Sam Harris talking in this video brings back to mind the metaphysical narrative of "consequential pragmatism" that drives our Western world.

This connection also ties into the After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre project... the enlightenment project (which Sam seeks to extend) wants to have all the pragmatic benefits of God and Christianity without those core sources. It wants the house while ejecting the foundation but the house collapses without the foundation.

Harris is now making a slight turn here... saying, maybe there is something to those foundations after all.

"...people are genuinely confused now because two things are true; we have lost trust in the normal channels of information and in normal institutions during and post covid, for obvious reasons but we desperately need institutions and a media that we can trust."

"Jordan and I differ in he wants to support a much more traditional picture of the utility and even necessity of religious thinking and religious identity and that way of giving meaning to one's life through traditional stories and stories which I think true a literal belief in can't be justified based on what we have come to understand about science."

"I'm convinced that at the core of every religion, there were real transformative and transcendent human experiences that are attested to by the literature and traditions that have grown up around that religion.

...there really was a person in history by the name of Jesus who had this effect on the people around him...

...this ego you take yourself to be is an illusion and it allows you to recognize that unconditional love is actually a possibility...

...it's obviously not a delusion... you don't have to believe in anything unempirical in order to experience that range of positive experience you just have to learn to use your attention in the right ways...