Ali Dawah - December 07, 2019


ATHEISTS EVOLVING INTO THE UNSEEN

Topics
intellectual honesty
Hosted by
Ali Dawah
Mentioned
Richard Dawkins Buddha Darwin
NEARLY GOING MAD AT HER THEN I REALISED - SPEAKERS CORNER THIS IS WHY ANDY RUIZ LOST TO ANTHONY JOSHUA

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

150.63

Word count

617

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the role of religion in shaping our understanding of the world, and the role that religion plays in shaping the world of ideas, and why we should all be more honest with ourselves about what we believe.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.240 Our habitual failure to recognize thought as thought,
00:00:05.980 our habitual identification with discursive thought,
00:00:10.260 is a primary source of human suffering.
00:00:13.200 And when a person breaks this spell,
00:00:16.060 an extraordinary kind of relief is available
00:00:18.680 that Buddha or Jesus may have experienced in his life.
00:00:22.800 So apart from just commending these phenomenon to your attention,
00:00:25.460 I want to say that our neglect of these phenomenon as atheists 1.00
00:00:30.400 puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage
00:00:32.960 because millions of people have had these experiences
00:00:36.740 and many millions more have had glimmers of them.
00:00:41.400 And these experiences are often the most important
00:00:44.540 and transformative moments in their lives.
00:00:48.400 And if we, by definition, ignore them
00:00:52.040 because of their entanglement with religion,
00:00:53.640 we appear less wise 0.97
00:00:57.520 than even our craziest religious opponents.
00:01:00.800 Now, I don't know if the universe is,
00:01:03.260 as J.B.S. Haldane said,
00:01:05.380 not only stranger than we suppose,
00:01:06.880 but stranger than we can suppose.
00:01:08.440 But I'm pretty sure that it is stranger
00:01:10.240 than we as atheists tend to represent
00:01:13.380 while advocating atheism.
00:01:15.880 As atheists, we tend to give people a sense
00:01:18.360 and even give ourselves a sense
00:01:20.160 that we are well on our way
00:01:21.760 to purging the universe of mystery.
00:01:23.640 As advocates of reason,
00:01:26.700 we know that mystery is going to be with us for quite some time.
00:01:29.080 In fact, there are good reasons to believe
00:01:30.480 that mystery may be ineradicable from our circumstance.
00:01:34.240 Because however much we understand the universe,
00:01:37.480 it seems like there could well always be brute facts
00:01:40.160 which we can't explain,
00:01:42.060 but which we must use to explain everything else.
00:01:45.020 Now, this is not a problem for human life.
00:01:47.460 It is not a barrier to human happiness.
00:01:50.520 But we are faced with the task of convincing
00:01:56.940 a myth-infatuated world
00:01:59.340 that love and curiosity are sufficient
00:02:03.180 and that you don't have to delude yourself
00:02:07.640 and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales.
00:02:11.280 This is a monumental task.
00:02:14.940 I don't think there's any intellectual struggle
00:02:17.380 more worthy of our efforts.
00:02:19.340 This is a future absolutely worth fighting for.
00:02:23.200 I think it may in fact be the only future
00:02:24.940 compatible with our survival as a species.
00:02:28.140 I mean, this will be a world simply
00:02:30.000 where people cease to praise one another
00:02:32.400 for believing things
00:02:34.000 or pretending to believe things
00:02:36.340 for which they have no evidence.
00:02:39.560 But the only path between now and then
00:02:41.980 that I can see
00:02:42.800 is for us to be unremittingly honest
00:02:46.580 and to advocate intellectual honesty.
00:02:49.720 And it seems to me that intellectual honesty
00:02:50.980 will always be more durable
00:02:53.320 and deeper and more easily spread
00:02:56.420 than atheism.
00:03:04.000 What are you talking about?
00:03:07.820 You're embarrassing your movement.
00:03:10.360 You're not talking about the cold, hard,
00:03:13.160 reductionist, scientific, materialistic,
00:03:15.860 naturalistic point of view.
00:03:17.880 You're now slowly using a bit of technical jargon,
00:03:21.480 a bit of rhetoric, a bit of semantics,
00:03:23.120 a bit of sophistry.
00:03:23.820 You're trying to fit a little bit of spirituality
00:03:26.420 into your little movement, aren't you?
00:03:27.980 Because you realise it's going to fail without it.
00:03:30.860 Because the essence of human beings
00:03:32.320 is we're not just physical.
00:03:33.400 Because if we were,
00:03:34.680 we would be doing what Darwin's,
00:03:36.220 what Richard Dawkins says,
00:03:37.700 the highest rationale of our existence
00:03:39.380 is the preservation of our genes.
00:03:41.080 That's how we should behave.
00:03:42.340 That's how you should act.
00:03:43.860 Don't start acting like us.
00:03:45.660 Because if you start acting like us,
00:03:46.980 well, firstly,
00:03:47.860 it shows your inferiority complex.
00:03:49.780 And secondly,
00:03:50.880 it just shows that your worldview
00:03:53.080 is actually undermined
00:03:55.020 by the behaviour of human beings,
00:03:57.460 which is to connect
00:03:58.860 with a higher spiritual power.
00:04:01.580 So while I go off and pray,
00:04:03.400 why don't you go do some reproduction? 1.00
00:04:05.700 Why don't you go do some reproduction? 1.00
00:04:05.720 Why don't you go do some reproduction? 1.00