0:00 – Being a 7th day Adventist; how the community has its own education system.
6:30 – Being taught evolution in a Christian High School.
9:04 – Cracks in his faith – bible study, reading apologetics.
10:32 – More cracks – conversations with friends, watching the Four Horsemen online, debates.
13:00 – Solution to the doubt – a la Descartes! Figure out first principles. But also, how his social life disappeared.
15:33 – The personal and logical arguments he used to think about God’s existence.
19:50 – How he’s an agnostic now, and why agnostics are the contrarians of the day.
23:00 – His drift away from the faith (rather than a sharp split). How he told his parents.
28:30 – How he filled the social vacuum – connected with friends, played sports, and have stuff in common!
31:00 – the things he missed from the faith, like singing. How the best we have is national anthems.
33:42: – His time as a strata corporation president and how being a contrarian saved the corporation a ton of money.
41:00 – The power of reason and logic. What to do with people who are dogmatic.
45:00 – Being a witness has its costs but also its benefits. You can’t just persuade someone to not be religious because it’s not just abstract beliefs. It’s a whole way of life!
48:30 – Result of becoming an atheist: less judgement, no free will, no guilt, more solutions oriented.
54:00 – We talk about engineers/physicists, and we critique social science.
58:00 – Descartes, beliefs. “REB” stands for Research Ethics Board. Heuristics.
1:00:00 – We don’t know the causes of free will, nor do we look at the arguments and the evidence around it.
1:05:00 – Free speech. For him, it’s a low priority. It kind of seems like religious dogmatism in fact. Talking with people you disagree makes you weaker. Taylor Swift. Dunking on people in arguments. Moving from debates into dialectics.
1:11:00 – Advice to contrarians. Check out Bertrand Russell’s “last interview”. In it, he says to only consider the facts, and not what you want the answer to be. Second, let love guide your decisions. Wait, but why wrote a great article on Elon Musk’s thought process.
1:15:00 – You can find him on Facebook and on Instagram.