Find our Sentientism conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and on the Sentientism podcast here.

Louisa Jane Smith is a Religious Education (RE) Teacher and Head of Life Skills at a school in England. She is host of the RE podcast, an RE Subject reviewer for Oak National, a member of the NATRE (National Association for Teachers of Religious Education) executive committee and the Surrey SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education) as well as being a public speaker and author.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips!

00:45 Welcome

– Kids today are “The most enlightened generation… so socially aware… so aware of, for better or worse, the bigger picture… so passionate about things that really matter.”

– Jamie’s appearance on The RE Podcast talking about Sentientism

– “The reason we love RE [religious education] is because we love those big questions… this is like a proper geek out for me!”

– The balance between neutrality and authenticity for RE teachers… how much to talk about your own worldview

05:45 Louisa’s Intro

– 22 years of RE teaching in UK secondary schools

– The RE Podcast “little lockdown project… I’d been wanting to do something creative… the first dedicated podcast for students and teachers of RE”

– “I had no idea what a podcast was… the RE community… have been so supportive… now nearing 4 years of doing this… I absolutely love it”

– Religious Education “fairly unique… to British schools… a national entitlement… every child up to the age of 18”

– How RE has evolved from religious instruction “how to be a good Christian” to now: “religion and worldviews – everybody in the world has a worldview… we all stand somewhere… show respect… compassion for people who think differently… religious and non-religious worldviews”

– NATRE executive committee

– Oak National online teaching platform

09:19 What’s Real?

– #catholic mum, #atheist dad, brought up Catholic (christening, school, church)

– “You just accept the reality that you are given by your caretakers. And that was then reinforced at school… reinforced at church… with my friends…”

– Despite atheist dad: “At no point did I really consider that atheism was a valid worldview”

– At 8 yrs old “My dad had this big conversion… from being a complete and utter atheist and hating religion to becoming quite an evangelical Christian… he had a religious experience… he heard a voice… felt a pressure… waves of energy going through him.”

– Going to protestant evangelical church with dad “so very different from my Catholic version… quite exciting… my whole family left the Catholic church and went to the Protestant church.”

– “It was quite fundamentalist… to the point of it being quite judgmental”

– “University was the first time I really questioned anything… taken out of my little religious bubble… exposed to… alternative ideas”

– “A lot of the things I’d been told just didn’t hold up to scrutiny… why there’s evil and suffering… views about who was in and who was out… everyone else is going to hell… attitudes to homosexuality…”

– “I ended up rejecting everything… if something falls apart everything falls apart”

– “This is why some people are very hesitant to question their faith – in case it all falls apart… so you don’t ask questions you just accept… blind faith is something that’s celebrated in some versions of Christianity”

– “I’m a naturally inquisitive, curious, cynical, questioning person – so as soon as I was given that opportunity I found that actually Christian faith just didn’t sit right with me”

– “I don’t like the idea of people going to hell. I don’t like the idea that homosexuality is wrong. I don’t think if there was a god this is the world that we would see… I became an atheist”

– “I didn’t seem to get the same thing from Christianity that everybody else got… peace… joy… feel god’s presence… answered prayer”

– “This doesn’t sit morally with me… but I think there’s also that… lack of experience… lack of evidence in the things I was believing”

– “Every single part of it was difficult… I got rejected from my church… the friends that I had at church stopped inviting me to things… emotionally it was incredibly tough… I suffer quite badly with depression & anxiety & insomnia – that’s when that started because everything I’d build my life on… had suddenly been taken away…”

–  “It still is incredibly difficult for my family… but… I carried on… was true to myself”

– Now… “You need just as much faith to be an atheist as to be a theist… so atheism for me didn’t last very long… the only true, scientific, reasonable conclusion is that we don’t know…”

– “I don’t believe there is a god but I don’t believe there is not a god… I don’t think there’s enough evidence either way”

– “Our understanding of god, if there is a god, is incredibly limited… to a religious version of that god”

– “I’m an agnostic… not knowing… not possible to know… scientifically, empirically”

– “The only true scientific position has to be agnosticism”

– Atheistic agnosticism “I would sit there if we were talking about theism as a belief in the Abrahamic god… I don’t believe in that god”

