Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations.
Interpretation
Spiritual practices can often become misleading and untested, leading to confusion among followers.
Sam Harris critiques the nature of certain spiritual practices that resemble the falsehoods found in fake martial arts. He suggests that many spiritual teachers make grand and untestable claims, causing their students to engage in bizarre beliefs and rituals, ultimately losing sight of genuine spiritual understanding and clarity.
In practice
During a seminar on mindfulness, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of questioning spiritual claims.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.
The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back _x000D_ _x000D_ Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, _x000D_ _x000D_ A great-sized monster of ingratitudes: _x000D_ _x000D_ Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd _x000D_ _x000D_ As fast as they are made, forgot as soon as done.
The problem of the Middle East is poverty more than politics.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.
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