I didn't become an atheist in order to be fashionable.

The intro music to this is unhinged. I was expecting one of them to produce a machete.

It doesn’t matter if atheism is fashionable. It matters what is true.

I'm an atheist, or agnostic atheist to be more precise. I was raised Catholic but by age 18 decided I didn't believe any of the supernatural claims. I'm now 66 years old and have had zero difficulty finding "meaning" in my life. I have a wonderful wife, two magnificent children and three adorable grandchildren. I had a great 37 year career as a high school teacher and maintain close friendships with many colleagues even after I retired. I have hobbies that I enjoy regularly. The fact that I don't believe in an afterlife doesn't diminish the meaning of this life. It seems many people disagree, thinking that if there is no sequel then this movie is just nothing. Therefore they're not only willing, but eager, to profess belief in dogmas so absurd it boggles the mind.

Once again:"Atheism going out of fashion" British national census - 2001: Christian 68% No religion 15% 2021: Christian 46% No religion 37% (Projected) 2031: Christian 33% No religion 51% And for the Canadian guest- Canada national census 2001: Christian 75% No religion 16% 2021: Christian 53.3% No religion 34.6%

Believing that the wizards and witches of Hogwarts are real and can ultimately rescue humanity and the planet through magic has real world consequences

O'Connor is a GOAT and owned the stage and conversation so easily.

Yes atheism is going out of fashion. It’s not a trend anymore. It’s just baseline. So it’s not edgy or cool to be an atheist anymore, it’s just normal. As an atheist that lived through the “edgy” era - I’d call this an absolute win.

I am an atheist from Islamic country I am 46 old and I am an atheist not because it is/was fashionable , because religion is noncense.

Atheisism going out of fashion?? I didn't realise it was a fashion

As an Atheist, I cannot stress enough just how much I do not care whether or not Atheism is "Fashionable". What I care about is that I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible.

Atheism, tells us what not to believe, but doesnt tell us what we should believe. That is probably why it makes some people feel empty and unfulfilled.

This was a good conversation, but I really dislike the staging music, which was tension inducing and not reflective of the respectful conversation that followed.

When I don't go to church, I go trail running, I watch premier league football, I read, I play with my dogs, etc.

Atheism isn't to blame for the lack of meaning in society. Social media is.

If you're an atheist for a good reason, you're impervious to fashion.

Atheism might be going out of fashion in the West. But it is definitely needed in Africa. At the very least, the role of religion in Africa needs to be interrogated.

Religiosity and religious attendance is at an all time low, and religious ideologues are in straight up denial claiming that atheism and irreligiosity are "going out of fashion". Methinks the theists doth project too much

This is the kind of discussion that people leave complimenting the speakers for how intelligent they are, but with no answers to the main question: “Is there a meaning to life after all? If yes, then where (or Who) is its source? If not, then why do we inherently need so much a meaning to our lives?”

Not having mitological believes is not a fashion, it is just a reasonable stand.

It's more like "cultural Christianity" is the new fashion among the inteligencia. There is no data to suggest the average person on the street is becoming more religious.

In today's age of long form discussion, this topic is criminally underserved in 30 minutes, particularly with two such panelists who are so capable of exploring this together for several hours at a stretch.

I can relate a lot to Alex. He's tackling the issue itself, without any apologetics.

For a second, I thought that was Douglas Murray by the thumbnail 😂

it is and was always unfashionable actually. As stated in many other places, you cannot be an openly atheist politician - not in USA and not in many, many other countries. This speaks for itself.

The host was annoying but good answer out of them

I'm an atheist, agnostic atheist except on certain models of gods, non-theist if that helps. I find meaning in learning and getting new on eyes on things. Learning isn't as objective as they teach at school, even though it is a big part of my identity, it how to understand anything. That is just what humans, animals and other organisms and machines can do. I am just chasing things with explaintory power for me and others

Out of fashion? I see the numbers growing.

Considering how daft fashion tends to be, I'm happy to be unfashionable.

My family and believing true things is what gives me my life meaning. No god required. I was about 9 when I learned about fossiels and realised that not everything I was told in sunday school was true.

The question should be, why is atheism out of fashion.

Imagine John Varvaeke and Eric Weinstein in a discussion 😂

6:34 He’s describing “hope”; it’s the strong desire for something know but unseen. God calls us to hope for Heaven. ❤️‍🔥🇻🇦🇺🇸

OMG, just fanboying over JV and AO'C right now. Clicked straight away.

Narratives are composed of a stream of propositions. You can't get away the proposition.

Social media has removed any meaning for life. Before you based your life around your friends and family and the people around. Now you get your meaning from strangers across the world who you've never met.

Atheism has never been in “fashion” at least not in the US. As an atheist myself, I personally couldn’t care less.

