 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. We are live today, Saturday, January 23rd for the Nevada Transhumanist Party panel on hereditary religions. This is a panel discussion that's being held on the same day as the fifth annual international protest against hereditary religion. It is, however, I am hearing some feedback, so if you have the feedback on your end, I would suggest muting. So this panel discussion is an independent endeavor hosted by the Nevada Transhumanist Party, and the Nevada Transhumanist Party is a non-electoral political party that is devoted toward the discussion of emerging technologies and their implications. Today, we have five distinguished panelists to talk about the subject of hereditary religion, and I'd like to introduce the subject by quoting two sections from the Nevada Transhumanist Party platform. Section 23 states, the Nevada Transhumanist Party supports the rights of children to exercise liberty in proportion to their rational faculties and capacity for autonomous judgment. In particular, the Nevada Transhumanist Party strongly opposes all forms of bullying, child abuse, and censorship of intellectual self-development by children and teenagers. Section 26 states, the Nevada Transhumanist Party welcomes both religious and non-religious individuals who support life extension and emerging technology. The Nevada Transhumanist Party recognizes that some religious individuals and interpretations may be receptive to technological progress, and if so, are valuable allies to the transhumanist movement. On the other hand, the Nevada Transhumanist Party is also opposed to any interpretation of a religious doctrine that results in the rejection of reason, censorship, violation of individual rights, suppression of technological advancement, and attempts to impose religious belief by force and or by legal compulsion. And before I introduce my panelists, I would also like to honor an individual who really brought the topic of hereditary religion to the forefront of discussion a few years ago. His name is Richard Collins, and unfortunately, Richard Collins died last year, but he was the founder of the annual protests against hereditary religion. And as a way of motivating the discussion, I'd like to provide just a brief quotation from him. He wrote, first and foremost, the practice of hereditary religion is unethical and is accomplished using mind control techniques. Young children will believe anything adults tell them, and the superstitious concepts that are embedded in their immature minds are nearly impossible to dislodge later on. Childhood indoctrination is meant to create a lifelong adherent, and it succeeds remarkably. And with regard to my panelists, I'll ask you to share some of your thoughts on the subject of hereditary religion and on what Mr. Collins stated in this quotation. However, I emphasize that quite unlike those who would wish to indoctrinate their children in a particular set of religious beliefs, this discussion emphasizes free thought and independent ideas from the panelists. So whichever perspective you want to take on the subject, it's entirely your prerogative, since we do encourage free thought here. So let us introduce our five distinguished panelists. We have Adam Alonzi, who is a writer, biotechnologist, documentary maker, futurist, inventor, programmer, and author of the novels, A Clank and Reason, and Praying for Death, Mocking the Apocalypse. He is an analyst for the Millennium Project, the head media director for BioViva Sciences, and editor in chief of Radical Science News. And he has recently released numerous podcasts about emerging technologies, life extension, artificial intelligence, and a lot of other fascinating topics. We also have Troy Boyle, who is a comic book artist, writer, and former president of the National Atheist Party, which is now the secular party of America, which he co-founded in March of 2011. Troy has worked for Image Comics, Desperado Publishing, Calibre Press, and Boneyard Press. Some of Troy's comic book art is included in Mysterious Vision's anthology, A Tribute, and The Return of Happy the Clown. He also provided artwork for David Gerald's comic, A Doctor for the Enterprise. Rowan Horne is a philosopher and lecturer on the importance of trying to live forever. He founded the Eternal Life Fan Club in 2012 to encourage fans of eternal life to start being more strategic with regard to this goal. To this end, one major focus of the club has been on life extension techniques, everything from lengthening telomeres to avoiding risky behaviors. Currently Rowan's work may be seen in the many memes, quotes, essays, and video blogs that he has created for those who are exploring their own thoughts on this, or who want to share and promote the same things. Like many other fans of eternal life, Rowan is in love with life and is very inspired by the world around him and wants to impart in others the same desire to discover all this world has to offer. He also runs the Facebook page, Gods Are Unproven Hypothetical Conjecture. B.J. Murphy is the editor and social media manager of Serious Wonder. He is a futurist, philosopher, activist, author, and poet. B.J. is an advisory board member for the non-governmental organization, non-profit Lifeboat Foundation, and an affiliate scholar for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He's done work as a tech advisor for both TV and short films, and currently an ambassador for artificial intelligence technology company QMI. B.J. is a co-author of The Future of Business, Critical Insights, into a rapidly changing world from 60 future thinkers. His chapter being The Future Business of Body Shops, which explores how 3D printing, cybernetics, and biohacking will fundamentally change not only the business industry of the future, but subsequently the human biological substrate itself. And finally, we have Damian Zivkovich, who is the president of the Institute of Exponential Sciences, an international techno-positive think tank and education institute comprised of a group of transhumanism-oriented scientists, professionals, students, journalists, and entrepreneurs interested in the interdisciplinary approach to advancing exponential technologies and promoting techno-positive thought. He is also an entrepreneur and student of artificial intelligence and innovation sciences and management at the University of Utrecht. So with these introductions, let us launch into the topic of discussion, which is hereditary religion. And Troy, we will begin with you and ask you to share your thoughts on hereditary religion. What do you think its harms are? What do you think are the best solutions to this problem? Thank you, Anthony. Thanks for that introduction. And thanks to my fellow panel members. It may seem almost a misnomer to call it hereditary religion because it brings to mind the idea that you have inherited biological energy. When they hear that term, hereditary religion, they think that it is something that is unavoidable. It is inescapable, like inheriting a mole or a disease. But what I want to propose is that we use instead the term religious indoctrination because really what we're talking about is parents who impose a set of beliefs onto their child at a time when that child has no skeptical faculty, has no critical faculty to examine those beliefs in the light of any kind of external teaching. I know in my own life, my grandmother was a Baptist deep in Kentucky. And on Sundays, she would take me to the DeMossville Baptist Church. And it was one of those typical sweaty, non-air conditioned wooden clapboard out in the middle of nowhere, tiny white steeple churches. And the pastor, Brother Jay, I believe he was called, was one of those pound on the pulpit, scary with visions of hellfire and brimstone and punishment for the stain of sin. Now, she did everything that she could do, my grandmother, to indoctrinate me as a child. And certainly Brother Jay did everything that he could do. But somehow, whether through some kind of exceptionalism or through the fact that my mother was sort of an independent thinker, I sat in those pews when I was seven years old and I rejected them, rejected those thoughts. I thought that Brother Jay was a performer and a bad one. And I thought that everybody else sitting in the pews, clutching their pearls, clutching their purse and screaming hallelujah periodically, were even poorer actors than he. Again, I can't explain what specific thing it was about being seven years old that allowed me to reject the indoctrination. But I sat on the pews and I was uncomfortable, I was hot, I didn't understand some of what was being said, much of what was being said, seemed like a falsehood to me. Burning forever, how do you burn forever? Don't things burn up, aren't they consumed? How can you burn forever? What substance is being burned? These things occurred to me at seven years old. So I've been an atheist since that time. Now, I don't know whether or not indoctrination can be made illegal from a legal standpoint. You guys probably know or most people that know me know that I'm in my final year of law school and constitutional law is one of my areas of expertise. I don't think that there's any current vehicle for making the indoctrination of children, whether it is political ideology or religious ideology, illegal for parents to pursue. By and large, the Supreme Court of the United States and constitutional law takes the view that minor children are more or less the property of their parents. And until they reach the age of majority, a parent has every right to instill or inflict whichever ideology they feel is appropriate. And I'm not sure, even though I'm hopeful that we can make it socially irresponsible to teach our children that ideological matters are facts before they're old enough to decide for themselves, even though I agree with that on a social level, I don't know that there's any way to make that mandatory behavior by parents. So that's where I stand on the issue. Thank you very much, Troy. And I am quite impressed that you were able to independently decide at the age of seven in spite of all of the pressures that were imposed upon you by your elders and your surrounding culture, that the religious teachings that have been inflicted on you don't make any sense. That's quite impressive. And really, I myself as a child had an easier time because I was actually raised in a non-religious environment. So for me, what I was able to arrive at on my own through the use of my own reasoning didn't receive nearly as much pushback, at least not from my immediate family. And as a result, it was a more welcoming environment for autonomous intellectual exploration and development, and ultimately my current outlook, which is an atheistic outlook. And I think you raised some very important considerations. If we do want to reduce the prevalence of that ideological indoctrination of children, it may be very difficult, if not impossible, to do so from a legal perspective. Although if any of the panelists here disagree, I'd be interested to hear why, but rather it seems to me the more feasible course of action would be through some sort of societal or cultural change that is driven fundamentally by voluntary persuasion and activism. But again, this I think will be one of the most important areas that we're going to be discussing today. Rowan, you are another individual who has told me he has some personal experiences to share with regard to his upbringing and his interactions with religion. So please tell us your story and how it has shaped your outlook on children and religious influences of our children. Thank you, Janani. I was raised in a Christian family, so that's how I was indoctrinated. Let me start off with a quote from the Bible. The Bible actually promotes this indoctrination in a way with this verse, and so obvious. It says in Proverbs 22-6, it says, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. I've heard a lot of atheists use this show, this verse, as a just showing that the Bible actually promotes this. And this is why parents, they think, oh, if they brainwash their, indoctrinate their children with their religion, the child's mind is like a sponge, and children just believe everything so easily. And this is the problem. So I was raised Christian. My biggest problem when I was being raised Christian, what caused me a lot of stress, was the idea that I was going to be punished for not believing. So in a way, it's like they coerce you to believe because, you know, if you don't believe, you're going to be punished, you're going to go to hell, and all these ideas. And it's especially weird considering that you can't even really choose what you believe, but Christianity preaches you're going to be punished for not believing. And I don't think belief is really a choice. I just think people are either convinced of it or not. So it's weird that Christianity kind of promotes this idea that you're going to be punished. I think that can do a lot of harm, and I think that can traumatize children. The other thing I want to say, I think probably the biggest problem with childhood indoctrination, and I actually agree with Troy, I think childhood indoctrination is a better term to use than hereditary religion. I think that the biggest problem by far, by a landslide, is the idea of an afterlife, just that you can tell children that you're going to get another life. I think that's irresponsible. I think there's so many implications to how that can just destroy someone's life. They're going to obviously have lack of less concern for protecting this life, not only their own life, but other people's lives, because they think, hey, people are going to get another life anyways, or it's all, you know, it's just so many ways that that's a dangerous type of ideology, especially to teach children. I saw an article the other day that said, a young girl committed suicide because she wanted to be reunited with her dead father, because she's a religion being brainwashed to think that when you die, you're going to go to heaven. So this is really, I mean, this is on some levels, this could be equated to some kind of child abuse on some level, because it would be like, I've often used the