Abhijit: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Rationable. Thank you so much for joining us. Today I have a person on for an amazing interview, but someone who I have been actually quite an admirer of not for a very long time because I've just recently discovered his YouTube channel and his podcast.

But this is gonna be a very interesting conversation. Vimoh welcome to Rationable. Thank you so much for joining us.

Vimoh: Thanks, Abhijit. The pleasure is all mine.

Abhijit: I gotta say I have from my initial impressions you do seem to be like, and I don't wanna put you in a hole here or a box, so no.

Vimoh: Feel (free). Push me. Push me. It's okay.

Abhijit: So the Indian version of Matt Dillahunty, at least you're heading there in a, you're heading in that direction.

Vimoh: Yeah. I would be really happy if that were true. I don't think it is true. But I hope it becomes true one day.

Abhijit: I've been listening to a few of your podcasts and during a few of the very long drives I've been having recently, and the questions that you answer, the clarity that you have on aspects of religion, on politics are very clear and well defined.

So, you do seem to have a good handle on it. It's religion, unfortunately, something that I haven't managed to get a grip on most of my life because I was brought up in a very liberal setting.

Vimoh: Yeah. That's the difference. I think you think I have a hold on it because I've actually been religious, not extremely religious, but reasonably religious.

And I also had a phase where I was a huge fan of Deepak Chopra and stuff and all that. Yeah. So I've been through all those things. So the clarity comes from experience.

Abhijit: Exactly. And that's exactly what I want to dig into today. I really I'm very curious as to where your journey began and how... you explained this in proper detail in a video... but if you could give us a kind of brief version of what were the key factors that really broke down your worldview and brought you into a more rational perspective, that would be great.

Vimoh: Okay. So before even I start, I'd like to clarify that being rational is something like rationality itself a concept that I think everyone uses in a different way.

 So if someone subscribes to a religious worldview and they have their creation myths, and if their worldview, their behaviour are consistent with that creation myth, then within the context of that religion, they are being rational. So when we talk about rationality, we are talking about rational thought as it is understood in modern times, but it is perfectly possible to be a rational Christian, a rational Muslim, or a rational Hindu, depending on what the outer boundaries of your philosophical words views are.

Secondly, my journey into it was primarily like I was a boy, brought up in a reasonably religious family, and my family was... I would suppose if there's a religious spectrum where on one end there are extremely religious people who do everything according to religion, my immediate family, was not there. They were somewhere in the middle ground. They performed the rituals and took part in the festivities, which was about it. And I largely grew up disinterested in it. But what happens to NRIs happened to me on a more local level where people move to another country and they find that all the religiosity that was, that they were surrounded by is no longer there. So they become twice the Hindu, or three times the Muslim or something. So what happened to me is that as an adult, when I moved out of my home state and went to live in another city where I worked, I found that I missed all of that. I had been taken for granted for a long time, but I missed all of that.

So I picked up books to feel good about my religious heritage and stuff, and that was the second way of it you might have called me an atheist when I was growing up, but I wasn't really. But when I was away from my hometown, I actually became somewhat more religious, and somewhat more spiritual.

And then, from that, I got to reading books that justify religiosity in modern times, quantum shit and all that. So I got to be a huge fan of that also.

Then it became part of my work and for a number of years, I did not think about it a lot because I went into my, creative field of comic book writing and all that.

But again, my engagement was with mythology, so I was writing fantasy based on mythology. So the engagement was not completely absent. Then I was also like my politics also became somewhat religious. I was a rightwinger. I've done videos about that also if anyone wants to watch it. It's a long story on my channel. After I left that job and I moved away from it, there was never a single day when I thought, "Okay, now I will stop". But it fell away from me. Like I had spent almost all the mental space I could on it, and it fell away. And then one day I discovered Matt Dillahunty's channel, Matt Dillahunty's discussions for the Atheist Experience.

And I was having a lot of fun, they were bashing Christians and Muslims and in the spirit of reasonableness, I one day asked myself, does this all apply to Hinduism? And I was reasonably dispassionate at that point in time. The emotional aspects, as I mentioned, had fallen away. So I was able to make that determination that, yeah, it does apply to my religion, the kind of shit that I see over there and laugh, I should be laughing at my own also. And then I did, and then I actually started identifying as an atheist, and then now I'm here. The journey is still ongoing, by the way. Yeah, the journey is still ongoing. There's an entire breed of people in India called Hindu atheists who are, who, who don't subscribe to any superstitions but are unwilling to let go of religious identity.

And along with that comes a lot of other cultural baggage that may still keep them irrational. So those are things that took some more time to fall away, but I think I'm in a reasonably good place right now.

Abhijit: So I have also heard that there's a form of Hinduism or there is some sort of classification in Hinduism, which is an atheist classification.

Vimoh: I have a problem with that because the thing that people usually talk about is either nirishwarwad, which means religion without God. Which is okay. Or people talk about charvak philosophy, which is which was a school of materialists around 600 BC in India. My problem is, why would any of that be called Hindu?

Nobody was using the word Hindu back then. It, you can call it Vedic, but you can't because Charvak explicitly rejected the Vedas. You will have to call it ancient Indian materialism and that I'm okay with. When contemporary Hindus try to claim all of that, there are Hindus who will say that Christians are Hindu and Muslims are Hindu and all that.

