"I plant seeds for children... to think for themselves" Louisa Jane Smith of The RE Podcast - Sentientism 205

Welcome to episode 205 of the Sentientism Podcast, a podcast about what's real, who matters and how we can make a better world. The Sentientism worldview answers those deep questions by committing to evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings. In this episode I speak with Louisa Jane Smith. Louisa is an RE teacher, that's a religious education teacher and head of life skills at a school in England. She's host of the RE podcast where I've been lucky enough to be a guest recently, is an RE subject reviewer for Oak National. A member of the Natray, that's the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education and Executive Committee, as well as being a public speaker and author. I'd love to know what you think of this episode in the 204 others in our Explorable and Fairly Timeless Back Catalog. The best way to let me know is via review or ratings. Your subscriptions, reviews, ratings and sharing with friends help more people find out about the Sentientism worldview, hopefully nudging the world towards more compassionate rational thinking. You can find out more about sentientism at sentientism.info where you can sign up for email updates or just search for sentientism when you're favourite social media platform. You'll be made very welcome in all of our global online communities that are open to anyone interested, not just sentientists. And one of our ongoing community projects is working to get the sentientism worldview integrated into education curricula around the world, a topical idea given this episode. If you'd like to find out more or help make that happen in your country, please get in touch at [email protected], if I want one of our groups or just message us online sentientism. Thanks for listening. I believe that I plant seeds. I never see the finished product of the children that I teach. I'm part of their enlightenment. I'm not all of it. There are wrongs, but there's more than one right. And it's teaching children how to distinguish between those things. And so we teach them how to make judgments on moral issues. How do you decide what is right and wrong? How do you decide what a strong or a weak argument is? And actually giving them those skills, giving them that framework allows them to think for themselves, not being told what to think. Good afternoon, Louisa. How are you? I'm very well. How are you? Yeah, really good, really good. Well, it's such a pleasure to talk to you again. You may have seen it on Twitter, but I sort of pre-announced you as I think you might be my most important guest ever out of the 200 or so. I've done so far because you're not just teaching the new generations about world views and religion. You're also helping teach the teachers too. So your power and influence spread far and wide. So it's great to get the chance to talk to you. I mean, let's wait for that sort of judgment until the end and see, oh, good, my hands are so obvious. That seems fair. It's such a privilege to be part of spending time with the next generation and thinking about how they work and what's important to them and what they value. And I think, you know, my experiences are they're the most enlightened generation. They're just incredible. You know, I compare myself to me, you know, when I was 13, 14, 15, you know, my world is very small and I just kind of thought about me. And actually, they're so socially aware and they're so aware of, you know, for better or worse, the bigger picture. And they're so passionate about things that really matter. So it's a real privilege. Yeah. And I'm so lucky because I do some workshops and so on in schools, but I just get to do the fun bit. So I don't have to do the lesson planning or the prep or the marking or the discipline or the admin or the meetings. I just get to do the fun bit with classes. I just decadent is just sort of restores my hope and humanity working with young people. It's amazing. But at the same time, it's, you know, the work you and your colleagues do is deeply challenging because you're on the front lines of some of the most important and most contentious topics in modern society and dealing with kids in quite a few sensitive situations too. So a enormous respect to you and the people in your field as we'll dig into today. Yeah. Thank you so much. And I need to thank the lovely Karen's a past morpher suggesting I'll reach out to you in the first place. Oh, yes. And I've been lucky enough to be on your podcast, obviously. It hasn't, hasn't been published yet. So people can judge that when it comes out. So it's great to turn the tables. But and you know this already, but this is a series of conversations about what I think of as the deepest and most important philosophical questions. And those include questions about epistemology, what's real and how should we best understand this crazy universe we all share, but just as importantly, the questions of ethics and who matters. And I have an obvious bias because the world of you, I'm trying to develop and popularize as you know, is the same name as this podcast and YouTube series sentientism. And I summarize it as evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings. So when it's answering that, what's real question? It says, you know, let's with a healthy dose of humility, take a naturalistic approach that uses evidence and reasons to try and understand things as well as we can engage honestly with reality and a desperate attempt to try and get ahead around it. And on the ethical side, it's very pluralistic, but it doesn't insist that every sentient being at least, every being that can feel has the capacity to have experiences, should be included seriously in our moral consideration. But I'm talking to people, regardless of whether they agree or disagree with that worldview. It'll be interesting to dig into your own philosophical journey around those big questions and have that play through your work today, giving your teaching people about exactly those deep questions and much more both beside. And what's lovely is that I very rarely get asked those questions and I very rarely get the opportunities to talk about my own opinion because that's not what good our e-teachers do, particularly. They might select certain times and that might be appropriate, but generally, we're asking them and we're trying to give a balanced view on what other people think. So actually, it's really lovely to have the opportunity to be asked those big questions because actually the reason we love our e is because we love those big questions, that's the thing that motivates us and drives us. So, and quite, this is like a propaganda account for me, so thank you so much. It's a pleasure. And it must be, I'd imagine that must also be a little bit frustrating sometimes because I understand you want to maintain that professionalism and a sense of neutrality and an ability to engage with lots of different viewpoints in an open, constructive way. But at the same time, you've got your own views in your head that are bubbling away there that you are sort of desperate to express and share. And I often have to sort of compartmentalise me as a human being with my own thoughts and feelings and me as a teacher that has to present an unbiased objective reality of the variety of world views that we teach about. And some days I just simply don't, just in the choice of language, you know, and I think we will have subconscious bias anyway and it's almost impossible to do that. But I do have to sometimes distance myself from the topic if it's something I feel very passionate about. And I have very strong opinions about the opinions of others. I do have to just kind of take that moment and go, right, you know, this is not my therapy session. Well, before we get into those deep philosophical questions and geek out together, we've already hinted a little bit at your introduction. But how would you best introduce yourself for people who don't know of your work? Yes. So for the last 22 years, I've been an RE teacher in secondary school in the UK. In October 2020, as many people did, they got their little lockdown project. And actually for a while, I'd be wanting to do something creative. You know, I just think teachers are so talented and so knowledgeable and they do great things in the classroom, but those skills are often transferrable. And I had this real need to do something creative and I started books and tried to organize a road show and nothing happened. And then in October 2020, I started the RE podcast, which is the first dedicated podcast for students and teachers of RE. With no idea what a podcast was and no idea how to do one. So it was a very sort of steep learning curve. But actually, the RE community is so gracious and so generous. They've been so supportive. You know, actually now to 2024, I'm sort of nearing four years of doing this and it's just absolutely wonderful. I absolutely love it. So there are my two sort of main rays and detourers. And I think I think most of my oldest, I mean, we have a fairly global audience. I think most people have picked up what RE is, but it's essentially religious education. Yeah. And actually, something that's fairly unique, I think, too, to British schools. They don't have it in quite the same way in other countries, but actually here in the UK is a national entitlement. So every child up to the age of 18 should be receiving some kind of religious education. And obviously, there's been different incarnations of that from the beginning where it is very much, you know, religious instruction whereby you taught people how to be a good Christian person. To now, where we're really moving into looking at religion and world views and actually really broadening that idea that everybody in the world has a world view, we all stand somewhere and how best do we navigate all those varieties of opinions and show respect and tolerance and compassion for people who think differently. And that will include yet religious and normal religious world views. Modern life today means you have your fingers and a lot of pies. So obviously I teach, I do the podcast. I'm a member of Nat Trey, which is the National Association of Teachers of RE, and I'm on the executive for that. And I'm also working for Oak National, which is the sort of online teaching platform that was started during lockdown to support teachers and teaching online. And now it's kind of growing in strengths for really supporting RE teachers. So in my spare time, I do that. Yeah, I'll do something that you have any stress. That's one of the things that's blowing my mind about as I've been learning about the, you know, religion and world views education space in the UK and just meeting more people is everyone seems to have five or six different jobs. I don't quite know how you do it. Teaching is insane as it is, just as a day job, let alone everything else. But I think we're just generally, you know, we love opportunities, we like life, we're very, you know, we've got a lot of energy, we've got a lot of experience, a lot of talent. And I think that actually the nature of teaching is you get an issue too, lots of different people, with lots of different ideas and lots of different opportunities. So yeah, and I think, you know, the reality is teaching as you say is not the easiest job in the world. And I think a lot of us need to have sort of a focus that takes us out of that teaching mind sex. It can kind of take over your life a little bit, you know, you could be barking, planning, you know, every hour