In this episode, Dara doesn’t think he’s going to talk about Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who was killed in police custody in Iran in recent weeks, but that’s what he does end up doing. He questions the strength of a faith that feels it has to police itself so viciously. He argues that when religious teaching becomes dogma, it weaponises itself and betrays an inherent insecurity.
Dara nails his colours to the mast in terms of his own attitudes to faith, belief, tolerance and sex. He draws a comparison between the prohibitive interpretation of Islam in contemporary Iran and the repressive Catholicism that afflicted Ireland through the mid-twentieth century up until the relatively recent past. Institutionalised misogyny, shame, guilt, distorted sexuality, and hypocritical morality are all in the mix.
Time is also found to discuss: habits of self-interrogation as a means to ongoing personal evolution; neurotic apex predators; and very 80s, very white, Hollywood movies.