In this annual meditation and reflection, the trio consider the past year's significant happenings in conspirituality, discuss their biggest influences, identify 2024's most pressing challenges, and offer what gives them each hope as we transition into 2024.
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185: Light in the Growing Darkness

Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon.As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia.Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.

Society & Culture

Personal Journals

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

Social Sciences

Science & Medicine

Religion & Spirituality

Other

Spirituality

Christianity

Buddhism

Hinduism

Judaism

Islam

Science

In 2020, former NY Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson published Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book tells a compelling story: that the root of our social divisions is the invented hierarchical structure of castes, not, as we often assume in America, race. Race, she writes, is only another manifestation of caste.
While it’s certainly an important topic here in America, Wilkerson shows, by investigating the longstanding caste system in India, the social divisions in Nazi Germany, and America’s founding and expansion through chattel slavery, that caste is a universal phenomenon.
Derek discusses his thoughts on this powerful and important book.
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Bonus Sample: The Force That Divides Us All

Dr Sarah Ballantyne forged a career in science communication and health education advocating for autoimmune solutions in food and the paleo diet. In 2014, she began questioning her approach. Shortly after, she realized she was spreading nutrition misinformation and has dedicated her career to correcting those errors. 
Derek talks to Sarah about the dangers of diet and nutrition misinformation, dealing with obesity and eating disorders, and the challenges of talking about food in public. Her new book is Nutrivore: The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need From the Food You Eat.
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Brief: An Honest Discussion About Food (w/Dr Sarah Ballantyne)

We have a real treat today for listeners who love all forms of movement, especially yoga and strength training.
Derek and Julian talk to Movement Logic hosts, Laurel Beversdorf and Sarah Court, who navigate the curvilinear path of creating irreverent yet high quality science-based movement content that sets teachers and students free from dogma and fear-mongering. Our two podcasts intersect by looking into fallen gurus, pseudoscience health claims, dodgy alignment dogmas, and cults of personality susceptible to the dangers of conspiracism. And this week we’re diving into a recent Movement Logic episode on back pain specialist, Stuart McGill.
Yet, as this conversation shows, all hope is not lost, and all physical culture is not a pipeline into body fascism, or worse—multi-level marketing. There are still intelligent and grounded educators who share the love of movement, infused with the logic and humility of science.
Laurel Beversdorf is an international yoga educator, a certified kettlebell specialist, and a strength coach. Sarah Court is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, movement mentor, and yoga teacher trainer.
Show Notes
Movement Logic
Episode 62: Make McGill Make Sense
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205: Dismantling Movement Dogmas (w/Laurel Beversdorf & Sarah Court)

In the first full episode of this ongoing series, Matthew looks at the anti-abortion arcs of two men: Rob Schenck and Frank Pavone.
Both leaders invested the images and remains of the unborn with passionate but imaginary desires that obscured from them how much harm they were causing. 
One of them exited that highway, but the other is still burning it up.
Includes the story of Kermit Gosnell, and how his Philadelphia abortion abattoir exemplified a political and moral disaster worthy of Naomi Klein. An obvious, organized crime, something that everyone could see but some tried to paper over, aided and abetted by the dominant order and progressive hypocrisy. Something that becomes the focal point of reasonable rage, but then leads to twisted conclusions. 
Content warning: abortion details.
Full Show Notes available on Patreon.
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Bonus Sample: Imaginary Children #1: Fetal Remains

The late historian of religion James Carse (1932-2020) made a radical proposal in his 2012 book, The Religious Case Against Belief. He argued that beliefs, far from being central to or definitive of religion, are actually antithetical to religious community. 
A religion’s historical longevity, he argued, depends on its ability to absorb and neutralize beliefs—epistemological dead ends built on willful ignorance. 
“The challenge to religion,” Carse says, “is not its opponents from without, but its believers from within, and the real enemy of religion is belief itself.”
What does this mean for a project like Conspirituality and other projects of disillusionment carried out in the shadow of New Atheism and other modern skeptical movements?
Blair Hodges of the Fireside and Family Proclamations podcasts joins Matthew to discuss a potential casualty of the battle against religious extremism: a nuanced understanding of religion itself.
Show Notes
The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse
Fireside with Blair Hodges
Family Proclamations w/ Blair Hodges   
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185: Light in the Growing Darkness

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