Sam Harris Believes in God (Newsweek)

[Alex]

Sam Harris Believes in God
The neuroscientist and rationalist has made his name attacking religious faith. Who knew he was so spiritual?
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/18/atheist-sam-harris-steps-into-the-light.html

...his next project: a spirituality guide tentatively titled The Illusion of the Self. Based on Harris's own "spiritual journey," it will "[celebrate] the spiritual aspect of human existence [and explain] how we can live moral and spiritual lives without religion," according to a statement from his publisher, Free Press. ...

..."I see nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have," he writes. ...

...The answer to the question "Do you believe in God?" comes down to this: It depends on what you mean by "God." The God Harris doesn't believe in is, as he puts it, a "supernatural power" and "a personal deity who hears prayers and takes an interest in how people live." This God and its subscribers he finds unreasonable. But he understands that many people—especially in progressive corners of organized religion and among the "spiritual but not religious"—often mean something else. They equate God with "love" or "justice" or "singing in church" or "that feeling I get on a walk in the woods," or even "the awesome aspects of existence I'll never understand."

According to a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans believe that God is "an impersonal force." ...

...When polled about God, "people substitute in their own ideas," says John Green, senior research adviser at Pew. "People have a vague, fuzzy notion of transcendence, and they substitute God for it...When you try to make the definition more specific, fewer people answer in the affirmative." Or put another way, "If you let the concept of God float a little bit, almost everybody is a theist," says Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One. What Sam Harris believes in—rationality, morality, transcendence, humility, awe, community, selflessness, and love—meets a fairly common definition of God. ...

...Harris's true obsession, then, is not God but consciousness, the idea that the human mind can be taught—trained, rationally—to be more loving, more generous, less egocentric than it is in its natural state. And though he knows that he can sound like a person who believes in God, he thinks that God is the wrong word to describe his beliefs. "There’s a real problem with the word," he says, "because it shields the genuinely divisive doctrines and believers from criticism. If the God of the 25 percent is incredibly valuable, which it is; and it's actually worth realizing, which it is; and it's something we can talk about rationally, which it is; then calling it 'God' prevents you from criticizing all the divisive nonsense that comes with religion." Believing in transcendence is not the same thing as believing that you'll get virgins in paradise if you blow yourself up—and Sam Harris wants to be clear about that.



Alex's comment:  
We shall replace the name "God" by Transcendence.
我們應該停止使用「神」這個名詞，改稱「超越」。