23. Ariel Pontes on the Quest for Ethical Consciousness in a Divided World

"It's really not as hard as people think to have a peaceful conversation with somebody who disagrees profoundly with you on deep questions." - Ariel Pontes 

This week on Humanism Now we share our wide ranging interview with Ariel Pontes, a writer, podcast host and advocate for humanism, effective altruism, animal welfare and productive dialogue to counter polarisation. Ariel shares a wealth of experience and learnings from leaving Kardecist Spiritism to supporting Humanist groups in Brazil & Romania.

In our news section, AJ & Lola share their views on Richard Dawkins' recent statements comparing Christianity and Islam, whether we should compare religious virtues and the concept of 'Cultural Christianity'.

References:

• Richard Dawkins: I'm a Cultural Christian, LBC YouTube Channel
• Cultural Christians
• The Trouble with Islam Today, Irshad Manji

Follow (@ArielPontes)

• X.com
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Medium

More on Ariel's Work

• Homepage: ghostlessmachine.com
• Ghostless Machine Podcast
• Youtube @GhostlessMachine
• Humanistas Brasil
• Ariel on Effective Altruism

Ariel's references:

• Kardecist spiritism
• How Minds Change, David McRaney
• A Manual for Creating

Transcript

James H: 0:05

Welcome to Humanism. Now the podcast from the Central London Humanists. I'm your host, james. This week we'll be discussing should we compare different religions, do humanists consider themselves of a particular religious culture and why use the humanist label? Plus, we'll have our interview with host of Ghostless Machine podcast, ariel Pontes, and to discuss all this and more, I'm delighted to be joined by two of our regular guests here, lola and AJ, and to welcome Lola and AJ this week we have our regular icebreaker question. So this week our question is what source, condiment or dressing couldn't you live without? So, aj, I'll come to you first. Welcome back to the show. And what is your must-have condiment?

AJ: 0:47

thanks very much, james, glad to be with you, and also with lola as well after some time away. A condiment I'd have to go with tabasco sauce. A lot of my friends who are listening to this will immediately burst into laughter. I think I always ask for tabasco sauce wherever I go, and the story behind that is it's actually from my um in my martial arts dojo. Uh, my colleagues who compete in martial arts competitions often have to reduce weight or cut weight to get to a certain weight category, and food can be a bit of a struggle. But Tabasco sauce is an excellent way to give some flavor to your food without adding calories. So that's how I started doing it. Well, I got exposed to it initially and then just got addicted, even though I don't compete myself anymore. That's, it's always mixed up with martial arts, which I love, and also spice, which I, which I love as well fantastic, so it's a source that, like, represents your personality as well.

James H: 1:39

Tabasco, certainly, yeah, very good. And uh, joining us from the association of Black Humanists and Central London Humanists, lola, great to see you again.

Lola T: 1:48

Hi James, hi AJ, so you want to know about my sauce. I make my own sauce, so what an answer. I should give it a name and call it Root Sauce. From my village in Nigeria.

James H: 2:11

Wonderful and you're not going to share the secret recipe with us.

Lola T: 2:14

No, just in case.

AJ: 2:16

She's going on Dragon's Den or Shark Tank or whatever that is. Wasn't there that guy that went on that with that sauce?

Lola T: 2:21

Yeah.

James H: 2:21

Reggae sauce yeah.

AJ: 2:24

Become a millionaire, so I think that's in your future well, you heard it here first.

James H: 2:28

Well, thank you both for sharing that. Now our main topic for discussion this week, um, is following on from a clip that went viral in the past couple of weeks here in the uk, which was richard dawkins giving an interview to lb. Richard Dawkins, of course, probably needs no introduction to any of our listeners as a prominent atheist and humanist thinker, but some of his views have become more controversial in recent years. So I think, before we sort of dive into the topics, it might be good to set the scene. So, aj, what exactly did Richard Dawkins have to say about religion, and particularly about Christianity and Islam, during this interview?

AJ: 3:13

Well, he was speaking in a climate leading up to the London mayoral elections here in the UK, london having a Muslim mayor and also since Brexit, a really increasing ratcheting up of the tensions between immigrant communities, ethnic minorities here in the uk and white british kind of middle britain, the real britain, and that's really tearing apart factions of uk society. So in that context, dawkins is following actually on the heels of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are supposedly former atheists and people who are quite critical of religion, or at least one religion Islam, and they've now. In the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can discuss that at a later date. She seems to be completely shifted to becoming a Christian through and through, maybe even a religious one, I would say. But Dawkins stopped short of that. He says I'm a cultural Christian. I'm not sure how long he's considered himself to be a cultural Christian, but he seems to be more vocal about it now than he was when I first encountered him touring the United States, very much making the case for atheism and stopping right there, allowing no room for there to be some kind of cultural favouritism towards whatever Christianity may offer. But in any case, he's saying that now and in this latest interview he put that case forward. He said not only is he a cultural Christian, but and he was being interviewed by a host, an interviewer who's more towards the rights of UK politics, you could say that he said that Christianity is fundamentally more decent than Islam. And he's making that comparison again because it's in this context of the continuing war on terror Israel-Palestine, certainly, but this has been a long-standing comparison clash of civilizations that ensued after Gulf I and certainly Gulf II, the Iraq War and that kind of war in 2001 and 2003. He also says that the doctrines in Christianity are fundamentally more favorable towards women, whereas Islamic doctrines aren't. And he said that, but then he had that caveat.

AJ: 5:29

I don't believe in a word of the Christian faith. Maybe then he's leaving unsaid. Does he believe in a word of the Christian culture? But he didn't really expand on that, which I hope we will do in this discussion. What is a culture and what is a culture and what is a religion and what's a religious culture? And is this, as many people are fearing, islamophobia or racism or some kind of western superiority, white, caucasian, english, british superiority, which we're seeing a lot? I mean especially in the context of the israel, palestine um marches and activism. There was a lot of um. These people hate marching, etc. So cat fever is being whipped up and in the middle of that, I think this, this contribution by dawkins, has um has kind of exploded and hence it's gone viral oh, thank you very much for that summary, aj.

James H: 6:20

Um, and we'll link to the clip in the show notes it's it's only about an eight minute video, but much as aj has summarized there, there is a lot of talking points. That comes out of this and I think you know speaks to a wider discussion, as you say, that's happening in society. So I think, focusing first on this kind of idea that we can call one, uh, mainstream, one of the world's major religions morally superior or decent compared to others, lola, what's your view on whether we can describe any particular faith or religion as more decent or superior to another?

Lola T: 6:58

Before I answer that specific question, I think I just want to add a little bit. You know Eddie has covered, you know the summary of what Richard Dawkins said at the interview. But to put just slightly more context, to put it in, put more context into it, it was during Easter, the Ramadan and Easter, you know they happen around the same time this year. And then the question that Rachel Johnson first asked was, I think that was promotion of the Eid, the Ramadan, around that period over Christianity, over Easter, and that was what Richard Dawkins was talking about. And then, you know, in the context of everything that AJ has summarized, and if you have to look at what religion is, you know, to determine whether one religion is morally superior, I think my take, you know I don't want to put a word into Richard Dawkins' mouth, but, as AJ said, there is a confusion about culture of the people and the faith itself, the belief. So, in terms of, I think, to just go to the heart of it, in terms of comparing Islam and Christianity, you know a statement that Christianity is fundamentally, you know, more decent than Islam. You just have to. We cannot divorce the faith from the scriptures. So, because that is where you know the belief come from, you know the dictates of the beliefs come from. So when you compare, you have to compare what the Bible says to what the Quran says. The Quran says.

