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.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on FaceBook.
Thanks for the post-prod Graham.