Atheist trying to understand Meditation

The only claim I making with respect to meditation is that there are methods of training our powers of attention, such that we can come to observe the flow of our experience with astonishing clarity. And this can result in a range of insights that, for millennia, people have found both intellectually credible and personally transforming (mostly in the East). The primary insight being that the feeling we call "I"-- the sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our experiencer -- really disappears when looked for in a rigorous way. This is as empirically confirmable at looking for one's optic blind spot. Most people never notice their blind spot (caused by the optic nerve's transit through the retina), but it can be pointed out with a little effort. Loss of the feeling of "self" can be pointed out and discussed in a very similar way. It's just a little harder to get someone to notice it, because most people can't stop thinking for more than instant.

—Sam Harris, interview at Raving Atheist

Reading evolution and science blogs does tend to lead one into the realm of atheists and antitheists. The rational ones are quite interesting to read. The irrational ones...well, they're slightly better than reading extreme fundamentalist writings, but not by much. It's interesting to me that most of the people who call themselves atheists have little or no knowledge of eastern thought. Of course, some Buddhists would also describe themselves as atheist, but that's another story. What I like about this interview is that the self-proclaimed Raving Atheist is actually making an effort to understand Harris's POV. He's not convinced he agrees with it, but he doesn't dismiss it out of hand.