every, every day. So it's really important to have those kind of other focuses for your own well-being, I think. Yeah, sounds good. And occasionally to talk about your own opinions, which is so let's come on to this, the first of these crazily broad questions. And I'd in common sense terms, describe it as what's real. And in a way, I've shifted over time from focusing on the sort of ontological question of, you know, do supernatural things exist or is the natural world all that's there? More to focus on the toolkit, we use the epistemology, you know, how do we go about working this stuff out? But it's such a broad topic because it can cover every field of human knowledge, belief and credences. But quite often, an interesting way, given your background and your current work into the topic is to understand people's journey with respect to religion and the supernatural and naturalistic worldviews or spirituality and how that's changed over their life, even since childhood. And how do you think about those deep big questions of the nature of reality and how best to understand it now? So I don't know, you can wind the clock back as far as you'd like to tell us this about, you know, what sort of context you grew up in and what your journey's been so far on that? Yeah. So I was brought up in a family where my mom was Catholic, my dad was an atheist. And so for the first seven or eight years of my life, I went to a Catholic school, I went to a Catholic church, I was brought up as a Catholic, I did my Holy Communion, I was a chrysanid as a baby, you know, I had this kind of very Catholic religious upbringing. And so my world view at that point was very much like that, you just accept the reality that you are given by your caretakers. And that was then reinforced at schools, I went to a Catholic school, reinforced at church, with the priest, reinforced with my friends because all my friends were Catholics as well. But what was interesting is having a dad who was an atheist, and at no point did I really consider that atheism was a valid world view. I didn't think about it, I was eight years old, but I do remember at sort of eight years old, my dad had this big conversion to Christianity from being a complete and utter atheist and hating religion to becoming quite a evangelical Christian. And so he started going to a Protestant church. And how did that come about for him, if it's not too much of a chance? He had a religious experience. So yeah. He was kind of a soul on Damascus Road type thing where his sister was sort of evangelical Christian and kept sort of talking to him about religion. And eventually took him to some kind of men's prayer breakfast. And my dad, the sort, it was terrible and spent the whole time going home. Go this is rubbish. If I was a Christian, I would do it like this, this and this and they should do that and they shouldn't do this. And and then he heard a voice saying, do it then. And by this time he'd got home and he got pushed, he felt a sort of pressure pushing him onto the bed. And he couldn't move. And he felt three waves of energy go through him, which he subsequently thought was for God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And so that was this quite dramatic experience. And so that version of Christianity was so very different from my Catholic version that it was quite exciting. So I ended up going to church with my dad. And so therefore I then had, you know, this other worldview, but it was still there is a God and God created everything and you know, the Bible is real and everything. It says it's real. And what sort of response did you get from Catholic friends and for me, a mother and the rest of the community given that of, was that a difficult transitional? Was it quite an easy switch? Yeah. Not at all. And actually ended up that my whole family sort of left the Catholic church and went to the Protestant church. I think my mom had been brought up in the Catholics. So that was the denomination that she was connected to, but actually saw what had happened to my dad and started going to a sort of Protestant church. And there was much more, as I was becoming older 9, 10, 11, there was much more for my age group in the Protestant church in terms of youth work and things like that. So we actually sort of transitioned over to that. And up until I was probably 18 or 19, that was my worldview. And it was quite fundamentalist that the church that my dad went to was, you know, an evangelical church and there was very clear sort of guidelines and belief systems and morality and what's right and what's wrong and what's real and what isn't. To the point of it being quite judgmental, I think. And I think at university was the first time I really questioned anything. So I think it was the first time I'd been taken out of my little religious bubble that I was in and exposed to ideas, alternative ideas to sort of the religion, the religious worldview. And actually a lot of the things I've been told just didn't hold up to scrutiny. So that's sort of critical realism that you want to kind of assess ideas with. Particularly I think sort of the idea of the evil and why there's evil and suffering. I just didn't feel that that was at answer. There was no answer that satisfied that question, that problem. And I think particularly views about who was in and who was out that sort of exclusivity that some some Christian donna denominations have that there was the only way to God is through Jesus and everyone else is going to hell that I found very problematic attitudes towards homosexuality. I found very problematic. And actually that sort of helped me to reevaluate my own belief system and I ended up rejecting everything. So I think that often happens is if you very much in something, if something falls apart, it all falls apart. And I think this is why some people are very hesitant to question their faith in case it all falls apart. Yeah, you're a what you, there's a worry that it's a bit brittle and if a crack appears, the whole thing goes and yeah. Yes, so you don't ask questions, you just accept and there's you know, this idea of blind faith is something that is centibrated in some sort of versions of Christianity. Yeah, it's almost a mark of pride that you sort of double down on it without questioning. It's a sign of your commitment, right? 100%. And actually I am a naturally inquisitive curious cynical questioning person. So as soon as I was given that opportunity, I kind of you know, found that actually Christian faith did just didn't sit right with me, you know, just looking at other alternatives. I suddenly thought actually I don't like the idea of people going to hell. I don't like the idea that homosexuality is wrong. I don't think if there was a God, this is the world that we would see. And so I became an atheist for a long period of time. It feels like there was a very strong moral theme to your challenges there. Like you say, the problem of evil and the problem of suffering, you know, the immorality of sending billions to hell and things like homophobia and I don't know if there were some other issues as well. You know, often things like sexism and you know, various types of work, anti-world view, bigotry pop up and so on. And for many of my guests, that's the same. It's actually a sort of moral thing where they're going, hold on, I've been given this set of moral guidelines that just don't sit with my moral intuitions and what I think's right and wrong. So that's where the challenge comes from and the cracks appear. With others, it's more of a technical fact and evidence and reason thing. It's more of a sort of you know, atheist argument of, you know, I've looked at the evidence that it just doesn't seem to stack up. These things don't feel true to me or they feel very unlikely. Was it more of a moral thing or was it a bit of both? Was it also just, I don't see the evidence. I think, you know, there was a sort of running alongside this was that I didn't seem to get the same thing from Christianity that everyone else got. I didn't get that piece. I didn't get that joy. I didn't feel God's presence. I didn't see answered prayer personally. I saw it around me, but not me. Actually, there was this personal evidence, this personal experience thing that I also didn't have. So I think there's the moral sign of things that actually I feel that this doesn't sit morally with me and what I believe is right. But I think there's also that sort of experience of or lack of experience, lack of evidence in the things I was believing. You know, I just didn't feel peace or love or joy or any of these things. The Christianity is meant to give you and God is meant to give you. And what did that transition feel like? Again, because some people, for some people it's really easy and it's just a natural switch and off they go. For other people, it's quite a psychologically difficult thing for them to cope with. It leaves a gap. Awesome. Really challenging. I'll answer questions or a sense of uncertainty. For others, it's a social challenge. And particularly, as you were saying, it's very important to your family. So what did that transition feel like to you at that point? I mean, I think every single part of it was difficult. So it was difficult because I got rejected from my church. I was no longer a part of the church because I didn't. And was that an active rejection? Yeah, yeah. So I stopped going to church, but actually the friends that I had at church then stopped inviting me to things because I'd backslidden. And I think emotionally it was incredibly tough and I think that's the moment. I suffer quite badly with depression and anxiety and somnia. That's when that started because everything I built my life on, everything that I saw was safe and secure and firm had suddenly been taken away. And it was incredibly difficult for my family. And it still is incredibly difficult for my family. But at the same time, it was exciting enough that I carried on. I was still true to myself. I think that what was interesting is that now I look back and I think that atheism is the flip side of theism. You need just as much faith to be an atheist as to be a theist. And so actually, atheism for me didn't last very long because I was saying that I kind of came to the realization that the only true scientific, reasonable conclusion is that we don't know. There is no evidence either way. And I would say that I'm, you know, I don't believe there is a God, but I don't believe there's not a God. I don't think there's enough evidence either way. I do think however that our understanding of God, if there is a God is incredibly limited to a religious version of that God. And so I kind of now would say I'm an agnostic because I think Huxley who coined the phrase agnostic, which means not knowing, it's that it's not that I don't know, it's that it's not possible to know scientifically, empirically, whether or not God exists. So the only true scientific position has to be agnosticism, which is kind of where I've ended up. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And I'm, I'm personally, I'm reasonably comfortable with the term atheist because I might describe myself as a sort of fairly extreme agnostic. I'd agree with you. I, you know, I think I'm going to say I'm not knowing, but my sense of the evidence is quite strongly one way rather than the other. So that's where I'd, I wouldn't say, you know, 100% or 0%, I wouldn't even use the word belief or not believe so much, except then in a sort of a fanatical way. But if I think about credences or degrees of confidence, you know, I'm I'm pretty confident there isn't a God, but I wouldn't put that as zero. So, you know, in that sense, I'm an agnostic too. Yeah. So you have there's something called an atheistic agnostic, which is you're an agnostic, but you're leaning towards atheism. And I think I would sit there if we were talking about theism as a belief in the Abrahamic God, then I probably would, I don't believe in that God, I don't believe in the God of the Old Testament, all the God of the New Testament, all the God of Christianity. What I, I, why I'm not an atheist is because I cannot rule out that there's not something that is some kind of ultimate higher power that is greater than ourselves. But I think if that thing does exist, it's so different from our human understanding of it. Yeah. Thank you. And I think that's a really important distinction that's often missed because there is a traditional sort of path to becoming an atheist, which is, you know, you brought up in one religion and then you reject that religion. That takes you to atheism. And because of a rejection of one specific religion, but rejecting the beliefs and the tenets and the facts and evidence and the moral systems of one particular religion is not the same as rejecting theism as a broader philosophical concept, which can be much more and more first and much more in a much, much less strictly defined. Right. So I think there are many people who've moved away from a religious worldview who would still have some degree of credence in theism as a concept, but they have the humility not to say, and I know exactly what the characteristics of that God are and what they want us to do and here's the Ten Commandments. Is it? Yeah. 100 percent. A big difference between those two stances. Thank you. And, and again, to draw this distinction between the sort of ontology of, is there a God or not? And the epistemology. What do you think about those different modes of knowing? Because again, with this sentientism idea, I tend to focus more on a naturalistic epistemology, just using evidence and reason as distinct from other other modes of knowing, which might include faith or fiddies and or revelation. Although you could say, "Revelation is a type of evidence in a way, right? Your personal experience is still a type of evidence that's to evidence," or a dogmatic belief, which doesn't change based on the evidence or or an unquestioning or doing of an authority figure, whether or not they have the evidence sort of. So if you think about a sort of naturalistic approach, defining using evidence and reason in its broadest terms, you know, this isn't just sort of narrow science and doing randomized control trials. This is evidence, including past experience versus those other types of, well, would you say your way of thinking is naturalistic such that if you were to shift your view on religion or fearsome, it would be because of evidence and reasoning. Or do you think there is some valid space for a genuine faith that is independent from evidence? It's really interesting. I think as I get older, I'm less black and white about things. I'm very inspired by Buddhism that actually you've taken this middle way. I actually think it doesn't matter and let me explain why I think that. I'm always up for the impact of the belief, not the reason for it. So if a belief in a higher being brings purpose and meaning to your life, then it's real because of that experience. It doesn't matter whether God actually exists. I don't think that's the right question when we talk when we think about God. If we're talking about what is real, a belief in God is real. If that belief in God has a positive impact on an individual, a community, a society, a world, then that is real because the belief is real. I've spent an awful lot of time thinking about this, talking about it, talking to people. Actually, this is my world view, that I don't mind what is real and what is not. What I mind is the consequences of that. If your belief in God causes suffering, so if you are taking away someone's rights because of your belief, your belief is wrong regardless of whether it's real. I know people who believe in God and the value and positivity and joy and peace and purpose it gives to them is so beautiful. I never want to ask the question about whether their belief is real or not. For me, belief in God was not positive at all and I know people that use their belief in God to cause suffering to others. That for me is problematic regardless of whether it's real. For me, does God exist? How do we know things? I think is the wrong question. Thank you. That's fascinating. In a way, quite often people will think of epistemology and even ontology as distinct things that aren't related to morality. They're just technically about how well are we understanding reality? Are we right? Are we wrong? Or is our confidence well aligned with reality? Whereas your stance is deliberately almost driving your epistemology and your ontology by a moral view by saying actually what's more important is the outcomes and the impacts and the results of these moral terms, almost regardless of the ontology and epistemology. I think the reality is that we are all influenced by all of those things. We're all influenced by our reason. We're all influenced by our experience. We're all influenced by our upbringing. All of those things create our worldview, create what is real for us, create our own truth. To a more or less extent, we might have, if it was a pie chart, everybody's pie chart would have different numbers of segments in terms of what influences what they believe. That I don't think you can't put humans into boxes and I don't think you can put knowledge into boxes and I don't think you can judge ways of knowing and say this one is a more valid way of knowing than this because I think actually we're all a product of all of those ways of knowing. We are a product of our experience. We are a product of how we've been taught how to reason. That's very culturally specific. And I'd suggest that recognizing that and understanding that is part of a broadly naturalistic worldview. You have to have that understanding too. Otherwise, you've fallen into your own sort of dogma. Yeah. Exactly. I came out of a very dogmatic worldview. I don't want to move into another one. I tend to sit above everything. The reality is I'm a little magpie. I just take all the shiny bits from all the different things and I see value in all of them in terms of the impact that they have on people. Yeah, thank you. It feels like, tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but my guess is that broadly your default epistemology is naturalistic and that you'd use evidence and reason to try and work out what's real and what isn't. But you're not going to use that to crush someone's beliefs if they have a positive impact on them by insisting that they've got it all wrong. Just as one example, so you're not going to let that epistemological confidence that you might have drive rough shot over moral starts is. And I guess you probably works the other way around as well in that while you might have a open-minded appreciation for all sorts of different positionalities and worldviews and ways of knowing, if those ways of knowing happen to cause harm, you'll also be quite comfortable robustly standing up to those. I don't even have the basis. Yeah. So again, it's a moral drive for the epistemology, which again, although, although sometimes it's set as distinct from morality, I think often that is an artificial distinction because yes, you know, you might say there's some narrow technical intellectual interest in just understanding things accurately. But why do you want to understand things accurately and ultimately maybe there's a deeper reason, which is well because we want to have an impact on the world, a positive moral impact on the world, right? That's ultimately why we want to understand it well. So even there, I think it's very hard to extract a morality from epistemology and ways of knowing and arguably it can be dangerous too. So yeah. Thank you. I always, there's this beautiful story that's I don't know where it originated, but it's sort of from Indian culture. And the very, there's a very long version, but the short version is there is an elephant and there are three blind men. And they have all heard an elephant, they've heard what it can do, but they're not able to see one. And so this elephant is in front of them and they all hold the elephant in different parts of the elephant. And they start to argue about what the elephant is. And the reality is the elephant is all of those things. They're like, no, no, no, it's no, it's like a stake and there's a tree trunk, it's like, you know, whatever, it's like a piece of rope. The elephant is all of those things are much greater. And I think what we have in human history is people trying to make sense of the world around them. And too many humans throughout history have come to this idea of an ultimate being. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think there is something about the human experience that points towards some kind of higher being. I think the problem is, is when we tried to say that one person's view to higher being is more valid than another. When actually, I think if there is such a thing, it's all of those things and more. So there is both one god and many gods and no gods. All of those reality, you know, if we're talking about truth, I think the truth is much bigger than any one of our ideas. It's bigger than epistemology, it's bigger than ontology, it's bigger than phytism, it's bigger than experience. If there is some kind of ultimate being, and you know, I find it a weird coincidence that groups of people from ancient cultures that had never, ever met came to similar conclusions about what is real and ultimate, you know, beings and after life's because of their making sense of their experiences on earth that I have to be opened to the fact that there's something greater. I also, if I'm talking about cosmology, and 100% okay, understanding that the world began or the universe began with a big bang. Completely understand that. How the big bang happened from nothing? I don't know, and science doesn't know, you know, there's theories. So I just think there's little spaces where we just don't know, and you know, I don't want to have a sort of god of the gap's theory where if we don't know something scientifically, it must have got. You know, that would be naive, but I just think we have to understand the limitations of human knowledge and human experience and the truth is far greater than that. Yeah, completely. And that answer I don't know. I think is it, and we talked about this when we, when we, you turn the tables on me, or vice versa, is I think one of the best naturalist to answer that if someone says I don't know, but, you know, I'm curious, let's try and find out. That's a good naturalist answer. Making up on answer isn't such a good response. And I, and I, and again, going back to your previous conversation, your sense that there's so many different groups of humans have come to this sense that there must be some sort of ultimate being that can even broaden out to a sense of God as nature or God as the universe where where it's not really a being or a consciousness, it's just another way of describing physical reality. And there the, you can almost get a bit of blurring between a fearsome and, you know, a naturalistic ontology where it almost just becomes a different way of describing the natural world. Yeah. And actually, I, I'm reading a book at the moment about hallucinogenic drugs, what