– “Why I’m not an atheist is because I cannot rule out that there’s not something… some… ultimate higher power that is greater than ourselves”

– Ontology and epistemology

– Faith, revelation, dogma, authority vs. naturalistic epistemology (~evidence and reason)

– “I’m very inspired by Buddhism… take this middle way”

– “It doesn’t matter [whether or not there’s a god]… the impact of the belief not the reason for it”

– God might not be real but a belief in god can be real “and if that belief in god has a positive impact…”

– “If your belief in god causes suffering… taking away someone’s rights… your belief is wrong regardless of whether it’s real”

– “I know people who believe in god… the value and positivity and joy and peace and purpose it gives to them… is so beautiful… I never want to ask the question about whether their belief is real or not”

– “For me belief in god was not positive at all… I know people that use their belief in god to cause suffering to others… that for me is problematic regardless of whether its real”

– “I don’t think you can judge ways of knowing and say this one is a more valid way of knowing”

– “I came out of a very dogmatic worldview – I don’t want to move into another one… I’m a little magpie… I take little shiny bits from all different things… I see value in them”

– The story of the elephant and the blind men. Each has a different, but still valid, perspective

– “There’s something about the human experience that points towards some kind of higher being”

– Cosmology… “How the big bang happened from nothing… I don’t know and science doesn’t know”

– “I don’t want to have a god of the gaps theory… that would be naïve… [but] we have to understand the limitations of human knowledge and human experience – the truth is far greater than that”

– JW: “I don’t know” as a great naturalistic answer… instead of making something up or believing something arbitrary

– Psychedelics and their impact on human experiences… links to religious experiences “If a Christian takes DMT… they will narrate that same experience with the language of god”

– “When you feel connected to the universe you are connected to something greater than yourself and some people call that god. If you’re an atheist you have to find different language…”

– “We can have experiences that are transcendent without there needing to be a god that’s limited within a religion”

– “There are wrongs but there’s more than one right”

35:34 What Matters?

– “I’m so thankful for having a religious upbringing… it was a very good grounding in thinking about morality as a concept”

– “Much of what I was taught I have continued believing… you treat others as you want to be treated… kindness”

– “Growing up as a Christian… if god said it was right… whatever god tells you”

– Learning about the Euthyphro dilemma “Is it good because god says it or did god say it because it’s good”

– “The morality of… the evangelical church… I had to get rid of all of that… it was actually very damaging to me… it took a long time to unpick”

– “A huge about of judgement of people’s lifestyle choices… going to hell… punishment…”

– “I’ve had to re-build my morality back up again… almost teleological… looking at the end or purpose… survival… protect life…”

– “I don’t eat meat because I don’t need it to survive… but if there was a choice between eating meat or dying I would eat meat… I’m an animal and I need to survive.”

– “I want everyone to be happy and I don’t want people to suffer… it’s not just about surviving it’s about living… so everyone can flourish”

– Descriptive morality (how we’ve come to have these morals) vs. normative morality (what our morals should be)

– “I don’t think we should ever use nature to justify human behaviour”

– “Homosexuality… my moral stance has to be if I say this is wrong it causes suffering if I say that its right it doesn’t… no human suffering comes from allowing people to express their sexuality…”

– “It always comes down to survival, flourishing and not causing suffering”

46:15 Who Matters?

– Exclusionary human ethics: fascism, casteism, gender discrimination, lookism…

– “Humans can suffer, animals can suffer, nature can suffer… so all of those have to be taken into consideration”

– “If I pollute the atmosphere – it suffers”

– “If something can suffer it needs moral consideration”

– “I don’t think suffering should be limited to conscious beings”

– “Suffering is… it cannot flourish. So if it’s not flourishing it’s suffering.”

