Modern Wisdom - #103 - Cosmic Skeptic - Veganism, Atheism and Morality

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Alex O'Connor aka Cosmic Skeptic is a YouTuber and Student at Oxford University. How many people go vegan due to a philosophical debate? And how many actively try to get the fans of their YouTube Channel to talk them out of it? Alex is one person on that list. Expect to learn the one philosophical question which Alex has trouble justifying, Alex's reasons for going vegan, whether he thinks that a less religious society has problems with morality and how religions relate to social cohesion. Extra Stuff: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/CosmicSkeptic Subscribe to Alex on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/cosmicskeptic A Meat Eater's Case For Veganism - https://youtu.be/C1vW9iSpLLk Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Alex Okona, otherwise known as Cosmic Skeptic. He's a YouTuber and a student at Oxford University, and I've been looking forward to sitting down with him for quite a while. His YouTube channel is incredibly interesting and very popular, and today we're talking about something which had nothing to do with his channel at all until very recently. Alex usually talks about philosophy and religion and we do get on to that, but the more pressing issue, which I was interested to speak to him about, was his recent conversion to veganism, and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. Alex didn't see images of factory farming which evoked an emotional response. He

had a philosophical discussion with some friends where he was unable to justify his eating of meat and the subsequent suffering of animals for his own sustenance. So yeah, get ready for that. It's a very compelling argument and I'm struggling to reconcile the fact that I consider myself to be a good human whilst also still eating meat. So I'll be very interested to hear if this changes your opinion to meat eating. Get at me at ChriswellX, wherever you follow me. I would love to hear your thoughts. Also make sure that you check out Alex's channel on YouTube, Cosmic Skeptic.

It is really fantastic. But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Mr. Alex O'Connor. I am joined by Alex O'Connor, otherwise known as Cosmic Skeptic. Alex, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We'll have a lot of your fans tuning in, I'm sure as well. It's been a lot of changes recently we've been talking about booking this appointment

in with yourself for a little while, and the topics I've wanted to talk about have moved as the years gone on. First things first, you've recently become vegan. That's right, yeah. Can you tell us the story behind that, please? Yeah, sure. Well, you say recently, it's recent in the long scheme of things, but it's been maybe four, five months now,

coming on half a year soon. For a very long time, I've been thinking about it. And when you talk about philosophy, and for some reason atheism, it seems to lend itself, your audience will always say, what do you think about this? I've always found it very strange. Someone likes what you have to say on one topic and they're desperate to hear on what you have to say on Brexit, on veganism or whatever it is. And I've never quite understood that. It's like really enjoying a footballers' commentary on veganism or whatever it is. And I've never quite understood that. It's like really enjoying a footballers' commentary on a game or something and say, oh yeah,

but what do you think about this political issue? It's like, well, that's not what I do. I do philosophy of religion, but people wanted me to talk about veganism. So I did it in the past, and you find yourself kind of jumping through hoops. And if you listen to people like Sam Harris or someone when they're asked about morality, especially because his veganism, his moral philosophy is based on suffering. Someone says, why aren't you a vegan? And he just kind of, he answers like a politician. He's like, well, we have to, we have to have an honest conversation about the precepts of the stuff. And it's like, man, just admit that you know you should be a vegan. So I was kind of in that spot. and I was talking to friends and essentially saying,

I'm pretty sure that veganism is the moral thing to do, but let me give you some arguments against it and see where we can go, and it just didn't work. And then eventually I was like, you know what, I'm gonna put out a video essentially saying to people, here are the reasons for going vegan, try and talk me out of it. And the main thing that got me thinking about it

was Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation. Peter Singer is probably the most important philosopher in my life in terms of how he's changed the way I think. I mean, there are lots of atheist philosophers who I'd be more closely associated to because that's what I've spoken about, but they were more people who I listened to and admired, but they didn't really like overhaul the way

that I'm living my life. Peter Singer has done that completely with animal rights and also with his writings on philanthropy. I saw he read that and I thought, man, this is big, this is a big problem. And so I made the video, no one talked me out of it, so I went vegan. It just kind of happened one day. I went cold turkey. I was on a bus into work and I saw this cat cross the road and it got scared of the bus, but because I was on the bus, it was like it was looking at me and I saw this cat like backing away in fear and I just looked into it and thought, what the hell am I doing? So I went and had a vegan breakfast and then since then I haven't had any animal products except by accident every now and again.

But that's basically how it happened. We have a co-host on the show, Yusuf, who is from a Islamic background although he's not a believer anymore. And he refers to it as being stealth pork when there's accidentally some pork products in whatever it is that he's eating. So I'm guessing that you've come up with stealth meat. Well, you know, it's an interesting debate actually. What you should do in situations like that,

like if you accidentally, if a chef accidentally puts some cheese on a meal. So for instance, the other day, I had some cheese on chips because I was with a friend and it was really late at night and we ordered some chips from a good bad place, you know. And like we expressly just didn't say cheese. And I even said can I have some chips with some salt and vinegar and nothing else, no sauce or anything. And he was like, yeah, sure. And they came just loaded with cheese and we thought, what the hell do we do here? If we give that back, and it's going

in the bin, there was no one else around us about to close. So it was like, we either eat it or it gets thrown away. So we ate it because as far as I'm concerned, the suffering's already been wasted. It'd be a waste of it goes in the bin. It's a waste if it's used for my sensory pleasure. But at least the pleasure's somewhat maximized in that situation as it stands. Some people, like when I spoke to a guy called Earthling Ed, a friend of mine who makes a lot of vegan content on YouTube, he, I asked him about this and he said, when that happens, he wouldn't, he wouldn't touch it. He'd rather it went to waste.

He'd rather throw it in the ocean or something, just because he doesn't see it as food anymore. It's like being so plastic in your meal or something, you just wouldn't be able to eat it. But for me, because it's basically a philosophical position, like you say, I don't have an aversion to it, I'm not going to throw up if you put a stake in front of me. I see it the same as I've always seen it, just not in the same moral light. So if it was like, here's a stake, it's going to go to waste if you don't eat it. I wouldn't have a moral problem with somebody eating it in that circumstance, where some vegans would.

