Sam Harris is best known for his barn-burning 2004 attack on religion, The End of Faith, which spent 33 weeks on the New York Times best-seller List. The book's sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation also came out in editions totalling hundreds of thousands. Last Monday, however, the combative Californian produced a shorter (seven pages) and seemingly calmer publication that will be a hit if it reaches 10,000 readers: "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty." It appears in the respected journal Annals of Neurology. And Harris, 40, claims it has little if any connection to his two popular books. Believers, however, may draw their own conclusions — and may want to read his subsequent neurological studies even more carefully.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1694723,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar
The current paper recovers Harris's identity as a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at UCLA, his occupation before he commenced what he calls his "extramural affair jumping into trenches in the culture wars." It is an addition to the growing field of brain scan trials, and Harris thinks it may be the first to detail how the brain processes belief. At first read, it seems less dangerous to Christianity than to another cherished pillar of Western thought — that "objective" beliefs like "2 + 2 = 4" and "subjective" beliefs like "torture is bad" belong to entirely separate categories of thought.
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