[Originally published on Wednesday, November 15, 2006. We have corrected a couple of typos, corrected the note at the bottom, and added an image from the magazine cited.]
From the September 2006 interview of Sam Harris in The Sun Magazine:
...What we need are secular rituals.You can find the complete published interview (as well as information about how to subscribe to the print edition) on the Magazine’s web site.
This is an idea that has been bouncing around among scientists: that we need a kind of scientific liturgy. It’s not as if, looking into this universe billions of light-years across, you can’t find anything amazing to say about reality. It’s actually far more amazing than the God of the Bible stalking the deserts of the Middle East, demanding burnt offerings. So we need a language that expresses a reasonable awe at the nature of the cosmos and our existence in it. And we need to make this language emotionally moving for people. I think it would be thrilling if we had a temple of reason that presented through ritual our growing scientific understanding of ourselves in the cosmos. Surely we could think of profound, uplifting, scientific things to say at the occasion of somebody’s death. It’s not as if, once you divest yourself of your religious myths, you’re left with an excruciatingly boring, trimmed-down sense of confinement. In fact, it’s the religions that are excruciatingly boring and confining. The scientific truth, so far as we understand it, is magical and open-ended and thrilling. It just takes a little more work to understand it.
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