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
Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.
It is time we realize that belief is not a private matter. As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is only a matter of being asked to do it.
Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could not be more distinct For Chomsky, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska.
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.
The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.
It was very violent, ... We had gunfire. They shot at our trucks, they shot at the captain of police, ran barricades.
It's going to be great for the entire downtown.
It's going to be a car show for people who don't ordinarily go to car shows. There will be lots of things for mom and the kids to do.
It should create lots more walk-around traffic. You can walk to the movies, you can walk to Kaiser Grill or the Chop House or my place, you can walk to the Spa casino. There's just a lot more out here than there used to be.
While liberals are leery of religious fundamentalism in general, they consistently imagine that all religions at their core teach the same thing and teach it equally well. This is one of the many delusions borne of political correctness.
Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.
As a parent, it's my responsibility to equip my child to do this - to grieve when grief is necessary and to realize that life is still profoundly beautiful and worth living despite the fact that we inevitably lose one another and that life ends, and we don't know what happens after death.