Lola T: 9:04

So in terms of whether the Bible is fundamentally more decent than Islam, it's very problematic. The Bible clearly condones slavery. The Bible condones, I've got you know. I think it may be useful, you know, so that you know I'm being factual about the context of the Bible itself. So Genesis 3.16 says, you know, to a woman thy desire shall be to their husband and he shall rule over this. You know 1 Corinthians 11, christ is the head of every man and the husband the head of his wife. I can go on and on 1 Corinthians 11, 7 to 9, for a man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man, for man did not come from woman but from you know, but woman from man. It just goes on and on to the extent that the Bible also condones rape. Not just condones, it orders rape. The Bible uses the Bible. In the Bible rape has been used as weapon of war.

Lola T: 10:29

I can go on and on about, you know, problematic verses in the Bible and when we talk about. You know whether one religion is fundamentally decent. I think you cannot assess a religion on a whole. You can only assess. I've always said it. It is wrong to say your religion is like this. This is what your religion is about. It is so individual the number of religions on this planet your religion is about. It is so individual. The number of religions on this planet depends on the number of believers.

Lola T: 11:14

So, not two people believe exactly the same way or practice exactly the same way. So I think for us, as humanists, we shouldn't compare religions, what we can look at and we must resist. We must resist this feeling, this sentiment, this outcry, you know. That is why I think we are humanists and atheists, because we talk about being proud or being rational and not allowing emotions and sentiments. You know public sentiment, practice, their religion, what they are saying, regardless of how easy it is very easy to lump people together. You know you might look at your average church of England and use that as standard of you.

Lola T: 12:21

Knowianity is really soft. If you are talking about christianity, are you talking about the pentecostal churches? You know the new strains from. I'm an african and I know some of the new strains from africa. They, they are terrifying, the one that are casting demons. We know the story. Um, maybe people who are young we don't know the story. Maybe people who are young may not know the story, but Christopher Victoria Columbia, that girl that was killed as another boy, I can't remember his name. We've had cases of children being beaten to death because of Christian religious beliefs. So we can't.

Lola T: 13:06

I think we need to resist that temptation of comparing religions. We have very difficult verses in the Quran that any modern person that believe in human rights, modern human rights values, would disagree with. And we have different types of Muslims as well. We have Muslims that don't conform to fundamental interpretation of their scriptures. We have Muslims that don't even touch the Quran and they would describe themselves as Muslims. So we have Christians who don't read the Bible and they just, you know, for them, praise the Lord and off they go, and for them they will define themselves, you know, they will describe themselves as Christians.

Lola T: 13:56

So we need to be careful about comparing religions.

James H: 14:02

Yes, absolutely, lola. I think we're talking here about two uh broad faiths that have more than a billion members each, so there's probably a billion, more than a billion, different ways to be a christian or to be a muslim. I mean, I will say, obviously, as you say, that the the question that was posed was quite, um, generalized um, and it was a short interview, so there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of time to give that context. But, yes, I mean, it's very difficult when you're talking about the range of denominations and beliefs that people have within one faith. How can you it's very difficult to create, to have, you know, broadly make a comparison like that? But I know, aj, I know you're a scholar of different faiths and have studied comparable religions. So, in your view, do you think, can the moral teachings and principles of the religion be objectively compared?

AJ: 14:54

I would say I'm definitely a student of many faiths, but nowhere near a scholar. I would say no, I don't think, for the reasons that lol are outlined. We can't objectively compare the teachings of one religion to another any more than we can compare the, maybe the actions or the beliefs of of any two individual people, because we have to take their lives into consideration. We have to take, if we're doing it in a court of law, if we're trying to get a moral assessment, if we're trying to get a legal assessment, we have to take it case by case, and jurisprudence gives us that indication that we do have to take context into account. Even if we could, we could definitively say islam says this and christianity says this and let's compare, even if we could, that there'll be a problem because of this ambiguity in legal comparisons, assuming that a court of law is the highest measure we have in society for investigating and finding out the truth of something and assessing its moral value. Even there there's some ambiguity. On top of that we have to introduce the point that Lola made in that one Christian cannot be compared really to another one because they interpret things in a different way. From a neuroscience and linguistic perspective. We can say that the interface between a human and a text and a scripture. Just by that very interaction, people can take away different meanings, different interpretations. Some Christians are more literal, some believers are more literal, some believers are more mystical. Literal some believers are more literal, some believers are more mystical.

AJ: 16:28

I spend time teaching and studying and helping facilitate community learning of holy scriptures, the Quran, the Bible. We have a Gita class running at the moment and in that, as a humanist, I approach that and what I can see is that there is this differentiation in how people understand beliefs and anyone and it's usually the fundamentalists, it's the extremists that insist on this is the only way that our religion can be understood, and that's bad for humanists, for non-believers, and also it's bad for the people in the religion themselves, because even though they may not want to leave the religion, just having a diversity of thought and maybe heterodox thought within that religion is then outlawed or is then persecuted. So that's what we cannot do and unfortunately I also see this for understandable reasons, but I still nevertheless see this and I regret it. I see this in apostates. So when people leave religion, they will turn back and point to the religion and say that is that, that religion, and that's all that that religion can be. And unfortunately I see them making common cause there in some sense with fundamentalists who are in that religion.

AJ: 17:33

So the one thing that unites the fundamentalist inside of a religion and the apostate outside or the hostile, uh rational criticizer of religion, is that they can boil down a religion to just one thing, and I would think a more humanistic way to approach this if we think of religion as a human endeavor, human creation to help support us and help give meaning to life, as I do, then we can say that we should encourage religion to be a private, personal, spiritual endeavor humanistic spirituality being an important idea here that people use to give meaning to their own life rather than interfering in the public space and in other people's lives. So in that sense we can say that all religions, to the extent that they try to do this, they try to prescribe activities and try to infringe on people's human rights, in that sense we can compare all of them and say, as humanists we oppose that. But to the extent that they're private and again we may come on just a bit later some religions just by, by a fact of history and by a fact of politics and just the way that society has treated them. They are allowed to be more personal and spiritual. Maybe buddhism, zen buddhism, doesn't have as many politics associated with it, and indeed I, I follow many aspects of Zen Buddhism in my life practice. But Islam hasn't been afforded that luxury in some sense because of things like the war on terror, because of things like the founding of Saudi Arabia as a country and their export of a certain fundamentalist Islam to the world, because that's happened.

AJ: 19:00

Judging Islam by the same token that we judge Zen Buddhism, I don't think is right, because we have to consider the social context, the political context, the historical context and how certain radical elements of that religion have been stoked. It's not as if that religion is in a test tube and we're seeing it evolve and seeing how nasty it can be. It's not in a test tube. It's got all kinds of inputs into it, including, for example, funding and collaboration from Western governments in how we seek to exploit natural resources in the region. So these things have to be considered, I think so. For that we can take a case-by-case comparison of certain teachings, certain arguments, of course in a philosophical way, but not any kind of definitive, absolutist way comparing one religion to another.

James H: 19:43

Yeah, absolutely, and I think we all know what the experience where you meet someone and maybe you tell them any identity whether it's your belief, your political leanings, whatever and someone immediately makes assumptions about your views on certain things.

James H: 19:59

It's immediately off-putting and it's a very easy argument to deconstruct if someone is making such assumptions. So I think one thing I've definitely gained from engaging much more with humanists is that when someone tells me they're of a particular faith, it really tells me nothing about their moral and ethical stance, because I've encountered every kind of view from within every all the world's major faiths, um, and I think, just just knowing that, okay, that's, that's a sort of. It could be cultural, it could be belief elements, it could be identity and belonging, but actually I need to dig deeper to understand what you truly believe, and I think the same goes a lot of humanists. I think that the term humanism will come onto this more later does give at least a bit of an indication of some stance on certain beliefs or priorities, but atheists tells people nothing, I think, in terms of what we believe.

