#Peter Boghossian

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Is Religion Inevitable?" - Richard Dawkins Reveals All

Is white privilege the modern day Original Sin? How is mass denial about the truth of gender, any different from Catholic transubstantiation? Is woke culture today's dogmatic religious mob? Join me and @drpeterboghossian as we explore these questions and more in another episode of The Poetry Of Reality.

--

Peter Boghossian: I wrote, you know, "A Manual for Creating Atheists," and I was trying to make the world more sane and more rational. And I was trying to help people become more thoughtful and reflect on their beliefs, have reliable epistemologies upon which they could rely. And one of the things that I noticed since maybe 2013, maybe 2012, was that as religiosity decreased, deranged woke beliefs increased. And I guess my first question to you is -- uh, I don't know who came up with this, I might have come up with this, I don't know who came up with this -- but the Substitution Hypothesis.

Richard Dawkins: Yes.

Boghossian: So, do you think, and I honestly do not know the answer to this question, do you think that as one religion fades another -- like default is the belief state for humans, they just have to believe something -- and as one, as the old religion fades, a new one has to come in?

Dawkins: Yeah. Gullibility expands to fill the vacuum.

Boghossian: Exactly. Precisely.

Dawkins: I suppose that's right. I hadn't really thought of it before, but it sounds plausible to me. I think G.K. Chesterton, who was a very religious man said, "when people stop believing in God they they believe in anything." And he was a very witty, clever man, although he was a devout Roman Catholic. There's something in it I think, and there's no doubt about it that we seem to have exchanged one form of superstitious religiosity for another, and the analogy goes pretty deep. I think John McWhorter pointed out that there's a strong relationship between original sin in the Christian religion...

Boghossian: No, that was me pointing that out. 2014, with my article with James Lindsay. "Privilege is the original sin," but yeah, go ahead.

Dawkins: Good for you. So, original sin being we're all born in sin, we all inherit the sin of Adam. And we white people inherit the sin of slavery and colonialism and because we're white we have to feel guilty for what are, not necessarily our ancestors but people of the same color as us, in past centuries did. So that's that's one analogy. And then, well, transubstantiation which in the Catholic religion you know, the wine literally turns to blood, where "literally" doesn't quite mean literally, it means what Aristotle called the "accidentals" stay wine but the true "substance" of the wine becomes blood. So when somebody stands up and says "I am a woman," although they've got a male body, that's transubstantiation. In the accidentals they still have a penis and they still have Y chromosome, but in the true substance, they have become female. So trans -- that's where the word transubstantiation comes from, the transubstance, and there's a very strong analogy to transubstantiation in transsexualism.

Boghossian: Tell me more, how so?

Dawkins: Well, the wine becomes blood where the priest simply declares it as it is. And a male person becomes female when he declares himself to be female. And in the Aristotelian terms, the substance has changed, the substance of wine has changed to blood, the substance of maleness of changed to femaleness, but the accidentals, the incidentals are what are regarded by Catholics as trivial and by trans people as trivial. So they really believe that they have become the other sex.

Boghossian: It's remarkable how obvious it is that those are delusions. I mean it's crystal clear to anybody not caught in the orbit of the ideology that that is a delusion.

Dawkins: Yes. They get around it by this word "gender," which is separate from sex. And there are some who I think even think their sex has changed.

Boghossian: Correct.

Dawkins: And others who think that, they admit that their sex hasn't changed but their agenda has.

Boghossian: So, I guess I have two questions. One is, it seems to me that there are degrees of delusion that one can have. So, if we accept that, like there are certain things that are -- if I told you those books are really aliens from another planet and they've come down, okay that's another level of delusion. And so, I often think -- this is the thing that that's been causing me to think about this. I'm utterly incredulous at the sheer madness that people believe now. In a way that I was not incredulous, you know in 2010 or 2000 or so. So, let's take a look at, somebody walked on water. This guy named Jesus, he walked on water, you know, this is intervention in the space time continuum by a supernatural being and it caused this individual to walk on water. Okay, that's clearly a delusion if somebody believes in it, if someone accepts that is true. And then you have the belief that men can get pregnant. That to me seems like a significantly more profound delusion. Or am I wrong?

