Oh, dear God -- it's him again

Incendiary "unbeliever" Sam Harris has become a pundit du jour in these times of high religiosity, popping up on TV and radio talk shows from "The O'Reilly Factor" and "The Colbert Report" to tonight's appearance on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." His latest tirade against the god-fearing -- "Letter to a Christian Nation" -- has shot up bestseller lists, enhancing his already considerable reputation as an iconoclast spokesman for today's weary godless.

But despite his fame, Harris himself is something of a mystery. He won't say where he lives. Or where he grew up. Or what his parents do professionally. Or the name of the university where he's pursuing his doctorate in neuroscience. At the request of friends and family, he never acknowledges them by name in his books. He will allow that he's 39 and didn't start out an atheist, though he was raised in a secular family. He is deliberately vague because, he said, murderous religious fanatics know their way around the Internet.

"I have some significant security concerns," Harris said Friday. "The Salman Rushdie effect is something I'm cognizant of."

Other personal revelations aren't so closely guarded, however. The fact, for example, that all Harris' deep-thinking about religion originated from a psychedelic trip in 1986 on the synthetic drug MDMA (a.k.a. Ecstasy). Or that he dropped out of Stanford University to write a novel and instead spent 11 years exploring spiritual practice, meandering through northern India and Nepal and exploring his mind at retreats in Massachusetts and Marin County where he would meditate for 18 hours a day and refrain from speaking for up to three months. Ultimately, he got a philosophy degree at Stanford. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks inspired him to write his first book, the 2004 bestseller "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason." He expects that once his dissertation is finished, it will lead to his next book, a close look at the "biology of belief."

When he first arrived (10 minutes early) for a cup of coffee in the lobby of the Casa Del Mar Hotel in Santa Monica, Harris exuded a genial but buttoned-down sort of presence; it would have been a stretch to imagine him all blissed out on a mountaintop -- at least initially. Just back from his New York publicity tour, he wore a crisp blue, short-sleeved shirt and jeans, and carried a pen and paper that he set aside once he began to talk. As the conversation wandered into the murky subject of consciousness and Harris described those contemplative years, he drifted into more metaphysical spheres.