James H: 20:56

And the point you raise as well, aj, that so much of this is wrapped up in the context as well. Wrapped up in the context as well. And I think we will have to also check our own um, inherent bias and what we've been raised in, or and the media climate that we exist in, to see how that is influencing our thoughts. And so, lola, I wonder, how do you, how do we best address, you know, inherent biases or other influences, our upbringing, our history, that might influence how we view one religion against another, even for those of us who have either never had a faith or have left faith.

Lola T: 21:32

How do you deal with it day to day? I think it goes back to what I said at the beginning, that as humanists, one of the things that we pride ourselves, you know, for, is basing our decision and outlook on life from a rational point of view. And being rational means being objective as well. You know looking for, therefore you need to. You said something you said it so beautifully. You know, and it's something for me to take away that somebody's religion, somebody saying I'm Hindu or Christian or Muslim, it doesn't say anything about them. I've never had it, you know, put it in that way before. It's so beautiful and it's for me, you know, personally, and I encourage everyone of us, you know, when you go out there, when somebody says, oh, I'm a Christian, it doesn't say much, it doesn't say anything about them. If somebody says I'm a Muslim, it doesn't say anything about them. So we have to be neutral and then give that person the opportunity to tell us who they are. And the same thing now goes to sometimes it's easier for us to deal with people on an individual level. If we meet somebody while working with somebody or we have a friend, it's easier for us to take our time to get to know them and then make up. But when they are distant from us, when they belong in a group, that's when, you know, our natural instinct kicks in. There's something I read on the Humanist UK I'm sure it was on the Humanist UK where I came across it that we have to be mindful of our instinct, because it is a fact that you know, nature wires certain, you know, because of how we evolved, you know what is different can put us at risk. So we are wired to be sensitive to what is different. But as humanists, again, as I said, we need to be mindful whatever we feel, when we feel something, to question what we feel, so that if a group of people, if we have any feeling about a group of people, if we see a group of, for example, seventh-day Adventists they are Christian, seventh-day Adventists, that group how should we feel towards them? We need to step back.

Lola T: 24:26

It depends on what maybe that particular group described themselves. You know, these days we can check what does this particular group say about themselves, about their beliefs? You know, for example, some fundamentalist Christians, pentecostal, or you know in America, what do they call them being against abortion rights and things like that. So it depends on what a group of people. You know what they publish, what they say that they believe, and then we can challenge whatever we think is against human rights or, you know, against the modern democratic standard. You know of ethics, so.

Lola T: 25:30

But to just have any particular fixed view of any group of people or any person, we, as humanists I think this is one of the things that we are promoting you know, to be against, not to have a fixed view or for anyone not to have a predetermined opinion about anyone or even any group. Until a group says, until somebody comes out to say all homosexuals should be killed, we shouldn't assume that anybody you know, because they belong to any faith, that that's what they believe. A lot of people of faith don't believe that. So we can only challenge what an individual says they believe or what a group says. We should not have a fifth view on any group of people or any individual.

James H: 26:12

Yeah, it's always good to remain curious and find out what people believe so that you can meet them where they're at, with the argument, and I think it's important as well to find where there's areas of common ground and encourage and endorse those positive beliefs that we share as much as possible, because that is going to build the rapport, which helps if you want to try, and you know, engage someone and change their mind on other topics. Um, before we move on to this point about um being of a religious culture, which I think was the other main theme that came out, a lot has been made in terms of this sort of internal coherence and consistency of particularly Islam and Christianity. So yeah, aj, I'd be keen to get your views if you think it's appropriate to say that any religion is more consistent or coherent than any other.

AJ: 27:04

We might start by asking what do we mean by a religion, as in, how do we assess a religion's coherence? Is it purely by the scriptures or is it by the scriptures plus how those beliefs, those doctrines, are enacted in each age or time by the people who follow that faith? Irshad Manji, who wrote a quite famous book, the Trouble with Islam Today she's an LGBT plus Muslim who still kept her faith but is having some disagreements with and reinterpretations of some of the ways that Islam is interpreted that are fundamentally hostile in the mainstream of Islam towards LGBT plus people she said well, which I think is right Islam should be judged in a significant way in each age by the conduct of the people who claim to be the believers, of course including the scriptures as well. But the scriptures can be reinterpreted in each age as time. Civilizations mature, society matures, etiquettes and values they change. And islam, the quran, was revealed and written down, sort of seventh eighth century arabia in a tribal desert society. It has some universal values that just has. Pretty much every text, fiction and nonfiction has some universal takeaways, sure, but there are also other things that are highly contextual for that time and for that time it could have been a progress in some ways to what came before Islam. But I think that kind of reinterpretation is key, and that's what Irshad Manji argues, argues.

AJ: 28:49

So if we judge by that, if we judge by how a particular religion is enacted or implemented, or its views and beliefs are being carried out into the real world, well then we're asking how internally coherent are people, are people's actions, and that's a, you know, a failing endeavor and you shouldn't put much stake in that. I don't think we're not automatons. We're not, we're not robots. We use gut instinct, we use rationality, sure, but we also use emotional reasoning, we use shortcuts. You know we have a lot of many, many biases. We're organic creatures. You know we're imperfect. We're not calculating 100 logical machines, so therefore I think it's not manipulating a hundred percent logical machines. So therefore I think it's not particularly fruitful and although I don't think it's very useful to try and ask that question, isn't is a religion more coherent than others?

AJ: 29:32

I mean, actually, one aspect of religions that I've really noticed, coming from a mystical, spiritual point of view, is that they don't want it to make sense. In some sense, if you look at zen teachings, if you look at dao and also some aspects of christianity and islam. When you really go to a revered saint or a teacher who's giving kind of quite mysterious advice, they'll say oh no, well, you know it'll make sense when you walk the path, you know it can't. You can't follow it like a recipe. It's not like well, first add the flour, then add the eggs, then add the sugar. No, no, it's not. That's not like that can be like that.

AJ: 30:03

Religion can be like that for some people at some part of their path. Pray five times a day, don't eat bacon, x, y, z, and then, don't worry, you'll get into heaven. Some people just want a checklist, some people want a recipe, but other people want a self-transformation, they want love, they want mystery, they want awe and majesty. These things can't be listed in a, in a recipe fashion for followers to enact and to implement. And the bible, indeed itself says go by the narrow gate, don't go by the wide gate. In matthew, you go by the wide gate where the majority of people enter. That leads to destruction. I, where the majority of people enter. That leads to destruction.

AJ: 30:40

Ie, the majority of people aren't interested in this kind of self-transformation, a deep psychological investigation of the meaning of life and human frailties and conditions. They just want a checklist. Their accountant tells them what to do with their taxes and the priest tells them what to do with the moral side of their life. They follow both of them and they think they're going to have a good life. So if you want that kind of coherence and consistency, we have to be careful about where we're looking and what we're comparing with what.

AJ: 31:07

Because if we're judging a religion by its own merits, many religions and belief systems will all say, well, listen, life is complex, life is mysterious, we can't figure it out. God knows everything. So if we, if we accuse those belief systems of being incoherent, they'll say, yes, we are incoherent because life is incoherent. So we end up into this we're not sure what. We're trying to prove that because we're coming from a point of incoherence ourselves as being human beings.

AJ: 31:34

Science and rationality and empirical investigation they're very, very narrow fields where, yes, we're testing a vaccine, and empirical investigation they're very, very narrow fields where, yes, we're testing a vaccine, we're testing a technology, we're testing a silicon chip. In those narrow areas of life we can demand high rationality and we can demand high logical coherence. But in life in general, I don't think it's. I think it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. So, based on that, and based on what we said before about each individual person having a different interpretation of religion, we have to go by the jurisprudence example, judge each case and each person and each action on its merits, rather than trying to judge it by association with a certain belief system.

James H: 32:14

Richard Dawkins did dwell on the point of being a cultural Christian, being a cultural christian um and so, um, this is an interesting point, I think, for those of us who, you know, are openly non-religious, um, whether you maintain a sort of religious culture, um, whether you were raised in it, or it's just that happens to be the, the state um religion where you were raised. So do you consider yourself of a religious culture? Maybe, lola I'll start with you, because I think you know, being raised as a Christian do you still consider yourself culturally Christian?

Lola T: 32:50

Before I answer that question, I'll come back to it. I just want to add something to what Adia said so well, to what AJ has said so well inconsistency and, you know, incoherence within religion it's also, you know, we shouldn't view it as something negative. There is something really useful about it because that is what allows, you know, the religious communities to progress and to move forward and to be able to reinterpret, you know, the scriptures, to say, actually, you know this is wrong, we don't need to do this, and then they will find, they will find a way, as you know, as humanity is progressing, they find a way within that scripture, within the problems that I spoke about earlier, within that problematic scriptures, they will still find ways of reinterpreting the scriptures to be in line with a democratic, modern, democratic, human rights values. So we shouldn't seek to have it to be coherent, we shouldn't seek to have it to be consistent, because it has its, you know, positive side. It has its positive use In terms of how I see myself culturally.

Lola T: 34:22

Okay, I was raised a Christian. I wouldn't describe myself as a cultural Christian because I don't know what that means. What is Christian culture? Because it goes back to everything we've been saying the diversity within each religion. So I find it very difficult to say, if I say I'm a cultural Christian, which culture am I talking about?

Lola T: 34:58

I have to say one thing, you know, because Richard Dawkins is somebody that I respect a lot and I will actually use the word adore, you know, and when I was watching that interview with Rachel Dawkins and I was talking to Justin, he caught himself. He knew that he was going to get into trouble. I think he was trying to say something. I'm not saying it. I'm not saying it in the way that I think he would have preferred to say it. I think you know, I don't know whether he thinks Christianity is entitled to love English culture, european culture. You know he's entitled to love it. You know I love English culture, I love a lot of aspects of European culture that way, and I love my culture. And as an African, you know, christian, I don't know what aspect of a lot of African churches they've infused African culture into Christianity. So it's very difficult for me to say I still, you know, I'm a cultural Christian. That is not a coherence.

James H: 36:19

I think it's a bit like when people speak of Judeo-Christian values. We're all supposed to understand universally what that means. However, I think I probably can connect a little more with Richard Dawkins because I think he has spoken fondly of the Anglican church, which I think when he speaks of being a cultural christian, I think he's referring to the anglican church. And even in the god's illusion there is, there is a long list of, um, some of the poetic verses and things that have entered our uh, you know lexicon that come from the bible, um, and so you know, I was know, I was raised in a CAB school and you do sort of find that you just become. The stories and the parables are very much embedded, if you need an analogy to go to. There are, as I said, lots of verses that are just littered throughout our language. So I can understand that to an extent, and I think he's also spoken previously. You know his love of some of the hymns that you would have in Anglican services.

James H: 37:26

So culture, when we think of culture in terms of the arts, it clearly influences a lot of what is around us, and particularly in a country like the UK where obviously church and state have been deeply connected for a long time. Obviously, church and state have been deeply connected for a long time. But, yes, if it's culture, in terms of your ethics and morality, that becomes a much more difficult thing to pick apart and sort of say, well, really, has that come from Christianity or from any number of other areas? And how much is Christianity in the UK been influenced by other sources and informed because of other views that we have in any country? So, um, but aj, I'd be keen to get your, your views as well. Um, as someone who's studied many religions, do you think, do you see this idea of people being culturally of a religion, even if they don't adhere to the faith?

AJ: 38:18

yes, I can see that there could be a utility for that term, but I think we have to be careful that it doesn't become a term like cultural marxism, where it just ends up meaning whatever you want it to mean and I still have no idea what that means and like jordan peterson's built a career off of cultural marxism, it seems, and many other populist figures. So I'm not saying it's quite got that bad, but for the reason that you say, poetry, history, art that were fostered in a religious, supernaturally associated environment can be disassociated from that supernatural sort of baggage and can just be kept and taken forward just for the culture in themselves, just for the art and the aesthetic beauty in and of itself. You can admire the Sistine Chapel as an atheist, as a humanist, as a Muslim, as a Hindu. You don't have to believe in what Michelangelo believed or didn't believe in, because aesthetically we're all human and there's an appreciation of beauty that in many ways can cross cultures. So I think if we define culture as things not to do with theology, things not to do with the supernatural or the afterlife, or divinity or God, then maybe in some sense what he's talking about is saying he's a humanist, because that's what humanism tries to do is take the good things of religion that actually belong to all of humanity, even before religion. But anyway, take the good things, the moral teachings, the history lessons from history, the art, the aesthetics from a religion that undoubtedly, for UK humanists, were undoubtedly influenced by the culture of Christianity and the history because it's surrounding us. We take that, we remove the God element and we just take it forward and have our own belief system, have our own art. I mean art is famous for stealing and copying from different sources. That's what art is. So in some sense, if he's saying cultural Christian, he's just saying humanist, humanist, who has a fondness for Christian art, maybe, or something like that. So I think we shouldn't these labels we should try and use with a pinch of salt.

AJ: 40:28

I don't think we can have too bright line of distinction between religion and culture. At CLH, for example, we've got quite a large association with the humanistic Jewish community and that's quite interesting in how they define what that is. So I think even if in Christianity it may make a sense to make that separation, in other religions it doesn't, and certainly in Hinduism. I mean I was born in India, grew up around a lot of Hindu relatives and Hindu celebrations of festivals and so on. And celebrating Diwali could easily be done, just like we now do with Christmas, without a belief in the actual mythological tale about gods and victory over evil. It could just be new lights, enlightenment, new knowledge, new beginnings. So Diwali, like Christmas, can come to many different meanings, as indeed can even Ramadan and Eid. I have ex-muslim apostate friends who are trying to celebrate a secular eid because they they can see like I think nicole uh also mentioned in our previous podcast a secular yom kippur. So I think these are. These are just natural ways in which belief systems and movements can evolve and dissolve and become new things, and just through the progressive march of history. And I think we see that in ourselves, in humanists.

AJ: 41:47

Going back to the previous point about the coherence, we famously say if you have three humanists in a room, you have five opinions.

AJ: 41:55

And now where's the coherence in that, if we're meant to be the logical, rational people we are? So what that tells us is actually what I've noticed is that every religion or belief system says that Christians will say this, muslims will say this If you have five Hindus in a room, you have 10 opinions. Everyone has their own version of this and everyone thinks that their own religion is the worst one. But actually we're all like that because humans are like that, because we naturally we want to be part of a team in group. But are like that because we naturally we want to be part of a team in group. But then also we want to be unique and we want to be kind of special so we can't help ourselves. And especially young people, they want to be special, they want to be radical, they want to divert, divorce themselves and what their parents were doing. So that naturally builds into human societies a divergence which I think should be celebrated. We shouldn't be afraid of it.

James H: 42:39

I think that's probably a perfect place to leave it. There's lots more to talk about here, but Lola, aj, thank you so much for your thoughts and we'll be back with Lola and AJ after this week's interview. Ariel Pontius is a software engineer and the founder of Humanistas Brasil. Through his blog and podcast, ghost machine, he covers philosophy, science, secular humanism and effective altruism. Ariel, thank you so much for joining us on humanism now.

Ariel Pontes: 43:08

thanks for having me did.

James H: 43:09

You cover a wide range of topics in your work and in your writings and online content and obviously you're at the forefront of creating humanist communities. Um, could you give us a bit of background to yourself, your upbringing and whether there was any faith involved, and your personal journey to humanism?

Ariel Pontes: 43:28

Yeah, sure, yeah. So I was born in Rio in Brazil in 88. I'm a very small kid. I moved with my parents to another city nearby, a smaller city. I lived there for 10 years and then I went back to Rio. I was raised nominally Catholic. I was baptized Catholic, but my family really and this is actually very common in the southeast of Brazil among middle-class people, but it is extremely unpopular internationally or unknown.

Ariel Pontes: 44:03

There's this religion called Cardassist Spiritism which is not very organized. It's by this French author called Alain Kardec. Actually, it wasn't his real name, this was his pen name, because actually this was well, this was his claim. Alain Kardec is the spirit who talks through him. He was a psychographer, so he was writing books, claiming that these books were yeah, were revelations from spirits and things like that. He has this book, which is basically the Spiritist Bible, which is the book of the spirits. I haven't read it. It's on my list, but basically I was raised believing in that. It's basically like Eastern religions adapted to a Western Christian public. So I believed in karma, samsara, like the cycle of reincarnations, nirvana, like when you reach, when you escape samsara and you go back to God. I learned these terms afterwards reading about Eastern religions and I was like wait, we have all this, but we didn't use these Eastern names.

Ariel Pontes: 45:08

We just say, we just said the reincarnation and cycle of reincarnations. And coming back to god, and things like that.

James H: 45:11

So that's basically what I believed growing up and you were you were fully believing all of this, yeah I, I believed.

Ariel Pontes: 45:17

Uh, I mean it was this. It was kind of a mixture, you know, because you get these influences I got these influences from family and from friends, but also you get the Christianity and it all kind of gets mixed in this weird way. When I started questioning at first, I started questioning the idea of God, the idea of God being all good, all powerful, anding, because it seemed contradictory. I very quickly reached the problem of evil. I was like, wait, if God is so good and all-powerful, why doesn't he fix all problems? And then whenever I had these kind of questions, my family would always say go talk to your grandpa, and my grandpa was the spiritual authority of the family and he was going actually to spiritist centers. He was, let's say, he was going actually to spiritist centers.

Ariel Pontes: 46:02

He was, let's say, the most unabashed spiritist. I mean he didn't even claim much to be a Christian. I mean he said Jesus, one of the things that spiritists say all the prophets, all the prophets in all religions, they're all evolved spirits who came to send a message. And the message gets misinterpreted along the way and that's why we have different religions, but at the end of the day, it's all the same. It's all the same religion everyone. Uh, it's all about being good and blah blah, and but jesus was the most evolved prophet, so it meshed very well with the the Church as well.

Ariel Pontes: 46:40

I think it's popular because in Brazil they have this crazy mixture of cultures and of religions and the indigenous traditions and the African traditions that came and the Christians that were trying to colonize, and other people who came from other religions, asians or Middle East. The people of all religions and somehow this is sort of a very friendly religion because you can say I'm not against you, we are a different religion, but it's the same thing in the end.

James H: 47:10

And why would you say you really started to question, have these questions and, I guess, follow up. How long was it then until the formation of the humanist group in brazil?

Ariel Pontes: 47:23

yeah, so in my in my early teens, it's when I started questioning this idea of a benevolent god and then I started reading about it. But I was still very much into spirituality and I was particularly interested in astral projection, which is basically this idea of leaving your body as a spirit. Um, my aunt said she claimed that she did it unintentionally, like she would go to bed and she would see her body. And I found it really cool and I went it's like oh, I want to do this, I want to do this on purpose. So I started following a lot of resources, everything that I could find documentaries, the internet was appearing. There was some social network that was very popular in Brazil Orkut. It was by Google. It wasn't very popular elsewhere, but in Brazil exploded and I became very excited about this, I think also because when I was a kid I used to see spirits, or I would. I had this episode, let's say my first episode, when I went to the bathroom once and I kind of I remember still that I looked in the mirror and I saw somebody behind me wearing all blue and I kind of I remember still that I looked in the mirror and I saw somebody behind me wearing all blue and I kind of had a mini panic. I left, I had like my lips were white and my family was what happened? And I said I saw someone in the bathroom and they started asking questions and I had a relative who had recently passed away. So of course they made all these connections and they thought they told me that, ah yeah, because children are more pure and more in touch with the spiritual world and some kids have a gift. So they put me this idea in my head that I'm special and that I am a medium. So this is what made me very interested in spirituality for a long time and, in a way, what makes me interested in humanism now, because there are many elements of, you know, spiritual questions or religious exploration. It's, at the end of the day, it is a lot about answering existential questions, and now I find my answers in science and philosophy and humanism.

Ariel Pontes: 49:19

But throughout this period, yeah, I had the phase where I was trying really hard to get out of the body and I started. I just started having questions, for example. I had some interesting experiences, but I wasn't sure if I managed to do the proper thing. So I was like, was this a lucid dream. How can I tell a lucid dream? Or how can I tell a dream from actually leaving my body? So I had this instinct I don't know why, like I, just I just had the cause. I wanted to be sure that I'm doing the right thing and that I'm not fooling myself. But when I would bring this up to other people, they would become defensive and in spirited centers. Where I went and I, they said I, if you have the skeptical attitude, it's not going to work.

Ariel Pontes: 50:05

And once on this social media platform that I mentioned, somebody posted in this forum some challenge hey, I have on my nightstand I have a post-it note with a code or a series of words, and if you guess it, I'll send you a thousand dollars. And everyone was. Some people were trying, kind of as a joke, to guess. Other people were, uh, coming up with all sorts of excuses like I know, when you come out of the body you don't have your physical eyes. You know you're in a spiritual realm, you don't. You see things differently. It doesn't work like that. And I was like wait, but this then? How then? How can you ever? Why don't you always assume that it's always a dream? What makes you think that there is a separate category if there is no way to test that in any way. So I started reading. This was one of the pivotal events. I guess this challenge on this social media platform.

James H: 50:56

That sounds a lot like the excuses that you hear from supposed psychics and mediums, and when they, when they are forced to undertake more scientific testing, they're just, you know, stage performance. So, yeah, it's very interesting. So so what do you attribute, um, some of these experiences to now, now that you take a more scientific worldview, was it just a product of being a child and having more hyper-imagination? I suppose.

Ariel Pontes: 51:28

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot about how the brain works, right, I think when we are children, we are in this training mode, so to say. We are gathering a lot of data and we don't know how to make predictions so well anymore on that basis a lot of data and we don't know how to make predictions so well anymore on that basis and so we are somehow more open to interpret the input. Data is more open to interpretation. We are more predisposed to see things as something else. It's kind of also there's a lot of research on psychedelics lately that also mentions that it puts your brain in a sort of similar mode.

Ariel Pontes: 52:01

It's kind of you go back to training mode instead of, instead of just trying to ignore the irrelevant input and focus on taking action and making predictions, you'd stop trying to make predictions and you take in as much input as you can, and then suddenly everything becomes very vivid and you're like, and you are prone to seeing things that aren't there or to interpret things as to interpret, I don't know a stick as a snake or some cloud as a face and all sorts of things.

Ariel Pontes: 52:32

So now, when I look back and I actually did have a growing older, some other experiences and when I started looking back with this perspective, I realized that there was often something like a towel. And now my assumption is, honestly there was something simple as a blue towel hanging, maybe in a funny shape, and when I looked I just thought it was a person and ran away, and then I didn't come back to check something like this. There's this book that I really like and I really recommend by Michael Shermer, the believing brain, and he talks a lot about this all sorts of how the brain works that gives us all these illusions.

James H: 53:10

Yes, we're much more prone to false positives, and that's that's an evolutionary survival, exactly so. That makes a lot of sense, great and so. So then, your questioning and reasoning took you to the foundation of Humanists, brazil. Could you provide a little bit about your experiences in setting up the group? And you know we're talking about a big country here. How are you structured to serve your membership?

Ariel Pontes: 53:40

membership. So it's very tricky, uh, I mean. Okay, let me try to make this concise there were first of all. There was a big gap between me becoming an atheist and actually getting involved in humanism at first, like when I was 15, 16, I became an atheist and I stopped and I started reading I became very interested.

Ariel Pontes: 53:56

But I started a university and I was busy with other things. I started writing. That's already when I started writing and blogging about atheism and stuff like that. But then and then I discovered humanism and I got interested Before I left Brazil and then I left in 2014,. In 2013 or 2012,. There were some atheist meetings, some big big event where people were trying to do atheist meetups all around the country on the same day, and I went to one of them and then I think it's the first time that I met people who were somehow present in the community in person and I got.

Ariel Pontes: 54:32

I joined I think it was in that period that I joined the previous humanist organization that existed in Brazil, which was Liga Liga Secular Humanista do Brasil. Like a lease, but they were a bigger organization. It's very sad that they don't exist anymore. But they basically collapsed because of the political polarization that was increasing while we approached the election of Bolsonaro. So this really it imploded because there's some people that were very involved. They became kind of flirting with alt-right, I mean. Suddenly the main causes for them were to fight the woke people, to fight, yeah, extreme wokeism, or whatever they would call it. And in a context where we had an extreme right president winning, so it was. A lot of people became extremely frustrated, me included, and they kind of started a separate group and I joined. It was just a Facebook group. Then eventually they put me as an admin because the guy didn't want to get involved so much anymore. And that's when I started getting involved, because the guy didn't want to get involved so much anymore. And that's when I started getting involved. And eventually we joined the Humanist International because there was a change at some point right where up to a certain point you had to be registered as an NGO. But then when they dropped this requirement, we figured okay, now it's easy to join Because we are a small group. Unfortunately, we rose from the ashes of this previous organization and we're very small.

Ariel Pontes: 56:06

I tried to have small groups locally and I'm still trying to some degree. But the way that I do this in Romania because I'm also active here in Romania it's by doing local, by doing meetups, to meeting people in person. And is this a big challenge in Brazil? Because it's a very big country, also because we have very big cities and people are sometimes lazy, I don't know. I went to, for example, an effective altruism meetup in Rio last time I was there I think it was the first one that ever happened I kind of helped make it happen. Luckily, there were other people there to help me and there was people who were like travel an hour or more to get there and it was supposedly a central location but its infrastructure is not very good and it's yeah, it's very hot. People sometimes just don't want to go out because it's too hot, so people are very, very online. It's kind of, I think, also contributes to the polarization the fact that people are so online all the time. So these are a few challenges.

James H: 57:10

Yeah, 100%, and you mentioned now you live in Europe. So what do you see as the differences in terms of, I guess, the state of secularism and the challenges that you face between living in South America and your experiences living in Europe?

Ariel Pontes: 57:30

Yeah, I mean I live in Romania, so it's like Eastern Europe. I've lived also in Sweden and it's very different, for example. So yeah, that would be uncomparable. Sweden and Brazil, I would say, well, sweden is just some light years ahead of us, but Romania is interesting. It's more interesting to compare because there are many things that are better here, but there are also things that are going very slow.

Ariel Pontes: 57:59

I guess I feel like it's a much more conservative country in some way, because they have such a rural population, for example, while in Brazil we have populations very concentrated in large cities. So certain things, like I don't know LGBT, for example, are less of an issue. I mean, in Rio it's that I see gay people all the time and I see them holding hands and there are gay parties and there is a parade and there are artists that are famously gay, flamboyantly gay, on TV since I was a kid. It's like kind of part of life In Romania. It's so hidden and somehow taboo, so that's one difference. But then, at the same time, abortion is illegal in brazil and when I say that to people in romania, they're like they cannot believe it. They're like really in brazil there's still a and like whole latin america? What are you talking about?

James H: 58:49

so yeah, there are all sorts of differences yeah, it's always interesting how societal norms just develop and change at different paces, and it tends to be regional. I think it's interesting you mentioned that what is the case in brazil is perhaps also the case throughout latin america and similarly, when we look at you know europe, there tends to be in you know where, where, with with the normalization of gay marriage, for example, it happens sort of sweeps across the continent very quickly rather than, uh, you know small countries uh, changing. So, yeah, and I, and I think obviously it having that comparison must be helpful with your campaigning work as well, in terms of being able to say, actually there is another way, um, and there are other examples we can draw upon, um, so I I mentioned at the you're also a fellow podcaster and a blogger. The stream is called Ghostless Machine, which is a fantastic name. What was the inspiration and what does it mean for you?

Ariel Pontes: 59:52

So there is this concept of the ghost in the machine, I think, with this terminology. I think it appears in this book by Gilbert Ryle, I think a philosopher who has this book, the Concept of Mind in which he talks about he talks a lot about language and the mind and the concept of mind, philosophy there has always been this idea of not always, but it's a common, recurring theme the idea of a soul. I mean, in Christian philosophy, of course, there is a soul and or in Plato, there are the forms or there are these ideas of Descartes has the mind-body, dualism, dualism and uh. As uh society became increasingly secular, it became more and more uh, kind of untenable for philosophers to justify, uh to, to call these concepts the spirit, to say to sound very supernatural. So it basically uh, it changed to this notion that people will often say now I don't believe in souls or spirits, but I still believe, you know, that there is something inside you, the idea of free will, that there is still something. Even if I have the same genes and the same upbringing as another person, I will act differently because there is some sort of essence that would allow me to act differently. And that's exactly what I call the ghost in the machine and what I don't believe in.

Ariel Pontes: 1:01:25

But I reached all this from a more humble beginning, from the anime Ghost in the Shell. I really liked it and it does have a lot of very interesting philosophical ideas that I hadn't thought about. So when I started reading about it, I reached this book and I got interested and I went into this rabbit hole.

James H: 1:01:43

In your podcast you try to tackle this global phenomenon that is, political polarization.

Lola T: 1:01:51

Yeah.

James H: 1:01:52

And have some sensible discussions around this. What have you learned from these conversations and, and you know, what do you see as the best way to to tackle this crisis really?

Ariel Pontes: 1:02:04

yeah, I mean honestly, I went into this because I just saw this problem and I became frustrated by how so many people in these activist circles seem to be at war with each other and they are unwilling to engage with certain people if they have the wrong opinions. And I've simply never, I've simply always been the kind of person who I don't know. First of all comes curiosity. I'm curious to understand, like, how can these people actually believe these things? Like it blows my mind sometimes and I really want to talk to them and understand. And I don't know, maybe for some reason I get triggered less easily than others, so I'm able to have this kind of conversation. I mean, I also get triggered, of course, especially with my family, when I go visit Brazil. There are people that I'm like okay, I had this conversation. I'm tired of them. I see they're not going anywhere. But also, I mean I read lately about street epistemology. There's this book, how Minds Change, where they talked about the street epistemology a lot and I became quite interested. I also read before Peter Boghossian a guide for creating atheists or something like that, which he also has a lot of. You know, socratic dialogue. It's basically the idea of dialogue as being friendly and listening to the other person and exploring their views without trying to convince them or catch them making a mistake or something like this, and in my experience it works, in the sense that it's I don't know.

Ariel Pontes: 1:03:39

It's really not as hard as people think to have a peaceful conversation with somebody who disagrees profoundly with you on deep questions. I never had, like, any difficulty, like I never had a moment or a conversation that I had to cancel or something going wrong. I haven't had many conversations I had three only so far but I mean, I do this all the time in my real life. I engage with people and I try to yeah, no matter what they believe to question them. That's also difficult. Sometimes people don't want to question it because they think they're going to be interpreted in a bad way or people are going to get very annoyed.

Ariel Pontes: 1:04:18

When I was a teenager maybe this did happen to me, but I think I learned and now I engage. Sometimes I feel like people getting awkward around me or feeling uncomfortable that I'm even bringing this conversation, but the people that are actually engaging with me are usually quite okay with it. So really I don't know. I think it's a bit the internet effect. We get used to these people screaming at you all the time and we forget that real life isn't like that. People can actually be nice.

James H: 1:04:46

Absolutely, and yeah, engaging people with genuine curiosity and a charitable nature is a much more effective way of developing your own understanding and hopefully influencing some form of change. But the main goal should be to understand better ourselves, and another controversial, or potentially controversial, topic that you tackle is that of effective altruism, as you mentioned well, now it's controversial I guess, yeah, exactly yeah.

James H: 1:05:17

I mean, this is, this is an area which, on its face, sounds entirely, you know, in its purest form, sounds completely reasonable, but, of course, has come under a huge amount of bad press in recent years. What would be your pitch for effective altruism?

Ariel Pontes: 1:05:35

Yeah, my pitch is for the philosophy. You know, is that effective alt, effective altruism is the philosophy. It's the philosophy of doing as much good. It's an idea that If you are going to try to do good and you should, so that's the part of altruism is that we have a moral duty to help people who are in need, the people who are in a much worse situation than ours, and we should try to do that as effectively as possible to maximize their impact. It basically follows from, in my case specifically, from being a consequentialist. The moment you adopt consequentialism as a moral philosophy, the moment you say that the only thing that matters is the amount of suffering that you reduce, the amount of happiness that you increase, then it becomes very clear that then, basically, every moral question is reduced to an empirical question what actually has the best consequences? And once you realize that these questions are so important for the well-being of humans and animals and all sentient beings, you realize that well then I better be right about what consequences this intervention is going to have, because there's a lot hanging here. And this is why I like effective altruism, because they reach similar conclusions.

Ariel Pontes: 1:07:02

They are very rigorous about their epistemology. They want to know what the truth is, what the current state of affairs in the world really is, what interventions really work. Because at current state of affairs in the world really is what interventions really work, because at the end of the day, this is what matters. You know results and I think the world, when you talk about politics and policy, it's so little of it is based on evidence and so much is based on hype and religion and whatever appeals to people. So it was a big frustration that I have and it was, I guess, finding effective altruism. For me it was a relief. In this sense it's like, okay, people who are reasonable and they want to bring good consequences to the world and they care about whether their beliefs are correct and about keeping their beliefs updated constantly. Because you know, things change and we get new data and we have to use science to do not only to create rockets and technology, but to do good.

James H: 1:08:01

I couldn't agree more. Yeah, thank you for everything that you do and everything that you advocate for as well. Before we go, we have our standard closing question. Ariel, what is something that you've changed your mind on recently?

Ariel Pontes: 1:08:14

Yeah, so I guess the biggest let's say I had a couple of sort of biggest changes. I guess the latest one was regarding animal welfare. It's funny now because you know I went through a period of trying to be vegan, trying to be vegetarian, then settling for reducitarianism, then kind of taking a break even from that, but ignoring these concrete aspects what I did change my mind about and it was actually in one of the events that I did with a humanist organization here in Romania, before I was doing the podcast, before the pandemic, I was doing physical events that was important to me. I consider sometimes doing that again, but in one of them I was discussing with a vegan and at that point I wasn't vegan, I wasn't even trying, I wasn't even much concerned. I mean, I did care about animal welfare but I kind of assumed that you know there are laws for humane slaughter. We're living in Europe. You know like these things industry is regulated. These videos that you see are usually like in some poor country in Asia where they're not being regulated. It seemed to me like the vegans were trying to paint an overly dark image of how the industry actually works and then after this discussion they had a lot of good arguments, that it was hard for me to have strong arguments. I realized that my arguments were weak in the sense that I don't know, I don't know, I didn't do a lot of research, I just kind of assumed what was convenient for me to assume.

Ariel Pontes: 1:09:51

And then, when I started going more into it, then I read the animal liberation by Peter Singer, I that was for me a moment that I was like I was wrong, it really is bad, it is really, really, really bad. And I I was torn because I like meat. I grew up eating meat every day from Brazil, steakhouses, everything and I was like I have to do something. And I tried to be vegan for a while. It was too hard, I don't like cooking blah, blah, blah. Then I, yeah, vegetarian. Then I was reducitarian for a long time. But regardless of what I practice, I acknowledge now that the problem is big in a way that I didn't realize before. And yeah, and I am sympathize more deeply with the vegans and I support, I feel more supportive, even if I can't resist my own temptations, even if I don't have the willpower to at least you know, yeah, well, I think.

James H: 1:10:57

I would also recommend how Minds Change by David McCraney, and one thing that certainly comes through from that is that minds change slowly and we're all on a journey, so it sounds like we've caught you mid-journey on this, so thank you very much for sharing in your honesty. If our listeners would like to get in touch or find out more, what's the best place to find you?

Ariel Pontes: 1:11:17

yeah, I mean on ghostlessmachinecom. I have all my links, but my name is ariel pontes and you can find all my tags are something like that on social media. So, yeah, instagram, facebook. Yeah, well, ariel pontes, thank you for your time and everything that you do on social media.

James H: 1:11:29

So yeah, instagram, facebook. Well, ariel Pontes, thank you for your time and everything that you do with Ghostless Machine and Humanist Brazil, and thank you for joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you for inviting me, welcome back to Humanism Now, and thank you once again to Ariel Pontes for that very insightful interview. You can find out much more about Ariel in the show notes. Aj, I know Ariel is a friend of yours, so thank you for introducing us and it was great to have him on the show. Yeah, how did you get to know Ariel and what were your thoughts on the work that he's doing all around the world?

AJ: 1:12:00

Yeah, I'm super glad to have Ariel as a guest. Finally, on Humanism Now. I met him through the Humanist International Network, through international conferences and general assemblies, the Humanist International Network, through international conferences and general assemblies, and he's really I mean, along with a long line of guests that we've already had, but he's very much in that vein a true global representative of what humanism is and how it's not a Western or European outgrowth or project. His background is from the spiritism, mysticism, origins and roots of South America or Brazil, also mixed in with the Romanian liturgical tradition there. So he's taken in those and he's had a long journey, as he describes, there to get to atheism and to get to humanism. But he's not forgotten as indeed Lola also shows this he's not forgotten that sympathy and that empathy and that importance of understanding what our fellow humans need and what they look for in religion and why.

AJ: 1:13:01

Some of this and its particular focus on polarization I've been very, very inspired by, because something that I also try and achieve in my interfaith dialogues I often get asked why do you bother with Quran classes, gita classes, bible classes or Jewish study classes? Why do you bother with it? Because it's a hopeless project? Well, people like Ariel are one of my inspirations, because working on polarization or depolarization, working to build bridges, working to show to be an ambassador of humanism at the same time. So we're doing multiple things. We're being an ambassador of humanism as he is in his podcast. I mean he's touched on all the big topics transphobia, veganism, political polarization. He really doesn't shy away from the big topics and he's such a friendly soul, fierce academic background computer science, if I remember correctly, and also, I think, analytical philosophy or certainly a philosophy degree. So because he has that foundation in a lot of the core humanist subjects, humanist academic background, he's able to really dialogue well with people from a variety of faith and beliefs and be that good ambassador for humanism.

AJ: 1:14:12

And especially in a country like brazil, where you know he is, and also in romania, but especially in brazil. It carries a price. I mean having a humanist meeting or having a humanist, as brazil barely has a handful of members, for good reason, because it's very it can be dangerous, maybe not so much under the current government, but certainly under the Bolsonaro government, the previous government in Brazil. Hopefully that will be better for them now. We'll see from a humanist international perspective as one of our members. We'll see some growth there. De-radicalization, de-polarization work is, I think, something that we take for granted in, maybe, places like the UK, although we are maybe, I think, headed that way.

James H: 1:14:57

So I think we'll very quickly realize the importance of this kind of work ourselves as well. So I'm so glad to have given Ariel the platform here. Yeah, absolutely. He's quite an inspiration in terms of the range of projects that he's involved in, and particularly in some very challenging communities, and I love that he highlighted the different challenges that he sees in Eastern Europe to South America as well.

James H: 1:15:12

But I think it speaks again to this role that just being an empathetic ambassador and stating openly that you are a humanist is one of the best ways of introducing people to the idea and showing people that it's actually a compassionate worldview and helping to ease the impression sometimes that non-believers may have. In some of these communities where, as you say, aj, there are, it's quite difficult to be openly non-religious. Now, usually at this stage of the interview, I ask our panel for something which they've changed their mind on, and I wanted to link it back this week to our main news article item in part one and ask you, lola, someone who, as you mentioned, you greatly admire, richard Dawkins, is somewhat of a hero to you. Do interviews like this change your opinion on him and the influence that he's had on the humanist?

Lola T: 1:16:06

movement movement. My view of him hasn't changed. I don't have any negative feelings towards him at all. I still, you know, regard him highly. I still like him. I use the word love I don't know why when I'm talking about Richard Dawkins I still love him very much. Maybe I'm positively biased because I like him. He's a decent man. He's still very much a decent man, Richard Dawkins.

Lola T: 1:16:49

And yes, I disagree with him that one religion is fundamentally more dissent than another. I disagree with him on that. And, yeah, we are allowed to, like we've said throughout. You know so, even within the humanist community we don't all agree on everything. So I disagree with what he's saying about. Maybe, if he has more time, I don't know whether he'll be able to explain himself better. He's not very, very good when it comes to that kind of discussion. I just wish it would take care of political discussions and then focus on atheism and science, which is great art. It really needs to take care of politics. But I, you know, my feelings towards him haven't changed. It's contributed a lot to humanity, I will say, and for that he holds a very dear place in my heart.

James H: 1:17:54

His books are all fantastic, incredibly well written, one of the best science communicators. I think we've had AJ. How about for you? Has it changed your mind? And also, do you find these general interventions helpful?

AJ: 1:18:08

I don't really find them helpful at all. As I said at the start, I think it's quite incendiary and I think as much as I benefited from and I think the atheist, humanist community generally benefited from having him as an ambassador, as that kind of a rational, very sort of level-headed, very calm explicator and proponent of a scientific, rational approach at answering some of the big questions of life, as he's moved away from that becoming more of a public figure, becoming more of an author. As a function of that I mean Lola mentioned. You know he should stay away from the contentious topics In some sense. Why should he? Because I mean, I'm sure he doesn't need to earn any more money but given his success already his success of his next book or his interview or maybe as a netflix documentary that's directly proportionate how controversial he is. So when he does things like randomly as the another tweet that I remember sitting in front of I think it was in cambridge the uh, you know church bells ringing on a bench and just tweeting saying I'm sitting in front of a church and how wonderful it is to hear these bells and how awful it would be if it was the azan from a mosque, there's no words fail me. What can you say to that, apart from he really, really seems to have this cultural, christian-like fondness for his Christian heritage and he seems to have some. Whether it's warped through a naive interpretation of how the media is feeding him, or he's consuming ideas about Islam. He's talking, maybe, to Muslims who give him that very narrow perspective. I don't know, but these things are not.

AJ: 1:19:47

I think if I was a public figure, I certainly wouldn't be making those kind of statements, even if I felt that privately. I just don't think it's helpful, especially in the age of the Internet, and we're still finding out how to really be aware of how the hegemonic thought, control and discussions and the Overton window can affect minorities, can affect their self-perception. We're still figuring out all of this. So we don't need people throwing incendiary bombs into the discussion. I don't think. But again, that's how you look at other people like Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson. That's how, from left to right, rational to irrational, all across the spectrum, if you want to make a splash and your editor is telling you that your number of Twitter followers, et cetera, is proportionate to how successful your voice will be in the global echo chamber, maybe it's not surprising that he's engaging in this kind of thing. So no for me.

AJ: 1:20:40

For quite a long time I was never really a fan personally I mean, I had nothing against them personally but of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens I think they did more bad than good personally. But you know, it is what it is. I think we have better ambassadors for humanism, and the best ambassadors I would want are scientists who actually work at the coalface, who work on the labs, who are becoming better science communicators and giving interviews and podcasts and so on, in some sense, hopefully going forward. We don't need someone who's left science and become an author to be a science communicator to say that we can actually have the scientists themselves, um, and maybe people like brian cox and others. I think that there is a. There is a danger when the person is talking about things that they're not doing on a day-to-day basis, I think they get divorced from what the cutting-edge scientists are actually believing and doing and becoming a popular intellectual.

James H: 1:21:38

Fantastic. Well, I think that's a perfect place to leave it for this week. Thank you, AJ and Lola, for your time on the podcast. Before we go, a quick plug for our groups. Our groups, aj, is anything you'd like to flag at either central london humanists, young humanists or humanists international yeah.

AJ: 1:21:58

So for humanists international, we've got a series of webinars coming up this year that's going to help our members and also associates and hopefully future members and volunteers to engage with the freedom of thought report our big publication we publish every and also how to grow humanist communities wherever you are in the world, and so please do their free webinars. So please do try and sign up for them. The details are on the Humanist Youth International website and for CLH, I believe we have an open mic poetry night to honour Benjamin Zephaniah, believe we have an open mic poetry night to honor benjamin zeff, and I are the late. Benjamin zeff and I are coming up in may and the details of that are on our meetup and social media as well. So I'll be there hopefully, so see you there as well and will you be performing?

James H: 1:22:42

well, you have to come and see yeah, and that will be hosted by alex williams, a former guest on this podcast as well, so very much looking forward to that. And, lola, thank you very much for your time again, and is there anything you'd like to mention with Association of Black Humanists in the coming months?

Lola T: 1:23:00

Yes, on 27th of April, the last Saturday of the month. So we meet in person last Saturday of each month. So the next meeting is on the 27th of April, saturday. The address is on meetupcom, so check us out. Association of Black Humanists on meetupcom. And we are discussing something you know, important, sensitive and it is assisted dying and we are exploring whether is it a white privilege thing you know.

James H: 1:23:48

So we are discussing that and, yeah, please come along Now a very important topic, lola, and one we'd love to delve into once you've had the discussion with the group. So thank you, aj and Lola, for your time, and thank you for joining us on the podcast this week. Do remember if you enjoy what we do, please do rate, leave a review and share the podcast as much as possible. We're trying to build a positive invitation to humanism globally and we're delighted with the number of international listeners that we've found so far. And if you'd be so kind, please do support us on Patreon, and it helps us grow our network and create more content just like this. So, with that, have a great week and thank you for joining us on Humanism Now.