Sam Harris on Spirituality without Faith
Sam Harris has an article in Newsweek on Consciousness Without Faith, which I think would more accurately be titled Spirituality Without Faith. His views seem very much in line with those expressed by Ann Druyan I mentioned in my previous post.
There is no question that people have “spiritual” experiences (I use words like “spiritual” and “mystical” in scare quotes, because they come to us trailing a long tail of metaphysical debris). Every culture has produced people who have gone off into caves for months or years and discovered that certain deliberate uses of attention—introspection, meditation, prayer—can radically transform a person’s moment to moment perception of the world. I believe contemplative efforts of this sort have a lot to tell us about the nature of the mind.
January 8th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I agree that Sam Harris’ article would be more accurately entitled as you’ve suggested, but the term ’spirituality’ comes with a lot of baggage. Presumably, it was given the title it was to avoid that… as he didn’t have the space to lay out his full argument.
If you’re interested, you ought to check out Dan Dennett’s definition of spirituality from his new book (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon)