Several days ago, I was horrified—as many were—by the news that a bomb had been detonated outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. The blast killed the 25‑year‑old bomber, Guy Edward Bartkus, and wounded four bystanders. The attacker left behind a manifesto declaring that “humanity should not exist at all” and described life as a “disease.” It quickly became clear that the bomber was a devoted follower of the radical anti-natalist Atheistic philosophy known as Efilism.
This is unfortunately not the first time that Efilism has inspired a terrorist attack; Adam Lanza, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooter, was inspired by Efilism as well.
Reddit, where the bomber had been active in the r/Efilism subreddit, immediately banned the forum for violating its policies against advocating violence — but reddit has not banned any of the other dozens of anti-natalism subreddits used to spread this ideology, which remain on the site in operation, including both r/natalism and r/childfree, where the Efilism movement was born and which are still used to funnel people into its radical ideology. It is unsurprising to me that these communities were not also banned given reddit as a company popularly promotes anti-natalism ideologies such as the politicized form of abortion activism. So unfortunately reddit will never genuinely do anything to hinder the spread of these ideas on their website, and reddit will continue to be a home to fringe violent hate groups so long as the hateful rhetoric is aligned with whatever is trendy among the radical political leftists who run the website.
The task of combating these dangerous ideas must instead fall to those willing to speak out against them, and against those who funnel vulnerable depressed and mentally ill people toward these ideas. Yet I fear few Atheists will be willing to do so — indeed, at the time of this writing no Atheist organization has condemned the attacks despite the unavoidable fact that Efilism is an Atheistic movement that was inspired by a twisted re-interpretation of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and the anti-natalism pro-abortion rhetoric that is widely promoted by popular Atheist organizations such as American Atheists, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Humanists International and so many others who are intent on intertwining their brand of Atheism with political ideas that have absolutely nothing intrinsically to do with Atheism itself.
This essay is my response as an Atheist to the dangerous ideology of Efilism and its ideological parent that birthed it, Anti-Natalism. As the founder of Atheism Daily (a politically moderate news site for Atheists) and the author of The Book of Chivalric Humanism, an Atheistic virtue based moral philosophy, I reject the misanthropy, despair and moral cowardice at the core of these movements. I will address the history of Efilism, its founder, its philosophical flaws and the pseudoscientific fear-mongering it relies on—particularly the long-discredited conspiratorial panic about overpopulation. Most importantly, I will explain why I view Efilism as not just irrational, but evil.
Efilism: A History of Despair
Efilism was coined by Gary Mosher, better known online as “Inmendham,” a YouTuber who began developing the idea around 2011. The name itself is “life” spelled backward to mean anti-life, which tells you everything you need to know about its values. Efilism goes beyond standard anti-natalism, embracing not only the belief that humans should stop reproducing, but that all sentient life should be exterminated to end suffering. As another redditor pointed out over a year ago before this horrible attack, Inmendham twists the findings of scientific evolutionary theories to suit his pre-existing misanthropic beliefs. He openly promotes suicide as a form of euthanasia, a topic his adherents widely discuss and celebrate — something which, unfortunately, he shares in common with many Atheist organizations such as Freedom from Religion Foundation which promote the ideologies of Jack Kevorkian, a doctor who was convicted in 1998 of second degree murder for his “assisted suicide” activism that led him to murder over 130 patients in violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Inmendham has rambled on about his violent fantasies, such as that he would like to push a pregnant woman down a set of stairs and he fills the backgrounds of his videos with morbid cartoon imagery of women giving birth to tortured deformed babies. In Mosher’s own words: “Life is a disease. All sentient organisms are factories for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
Efilists argue that because suffering will always exist, existence itself is immoral. They believe that no amount of joy or progress can ever justify the experience of pain. This is a grossly reductive and dangerously misanthropic view of the world. Pain is part of life, yes—but it is not the totality of life. Suffering gives context to joy, and hardship gives rise to courage, invention, and love. Pain is not proof that life is evil; it is proof that we are capable of growing stronger. On our planet, regardless of how hostile an environment may be to life, new births continue and organisms of all kinds prosper; there is something admirable, even beautiful, about this. Generations of organisms are all connected throughout time to one another, bound together by a powerful drive to live. That is what science has shown us.
More than this, there is no real evidence that suffering is inherently evil. The ability to feel pain is a normal trait of organisms with nervous systems, humans included. Like all basic traits of an organism with a nervous system, this ability to feel pain aids survival, and it is only people’s misunderstandings about pain that leads to the development of nonsensical ideas about how pain is inherently wrong. It can be that the intentional infliction of pain on another can be an evil act, but the claim that it is automatically evil in all cases is a wildly inaccurate one rooted not in reason or science, but instead a desire to simplify the complexities of life into a simple binary of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to justify the selfishness of those who wish to shirk responsibility for one’s own happiness and blame others for misfortunes self-inflicted through poor decision making.