– “If we pollute the atmosphere… poison our seas… that’s going to have an impact on living beings… fish and birds… humans… because the whole of life is interconnected…”

– “Mother nature… she will always win… she’ll fight back… then actually humans cannot survive and flourish”

– “My morality has to take into consideration the suffering of all humans, all animals, all living things”

– “There are some people that I don’t count in my moral considerations… they cause so much suffering… I find it very, very hard to want them to flourish”

– “Day to day – if someone says something to me that I find abhorrent… I find it incredibly difficult to want them to flourish in that moment… I can get very judgemental… racist, homophobic, exclusive, transphobic… anti-poor, pro-rich”

– “Abuse of power” as a fundamental wrong? “Everything else… killing could be right in certain situations… lying could be right in certain situations… there is never a time where abuse of power is OK… whether you are a church… a teacher or a husband or wife… or a parent”

– Biocentric and ecocentric criticisms of sentientism and sentiocentrism

– Finding a middle way because we have to live in this world “If you take any idea to its extreme then it becomes destructive”

– Justifiable use vs. abuse of the environment… “If I cut down a tree to make a house I’m using the environment but it’s completely necessary”

– “I don’t believe that a tree is sentient in that if I burn it to keep warm it’s hurting”

– Vs. deforestation “that is wrong… immoral because it’s abusing… it’s not because the trees are feeling ‘ow that hurts!’”

– “I want to limit the impact that I’m having on the environment but not to the fact that it’s an extreme”

– JW: Should we be concerned about whether Venus’ atmosphere is “suffering”? No because there are no sentient beings there to depend on it

– JW: The risks of ethical flattening via ecocentrism “everything matters… there’s no moral difference between pushing a knife into a pig and pushing a knife into a carrot… that’s where the alarm bells start to go off for me… the carrot isn’t feeling pain and the pig is – there’s a real difference there… I’m really keen we don’t lose that distinction”

– “We don’t need to eat pigs to survive… the only way we can eat is to use nature… choosing what part of nature do we take so that everyone can flourish and survive”

– “If we grow a carrot and eat it there’s no resultant suffering at all… if we kill pigs it causes suffering and its unnecessary”

– “There’s not a single part of me that cares what anyone thinks… I just don’t care”

– “There’s a lot of extremist vegans out there… I think people that eat meat use those as a reason to eat meat”

– “’You have to give up meat or you’re a bad person’… guilt trips… I don’t think that that is helpful in this conversation”

– Backyard hens and non-factory farming

– “This [not eating meat] is something that I’ve decided is the right thing for me based on my knowledge and experience… for the first 35 years of my life I ate meat… it would be completely hypocritical for me to say to someone else ‘you’re not allowed to just because I’ve decided not to…’”

– “Everybody is on their own journey towards what they think is the right thing to do… I think we’ve got to be compassionate to where people are… their experiences, their knowledge, their context”

– “I am not a perfect person. I know that drinking milk from a cow causes as much suffering as eating beef. I don’t eat beef but I do drink cows milk. And so there is an inherent contradiction in my own morality because I am human and actually I am trying to exist day by day and make it as simple as possible.”

– “For me giving up meat was easy… if it had been hard I don’t know if I’d have done it. So I think that there’s these idealistic morals that I have then there’s the reality of day to day life… so therefore I must be compassionate to where other people are.”

– “I wanted to be vegetarian for a long time but I really loved meat”

– “For me it was environmental… before it was about the suffering of animals… that was selfish… we have to look after this planet because it’s our home”

– “Eating meat is the worst thing we can do for the environment… deforestation… air and sea pollution… just devastating”

– “The suffering of animals… the processes… the horrendous way we treat animals that we use… it was overwhelming that this was not the right thing for me to be doing”

– A question from a student “’Miss, are you a pacifist?… Do you eat meat?… Then you are not a pacifist’… that was it… the last piece of the puzzle… They’ve probably forgotten it but it was life-changing for me”

– Then giving up meat for Lent “It was the easiest transition I’ve ever made and then I haven’t looked back since…”

– “I am probably 99% vegan… but because I believe in the middle way… because I don’t like taking things to extremes… I have to sometimes weigh up the cost to my life… the impact that me having some milk in my tea in the morning if I’m having a low day… I very rarely have any dairy products but occasionally I do…”

– “If everybody cut down… the impact that that would have… is huge”

– “I feel very happy that I am doing the least amount possible that is causing harm to other living beings”

– JW: “Seeing it with clear eyes… even the most supposedly ‘humane’ farms the animals are treated in brutal ways and end up in the same slaughterhouses”

01:11:26 A Better Future?

– JW: How can religions and worldviews education help us towards a better future? Critical thinking, pluralism and understanding, kids freely finding their own paths

– “I believe that I plant seeds… I never see the finished product… I’m just one little segment… I’m just part of a process.”