Dawkins: Yes. But doesn't it come from the postmodern belief that feelings are more important than facts?

Boghossian: Yeah, standpoint epistemology. And it comes, I guess they could just say that it's the redefinition of the word. But they actually like, they literally believe men can get pregnant. And the thing that I've been thinking about is, kind of goes back to Plato, is it better to let people believe benign delusions? I mean, in an ideal world, people wouldn't believe, people would proportion their confidence in the belief to the evidence they have for the belief. But humanity is sloppy and messy and the thing that I've been thinking about recently is, if it's true that there are degrees of delusion and if it's true -- and I don't know if it's true -- that there's a substitution hypothesis, then should rational people step out of the way or -- not encourage people to believe things that are false, because I would never do that and I think that's grossly unethical -- but there are certain delusions that are better for people to believe in en masse than others.

Dawkins: Yeah, so if you've got to believe in a delusion, if there's something, some law that says there's a certain quotient of deludedness that everybody's got to have, and certainly some are more harmless than others.

Boghossian: Correct.

Dawkins: I mean, I sort of feel there's a little bit about Islam and Christianity that -- Islam is such an evil at the moment, or Islamism is such an evil at the moment, that in Africa especially, maybe Christianity is a better alternative and it may be that it's no good trying to preach atheism in Africa, and Christianity might be a better a better alternative.

[..]

Dawkins: I think Stephen Pinker in his latest book has evidence that when we make our political judgment -- we, I mean humanity -- it tends to be not based on evidence, but tends to be based upon tribal loyalty, And that's a very depressing conclusion. And, by the way, one of the things that's been depressing me about my being sort of anti-woke and anti-the militant trans lobby, is that people think I must be right wing. And I've never been right wing. I voted left all my life and, I mean, I detest Donald Trump, for example, but there are people out there on Twitter especially who think that because I detest Donald Trump, therefore I must be an apologist for trans-wokeism or vice versa.

Boghossian: Yeah, so let's talk about that. I think that that is an intentional tactic of people. I think that that is what woke people use, people who have fallen -- have had their cognitions hijacked to this ideology, and I think it's very easy to write you off entirely if they say, "oh Richard Dawkins, he's just a right-wing extremist," you know, "Pinker he's a right-wing extremist," although he's the second largest donor to the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and Harvard, or who whoever it is. I've never voted for Republican candidate my whole life. I'm constantly getting that I'm on the right, but I think it's a tactic both because they don't have to do the intellectual work to rebut the arguments, so they can just a priori say that's not true. And it's a tactic because the left-wing media won't have me on, for example, so left-wing media won't, it has a kind of allergy to any self-criticism. So, then I'll go on the on the right-wing media, and the people on the left will say, "well look Boghossian's a right-winger." Well, no I'm only going on the right because -- I'm more than happy and nobody's ever invited me. I've actually invited myself and they won't have me. So, I think it's a kind of strategy to not do the intellectual work to rebut the position. Because it's hard to rebut the position.

#Richard Dawkins #Peter Boghossian #The Poetry of Reality #delusion #religion #substitution hypothesis #woke #wokeness #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #original sin #white privilege #white guilt #inherited guilt #transubstantiation #gender transition #gender ideology #queer theory #religion is a mental illness

[weatherman667]

Spectrum Street Epistemology with Nina Power and Carl Benjamin (Hampstea...

Carl Benjamin:  As an atheist, Christians should retake the Holy Land.

Fascinating discussion.

Runtime:  56:52

#youtube #Peter Boghossian

[gettothestabbing]

Dr. Tabia Lee is a longtime educator, pedagogist, and a founding member of Free Black Thought. In 2021, Tabia was hired at DeAnza College in California as the Faculty Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education. Tabia attempted to reform the toxic campus atmosphere characterized by many faculty and staff members as “too woke.” 