But you've seen this being done by people from all religions. There are in a Christian-majority country, someone might say, "We are all children of Christ". It's the same sentiment, it's basically picking someone up and saying, You are actually like me. And that person does not have enough political power or a voice to say, "No, I'm not like you, man. I don't identify as you. You are you. I am me. Let me be me. " You'll see Muslims doing this also everyone was created by Allah and therefore, everyone is by default Muslim, so people have forgotten they're reminding them and that sort of stuff. So Hindus do that also like you've seen the RSS repeatedly say that everyone in India is Hindu.

So what they're actually doing is that they're equating the Indian identity with the Hindu identity. And I think that is problematic, not only for historical reasons but also for political reasons. Because you are, you are granting weight to the Hindutva way of life, which is treating Hinduism as if it's some fundamental part of being Indian.

It is not. India's a diverse place. Even within Hinduism, there are so many tribes and so many religions and stuff that will not like being called Hindu. There are people who don't like being called Hindu and we keep calling them Hindu. There are tribal religions which are assimilated into Hinduism.

There is the Hindu code in our constitution applies to Sikhs and Buddhists also, and there are Sikhs and Buddhists who don't like it. So I'm just, I just try to keep my ears open to that sort of thing. And I'm not a huge fan of labelling everything Hindu, just because it is from India. I think we already have a word for things that come from India. That word is Indian. That's why I called myself an Indian atheist, instead of a Hindu atheist.

Abhijit: Yeah, same here actually. And I've grown up in a family which is more Brahmo, a reformist sect of Hinduism. And very liberal. So there's no idle worship, there's no statue worship. There's, it's just, it's a very pantheistic version or perspective of God.

 We don't have to celebrate anything. We don't have any fasts. We don't do vegetarianism on Tuesdays and (Thursdays) anything of that sort. So my parents did take me to these congregations when I was a kid, but I was never force-fed any of that. So fortunately I was allowed to make up my own mind as I went along.

And I was, most of the time I was either apatheist or agnostic. Of course, agnostic atheists are what we all are, most of us. Yeah. With the exception of maybe somebody like David s Silverman,

Vimoh: Who's the right-winger now? Yeah, he's not where he started is all I'm saying.

Abhijit: Yeah. Yeah. He's had a journey himself. But I remember I read Sam Harris's Atheist Manifesto and by the time I finished that I was like, Yeah, that makes sense. That seems to be the way I seem to identify how I see the world, basically. So have you read that by any chance?

Vimoh: I've read this letter to letters to the Christian Nation. Is that the one you're talking about?

Abhijit: No. This is an essay called The Atheist Manifesto.

Vimoh: I may have, back then, I read a lot and I read a lot by Sam Harris also. I may have, but I don't have a clear recollection of it.

Abhijit: But it should be available on Google and stuff.

Vimoh: My, my journey was actually this Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens brought me to the cliff. Matt Dillahunty punched me in the stomach. And Yuval Noah Harari pushed me off the cliff. That is...

Abhijit: I really love the way he's, he, he puts religion and politics and all of that across, in the book, Sapiens. It's like he puts something that I knew, but in a completely new perspective that it, whole imagination,

Vimoh: The book has been accused of oversimplifying a lot of things.

And I appreciate that perspective also. Yeah. But for me, it was just that, I think the only thing that was still keeping me connected to religion was that I was thinking there are some things that I can't clearly put my finger on as to how these happened. And it had never occurred to me to look in the direction of anthropology.

Ah, which is, just, I blame it on my own, personal lack of perspective. But he pushed me in that direction. And once I looked, I found that the evolution of religion can also be at least narrated in evolutionary. Like, we come from we evolve together. Social evolution is a thing. Tribal unity is a thing. Storytelling is a thing that works for tribal unity. And it helped me really put my thoughts in perspective.

Abhijit: But in India as an atheist and somebody who has been been on calls with multitudes of people twice a week and earlier, apparently every day

Vimoh: Every day. It was twice a week in the beginning. Then it got every day, and then they realized I can't handle this. So it went back to twice a week.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. So I, and some of these conversations that you've had were very interesting and the first part I want to ask about that is what, how do people perceive you as an atheist?

As I was talking to Kumar Nage yesterday, my previous interview will be coming out very soon. He is one of the founders of the Bright Society, which I had told you about earlier, which is a Maharashtra-based based atheist group, which I'm also a part of because they're kinda spreading their footprint a little bit.

I had spoken to him and he said that India, as far as being atheist is concerned, is very tolerant. At least most Hindus don't really mind if you're an atheist. So the things that we hear about that, that have happened in the US where people have been fired, people have lost their families for coming out as an atheist. I wanted to get your perspective on how that is. You've spoken to so many people and in your own life, have you felt any sort of discrimination or any stigmatization against atheism or you per se?

Vimoh: No. In my personal life, I have not, because as I said, my immediate family is quite chill.

But I think the reason some countries tend to have a more... the outcome of being an atheist tends to be more serious in some countries. You have to look at it from the perspective of what that country, what religion means in that country, and what they value. So here's something I'll tell you.

If it is a simple matter of not believing in God, then Abrahamic religions are going to be harsher on it, because believing in God is a very vital thing there. Yeah. In India, not believing in God alone will not bring harsh punishments, but rejecting a guru or the caste system will bring harsh punishments.

