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" "Las mentiras de los débiles nos vuelven insensibles al sufrimiento de los demás.
Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, public intellectual, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005 and appeared on The New York Times best seller list for 33 weeks, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), The Moral Landscape (2010), Lying (2011), Free Will (2012), and most recently Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014).
Biography information from Wikiquote
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To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. Of course, this insight does not make social and political freedom any less important. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was. Having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. But the idea that we, as conscious beings, are deeply responsible for the character of our mental lives and subsequent behavior is simply impossible to map onto reality. Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom — for what would influence the influences? More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
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Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition — and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. Prophecy is also a very strong indication of chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students. One can extrapolate from scientific data or technological trends (climate models, Moore’s law), but most detailed predictions about the future lead to embarrassment right on schedule.