DEI colleagues at DeAnza rejected Tabia’s efforts to promote a “pro-human” approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Tabia, a black woman, was called a white supremacist, a racist, and a right-wing operative, among other accusations. 

In June this year, Tabia was fired. She is suing DeAnza College for violating her academic freedom and free speech rights. 

Donate: http://gofundme.com/f/SupportDrLee 

Website: http://www.drtlee.com 

Free Black Thought https://freeblackthought.com/voices/d... 

“A Black DEI Director Canceled by DEI” by Tabia Lee https://compactmag.com/article/a-blac...

#Tabia Lee #Peter Boghossian #interviews #diversity equity and inclusion #firing #colleges #video #DeAnza College #CA #community college #woke #Free Black Thought

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[@mitigatedchaos]

#twitter #screenshot #james lindsay #michelle e morse #peter boghossian #birth equity

[thearbourist]

All Things Reconsidered Episode 2 - NPR's Coverage of Elon Musk & Professor Harassment

View On WordPress

#All Things Reconsidered Episode 2 - NPR&039;s Coverage of Elon Musk & Professor Harassment #Peter Boghossian #Youtube

[kramlabs]

#woke culture #peter boghossian #Youtube

[grimlocksword]

Peter Boghossian Explains Wokeness & The Rise Of The FAR LEFT CULT

#youtube #timcast irl #peter boghossian #wokeness #woke agenda #woke activism #wokeism #woke ideology #anti woke

[floral-ashes]

Thanks to Peter Boghossian for advertising my work! How kind of him. He even seems to imply that he wish he’d written it.🥰

#transgender #lgbtq #trans #queer #lgbtqia #lesbian #gay #lgbt #law professor #professor #law school #university #academia

[burlveneer-music]

Økapi & Aldo Kapi's Orchestra - Pardonne​-​moi, Olivier! (feat. Geoff Leigh, Mike Cooper) 16 oiseaux pour Olivier Messiaen - plunderphonics + instrumental overdubs

The album is a plunderphonic parabola of the imaginary world, mystical and ornitological, of the French composer of the XX century, Olivier Messiaen. A sort of birds' catalogue, as Messiaen tried to do during his life. As always, even in this case økapi composed a little sound-collagism opera, which includes a video development. This is the soundtrack of this "movie". For this A/V-project, økapi is co-working with the italian video-artist Simone Memé, part of the collective MoreTv-V. Because of his dixit plunderphonic nature, and for the occasion, økapi involved Geoff Leigh (sax/flute) and Mike Cooper (guitar) into his phantomatic virtual orchestra. Økapi is Filippo Paolini (see also OCD032 K-Mundi), an Italian turntablist and sample cutup artist. Filippo has recorded several solo albums, as well as recording in the duo Metaxu and with the trio Dogon. He has performed live for national Italian State radio broadcasts (RAI) with renowned avant-turntablist, Christian Marclay and collaborates with numerous international artists such as Mike Cooper, Geoff Leigh, Peter Brotzmann, Mike Patton, Matt Gustafson, Zu, Damo Suzuki, Andy EX, Kawabata Makoto, Metamkine…

ØKapi's album releases illustrate his unique and edgy use of turntables and computer beyond the hip-hop school of chopped up music, creating music that veers from orchestral to lounge with quirky experimental electronics that maintain a delicate and spacious sound throughout. Website: www.okapi.it. Økapi: Direction Geoff Leigh: voice, soprano sax, flutes Mike Cooper: guitars Aldo Kapi’s Orchestra: Olivier Messiaen - Jon Appleton - Senking - David Berezan - Kyoka - Marc Tremblay - Aoki Takamasa + Tujiko Noriko – Paul Dolden - Ryoji Ikeda - Mochipet – Elsa Justel - Circuit Bent- Subjex - Mr. Ours & 4bstr4ck3r - Coh - Martin Leclerc - Herve Boghossian - Monty Brigham bird sounds collection - Adrian Moore - Signal - Christian Bouchard - Anemone - Kangding Ray - Louis Dufort - Hildur Gudnadóttir - Wolfgang Voigt - Marc Tremblay - Atom Tm - The Three Suns - Åke Parmerud - Emptyset - Spontaneous Music Ensemble - Ivor Darreg Visuals: Simone Memè

#Økapi #Aldo Kapi's Orchestra #plunderphonics #turntablism #messiaen #2023 #modern classical

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian discuss if Woke ideology has turned into a new religion

Wokeism kept the Christian ideas of guilt and original sin, but removed redemption and forgiveness.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Helen Joyce: Something that you may not have thought of is that there's a lot of people who can't move on on this. And because that's the people who've transitioned their own children.