Do you think that your particular stance, your lineage of entry into veganism is typical? I don't know of many people, at least publicly, who've taken it from the particular root that you have. Yeah, I don't know, because most of the vegans that I know personally weren't vegan until I went vegan and tried to talk to them. We ended up all going together. The biggest, the most popular way for people to become vegan is by having friends with vegan. That's the most common way that happens because your share meals with them or whatever, they'll show you how it's done, you'll realize how easy it is. But I think,

it depends on type of person you are. I spend a lot of time talking to people who are interested in the same things as me, they're interested in philosophy. If you're interested in philosophy, then when you have an argument presented to you, that can be really important for you. That can really change the way you think. But if you go to the average person on the street, they're not going to be as affected by that as if you just showed them some footage. So I think it's probably the case that the majority of people who are vegan either were convinced by a friend or they looked at the footage online and that kind of stuff. I think it's kind of an emotive response because even for me, after all, I became convinced of the philosophical

argument and then I had that experience with the cat that finally made me that was the day that it happened. You need that kind of emotional motivation. Ethics doesn't work unless it has some kind of grounding in your emotions, in your feelings. I think it needs both, but I would probably say that it might be quite unusual, especially because like, I don't see many vegans kind of going unconvinced of this, someone talked me out, you know, they just kind of, they have like an emotional response and they say, man, I'll never eat meat again. This is horrible. Although they'll do it for the environment, I think that's actually probably the big one at the moment. The most, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the people who are going vegan

now are mostly doing it for environmental purposes, because you're beginning to see this big kind of backlash of people who are all crazy about the environment. I mean, it's the big issue at the moment. Everyone's going crazy about the environment and the oceans, and people are just saying, okay, so you're going to stop using plastic straws to save the fish, but you won't stop eating fish to save the fish. Like, what's going on here? And people are beginning to wake up and realize that, oh, the Amazon rainforest is burning. Okay, why is that happening?

Well, it's got a lot to do with the fact that people are eating too much beef. Oh, well, okay, well, let's stop using plastic. No, no, did you not hear me? Like, if you e-stop eating so much beef, then the environment, the environmental problem with the environment practically disappears if we weren't vegan tomorrow. And they're like, yeah, but there are, there are other, it's like, no, you're either care about what you don't. And that's why I get annoyed with people like the extinction rebellion group who are blocking parliament, blocking the roads and London and things.

I understand that direct action is needed sometimes. I can get behind a bit of civil disobedience. But my God, if this is important enough for you to bring London traffic to a standstill and stop aeroplane from taking off, then it's important enough for you to choose something else on the menu. Like, come on, I can't give anyone the time of day who knows. Some people don't know, and that's fine. But if you know how important the agricultural industry is to the rise of climate change, and you're still one of these

steadfast campaigners getting people to do everything they can and saying, you're not allowed to travel, you know, parliament isn't allowed to concentrate on anything else. This is the most important thing in the world, but you're still eating red meat and you're still eating fish, then I just don't know what to say to you. People picking their morality piecemeal, I want this bit, but I don't want the other bit. I want the bit that doesn't inconvenience me and makes me look really cool to my friends, but I don't want the thing that requires me to learn some new recipes in the kitchen. Exactly that. I don't want people to get me wrong. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be

campaigning. I'm just saying that if they're campaigning that much, then they should kind of take it to a logical conclusion. It's like if someone were campaigning to end the form of slavery, but supporting another form of slavery, it's not a bad thing that you're campaigning to end this form of slavery, but you've got to be consistent about this if you want people to take you seriously. If you want the people who are interested in the philosophy behind your movement, if you want people who are interested in the arguments behind your movement to take you seriously, you have to be consistent. It's going to be too easy for people who are climate skeptics to turn around and say, well,

if you care so much about the environment, then why aren't you doing anything about your diet? And you just kind of, you'd be stumbling around and you won't really know what to say. So I think, yeah, you've got to be consistent to, if only just to avoid the kind of criticism that you're going to receive if you don't do that. Yeah, I've got some party friends. We run club nights. It's been my job for the last 13 years.

And in the clubbing industry, there's's an increasing woke movement which is very very interesting and recently one of my friends posted something online talking about woke promoters there's quite a lot of them down south people that are going vegan and vegetarian but notice the fact that they were concerned at the plight of animals and factory farming and stuff like that what were more than happy to put 60 quid into a drug dealers' hand to get some cocaine which had been made off the back of children in Brazil and in Mexico and all of the sort of drug gangs. So I think you write there's there's layers and levels to this sort of a thing.

So one of the things that I wanted you to present to the listeners was, could you give us the arguments that most wanted you to present to the listeners was, could you give us the arguments that most compelled you to go vegan? Yeah, well, it's more, I mean, I kind of look at it in the reverse. I say that if you're going to do something that involves causing suffering, then you have to be able to justify it. And so it was more the arguments in favor of eating meat disappeared. I mean, if you want an argument against eating meat or, let's say,

because eating meat intrinsically isn't wrong, but I kind of, I use the word the phrase like eating meat to be synonymous with the mistreatment of animals, although that's probably an unfair thing to do in many ways, but sometimes that's what my vocabulary does. But if you want an argument against torturing animals, then it's like, most people will be content if you just say, well, would you be okay if I taught you to dog?

How would you feel if you just saw a dog being beaten on the street, like, what would you do? And they'll say, well, that's awful. And it's like, well, you're already convincing. We don't actually need to get into the meta-ethic of why it's wrong to make animal suffer. I just have to show you that torturing a dog is not morally different from torturing a pig. Some people might say, well, I wouldn't have a problem

with that, like why should I care about the dog? In which case, it gets a bit more difficult. You have to kind of present a meta-ethical position about suffering, which, I don't know, it gets complicated, but the main way that I get people to go vegan philosophically speaking is with an argument from consistency. If you're against racism and sexism, you should probably be against speciesism too. And that doesn't mean seeing people as equal.

That's one of the big things that Peter Singer pointed out. He said that like, like, races aren't equal. Sexes aren't equal. We have loads and loads of differences. We have different proportions. We have different languages and cultures and different, different all sorts of things. Like, nobody's equal. And even in terms of skill, like different people have different skill levels.

And intrinsically, they have different strengths and weaknesses. He said, you know, if political equity, if political equal treatment was based on actual equality of people, then there would be no equality. There would be no basis for it. He says it's not like being anti-racist isn't saying all races are equal, it's saying that despite our differences, we're all worth the same morally. And it's the same thing with animals except,

you don't have to say that we're worth the same, you just have to say that we're afforded the same moral, the same kind of, you're kind of included in the thought process at least. Like, if you're in favor of equality of the sexes, you don't have to give men abortion rights, because that doesn't make any sense. In the same way, you can be in favor of treating animals with respect and giving them kind of an equal consideration, is the phrase that Peter Singer uses. Doesn't mean we're going to let them vote. Doesn't mean we're going to make them treat them as though they're the same as humans

or even have the same moral worth as humans. It just means that we treat them as much as they deserve. So if I say like, what is it about an animal, a non-human animal that allows you to kill them and torture them in fact, and put them through factory farm processes? Like, what is the thing that they have or the thing that they lack? That if a human were to have or to lack, you'd be okay with doing it to the human as well. Like, what is it? Is it intelligence? If it's intelligence, then can we throw people with

under a certain IQ into factory farms? Like, probably not. Or maybe it's self-awareness. It's like, well, is a dog self-aware, probably? Well, a pig is just a self-awareness of the dog is, so why aren't you? It's just about consistency, right? If someone turns around and says, actually, yeah, I do think that if we, I do think it'd be a good idea to throw people with an IQ under certain amount into factory farms, then I'd be like, well,

at least you're being consistent. Right, the conversation is just- It's strange views, but yes, you're being consistent. Yeah, I'm no longer saying now, here's where you should be vegan. It's here's why you should not want to kill people who are done, right? Yeah. The conversation shifts, but if somebody is on the same page, which most people are, it sounds absurd to compare racism to the treatment of animals, but if anything, if you quantify suffering, if what you care about is suffering, and I think most atheists at the very least do care about suffering as the basis of their morality, then animals can feel suffering just as we can. It's in different ways, like they might feel they might not feel the same kind of fears and anxieties we do. They don't have anxiety over debt, for instance, as a very human-specific suffering. But when it comes to physical pains and things, like these things might be comparable.

