Better Living Through Chemistry

The Washington Post has a great article today about an "Athiest Evangelist." This guy is really some sort of something. He is a very militant athiest who believes all should reject god. How did come to these conclusions?

What he'll say is this: At age 19, he and a college friend tried MDMA, better known as ecstasy, and the experience altered his view of the role that love could play in the world. ("I realized that it was possible to be a human being who wished others well all the time, reflexively.") He dropped out of Stanford, where he was an English major, in his sophomore year and started to study Buddhism and meditation. He flew around the country and around the world, to places such as India and Nepal, often for silent retreats that went on for months. One of his teachers was Sharon Salzberg, a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass. Harris stood out, she recalls, not just because of his relative youth -- everyone else was a generation older -- but because of his intensity.

"His passion was for deep philosophical questions, and he could talk for hours and hours," Salzberg recalls. "Sometimes you'd want to say to him, 'What about the Yankees?' or 'Look at the leaves, they're changing color!' " At the time, he was supported financially by his mother, though he did work for one memorable three-week stint in the security detail assigned to the Dalai Lama.

"You walk into a room and everyone is beaming good vibes," he recalls, "and I'm looking for dangerous lunatics. I wouldn't recommend it."

What an intense guy! I think he and Jack Bauer are the two most intense people (fictional or non-fictional) on the planet. If you want to get his feelings of love though, you don't have to take MDMA. I get those feelings by eating Chipotle.

BTW, Daylight Savings Time exists because Jack Bauer needed an extra hour.