"We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like c… - Sam Harris

"We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?” However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century.

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About Sam Harris

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).

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Birth Name: Samuel Benjamin Harris
Alternative Names: Samuel Harris
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If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.

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This is a constraint of evolution. We weren’t built to acquire new cognitive abilities de novo. The only materials used for modern human cognition are these ancient structures that have to be commandeered to new purposes. Everything we do is built on the back of these apeish structures. Here we’re talking about the insular cortex, which receives the inputs from the viscera. You find rotting food disgusting — that’s the tale told by the insula. And the only way to build a mind that can find abstract ideas unacceptable is to repurpose, or extend the purpose, of those brain areas.

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