We can't do it in practice, but if you think pain can be quantifiable, which some people do, some people don't, then you might say, well, yeah, racism is awful, but with the state of racism at the moment in the United States, the amount of pain is not as much as the amount of pain in the animal industry.

You might agree with that, you might not. But they are comparable at the very least. They can be analogous. And if you think about the sheer numbers involved, this is, I mean, Peter got an a lot of trouble years ago for doing this Holocaust on your plate campaign, where they made a comparison, saying like 12 million people perished in the Holocaust between the years of World War II, between 39 and 45, 12 million were killed. And then they just point out that the same number of non-human animals are tortured and killed every single hour

in the United States alone for food. And people were like, how the hell could you possibly compare them? It's like, well, think about that for a second. Even if you think that one is way worse than the other, just think about the numbers there. Like, 50 billion animals being tortured and killed every year, not for war, not for some social progress, just because people think they taste nice. Like, that's insane, right? And so if you begin to make people see that animals can feel suffering, and you begin to make them see how that's

analogous to our own suffering, like, evolutionarily speaking, rationally speaking, I have no reason not to be a racist. I mean, I'm never going to, I'm never going to suffer from racism, like in a society, in a society that's dominated by white people, I mean, I'm never going to suffer, let's say, from anti-black racism. No, it's not going to be a problem for me. So why would I be against it? It's a rational thing. It's a moral thing. It's like, I tap into my empathy, I tap into societal cohesion, all of these kinds of things. And I realize that suffering is bad, no matter who's suffering from it. And if I can do the same thing for them, then I can do the same thing for non-human animals as well. It is a compelling argument. It is a compelling argument. I think speciesism is definitely what most people

are drawing that line at. It's an extension of us just being tribal the same way that it would have protected us a long time ago. Does consciousness and suffering, do they go hand in hand? I think it depends on you depending on consciousness. The only thing that I care about when it comes to morality is the ability to feel pain and the ability to feel pleasure, which someone like Singerwood point out is predicated on or is the basis for preference. If a creature has such thing as preference,

then they have moral worth, at least some minuscule level of moral worth. If you have some creature that somehow conscious but doesn't feel pleasure and pain, then I wouldn't consider them as part of the moral framework. Because if you didn't feel pleasure and pains, like you'd essentially just be a vegetable, it's preferences that motivate action. You only do things because you want to do them, like that's what motivates action, desire, motivates action. In order to have desire, you need to have some conception of pleasure and pain because desire is predicated upon pleasure itself.

So without pleasure and pain, I don't know if consciousness can even make sense, but if it can, then that's not the important thing for me. It's just the pleasure and pain. I'm sitting down with Neil EL on Monday to discuss his new book, Indistractable, and in that he's cited a couple of studies that he suggests show that there isn't such a thing as pleasure chasing. There is only pain

avoidance. And that was an interesting eye-opener for me just thinking about the way that we live our lives and what it is that we go towards and applies even more pressure to avoiding discomfort, avoiding suffering, as you're saying here. So, there must be a spectrum of suffering and of consciousness, and there must be a bottom end. There must be a line where animals no longer are animals and become vegetables. There's some animals that are more responsive to stimuli, some plants that are more responsive

to stimuli than animals are, like coral or limpids. Where do we draw the line there? Where does the rubber meet the road with that? So it's all about the maximization of pleasure or, or I'd rather frame it actually as your guest would in the terms of minimization of suffering because a lot of philosophical pessimists, so for instance Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in his most famous essay, he essentially said, look, all these philosophers have it totally wrong. Everyone thinks that pleasure is like the affirmative thing and pain is like the absence of

pleasure or something along that lines. It's like, no, the most real thing, the most active thing is pain and all pleasure is just some kind of negation of pain. It's all about avoiding pain thing is pain and all pleasure is just some kind of negation of pain. It's all about avoiding pain. Or whether that be physical pain or like philosophical pain and then not being able to understand the world and absurdism, Kamu said that all of the meaning of life is essentially just finding excuses not to kill yourself, like that's all that life. That's all that life is, you know. I think it makes sense to view the world in that way. And if we do, then we have to, we have to figure out the calculation that's most going to minimize suffering, a way to think about it,

how you would frame the world, like where you would draw the line, whether you'd, whether you'd be okay with us killing plants and trees or whatever, is to apply John Rules is principle, the veil of ignorance. John Rool should have been a vegan, because he quite famously came up with this analogy that if you didn't know if you were going to be born black or white or lower class or upper class or whatever it was, you didn't know what social characteristics you had, but you're about to be born into the world and you have no idea where you're going to be born. Let's, like in the United States, for instance, design society before you get into that society. So design society before you know where you're going to be in it.

So he concluded, you probably want to have a capitalist economy so that if you have an opportunity to make money, you can do so and you can be free to make as much money as you can, but with some kind of social safety nets, that if you're born into areas with no economic opportunity, you'll have some help. That would be fair, because you realize that that's going to better your chances. Now, just do the same thing, but apply it to you.

You don't know what thing you're going to be. You could be a tree, you could be a bush, you could be a chair, you could be a pig, you could be a human, and design society. The question is, would you have an agricultural industry in that society? Of course you bloody wouldn't. Like, chickens outnumber humans three to one. You've got three times more chance of being a chicken.

You're going to be okay with those odds, or you're going to say, no, no, let's not have KFC in the society. And I say to you, well, no, you don't understand, because you could be born a human, and you'll get so much pleasure from eating chicken. And if you are born a chicken, like chickens have so much less intelligence, and you won't, no, you don't understand, because you could be born a human and you'll get so much pleasure from eating chicken. And if you are born a chicken, like chickens have so much less intelligence

and you won't be smart, you won't feel the pain as much, like you'll be, and you'll be like, no, that's insane. I'm not gonna run that risk. I would rather have the chance of being a human and have to not eat chicken, then run the risk of being a chicken in the animal industry, right? So now the question would be, would you be okay being a tree or a plant?

It's like, well, as far as I'm concerned, they don't feel pain, so I probably wouldn't have a problem with that. But the thing is, let's say that plants can feel pain. This is an important thing, because people often bring it up as a bit of a meme. It's like when an atheist, someone asks an atheist, like, but where do you find your meaning or something? And every atheist just rolls their eyes like, how if you're not like, this is just ridiculous. It's the same thing with the plants thing.

People always bring it up, it's like, but plants can feel pain and the vegans go off for God's sake. And what most of them say is they go, no, they can't feel pain. That's ridiculous shut up. What I say is, okay, let's say they can feel pain. You understand that the vast majority of plants that are destroyed are not fed to humans, they're fed to livestock. Where do you think your protein gets its protein from? They're eating plants as well. If you think plants can suffer, then the best way to minimize

plants being killed is to go vegan, because then we won't be feeding them to the livestock. So even if plants can feel pain, the way to minimize that pain is to go vegan because then we won't be feeding them to the livestock. So even if plants can fill pain, the way to minimize that pain is to go vegan. Like veganism doesn't eliminate suffering. You're still killing animals. You're still destroying land to grow crops and things like that. It's just about minimizing it because that's already happening right now in order to grow crops that we then feed to cows, which we then kill and eat. Like just cut out the middle man and we'll reduce the suffering even more.

So you're never going to be able to eliminate suffering. So if plants can feel pain, then that would just be a sorry fact of existence, but it would be one that we could manage by still going vegan. Yeah. Would you say that moving forward, if you were able to create the equivalent of a philosophical zombie animal, some meat that's being grown in a chest, test tube or whatever it might be, what would just stand to be on that? If you can't feel suffering, then no problem I said no suffering no problem. Do you think that most vegans hold that view? I wouldn't know. I mean a lot of vegans I've spoken to most vegans I've

spoken to who didn't go vegan at the same time as me for the same reasons give a lot of weight to preference. So I was speaking to someone in London recently, I do some events sometimes and it's always nice because people will come who've seen your channels so you know you get an opportunity to meet people and I'm very used to people coming up and saying, you know, I like the videos you did on atheism, I like this moral that can we talk about the nature of morality or something but I kind of forgot that I'd done the veganism thing so recently and someone comes up to me, these people come up to me and say, hi, we're some of your vegan viewers. And I was like, wow, this is the first time, this is, this is ever how I've never had this

before. So I was talking to them about it and they were talking about preference. The idea being that because animals want to live, they have a preference to live, we should respect that just intrinsically. If you were to go and kill an animal behind its back with no suffering, would that be a problem? And I'm of the opinion that it's all about pleasure and pain. So I would say, the preference alone isn't enough to say that you shouldn't kill that

animal. And they had a problem with that. They were like, no, there is some moral worth to preference. You're getting rid of potential pleasure, that kind of thing. I reject that because for instance, if you're talking about potential pleasure having worth, then you get into a whole problem with abortion. And I'm not just talking about the normal debates

of having abortion. I'm talking like the idea that you doing this podcast instead of going and having sex right now is preventing potential pleasure. But that's just absurd. That's what we're just going to have to leave with that name. I'm afraid so. I mean, that's the excuse I always use, right? But that's an absurd argument, obviously. And I wouldn't want anyone to take that argument seriously, but that just demonstrates why potential pleasure, at least on its own, isn't enough to justify it. So they say, for instance, well, then would you be okay with going and killing a human being without them feeling any suffering and without them knowing it was coming? And it's like,

okay, I'm going to need to qualify this, but yes. And the eyebrows, back of the head, it's like, the reason that wouldn't work is because firstly, the very fact that we would be aware in our moral system that it's okay to do that would cause panic and suffering. So, even just allowing that as part of the moral zeitgeist would lower suffering, which means even allowing that to be thought of as moral is immoral in itself, so we shouldn't do it. But besides, there's so many more complications with things like friends and family and then the effect on society and things like that, they don't apply to chickens and pigs. Like if you take one chicken out of a herd of a hundred and kill it without knowing it,

without feeling any suffering, there's not going to be any real social implications for that. Although there are arguments to say that the animals, that are social animals, will really notice. Like I had this big discussion with Armin Novabi and some other YouTubers in London recently about chicken depression. There was a friend of ours who knows someone

who runs a chicken farm and he was talking about, no, I think chickens can get depressed. Like you see them when their family are killed, like they get upset and Armin's like, that chickens can't get depressed and we were arguing about chicken depression. And so some people would say that even if you go and kill an animal without it knowing that's going to be a problem because it's friends and family will know, but then again the reason

that would be wrong wouldn't be because of the intrinsic removal of the preference of the animal you're killing, but because of the suffering of the other animal. So it still comes down to suffering. Exactly. Yeah, so it's never the preference alone that I think has the moral work. It's always the suffering. And I think that's where I would differ from many other vegans who give more, they almost say kind of sanctity of life approach. They're like, we need to respect life. Or they take a kind of animals aren't here for our youth kind of thing. It's just like a philosophical deontological principle.

For me, it's like, there's no special thing about it. Like veganism isn't a special thing in and of itself for me. It's just a derivative of my general moral principle of minimizing suffering. Like, on the same reason, I'm vegan for the same reason that I'm not a racist. It's like, it just kind of follows naturally, right? It's not a specific thing in its own regard.

Like, being an atheist doesn't really fool in that category. Like, that's a whole different area of discussion. It's a whole different argument. But the veganism thing is just well under this umbrella of all more principles that I hold. The same reason that I wouldn't be to dog on the street, the same reason that I'm against domestic violence, the same reason I'm against racism, or whatever it is.

It's all part of the same thing. It's all just about minimizing suffering. How do animals that kill other animals fit into this paradigm, have you thought about that? Yeah, I have, and people say, you know, you don't judge the lion for dining on the gazelle. So I should, I'd be judged for doing it. It's like, okay, well, lions also will murder

other lion populations and impregnate the females to repopulate the pride with their own children and murder the children that exist there already. Should we do that as well? Like, hard, hard, hard press to roll that one forward. Yeah, you might base your moral, your moral framework on that of wild animals. I think more highly of humans than than that, you know, like in the same way that if you had a severely disabled child who had a tumor present against the part of their brain that dealt with rational thought and they kind of smacked someone in the face, you wouldn't hold the morally responsible for it. It's, but just because we don't hold that child morally responsible for doing things that we would consider wrong. We can't then turn around and do immoral things to them. Right? So just because we don't hold, like

you could take an intensely disabled person who just was totally out of control of any of their actions, we wouldn't hold them morally responsible for trying to hit us, but we can still hold ourselves morally responsible for trying to hit them. In the same way, we don't hold animals morally responsible for raping each other or for killing each other or eating each other, but that doesn't mean we can do it to them as well. I mean, are we okay to have sex with animals? Some people would say yes, that's an interesting,

that's another interesting discussion actually because like, you know, I would argue that, and I don't have to take this route because I'm a vegan, but if you're okay with putting animals in factory farms, then I don't understand how you could be against people having sex with them because then at least there's a chance they might enjoy it. And even if they don't enjoy it, it can't be much worse than being put through a factory farm.

So like, that's a whole other discussion, you know what I mean? To keep to the question, the answer that I would give is, my moral system is based on what I consider to be rational thought processes, not trying to mirror the animal kingdom. There's no, it might make right. There's no appeal to nature or anything like that. It's just about minimization and suffering. I think that difference between the animals for eating and animals for sex that you've come up with there probably strikes a chord with what most people, the reason that most people choose to go vegan.

It's that much more visceral amount of response, right? Because when you think about the killing, you're somehow removed, it's not you that's doing it, you're just doing the eating. Whereas with the sex, like you're there. Like anyone who's watched Black Mirror, like. That's the thing. Yeah.

