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
The idea that the things that you engage in here, at least in terms of grand projects like religion and society, are, even if just subconsciously, an exercise in the denial of death.
What would that mean?
It means that if you encounter other communities...
If you encounter other traditions who just by their mere existence threatens the truth of your claims, those traditions subconsciously represent death.
They represent nihilism.
So what happens in a society that develops the kind of telecommunication technology whereby every single day you open your phone and you are addicted to a process of scrolling through every seven seconds a new person with new ideas, with different beliefs from all over the world?
Do you think that might have something to do
with the meaning crisis that we find ourselves in.
We're told that what's happened is that people stopped believing in God and now they're all depressed and upset and nihilistic.
That's far too simple.
You don't think it might have something to do with the fundamentally revolutionary change to our society that has been brought about specifically by telecommunication, by the ability to...
Oftentimes, unintentionally and non-consensually be confronted with traditions and people from halfway across the world that just remind you every single day, zing, zing, zing, every single day that your truth is not the only truth, that the transcendence that you've placed your trust in is completely subjective and personal and that someone over there
believes something totally different and seems to be living just the same kind of happy life.
That, I think, is why people are struggling so much.
It's not just because they're atheists.
I think that's why people experience that.
Now, of course, as a matter of truth, you could say, for example, yourself, you could say, yes, I'm constantly confronted by different religious traditions, but I believe that Christianity is true.
I think it has the best evidence and whatnot.
Which is why what I'm saying is insensitive to the truth or falsity of any of the traditions.
What I'm saying is- Okay, that's good, because I
Showing 1461–1480 of 2,073 · page 74 of 104
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