are they called? Psychedelics. And it's a book by David Nutt, Dr. David Nutt, who's one of leading experts on this. And if you, people that take things like psilocybin or DMT and have experiences, they experience the universe as a whole and their part in it. And so actually they have what is commonly seen as a religious experience, it's just their narrative around it is different. If a Christian takes, you know, DMT or psilocybin or some kind of psychedelic drug, they will narrate that same experience with the language of God. And so I think that when you feel connected to the universe, you are connected to something greater than yourself and some people call that God. But if you're an atheist, you have to find different language to describe that same experience. But I think we can have experiences that are transcendent without their needing to be a God that's limited within a religion. Yeah, I agree. And I think my sense is that the reason so many different radically adverse human communities over time and cultures and regions, so common to come out of that, says something more to do with our evolved psychology and agency detection and so on. That's probably where the common anticancer might get against. I'm a boring straight down nationalist. But regardless, I still think even with my completely naturalistic understanding the world or 99.5% naturalistic ontology, I can still feel that sense of transcendence and connection of one that an or that I think is very rich to a religious experience as well. And again, I might use different words to describe it. I probably wouldn't think of I wouldn't put a sort of human style consciousness into whatever that thing is. I would think of it as the universal nature and the operation of the laws of physics and so I think that same sense of wonder and you know, amazingness is still consistent. They're still we draw clean lines sometimes when there's a lot more fuzziness than overlap. And I and one of the reasons I really like the the elephant analogy is because one of the challenges with if we really open minded about ways of knowing there's a danger that we lose a connection with the reality we share and you can almost get to the point where anyone can make up anything, you know, I could just make up an arbitrary belief now and you would have to accord that respect and and so on. Whereas with the with the elephant story, the three men have a radically different perspective on what this thing is. But there is actually an elephant there, right? Ultimately, if they compare notes and they keep doing research and they keep working on it, they probably can converge on an understanding of their shared reality that enables them to collaborate and cooperate and work together as opposed to us being sort of separate bubbles of arbitrary beliefs that we connect. Yeah, and I love the idea that seemingly contradictory beliefs can both be right at the same time, you know, and there's a phrase I use a lot which is there are wrongs, but there's more than one right. Yeah, yeah, I like it. Well, let's come on to the second crazily big question, which is about ethics and what matters. And it's often interesting to explore with someone like yourself, he's gone from a sort of quite deeply religious world, you know, in some senses as you're saying, quite fundamentalist world and quite structured and quite strict about morality, two, one that is more broad and naturalistic, agnostic because with the religious world, they often come with a package of morals and that can be both a sort of divine command theory structure that says ultimately morality is about following the rules and, you know, echoing the instantiation of the perfect good that is the deity, right? That's the ultimate point. It's not about compassion or kindness or caring or justice. It's about because God says, right? So that's one style, but quite often you can also get a lot of specific rules that come in the commandments or the books or the stories that come along as well. So it'll be interesting to explore one, you know, as you are growing up in that Catholic context and then an evangelical Protestant context, how those, how much those did actually shape your moral views about what really mattered at the root of it all. And then as you went through that transition and those challenges and you left those world views, was it like releasing an underlying moral intuition that you always had or did you feel like you had to rebuild your morality? And that's an insanely long question. But I actually get a sense of, yeah, that moral journey about what matters and wherever you've got to now as well. And I think the first thing I want to say is that I am so thankful for having a religious upbringing. I think it was a very good grounding in thinking about morality and as a concept. And I think, you know, and actually it was done in a very nice structure that was easy. And much of what I was taught I have continued believing in terms of, you know, you treat others the way you want to be treated. You love your neighbour, this kind of kindness. That kindness and that golden rule and that consideration for others is something that's so rich and echoes through most different or religious world views. Did you get a sense in both the Catholic context and the Protestant context that that was the route? 100% not. Is that part of what you're coming to next? Yeah. Yes, right. So no, as a growing up as a Christian, if God said it was right. And so I later learn about you, Cypher, the Cypher, debate, is it good because God says it or did God say it because it's good. And actually the Christian church as I was introduced it, it's good because God said it. And therefore if God said it, it must be good. And by extension, whatever God tells you is good, whatever it is, right? Yeah. Later, when I had to work through that and I was like, okay, there are lots of things that God says and I'm doing sort of air quotes because that's all about interpretation and what you can choose and take out a context or whatever. The powerful men who've shaped these narratives. Absolutely. And change the way it is. Absolutely. So the morality of the church that I experienced, the sort of evangelical church, I had to get rid of all of that because it was actually very damaging to me. And it took a long time to kind of unpick that route went very, very deep into who I thought I was and how I treated other people. There was a huge amount of judgment on people's lifestyle choices. There was a huge amount about going to hell and punishment and if you didn't believe the right version of Christianity and things like that. And so I had to kind of strip away everything and go, right, what am I core fundamental beliefs? What am I still okay with? And I think, you know, through a lot of teaching lessons, a lot of research, a lot of conversations, I've had to rebuild my morality back up again. And I think it's almost, it's almost teleological, I think, my morality in that I'm looking at the end or purpose. I'm looking at what is it I want to achieve and what's the best way of getting there? And I think, you know, a very, very crude naturalistic approach would be about survival. You know, that actually we are animals and we are part of an evolutionary system and we have to survive what allows us to do that. So if I think about killing, is it right or wrong? Well, actually, it can't be right because that is counter to our survival. But can it be right sometimes? Yes, if the end or purpose of that is to protect life. So for example, we go to war with people like Hitler, because Hitler's trying to kill lots of people and overtake people and get rid of the, you know, blah, blah, blah. But actually we have to protect life and therefore it's sometimes right to kill in the same way that a lion will kill, you know, a buffalo or whatever, to lions eat buffaloes. I don't know, I'm not very good at his geography, you know, in order to feed the young so that they can survive, but they won't kill a whole herd, you know, and they will eat everything from the animal. So I just, I do feel sometimes, you know, and I think, you know, we have obviously talked about sin tinkism, we've talked about veganism. I don't eat meat because I don't need that to survive. There's no end or purpose. I don't need it. But if it was a choice between eating meat or dying, I would eat meat because actually fundamentally I'm an animal and I need to survive. So I think that that's the sort of crude version of my morality, but I think I've also got the sort of soft romantic fluffy, I want everyone to be happy and I don't want people to suffer. And and so therefore that's kind of runs alongside that, that it's not just about surviving, it's about living and it's about living so that everyone can flourish, everything can flourish. And because the natural world is so interconnected, that every living thing that flourishes and it's to my own flourishing as a human and if that's my species. Yeah, thank you. So that's probably the core of my morality. The way I tend to think of those two, starts it's the former one, the sort of evolutionary survival thing. I tend to think of as quite a good description of how a morality has evolved and even how non human animal morality evolved because nature itself is a moral and brutal and evolution is a horrific process where nearly everything dies quite a lot of it horribly. So I don't think it's a good moral guide, but it's useful context for understanding descriptively how it's come to happen that we feel things like compassion for each other and a mother cares for the child and so on. It's a good description of how that path is developed because while there's we've developed some brutal aggression, which also has an evolutionary path because it's not about survival of everybody, it's about survival of my genes, that's what really matters, that can lead to some horrific brutality. It has also led to the fact that, you know, cooperation can be evolutionary adaptive as well. So that's not all bad, but there's good and bad, but it's what an amoral starts this useful descriptively. Whereas for me, morality in a way is almost the deliberate stepping away from that as you would then talk about with sort of fluffy kindness flourishing thing, because in a way to my mind that morality is a deliberate, deliberate stance of saying regardless of descriptively how we might have evolved and what it takes to survive, what should matter to us in an ethical sense. And that, you know, with me as well leads to something that is about a concern for others and wanting others to flourish and seeing the suffering of others as a bad thing, almost regardless of whether it's going to help the propagation of my genes, because if we use that naturalistic stance to drive our behavior, you know, it can take you to some pretty weird places like I should beat down a sperm bank every every other day. And it leads you to some other also extremely nasty places too. So I quite like to draw that distinction between a descriptive historical context, which is more about evolution, and then a deliberately moral stance, which is grounded in compassion and caring and thinking about how others see things. I don't think we should ever use nature to justify human behavior, you know, and I think I've seen it in lots of different ways. So I've seen arguments where people have gone home as sexuality is okay, because some animals have same extra relations. I'm like, hang on. Let's not do what animals do, because animals eat their young and you know, animals. Yeah, it's rape and fantasied. I mean, all sorts of