It's really strange though, isn't it? It's like people have this weird aversion. Like if it came out in the newspaper that some farmer had been seriously raping his pigs, people would be like, that's disgusting. It's like, okay, so you're okay with this person torturing them, skinning them, putting a bolt through their brain,

but as soon as they put their dick in it, like, oh, no, that's not true. Come on, what are you doing? It's the same thing when people, this is something that, like what Chris Vitchin said in his memoir, he was sort of, Chris Vitchin wrote a book, a biography of Thomas Jefferson, who famously owned very many slaves, including Sally Hemings, who he's believed to have sexually sold it and having a child with. And he pointed out that historians

are quick to kind of defend Jefferson and say, no, no, he didn't, he didn't sexually assault Sally Hemings and they get kind of upset by the idea that this hero of American history turns out that he just as sexually assaulted some woman. And Hitchens is like, oh, but they were okay with the whole owning her. Like they were, they were okay with her with him owning this woman as proper. But the moment it suggested that he tries to have sex with them, like it suddenly becomes this horrible thing and they can't believe their hero has been stained in this way. It's like, come on, give me a break here. And I think it's kind of that that's analogous to the same thing with having sex with animals. It's like, if you think it's bad to have

sex with a horse or a pig, then maybe you are giving pigs moral worth. Maybe you do care about their suffering. And if you do care about their suffering, and if you do care about their suffering, then my God, stop buying McDonald's. It's people taking their moral virtues piecemeal again, isn't it? It's picking what they want from different areas. So what do you think, what strikes me

and the thing that I've thought when I watched your first video, a meat eaters case for veganism, which will be linked in the show notes below, if you just want to see what Alex is talking about, really cool video. What struck me with that was the fact that you then decided on the basis of quite a cerebral approach to veganism that you would commit because you wanted to live in line. You wanted your life to live in line with your moral, your moral standing. I think that, to me, that friction in the system or that slippage in the system is probably where people don't make the jump. They think, well, okay, compelling argument, Alex, like, you know, yeah, maybe you're right,

maybe you're right about that, but I just can't be asked. Yeah. Then essentially, the question is, is YB moral? And that's a difficult question to answer. That's a whole different ballgame. It's like people will tell me it's the one question that I can't really answer very well. It's the one kind of impenetrable boundary is when people say, yeah, okay, I accept that it's the moral thing to do, but I'm just in a moral person. It's like, all I can really do is tell you how to be moral. Like, all that, that sounds

incredibly preachy and self-righteous. I mean, all I can tell you, what I mean by that is, all I can tell you is what I philosophically believe to be the moral thing to do. That's what I mean by that. I can't really tell you why you should be moral. There are philosophical arguments to do that, but all I'm saying is if you want to be moral, this is how I think it should be achieved. The question of why should I be moral, why should I be asked is like, I don't know, but what if you, the way that I usually approach these people, is I say, okay, let's say you are having a conversation with someone who is a racist or a neo-nazi or something like that. And they said, you know

what, that's a good point, maybe, you know, maybe Jews are all right after all. Maybe the moral thing to do is to not be anti-Semitic, but I guess I'm just an immoral person. It's like, what are you? Whoa, who is this? But you think they were insane or something? And that's the thing, like people like people when you talk people about veganism like the conversation usually ends with them kind of going like yeah, wow oh man You make some good boy. It's cool. Yeah, but bacon though You kidding me like this isn't just some kind of like interesting Music right this is this is the most important moral issue of our time.

It's like, is it like a nervous laughter that you're just kind of laughing it off? Like, yeah, good point, no dear. It's like, think about this seriously. Come on, like, how would you feel if you were living in the society and you were turning around and saying, guys, how the hell are we owning people as slaves right now?

This needs to end and someone goes, oh man, that's a good point. That's a, the cotton though, Yeah, it's like, oh man. And it's like, hold on, but you can, and it's the same thing. It's like people turn around and go, but, but like, so, so you don't own slaves and you're like, yes, and they're like, but, but, but where do you get your cotton? It's like, what, what, what are you talking about? It's like, but you're a vegan. So where do you get your protein? The same place that your protein gets your protein from. It's just absurd. And it's like these people have never thought about it before. And most of them haven't

ever thought about it before because it's not something that's talked about in mainstream philosophy. If you think about how important the moral issue actually is, it's something that in the future will be one of the biggest political issues of our time. But can you imagine Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn go and add each other talking about the nuances of the ethics of factory farming? I don't think it's even imaginable, but they would do it on almost any other issue. They do it on disability benefits.

They do it on the NHS. And it's like many of the issues that I talked about regularly in Parliament are nowhere near as important as the suffering and torture of over 50 billion send you increases every single year. But it just seems absurd to suggest that that would be something that would be talked about in Parliament. But that just goes to show how utterly unthinking we are

when it comes to this area of ethics. It's like, it's our biggest ethical blind spot. It's not like people don't know it's there, but it's staring us in the face. And all you have to do is just readjust your site a little bit. It doesn't take much more than that. It's not like something that people think is totally, totally okay and would fully defend. It's just, you just need to start thinking about it. That's it.

And there's no way, like if you saw a book on the shelf, for instance, this is a point that was made that there's a book called, Eating Animals Should We Stop. I can't remember who it's by. But he made this point. He was like in the introduction or something. He says, I bet you assume what my conclusion is here.

Like the book title just says, should we stop eating animals, right? That's all it says. But I bet you've already assumed that I'm gonna conclude that yeah, we should stop having you. Now why is that? Like it's probably because you know

that anyone who's given it enough thought to write a book about it has probably become convinced that it's wrong to do. People know that if you think about it enough, then you'll become convinced that it's wrong. They're just not willing to do the thinking. then you become convinced that it's wrong they're just not willing to do the thinking and i wasn't willing to do it either but the moment that i committed to it like you just have to go vegan and it's a lot easier than people think it is it's so easy and the more people do it the easier it gets still i wonder what the equivalent success ratio would be if the government employed Alex O'Connor Cosmic Skeptic to do the marketing campaign for

pro veganism versus the more visceral response of Peter, like yours it would be different sort of delivery and definitely some different imagery. I think so. I wouldn't I wouldn't really trust myself as a as a campaign. I go toe to toe with a lot of vegans. I argued with Peter Singer about this. I argue with Earthling Ed about this. I argue with Non-Vegas like Armin Navarbi about this. Essentially things that are good in terms of progress that are politically good moves. For instance, in a lot of the colleges at Oxford, they have like meatless Mondays in the halls. of the colleges at Oxford, they have like meatless Mondays in the halls. Right. It's a good thing.

