I asssume you have not read "The Moral Landscape"?
Sam Harris' morality?
Throughout Harris can barely curb his enthusiasm for George Bush's 'war on terror', announcing gleefully that "we are at war against Islam" – not at war against violent extremists, mind you, but against the very "vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran." He finds tortured justifications for torturing suspected terrorists in America's gulag. He goes further: "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.... Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others."
This doesn't sound very scientific to me, Cofty:
I would have no argument with Harris if he were only recommending spiritualism as means for mindful relaxation. Indeed many wise mystics have realised that the mystical experience does not confer existential status on its content but can be enjoyed and valued for the experience itself. Unfortunately Harris loads spiritual practices with metaphysical baggage. While he tries to distance himself from the more extravagant fads, he ends up endorsing fundamental New Age assumptions as rational alternatives to traditional religiosity.
He celebrates the growing popularity of western and eastern occult traditions, everything from "shamanism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism) and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception." He rejects a naturalistic understanding of nature and the human mind and sets consciousness free from such mortal things as brains and bodies, allowing the possibility of pan-psychism, the doctrine of immanence of awareness or consciousness throughout the universe. For someone studying to be a neuroscientist, Harris holds rather unconventional views. He scoffs at the physicalism of the mainstream of scientists who believe that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of the brain. He gives full credence to reports of near death experience and leaves open the possibility that a disembodied soul can survive the death of the body, claiming that we don't know what happens after death. After denying that consciousness is a product of our physiology, he presents it as a fundamental ingredient of nature, "a far more rudimentary phenomenon than living creatures and their brains." This is nothing but good old spiritual monism, the first principle of all New Age beliefs. The problem is not that Harris holds these beliefs, but that he wants to convince us that they are the very height of rationality.