So those people are going to be like you know the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific Islands and didn't know the war was over. They've got to fight forever.

This is why, this is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we ever have experienced. A lot of people have done the worst thing that you could do. Which is to harm their children irrevocably because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they'll still be fighting.

And each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups. Like, I've lost count the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has got turned upside down on this, oh the deputy director has a trans child, or you know, oh the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child, or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person, and it may not even be widely known at the organization that they've a trans child. But it will come out. Like people will have sort of said it quietly.

And now you can't talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can't. Because what you're saying is, you as a parent have done a truly, like a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your child. That cannot be fixed.

There are specific individuals who are really actively against women's rights here, and it's not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels that it's because they've transed their child.

And so those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me. Because people like me are a standing reproach to them. I don't want to be. I'm not talking directly to them, I don't spend my time bitching about them. But the fact is that just simply by saying, we will never accept natal males in women's spaces, well it's their son that we're talking about, and they've told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his sexual function, and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don't, there's no way back for them and their child.

They've sold their child a bill of goods that they can't deliver on. And I'm the one who has to be bullied, to try to force me to deliver on it. So those people are going to be the people who will keep this bloody movement going, I'm sorry to say. Because they've everything to lose. And it's a fight to the death as far as they're concerned.

--

Full conversation:

==

Completely explains Susie Green, former CEO of the discredited organization Mermaids, who drugged her own son, leading eventually to taking him out of country to get illegally butchered in Thailand because her husband was afraid he was gay.

https://unherd.com/2022/11/mermaids-useful-idiots/

“As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.” And if a four-year-old looking at dolls weren’t evidence enough that this child should be committed to a lifetime of medicalisation, Green added, “[Jackie] loathed having her hair cut.” Green put Jack — as he was then known — on puberty-blockers and flew him to Thailand for a sex change operation when he was 16, making him the youngest person in the world to undergo that surgery. [..] In her Tedx talk, Green says that as soon as her baby boy “got mobile” — ie, learned to crawl — “he was gravitating to things that you would think are stereotypically female”. Like what, tampons? Was her one-year-old trying to book an appointment for a cervical smear test? Nope, “the Polly Pocket and My Little Pony”, she says, and then quickly adds “that was fine – but not for Dad”. Green’s then husband disapproved of his son playing with My Little Pony toys and therefore banned them from the house. [..] As Green recounts in her talk, “What I had come to the conclusion, up until she was about two, was that I had a very sensitive, quite effeminate little boy who was probably gay.” So when four-year-old Jack told her he should be a girl, Green felt “it explained so many things”.

A homophobic father is one thing - plenty of gay kids have survived that, and some have even had an anti-gay parent come around later.

But a mother who responds to this by mutilating her own child is already mentally ill and ultimately far more dangerous than the father ever was.

There is no coming back from this, for either Jack or Susie. The only way to not mentally self-destruct is to double, triple, quadruple-down, to deny the blatant atrocity you've committed and insist that it's good and righteous, and everyone else needs to play along with that delusion.