They have like straight off the bat. It's good marketing. Yeah, well that's it. It's also supposed to be very fun and friendly and everything. And people, people, I've argued with people about this because they assume that I'm going to be all full. Like if my college were like, we're going to start doing meatless Mondays, people would think that I'd be all in favor of that. I can't put my name behind a campaign like that. That's why I wouldn't want to run a vegan campaign because technically that is reducing animal suffering, but I can't put my name behind giving up meat on Mondays for the same reason that as an abolitionist

in the 1800s, I wouldn't want to have put my name behind a campaign that says, how about you give up your slaves on the weekend? Let them have a few days off. That's not what I'm going for here. I think this is wrong in the need to stop. If I want to be ethically consistent, I have to advocate for that position. People would call that a kind of absolutism or fundamentalism. Well, maybe that's the best way to describe it, but in the same way that you're probably an absolutist or a fundamentalist when it comes to your opposition to human slavery, you probably wouldn't accept compromises. You'd say you've got to stop doing this now,

like full stop, there's no excuse for this. So it's a difficult position, that's why I wouldn't consider myself an activist and wouldn't do much activism along those kinds of progressive means. But I don't want to hinder people who are doing that, because like I say, it is technically reducing suffering, but I can't be the one to be in charge of that. Like that's just coming out from all of the different angles, right? Coming

out from your particular stance, which is quite cerebral, coming out from this more emotive visceral response stance. And then this, I suppose, habitual slow, habitual move where you, well look, you got away with Monday, you got away with without me on Monday, like what now, how about if we do Tuesday? Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I consider like, I think about moral progress and you kind of, like you say, you have to have all the components. If you think about like the American revolution, you know, you needed the, you needed the Jefferson to draft the document. You needed the Washington to be the emotive leader, but you also needed the Thomas Payne who wrote the essay and said, no, no, like, forget this, forget this representation nonsense. We're going to be independent. Like, at the time

of the revolution, nobody really wanted independence. They just wanted a bit of representation in Parliament and for the taxes to be fairer. And Thomas Payne writes this essay that says, independence now, no exceptions. We're against tyranny, full stop, and you put out the essay. And no one remembers Thomas Payne, because he wasn't the one who actually went on and made the social progress happen, because you can't just do it like that. But you need it without that essay, without that philosophical push, then the rest of it wouldn't have happened.

And I think if I'm going to play a role in the liberation of animals, and I want it to be a kind of, like you say, a kind of armchair philosophy, I want to write the essays that I want to write the essays, I want to do the arguments that are arguing for the absolute moral position, so that the moderates and the progressives have a philosophical basis on which to base their political moves. But I couldn't take part in that side of things really. And maybe I will in the future, maybe that will change. I don't know. But the thing that I don't think can ever really change is my conviction that this is the way forward, that this is what's not only what should happen, but what's going to happen.

Especially with people carrying so much about the environment right now, it's not going to take much, I think, to convince the next generation, or maybe even the generation after that. That we need to stop eating meat at the very least and probably all dairy products is what you give me to not a big step to then also give up dairy. Yeah i i don't know i don't know what role i play but. I'm not big on the whole. The whole compromise thing it's not for me. I'm not big on the whole compromise thing, it's not for me. I think if your philosophical framework for this, your conceptual framework forms the foundation, there is a fair bit of weight on your shoulders, so you were all of the practice

that you've had of forming these arguments and having these discussions going to up the toe with people, hopefully you will stand you in good stead as you move further forward. So I wanted to get onto your degree at Oxford. You're doing philosophy in theology, is that correct? You've just finished your first year. Yes. What is it like studying theology as an atheist? It's fun. You know, interesting. So at Oxford at the very least, and I think the most So, Adoxford at the very least, and I think most theology faculties now, certainly in this country, are not theology faculties, they've rebranded themselves into theology and religion faculties. So, you can tailor your approach, so you're not just studying theology, you're also studying religion as a concept. And for instance, the compulsory papers, one of the compulsory papers that

all theology students have to do is the figure of Jesus through the centuries. That's a compulsory, a compulsory theology paper, but it's very broad. And my tutor gave us a list of certain topics that we were going to study. And I looked at the syllabus and said, hold on, we're doing this really boring, dry, mystic, Russian thing in this week. But I've seen on the syllabus that you can, if you want to, do the novels of Dostoevsky, you can do Jesus in those novels. And I just said, can we do that instead?

And he goes, yeah, sure, whatever. Like, that might not be the same at other universities, but because of the tutorial system at Oxford, it's very much catered to what you want to do. So it's not like I have to sit around, like in churchy situations and learn about the nature of God. You have to do a bit of that. Like when we do Athanasias, he was one of the church fathers.

We have to kind of engage with the debate as to whether Jesus is fully man and fully God or whether he's not fully man, or whether he's subordinate to the father. But you can frame that not as is Jesus subordinate to the father, but did Athanasius think he was subordinate to the father, and why not? Like what was his biblical basis for that? You don't need to kind of actually think it's real.

So you can study it from a very detached secular perspective, which means that it's not like ironic or funny than an atheist studies theology. And I think at this point, probably more atheists are studying theology than religious people. And you find that when a religious person studying theology, at least in my experience, a lot of the time they're very devout and they're doing it because they want to go into the priest's hurdle because they want to develop their theology, like for their personal benefit. Whereas when an atheist studies it, they're doing it in a more kind of academic framework.

But again, that's fine because you can do both of those things. You can tailor it. You can do the reading you want to do. You can answer the questions you want to answer. So it's actually not like, you may as well ask what it's like to be an atheist studying history. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of religion in history, but it's the same as studying it for anybody else. I think the same thing is kind of happening with theology. Does it feel very voyeuristic in a way, the fact that you have this detachment from the belief and obviously you had a fairly strong, existing understanding of theology going into, or at least based on your YouTube channel, it seemed like you did. Well, there are any significant changes? You've just completed your first year.

Have you found yourself looking at your world view significantly differently in any areas after 12 months? Well, so far on the theology side of things, on philosophy, you had to do moral philosophy in general philosophy, which doesn't really touch religion, but the moral philosophy changed a lot what I think about moral philosophy, we have to do moral philosophy in general philosophy, which doesn't really touch religion, but that, like, the moral philosophy changed a lot what I think about moral philosophy, but we've referenced it to theology. Nothing much changed, but the papers weren't really about that. Like, next year we're doing philosophy of religion. So the thing that I talk about on my channel

mostly is arguments for the existence of God and things. I don't talk so much about the nature of Scripture or about the pragmatism of certain religious traditions and things. That's not really my area, I'm more about the philosophy. So if my views were going to change on the things I talk about, it will probably happen next year. But you kind of, I don't know, let me think. I guess you realize it's much less unified than you thought. You

realize that one of the things that really strikes me is that these people who were heralded as philosophical giants in the theological history, people like Aquinas or Augustine or Athanasius, and you read their texts and you begin to kind of realize this is just some guy. This is just some guy. This is just a person writing stuff. It might be pretty good at writing, but it's just a person just writing something. They're easy to engage with. You can engage with them in the same way that you can engage with a modern philosopher. It's not this kind of untouchable ancient wisdom. It's just writing. It's just philosophical argumentation. It can be engaged within the same way. But nothing's really changed on

that front. No, I think so. I had a, I asked for some questions from friends and some listeners to the channel. One of them that came up was really, really good. So I wanted to, I wanted to put this one to you as a nice way to book and this podcast. What do you think of the claim that an increase in secularism in recent history has resulted in a decrease in moral virtue? I don't think that's true. I think implicit in the question might be, if that's true, then if the question's being asked in a kind of challenging way, it would be like, if you get rid of religion, then you get rid of moral virtue. Well, secularism isn't getting rid of religion. It's getting rid of religious influence over government.