analogy of like, okay, would it be child abuse to go tell a child that you can cross the street, get hit by a car, and you're going to be okay? You know, in the end, you're not going to lose your existence. Well, that's kind of what religion does to people. By promising children this heaven and afterlife. So I think that's probably, even on a bigger, massive scale, this is the problem, because if everyone thinks there's an afterlife, because they've all been indoctrinated as a child, are they going to care about progressing science to the point of giving us indefinite lifespans and curing aging, things like this? Or are they going to be, they're not going to really care, because they're going to think they're going to get heaven when they die, and they're actually going to want to die, and they're going to want to promote physical death, because they think they're going to get a spiritual afterlife that's just so much better than this world. So that's, I think, probably one of the biggest problems with childhood indoctrination. And another thing that particularly irks me is the examples that are held up in these religious texts for children to look up to and aspire to. You have a figure like Abraham in the Bible, who almost killed his son, you know, and he's listening, he's hearing voices in his head that he thinks are God, and telling him to kill his son, and people like Abraham are looked up to as an example for children to go, this is a holy man, he almost killed his son because of a voice he heard in his head. So this is not the type of examples that we should have our children looking up to. And in Islam, you have Muhammad being preached as the perfect example of a human being, and I don't even need to get into all the reasons why that's ridiculous. But so, I mean, is religion, I mean, is childhood indoctrination child abuse? I mean, that's one of the questions that we're going to have to, and if it is child abuse, it should be, you know, if it's leading to such harm for these children's minds, right, and what happens, then should it be illegal? I mean, and, but Troy said, you know, could we really make it illegal? I don't, I don't know. And, you know, obviously, it infringes upon the freedom of speech if we were to try to make it illegal, but, you know, how far should the freedom of speech go? I mean, should you be able to tell your child that you can walk across the road and get hit by a car? Because on some level, that is equated with this idea that there's a spiritual afterlife. So, as far as my own upbringing, I did manage to, I was lucky enough to indoctrinate myself, but not many people are as lucky as I am. I guess I will, and I wouldn't know, I don't know the solution for this, like, what do we really do about this? Like, making it illegal to indoctrinate your children, you open up a whole can of worms, like, what do you do? What is the, how do you actually implement that in the real world? What do you spy on parents? You know, do you make sure they're not indoctrinating? You know, are the children supposed to be raised by the government? So it becomes this whole new, if you go down that route to actually make it illegal and enforce that in the real world, that's such a problem. I can see many problems arising from that. So it's a very, it's a very tricky thing. I don't, I don't have the solutions for this, but it is definitely a problem. I will end it there. Thank you. Yes, thank you, Rowan. And even though you stated you don't have the solution, you did raise some extremely important questions and observations. One important thought that I got from your comments was children can be very impressionable, much more so than an adult who is thoughtfully approaching a subject for the first time. So children will very often tend to lend a lot of credence to what the adults around them, the authority figures around them say. And this is not just on the subject of religion. You mentioned that the idea of an afterlife may serve as a demotivator to a lot of children in terms of their desire to fight against senescence or death. And unfortunately, some children even take it so far as to want to die, to be reunited with their loved ones. Actually, an attempt to remedy this problem can be seen in my illustrated children's book, Death is Wrong, which is intended as an entirely voluntary persuasive tool for children to access as a response to the common types of comments that they hear from adults around them on the subject of death. Initially, when they hear about death, they become outraged because of the apparent injustice of innocent people essentially ceasing to exist in spite of not having harmed anybody else. But then over time, a lot of arguments, both religious and secular, are leveled in essentially favor of this assertion that death is somehow normal or natural. And perhaps the best way to counter that is just to provide alternatives, provide a different narrative that not only enables children to consider alternative ideas, but also enables them to recognize what the adults around them think isn't the only possible set of options. So that's something else to consider. To what extent can just the sheer availability of information and voluntary persuasion from free thinkers make a serious difference in children's lives as they grow up? BJ, I would be interested in your thoughts on hereditary religion or religious indoctrination or any other terms you would wish to associate with it. Yes, thank you for having me here. I suppose my position on hereditary religion or child indoctrination, whatever. It comes from my own history. I was raised as a Christian like Rowan. In particular, it was Southern baptism. But it didn't last that very long for me. It was probably around the same age as Troy when I started questioning things. Thankfully, I had a biological father whom I visited every summer. He's an atheist as well. He laid the grout work for me to start questioning things. I was always his plan. He told me to always question what I'm told to not take everything at face value. That resulted in, eventually, I started questioning the concept of heaven and hell before I even questioned the big man upstairs. It was sort of just like a working from the ground up effect. Eventually, I got to the point where none of it made sense to me, not the concept of heaven nor hell, not the concept of gods and angels and what have you. It was definitely a freeing experience. It felt like huge weight on my shoulders was lifted for so many years because at the mind of a child, which is very impressionable, as everyone else has stated, those kind of indoctrinations, those kind of teachings from religious studies, especially within Christian teachings, it can leave quite the psychological trauma on such a young mind, especially in Southern baptism, which was a lot of doom and gloom. There is always the joke that there is nothing of which cannot be considered a sin under Southern baptism. When you're at a young age like that, it's hard to get out of that without having already been psychologically traumatized because at that point, you believe that everything you do outside of the church is being scrutinized by some invisible entity up in the sky. It's not healthy and it's something that needs to be addressed, but then the question is how do we address it? Like Troy stated, it's hard to even consider a legal precedent to addressing this kind of issue because if we do start legally fighting back as far as we prevent parents from indoctrinating their children with religion, as Rowan stated, that opens up a whole can of awareness. How do we address something like that? And if it is implemented, what kind of implications or ramifications might arise from such a policy? Because despite my sort of inclination to say I would be in favor of people, of parents not being allowed to indoctrinate their children with religion, also recognize that there has a authoritarian side effect to that kind of a policy which may actually be even more destructive than the indoctrination of religion in itself. So we have to be very careful about what we do and socially I think that would that might be the only way we can address it and to try and make it a maybe a grassroots movement of people like Troy who's started his own organizations and organized people to fight back against these kind of traumas that are being perpetuated against children. But that again takes a nationwide effort and unfortunately at least here in the United States we still have like what over 70% of people in the country who believe in angels and demons and how we address that again it's going to require something similar to a grassroots movement. I came out as an atheist luckily and which isn't easy for a lot of people and I'm actually involved with the atheistic satanic temple whom I got associated with simply because they're making some grassroots efforts to try and redefine or to challenge the notion that to be religious it requires superstitious belief. In their way they're trying to open the gay ways so to speak for people to question the status quo of religious indoctrination that perhaps maybe you do want to be religious but don't want to be indoctrinated with these superstitious or psychologically traumatic belief systems and perhaps you could be religious with a secular set of beliefs. So any way we can from different organizations from the atheist organizations or satanic temple or anyone or anywhere whatever we can do socially I believe it will make the most impact on this hereditary religious indoctrination. Thank you BJ and I do agree with you it seems to me to have any sort of outright legal prohibition on what parents teach their children would pose a lot of unintended consequences it may even create political pressure groups in the opposite direction in the sense that some people might be outraged oh the atheists are saying we can't teach our children our religion well let's have some balance here let's tell atheist parents that they can only go so far in what they teach their children and ultimately everybody gets taught some sort of politically correct respect for every possible belief system no matter what it might say for fear that somebody might get politically preferential or disadvantageous treatment so I do think this is ultimately a cultural challenge for us to overcome but one thing that is encouraging is everybody who has spoken thus far has faced considerable religious indoctrination in childhood and yet has been able to reject it overcome it and begin to help others overcome it indeed that rejection occurred at quite an early age suggesting the children may have a lot more defense mechanisms than many people might attribute to them and the key is how do we elicit those defense mechanisms so that they work for even more children Damian I would like to hear your thoughts on this topic as well of course first thank you very much for having me and I think that it would be somewhat important to actually differentiate between hereditary religion and indoctrination because I personally I was my mother was a Catholic she still is a Catholic and my dad is an Eastern orthodox Christian and while religion was a small part of my upbringing I was never forced into it you know I wasn't being pushed to go to church they were like you know we're going to church they want to come with us and they said like you know things that are being said are often not literary they're part of culture that kind of stuff and I've never had this feeling that it was pushed on me like when I was around you know seven eight years old it started to stop making sense to me but they weren't you know aggressive to me about it they didn't be they didn't get hateful or negative when I you know started having doubts about this so I think that there is a difference and that it also ties in with the larger issue of how authoritarian parents act with their children you know it has to do with how tolerant parents are of their children being different from themselves or their ideal for how their children should be and well what has already been said you know from a legal point of view I wouldn't want to create legislation that tells parents how to raise their children because if you do that you can you know you can open up a whole set of issues like how do you legally define religion how do you define indoctrination who sets this line and who enforces it so that's a whole set of questions and I would rather see indoctrination or sorry indoctrination or child abuse as a sliding scale you know how reasonable is it what parents are doing with their children and there could be you know like a certain point where a judge or you know child protection service could say you know you're going too far but I wouldn't invoke such a thing for just religion it's you know for extreme cults or fundamentalism maybe you could do something you know you could for example argue that in Islamic culture if you're a member of the more more Salafist movement you could perhaps prosecute parents for discrimination if they indoctrinate girls they're inferior to boys you know that kind of stuff so I think that it would it would be wise to look at each case and that you don't you know impose a blanket control over parents but rather take the pros that we now take to child abuse which is you know like with any crime if it's if it's obviously visible and if it's actually abuse maybe we can do something about it but I wouldn't call for a prohibition on religion itself and I'd also like to reply to Rowan about eternal life and the effect of relation on that because it's not uniform you know not every religious person believes that there are religious people I know two of them themselves who are transhumanist because their religion thought them that life is precious and that life should always be protected that it's sacred and I'm sure that's a minority of people you know but the problem here the wider problem I think is deathism and deathism is an element of the religious expression of many people deathism is also the an element of the ideological expression of many atheists for example you have people like Richard Dawkins telling us that you know it's arrogant and bad to want to live forever and I personally find that a lot more