We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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Anders Reagan is a peace entrepreneur, philosopher, academic, and technologist. He is founding director of the Peace and Conflict Science Institute (PACS), an academic think-tank and advocacy organisation with special consultative status at the United Nations that aims to put peace and rights mechanisms on more rigorous, evidence-based foundations. Anders is also an AI Consultant at the University of Oxford.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better world?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips
01:06 Welcome
02:58 Anders’ Intro
03:58 What’s Real?
– “My upbringing and emotional impetus for initiatingthe academic journey that I went on… happened because of a clash between a non-theistic, agnostic background and a religious, Christian environment”
– Born in Boulder, Colorado “rather liberal”
– Agnostic parents, father interested in Buddhist traditions
– Moving to Arkansas at 7 yrs old “quite conservative leaning”
– “A sudden transition happened with our social relationships… encountering people who had a Christian religious doctrine at such a core place… in their personality”
– “Oftentimes the first question you’ll be asked is ‘what church do you go to?’… and at the time we didn’t have any answer”
– “It is an ingratiating tactic… These people are so kind and approchable… they’re clearly looking for common ground to build off of”
– “But when you respond with ‘I’m atheist I don’t go toany church at all’… the reaction… would be suspicion, confusion…”
– “My mum… took the tactic of saying we would ‘homechurch’… either indicating that we have no religion at all or we’re way more intense than the rest of you” 🙂
– At 7 years old: “That was intense… I didn’t haveany concept of god or theism or religion – I’d never heard of any of these things… it was like living through a culture clash even though I hadn’t left my own country”
– “We eventually did find a home in a Unitarian Universalist fellowship… very welcoming of what they called liberalreligion… people who had found themselves ostracised by other congregations… LGBTQ+… Muslims… the Wicca faith… they would congregate in this space… exchange ideas… trying to find common ground across all of these different religious doctrines… I found that to be very enriching”
– “Sunday School programme which offered a survey ofreligions. By the time I finished that programme… I felt like I had a pretty thorough understanding of the full range of religious and spiritual traditions”
21:54 What Matters?
42:14 Who Matters?
01:09:40 A Better World?
01:32:30 Follow Anders
And more… full show notes at Sentientism.info.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our ”I’m a Sentientist” wall via this simple form.
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