So, I think it's probably related towards less religious following or people increasingly becoming non-religious or a religious, I suppose. Well, so those are two different questions. I think that if by getting rid of religion, we're getting rid of kind of religious morality, then I think that's probably a good thing. If you understand what religious morality often entails, then it's probably a good thing that we're getting rid of it. I don't believe, like, if you meet an atheist, and this isn't just me talking, I think this is probably just an intuition that most thinking people would have, you wouldn't assume that they're less moral. Now, you might assume that they have less of a grounding for it if you're somebody who

believes, if you're like an ethical subjectivist or you don't think morality can exist without God, you might think that they can't ground them orality. But if you speak to Christians who make them moral argument, they say, if you're an atheist, you have no basis for morality. And people always criticize them and say, and the Hittrens usually, how dare you say that we need moral permission to be good? How dare you say that we can't be moral without God? It's like, that's not what they're saying. They're saying that you are being moral, but that you have no grounding for it and that you're actually secretly kind of using the the Christian worldview to buttress your moral views I don't think that's true. So when I make moral arguments I

I base them on I base them on secular principles and I think that they hold up like them on, I base them on secular principles. And I think that they hold up. Like, if you need religion to be moral, then let's investigate why that's the case. Like, why is it the case that if God says you have to do something, that becomes the moral thing to do? I mean, what is it about that? Why should you do what God proclaims to be good? Like, is it because you want to avoid hell? Well, then it's just down to suffering again. Like, why should you do want to avoid hell? What's wrong with going to hell? Well, then it's just down to suffering again. Like, why should you want to avoid hell? What's wrong with going to hell? Well, it would hurt. Okay.

Like then your argument is the same as mine. Do you think that God is just speaking ontological truths with his morality? Well, commands can't have truth value. You can't say, go over there. Is that true or false? As a command, that's not that there can't be true or false. Like the same problems that you get with trying to ground morality without God, you get the same problems trying to do it in God. Like it's just a kind of different, it's a different ballgame, but the problem still arrives. So I don't think it's true. And if it is the case that if you get rid of religion,

moral virtue declines, then that isn't a problem with atheism. That's probably just a problem with the way that atheism is being branded. And the only people who are really going there, going around convincing people that if you're an atheist, you can get away with immorality. And then if you're an atheist, you don't need to have moral virtue. And if you're an atheist, you don't have to have moral principles. The only people who are advocating that view are the religious. But if it is the case that getting rid of religion is getting rid of morality, that's because of the way that the religious have painted atheists morality. If you speak to atheists, if we allow atheists to speak about their morality and have discussions

that are popular about grounding morality in a godless universe, then we wouldn't have that problem because people would realize that we can ground morality just as easily if not better than we can ground that religion. And if it does take a leap of faith, if it really is just a total bullshit to try and ground morality without God, then my argument would be, then maybe it does take a bit of intellectual acrobatics or a bit of intellectual ignorance to base your morality in a godless universe, but it takes less intellectual acrobatics than it takes to convince yourself that a loving god exists, I think.

I think certainly speaking to people about analogous topics, I don't understand, I'm a good avatar for the layperson when it comes to these sorts of discussions, but it's almost tropey now. I'm very cliche for people to have this sort of wistful days gone by view of when things were better and family's stuck together and you had the support of the church and you had this that and the other. I think that certainly seems to me to be an argument that is put forward for this, that there was just more social cohesion and the golden days of when people actually used to look out for each other. All of these kind of very wishy, washy, nebulous, tropey, ephemeral sort of claims and statuses that get used. That I think is what a lot of people think they're referring to.

Yeah, and look, I mean, that's rose tinted glasses. It wasn't all as good as you think it was, and if you were to be dropped back in that society, maybe it'd be okay depending on who you are, but if you're a gay person, you'd probably have a pretty horrible time. Now, why is it that if you went back to this golden age of morality and social cohesion, that as a gay person, you'd have a pretty bad time? Is it because of creeping secularism ruining your life? Or is it because of religious tyranny saying that you're not allowed to love the person that you love? I think that's probably the answer. It's not, name a society that has been worsened by throwing off religious influence over government. by throwing off religious influence over government. Like, it can't be done.

Like, the all of the social progression that you can think of is coincided with secularism. Every social progression has gone forward. Like, there's nothing that's gotten worse in that sense. Like, I don't know. I mean, it really depends on what the person means specifically when they're answering when they're asking the question, because if they do actually mean secularism,

like on a governmental scale, well, moral virtue shouldn't derive from the government. Like, you shouldn't be being good because the government is so, because the church says so moral virtue should be a private thing. You can and secularism is just as a secular government will protect my right to be an atheist, protect your right to be a Muslim, or to be a Christian, or to be a Jew. So if you think that morality doesn't need to be grounded in Judaism or Islam or Christianity, then the best way that you can protect your religious freedom to express that religious morality is to live in a secular state that will not influence your church. People think of secularism as the church not influencing the state. It's also the state not influencing the church. It's about a complete separation. Even if you

do think, which I don't think is true, but even if you do think that you need religion to be a good person, and the best way to protect your right to be religious is still living a secular society. I had a recently had Zubi on the podcast, who's a rapper and actually an Oxford graduate from back in the day, a very, very interesting guy. And he's Christian, given the sort of shows that he's on and the kind of discussions that he has. That was a surprise to me, to hear someone

who has those particular worldviews and was still Christian, that was surprising. One of the things that he has, that was a surprise to me, to hear someone who has those particular worldviews and was still Christian, that was surprising. One of the things that he brought up that I thought was incredibly interesting was he said that he feels like people who are atheists, sometimes are more religious, they're more theocratic about their atheism than some people who are religious are about their religion and he said that he looks at the times that we're in now and sees people trying to find religion, he called it, in other things. So he said people try and find religion in a football team, their favorite football team, they're very religious about their football team or about their diet, about their particular approach to a diet. And I wondered what your thoughts were on that particular module in humans for something

that fills that block that religion was in or is in. Well, if that's true, then it's the criticism of religion. It just goes to show that religion has tried to monopolize the idea of social cohesion. People aren't striving for religion. They're not striving for some skydady to look after them when they're sleeping. They're looking for connection with their fellow creatures. They're looking for camaraderie. They're looking for a way to get together and do something productive for the world. And some people believe that that's throwing yourself into a football community and supporting a team. Some people believe that's by going vegan and trying to

help the world. But like, it's got nothing to do with religion. And if you're someone who believes that that is religion, then you've been completely brainwash into thinking but the only way that as soon as somebody is trying to find friendship and community and do good in the world, that they're being religious. Like, what are you talking about? If that's what religion is,