harmful than my parents taking me to church and you know telling me about culture and telling me you know it's here you can believe it you know it's it's there's it's a lot more complicated than just saying religion there's just this whole set of negative behaviors and beliefs that can occur in pretty much any ideology and I think that if you're going to address indoctrination or non-physical abuse of children emotional abuse indoctrination that kind of stuff we have to focus on these negative sets of beliefs which are psychologically or philosophically harmful and not necessarily a religion in general even though a lot of religion does fall on in this set of behaviors and beliefs very good discussion very good points Damian and I think you illustrate the need to make an important distinction between what I would consider soft religion or post-enlightenment religion which is the case for for instance a lot of European Christianity most of Judaism today this is religion that is tempered by modernity and bicultural influences to the point where it really does become very personal very tolerant and even parents who are of a certain religious persuasion may expose their children to it but wouldn't impose it on them so one could consider is it damaging for children to know of the existence of religions or of religious beliefs per se and my inclination would be to say not in the sense that it's just exposure in the sense that even I when I was growing up I learned about ancient mythology I learned about ancient Egyptian mythology I learned about Russian Orthodox Christianity my mother's parents were Orthodox Christians culturally so my parents did have me baptized in an Orthodox church just as part of the ritual and I remember that church I remember sometimes visiting services in it I never thought that anybody was forcing me to believe or imposing anything on me so I don't believe that was harmful to me in any way and at the same time neither of my immediate family was that religious and many of them were outright atheistic so I didn't feel any pressure I didn't feel any damage from the imposition so I do think it's important to consider these distinctions and at what level does the interaction with religion become abusive what kinds of behaviors constitute abuse because I agree it's not just knowing about the religion or being exposed to it it has to be a lot more egregious did you want to add something yes yes it's I'm sure it might be a very unpopular opinion here and I'm probably a minority of people exposed to religion on who it had that effect but even though I'm atheistic from like seven eight years old I think that being exposed to religion has had some positive effects on me like it's it boosted my creativity you know it's um being seeing these majestic churches on a young age made me think about you know architecture it made me think about rituals about culture it's um actually thinking about heaven and hell when I was six years old made me think about cosmology about how this would look and even though it's very obvious that you know it's nonsense it still did evoke these thoughts that had I think a positive effect on my development so it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing even though it often is very good points now Adam we would be interested in your thoughts on the subject given everything that you've heard thus far and since we've all begun with biographies I suppose I should say around the time I was three or four years old I had a set of cards about different animals and there was a very large stack probably about a hundred of them and I ended up memorizing them the Noah's Ark story seemed absurd to me because I couldn't believe a bronze age shepherd or whatever he was supposed to be was able to pack in that many animals onto a single boat or even or construct the boat for that matter so clearly a literal interpretation of the scriptures was out of the question I didn't have a particularly religious upbringing I went to a Lutheran preschool and I went to Lutheran services about a half dozen times or so and while nominally both of my parents were Christians they never really tried to force it on me or on my sister and the real nail in the coffin from me when I was probably in the fourth or fifth grade was when I thought of how many people had lived before the advent of Christianity who would be punished for never having heard of it of course because according to some Christian doctrines if you do not accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior you will go to hell and yet I think there are always going to be segments of the population who are drawn to extreme or silly causes Richard Dawkins talks about a feminist professor who claimed solid mechanics were discovered before fluid dynamics well solved more than discovered because men have penises and women are more fluid and watery now mind you this is a respected professor okay who is making this kind of bogus claim and these these claims are being published in pure reviewed journals as someone might have a susceptibility say to something like homeopathy they believe in it because someone uses hormesis which which we don't really completely understand and even though it's superficially similar to what homeopathy claims to do it has nothing to do with it but you could trick someone into believing that there's some validity to this junk science by citing real science I suppose the point that I'm trying to make is that these propensities this lack of critical thinking is probably to a large extent genetic and the goal of transhumanism of course is to augment human beings so they don't fall into these sorts of pits over and over even within the skeptic community if I say something like and this is a true story in a paper published in a German journal of chemistry a man found that the fluoropaxide layer formed by fluoride consumption was too thin to provide any sort of real protection now this is perfectly valid this was in a respected journal but this could be deemed as or is usually deemed as some extreme hippie nonsense it's not at all it's just saying that well what we thought was true turns out not to be and this isn't proof that it's harmful it's just proof that it's kind of useless when we look when we look at the ancient world when we look at really most polytheistic religions and very few wars very few real tragedies besides the occasional human sacrifice to Baal and Carthage and things like that are are directly the result of religion and the Romans didn't go around the world of slaying people and conquering nations because they were driven by their faith and Jupiter they did it because they wanted to pillage plunder and get free stuff well on the other hand what about the crusades or the various early Islamic conquests in the seventh through 11th centuries both of which were motivated by religion or the wars of religion in Europe after the Protestant Reformation which saw many atrocities on both sides solely as a result of religious zeal and sure there there may have been some side motivations like oh this guy believes something other than what I believe and he has substantial land holdings and he's a respected member of the community and if I have him accused of being a witch and burnt at the stake then I can take his stuff yes there is that but were it not for the religious component I think it would have been a lot more difficult to achieve I don't think psychopathy or psychosis are the results of religion so much as things that feed into religion or can use religion to further their own ends right is somebody in the phone exactly yes so someone like Abraham probably would be diagnosed with schizophrenia in this day and age but instead of Yahweh talking to him he might think that the NSA or the CIA is transmitting messages into his brain he would still be a severely ill person yes and of course the question is in my mind what types of societies cultures political structures make it easier for those people to rise to power versus being dismissed as cranks or identified as being psychopaths so that's definitely an interesting question to consider now before we delve further into it I wanted to ask Troy to share some thoughts because he messaged me saying he wanted to comment on Rowan's opening well Rowan said something very interesting which was that he discovered that choice that was being offered by the Christian religion wasn't really a choice because it was a choice between believing or burning so it's a coercive choice it's a choice that's achieved through intimidation it's a choice that's achieved through the threat of pain and eternal pain at that and I was thinking about this idea of choice and the first phrase that leaked to my mind was I wonder how old I was when I decided to believe in gravity because I don't I don't think that belief is so much a choice as it is confirmatory you know it's a method of recognizing the forces in our lives rather than a smorgas board that you can pick from Christianity offers you know a certain narrative and use the recipient of that narrative weigh it against your your education your experiences your environmental experiences for sure and I think for me there was there was no choice because everything that was being proposed was in direct opposition to my experience for instance the idea of eternity I immediately thought and still do eternity is a long time I don't think that most Christians when they say you'll live forever in heaven have really stopped to think about how long forever is a hundred years a thousand years a billion years you know a quintillion of years worshiping God in heaven a septillion years how long is eternity you know and so when I when I think about that as a choice I I think no even if it's the best thing in the world I don't want it so those are my thoughts on choice after Rowan talked about it and you can comment on that a little bit just a little bit go ahead um I suppose this would be a good part for me to mention some of the positive effects that religion had on me as a kid one of which was actually contemplating the idea of eternity in heaven you know just the idea you know in Christianity heaven and eternity is is like an it's the obsession it's the whole focus of the religion is is to get eternal life and that whole centeredness on that idea of eternal life I consider to be one of the most positive things that religion did for me because it got me thinking about the idea of living forever and about the idea of getting to have eternal life and that was so awesome to me like Troy said he doesn't doesn't doesn't want eternal life um I would want to ask him more about that like why doesn't he want to live forever but like to me I want eternal life and that and that that focus on eternal life carried on to this day although it's it's not about a spiritual heaven anymore it's about physical immortality and living forever physically but still the the idea of eternal life was very inspirational and I consider that to be very one of the most positive things that religion did to me um yeah yes and I think the distinction between uh the eternal life that is portrayed by many religious denominations like an eternal existence in an unchanging heaven versus the indefinite life extension that uh can be scientifically pursued is that uh in this physical world it's always going to be a changing world and our existence is always going to be contingent in the sense that no matter how well we maintain our bodies uh they're going to be physical prerequisites to our survival so we still have to exert effort we have to apply scientific knowledge and uh there is still some element of risk involved in our existence so de facto I hope that we do achieve sufficiently rapid progress that we could live for hundreds thousands millions of years as individuals indefinitely but in order to do that there's not going to be a magical moment where we know uh oh now now we're immortal now there's nothing that could get us possibly and we're just going to be in this state of bliss forever so I think that's that's the distinction but I appreciate what you're trying to say that uh this uh religious concept of eternity uh led you onto the more secular concept of life extension and attempting to reach indefinite life and what I appreciate about your thinking Rowan is you refuse to throw out the metaphorical baby with the bathwater religious system is often constructed as the response to people's very understandable fear of death and historically that's how it emerged for most people it's very difficult to conceive well how could it be that I could just stop existing that's like the most terrifying idea in my view so a lot of people derive comfort from religious systems that tell them we'll know you have an immortal soul or you're going to be resurrected someday or you're going to be reincarnated into some other type of being and the question is how do we as secularists, atheists, materialists respect that very understandable human desire to continue existing without indulging in essentially fantasy or rationalizations or constructs that make us feel better without really accomplishing uh improvement in the real world now Troy you sounded like you had a response to Rowan as well well actually you covered quite a bit of it my thought was as a transhumanist myself uh I would love to see a translation from the physical to the to the electronic but even in in in an electronic existence you're still going to risk erasure you're going to resist you're going to um risk uh some kind of magnetic incident you're going to risk some kind of deletion so even even beyond physical if we if we somehow translate into a an electronic or a or a machine dependent existence that existence itself is not a guarantee so so you hit the nail on the head there and also as your capacity increases it makes existence worthwhile if you are a limited being with a limited amount of developmental capacity what of what benefit is eternity because you're not going to you're not going to become more than you are you're simply going to reach a point of stasis you're going to reach a point of satiety and you're not going to continue to improve or to grow and at that point you're and at that point you're just a