Harris' thoughts are always so beautifully reasoned and sharply logical......as long as you don't ask him about Buddhism or reincarnation....

as long as you don't ask him about Buddhism or reincarnation....

He believes in that? Sources? I have read both his books and lots of other things he's written, but I've never seen any kind of embrace of these things, he does talk about the "spiritual" part of the mind, but I read that as him frowning when he has to resort to the word "spiritual" because he does not mean in the new age/reincarnation sort of way. At most, I think what you can say about him is that he finds our consciousnesses deeply mysterious and thus worthy of scientific investigation, and he is inspired by eastern cultures in that they may have stumbled onto different levels of understanding of our minds, but I'm pretty sure he doesnt believe in reincarnation, nirvana or is religious in the Buddhist sense..

I think he kind of embarrasses himself here for instance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbwBqn3esy8

On his site he addresses the 'controversy' here http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy3/

where he even invokes the (blatantly fraudulent or at best a laughable sort of pious believer's delusion) claims of Ian Stevenson that children talking in tongues constitutes actual evidence of reincarnation. Though no less than Carl Sagan himself came near to endorsing this very field as 'worthy of future study' in The Demon Haunted World. so, not the worst lapse of reason in history I guess. Everybody got a gree-gree though, right?

Yes religion of any kind requieres blindness to logic. So soon or later it is bound to fall apart. Whether it is reincarnation, souls or whatever. However if people insist in souls this is how I would define them.

But before I do that I will actually go step beyound this gentelman and said that a humans by themselves are soless creatures. The so call soul is made by life experiences. The end result is that you have a soul with many dimentions to them. Whether a soul is great or not is base on summing all the dimensions where those dimensions could have positive or negative weights to them. The value of those weights is what is call moral values define diferently by diferent people.

I will considore a new born child to have little or not soul. But he/she has great potencial to have a great soul. A fly has also a little soul but it is physically incapable to have a great soul. At the end only great souls are worth remembering. For instance people who kill other people for fun may have complex souls but not great.

This is how religion should think of souls rather than little angels flapping their winds.

Ok, thanks for the clips, I still think he is just trying to keep an open mind, although it might be a little more open than I am on these subjects, but I agree that consciousness and the human mind is worthy of investigation

Regarding reincarnation, he's being facetiously open-minded to satisfy the guy asking the question, in the same way one has to be strictly agnostic about Russel's Teapot. He's not endorsing any of that stuff, he's just being open to research on the subject.
He's right to be worried that something might be stigmatized to the point that no one would bother reading research on the subject.

Wireless communication between brains, like wireless communication between laptops, is not obviously physically impossible. It just might evolve or be genetically engineered at some future date, but there is still no known conclusive evidence for its existence, and nothing in the links you provided seems to show that Harris deviates from that view.

Attacking a speaker is the last resort of someone who doesn't know how to counter the speaker's arguments.

Don't getchyer panties in a twist hon, no one's 'attacking the speaker'. Making unfounded claims of ad hominem attack by someone else are as bad as commiting an ad hominem itself. I'm merely pointing out the incongruity of his claim that we (rightly) should have just reason to believe in the things we do, while he also indulges in an apparent near belief of the potential of supernatural phenomena such as reincarnation. I am also entirely unconvinced that his response in the first video about mystical stuff was supposed to be facetious. He looked pretty earnest to me. Robert Carroll of the Skeptic's dictionary shares my concerns on the subject http://skepdic.com/news/newsletter74.html#3 .

*science *religion

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And now I can *promote now that my powers have recharged.

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Goddamn, I miss Gluonium sometimes. When he was right, he was right. And he was always fucking right.

*talks

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