Which leads us back to Gary Mosher / “Inmendham”, and his own childish reaction to the fruits of the nonsense he has been spreading on the internet over a decade.
Inmendham’s Disavowal and Responsibility
Following the bombing, Inmendham released a video disavowing any connection to the attack. He called it “stupid,” “pointless,” and “show-offy,” and insisted he had never supported terrorism. He emphasized that he believes in civil discourse, not violence. But I do not accept his disavowal. Watching the video for myself, he was more concerned with the consequences for himself than for what horrible impacts his teachings have had on the lives of others. He seemed to me more upset that the spotlight of his ideas had been taken off himself than that his teachings encouraged someone to suicide bomb a fertility clinic.
When a person spends years promoting a worldview that insists life is inherently evil and that non-existence is the only moral good, they bear some responsibility when others act on that ideology. Inmendham’s rhetoric is filled with alarmism and despair. He may not have directly called for violence against that particular fertility clinic and the people in the building, but when you declare that all reproduction is evil and all life is suffering, it is not surprising when some unstable person interprets that as a justification for killing. Indeed, if you claim the extinction of human life is necessarily good, then the only logical conclusion to derive from that statement is that anyone who kills other humans is doing a good act.
Besides all of this other criticism I have made, Inmendham’s moral claims are unavoidably contradictory. If you genuinely believe suffering is always evil, why would you seek to encourage suffering in others by discouraging people from being inspired by the hope for happiness? By his own metric, he is spreading evil by poisoning the minds of younger generations in need of hope.
The harsh reality is the suicide bombing in Palm Springs would never have transpired if Inmendham had not plagued the internet with his insane ideas and built community to promote them. He bears responsibility for the attack because it is the logical outcome of his efforts to cultivate a community of people who believe that extinction of life is an automatic moral good. He also bears responsibility for the death of every person who was influenced to commit suicide due to his rhetoric and the rhetoric of other Efilists he has influenced in his community.
Reddit, likewise, bears responsibility for hosting these kinds of fringe violent and destructive groups on its website, financing the spread of ideologies that literally declare the extinction of humanity to be ‘good’ and encourage suicide.
From Where Efilism Originated
As I mentioned earlier in this essay, Inmendham did not invent his rhetoric in a vacuum.
The philosophical roots of anti-natalism are complex, stretching back to antiquity. Thinkers since the time of Thales of Miletus have pondered whether life itself is a blessing or a burden. More recently, the modern environmentalist “de-growth” movement gained traction during the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly after the publication of Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. That alarmist book catalyzed the formation of groups like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which explicitly tied overpopulation fears to a rejection of procreation. However, what we now recognize as formal anti-natalism did not crystallize into a distinct moral philosophy until the early 2000s.
The term “anti-natalism” was most prominently popularized in 2006 by South African philosopher David Benatar in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. Benatar’s thesis is stark: that bringing sentient life into existence always constitutes a harm, and is therefore morally wrong. Around the same time, Belgian writer Théophile de Giraud articulated a parallel vision in works like The Impertinence of Procreation and The Art of Guillotining Procreators. These ideas gained further momentum within the online blogosphere and fringe intellectual circles, among figures like Sarah Perry, Jim Crawford, and Thomas Ligotti. But it was YouTube, with its then-unmoderated culture of dissident debate, that gave anti-natalism a larger audience.
During the late 2000s and early 2010s, YouTube became a fertile ground for radical Atheistic and existentialist discourse. To be clear, Atheism itself is simply the rejection of belief in claims that deities exist, but individual Atheists frequently tack on other kinds of ideologies and incorporate them into their Atheistic identities to intertwine their Atheism with some kind of ethical structure. It was within this digital environment of the 00s and 10s that Kirk Neville—known online as DerivedEnergy—posted a two-part video essay titled A Defence of Anti-natalism, which convinced many people in the r/childfree subreddit to the idea that they were, in fact, anti-natalists all along. His video ignited a flurry of responses, both supportive and critical, which coalesced into the beginnings of a self-identified online anti-natalist community.
As the movement evolved, its darker edges became more visible. A so-called anti-natalist pipeline began to form, drawing in people from passive rejection of parenthood to more radical and despairing worldviews. Gary Mosher aka “Inmendham” was among these people.
