Instead, the birth of consciousness must be the result of organization: Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being… - Sam Harris

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal — and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love — I love you because. . . — now made no sense at all.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention — distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence — is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity — a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside.