Spirituality and atheism

[mralstoner]

I think what Harris is trying to get at is that living literally in the moment and not being a slave to your thoughts is the key to being happy - and that it's something most people don't even consider.

If spirituality just means meditation, mindfulness, impulse control, etc, then all well and good, if that floats your boat. There's nothing spooky about those techniques. They are all useful for improving your emotional well-being.

But there is one spooky angle that Harris takes on spirituality. He ponders whether there's some higher state of being that can permit us to transcend, or break out of, merely pursuing life's pleasures. He gives examples of spiritual masters who seem to have achieved this higher state of being, and he says we should study these guys to see what's going on. Fair enough, study them. But to think that they've escaped from the pursuit of life's pleasures, and they've tapped into some other source other pleasureless motivation that brings them to a higher state of, ahem, bliss, is crazy talk.

Whatever the techniques of spirituality may be, they don't come with some mythical new source of pleasureless motivation that, ironically, just happens to bring forth bliss.

As Jeremy Bentham said: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do... In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while."

You can't escape from the pursuit of pleasure, and the avoidance of pain, because there are no other motivations in life. None.