brutality, yeah. Yeah, that's not our moral compass, but I think it's the end or purpose of survival and flourishing, that that benefit, you know, that motivates my morality. And so, you know, if I have a look at homosexuality, my moral stance has to be, if I say this is wrong, it causes suffering. If I say that it's right, it doesn't. No human suffering comes from allowing people to express their sexuality in the way that is natural to them. Nothing. A lot of suffering comes from sex that is not consensual. So therefore, there are very strict rules about sexuality, and it's always down to suffering. Homosexuality does not cause suffering. Where is actually not a consensual sex does? It therefore doesn't matter what gender, what number of people have sex as long as everyone is consenting, and everyone is free to do that, and it's not adultery or anything like that. And so every time I think about what do I believe is right or wrong, it always comes down to survival, thririshing, and you know, not causing suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And I think that that's not to carry about the suffering and flourishing of others as a sort of consequence, the outcome, I think, would echo with, you know, many people's intuitive sense of morality, regardless of their worldview. Like I say, it runs through richly through many religious worldviews and supernatural worldviews. It runs through humanism. It runs through sentient to them as well. But there's a really interesting subsequent question, which is, well, come on to now, which is who matters, because there are some humans who would have that rich sense of compassion and carry about suffering and flourishing only for their in group of humans. And if you're in and out group of humans, I'm sorry, but you know, brutality and shoes, right, we know the problems, that causes whether that's you know, explicit sort of neo-fascist exclusion or whether it's forms of discrimination on caste or gender or sexuality or whatever it might be, looks, right. So, so there's so there's problems even within our human species about in groups and out groups that you touched on before. There's also a deep challenge that obviously sentientism is speaking to, which is that many people would agree with this and tickle the boxes, but they would only go so far as the human species and would say, I'm on board with universal human rights and compassion for all humans, but that's basically where it stops. And even they would make some exceptions, you know, for a companion animal or a couple of charismatic wilders, but they wouldn't go beyond that. And so that's another story I'd be interested in is what's your journey been on that moral scope question about who gets to count, both within humanity as you work through some of the moral challenges of the shifts in your worldview. But also, how do you think about non-human animals or maybe even broader than that? If you look out to environment as to thinking about who matters in our moral considerations, you know, when you're thinking about the consequences and the outcomes and the suffering of flourishing, who gets to be, you know, thought about who gets to be in the spreadsheet, not the spreadsheet. Yeah, you know, my spreadsheets very long. There are many painters, many cells. The reality is that humans can suffer, animals can suffer, nature can suffer. So all of those have to be taken into consideration. You know, if I pollute the the atmosphere, then it suffers. You know, if we have acid rain, if we have dead zones in our seas, if we have oil spills, whatever it is, it creates suffering. So if something can suffer, it needs moral consideration. And is your sense that, because I think polluting the atmosphere is bad and I think polluting a river is bad, but I don't think the atmosphere or the river suffers because I think of suffering as a mental state. And people have lots of different views about what consciousness is, but my personal view is it's a out of computational processing that's involved in our heads, whatever it is, right? But there's something about there's a difference from me between, you know, the atmosphere being polluted. And me pinching the back of my hand, right, the latter feels like something I can suffer. And I don't think the atmosphere can suffer through being polluted, even though that might be bad for all of the sentient beings in fact. Yes. I respectfully disagree. Yeah. In that, I don't think, I don't think suffering should be limited to conscious beings. For the same reason, as if a human is unconscious, it doesn't mean we can do whatever we want to that body. I don't think there should be a relationship between those two things. I think in terms of suffering, suffering is it cannot flourish. So if it's not flourishing, it's suffering. And so actually, if we, and also because the whole of the the natural world is connected, that actually the stuff, if we pollute the atmosphere, if we, you know, poison our seas, then that's going to have an impact on living beings, on fish and on birds. And then that's going to have an impact on humans. And so actually, because the whole of life is interconnected, if one part suffer the whole bar suffers, you know, that's a biblical reference, you know, and it's so true. And so I do see that the natural world can suffer. And we can see that, you know, the reality with the mother nature, though, is that she will always win. So if we are attacking her, if we are destroying her, she'll fight back. That's not going to be great, because if mother nature fights back, then actually humans cannot survive or flourish. And so I think because we're all into connective, one part suffers, they all suffer. Then my morality has to take into consideration the suffering of all humans, all animals, all living things. Having said that, I actually find it harder to, there are certain human beings, I find incredibly difficult. I don't know how to put this without sounding really horrible. There are some people that I don't count in my moral considerations, because I think sometimes they cause so much suffering. I find it very, very hard to want them to flourish. And so, you know, and, and, you know, even just on a very personal day to day, you know, we know all of it, the ideas we're talking about at the moment are very up in the sky day to day. If someone says something to me that I find a parent, I find it incredibly difficult to want them to flourish in that moment and to feel respected. And so I can get very passionate, I get my high-hors, I can get very judgmental if people have racist, homophobic, you know, exclusive, transphobic, whatever views, you know, anti-poor, pro-rich. There are lots of views I find a parent and they're the people I find hard, where I was actually looking after the trees. I'm like, yeah, I'm good with that. I'm with you. And to take those backwards, I think the, that's one of the hardest things about commitment to universal compassion is it means having moral consideration, even for people that annoy us on Twitter and even for people that commit a greekous harms. And, and I think this is one of the things that I quite often talk about with compassion because some people will challenge compassion, which in simple terms is not wanting others to suffer or wanting them to flourish. In their own terms is that it doesn't imply weakness or appeasement or you just sort of roll over and let people do what they want. You can, if someone is causing harm or has deeply harmful views or is one, you need to have compassion for the people that they are impacting negatively. And that can justify you constraining, harming or even an extremist killing other humans, right? If I see someone with a machete running towards a school bus, if, you know, and you have a chance to stop them by killing them, most people would say, yeah, let, let's do that. I still, I would still say technically I would be including that person in my moral consideration because I wouldn't want to, the only thing I want to do is prevent them from causing harm, even if that harms them. But I wouldn't want to cause them harm over and above that. I wouldn't want to then lock them away and torture them or, you know, there's still a moral consideration that they still count, even though I think they're evil or dangerous or, and need to be dealt with in some, maybe even a brutal way. So that's the way I try and maintain at least a technical moral consideration for them. I haven't excluded them, but I still retain the motivation to punish, challenge, constrain, whatever it is. I agree. I remember once, years ago I was working in a school in Colchester, Colchester, kind of a school for girls, a shout out if anyone's listening. And a student there asked me, is there anything you believe is absolutely wrong? And I was like, goodness me, that's one of the best questions I've ever been asked. And I said, abuse of power. I think anybody who has any amount of power and they use that to call suffering to other people or they abuse that power. I think that is always wrong. There is never a time. I think everything else, you know, killing could be right in certain situations. Lying could be right in certain situations. There is never a time where abuse of power is okay. And I think whether you are a church, whether you are a teacher, whether you are a husband or wife, whether you are a parent, if you abuse the power that you have, that is always wrong. Whereas most other things, you can at least technically imagine some justification, which is justification. For example, yeah, shooting the man that's about to shoot a class of kids like that, yeah. Sorry, these thoughts, experiments are often quite pleasant. Let's leave that one there. I want to come back to your thoughts about on the environment, because many people share that sort of stance. And it was actually one of the first times that the word sentientism was used was to criticize the idea. And it was people who have a biocentric or an ecocentric stance, who said, look, sentientism in a way is discriminating against the non-sentient stuff, the things that can't suffer. But you took a slightly different time, because in a way, you're not saying, well, I'm discriminating or I'm excluding insentient things. You're saying, in a way, things I think aren't sentient, you think are sentient, because it's not an aspect of consciousness. You think an environment or an atmosphere or a river can actually suffer. So in that sense, you're including them in your sentientism, because you see they are sentient. Now, my, in a way, I would share a lot of that sense of interconnecting this with those things. You know, the reason I care deeply about the environment is maybe a bit more instrumental than you, whereas you would care directly about them, because you think the atmosphere can suffer. I would care about the atmosphere, because it's impact on the quadruillion of sentient beings, you know, human and non-human living as a Earth. For me, it's both. Whereas for you, it's both. Yeah. But also, what I do want to just say is that, you know, this middle-way idea that I get from Buddhism is that I still have to exist within this world. And I do, I do not believe in extremism. I think if you take any idea to its extreme, it becomes destructive. And so, you know, I'm not going to like wear a mask so I don't hurt bacteria. I'm not going to sweep the path so I don't accidentally tread on an ant. You have to be balanced in these things and take that middle way. And I think, you know, very, very crudely, you've got a use of the environment and abuse of the environment. If I cut down a tree to