static element existing for what purpose so I like the idea that with transhumanism you're not only extending your lifespan you're extending your capacity you're extending what you can learn how you can grow and where you can go and what you can achieve none of which are available through religion yes I absolutely agree with you it seems to me that a lot of at least religious orthodoxies are formulated as static creeds and the purpose of the creed is essentially to end discussion on particular subject so that there is a final answer you're expected to agree with the answer you're expected to toe the line and then nothing else is going to be said about it except maybe centuries of reinterpretation of the same ground essentially until external changes within the society move the doctrine in a certain direction now I was curious Adam did you have some comments on this subject sure about transhumanism of course I have comments there's a very old quote that goes back to one of the oldest tests in the world the Rig Veda it says the truth is one different sages call it by different names and the spirit is carried on in the Brahmic religions Buddhism Jainism and certain forms of Hinduism that religion has to evolve alongside the society it exists within and it has to take that particular form and within Vedanta within Buddhism and within Taoism Taoism in particular there is an emphasis on extending life in order to achieve whatever blissful state you're aiming for there is a great emphasis on self-improvement on the acquisition of what they call cities or perfections and these religions are practiced in some form or another by a very large percentage of the world's population the real problem seems to be with the Abrahamic religions which are not as easily reconciled on the other hand I'm surprised to find there are a great number of Mormons who are joining the transhumanist community the Christianity has evolved a great deal over time and I assume once the economic circumstances of the Middle East improve Islam will evolve in the same way the problem seems to be more economic socioeconomic than with the religions themselves I mean if we compare the deep south which is where I'm from and I'm glad to hear that two of our other panelists are also from there I'm not alone in this instance the problem was botched reconstruction the fact that it was dependent on an agrarian economy and that the two fellows who were left to reconstruct it at Johnson and then Grant were incompetent and corrupt Grant was mostly just incompetent that's a different topic and the side effect of this is a rapidly religious educated and they are really religious because they are poor and uneducated not the other way around interesting thoughts now I do think this is a good opportunity to delve into this distinction between soft religion and hard religion and Adam you brought up some of the environmental factors that render adherence to hard religion more likely and by hard religion I mean the more dogmatic authoritarian branches of religion say the southern baptism or Islamic fundamentalism which are more likely to pursue this type of harsh indoctrination stating to children you will agree with this or else so what are some of the ways in which a particular society where hard religion is prevalent can be transitioned to one where the culture is more conducive to soft religion or free thought or a substantial population of atheists who can be open about their atheism and not fear persecution or reprisals and I'll leave this question open to anyone to answer I'll take the first point on that well you know I believe when it comes to first differentiating the soft and hard religions I believe it requires historical context as well because some people you know when we look at religion today we we sort of got this conjure in our heads that Christianity is definitely a hard religion but in comparison to other hard religions like Islam it's on Christianity is sort of on the softer side almost but it's funny to consider that because historically Islam at one point was considered a softer religion than that of Christianity and paganism during the wars between that like crusades Islam came around as sort of a response to the unfortunate side effects towards women and children in the wars that were being waged between the pagans and christians Islam made it very very clear that women and children were to be untouched during these kind of crusades and wars so at that point they were sort of on the progressive side at that moment in history but somewhere along the way Christianity evolved beyond that and Islam is still going through its own period of extreme fanaticism which was much more prevalent during the historical times during the crusades amongst almost all religions so keeping in keeping in mind historical context will help us in trying to figure out what religions are soft what religions are not and from there we should also consider not just whether or not something is a hard religion or a soft religion but we also have to keep in mind the cultural studies of these religions both hard religion and soft as Damian made a very good point in his opening that being indoctrinated is something with which we do not want to emphasize on teachings of our children but to be exposed to a rich history of cultural religion I believe would actually help the mindset become much more open and that would have a larger societal impact because you know culturally there are many religions out there that will are that would provide a rich amount of history and teachings of which may not be provided under a singular secular upbringing you know Hank Felicier so you have a brighter brains he you know he'd written an excellent article on how in the groups of the asca asca nazi jews they have a considerably high IQ level and the reason for this is because of their cultural upbringing and not so much the religious principles in itself but in the culture upbringing within that religious group of people so when we consider the cultural aspects from religion I believe that could come as a useful tool and our ability to try and open up the minds of people because if we want a free and open society I believe people need to be subjected to all sides of the argument you can't you know from from the sample of an atheist I cannot condone someone to be something of which they have limited knowledge on I believe if you're going to be an atheist which I you know I myself am I'm an atheist because I have studied other religions I have gone out of my way to learn about these things and know what I'm up against and know what I disagree with I cannot I wouldn't be able to say that I'm an atheist if I had no clue what the other religions were providing or what their cultural studies were providing having that that open view of all types of religions it's helped me become more of an open-minded person because I do have available to me all ends of the spectrum I do have all of the stories all sides of the coin available to me to actually properly analyze and if other people especially children can be subjected to this kind of teachings I believe we would be a much better society because of it yes Damien can I add to that yeah yeah about cultural religion I agree with you it can be a very positive thing I personally have developed my own philosophy I call it rational egotism which doesn't actually have much to do with God even though it has the word theism in it and it essentially uses this ability people have to internalize a culture or a story a certain body of cultural and ethical you know information and it encourages people to create their own stories and aesthetics ethics without actually believing that there is a phenomenological reference for them in the external world it's I think that a certain amount of you know an extended mythology which is not taken literally but more like like symbolism for things that exist in the real world I think that this can be a very positive thing that can give meaning and identity to people and for some people it's you know they're going to take over external cultural stories ethics etc but I would personally want to encourage everyone to create their own also to increase their tie to themselves and their how do I say is their desire to exist on forever because there is an in psychology there's actually this theory it's called the threat management theory that states that people associate themselves with a certain culture outside of themselves because they're afraid of death and by doing that they mitigate the feeling that everything that they stand for will cease to exist everything that they identify with that will stop to exist when they die and I think that when you internalize a personal individual set of beliefs and the self-created set of aesthetics that you actually go around this effect and increase the level of valuation you have for your own existence because simply put by doing that you create more of what you identify with so you have a greater sense of loss if it all goes away very good points both BJ and Damian and certainly there's a lot that we can expand upon here it's interesting BJ that you mentioned a time when the Islamic world was seen in some ways is more tolerant than the Christian world or the pagan world just recently I was reading briefly about some of the key thinkers within the so-called Islamic golden age and a lot of what I found suggests that most of these individuals were not strictly Islamic in fact a lot of them were highly skeptical not just of Islam but of organized religion at the time and they tended to come from minority ethnic groups kind of on the outskirts of the great Islamic empire so many of them for instance were Persians some of them were Christians and Jews who were tolerated within the Islamic caliphate but it was in a sense a more progressive era for the Middle East because people like that tended to be tolerated and there were certain caliphs who for instance would welcome them to their court or would look the other way when harder line Islamic clerics would object to their teachings and there was a lot of tension for instance between Orthodox Islamic teachings and the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle which were imported to the Middle East by a lot of these scholars but what really put an end to this in the 11th and early 12th centuries was a book by an Orthodox Islamic theologian named Al-Ghazali called the incoherence of the philosophers where he made the argument that Islam should be a kind of unchanging body of knowledge and that Plato, Aristotle, all of these ancient Greeks, all of these naturalist materialists they're heretics they can't be accepted and anybody who adheres to their ideas or tries to blend their ideas with those of Islam is also a heretic so essentially Al-Ghazali became very prominent in the Islamic world and his ideas prevailed over kind of the more eclectic Aristotelian or Neoplatonist Islamic or quasi Islamic or skeptical thinkers that existed at the time so it was very tragic of course how a flowering of knowledge and culture and the arts was arrested in a sense by this turn toward hard religiosity and it's also interesting to consider Adam what you said with regard to how the external environment may have had an effect on this because Al-Ghazali wrote during the time of the Crusades justice the Islamic world was coming into conflict with the Christian world and there was wave after wave of invasion and incessant fighting looting a great deal of damage to the economic infrastructure of the time so just ideas to consider now Damien you also made interesting points about culture and identifying with a culture and seeking to contribute to it in a sense I see it as an extension of attempts to live on persists even when persisting physically is difficult or impossible as it was in later eras so in prior eras and later eras hopefully it will be quite possible but in prior eras that was one of the only outlets people had that is if they wanted their names remembered if they wanted their contributions remembered they had to make a difference to the culture to the civilization in which they were a participant so creating art music writing a philosophical treatise was a way in essence of living on in my view it's an insufficient way of living on in the sense that I would prefer to be around physically to experience the future that I am working toward but on the other hand I do think it's important to consider oneself a part of the civilization in which one is involved and attempt to advance it to be a force for progress to be a force for improvement because ultimately that infrastructure of civilization is what facilitates science and technology and hopefully life extension in our lifetimes now I wanted to go on to some comments that certain individuals have been posting first of all we have Kayaki Angarika who stated once we decide that the sharing of ideas are abusive and we cannot teach specific things or share them with certain people we end up in a particularly dangerous place that has harmed the far outweigh any damage a bit of religious inculcation will likely have on individuals and society the answer to people providing bad information is not to silence them but to provide better information that repudiates the incorrect notion this applies even with people who do not have strong skills or abilities in the area of critical thinking and I think based on what everyone has said thus far most of you or all of you would agree with that statement but I wanted to ask if you had any further comments on it particularly with regard to sharing better information with children or with adults in particular what persuasive methods do you think are better than others what persuasive methods do you think would be able to lead more individuals to be critical thinkers and evaluate world views on their merits for themselves instead of just being indoctrinated or going along with the prevailing culture well through modern technology you know we are right now at a point where we're so close to unleashing so many more minds to the interwebs or you know we're starting to connect more minds at a global scale getting people this kind of information and as more people become connected to