Upper-caste Hindu children can afford to tell their parents that I'm, I don't believe in God. And their parents will be, I eat your food and go do your homework. But the day they say that the guru that the family believes in, or the deity that the family believes in was a liar or a cheat, that day there will be serious consequences. Or the day they say that our family is someone that belongs to an oppressor caste that day, it'll be harsher consequences. We have seen inter-caste marriages being punished all over India by deaths, by families in fact. When it's called honour killing, apparently that's what it is called It should be called dishonour killing.

So the foundation of religion abroad might be God. In India, it is not. And that is why I think that the simple act of not believing in the existence of God is okay in most Hindu households unless you are someone who goes after, these days, it's even more complicated because we have brought God back into the equation with a vengeance.

Like modern-day Hindutva is very God-focused, it's very deity focused and regardless of what someone slightly chiller might say online. Yeah. No. We don't believe in God. I find that there are two distinct categories of people who talk about Hinduism. One is talking about Hinduism to white people. So that version of Hinduism will be all chill, spiritual, calm, no punishment, no hell and everything and white people and go, "Wow, this is not at all like my religion." then there is another kind about which people will not talk. They will not recommend those books. And these will be books about the cast. These will be books about the oppressive practices in the religion. These will be books by Ambedkar, et cetera.

I think a crucial part of being an Indian atheist if you truly want to understand what an atheist feels like in Pakistan or in America, will be to see how opposed someone is to the caste system. Because at the end of the day, it still comes from the doctrine of Karma. People get their cast from their births, and they are born into whatever conditions they're born into because of the actions that they performed in their past life.

So that is our God. What the position God holds in an Abrahamic society, caste holds in our society. So atheism alone might be not very, might not be punished, but that will be. So that is my position on that.

Abhijit: Ah, very interesting. And this then the concept of karma is something that... karm

Sorry.

Vimoh: Yeah. Karm. If you think karma, you're like, westernized and all that.

Abhijit: Yeah. So karm. So I have a lot of very serious problems with that very concept. But I want to let you have a go at it before I tell everyone what my perspective is.

Vimoh: My general perspective on the matter is that what are we exactly doing when we believe in God? We are ascribing consciousness and agency to the universe.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Vimoh: Or a creator of the universe. But you might as well call it the universe because if someone is going to justify the existence of God by saying the universe must have a creator, then you can say, God must have a creator, and then you're stuck with the same problem. So might as well remove the middleman and make it the universe.

These days, a lot of Western commentators of the religious variety also would say that you universe is love, Universe is God and all that. So what we are doing when we believe in God, or saying that God does things, is that we are saying there is a cosmic intelligence that concerns itself with the affairs of humans who are one species on one planet in one corner of one galaxy. Right? Now there is a personal aspect to it. There is compassion, there is care, there is listening to prayers and all that. But even if you take all of that away, you are left with karma, which is impersonal, but it is still a principle of the universe according to religious people who believe in it, that has some kind of interest in human affairs.

 It concerns itself with goodness and badness. It concerns itself with actions and their consequences. And it is not universal because it does not apply to animals. It applies to human beings. So at the end of the day, karma is God. You've just removed the face and the name and the beard and the clothes, but at in, at its core, it is still ascribing some kind of moral quality to the universe, and therefore it can be rejected on the same grounds as we reject God.

Abhijit: Yeah, very true. I never looked at it that way, but I've looked at it more from the perspective of Even if you just take it as its essence of good deeds and bad deeds. And even a lot of Hindus, friends of mine who I've spoken to basically that, whatever goes around comes around, which is the basic concept of it.

If you do bad, you will get bad. And if you don't, yeah. If you do good, you will get fortune and fame and whatever, at least happiness in your life. And good luck on the whole. And essentially my problem is that is always seen from a very narrow perspective of the here and now. And like if somebody, whacks your wallet or like a girlfriend breaks up with you with a, in a very nasty way, and like she's gonna get what she's, what's got what she's got coming.

Or even from the male perspective that he's getting what's coming to him. It'll bite him in the ass later. But when you stretch it out a little bit, at least from my perspective, does that mean that people who have really horrible circumstances right now did something really bad in their past life? That's almost judging a person without knowing them, saying that, street kids or beggar children or something of that sort and they have probably the worst circumstances under which anyone can live.

Vimoh: Yeah.

Abhijit: And that is essentially passing judgment on what they did in a past life that maybe they had absolutely no responsibility.

Vimoh: It's generally speaking, it reduces empathy.

Abhijit: Absolutely. It just disconnects people from other people. It's just I find that extremely problematic.

Vimoh: And of course, like that's the social aspect of it, and it is used to justify cast violence and stuff.

 I am a huge critic of this hustle culture thing that is happening right now. , where people say that if you work hard, you will get what you want. And they ignore all the other aspects, all the other factors that go into making someone successful, which is parental wealth and all.

 So in America also, you'll see people saying the poor are poor because they're lazy and the rich are rich because they're working hard. So there's this deification of hard work

Abhijit: yeah,

Vimoh: Which is counter to everything we know about how society works. And this is, it's almost religious in nature, right?

Because it discounts every other factor, it discounts the fact that you have privilege. It discounts the fact that the other person who's poor does not have access to the resources that you have. The reason they're not articulating English is because they did not have the opportunity to study English or to live in environments where English was spoken quite fluently by your parents, spoke English, or neighbours spoke English, you were encouraged to pursue English, have brought books, et cetera.

People forget all of this. So all of these factors go into the making of something, and then at the end of the day, you have something and someone else does not have something, and you simply say, Eh, it's karma. I'm so nice that I deserved all this. And they're clearly people who did something bad in the last life.