make a house, I'm using the environment, but it's completely necessary. All right. I'm not I don't believe that a tree is sentient and that if I burn it to keep warm, it's hurting. You know, that at all. If I, you know, cause deforestation, then actually that is wrong. And so, you know, deforestation has to be counted as something which is immoral because it's abusing. Yeah, but it's not because the trees are feeling pain. It's not that kind of consciousness suffering. It's seeing the universe or seeing our earth as, you know, it's a closed system that we are part of. We are allowed to use it. We're allowed to cut down trees. We're allowed to breathe in bacteria. We can accidentally tread on an ant. We're okay with doing this. And actually I drive a car, you know, it's an unledged car. It's not electric. And I drive half an hour to school and back every day. I want to limit the impact that I'm having the environment, but not to the fact that it's an extreme because again, the end or purpose is about survival and flourishing of human life. And what do I need to create that? I don't do anything but it's unnecessary. Yeah, that makes sense. And so, while you'd see when you talk about the atmosphere suffering off flourishing, I get the sense that that's more in the context of the atmosphere playing a role in the broader sea co-system that enables the good lives of sentient beings rather than it being an abstract thing. So for example, if we let climate change go completely nuts on earth and you know, this widespread extinction and there's a ratchet effect and a spin-off effect, we'll essentially end up like Venus, right, which is 150 degrees centigrade and whatever. But you don't look at Venus and think Venus's atmosphere is suffering, you know, there's something wrong, you know, nature's fighting back, right? That's just a different planet. The reason you use the term flourishing in the context of our atmosphere is because it is so important to the interdependent lives of all sentient beings. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And that leads us, the other thing I wanted to touch on in this topic is that one of the dangers with a pure eco-centric stance, which does almost do what I was suggesting, which says look, you know, the environment independent of the sentient beings has its own moral worth, such that someone would look at the environment on Mars and go, you know, that matters morally, even that has a zero impact on sentient beings. In a way, I don't sort of mind if people want to go beyond sentient beings, but the risk often is with a sort of ethical flattening where people go to the point of saying, well, human beings matter, sentient animals matter, plants and fungi matters, rocks, rivers, trees, ecosystems and the earth has got all matter. You know, everything matters, but because we need to live, there's no moral difference between pushing a knife into a pig and pushing a knife into a carrot because everything matters. And that's where the alarm bells start to go often. Yeah, and I don't think that because I think we have to eat. So we. And because as you said, the carrot isn't feeling pain and the pig is. So there is still a real difference there that I am really keen we don't lose that distinction. No, no, we don't need to eat pigs to survive. We do need to eat to survive. The only way we can eat is to use nature and it's about choosing what part of nature do we take so that everything can flourish and survive. If we grow a carrot and eat it, there's no resultant suffering at all. It's what nature was designed to do. Nature was designed to feed us and allow us to survive. If we kill pigs, it causes suffering and it's unnecessary. I have to feed loads of carrots to pigs. Let's log into feed conversion ratios and land use themselves. Yeah. No, thank you. So the other thing you touched on in this context is that you mentioned you don't eat meat and I think you're honest sort of journey towards veganism, public for that and those. What's that journey been like for you? Because this is a really interesting shift because from my perspective, I was vegetarian in my early mid-20s, basically for animal ethics reasons, which haven't changed to today. But there was something so visceral about putting a piece of animal that once was sent in my body that made that very visceral and actually quite socially manageable thing to give up at that time. Whereas at that point, going vegan and giving up on egg products and dairy and whatever else, it felt socially like a step too far and because you're not actually putting piece of the animal in your body, it felt like there was another few steps removed. But I guess the interesting thing is I look back on that journey and it's never complete because just because someone's vegan doesn't mean they've reached some state of ethical purity. You basically can't live without causing some harm as you were saying. We have to live and there's there's also some incidental harms that we cause, however well we can put down. But as I've gone through that journey, it's been interesting because I think there's been a shift in my own mind where a lot of the decisions were really very much about me and social acceptability and maybe senses of disgust and senses of involvement and a deeper shift that's taken longer to come through has been trying to put that stuff to one side and more thinking from the perspective of the non-human animals that are being harmed. So it shifted away from being a thought about what should I buy and what are the products and so on to thinking about the ethics of how those things are produced and the processes and the farming processes and what that implies for the sentient beings that are going through it, which has led me to slightly purer ethical starts. But my motivation shifted as I've gone through that journey. But again, I should stop rambling on because I'm supposed to be into being new. But I'm interested in what your journey has been like on that, how challenging it has been and where have you got to and what's the response been from again, family friends and others around you because it's you're butting up against a pretty strong social norm there. Yeah, I mean, I there's not a single part of me that cares for anyone thinks. You know, that's that's the reality. Yeah, it's a helpful start. I just don't care. And you know, there's a lot of extremist vegans out there that I think are unhelpful. And I think people that eat meat use those as a reason to eat meat. So I think they need to just just and stop. And is that because it's becoming it becomes a sort of polarising tribal label thing and also it's there's an implication that is a pure it's a purity thing. Yeah, I think it's one of these things, but it's like you have to give up meat or you're a bad person, you know, and I think there's a lot of guilt trips and all this kind of stuff and I just don't think that that is helpful in in this conversation. I think, you know, I so that's the first thing I'd say if you take things to extremes, you know, if you eat meat and you do intensive farming, it's wrong. If you grow your own, you know, have your own chickens and take their eggs and then kill it, you know, la la la, eat it. It's a very sustainable way of surviving. I'm okay with people doing that. My children eat meat. It's not up to me to decide their morality. This is something that I've decided is the right thing for me based on my knowledge and experience, but for the first 35 years of my life, eight meat. And so therefore it'd be completely hypocritical for me to say to someone, "Oh, you're not allowed to, just because I've decided not to, based on my experience." And how does that how does that relate to some forms of interest human ethics because there is an interesting dynamic here where I think there's something about, you know, for example, food choices and nonhuman animal ethics. There is this sense that it's just a personal choice and I don't have the right to judge others, which we don't apply an entry human ethics because if someone else is being homophobic or sexist, we're quite comfortable saying, "Well, what you're doing is causing harm. It's needless harm." But I think there's a difference between not agreeing with homosexuality and being homophobic. The two don't go hand in hand. In the same way is it's okay to, if someone decides to eat meat, but actually make someone else eat meat or judge someone for being a vegetarian or is part of a process of intensive harm and whatever. I think there's degrees of things. And I think everybody is on their own journey towards what they it's the right thing to do. I don't think it's helpful to try and take someone else to a place where they're not ready to go to yet. I think we've got to be compassionate to where people are, you know, their experiences, their knowledge, their context that genuinely people are trying to do the right thing. And, you know, I am not a perfect person. You know, I know that drinking milk from a cow causes as much suffering as eating meat, as eating beef. I do need beef, but I do drink cow's milk. And so there is an inherent contradiction in my own morality because I'm human and actually I'm trying to exist day by day and make it as simple as possible. For me, giving up meat was easy, ridiculously easy. If it had been hard, I don't know if I'd have done it. So I think there's these idealistic morals that I have. And then there's reality of day to day life. So therefore I must be compassionate to where other people are. The reason I became, do you know what it was interesting? I wanted to become a vegetarian for a long time, but I really, really loved meat. And I knew that if I became a vegetarian, I wouldn't be able to eat it. And that was as far as I got. But I know that feeling. Yeah. It was like, I don't, I know where this is going to go. If I let logic take me. Yes. I know what this means. So I think that for me, it was environmental. It was the environmental cost of eating meat before it was about the suffering of animals. Yeah. Seeing them as another whose experiences matter. 