these online systems we'll have a better chance to sort of instill more and greater ideas to the common narrative or as a means of challenging people on what they have been indoctrinated to you know people today everyone has or at least a lot of people in modern countries and slowed but surely even in the developing countries have access to technologies like cell phones and laptops and they're constantly being updated with new information through different applications and social medias we could take advantage of those kind of technologies to where it would allow us to freely share out information and you know we could it would vary from different from cultural studies to scientific studies and so on and so forth but it would be probably one of the best methods that we have available to us of which was never available in any other time in history that would allow us to sort of witness the proliferation of information the proliferation of and like the knowledge yeah technology it's it's definitely it might not be the best tool or the only tool but it's certainly a great tool of which we cannot just ignore well the unfortunate thing about technological dissemination of ideas is that it's largely in control of you know whoever the regime is and the first thing Taliban does when they get in control is restrict the servers the first thing the Chinese do is restrict access to information the first thing that any impressive regime will do is restrict the public's ability to access the news and social networking and private email and that's an unfortunate reality of of today's sort of technological war that we're in but another aspect of that that I wanted to address is that we were talking about how we can transition the hard religions into into a more soft religion and I think Adam hit the nail on the head it's all about prosperity it's about prosperity and it's about education but in other words wealth of substance and wealth of education if you have wealth just pouring into an area as was true in the caliphate era of Iraq and Iran that was a secular flowering unlike anything else on the planet at the time and unfortunately that has seen a lot of regression in the last several hundred years but I think that the the solution the prescription is is wealth and prosperity maybe maybe we need a sort of a more of a global sharing of wealth a redistribution of wealth every everybody in an oppressive regime would like to have the luxuries that the West has and we've seen time and time again that when they get them that they come we become a more closely knit world we become a smaller world and I'd like to see that continue in the case of these hard religions they will eventually in my belief disperse throughout the other populations and lose that fundamentalist edge because to maintain it is to be criminal good good observations Troy now Damian I saw you shaking your head so you might have disagreed with some of what Troy has said well I mostly disagreed with the redistribution part because you know it's had this socialist ring to me well I am a socialist so that would that would be a good reason for that that's not explains it that explains it I'm a I'm moderate libertarian myself you know I'm like a classical liberal with some progressive ideas like I think that when AI takes most of the jobs a basic income might be a good idea I'm not I'm still not out on that one I'd need more information but to come back to that when you say that's more welfare leads to a more secular world I don't necessarily agree with that you have like in Saudi Arabia you have there's a lot of money going around a lot of oil dollars the shakes are you know really rich there's a lot there's like a lot of stuff but there's still one of the most repressive countries in the world so exactly the wealth that they receive is not being distributed to the common man the common man is still living in the 14th century yeah but still when I look at the Saudi you know the regime I don't think that they're using their religion necessarily to oppress the common man they sincerely believe that stuff well when I was in Iraq and with the coast guard and and saw you know this society you know firsthand and I and I just mean Middle Eastern Muslim society I didn't go to Saudi Arabia but what I saw was a money to elite with access to satellite entertainment and modern cars and suits by Armani and then I saw a middle class that was that was I would say at the at the level of wealth of the United States lower class and then I saw a poverty class that makes our poor class in America look like kings and queens the poverty class in Iraq is living out of you know mud puddles and and and and threadbare so I mean that's the reality of the economic situation I saw with boots on the ground so I don't know so um how do you explain for example I'm not saying you're wrong but how do you explain that there's a substantial Salafist fundamentalist movement in Islam in European countries that have a well-developed welfare system that have almost zero homeless list rates except in the people who are you know insane or mentally ill that kind of stuff I think fundamentalism always appeals to a certain segment of society especially those who want surety and certainty of course but we are not talking you know about a fringe we're talking about a very substantial minority of an immigrant population which has been here for you know one or two generations and you know I'm not anti immigrant I'm not anti multiculturalism but I am anti you know primitivism and I don't care if you're from this country or if you came here or if your parents came here I don't you know give them but you know this is not like two or three percent this is a very substantial population that has had every opportunity to assimilate and that still reject modernity while reaping all the benefits of it well I simply don't think there's been enough time I you seem to think that they'll immigrate to a place one or two generations is enough to abandon their cultural heritage I don't think that's that's correct I think it's more along the lines of 10 or 12 generations I mean you have to give them time to to you know completely become assimilated into the area that they've that they've come to I don't think that one or two generations is long enough I mean it's just off the top of my head do we have that time and if if the you know the anti modern ideas if they're you know if there's enough traction for them isn't that a threat to you know civilized society those would be the perfect argument for indefinite life extension all the time in the world yes I agree I agree yes I can I can see both sides of the argument in terms of time yes we should pursue indefinite life extension and it would be amazing to see how cultural change plays out over the course of many generations or many centuries on the other hand if you're sitting in a cafe in Paris and some islamic fundamentalist fanatic blows you up because he's trying to make a political statement then you lose all that time as well so I am deeply concerned about the spread of the most barbaric forms of religion in Europe and BJ you mentioned a lot of the liberating effects of technology I completely agree with you with regard to that unfortunately it seems to me sometimes technology can also get hijacked by the worst and create a kind of ideological bubble of indoctrination that they can generate a lot of information about their beliefs and ISIS for all of their faults does not lack skill in online communication in fact they've been frighteningly effective in so in my mind it's important to consider how do we use technology to counter the very harmful applications of technology by fundamentalists as well now the discussion on Saudi Arabia is a very interesting one I could see both of your points Damian and I actually had the occasion to speak to some visitors from Saudi Arabia who were in the United States to learn about insurance but eventually the conversation took us in other directions as well these were probably from the upper middle class in Saudi Arabia they had fairly well I would say mid-ranking government jobs they were fairly young fairly polished fairly westernized in appearance and what was interesting when they spoke about Saudi Arabia they pointed out there are no taxes in Saudi Arabia in fact the government controls the oil revenues but it does not need to tax the population in order to be well funded and indeed every Saudi citizen receives a stipend upon reaching the age of maturity and it's a fairly substantial stipend that enables them to have a fairly high standard of living now the question is of course which segment of the population gets it is there an underclass that doesn't get it how is it distributed and then another question is do the people who receive it continue to have an inclination toward Islamic fundamentalism either because they're afraid that the authoritarian regime will take away the goodies and punish them or is there a different segment of the population that is poorer that is more inclined at least as a proportion of the population to accept fundamentalist beliefs and I don't know the answers to that but I think it's important to consider because on the one hand I wholly agree wealth and prosperity help people adopt more secular attitudes on the other hand could there be also situations where if the source of the wealth is an authoritarian government that people might want to accept the wealth and just decide it's not worth it to speak out about religion it's not worth it to express ideas that differ from the regime so I'd welcome any thoughts on those areas I can tackle it sure a lot of a lot of stuff has been covered and it's going to be hard to organize all that needs to be discussed but let's give it the old college try of course wealth in and of itself is not going to humanize a religion and of course you have to take into account the distribution of wealth and it's even the distribution is not the issue it's whether the people have the time and the inclination to become educated to realize that all of those animals could not possibly have fit on Noah's Ark that sort of thing now when we were talking about Ashkenazi versus Sephardic Jews the Ashkenazi's higher intelligence scores more than likely are the result of well better genes of long-term breeding between them to select for those that are going to give them that competitive edge I'm adopting Judaism or instilling Judaism into a child more than likely is not going to make them more intelligent and in spite of what the far left likes to say IQ tests are pretty good approximations of a person's innate mental faculties within a margin of error of course which brings me to the topic of information and assimilation well separate topics you can give someone all the information in the world but chances are they may or may not be able to scrutinize it properly for instance if I read a paper on theoretical physics I would be totally lost because I'm not a physicist on the other hand if I read a paper on cell biology I could look and say well I'm not so sure about the amount of that particular drug they gave the cells and I know that that particular cell line does not have that kind of receptor so these results are skewed they're not quite they're not giving us the right answer and that's why I'm just sort of skeptical about giving people information more like more likely than not what will turn people away from hard religion is apathy and indifference and that comes from material comforts people look forward to eternal life not just because they you know they want heaven they want heaven because their lives here on earth they're not particularly good I mean have you ever seen a decent looking nun no of course not and religions attract those sorts of people who are sexually repressed who who don't enjoy earthly pleasures and that's not to say that there is no value in religious practices or religious disciplines I myself think meditation pranayama and shigong are wonderful and enriching experiences and for some people prayer is probably just as powerful and has real measurable biological effects on their bodies yes interesting comments Adam and I also wanted to bring in some viewer comments here as well which are relevant to this thread of discussion Wendy Stoleroff my wife has written the second generation Muslims are often much less moderate than their parents who have attempted to integrate if they are not becoming more moderate over time due to their extremist religion what should be done and I think that is an important question to address in light of the discussion of well should the change happen over a single generation or do we really need to wait 12 generations but can we really rely on the change happening in 12 generations if some of the tendencies might even become more reactionary and subsequent generations think about say a fairly educated moderate Muslim family that comes to a European country from the Middle East and maybe the father is a doctor the mother has a background in financial services they find some jobs and their their children grow up in a Western country but they undertake this kind of rebellious teenage streak and they're dissatisfied with their lives for whatever reason maybe they feel their economic opportunities aren't as great as what their parents were able to access and so they think of some sort of way to lash out at their environment and their culture whereas a lot of teenagers in the West might do things that are fairly innocuous at least from the standpoint of the larger society these teenagers have their quote Islamic heritage to fall back on and so they're attracted to ISIS whereas somebody else might not be who is not of that religious background so what do you think about that particular problem and the fact that the ISIS members are predominantly very young younger than we are which is quite scary we have a recent example of this and I don't mean to push the analogy too far but point by point it would seem to reflect exactly what you're talking about and I'm going to reference the diaspora of the Irish in the 1850s a good million to three million Irish people came to America and during that period they were they had a difficult time integrating