We all know good people who did not get good things and bad people who got good things. And the only way you can rationally justify it is by saying reincarnation exists. And there's no evidence of that either.

Abhijit: Yeah. No, that's a good point. And I, there's something else which I had spoken to Kumar about yesterday was, do Atheists think religious people are stupid?

Vimoh: They shouldn't, actually, I don't because, and I have complained about this also. I've said that Atheists should avoid doing this shit because it does not help at all. The moment you call someone stupid – A: how do you know they're stupid? I've seen a 17-year-old edgy teenager who only makes atheist memes talk about a quantum physicist who's religious.

Clearly, there is a difference in intelligence, and you're not smarter than him. Not believing in God has nothing to do with intelligence. You cannot believe in God and still be a dumb fuck, and you can believe in God and still be very wise on matters, on individual issues. This is why like I, I do this live stream, like where people come in and talk.

My approach to it is always to try to understand where people are coming from. If someone says, I believe in God, I will say, Okay, gimme your definition of God. We can talk about that. Because when you're making YouTube videos, you are making, you are responding to some unstated thing in the air, it's a nominal definition of God. Like what everyone understands to be God. Yeah. I try to avoid doing that and that is why I actually do a live stream because every person is different. Every person has a reason for thinking what they think and we should not be so dismissive that, haha you believe in God, therefore you're stupid. I oppose that to a great degree. Yeah.

Abhijit: I know a lot of people who are extremely intelligent, perfectly good human beings have an exceptional perspective on things and are generally good people. But they hold a lot of contradictory or supernatural belief systems, not just pertaining to God, but maybe astrology in numerology, et cetera.

Vimoh: Yeah.

Abhijit: Which of course have absolutely no basis in science, which maybe some of our viewers might not agree with us on that one. But yeah, it doesn't take intelligence to believe in something which is superstitious or religious. It just, it is something that we have been almost brainwashed or conditioned to believe since we were children.

And since everybody in our society does believe in it, it provides a sense of community. It brings people together and like these tropes we don't know everything in the universe. Therefore there's probably a god or might as well live life as

Vimoh: as if one exists,

Abhijit: it's not a factor that really counts in too much. But going onto a little bit more specificity in your journey, when did the whole Vimoh channel start? When did you start podcasting? How what brought that idea to you?

Vimoh: Oh, Vimoh actually did not start as an Atheist channel. My name on social media is Vimoh. I just started a YouTube channel. I had no idea what I wanted to do there. The first few videos, if you watch them, were just for short on my phone. The audio is really bad and the idea was to talk about society and storytelling.

And I had hoped that, in some way, it'll bleed into atheism also because religions are stories. So I was hoping to get to it somewhat tangentially. I was trying to create an awareness of stories as the foundation of society and how a lot of things that we consider objectively true about religion are actually also just stories.

So the first three videos you'll find, I'm talking about Green Lantern and the Netflix series and something or the other. The thrust was always the same. Then of course, as usually happens when a YouTube channel starts, people are wondering why are people not watching. And then I realized maybe I was being too smart.

So I started making short explainer videos and stuff, and even that didn't work for quite a long time. And then in the middle of the political upheavals of early 2020 and late 2019 when Jamia was attacked and everything, I started writing Twitter threads and posting screenshots of them on Instagram. And it really worked. It shot up. My subscriber base went from, on Instagram, went from 600 right now it is at 36,000 something. So it really shot up, and I figured that, hey, I can actually use this as the place to do the things that I wanted to do on YouTube. So I started putting those short videos on Instagram, and they got some traction.

Eventually, I asked people," Hey guys, you, would you like me to do an Instagram live every day?" And they said, Yeah. So I did, and we talk about atheism and politics and social justice and everything. And of course, Instagram is notoriously unmonetizable for people who are not posting, soft porn.

So at some point, I figured I have a YouTube channel. It didn't work. Maybe I can take these people to YouTube. Mm-hmm. but tried for a long time. I, I tried to do live streams on YouTube. I would do simultaneous live streams. I'll be live streaming on Instagram (and) say, Hey guys, if you wanna come on YouTube, you can.

So through that, a few people came. And in due course of time, I stopped Instagram because the interface was really hard to work with. I would answer comments, right? So the comments, you can't scroll and hold the phone properly. And there was a weird sound when the hand touched the screen because of the static and all that.

So I figured I'll just invest in some good equipment like this mic and a good webcam and do it on YouTube. So I moved to YouTube. I had a podcast that I was updating infrequently. At some point of time in the last two years, I decided I can just unite the two. I'll take the audio from my Livestream, and I'll put it on my podcast.

So now it's all uniform. It's like I do the show as a podcast. I take callers, and at the end of it I take the audio and put it up on the podcast. That is what has been happening.

Abhijit: Very nice. I think that's a, I might actually steal that idea from you.

Vimoh: It's like blundering in the dark. I, I keep an eye on how the media landscape is working, right? So I, I keep my eyes on the things that might change in the next five years, and I always have a backup plan. Right now I have four channels. One of them is a writing-related channel. I don't know what will happen to it, but maybe something will happen to it. In the middle, for some time I started a Hindi Atheism podcast, but I could not keep up with it. So that fell by the wayside. My approach towards content creation is that I'll also, I'll always be trying 10 ideas. Mm-hmm. , maybe two will work and the other nine will die. And that has been happening. I have more dead projects than I have a live projects. It's evolution.