100%. It was, and actually that was selfish. That was, we have to look after this panic because it's our home. And therefore I know that eating meat is the worst thing we can do for the environment. It causes the most deforestation, the most air-mint-sea pollution. It's just devastating. And this is my planet. And I have children. And I want my children to have children that live in a planet that helps them to flourish. Yeah. And if animal agriculture didn't exist today, creating it would be one of the most insane things anyone would ever suggest. Absolutely. You know, I think that there was just, there was too many overwhelming reasons not to eat meat. I didn't need it. It didn't offer me anything nutritionally that I couldn't get anywhere else. It was destroying our atmosphere. Then you think about the suffering of animals. Then you think about the not just eating animals, but the processes around it, these intensive farmers in just horrendous way that we treat animals that we use. It was overwhelming that this was not the right thing for me to do as a human being. But it wasn't until a student said to me, I mean, they owned me. We were doing a lesson on peace and conflict. And they said to me, miss you a pacifist. And I said, yes. And they said, do you eat meat? I said, yes. They said then you're not a pacifist. I was like, oh no. I'm asking you sir. That was it. That was the last sort of like piece of the puzzle. And it happened to be on Ash Wednesday. And while I'm not religious, I was like, do you know what? Because you've just said this to me, you've totally destroyed me. I am going to give up meat for lent. What was the reaction to that? And they were like, well, they're a teen agent, so they were kind of cool about it. But for me, it was a very important moment. They probably forgot it, but it's life changing for me. For six weeks, I didn't eat meat. At no point did I miss it. It was the easiest transition I'd ever made. And then I haven't looked back since. I just haven't. What I've done in terms of veganism is I am probably 99% vegan. But because I believe in the middle way, because I don't like taking things to extremes, I think that I have to sometimes weigh up the cost of my life emotionally, whatever it might be. And the impact that me having some milk in my tea in the morning, if I'm having a bit of a low day, the impact for me is that is that is that is notifiable. So I very rarely have any dairy products. But occasionally I do because actually the greater good in that situation. If everybody cut down, if everybody had a meat free day, if everybody cut down on the amount of meat that they had, and they had a meat free, the impact that that would have on the environment is huge. And I think sometimes people feel they have to do something extreme for it to be worth it. Like exercise, I've got to run a marathon. No, just walk around the block once a day. Just do something that's manageable and maintainable that will have a positive impact. And so I'm all about the middle way. In all honesty, don't think there'll ever be a time where I'm 100% vegan. I feel very happy that I am doing the least amount possible that is causing harm to other living beings. Yeah, we'll see if we can tip you over the edge. And I'm at risk of doing what I don't think it's useful to order to each other on this stuff at all. It's more interest in the personal journey. Because I think for me, where I've got to is I think it is important to think through the theory and the intellectual stuff about the ethical, pole, and recognizing non-human-centred beings as moral patients in their own right. And seeing with clear eyes, as I think you do, what the reality of farming is, for example, is like for them or the reality of research or various other forms of animal exploitation as well. And not dodging that stuff. Seeing it with clear eyes and open eyes, you know, the most supposedly humane farm the animals are still treated in brutal ways and end up in the same slaughterhouses. But at the same time, I agree that if we try and present this as some sort of pure perfect ethical stance that everybody has to reach now, just in practical terms, that's not particularly compelling message for people. And if we do have a universal compassion for each other, even people we disagree with, both tactically in terms of, you know, making things better for non-human animals, other humans and the environment. And out of compassion, I think it's it is better to engage with compassion and understanding and remember the journeys we're all still on and you know, and do that in a good faith way. And just keep trying to all get better. So yeah, there's many echoes there. Thank you. So let in the time you've got left, I'm going to ask you one more crazy big question, which is how do we make a better future? Now, you can answer this in any way you like sort of grand utopian visions, but it will be fascinating to maybe as part of that zero in and the work you do, which as I've said is teaching future generations about world views. And one of the things I've loved about listening to the RE podcast and engaging with many of the people in the RE world is, you know, I'm sure there are more conservative people out there or maybe more reactionary people who, you know, wish it could be more narrowly focused on religion and their religion and they sort of have fond memories of how RE used to be in the 50s. I'm sure there are plenty of those people, but the people I've engaged with and listening to the people you talked to on the RE podcast, I've been sort of blown away by the open mindedness and the progressiveness of the stars in that some of the themes that come through from you and your guests and the other people I've spoken to in the world really want kids to be able to come away with critical thinking skills with a deep appreciation for the diversity of each other's world views as we try and live together in, you know, excitingly mixed communities. And the kids have the skills and the freedom to find their own path through these things as well and work out what they think, what they believe and what's important to them and how to find meaning the world. And I just love all that stuff and it ticks all the boxes. So in that context, what role do you think RE or PSH or philosophy or religion and world views teaching can play in helping us make a better future and how optimistic do you feel about role and play? And sometimes I'll have conversation and it feels like nothing I'm saying is going in and they're still bigoted or closed-minded or, you know, immoral. But I have to remember I plant seeds and I'm part of a bigger part of their life. I'm just one little segment. I cannot change lives. I am not going to change lives. I am part of a process. And so if I tell them something and they disagree with me, that little seed is in their mind. And then someone else is going to come along and say something and it's kind of, oh, they said this. I remember my teacher said something like that. And then they have an experience here and they're like, oh, they've learned this and that's like watering that little seed. Very slowly over decades things start to change. And I think in answer to your question, how do you make a better tomorrow? Very slowly. I think sometimes we want change to happen too quickly and that's not how nature works. That's not how humans work. Things change very, very slowly. And so sometimes it is taking those that step back and going, I'm just planting a seed. I'm not dealing with the finished product. I'm dealing with the child and I'm part of their socialisation and I'm part of their awakening. I'm not all of it. I heard a phrase, a little shout out to Sarah Lane Court who's the CEO of the Religion Education Council, who is the Education Council. And she used this phrase in an interview about respectful curiosity. That's how we make a better tomorrow. Is we are curious about what other people think and why they think it and we are curious in a very respectful way. And I think that some is kind of a little bit of what we've lost. I think in the past we didn't have any curiosity. We just accepted what we were told. And now we are aggressively curious. I think what we need to have is respectful curiosity. And I think that's what our reteachers young people is to be curious about the world around them to ask questions, not necessarily agree. You know, there's not religious instruction. We're not telling them what to think. We're telling them how to think. And if we could model in the conversations we have in the way that we present ideas to them, respectful curiosity. I think because of, as I was saying right at the beginning, children are naturally curious anyway. I bring in the respectful curiosity. But what I think sometimes we do with children is we dampen their curiosity. We don't allow them to ask questions. And actually, I don't just teach RV, I teach PSH as well. So I'm dealing with gender identity, sexuality, extremism, radicalisation, you know, all of these very controversial topics. And actually what's so lovely is that questions children ask when they go, because I don't want this to sound bad, but and then they ask me a question that could sound homophobic or could sound transphobic. But actually, they've said it in a way that's like, I genuinely want to know the answer to this, because this is going to help me to embrace things that are changing at a different that I don't understand in a way that's not scary me. So respectful curiosity. Yeah, I love it. Thank you. Now, one of the things I think you're greater, the R.E. podcasting conversations. And I think broadly the R.E. community is great at is finding areas of common ground across diversity, you know, finding those things like the golden rule or the platinum rule and ideas of universal compassion and caring for each other and respect that run through. And I think in almost every type of religion, there are many people are totally on board with that. So you can look at different religious communities that actually incorporate curiosity and intellectual exploration and analysis as part of their way of being in the world. And respect for other world views religious or not is part of their religious plurality as well. And allowing people to find their own way is something that people are comfortable to. And you can find that in almost every different form of religion. But there are also forms of most of those religion that can be more fundamentalist. And I'm interested in how you handle that because in a way there are world views and versions of world views that actually go against the idea of respectful curiosity because they might say, for example, I don't want you to be curious. Here is the right answer. You just must believe and curiosity is a dangerous thing. And not only will you not be respected if you follow curiosity and take a different path, but you may even be punished. And you yourself experienced a, you know, a version of what's somebody called shining, right? So and that conform a bunch of different ways. One is the epistemology, right? And you know, I don't want you to have curiosity. I want you to have faith or follow the authority or read the book. That's the answer. End of story. Some of it can be about the morality and ethics. So instead of it being respected, it can be, you know, they're in the outgroup. They're going to hell, you know, they're homosexual. They're going to hell. You know, the list goes on there in a different cast, you know, they're untouchable, someone and so forth. And and defining your own path thing can be difficult as well because sometimes, you know, finding your own path is seen as a deep horrific mistake that will end up with you being punished in this life and the next. So again, there's so much there, right? But hopefully you get the general point. How do you cope with teaching people about the more fundamentalist versions of religious worldviews that actually go against the respectful curiosity you're trying to instill? Have you handled that stuff? Yeah, I think the reality is that we don't, we try to avoid those most extremists because they're so extreme and they're so minimal, they're so insignificant as to the whole. The thing that we do is we show variety within a religion. And so part of the worldviews approach in our read, it's not just about teaching on religious worldviews, that's just that we've done that forever. For the last 50 years, we've been teaching religious, non-religious worldviews. Well, views is an approach saying that there is variety of religion and belief out there between religions, between religion and non-religion and within religion. And sometimes it's just a simpler saying, some Christians are the Christians. But we're not going to go and talk about, you know, fundamentalist church of Latter-day Saints. That's not what Mormonism is. It's a very fundamentalist extreme view and doesn't really reflect anything that's meaning for a significant. So we don't talk about it. You know, we talk about difficult issues but we don't talk about difficult people. And so that's really important that you make it, you