Conner Habib is a sex workers’ rights advocate with a rigorously intellectual take on spirituality.

photo by: Skeptiko

Charlie Chaplin, The Great Emperor: “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone, the way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls”.

Alex Tsakiris: So, if you are materialistically focused and you’re disconnected from the spiritual compassionate part, we can all see that and point at that and go, “Oh, how terrible.” But when we see the atheist Heather Berg, USC disconnect, we’re unable to do the same and say, “Well, your compassion is disconnected from the deeper spiritual reality.”

“It cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world. Millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of the system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.”

Conner Habib: Ask ourselves consistently “Am I evil?” It’s almost like the opposite of, if you can ask yourself if you’re crazy, then you’re not crazy. If you can ask yourself if you’re evil, then you actually do have the potential to become evil, because if you never ask, then you’re just in this way of compulsive sleepwalking forces, like everybody else, and nothing you do is really evil, but also nothing you do is really good. Like, you’re not really acting out of intention at all, so you’re not really able to extend to love and compassion for a real and an intentional purpose, for a meaningful way to people. And that is the gift of the possibility of evil to us, that’s the gift of free will to us, is that, the separation, the ability to do evil means that if we look at that, we ask ourselves that, then we can do good in the world.

I have an interview coming up in a minute with Conner Habib, and you just heard both of us talking over the very great and famous Charlie Chaplin clip from the The Great Dictator. And while I almost feel like we can’t possibly do justice to a clip like that, I did want to set the stage for a discussion that I feel like has been going on in the background here on Skeptiko for a while, and that is the link or maybe better said, the disconnect between spirituality and progressive social thinking. I mean, when you listen to Charlie Chaplin, who the heck disagrees with any of that? But at the same time, does anything Charlie Chaplin is saying there, does any of that make any sense, if there isn’t a larger spiritual reality?

So, in this interview we talk about that. It takes us a little while to get there, there’s a lot of other things that Conner and I talk about. It was a great chat, a really interesting chat, and I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to Conner, since I’ve known him for quite some time and he’s never been on Skeptiko.