Abhijit: Exactly. That was exactly what I was about to say. That is what evolution is. You have good mutations you have bad mutations, and you end up with ones that succeed.

Vimoh: The ones that work. Yeah. and success is defined by how much something can help me sustain myself. Indeed.

Yeah.

Abhijit: And having spoken to so many people, and I'm sure a lot of atheists and what is colloquially known as the agnostic who is on the fence, have you met atheists who are relatively unaware, uninitiated into, thinking sceptically, thinking rationally or critically instead.

Vimoh: On the whole, it seems harder, right? You can either be someone who's an apatheist to use a lose them – who doesn't care.

And there are plenty of people like that they don't believe and they don't care to talk about it either, I don't believe. And what's your problem? Why are you trying to tell me that I should believe go away? Yeah. So that is one category of people. I find very few of those. Most people who are atheists actually grew up in religious households and they have some reason for believing what they believe. And most of it has to do with childhood nostalgia. The conclusion I have come to after watching a lot of people is that – here's the sequence of events: you're born in a religious house. You love your religion because you don't know any better. You get to a point where you are smarter and you think none of this makes any sense. But you also don't want to let go of the sweet feelings of childhood. Festivals, cousins, parents, Dada, Dadi naye kapde khareedke dete the, woh sab. So that happens. So at that point of time, in order to reconcile your understanding of the real world, And to maintain your religion, you get into a phase, which is something I would like to call the justification phase. So you find books which say, Yeah, sure. This, it's just superstition, but quantum reality. So that justification phase usually turns people spiritual, which means that they will continue to be religious, but they will not call themselves religious. They will call themselves spiritual, or I consider myself a physicist.

I got some guy a couple of days ago who's not a physicist, but he considered himself a physicist. Aise hi!

That phase happens and then maybe if they expose themselves to enough sceptical thought, some of them break away from it saying, " It doesn't make sense. My childhood is too far behind me. I have lived half my life in ignorance or at least believing the wrong things. I don't have to spend the remaining life believing the same shit."

And maybe, there is the reason around to see that religion is doing some tangible damage to human society, to democracy, to rights, to human rights. Maybe it is time I just broke away from it. Maybe I just called, call it for what it is. Yeah, it's a funnel, the funnel thing, marketing funnels. The number of it to come out at the end of it is very small. But everyone goes through it.

Abhijit: Exactly. Except for someone like me who never really had

Vimoh: Yeah. I think on the whole people like you are rarer.

Abhijit: Exactly. We're very rare. I have always had this problem with really educating myself about Indian religions because such a vast amount of material out there is based on Christian worldviews and on now becoming more frequently, Muslim worldviews, where a lot of ex-Muslims are making content to educate people about the problems with the religion. But it's very rare to find an equivalent for Hinduism, which anyways, Hinduism is very hard to define. So I'd love to hear how you would define it.

Vimoh: See, I've run into the same problem, and I had seen Western atheists struggle with this so much that when I started doing this, I figured that I need to come up with a way actually to deal with this because Hinduism tends to be slippery. You cannot come to any single conclusion about it. You talk to a person and you say, Hey, this belief is wrong. And he'll say, I don't believe in it. And he will have 10 other beliefs, which you hadn't heard of till now, right? Yeah, exactly. So the main reason I do the Livestream is because I cannot deal with this stuff by making YouTube videos about, okay, so today we are going to debunk Hinduism.

It cannot be done. You cannot have 10 reasons Hinduism is false because there will be 20 people who say, I don't agree with any of these 10 reasons, and here are 25 more reasons that you need to debunk. You'll be spending your lifetime doing it. So what I do is just whoever comes, I ask them, What do you believe and why?

And I start there. Then there is no scope for ambiguity because it's a direct face-to-face conversation. So even if it's a Hindu who has incorporated a little bit of Abrahamic thought into it, even if it's a Christian who believes that he's actually Hindu, even if it's someone who says, I have no religion, but the universe is conscious, I just start there okay, that is a belief.

Let's go step by step through it. I think that is the best way to do it.

Abhijit: That's a very good strategy. Definitely. But is Hinduism a religion from your perspective?

Vimoh: I, it's too big a question, and I give a simple answer saying, if I pick up a government form in the list of religions, as Hinduism mentioned, if it is, then it's a religion.

Your philosophical sophistication can go F itself. Like if I go out and ask someone, “Hey, what's your religion?” They say, “Hindu”. They don't say, “Ah, but what do you mean by religion? Is it advaita vedanta, is it charvak school? Is it nirishwarwad?” Nobody does that. As far as normal people and normal conversations are concerned, it's a religion, and that's what I go by. If someone wants to talk about the nuances of it, I'm happy to do but come on my live stream and do it.

Abhijit: Ah, because I have met people who have said Hinduism isn't a religion.

Vimoh: Those are diversions. Those are diversions designed for a Western audience. You And I will also count as westernized, right?

Abhijit: Yeah. Relatively.

Vimoh: Yeah. Urban western, sort of.

Abhijit: Yeah. So they said it's a life philosophy. I'm like, Listen; you have certain supernatural beings that most people believe in who represent the part of Hinduism they have. And they spend a significant amount of their time and money investing in, praying to those supernatural beings and asking them for things you just like you would for any God.

 So there are many gods, and there are places where those gods are worshipped. There are forms in which those gods are worshipped, and that's what makes it a religion. But it is very slippery. I'll give you that.

