Let’s start, as usual, by defining our terms. I think, first of all, that many different kinds of people who hold to many different kinds of belief systems can potentially be atheists, so I try not to posit anything beyond the minimum I can get away with. So typically I understand atheist to mean nonbelief in any gods. The many potential meanings of the word “god” complicate the issue considerably, but ultimately the atheist will claim that they don’t believe that anything that could be called “God” or “a god” or “a goddess” or anything like that exists. This does not necessarily equate to an affirmative belief that such things do not exist, but is rather, at the minimum, the absence of an affirmative belief that they do exist.
Tag: sam harris
A Satanist Reads the Qur’an
I want to know why Islam has been so successful, seemingly more so than any other modern religion, in convincing people to abandon this world for some other world and to construct what remains of them in this life around what awaits them in the next. I would know, is this truly what Muhammad intended? As much as I have fallen in love with the mystical Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez, and as much as I respect Islam’s singularity of vision, I see this religion as one of the greatest fonts of nihilism in the modern world. Is this nihilism reflected in the religion’s sacred texts? Are these texts misunderstood and misrepresented in Islam as Christian and Jewish texts are in their respective religions?
Satanism, the Self, and Ego Death
What is the ego? What is the self? How is it that we can gratify, intensify, or encourage the self without knowing and understanding what it is?
Books on Faith: The End of Faith
Coming back to it now, I read Harris’s text with disappointment but even greater disappointment in myself. Harris’s rhetoric is terrible, and though at the time I thought myself a competent critical thinker, I was nevertheless entirely blind to what I can now only call incompetence by way of still feeling too generous towards him to call him a sophist.
You Are Going to Die Soon
It is commonly thought that the Bible details the blissful afterlife of the righteous in Heaven and the torturous existence of the damned in Hell; in fact, the Bible has nothing of the sort to say about Heaven, and has little to say on the topic of the afterlife in general.
On the Mystical Experience of the Sacred
Skeptics of all stripes will rightly scoff at the word “sacred.” It has often been used over the course of history as a hollow justification for the rationally unjustifiable. But taken in its proper context, its reality and relevance to our lives is unavoidable.