Dr. Sam Harris
speaker
1,893 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard 23 Aug
Dr. Sam Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's certainly grown a lot in the last 20 years, but at the time I started writing, it was only a single-digit percentage of Americans who would describe themselves as atheists, and it was the only political identity that guaranteed you had no...
political future in America in particular.
I'm certainly, I'm not shy about saying I'm an atheist, but it just doesn't contain much information.
I'm an atheist with respect to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam because
The only thing you need to do to be an atheist there is to reject the claim that any of those specific books were written or inspired or channeled in some other way by the creator of the universe.
So who are you?
good evidence and good arguments.
And among my convictions are that spirituality, for lack of a better name, is an all-too-important project.
I mean, we really... There are the further reaches of the continuum of human well-being that I think we should all personally want to explore and we should want to understand scientifically.
But the thing I would point out is that
whatever is possible for us spiritually, if self-transcending love is possible, if a true experience of selflessness is possible, as I think that both of those things are,
We want to understand that in terms that are not sectarian and dividing our community on the basis of Iron Age tribes.
There's a deeper set of universal and transcultural truth claims to be made there about the capacity of the human mind.
It's a hard question.
You know, the honest answer is I don't know.
I think it's you know, it probably has something to do with.
more access to information, ultimately.
I just think that there is an important asymmetry in the tug of war, which is now many centuries old, between Enlightenment rationality and secularism and a universal conception of human rights and democracy and everything else that's on the good side of that sort of progress that allows for open societies.
and religious orthodoxy, Iron Age certainties about the unique veracity of a single revelation.
So it used to be that if you were a Christian,
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