Though every time I read the news it feels like the world is rife with religious-fueled mortal peril, I think it’s actually a really great time to be an atheist. Not just because it helps you face all that tragedy with laughter, but because the last 10 years has seen an upswelling of reason and secular philosophy that I believe will become the foundations of a movement to end the religious tyranny and pseudoscience that has kept humanity oppressed for far too long. Books like The God Delusion and The Moral Landscape are bringing big ideas to the table and not shrinking way when they rattle the established order.

A friend of mine recently asked me to discuss atheism, and how it intersects with my ethnic Jewish background, for a web-series he was working on: De-Conversion. You may also recognize him as Mike Lee, The Religious Antagonist, or from our Atheist Gansta Rap video last summer. Our discussion covered everything from the identity-based roots of anti-semitism, Jesus’s status as a “nogoodnik,” and what Jews think of the JJ Abrams Star Trek.

The video is below. Enjoy.