38]

Catholicism

In response to the report published by the Irish government's Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and other revelations of child abuse by Catholic priests, Harris wrote: "The evidence suggests the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of [Pope Benedict XVI]." Harris has criticized the Catholic Church's structure and forced celibacy within its ranks for attracting pedophiles, and blames its opposition to the use of contraception for poverty, shorter lifespans, and the proliferation of HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, he asserts that the Catholic Church has spent "two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo."^[39]

Judaism

In The End of Faith, Harris is critical of the Jewish faith and its followers:

The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves. This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth. […] the ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day. […] Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe that they are bearers of a unique covenant with God. As a consequence, they have spent the last two thousand years collaborating with those who see them as different by seeing themselves as irretrievably so. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion. Jewish settlers, by exercising their "freedom of belief" on contested land, are now one of the principal obstacles to peace in the Middle East.

Regarding Israel and Judaism, Harris has said, "I don't think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So I don't celebrate the idea that there's a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. I certainly don't support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible. Though I just said that I don't think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, the justification for such a state is rather easy to find. We need look no further than the fact that the rest of the world has shown itself eager to murder the Jews at almost every opportunity. 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."^[40]

On atheism

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 [...] I think that 'atheist' is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don't need a word for someone who rejects astrology."^[41]

On spirituality

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."^[16]

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.^[42] He writes that spirituality should be understood in light of scientific disciplines like neuroscience and psychology.^[42] Science, he contends, can show how to maximize human well-being, but may fail to answer certain questions about the nature of being, answers to some of which he says are discoverable directly through our experience.^[42] His conception of spirituality does not involve a belief in God.^[43]

In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), Harris describes his experience with Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, and recommends it to his readers.^[42] He writes that the purpose of spirituality (as he defines it – he concedes that the term's uses are diverse and sometimes indefensible) is to become aware that our sense of self is illusory, and says this realization brings both happiness and insight into the nature of consciousness.^[42][44] This process of realization, he argues, is based on experience and is not contingent on faith.^[42]

Science and morality

In his third book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Harris says that "Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors—ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics." Harris says that it is time to promote a scientific approach to normative morality, rejecting the idea that religion determines what is good. He believes that once scientists begin proposing moral norms in papers, supernatural moral systems will join "astrology, witchcraft and Greek mythology on the scrapheap".^[45]

Free will

Harris says the idea of free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and is incoherent.^[46][47] According to Harris, science "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."^[48] People's thoughts and intentions, Harris says, "emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." Every choice we make is made as a result of preceding causes. These choices we make are determined by those causes, and are therefore not really choices at all. Nevertheless Harris maintains that the absence of free will 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.

Social and political views

Harris describes himself as a liberal, and states that he supports raising taxes on the very wealthy, the decriminalizing of drugs and legalizing of same-sex marriage. He was critical of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, fiscal policy, and treatment of science. However, he believes liberals dangerously downplay the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism.^[49]

During the 2016 United States presidential election, Harris supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primaries against Bernie Sanders,^[50] 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.^[51]

In April 2017, Harris stirred considerable controversy by hosting the social scientist Charles Murray on his podcast, discussing topics including the heritability of IQ and race and intelligence.^[52] Harris stated the invitation was out of indignation at a violent protest against Murray at Middlebury College the month before and not out of particular interest in the material at hand.^[52] The podcast garnered significant criticism, for instance from Vox^[53][54] and Slate,^[55] while Harris and Murray were defended in articles in publications such as Quillette^[56][57] and New York.^[58]

In May 2018, Harris was profiled by Bari Weiss in the New York Times as part of the "Intellectual Dark Web" (a term coined semi-ironically by Eric Weinstein to refer to a particular group of academics and podcast hosts).^[59]

Career

Writings and media appearances

Harris's writing focuses on neuroscience and criticism of religion, for which he is best known. He formerly blogged for the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and Truthdig. His articles have appeared in publications such as Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the British national newspaper The Times.^[60]