some of them still spoke Gaelic the rest of them had an accent that was indecipherable to most Americans when you would walk through Boston or New York you would see signs on the window help wanted but Irish need not apply the Irish were used as indentured servants they were used as slave labor on the railroads they died in the thousands working on the railroads and the children of the initial Irish diaspora reacted by forming the Irish mafia and the and all of the violence that accompanied that especially in New York City but three four five six seven eight generations down the road we've had Irish presidents we've had Irish CEOs they became our soldiers they became our policemen they became our firemen they took the jobs that nobody else wanted and they successfully integrated into the rest of America from a religious standpoint a lot of them were fundamentalist Catholics which was a religion that was unfamiliar to most of Protestant America um so again they had that they had a religion that made them feel separate they had a culture that made them feel separate they reacted with violence and adolescent lashing out like you said and there was a rough I guess uh growth growth period but eventually uh they successfully integrated and I think we'll see that with a Islam as well I certainly hope so and I do appreciate the historical parallel I think it's very useful to consider that and see if we might have a similar situation in store for us a few decades later of course hopefully in the meantime various measures of damage control could be implemented obviously saving lives is the most important one making sure that the most violent expressions of this resurgent Islamic fundamentalism uh aren't able to damage actual human beings whether that be in the west or in countries like Iraq or Syria now I I do think it's also interesting to think about the sources of material prosperity and we touched a bit on that if the Saudi government gives you some money you're probably dependent on not aggravating the Saudi government at least if you want to continue to receive it on the other hand most sustainable forms of prosperity don't come from a single source they don't even come from a single industry like oil for instance they come from a very diverse rich network of commerce which enables individuals to interact across cultures and across religious and ideological barriers this was something that Voltaire observed when he was in a kind of quasi exile from France so he visited England and he noticed there are a lot of dissident sects of Protestants there and a lot of Jews as well who are engaged in commerce and who are quite tolerated whereas in France there was a monolithic block of Catholics and a monolithic block of Protestants and they were at each other's throats but Voltaire observed that when you have these 30 different religions they tend to coexist in peace because people realize they can trade with their neighbors who are of a different religion rather than attempting to kill them or expropriate them and that makes for a more remunerative existence certainly a more comfortable existence so that I suppose is less socialistic arguments but a more libertarian argument for the spread of free trade the spread of open cultural exchange throughout the world on the other hand I would probably upset a lot of US conservatives by saying the recent relaxation of sanctions against Iran and sanctions against Cuba are ways of encouraging that sort of commercial exchange and ways of getting people to be exposed to different ways of looking at the world different ways of being that hopefully will make them freer and more tolerant going forward so any comments on that observation would be welcome well there there is an argument to be had about progress in itself you know you already know I am a socialist so you know I'm definitely in agreement with Troy a socialist got to stick together but uh the argument about the the socioeconomic argument is still something of which needs to be addressed you know it's something of which does have historical precedents to especially when we get back into the you know the talk of the so-called Islamic Golden Age during those times while they were sort of more progressive at that one point they were also socioeconomically you know they were that was the golden age of their own you know even in those times Islamic scholars or Arab scholars they provided scientific knowledge of which we still adhere to today and that was a socioeconomic factor that you know where people were given the means of which they could free their minds or be able to exchange newer ideas and as the conditions in the Arab regions got worse we started to see a much more increase in fanaticism within those religions and unfortunately as these regions of which seem to be getting poorer and poorer due to various other reasons a lot of it has to be with war we have an influx of people leaving those countries and are trying to reach for more prosper nations you know the more recent immigration of Syrian refugees it needs to be noted here but unfortunately we you know how we respond to immigration is going to be one of those things which will determine how whether or not this fanaticism increases or not I believe a pro-immigration approach needs to be accepted because if we just keep leaving people in these war-torn countries fanaticism is only going to increase these are going to become more people are going to be perpetuated or not perpetually subjected to these kind of indoctrinations and then perpetuate that fanaticism all the more and unfortunately here in the United States we have a terrible immigration response I suppose our response to immigration our immigration policy tends to be equivalent to that of the Pokemon theme song unfortunately we keep thinking that we need to just catch them all and everything will go away but it just it doesn't help it doesn't help it doesn't work that way but how our response to that is only making conditions elsewhere worse and that's only going to increase fanaticism that's only going to increase the number of people who are against the conditions of which are that are taking place within countries like the United States but even within progress there's going to be those select few those pocketed sections of society who are going to reject it and Damien made a note of this in response to the socio-economic argument given by Troy you know the even in the socio-economically beneficial societies there are still going to be those types of people who are still going to be I suppose prevalent to more fanatic ideas and we're going to have to accept this unfortunately that might be an unpopular belief but there are always going to be that extreme reaction to progress itself over in Mexico we have the neo-luddite terrorists who are bombing nano technology factories you know we have like ISIS they are technologically savvy but they have access to technology which they're using against progress in the west so there are there always going to be people who are going to be reactionary towards progress but I don't think that's necessarily an argument against progress in itself it should be an art it should be argued that as we increase progress we're going to have to address more and more fanatics but they're going they might be louder than ever but they're not going to be large numbers they're going to be an increasing number of people who are no longer going to be persuaded or swayed towards fanatical ideas very interesting observations bj and I actually tend to agree with you about immigration I certainly agree with you about progress with regard to immigration the vast majority of immigrants of any demographic are going to be completely peaceful and they're going to be seeking a better life the issue is how do you identify the ones that aren't and how do you prevent them from causing damage and there have been different ideas floated around with regard to that one of the more how shall I say provocative comes from the U.S. transhumanist party candidate Zoltan Istvan who has suggested allowing in all of the refugees who asked for asylum but embedding RFID tracking chips into them at least for a certain time period so that the government can essentially detect any proclivities toward terrorist behaviors now I personally don't agree with that proposal I think that would be far too intrusive for the majority of people who are innocent but my proposal would be essentially dismantle the apparatus of indiscriminate mass surveillance and instead focus all those resources on a much smaller pool of individuals and it wouldn't be all individuals of a particular ethnicity or a particular religion it would be essentially a set of individuals about whom prior evidence is available that they have entertained certain very fundamentalist notions or communicated with known criminal groups and those individuals essentially it would be similar to the deck of cards that U.S. soldiers were given when they were moving into Iraq during the Second Gulf War to identify the leading operatives of Saddam's regime except it would be TSA operatives or say private security operatives at the airport who would have these decks of cards and are instructed essentially look out for these people don't don't bother anybody else no matter who they are no matter what they believe but these particular individuals with known fundamentalist ties make sure you don't let them through and I think that would be a much less intrusive security system for everybody but on the other hand it would be very targeted toward detecting these likely threats now I wanted also to be able to get to some additional reader comments Rodney Berry states Damien made some good points about the history of the Bible that it makes many love and respect life yet Rowan Horne is also correct that some begin to embrace death and even let's say promote death so he is essentially acknowledging that different people will derive different messages from a particular religious text and many of you have touched on what the influences on that might be for instance someone living in a more prosperous and open society might be more inclined to say well the Bible preaches peace and love for your fellow man or even to say well Islam is a religion of peace if they're Muslim on the other hand in let's say more destitute or more authoritarian environments people will harness those same ideologies for ill and I was curious if any of you had anything additional to say with regard to this observation of two sides of religious interpretation well to me Christianity is a through line from Genesis to the human sacrifice of Jesus figure so when you start with original sin by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the story of Genesis and you follow that down through all of the the genealogies and then the birth of David and then Jesus as the direct literal descendant of David who is finally sacrificed in a mortal sort of guys in order to expiate this this burden of original sin to me it inculcates a belief system in which death is glorified where the individual thinks how many times you've heard someone say I'd give my life for this I'd give my life for this ID and part of that expectation is that they'll be rewarded for doing so and and certainly the Jesus figure in in the fiction of the Bible didn't suffer greatly from his death he rose three days later and sat at the left hand of the father he's in heaven forever so with this expectation of reward for sacrifice that mathematical equation is something that pervades Christianity and all the Abrahamic religions Judaism and Islam as well this idea that if you kill yourself whether you strap a bomb to your chest or through public works you'll be rewarded after life I think I think that's the most dangerous single idea that arises from the Abrahamic religions I'd like to add something to that and I think you're talking about dangerous ideas but I think that the harm from you know I was at the beginning of this discussion I was talking about harmful beliefs and practices and I think that both secular and religious ones often have a grounding in what I call an external essentialism and what do I mean with external essentialism I mean with that that sorry I have a bit of a cold but I think that external essentialism is attributing identity question identities or ethical frameworks to the external world and this can be a religious in nature like there's a god that tells us what to do what's right what is wrong and we should follow that but it can also be very much secular it can be very naturalistic it can be like you know there's evolution and the purpose of evolution is to you know procreate spread our genes so that's what we should do and both of these things make an attribute an essential quality of an external reality having being a being morally allowed to tell us what to do and I think that's a very harmful thing it leads to a lot of damaging self-destructive ideas it's it's the idea that there is something outside the self that is greater and more important than the self which leads to all kinds of self-destruction but also to destruction of others for a greater good you know the idea that there is a greater good that transcends the individual I think that's the most dangerous idea in the world like it it's not just that it leads to you know self-destruction or violence it also leads to a lot of harmful ideas for example things like sexism can be you know science washed by saying oh but yeah they are different there are there's hormones and stuff that's equivocates biology with identity while behaviorism which is you know the essence of biological essentialism in psychology has been debunked nobody takes behaviorist psychologists seriously in academic circles this idea of an objective outside reality that can fully describe our entire experience is not scientific but a pseudo scientific discourse which tells us that something is a certain way because we can observe it ignoring the internal mental representation of the world which is by definition unknowable to others is something that keeps coming back in different forms so I think that that's something that we should really strive to combat whether it comes in the religious form of an external god that tells us this is how it is or pseudo scientific appeals to nature or objective reality that tells us that we should want something that we that's not good for us well people tend to unfortunately differentiate try and differentiate secularism from religion and I'm of the opinion that might not be popular but I don't think that the two have to be antithetical from one another now we are starting to witness an increase and a number of secular based religions that are arising that you know their their strong help beliefs are more secular in nature and that could provide us a good opportunity to try and because people tend to be religious almost in nature to a certain extent are spiritual in nature they're always looking for something more than what they currently perceive so if we can figure out a way to provide secular values uh through a religious context I believe that could help us in the long run you know we're you know you know transhumanism as a topic you know where we witness the rise of Mormon transhumance which uh from person to person some are more a theistic than others but others uh leaking can and he tends to provide a sort of almost secular point of view in terms of you know what is god maybe god is mankind or humankind and so it's sort of an auto theist point of view we have the terrorism which tend to be secular in nature I just a few months ago interviewed this person you know he wanted to remain unknown for now but he started a new religion called neptrion and it's sort of a cyborg religion but it's secular in nature and they have secular values uh so we're going to I don't think you know with religion that we're we're not going to see the end of religion religion is going to live on it's going to adapt with the conditions and then there are going to be those are going to try and oppose it but we're going to witness the rise of secular religions and that becomes an interesting prospect because as a conversation right now on religion we still have to keep in mind regardless if it's or if it's a superstitious based religion or if it's secular based religion there's always going to be the threat of you know regardless if it is secular not what values are being proposed and if it is a quote unquote hereditary if it's being forced upon if it's being in as a means of indoctrination do we allow it and but what exactly is this indoctrination is it you know are they being imposed with beliefs that man is equal that we should respect to the LGBT we should respect the immigration that is sort of a form of indoctrination but it's not necessarily negative either so I don't think you know it tends to be too simplistic if we keep saying that we we should prevent people from instilling certain belief systems to the impressionable young mind certainly they should be open to all ideas but we can't go on with the simplistic attitude that all things of which are perpetuated against or perpetuated into impressionable minds will be negative in nature well I certainly do agree with you and I actually think that secular religions can really be a very positive force that can give us a sense of identity and a sense of meaning at the top that I touched upon earlier in the debate and I also think that it's important to look at what a religion is from a scientific point of view and not just from a psychological point of view because a lot of movements that do not describe themselves as religious have strong religious aspects to them I have actually studied a religion in an academic context I've taken a course on truth and authority that takes a lot of that touches upon a lot of religious topics that touches on the science of what is religion and it's part of my philosophy studies and when you look at that there's a lot of movements that share a lot of characteristics with religion one of them is for example football hooliganism football hooliganism has a lot in common with a lot of religion there is this strong sense of identity a strong sense of group cohesion a strong set in a strong belief in an abstract concept because these people are not like worshiping the football players they're worshiping the club the firm as an abstract concept with which they identify and another very strong example of religion is the gender culture you know that people attribute themselves to a group of people because of their biological sex and they attribute a lot of characteristics that this group should have that's again the external essentialism idea and because of this we get a lot of negative effects you know like vandalism or sexism or whatever and on the other hand you had what you mentioned the positive secular religions like the terrorism or like people's personal cultural aspects which are really good and it's very simplistic to attack religion in itself I think that's like you said we should look at the values the system of values which is certain body of attitudes and beliefs about life promotes from everyone and I do think it is interesting to consider emerging religions BJ mentioned terrorism netrion I will add to that the church of perpetual life in Hollywood Florida which holds regular services on practical ideas for life extension but they also utilize elements of Russian Cosmism for instance in framing their services it would be very difficult for any of these to become hereditary religions especially in a more open-minded era where ideas evolve rapidly and each of these strains of thought interact with others in a very open manner simply because they have to simply because for terrorism to be relevant or for the church of perpetual life to be relevant or for Mormon transhumanists to be relevant they have to engage the broader transhumanist and life extensionist and free thought communities and they also have to engage the broader public so they can't be very insular they can't be very authoritarian they want to invite people and make people feel welcome even if those individuals may come with slightly different perspectives now I also wanted to emphasize a point that both Damien and Troy made and I think it was interesting for me to hear this that because it bridges the libertarian socialists divide in many senses both Damien and Troy observed that great harms come from the glorification of self-sacrifice the glorification of destroying the self in favor of some greater ideal be it an abstract ideal or a perceived concrete ideal some people personalize their deity but just as destructive would be self-sacrifice for the nation-state or self-sacrifice for mother nature or self-sacrifice for evolution which is an argument I've often heard from atheists who have said well we need to allow evolution to happen as it has happened historically because if evolution had not taken its course over billions of years we wouldn't be here the way we are and my thought that yes evolution got us to where we are but it was a very cruel process that eliminated 99.9 percent of all species that ever existed and surely we can find a better way to move on from here and advance from here I've actually once it's maybe not really related but I've actually once created a formal logic structure that utterly debunks the argument that we should do something because a thing that leads to that thing has gotten us to where we are I've actually you know constructed this whole formalism that destroys that argument if anyone's interested in it send me a message absolutely and please do feel free to share this subsequently to this conversation and if you haven't published I'll be happy to post a link in the description so that the viewers of the video recording could see it as well but yes it seems to me to be a version of the argument that what is is right it's essentially the type of naive optimism that Voltaire refuted in Candide where essentially the argument is well we live in the best of all possible worlds and because this process got us to where we are it must be a just process in spite of all of the obvious suffering that it inflicts now I wanted also because we are right now slightly over the two hour mark to make sure that everybody had the opportunity to offer some statements recapitulating their impressions of the discussion and we can start with Damien first since you expressed some enthusiasm and then we'll move on to Rowan so Damien let's begin with you yeah first I actually wanted to say I've sent the proof thing to the logistics for the panel discussion so if you want to do something with that feel free to do so in conclusion what I'd like to say is that it's very important to try to analyze understand what religion is and try to see it as a thing that doesn't necessarily have to be connected to certain assumptions we have about it because you know religion is is a kind of group behavior and a certain attitude towards a concept and this concept has traditionally always been God because we have been living in a society in a time where we didn't understand much of the universe we still don't but we understand enough perhaps to know what we don't understand but when we see our understanding of the world's evolve we also see the the concept of religion evolve and religion has historically always served a certain purpose to people and I think it can still continue serving a purpose as long as we can detach it from the irrational metaphysics and the external self-destructive essentialism set of ethics like I don't think that a secular religion is a contradiction or an impossibility and I think it can be a force for great good or a force for great evil and what people do with that I'll leave that to the viewer all right thank you Damian now Rowan let us hear your closing statement I'll also point out that in the internal discussion you mentioned that you are a socialist as well so if you want to tie that into your closing statement feel free to do that okay um so a bit earlier genotti asked the question about different interpretations of religion so one people can some people can read a verse and interpret it in a way that they think something another person interprets the different way I think one of the most dangerous interpretations that comes from religion and uh Troy and genotti were talking about this earlier is this idea that eternal life is a guarantee that that eternal life is a certainty it's something you like one day like these these Christians will say oh am I born again Christian I I have eternal life they'll talk about in eternal life in terms of possessing it as if they they know the eternal future of what's going to happen they know if they're going to exist forever this is the kind of ridiculous dangerous ideas that are coming out of religion and this and you guys talked about self-sacrifice I think that this idea of that eternal life is a certainty that eternal life is a guarantee this is the kind of thing that breeds self-sacrifice this is why a suicide bomber is willing to go out and blow themselves up it's because they think that their eternal life is guaranteed to them right and so it's like oh well I'll get another body so it doesn't matter if I kill myself and I'll get bonuses in heaven you know if I kill these people it's just it's so evil and this to bring it back around to the idea to the issue of childhood indoctrination I mean this is truly despicable to tell children that eternal life is a guarantee that you're going to live forever for certain and you're going to exist forever I mean that is it is so unethical um so yeah I do think childhood indoctrination is childhood I don't think I think it is child abuse to tell someone that their eternal life is certain and um it's it's child abuse to tell to tell children that anything is certain in in terms of things that cannot be known you know certain things are maybe knowable like mathematical equations one plus one equals two like we can know that because it's a truth it's a truism that cannot be undone but as far as things that cannot be known you know children should be taught how to think and to doubt and to understand what is in the realm of the things that can be known and what is in the realm of things that cannot be known so I think you know religions should be taught as possibilities and not as and not as facts you know it's it's and I'm not biased I would say the same thing as far as you know teaching children the atheism is a fact I mean that's ridiculous too you shouldn't tell children that that that you know something that you don't know and nobody knows these things like nobody knows for sure if there's a god or if there's not and what people believe is a different question and but let that be up to the children once they come to the age of reason like let them think for themselves and not brainwash them with um you know and this and you can find a as far as the idea of eternal life being a guarantee that idea should be ridiculed wherever it's coming from whether it's coming from religion or whether it's coming from secular transhumanists I've heard transhumanists say the same thing through you know they're gonna they're have their eternal they're gonna get to live forever because it's certainty because the singularity and then we're gonna have quantum archaeology and everyone's gonna be resurrected this this whole thing of the idea that immortality or eternal life is a guarantee should be just just completely whoever says that needs to be ridiculed like wherever it's found um and then uh is this my completely cold closing statement feel free to say anything you wish we are flexible here I will want to give everyone a chance to offer a closing or quasi closing statement though um okay I'll say one more thing um so you talked about I think we should mention Richard Dawkins so you talked about Richard Collins well there's another Richard Dawkins so I thought has contributed a great amount to this whole idea of childhood indoctrination he taught he came up with the idea of the meme and that religion is he compared it to a virus like a meme that gets you know perpetuated much like a virus through infecting and it how does it happen it's through the indoctrination of children and it's it's gonna be an endless cycle we're always gonna have religion and unless we can somehow prevent this childhood indoctrination it's just it seems to me there's no there's no way to stop it if if that's if unless we can make it illegal but I don't but we've talked about that before there's there's many um problems with with doing that as well so um the question shouldn't be how to stop it all together but how to diminish its prevalence and diminish its harmful effects to the point that we can advance in terms of the prevailing level of technological and cultural and moral progress so that essentially all of the good aspects predominate over the bad uh so let us hear a closing statement from adam adam yes i had uh my phone muted for a moment well well we have covered quite a bit of ground and i think it's good to start with something that milton freedman mentioned no i'm not a socialist sorry guys those who are i i'm certainly not a libertarian either but freedman said that you cannot have social programs and an overabundance of social programs and open borders at the same time because those are bound to be exploited i would like to add a caveat to what he said which is you need some sort of pressure for assimilation now i am a third generation american on both sides of my family one from italy the other from germany and within a generation they were speaking english they were singing yankee doodle they were doing all those things in a good american fashion however this is because there is an enormous amount of social pressure to do these things whereas if you have immigrants who are allowed to mean keep all of their culture even those parts that are not compatible with western civilization those parts that might be homophobic or misogynistic or whatever it may be they're going to remain that way and that seems to be the situation in europe i don't think anyone is going to benefit from europe being turned into an annex of the middle east i don't think the world will benefit from europe turning into a third world hellhole so i i think those policies have to be addressed and we have to look at how our cultures are structured subjectivism which comes largely from the frankfurt school the marxian frankfurt school needs to be demolished ultimately that comes from academia to a large extent damien was saying that a behaviorism was dead and this is true in the cognitive sciences and neuroscience but it's very much alive in the humanities and the humanities nurture is almost always taken over the side of nature and at the end of the day what it seems as human beings are not blank slides we are not these infinitely malleable beings and culture all cultures are not created equally some are much more conducive to progress and to things that are universally valued as good we almost all cherish health we all cherish life we all cherish a lack of crime we all cherish well at least except for the neoprimitivists and other insane luddites we all cherish material prosperity as well because that's what makes life good or at least life on this earth and thinking about some of the the other points that it come up oh dear dear dear i i i foresee the greatest advances for humankind coming from the amplification of our faculties and without those amplifications without some change to our hardware there will not be any significant progress in this area because people will be drawn to equally ridiculous secular faith systems as bj was saying oh it's a problem they're problems with the human brain itself that need to be changed that need to be addressed i completely agree with you adam with regard to problems with the human brain it does seem to me the internet has succeeded tremendously in making vast amounts of information available to vast amounts of people but there is still the challenge of processing all that information and appropriately applying one's critical faculty to it because a large portion of that information is misinformation or conjecture and to filter out the truth from the misinformation and still requires a level of intellectual discipline that many people do not have and my great hope for transhumanism is that emerging technologies will amplify human cognitive capabilities to the level where people can reason through this uh unprecedented volume of information and put it to good use troi i would be interested in a closing or quasi closing statement from you i'll also uh cite a comment that you made uh as a clarification a you wrote to be specific i'm a socialist of the nordic model i support the notion of luxuries and innovation should be traded in a competitive marketplace but we should also be big enough and responsible enough to guarantee the basics for all and bj expressed agreement with that statement as well uh but troi uh let's open this up to any thoughts you may have on the discussion sure um i think what we're talking about basically is a uh is a children's bill of rights uh children should be uh or have access to um nutrition certainly they should have access to uh physical education they should have access to uh a home that's free of violence they should be they should have uh i think we can all agree on these minimum these de minimis uh conditions that all children should be raised in and you said it earlier and i think i think maybe adam mentioned this also is that during the indoctrination of children which we cannot stop legally we've we've all admitted that we can't stop a parent from trading their ideas downward to their children um we if they're a republican and they want to raise a republican child we can't stop them from from uh passing on what they think is their good knowledge to their children and religion is part of that good knowledge that they believe they're passing on whether we believe that's good knowledge or not that's what they're trying to do but i think that from a a perspective of the children's bill of rights what we can do legally and i've been tossing this back and forth all in my head all during the conversation how to arrive at some kind of legal action what we can do is look at a child like myself who at seven years old had rejected religion now if my grandmother and my mother my father wasn't in the home if they had continued to try and force me to to believe to take me to take me to weekends to put me in lockdowns to put me in overnights and i and i know christian families do this then they would be violating my rights so i think we need to get personal with the families and we need to know is this child a secular child or are they a religious child do they accept their religious indoctrination willingly or do they resist it if they resist it then we have to support them with some kind of legal tools and i think that's one um one vector that we can that we can attack the idea of childhood indoctrination from a legal standpoint we have to support that child's ability to choose if they choose yes that's really my final statement well uh i really like the concept of the children's bill of rights as a libertarian individualist who wants to extend the principle of individual rights to as many individuals as possible individuals who are capable of let's say supporting those rights by virtue of their nature so for instance it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say an infant has the right of free thought on the subject of religion because an infant doesn't have that capacity however for a seven-year-old i think it's important to acknowledge that right because a seven-year-old already has had some experience with the world has a rational faculty has an ability to accept or reject ideas and even to find some ideas to be completely ridiculous so uh there should be in essence a sliding scale of rights the children come to acquire as they become older as they acquire additional capabilities leading up to the full set of individual rights that all human adults enjoy and of course that raises a set of very interesting questions like when do you recognize a particular right in a particular individual what are the prerequisites it's not just chronological age because different people develop at different rates and and for instance i've often found it ridiculous to think that oh some people are denied the ability to vote even though say of 14 or 15 they may be far better versed in the political system of their country than most adults are and that doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate restriction so perhaps i'm inclined to be more inclusive in terms of recognizing the full set of rights of many people a lot earlier than legal ages of maturity in western countries today would permit now bj i also wanted to get a closing or quasi closing statement from you right i'll try make this as quick as possible uh you know everyone has made a very good arguments regarding religion and how to address it from social economic standpoint and otherwise uh you know we are in a certain position today where there are an abundance amount of uh venues of which we could adhere to to try and address these problems and that in itself is definitely uplifting to know because we have an abundance of choices now that people are available to to address these unfortunate realities that we're currently perpetuated with uh you know it we you know we are differentiating you know in the panel we tend to differentiate politically and economically it varies from libertarian to socialist and otherwise but for my my point of view is you know we are economically in a position now to where we can address things like religious indoctrinations uh by uplifting people's social conditions especially uh children who as we've all agreed are have very impressionable minds and uh where you know it was uh chinese it was a chinese socialist dim shall be who once stated that you know we are going to have to live with capitalism for a while that uh no matter what system comes after what social economic comes after whether we call it socialism or age of abundance or the technium as kevin kelly calls it you know it's irrelevant what we call it let's just get there uh but we are going to have to deal with the current conditions of which we are inherited with and i believe he he called it sort of uh the way we need to address it is to be economically capitalist but socially socialist uh insofar that we uh you know we keep in mind the economic conditions that are uh being exacerbated in our current days but keep in mind that everyone deserves these basics for all and that we should if we can provide as much for the common man and woman and child and this will help us address these conditions especially uh religious indoctrination uh but he made it very clear that at the forefront of it all science and technology must be perpetuated to society it will help uplift humanity and uh and i've heard people say that you know technology is great but there are always going to be those side effects which is true and i don't think anyone here also would would make the argument uh that we should have limitations on our technological growth i believe that the proliferation of technology will help not just share information across the board at a global scale but will also help us uplift people socioeconomically it's not an idea that could be uh provided it's something that is already a current people already using those uh the proliferation of technology to help lift uplift themselves out of their socioeconomic conditions to engineer new infrastructures that is helping not just themselves but their uh community and it's going to help all it's going to also help them uh address religious indoctrination to help them have more choices and more information to uh fall upon but religion in itself will also help them to some extent or at least certain teachings you know we are we tend to use religion or the religious text from the holy bottle to the Koran whatever as sort of a basis of what we need to address scientifically and uh there are many ideas of which we are uh we we tend to agree with like uh rowan mentions eternal life you know we want to achieve something like that from a choice-based perspective where people have the choice of living for as long as they want from a scientific and technological means and there are other companies like QMI who i'm an capacitor with who want to uh try and give this uh the concept of an afterlife the the ability to come back after depth through cryonics and uh stem cell research and um cypher denix will be able to help uplift people and help them have another chance at life even if they go through the unfortunate demise of death so we are in a position where we can finally use religious text to our advantage to help uplift ourselves scientifically and technologically uh but uh getting there it's going to require a global effort and it's going to have to require the efforts of people who might not even agree with each other uh but i i feel a sense of hope that we will be able to achieve this uh if not for the example of what we're currently showing we are libertarian socialists and otherwise but we've all come to the agreement that hereditary religion is bad we must oppose it in any way possible and we i would argue that we're all transhumanist uh to some degree and that you know that brings us all together regardless of our socioeconomic ideologies and those are excellent points bj i was just thinking uh right before you said it this discussion is an excellent example of what we should strive to achieve in the broader society in terms of people of different perspectives thinking about common problems like religious indoctrination and working out possible solutions to them while still accepting essentially any of the beneficial influences that various religions might provide so with that i understand we've had a very spirited and thought-provoking discussion uh some people who are on their mobile phones have uh their batteries about to expire so i think uh this would be a fitting place to call a conclusion to it although we certainly haven't finished uh and couldn't possibly finish exploring all of the implications of the ideas that were discussed but i would like to thank all of our panelists for their excellent contributions today i think uh that made this panel uh extremely worthwhile and extremely beneficial for people to revisit months and years from now uh so thank you very much thank you thank you very much for having us thank you genotti excellent