Im an atheist and I really dont struggle for meaning or purpose.

Not being convinced by fantastical magical assertions that lack any evidence to lend credence to those assertions is not going out of style. Wanting better than assertions offered up by unknown primitive people who lived thousands of years ago will never go out of style as long as the human mind remains inquisitive.

Religion is going out of "fashion" in Western countries at an accelerating rate.

Why does someone have to find meaning in life, as if meaning is something that is fixed and defined. People who ask this question are usually religious people who are arrogantly sure that the meaning is their personal savior, as though they’re jumping up and down going around in circle singing “la la la la la, la la la la la, I’ve got a savior.”

So deep thinkng , skepticism, and a drive for intellectual honesty has gone out of fashion.

In essence, the difficulty in creating a means of meaning stems from the intricate interplay of subjective experience, linguistic expression, cultural diversity, existential uncertainties, and philosophical debates about the nature of reality and human existence.

Great discussion - Alex and John are the two most erudite on this subject.

Really wish there were a better host for this discussion. He didn’t seem to understand the ‘non-propositional’ aspects of meaning that made this convo so interesting, and instead fell back on prewritten questions

I'm autistic, so I find meaning in the specific answers. Knowing how many molecules are in the mug gives me empowerment, comfort, and then meaning.

Watching the atheist and theist debates is like watching the government 'spend great resources' spinning their wheels. Its a whole lot of arm waving with no advancement on any front.

When worldviews have become just another trend among trends. Thank you social media and KZfaq. This was a fascinating and important discussion by the participants.

I told a Christian that I was an atheist. He said “Wow! That’s a bold claim!” Oh the irony.

Alex is exaggerating the extent that simply quoting a founder ever just settled a debate in the U.S., and he understates the retained power and respect of the founders and their ideas.

We have a finite life, and you either make the most of it or you don't.... I find that my life is more fulfilling when I make the most of it

Thank you pop John and my Host Alex for thy availability!

The spoiled teenager that flips out that they got an Acura instead of a Ferrari for their birthday is miserable because they demand too much out of life. In much the same way, I think we intuitively understand as we age that fulfillment and peace is not won through getting the things you want, it's won through letting go of wanting things in the first place. When you get what you want, you merely get a short-term burst of satisfaction, and quickly return to either boredom or the pain of striving for the next thing you now see yourself as lacking. But when you abandon the need to get that thing you want, you also abandon the suffering that comes from striving to get it, as well as the suffering you would experience if you fail to get it. The problem is forever solved. You're satisfied getting an Acura, and really you're satisfied getting nothing at all. In the same way all the solutions to the meaning crisis, that I've seen, are wrong because they all presume that we're supposed to obtain meaning. But peace is won through abandoning desires, not fulfilling them. The solution is to abandon this need for meaning in the first place. And the best tool for this, that I know of, is meditation practice. Meditation is to letting go what the gym is to building muscle. So the solution to the meaning crisis is meditation: letting go of this feverish need to find meaning.

Gen Z is the least religious generation of them all. They think Gen Alpha is gonna be better?😂 Who is raising them?😂😂

Oh, Alex, are you blissfully unaware of the current character of the SCOTUS vis a vis what ‘the founding fathers wanted?’ 😖

People forget their connection to the arts and humanities and in this undereducated crisis we keep having, arts education is one thing lacking that many people forget, is our human birthright. We need culture, the arts, writing, history, literature, to make sense of our world. Religion is only one part of our culture that has posed as all of it for centuries. We are bereft of tools which were systematically taken away.

I know Alex is more known but John vervaeke is one of the brightest minds I have ever encountered in the course of my life. He is absolutely brilliant.

30:00 Alec O Conner misses the point about the Founding Fathers. It wasn't that the men who found America were infallible,. They were mostly certainly flawed and capable of error. When people quote the Founding Fathers it is for the reason of understanding why the Constitution was written the way it was and how to interpret it correctly.

This was brilliant, Alex. Absolutely brilliant.

I think that the conversation was more focused on answering what is "TRUTH" than what is "MEANING"

Listening to Alex speak about Christianity is life giving - something sparks in my senses, but Johns explanations brings emptiness and does nothing to my Spirit. I don’t know how else to explain it…

First, I'm 8 minutes in, and I'm enjoying this so far, John's point about disconnecting ourselves off, hit like a slap on the back of the head, walked and talked someone off a bridge, without even thinking about it, spur of the moment, Alex, first time seeing you, and enjoyed your time, John's evolution into his person has been great to see over the years, and thank you to the host, Freddie, peace

Good thing people are talking about meaning in a meaningful way

i love how open they, theists of the sort, are about religion being something that people look to, societally, for comfort of the recognition of existentialism and how its used as a tool for an illusion of fundamental truth, yet they wont admit it or look for a secular way around it. probably for the hardship of a reform, but maybe due to nihilisms upbringing we will get enough voices to advocate for that.