know, opinion based, not personal. And so, you know, we have children that will ask questions. Okay, this is a good example. So we were talking, I was talking about Muslim prayer and I was saying one thing they say is Allah, waqba, God is the greatest. And you could see them going, "Oh, miss you, I'm allowed to say that." I was like, "Yeah, isn't that like about, you know, and so you can guide misconceptions. You're going to Allah, waqba is one of the 99 names of Allah is recited during prayer. It has been misappropriated by extreme miscellaneous but they're not Muslims because the word Muslim means peace one who submits to the will of Allah. They are not Muslim and then you move on." So you answer questions. If there's curiosity, you don't dwell and you certainly don't teach those extremes. But you do teach that there are a variety of views. Some and other, are too powerful words. Some Christians are the Christians. And so I think there's definitely like a language shift is that we don't ever say Christians think this. There's very little that all Christians agree on. And so if there isn't agreement within Christianity, then it's okay that there's not always agreement between Muslims and Christians, but actually fundamentally there's more that United system divides us and it's about finding those those things. So it's not just about diversity of different worldviews. It's diversity within the world. Within the worldviews. Absolutely. You know, this is a very good one. There's a lot of people think that Buddhist don't believe in God, Christians believe in one God, Hindus believe in many gods. Actually, it's not that at all that that there are gods within Buddhism. So we can't call it an atheistic religion. And Hindus believe in one ultimate being called Brahman who has avatars in the same way as Allah has 99 names and God is, you know, merciful and gracious. And you know, that actually there's there's similar similarities between those beliefs. They're not these distinct little beliefs in completely separate boxes. And so the messy bit of RE, that's the bit that we love when it doesn't fit into those neat boxes. And I always say to my children, like, I hope you leave my lesson slightly more confused than when you walked in. You know, if so, I've done my job. Yeah, I love it. Thank you. And is that so much? Also, how you manage the risk of respect turning into a relativism? Because respect sounds nice. But if you then respect all views, including the extreme ones, it can lead to a relativism where you say, well, you know, some people think this, some people think that who will lead to judge, maybe homophobia is completely appropriate. You know, but it sounds like that's how you manage that boundary of, you know, you can respect the commonality and the the starts is that don't cause harm, but you do, you're still comfortable drawing a line somewhere where you are. Yeah, I mean, I think we, you know, there are controversial issues, you know, my teach homosexuality, I have to teach that some Christians believe it is an abomination. I have to teach that. But one thing that we do is we don't leave those things there. They then have to make certainly and GCSE available. They have to make a judgment. They have to be like practice critical realism in that there has to be some wrongs, but there's more than one right. So you can have pluralism and absolutism side by side. It's the same as the elephant. Two extreme things opposite things can both exist. And it's the teaching children how to distinguish between those things. And actually, giving them those skills, giving them that framework allows them to think for themselves, not being told what to think. Yes, the toolkit, not the answer. And I always say we teach them how to think, not what to think. If I teach them what different people think and then how to make those judgments of what's right and wrong and bring in their own personal worldview, that actually, what do you think? Why do you think it? What caused you to think that? So they're starting to apply that critical realism to their own worldview as well. I'm giving them the tools to make, to know how to make decisions in the future. I would never want to disrespect religion, but I have to critique it. And I think sometimes they get conflated. Yeah, thank you. Now, just to wrap up, if you, we've already had about, I think, 17 education ministers in the UK in the past 10 years. So if you were to be the next one, or let's take it to another level, if you were to be education minister globally, which takes it to a whole new level, given the cultural and the religious diversity around the world, but you had a hand in shaping the education, you know, kids globally got to have around these topics of worldviews, religion, and philosophy. What would you like to see if you could wave that magic wand? I take out exams. You know, I just think, you know, that would make such a fundamental difference because of the parameters which you are forced into to teach to an exam syllabus. Yeah, because you want to teach kids how to think not what to think, but they need to know what to put in the exam. So that's the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's not what education is. I don't think education is testing. You know, so I think I would never want to be an education minister. Ever. I would never want to do that. I really wish I hope and pray to an invisible, invisible, real, unreal God to the universe. Can we have an education minister that has come from education that has been a teacher, that's been a head teacher, that has had that lived experience because I think that our education ministers are doing their best, bless them. You know, I'm not going to criticize them, but they don't know what they're doing. They don't understand schools. They don't understand education. They don't understand what's going on in the classroom. They are basing it on their own very, very narrow experience of education 30 years ago. What is going on in classrooms right now is so fundamentally different and they're making policies based on the past, not based on the present. So actually, I would would not take on that role. My one change would be to get rid of testing exams and actually what I want is to see somebody in there that has experience. Yeah, thank you. And would you put sentientism on the curricula? I'm not biased at all. Yeah, I think the reality is that, you know, we want to, again, we want to teach children how to think, not what to think. If we teach them how to think, we're doing a naturalistic approach anyway. It's a fundamental way. It underpins everything we do. We cannot teach every religion and every worldview. We have to be selective. I don't want to teach every religion and worldview in a cursory one lesson on this because I think it's doing a disservice. What I want to do is make them get deep into ideas, concepts, you know, and thinking skills. I don't think it matters what the stuff is really, whether, you know, I don't think we have to teach every, you know, the six big religions and a non-religious point of view. I think we've got to think what we want to teach children how to think. And then if they come in contact with an worldview that's different from their own, then they can practice that respect for curiosity. We don't, education is not the end of their education. School is not the end of their education. We've got to give them the tools to continue to be educated. Like, say, just planting the seeds. And I get that sense again, as a amateur looking from the outside, there are criticisms of the current R.E. world about maybe lacking depth, but the people want. And I think the depth kids need isn't let's go deeper into a specific world, view or a specific religion and, you know, really understand the rituals or really understand, you know, XYZ. The depth is about the themes and the philosophies and the epistemology and the aesthetics. And then, in a way, that's my biased pitch for sentientism is because that's exactly what sentientism about. It doesn't have the rituals or the cultural stuff or the history or the buildings of it. All it has is the epistemology and it has the ethics, which I think just fits into those things. You'd have to call it sentientism is those deep themes of epistemology and ethics, I think, resonate. And my final, final question, you spend so much time with future generations. Are the kids going to save us? Are we going to be okay? Yeah, I don't think this is a tool. I don't ever think that, you know, this generation is terrible and it's all going to fall down or this, you know, these are our saviour. I think they would do very similar to what we've done. They'll get some bits right. They'll get some bits wrong. Society will improve in one way and it will get worse in others. I think we somehow have this very strange idea that we are constantly getting better. I think we're constantly changing and evolving and there's not necessarily a better or worse. You know, we look back at our child and go life was better without phones. You know, we were outside playing, but actually our children are much more aware because they have the internet and phones. So I think that the reality is is that our future will be better in some ways and worse in others. And the future generation will do some great things and they will make some fundamental mistakes because that is the pattern of society. And the regeneration has done some great things and has done some terrible things and that's what's going to continue to happen in the future. Just how humanity works here. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Well, let me, I'm going to let you go. Is there anything else you wanted to add into the conversation? I mean, we've answered what's real, what matters, who matters and how to make a better future in the next thing. So it's pretty good. After a long, hard day at school that you've already had. So anything else you wanted to add in, but also how can people follow you, subscribe to the podcast, you know, keep your social media and so on. I'll include links. Let's of course. Yes. So the podcast is called the RE podcast. So I have a website, www.drepodcast.co.uk and you can follow me on the Twitter at the RE podcast one because I'm the first one. And on Instagram and LinkedIn, all, you know, Facebook, anything, just just come and follow me. If you go to my website, there's a Get In Touch page. I'm always up for a question or a suggestion or a thought people can get in touch. Yeah, so that's probably it. An episode on sentientism with Jamie Woodhouse coming soon. I'm looking forward to it. I'm quite uncomfortable even after all this listening back to myself. I will look forward to it and see how I did. Yeah. Oh, it was fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. It's a delight, the episode. Well, it's been a genuine pleasure to talk to you. Thank you again to you and all of your RE colleagues for doing amazing, deeply thought through important work. And it's been a pleasure to have you on sentientism as a guest. Thank you, Louisa. Jamie, thank you for the great questions and let me geek out on the stuff I love best. Brilliant. All right. Have a good evening. Please do stay in touch. Hello, do you take care? Take care. You're helping to normalise rational compassionate thinking. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us some stars or a review. You can visit sentientism.info to find out more and you'll be very welcome in any of our online community groups. The biggest is on Facebook. If you like what we're doing, why not tell your friends about us.