Hi everyone,
Here is something about Sam Harris the famous 4th horseman of the quartet consisting of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/16/sam-harris-interview-new-atheism-four-horsemen-faith-science-religion-rationalism***********
Back in the middle of the first decade of this century, a new movement was heralded by the publication of several books on the same subject. The main four authors were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And the movement was called the New Atheism.
The four, who would become known as the Four Horsemen, got together in 2007 at Hitchens’s apartment in Washington to discuss arguments for atheism or, more accurately, against faith.
The New Atheism has rather faded from prominence, partly because, as its proponents acknowledged, it was not very different from the old atheism. And partly because it was a product of the ‘war on terror’, or at least an intellectual response to what that war was ostensibly targeting: namely, radical Islam.
Today, Dawkins and Dennett are in their late 70s, and no longer quite as active, and Hitchens, the most charismatic of them all, is dead.
There is a growing divide between those who trumpet empirical evidence and those who question the cultural and social conditions to which empiricism remains blind.
Harris has a side to his character that, by comparison with his three collaborators, makes him look less like a New Atheist than some Californian New Ager. In the discussion he tells them that there is “a place for the sacred in our lives”, and Dawkins looks askance
for such a combative rationalist, he remains incongruously keen on what the besandalled used to call self-transcendence. One of his more recent books was entitled Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion. Harris sees no contradiction between his objective studies of the mind and the subjective experience of escaping its perpetual noise. They’re both means of understanding consciousness, he says.
“That we’re here and experiencing the world at each moment in the light of our consciousness is a deeply mysterious and profound fact, which, the more you pay attention to it, the more your experience begins to echo some of the claims of religious patriarchs and matriarchs down the ages.”
He says the west could learn a lot from the east – not Islam, but the traditions of meditation found in Hinduism and Buddhism.
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Sam Harris seems to understand the difference between religion and spirituality quite well and recommends meditative practices. Not bad for an atheist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Up:_A_Guide_to_Spirituality_Without_Religion His Youtube video in which he reads out from his book (Waking Up) is quite interesting even if it is quite long. (I haven't heard it fully yet).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUnIJrpbwUwSome of you could learn a thing or two from him.
Cheers.
Sriram