#Helen Joyce #Peter Boghossian #transhausen syndrome #child mutilation #gender ideology #queer theory #transhausen by proxy #munchausen syndrome #trans children #child abuse #gay conversion therapy #gay conversion #religion is a mental illness

[iseilio-blog]

危機時刻的知識份子、左派很多偽君子？

左派很多偽君子？ 【CC字幕】左派很多偽君子？支持進步價值只因不想當壞人？ft.美國哲學家 Peter Boghossian @drpeterboghossian | 斐姨所思【阿姨想知道】 EP153 - YouTube

【中華人文演講系列】王德威演講：危機時刻的知識份子 - YouTube

＊ 當王在一場討論中國文學會議裡企圖把台灣的鄉土文學納入

中國文學視野時，英國講評人以一種非常嘲諷的口氣暗示：台灣

根本沒有什麼東西，那樣的作品（鄉土文學），連文字都寫不好，

怎麼還能夠拿來當作是當代的中國文學來討論呢？（發現台灣 －

建構台灣後殖民論述。麥田）

＊ 將一個並不複雜的政治狀態，予以擴大、參雜、渲染，多元化，再

進行收縮、匯集至一點，其實還是離不開 “政治” 的反向操作；

簡單的說，也還是不脫藍綠、統獨 的標籤。

國民黨來台之前的台灣，並不存在這個面向的 國、體、文 的問題，

戰前面對的是日本。在日本時代，蠻荒的台灣也有不多的孔孟，也

有禮失求諸野的 “陽明學”，因此這些是來自日本的二手傳播。

除了仕紳階級，與一般勞苦民眾其實關係不大。左派力量更小，

不少還是二手傳習自日本。

聽教授轉述的 08課綱，應該是相當用心之作，雖然也富含了台灣

本島人的文化內容。做為中國偏遠地區的島嶼，在現代文明與資訊

透明的趨勢之下，追求主體性是必然的走向。所追求的，用簡單的

話說，就是 自由、平等、民主、人權。在這些人類社會的現代性之

下，所謂本土性質的內容的確可以縮減至 “聊備一格”；這個方面

或許還可以再做深思，終究這個生身複雜的島嶼；不客氣的說，在

目前就還是 本省 與 外省 的分際（客觀的簡單敘述）。在戰後第四代

接班之後，整個台灣社會將再度改造。反正就這樣一直下去；文化、

歷史云云，不就是這麼一回事嗎！？

[vague-humanoid]

https://thenewinquiry.com/an-american-education-notes-from-uatx/

A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches—in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was “a hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.” Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX.

Around this idea journalists, historians, technologists, and financiers had assembled. People like Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Joshua Katz, Peter Boghossian, and more. They saw a void in American higher ed. There was not, they asserted, enough free speech. Where, they wondered, was the pursuit of truth? Nowadays, those things were hard to find, but they would be abundant at UATX, an institution to be built from the bottom up, through sheer will and courage—and some backing from billionaires. The Yales, the Stanfords, the UChicagos had been overrun by hordes of “diversocrats” and woke elites. At UATX there would be none.

Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”

To build a university you need money and time to raise it. But the founders were eager. They were ambitious, impatient. They wanted students and classes now. So in the summers of 2022 and ’23, UATX established weeklong programs where students at other institutions could attend seminars and lectures by “world-class scholars and knowledge creators”—a sort of anti-woke summer camp. Title: Forbidden Courses.

An alluring name, Forbidden Courses. I decided to take a look. Although my spleen is not inflamed by the culture wars, although my heart is not lifted by calls like Bari Weiss’s for a “coalition” comprised of “trads, whigs, normies,” I was curious. How plausible was their project? What ideas would they discuss? I applied to UATX last March. There was the cover letter, and the three essay questions, and the writing sample. I speckled them with Harold Bloom and Nietzsche. “Exploitation … belongs to the essence of what lives,” that sort of thing. April 6th, the letter arrived in my email inbox: “Congratulations! … UATX is extending you an offer of admission to Session Iof this year's Forbidden Courses.” I flew south in June. 

@startorrent02 @that-biracial-geek-girl @karpad

[lmarodrigues]

"The New Puritans" | Peter Boghossian & Andrew Doyle (Titania McGrath)

#youtube

[thearbourist]

Important Conversations: Peter Boghossian & Kathleen Stock

View On WordPress

#Debate #Important Conversations #Kathleen Stock #Peter Boghossian #Youtube

[cultml]

The Insane Hypocrisy of Woke Activists - Peter Boghossian | heretics. 5

#Youtube