Religion helps you ameliorate your foolishness? Ha

Atheism is a rational position regarding one question. I dont understand the debate

Does anyone know where that C.S. Lewis poem comes from, or where you can find it?

'If at any time I declared concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it'. - Jeremiah 18:7-8. As syllogism (modus ponens): Premise 1: If a nation turns from its evil, then I will relent of the disaster I intended. Premise 2: I did not relent of the disaster I intended toward that nation. Conclusion: Therefore, that nation did not turn from its evil.

If people are feeling bereft after losing their belief in a God, then it's most likely due to the religious teachings that hammer home to the believers that their God is the legitimator of morality and meaning. As an atheist I'm doing fine with my naturalism, humanism, secularism, and existentialism. I think a lot of people who grow up in these religions, once they leave these belief systems like Christianity, or Islam, or what have you, they might be thrown into a kind of nihilism or something along those lines. To me it's I think that they're falling into their religious ways of thinking. They've thrown off certain aspects of their religious ways of thinking, but they've retained other ones, and they need to get rid of those. So, in their previous worldview God was the legitimator of morality and meaning. God was providing the grounding or justification (he's legitimizing) for morality and meaning by the religious individual's lights, at least by a number of their lights. If you preserve that but you take away other aspects of their religion, if someone preserves that belief that God is the legitimator of morality and meaning, once you remove God from the picture well then yeah, there's no more legitimator of morality and meaning. You lose morality, you lose meaning, and you lose all that stuff. What I would suggest to these individuals is that once they get rid of God, they should recognize that no, after all, God was not the legitimator of morality and meaning. Something else is the legitimator of morality and meaning. We can go through a number of different proposals. Like maybe it's certain principles that are universalizable, or maybe it's the intrinsic nature and character of sentient beings and their flourishing conditions, etc. You go through a bunch of different potential theories. So, I would urge them to resist that very religious thinking that they haven't yet cast off. They've cast off God, but they haven't cast off God being the legitimator of morality and meaning. I would just say, if you got rid of the former, then why not get rid of the latter? Because it seems to me just as mistaken. I used to be a devout Catholic before I became an atheist, and I'm not afraid to admit I fell into that nihilist pit at first too. But I was able to claw my way out of that pit once I realized it was still part of my religious way of thinking. I believe this is where "new atheism" failed. They criticized religion and theism and told people they didn't need these things. What they didn't offer was a roadmap for what happens after deconstruction. Sure, the "new atheists" can say, "It was never our job to give people guidance after their deconstruction; our purpose was simply to tear religion and theism down." My response to that is, "Fair enough." If that was their only goal though then I must say, it was a very short-sighted goal. As I stated above, many people who throw off religion and theism are going to experience a nihilistic pit in their heart, and they are not going to know what to do with it. They are not going to realize this is still their religious teachings speaking to them. They will want to fill this pit/void and given enough time they will. They will end up drawn back to religion and theism or something like it. Then they have ended up back where they started or somewhere else entirely, and the "new atheist" has ended up achieving nothing in the end. They should be helping people realize that this sense of nihilism is still their religious baggage and help with how to deal with that. They should be teaching them how different philosophies such as humanism, existentialism, absurdism, absolutism, etc. can be rewarding and fulfilling. I personally am not chasing after the end of religion and theism though. People are wired differently. Some people need religion and theism in order to survive in this world and deem it necessary in order to live fulfilling lives. Who am I to take that away from them? What I will do though, is challenge religious dogmatism and dogmatism in general since I believe it is a danger to my humanistic ideals. If someone tries to force their religion, theism, or atheism upon others then I will challenge that as well, since it too goes against my humanistic ideals and my secularism (secularism isn't really a worldview, it lacks content, it's more of a political rule). I will challenge those who want to replace established science in our society with religious teachings. I will challenge those who want to strip others of their rights and reject people's basic human dignity. And if someone wants to embrace atheism, I can help guide them in that landscape. Ultimately though, I want to be able to co-exist with those who think and believe differently than I do. We can be neighbors, we can be friends, and we can be family. Doing this in a peaceful, loving, compassionate, respectful, and empathetic manner is the hard part for humanity.

I lived as an atheist & agnostic for 30 years, I regret it so much i was empty no peace no purpose. I believe in the begging was God and not nothing that's why my life has meaning from 2007.

Atheism by definition acknowledges the concept of God has enough specificity and definition to take a position on.