Vimoh: Yeah. It's maintained as slippery; I think several layers of oil are applied on it on an everyday basis.

It's not naturally slippery. It is maintained as slippery.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. Which makes it very hard to define and very hard to refute in very specific terms

Vimoh: In general terms. It is hard to refute. In general terms, I suppose any religion would be hard to refute, but it is easier when it is Abrahamic because there are some foundations to it. God exists; there's a prophet or a son of God. And if you don't believe in them, your claim to that religion is significantly reduced. You can't have it like Islam has the Ahmedia sect or Shia and Sunni are there. Christianity has broken up so many times there are uncountable numbers of churches just across America, forget the world. And Hinduism is the same, but there are fewer foundational claims in Hinduism and

Abhijit: And scriptures.

Vimoh: Yes, it's true there is an attempt to make the Bhagwat Gita in some, into some central scripture, but that is also not true because there are many Hindus who will completely reject the Bhagwat Gita and continue to call them themselves Hindu.

Abhijit: Yeah. And there are so many of these. There's the Bhagwat Gita; there are the Upanishads, there are the Vedas, which is which a lot of people say that is the centre of Hinduism.

Vimoh: Most of them have not read them.

Abhijit: Exactly.

Vimoh: (laughing) And

Abhijit: Who is going to sit through and read every single word of those things.

Vimoh: No. I'm saying even the people who proposed these books as the foundations of the religion have not read them.

 The other day, on my Livestream, by the way, it was a funny incident. The other day on my Livestream, somebody said "the Bhagwat Gita mentions the stratosphere and the layers of the atmosphere. Mm-hmm. , How do you answer that?" I said, "Okay, where did you find this out?" He sent me a graphic, and the graphic says, that Krishna says this chapter and verse. I said, “Okay, let's open the chapter and verse”. Chapter and verse were not about that. It was something else entirely. And I said, "Do you think this mentions the atmospheric levels?" He said, "No. Okay, bye". There is random stuff floating around where people are talking about quantum physics and the atmosphere. And anytime sciences finds something, there is a small cottage industry with starts making memes and assigning random chapters and verse to Bhagwat Gita. And it's not even there.

Abhijit: I haven't read any of the religious texts. I haven't managed to get past Genesis in the Bible, let alone because that in itself is so densely nonsensical that it's just boggled my mind. I was like, Dude, I can't do this right now. But for people, for atheists among us who want to educate themselves more and become more knowledgeable on the Hindu religion, what can they look for? What are the books they can read? What are the websites they can go to? What would you recommend?

Vimoh: I don't know what I can recommend, but I do think that it is important to study. My advice would be to whatever extent it is possible for you to engage with religion, do. To whatever extent it is possible to engage with people who want to tell you that the religion is true, do. But always do it on a case-by-case basis. Because you will, you'll still run into people who say the Bhagwat Gita is amazing and they have not read it.

Or I sometimes, like my favourite thing is, I ask people, " tell me who the father of the Pandavas were". And the common answer might be Pandu, but they had five, like every single one of them came from a different father, and all the fathers were gods. So if someone is unable to answer that basic question, I cease the conversation.

I said, "You need to learn more about your own religion before you can teach me to follow it". Because I have run a YouTube channel for two years which has been devoted to mythology. I've written a comic book series, which is based on Hindu mythology. I need to understand that we are on the same level as far as knowledge of all this is concerned before I can start conversing. But I would recommend a book by Ambedkar called Riddles in Hinduism. In fact, at some point, I think I should make a book list for Indian atheists. I have tried to do it in a broken way many times. There is a book by Meghnat Desai called “Who Wrote the Bhagwat Gita”. I would encourage people to make a clear distinction between books written by Hindus for white people and books written by people who have been on the oppressed side within Hinduism about Hinduism. Those are the books we should go for.

The books written by Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi authors about Hinduism are the places where Indian atheists should start as far as reading about religion is concerned. And of course, I would also recommend that people read the Quran, the Bible and the Bhagwat Gita, because these get thrown around the most. Like some time ago, there was this proposal, right? Should there be a religious study class in schools? I think there should be, but as long as there's, it is taught like a religious study class, and people don't start using it for preaching. It should be taught by religious scholars. It should be taught by scholars of comparative religion, not priests from any religion because that will just mess it up.

Abhijit: And you need to teach every religion separately. Yeah. And and equally given equal weightage to everything. Yeah.

Vimoh: I mean we have had comparative religious studies, a as courses in universities for quite some time. Maybe a school version of it can be prepared if that is what is done. I'm totally in favor of it because somebody was asking me some time ago, How do you bring up an atheist child?

And as was, I wouldn't. Why would I bring up a child an atheist? I would bring up the child as a human being. Whatever they choose to believe is up to them. My duty as a parent would be to expose them to all kinds of thoughts. So I would tell them about Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, but also that there are people who don't believe in any of it.

Most people become prisoners of their religion because they're not exposed to anything else. And that is what you should fight. We should expose them to more things, and most people will, make their own decisions.

Abhijit: Absolutely. And as so many skeptics and atheists personalities in the US have said, you have to teach people not what to think, but how,

Vimoh: but how to think. Exactly. And in fact, for a, for quite a long time, my YouTube channel banner just had those words, how to think.

Abhijit: Ah, that's nice. I honestly I did consider that as one of the logos, as one of portals for Rationable as well, because I honestly I feel that the teaching of critical thinking and comparative religion and, the openness to different cultures, those kind of values should be taught starting from school, from preschool even, from, in very basic forms just to educate people.

But I think that the powers that be, which are governmental and educational institutions, I think would be very resistant towards, towards those.

Vimoh: No, absolutely there will be. Because, which is why the internet matters so much.

Abhijit: Exactly. So here we are , we're doing what we can on the internet to educate as many people as we can. You've been doing this for the last couple of years.

Vimoh: Yeah.

Abhijit: You think you've made a dent. Have you changed any minds yet?

Vimoh: If by any minds you mean more than one, then Yes.

Abhijit: Ah, nice.

Vimoh: A lot of people who come on my livestream are actually not atheists. They're religious people who find some merit in the way I talk about religion. So they come and I would like to think that I'm making small, dents all over the place. It is never, it is almost never possible to have a conversation with a religious person and the conversation ends and they give up their religion.

 Like my goal with whenever I talk to people is that this is a conversation starter. Mm-hmm. , this is where we are. I understand your point of view. I hope you understand mine. Come back. And if they find the experience stimulating enough, they will come back.

And in four or five meetings maybe they'll start thinking something. But, and if they don't, that's still okay because the content of our conversation is online and other people can watch it and maybe they will think something. Yeah.

Abhijit: I've noticed that your, the way you converse with your callers has a kind of a Socratic quality to it.

So you have the Socratic method, otherwise known as street epistemology, just epistemology and the way that has been promoted by Anthony Magnabosco

Vimoh: Magnabosco yeah. I'm a huge fan of his work, and I try to base my approach to conversations on his. I actually recently got the book that he was inspired by, which is a Manual for Creating Atheists.

Abhijit: Yeah, I've read that.

Vimoh: Yeah. So I'm reading that right now, and I'm trying to sharpen my methods, not sharpen, because that sounds rude. I'm trying to make my method more effective. Because usually it just becomes, I recommend that you read this book. I recommend that you read that book. The authors of those books are having a proxy discussion through us.

We are not talking to each other. So whenever someone sends me a link, in fact, I have banned links on my YouTube comments. If you want to make an argument, you're going to have to use your own words because it's very easy. Throw a link at someone. It's very easy to you go read these five books.

Yeah. Like he's going to . Nobody's going to do it. You're gonna throw the books at him and feel smug and he's going to ignore you completely. And no, no gain is going to be made. Talk to each other. That's my point. Exactly.

Abhijit: This have to have the conversations. Yeah. But as a recommendation, , I recommend a book.

Vimoh: Well, excellent timing by the way.

Abhijit: Exactly so Peter Bogosian, who wrote A Manual for Creating Atheists, has made a sequel which is much less controversial. Because it's not just about a manual for creating atheists. It's called How to Have Impossible Conversations, if I remember that correctly.

Vimoh: Anthony Magnabosco I think at some point in an interview, I remember, maybe it was him or someone else, he said this book should not have been called How to Create an Atheist. It should be called How to Create Doubt.

Abhijit: Absolutely. I found the book, the name of the book was very objectionable, but I did still read it.

Yeah. But I find that the the sequel that he's done a much better job of clarifying. And it's not just about atheism. He's talking about any kind of conversation. Yeah. It can be political, it can be about just basic beliefs about ghosts or

Vimoh: I'll definitely get my hands on this book.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Vimoh: Because that's the first thing that I noted was that the book is black and on it says in the red How to create an Atheist. It sounds like that book that the Scarlet Witch is holding in the MCU: “I shall now create an atheist!” That sort of thing is happening. The Darkhold, yeah like the book that if religious people touch it, they've burst into flames or something.

Abhijit: Absolutely. There's one last topic that I really wanted to touch on with you and get your perspective on. Now, this is some, this is a conversation that my father and I have had numerous times and we never managed to really agree on it. Now, the so what keeps happening is that somebody writes something controversial about Islam. They get a fatwa put on them and people try to kill him. Yeah. Sometimes they succeed. Yeah. So this happened,

Vimoh: Salman Rushdie most notably, they didn't succeed, but he was attacked quite significantly.

Abhijit: Absolutely. And I actually went to see him and Richard Dawkins in 2012 at the Jaipur Literary Festival. And he didn't come because he wasn't allowed to enter the country. And Richard Dawkins did manage to, because he's never said anything controversial against Islams or Islamic religion or

Vimoh: he has, but not to the extent. Like I think it's Salman Rushdie has a reputation with respect to that book from that long ago.

Yeah. Works to his disadvantage and disrespect. Richard Dawkins gets away because he has said many small things. Yeah. And Salman Rushdie is thought of as the person who wrote an entire book.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. Poor guy. But so the thing is, my father's position is he's, he feels that you should not provoke such people by writing material that will lead to violence or will lead to some sort of retaliation. While my position is, when it comes to freedom of speech, you have a right to I personally wouldn't do that myself. I wouldn't draw Mohammad or something like that, just for kicks. But at the same time, one has the right to express themselves and to criticize ideas and to ridicule really bad idea.

Vimoh: Absolutely. They do.

Abhijit: And it depends on the country you live in. If you're in a country where you have blasphemy laws where you're not allowed to do that, and you will get your head chopped off if you see it or executed in some form. Yeah, absolutely. To protect yourself. You shouldn't. But what is your perspective on communicating ideas that ridiculed religion and which mainly to controversy even mainly to a retaliation, but you have the right to do it.

