Why I like Sam Harris

For Israelis being atheist isn't easy. On the one hand there are those who will immediately decide you must be extremely left wing, since if you don't accept the idea that the land of Israel is sacred and was given by god to the Israelites then you are liable to be a bit light handed about holding on to it. On the other hand there are the Israel bashers and antisemitic elements who can be found even on otherwise respectable forums using atheism as an excuse to attack Israel. In one post on a well known forum on the subject of multiculturalism in Britain, the author managed to find an excuse to call Israel " racist and anti-democratic". This in a post about Britain and British culture?
This political climate means that I generally start to read any new book on atheism with a certain amount of guarded skepticism. I'm just waiting for the first comment that makes me say " Well, here we go again...." Which is why I like Sam Harris. For Harris being atheist doesn't mean you have to be toothless. It doesn't mean being a pacifist, in fact he explains quite nicely in " The Moral Landscape" how immoral the pacifist position really is, and it doesn't mean that Israel is automatically wrong in every conflict or decision. I can actually relax and read, fairly certain that I'm not going to have to throw the book at the wall, which, since I read on a laptop, can be expensive.
The other thing I like about Sam Harris is that he doesn't deny the existence of something more than the thinking mind. This is a problematic position for an atheist because there is no real proof that there is anything else, any independent consciousness, but he argues that the techniques of meditation and objective description of subjective experience do have a place in trying to understand what we really are. In fact he pushes the boundaries on all sides, and for me removes the feeling of restriction I sometimes feel reading Richard Dawkins, for instance. ( Which is not to say that Dawkins isn't brilliant as well...)