Also just in! Not collecting stamps is also going out of fashion! Hang on, I think the elderly person next to me just had a stroke listening to the grammar of that one

I think Alex strawmans atheists with this idea that atheists make propositional arguments to understand meaning. I don’t see any atheists (including Alex) using propositions to build or destroy meaning. We use propositional arguments to counter propositional claims by religions. We do NOT use those arguments to counter the meaning found in those religions. The meaning conversation seems to be a completely different conversation than theism vs atheism.

I don’t see religious ppl having meaning, I see emotional issues more than meaning.

We must make memes with this music. Like two dudes discussing French fries parallity settled state on delivery minimised by the speculum of random fries angles relative to their universal positional axis. 😅

When I was going to church and reading the Bible I was not "leveling up". I actually started judging people and then realized it and was annoyed at myself. At no time did my faith make me a new creation. I also have never seen a Christian I know be any different than me morally and ethically. I didn't do anything new... in fact, I had done it all before starting to voluntarily attending church at age 30.

A quote from the video, "I'm very impressed with the flexibility and depth of Alex's thought." Is flexibility of thought a good thing? And if so, what does it mean?

Alex just works harder to remain an unbeliever, thankfully he's a much more balanced unbeliever than Dawkins Harris

Is this the entire conversation?? Or just a part?

It drives me bananas when people repackage things that humans have been thinking and dealing with for thousands of years.

Ive been too upset living in this world of abrahamic religions that I haven't got time to contemplate weather there is a creator

Brits describing America is oftentimes cringe. This is one of those times.

So it's hard not to believe in stuff for which there's no evidence? Wow. Fashion is so powerful.

Meaning and satisfaction come from the belief that you are doing something to improve the life of others.

This infantile neediness for external meaning is completely alien to me. You create your own life and meaning. You are the only one who can do that. Making up nonsense about some magical, invisible thing that decides for you what the meaning of your life is, is beyond ridiculous..

I truly don't understand why Vervaeke is popular. Comes off as a total hack to me.

What is lost of confidence? Concerning....come let us have sincere conversations. With confidence!

The gambling analogy was really well done

I think the meaning crisis is a symptom. People who are in a miserable life situations yearn for meaning. If opportunity and wealth were more evenly distributed, and work wasn't so damn draining, life would become inherently meaningful to more people.

We need to protect Alex’s brain at all cost. It is a national treasure.

How can people continue to make the argument that people should trust their intuitions about what is ontologically real? Do they not know that colors and sounds aren’t ontologically real? Our ontological intuitions are profoundly terrible

The _"non-propositional"_ aspect they're referring to is the motive character of one's own being. If the quality of one's inner make-up nets in the positive they have no pressing, existential need to seek out external value and meaning, because they already embody them intrinsically. Religion can provide surface level relief to those with existential deficiencies by providing comforting narratives which help bury deep-seated pains and anxieties. In other words, they're a form of cope which, like all cope, leaves one psychologically dependent on believing certain propositions, regardless of their actual truth value.

Religions contain both positive and negative elements. The key is to discern and retain the beneficial aspects while discarding dogmatic beliefs. True meaning is found in the present, not in some distant place or future.

Atheism is doing just fine in Japan, South Korea and Australia. We don't even think about "meaning", we just live our happy lives.

I don't know why these type of things never mention much more common meaning-filled activities, like raising kids, getting married, gardening, cooking from scratch, hunting, making art, learning new skills etc The options aren't a meaning crisis or sacred narratives, prayer, exercise, meditation, Tai chi, mantras, scriptures etc. Just do normal stuff and don't think too hard.

There is meaning to life. The problem is that most ppl want someone else on the outside (god, religion) to tell them what that is. Atheist create their own meaning, define their own purpose in life. They own their choices, thus, their lives.

We fell into the trap of religion being entirely about material proving of the existence of God, that we fail to realise that even within religion itself is the space for doubt. Read the text, you'll find a lot of doubters, who were honest in their doubts. The silence of God and the rage against God all comes with the package of religion. Being religion doesn't mean you simply have all the answers.

For me it's not a case of finding meaning, but learning not to need it. It's a case of learning not to need this idea that our personal experiences and feelings have any kind of influence and effect on the outside world, and are purely contained within our perspectives. Only then we can truly focus on developing the idea of what a fulfilling and successful life looks like for ourselves. What can feel like an empty void can be used as an empty canvas to use however you like - an uncomfortable freedom at first, but something that allows you to really figure out how you'd like to spend your time here.

I genuinely cannot follow this supposed distinction between the propositional and the non-propositional. When he says (paraphrasing), “No, it’s not propositional, it’s about whether it’s powerful or not, whether it works or not!” how is that not an implicit proposition as to ‘it works!’ or ‘it does NOT work?’

The bearded guy is giving me Jordan Peterson flashbacks.