Waking Up With Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris discusses the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult and argues that we all have something important to learn from them about the power of belief. The following videos are discussed: Audio Transcript: Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I’m going to talk about cults, mostly. I’ve been in a cultish frame of mind in the last week—and getting over bronchitis, so my apologies for my voice being even raspier than it usually is. But I’ve been paying attention to cults for some reason, and I’ve focused on two that have been around for a while, Heaven’s Gate and Scientology. I recently saw the film Going Clear based on Lawrence Wright’s book by that name. The book is well worth-reading, and the film is really a devastating takedown of Scientology. I can’t imagine it won’t do the organization lasting harm if enough people see it. It exposes how goofy L. Ron Hubbard was and how sinister his organization soon became under him and his successors.