Harris has made numerous TV and radio appearances, including on The O'Reilly Factor, ABC News, Tucker, Book TV, NPR, Real Time, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show. In 2005, Harris appeared in the documentary film The God Who Wasn't There. Harris was a featured speaker at the 2006 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. Harris engaged in a lengthy debate with Andrew Sullivan on the internet forum Beliefnet.^[61] In April 2007, Harris debated with the evangelical pastor Rick Warren for Newsweek magazine.^[62] In April 2011, he debated William Lane Craig on whether there can be an objective morality without God.^[63][64] He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America.^[65]

Waking Up podcast

In September 2013, Harris began the Waking Up podcast, in which he discusses his views, responds to critics, and interviews guests. The podcasts, having started with very short posts, now vary in length anywhere from 1 hour to over 4 hours. The podcast has no regular release schedule, although the frequency of releases has increased over time.^[66] In 2017, the UK Business Insider included it in their list of "8 podcasts that will change how you think about human behavior" and PC Magazine included it in their list of "Podcasts You Should Download Now".^[67][68] The Waking Up podcast won the 2017 Webby Award for "People's Voice" in the category "Science & Education" under "Podcasts & Digital Audio".^[69]

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.^[70]

Neuroscience

Building on his interests in belief and religion, Harris completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCLA.^[17][23] He used fMRI to explore whether the brain responses differ between sentences that subjects judged as true, false, or undecidable, across a wide range of categories including autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual statements.^[71] Harris and colleagues were also able to use artificial intelligence algorithms to predict whether an individual believed or disbelieved these statements using fMRI measurements,^[72] and this work was later replicated with EEG.^[73]

In another study, Harris and colleagues examined the neural basis of religious and non-religious belief using fMRI.^[74] Fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers were scanned as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. 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.^[23] A "comparison of all religious trials to all nonreligious trials produced a wide range of signal differences throughout the brain," and the processing of religious belief and empirical belief differed in significant ways. 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.^[74]

In another study published in 2016, Harris and his team probed the neural systems involved in maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of opposing evidence.^[75]

Meditation

Harris is a proponent of secular meditation practices.^[76] His practice developed from Vipassana and Dzogchen. He states that the key aim of meditation is to enable its practitioners to see that the feeling of self is an illusion. In September 2018 Harris released a meditation app, Waking Up with Sam Harris.^[77]

Personal life

Harris is a student of the martial arts and practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu.^[78][79] Harris was at one point a vegetarian, but gave it up after six years, citing health concerns.^[80] In 2015, he returned to vegetarianism for ethical reasons, with the intention of eventually going vegan,^[81] and supported the idea of cultured meat.^[82] In early 2018, Sam Harris stopped being a vegetarian once again.^[83]

Harris has been reluctant to discuss personal details such as where he now lives, citing security reasons.^[84] In 2004, Harris married Annaka Harris, an editor of nonfiction and scientific books.^[85] They have two daughters.^[86][87]

Bibliography

• 
  The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004). .mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit}.mw-parser-output q{quotes:"""""""'""'"}.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration{color:#555}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-right{padding-right:0.2em}
  ISBN 0-393-03515-8.


• 
  Letter to a Christian Nation (2006).
  ISBN 0-307-26577-3.


• 
  The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010).
  ISBN 978-1-4391-7121-9.


• 
  Lying (2011).
  ISBN 978-1940051000.


• 
  Free Will (2012).
  ISBN 978-1451683400.


• 
  Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014).
  ISBN 978-1451636017.


• 
  Islam and the Future of Tolerance (2015). With Maajid Nawaz.
  ISBN 978-0674088702.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sam Harris.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Sam Harris

• Official website


• 
  The Washington Post "On Faith" articles


• 
  Huffington Post articles


• 
  Truthdig articles


• 
  Sam Harris on IMDb


• 
  Sam Harris at TED