Vimoh: It comes down to approaches, right? First of all, just to be on the, on extremely clear about this, it is not okay to kill people for criticizing religion regardless of which religion it is which prophet it is, which deity it is. It's not cool. People have also been killed for criticizing Hindu Deities

Abhijit: Absolutely.

Vimoh: But that's why I beside the point because you're talking about Islam and I don't want to deflect it into something else. I think that if the goal is communication, we have to think about I am having conversation with someone who's Muslim.

Abhijit: No, I'm not (being) specific. I'm saying any religion because Islam is of course most in the news for this.

Vimoh: Yeah no. I think it is important to talk about Islam from the point of view of this because power structures come into it. There is a difference between insulting Islam and Saudi Arabia. And insulting Islam in India in both cases, it's okay to insult Islam, I think, but I also think that we need to be mindful of what the repercussions of our actions are going to be for other people.

It's one thing for me to insult Islam and take responsibility for whatever happens. , if I criticize Islam, in what ways am I contributing to the already existing anti-Muslim bigotry in India? , because that is also a factor that needs to be taken into consideration. Now, I can be irresponsible about it.

I say, I don't care. Free speech. I'll say whatever I want. I don't care who dies, I don't care who's hurt. That's one thing, and I think I would be at dick if I did that. Secondly, if I'm talking to a Muslim person who's extremely emotional about his religion, I think the Socratic method works better than to just anger him.

Abhijit: Exactly

Vimoh: right. If I, if my goal is to just piss him off, if my goal is to just insult him and feel good about it, just to vent, then sure, that can be very easily achieved. But what is harder is actually talking to him, trying to find the foundations of his religion. I know there are really brave people in Pakistan who are secular activists, who are Atheist YouTubers that is Haris Sultan and Ghalib Kamal and all, and they criticize Islam on a daily basis.

They provide constructive criticism. They talk to people the same way that I do, and they are risking a lot.

Abhijit: Absolutely.

Vimoh: It is very easy for an Indian atheist to form a YouTube channel and criticize Islam because they will get support from all kinds of quarters. They will also put themselves at risk, by the way.

, I'm not a huge fan of BJP. I'm not a huge fan of Nupur Sharma, the BJP spokesperson who said something about Islam on TV and got death threats. It should not happen to her. It should not happen to anyone. Absolutely right. But we also need to keep in mind that the person who said this belongs to a party, which has recently why recently forever been at the forefront of spreading anti-Muslim bigotry.

And because of that, a lot of people have also suffered. Absolutely. So our criticism of religion needs to be tempered by an awareness of social realities that exist in the society that we live in, which is the bigger problem. Which problem am I solving by doing this? What problems am I creating by doing this?

Abhijit: Absolutely. That's very well put. Okay, so now for people who have just been introduced to you, where can they find you? Where where can they get in touch? How they can they get onto your calls?

Vimoh: My YouTube live stream is the more livestream is remote live.

It's at www.youtube.com/@vimohlive. And my YouTube channel where I mostly post shorts and occasionally a video is youtube.com/@vimoh. So @vimoh and @vimohlive are the two YouTube things I have. You can come subscribe to either of them and we'll talk on YouTube. I go live on witness days at 9:30 PM and Saturdays at 9:30 PM It usually happens for one hour, one and a half hours or two hours at max, but we take callers, people call in, we just talk about what they believe in, and it's, these are chill conversations.

Occasionally, some fun emerges from it, but mostly it's interesting as that's what I've been told. And if you want to listen to the audio transcripts of these, you can just find Wemo live on Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast. Ghana.com, any audio platform and search for Vimohlive, v i m o h l i v e and the podcast.

Subscribe to the podcast or listen to it.

Abhijit: Wonderful. Are you also on any social media like Twitter still?

Vimoh: Yeah, I'm on Instagram, but I got a threat last week that my account may be deleted because I used the word Brahmanism cause apparently that's hate speech. So no it's not hate speech, but Instagram is hand in glove with certain nefarious people in power.

So we shall drop it if you want to. You can follow me on Instagram. I post shorts. There also reels, or rather, ah, my handle is Vimoh ,v-i-m-o-h and the same on Twitter.

Abhijit: Wonderful.

Vimoh: Yeah. In fact, I don't even join any web service if I can't get the username Vimoh.

Abhijit: That's good. That's a good way to do it.

I have, unfortunately, I have compromised multiple times in that, it's become Be Rationable in most places because apparently there's another Rationable out there. I don't know who it is.

Vimoh: Wow. But it's very heartbreaking. You come up with a brilliant name, I'm sure nobody has it, and then turns out 20 people have it.

Abhijit: Exactly. And rationable.com, I was searching for that all over the place. Apparently it's not available and it's for sale for some few thousand dollars.

Vimoh: Yeah, I made that mistake. I had vimoh.com. I let it go because I was not getting a traffic and now it costs a few lakhs. So I have vimoh.In where my podcast website is, www vimoh.in.

Abhijit: Thank you so much, Vimoh for being on Rationable.

It's been an amazing conversation. I'm sure we'll have many more. We'll have more.

Vimoh: Thanks Abhijit

Abhijit: Thank you very much. See you on your podcasts and I'll catch you later. Thanks everyone for joining in. If you wanna find out more, if you wanna listen to the podcast, you can go to berationable.com, and you can subscribe to the podcast on any podcasting service.

Vimoh: And thanks Abhijit it was a pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Abhijit: Bye. See ya.