– “Very slowly… things start to change”

– Sarah-Lane Cawte, chair of the Religious Education Council: “Respectful curiosity”

– “That’s how we make a better tomorrow… if we are curious about what other people think and why they think it… in a very respectful way… a little bit of what we’ve lost?”

– Maybe we’ve gone from “no curiosity… accepting what we were told” to “aggressively curious”… “what we need to have is respectful curiosity… that’s what RE teaches young people”

– “We’re not telling them what to think we’re telling them how to think”

– “Children are naturally curious anyway… I bring in the respectful curiosity”

– “Sometimes… we dampen their curiosity… we don’t allow them to ask questions”

– Teaching PSHE (Personal Social Heath Economic) re: gender identity, sexuality, extremism, radicalisation “all of these very controversial topics”

– When kids ask “I don’t want this to sound bad but… I genuinely want to understand the answer”

– JW: How to handle forms of religious worldview “that go against the idea of respectful curiosity… they might say ‘I don’t want you to be curious – here is the right answer – you just must believe… curiosity is a dangerous thing… not only will you not be respected if you follow curiosity and take a different path but you may even be punished…” or more forms of religious worldview that exclude others “’they’re in the out-group, they’re going to hell… they’re homosexual, they’re going to hell’… they’re in a different caste, they’re untouchable…”

– “The reality is that we don’t… we try to avoid those… because they’re so extreme and they’re so minimal… insignificant as to the whole”

– “We show variety within a religion… part of the worldviews approach in RE… it’s not just about non-religious worldviews… it’s an approach”

– “Variety… between religions, between religion and non-religion and within religion”

– “Sometimes it’s as simple as saying ‘some Christians… other Christians’”

– “We talk about difficult issues but we don’t talk about difficult people… opinion based not personal”

– “Extremist muslims… they’re not muslims because the word muslim means peace… one who submits to the word of Allah”

– “You answer questions… you don’t dwell… you certainly don’t teach those extremes… but you do teach that there are a variety of views… ‘some’ and ‘other’ are powerful words”

– “We don’t ever say ‘Christians think this’ – there’s very little that all Christians agree on”

– “There’s more that unites us than divides us – it’s about finding those things”

– Common misconceptions about religions e.g. Buddhism has having no gods, Christianity having one god, Hinduism having many gods…

– “The messy bit of RE – that’s the bit that we love – when it doesn’t fit into those neat boxes”

– “I hope you leave my lesson slightly more confused than when you walk in”

– JW: The risks of respect turning into deference and relativism e.g. should we “respect” homophobia?

– “There are controversial issues… If I teach homosexuality I have to teach that some Christians believe it is an abomination… I have to teach that… but we don’t leave things there… they have to make a judgement”

– “We teach them how to make judgements on moral issues… how do you decide what a strong or a weak argument is”

– “Giving them that framework allows them to think for themselves – not being told what to think… how to think not what to think”

– “I would never want to disrespect religion but I have to critique it – and I think sometimes they get conflated”

– If Louisa was Global Education Minister: “I’d take out exams… the parameters which you are forced into”

– “It’s not what education is… I don’t think education is testing”

– “Can we have an education minister that has come from education?… has been a teacher?… They don’t know what they’re doing… what’s going on in the classroom”

– “What is going on in classrooms right now is so fundamentally different… and they’re making policies based on the past, not based on the present”

– JW: “Would you put Sentientism on the curriculum?”

– “We want to teach children how to think not what to think – if we’re teaching them how to think we’re doing a naturalistic approach anyway… it’s a fundamental – it underpins everything we want to do. We cannot teach every religion and every worldview… we have to be selective”

– “Make them get deep into concepts and ideas and thinking skills”

– “If they come in contact with a worldview that’s different from their own then they can practice that respectful curiosity”

– “School is not the end of their education – we’ve got to give them the tools to continue to be educated”

– This generation: “I don’t ever think that ‘this generation is terrible…’ or ‘this generation are our saviour’… they’ll get some bits right and some bits wrong”

– “We somehow have this very strange idea that we’re constantly getting better… I think that we’re just constantly changing”

01:30:50 Follow Louisa

– @TheREPodcast1

– The RE Podcast

– Louisa on Instagram

– The RE Podcast on Facebook

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Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.