then practically anything you can do is religious. And any social activity becomes religious. And if everything is religious, then nothing is religious. Like to call that religion is to do what you probably criticize in so many new atheists or new agi- atheists, which are the people who go around and say, like, they call anything their religion. They say, like, oh, I'm not religious. I'm like a spiritual person, I believe in the earth and like I'm connected

to the trees and things. And that's my religion. It's like you're just totally watering down the meaning of religion. Like what's your definition of religion here? And a lot of people criticize, well, it's not so much criticism of religion, but a lot of anthropologists, not so much any more, but certainly traditionally speaking, a lot of anthropologists, not so much any more, but certainly traditionally speaking, a lot of anthropologists thought that religion grew out of this. Like the Deukhymian view is of religion growing out of a totally, it's a total social fact. It's completely social in its origin, and it comes from people kind of getting together and designated things as sacred and untouchable and separate from the rest of society, and the

same way that people would do that at a football game or with a flag or something or nationalism. And the religious get very annoyed at that. They say, you know, how could you possibly compare the two? Like religion, religion comes from revelation. It comes from true facts about God. It doesn't come from some social progression or some some made up stories. Like a flag does. Like there's a made up concept that we just all chosen to believe in. But if this person is saying that religion is essentially equatable with things like that, with things like nationalism, with things like

football teams, and what does that say about religion? What's, I thought religion was supposed to be based upon what's true, not what's like socially cohesive. Did religion just get first mover advantage? How do you mean? So you have this particular module, this particular desire for people to have this social cohesion. Yeah. And religion in the same way as the iPhone might not be the best touch screen phone that's available, but it was the first one that got into most people's hands now they're getting grandfathered in. Is that what religion did? Did it get first mover advantage into this particular structure?

Well, it depends how you define religion, but I mean, yeah, it's like the earliest kind of forms of religion, the way that traditional anthropologists would try and understand religion is by looking at primitive religions. They'd go right back to the beginning and find, what is it that they all had in common before they got all super complicated with doctrines and dogma? What

is the actual essence of religion? What makes a religion a religion? And no one could quite put their finger on it. Like no one really knows. Religion is a very difficult thing to define. But the I also I don't see how that is necessarily a criticism of religion like of atheism. I don't have a problem or atheists don't have a problem with people arguing a case or trying to get the government to do good things. The problem isn't intrinsically trying to put your views into government action or to try and proselytize your views. The problem is that we don't think those views are correct.

If your views are correct, then of course you should be trying to influence the government. Of course you should be trying to convince other people and be shouting it in the streets and stuff like that. That's what I'm doing at veganism and that's the criticism that would come. It's like, well, you're being religious about it. No, I'm not being religious about it. I'm being steadfast about it. I think I'm correct. And therefore, I'm trying to argue that that's the case. And they're doing the same thing. It's like, I understand what

you're doing now. If I thought that Christianity was true, I'd be doing everything I could to make sure that my friends didn't burn in hell. I totally understand your position. My problem isn't that you're arguing your case or that you're being proselytized about it or that you're, that you're being religious about it. My problem is, I think you're wrong. That's all. Like the, the idea that it's, there's some kind of problem with, with shouting your views from the rooftop. Like, no, if they're correct, then that's what you should be doing. It's interesting that first move I've advantage thing and what you're talking about there that people now with a lot of things criticism is you've identified there you being religious about your veganism

It's that that first move of advantage and the pervasiveness of religion as a This matter Existence this this thing which is the first thing of all of its kind of things requires us to use everything in relation to that, again, that it's just a word that gets used and people use religious when they actually mean something that's a little bit different, they don't necessarily mean religious. But also, I mean, even if that is what they mean, then why do you think, let's say that is the case, which I don't know if it is, but let's say it is the case that people are trying to kind of fill that god-shaped hole, Like, why is that the case? Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that these people grew up

in societies and governments and families who told them that there's nothing without the religion that they were born into, that without God they're worthless, that they can't have, that there's no basis for their moral worth if there's no God. Like, if you grow up in a society that tells you that your meaning comes from religion, that your moral worth, that the fact that you are valuable as a human being comes from God, then when you give up that belief, of course you're going to be looking for something to fill that gap, because you've grown up your entire life believing that there needs to be something there. Like, if it is the case that people when they give up God are desperate to find something to fill that gap, it's just a testament to how evil people have been in convincing people that they

can't find moral virtue within themselves, that they can't realize that they have worth of their own accord, that they have worth because they can experience pleasures and pain, and because they have preference, and because they can be rational creatures, and that it has to be grounded in some metaphysical nonsense, and that they have to go and make up some football team that doesn't actually exist, but it's just an imagined structure or they have to paint a flag and invoke some kind of meaning into the flag or something. If that is the case, it's only because people have been told

from the day that they're born, that if they don't do that, then they're nothing. Well, my whole point is that, no, you don't need that. You can, you can find moral value, you can find moral worth without needing to, to make things up. You can ground it in what's real. And if you have a morality and a worth, there's grounded in what's real, like, there's nothing better than that. There's no, there's no criticism that can, that can floor you. There's nobody who can come along and tell you that you're not worth something or that you're going to hell, because it isn't just a difference in opinion.

It's not just your made up story versus his made up story. It's like this is grounded in what I believe to be true. It's not just a social fact. It's a fact of nature, you know. I don't know. I enjoy talking to people like that because I want to see what they mean because it doesn't really work when you relay a question like that to me because I want to see what they mean. Because it doesn't really work when you relay a question like that to me because I'd have to really get to the base of what do you mean by religion? What do you mean by religious? What do you mean by God?

What do you mean by what kinds of activities are you talking about? What do you include? What do you not include? But I think it's a false criticism. And even if it is a criticism, it's not a criticism of the truth or falseity of products. It has nothing to do with whether religion's a false criticism. And even if it is a criticism, it's not a criticism of the truth or false or teapotoxic. It has nothing to do with whether religion is true or not.

It's just a commentary on whether, whether human beings needed or not. Like even if it's the case that every human being really did need religion to be happy, it doesn't mean it's true. You should get Zubi on the podcast. He's been invited out, he's flying out to LA this week. He's on Rogan next week. He's on Dave Ruben's show the week after that. But when it gets back, I'll link you two guys in an email. I think it'll be a fascinating

discussion. I'd love to see you guys go on. I think you'd really get on with him well. But Alex, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, man. Can you tell the listeners if they want to find out more where should they they head? Of course. Cosmic Skeptic is the name and it's quite specific. So pretty much anywhere, slash Cosmic Skeptic. So like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, all of that. If you just hit the forward slash Cosmic Skeptic, I've got all the URL. So that's where to find me. But Twitter is probably the main place to keep up with what I'm doing. Fantastic. Alex, thank you so much for your time. Guys, if you've enjoyed this, make sure that you check Alex's YouTube channel out. It is fantastic. It's one of my favorites. As always comments feedback that you have feel free to get at me at Chris

WillX wherever you follow me like share subscribe all that good stuff But for now Alex, thank you so much for your time. Of course Yeah, I'll fix