Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And if I showed you the image and said, now just what music do you imagine is playing?
You know, somebody walks into a restaurant like that
and says, you know what this really needs?
It's like when I went in there, they were playing Kids by Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue.
And I'm just like, seriously, you know, it really gets me.
So I would probably do that.
nine in ten young people in the uk believe that their life is lacking purpose and a lot of people are turning back to religion there is something going on this is about the most important thing that anyone can ever find out about their life and god has made us for a purpose and the purpose flows from that meaning i kind of reject that because this is a perfect example of a solution being provided without explaining exactly why it provides a solution and that's what people are doing in religious traditions i
I hard disagree.
So children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a fruit.
If you want religion to provide existential comfort for people who are suffering, you have to do more in the face of children dying of cancer than some reference to mythical human beings.
So as an atheist, I'm offering a psychological explanation.
Well, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the new atheism movement, which was a mid-2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world, saying that religion is evil and terrible.
And I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular, humanist utopia, that if you'll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself.
People tried that and it didn't seem to work.
And I think that's because the new atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow.
It didn't seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.
And I think that is why it exists.
I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness.
We find ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world.
but also knowing those things.
Showing 1241–1260 of 2,073 · page 63 of 104
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