Jonina (@JoninaTurzi) is cofounder of Lancaster Farm Sanctuary, a volunteer district leader for HSUS, & a doctor of physical therapy & yoga educator.

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

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

0:00 Welcome

1:24 Jonina's Intro

- Lancaster Farm Sanctuary, physical therapy, yoga teaching, sobriety, queerness

2:33 What's Real?

- Hippie parents, social justice, civil rights

- Catholic father & schooling, more cultural than doctrinal

- Brethren Church family history

- Parents with a spiritual appreciation without buying into religious doctrine

- Feeling the freedom to explore "I just want you to be happy"

- "It felt like a human construct"

- Identifying as an atheist as a teenager

- Finding a beauty in the human body (& a sense of spiritual meaning) through an anatomy class

- Being bullied, as a "young queer kid", by members of "Youth for Christ"

- "I have no idea what's real"

- The lower & upper case "Self" in some Yoga practice

- Some things might always be unknowable

- Reverence, wonder & awe... openness

17:10 What (& who) Matters?

- Oneness & interconnectedness

- Unnecessary harm to sentient others

- Might plants have a kind of sentience? "I'm OK with saying we shouldn't harm plants unnecessarily"

- Seeing the similiarities between human and non-human animals through physiology

- "The idea that non-human animals aren't sentient is so bizarre to me"

- Movement & intent as indicators of sentience

- Are Roomba's sentient?

- Evolution, behaviour/comms, information processing as inferential evidence for sentience

- Intrinsic & instrumental value

- The ethical dangers of holistic/ecocentric thinking

- "Spirtual Bypassing"... rushing to find a purpose/meaning/spiritual goal while bypassing compassion & understanding

- Knowing very spiritual people who also own factory farms

- A local factory farm with a Bible verse written on it

- "The foundation of a spiritual practice is caring for others"

- Stages of moral development: Ego, ethno, anthropocentric...

37:30 Vegetarian to vegan

- Rebelling against Jonina's mother's vegetarianism as a teenager

- Being vegetarian. Not understanding dairy

- Seeing slaughterhouse footage & going vegan together with Jonina's partner

- Social indoctrination re: animal ethics & the supernatural

- Climate change

- The relationship between scarcity & morality. Is it harder to be moral under scarcity?

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall via this simple form.

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Thanks for the post-prod Graham.