11: “No victim, no problem!” – Floris van den Berg - Activist Vegan Atheist Philosopher - Sentientist Conversations

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Floris’s bio states he is “a philosopher and therefore an atheist”. He is a practical, activist, vegan philosopher. He has written a number of books including “Philosophy for a Better World”, “On Green Liberty”, “De vrolijke veganist” (“The Happy Vegan”) and “Hoe komen we van religie af?” (“How to get rid of religion. An inconvenient liberal paradox”). In 2017, Floris participated in a television series “To Hell With Your Religion”, in which he lived with a group of people of various religions for two weeks, exploring and critiquing religious ideas.

In these Sentientist Conversations, we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

You can find Floris’s books on Amazon & here.

After our conversation, Floris kindly shared a series of posters he has developed that relate to Sentientist themes. These posters, hosted here, remain Floris’ intellectual property but he is happy with them being freely used for educational purposes.

Floris is on our “Sentientist wall” – why not join him there in helping to normalise compassionate, rational thinking? Just fill out this simple form.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at Sentientism.info.

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Many thanks to Graham for his work on this video. Follow him at @cgbessellieu.

We discuss:

- The imperative to reduce suffering, human & non-human, present & future

- Growing up in a liberal Catholic environment

- Hiding from Jesus 🙂

- Never believing, then finding out that’s called “atheism”

- Finding the label “Humanism”, adding values

- Studying Zen Buddhism in a Japanese monastery

- Hell isn’t compassionate

- Religious compassion often conditional & restricted & subject to higher priorities (the collective, a god, the church…)

- Individuals can experience, collectives can’t

- Not objectivist, not relativist, but a universalist (e.g. slavery is wrong & it was always wrong & it will always be wrong)

- A universal focus on individual victims

- Peter Singer

- Vegetarianism & veganism

And more here!