Sam Harris - Extended Interview; PBS: Religion & Ethics Newsweekly; January 5, 2007; "I have an unremarkable history. I don’t have a religious upbringing that I’m rebelling against. I had a totally secular upbringing and was just encouraged to explore things as I saw fit. I was never raised an atheist as opposed to religious. It just was not an issue. In my teens I just got interested in spiritual experience and what happens after death and just began to see that religion is really the discourse that treats these phenomena and started exploring meditation and other specifically Eastern brands of religious thinking, but I have studied Western religion as well and have been interested in religion for decades."
Samuels, David. May 29, 2012. Q&A: Sam Harris. Tablet. Retrieved: 6 October 2014. "I was never a religious Jew. My mother is Jewish, so for some people I count as a Jew. But for me, being Jewish amounts to little more than just getting all the jokes in a Woody Allen movie. So, for the people for whom my Judaism is relevant, those people tend to be either overtly anti-Semitic or concerned about crazy conspiracies. The YouTube comments that reference my Judaism are completely crazy. For the most part, for anyone who is seriously engaging with my ideas, the fact that I was born to a Jewish woman who herself was not religious nor were her parents religious is completely irrelevant."