Amanda Sukenick, another prominent figure associated with both anti-natalism and Efilism, has admitted in public interviews that she has had to intervene and “talk people off the ledge” of committing acts of violence. In one video, she even expressed that if she could be absolutely certain that all suffering would permanently end, she would condone achieving that result by any means necessary. While she framed the remark as part of a hypothetical thought experiment, it nonetheless reveals how extinctionist ideologies flirt with dangerous moral lines. These ideas may originate in speculation, but their implications are very real—and, as recent events have shown, deadly.
These misanthropic influencers promoting this toxic ideology don’t commit suicide themselves of course — instead they sell books, monetize YouTube videos and solicit donations. They commercialize the hatred they spew, just like the leaders of any other religious hate group does. They are not philanthropists, as they often claim themselves to be; they are charlatans peddling a snake oil philosophy that can address none of the social problems facing humans today.
They are so self-absorbed in their delusions of grandeur as pseudo-intellectuals that they honestly believe killing random people you view as inconvenient is some kind of revolutionary new idea no one else has ever came up with before. Every megalomaniacal psychopath convinces themselves their rhetoric to justify genocide is some kind of brilliant revelation, when in fact they are no different than the other lunatics that came before them.
Our planet has no need of any more butchers of humanity, for our history is full of them. What we desperately need more than anything else, is those who will be knights of the world.
The brand of lunacy endorsed by Efilists is rooted in a cowardice to avoid the intrinsic duty as a member of the human species to contribute to its propagation and prosperity. Naively they believe they have no obligations, despite that their very existence has been built on a continual line of ancestors who fulfilled this obligation, which resulted in the anti-natalists own births. They enjoy the fruits of others contributions to build and maintain the societies they live in while condemning them for the efforts that created those fruits. Their response to their own sense of duty to contribute the same, to carry out the terms of the social contract, is to betray the hopes of the generations of humans who came before them, who sacrificed and toiled for their children to become adults, to repeat the process over and over again for hundreds of generations. Deciding death is the best choice so you can shirk an intrinsic and personal duty to humankind, a duty that literally everyone they descend from was able to successfully do despite far greater hardships to overcome than anyone living today has to endure, is unavoidably a cowardly act stemming from a fear of failure. It is nothing to be proud of, and succumbing to this fear does not make you greater than all those who came before you. It shuts the door forever on the possibilities that your progeny could have represented, as the potential contributions to humanity they could have made will never be realized.
Why Efilism Is Evil
Many people have differing ideas about what is good and evil, often rooted in superstitious ideas or oversimplified binaries such as the hedonistic view that suffering is always bad and pleasure is always good.
Chivalric Humanism, the philosophy I’ve developed and advocated in my writings, is built on the belief that secular morality should be rooted in rational naturalism and directed toward the survival and flourishing of the human species. Indisputably, all organisms seek to reproduce to propagate their species and humans are no different. The human body is optimized for this task, even if some outliers exist in certain rare individuals due to genetic errors. And as moral philosophies are a uniquely human characteristic it logically concludes that these philosophies ought to serve the core interest of humans as a collective species; our survival. Therefore, my Chivalric Humanism philosophy teaches that good is defined by behaviors that promote societal stability and human potential that aids our collective survival as a species. Evil, conversely, is defined by behavior that undermines that collective survival.
By this standard, Efilism is evil. It encourages antisocial, self-destructive thoughts not only for the individual, but for the rest of humankind. It seeks to extinguish not only individual lives, but the very possibility of a future for anyone. It encourages despair instead of duty, cowardice instead of courage. It masquerades as moral clarity, but in truth it is an abdication of moral responsibility. Efilism tells you to give up—to believe that suffering makes life not worth living, and that annihilation is the most compassionate solution. That is not wisdom. That is nothing more than nihilistic cowardice. It is a warped form of hedonism embraced by a mind that has turned self-pity into a lifestyle.
The failure of Postmodernist ideologies based in hedonism is that they convince people that life is about what the individual wants and who “owes” it to them, instead of considering what they as individuals should be providing to others. Hedonism has a way of brainwashing people into believing all relationships are transactional, to become self-absorbed and narcissistic. It obscures that you don’t need a reason to help anyone; you can simply be helpful because you believe it is the right thing to do. And helping others sometimes leads to your own suffering, too, and that can be okay, because after the suffering is over, you can feel contentment in that you stood by your principles and achieved something meaningful for someone.
Emotional Thinking is Not The Best for Determining Right from Wrong
Our emotions, including pain and pleasure, joy and misery, happiness and suffering — these are not the final arbitrator of what is good and evil. Our emotions were honed in the daily lives of our distant ancestors, who lived over the course of hundreds of thousands of years in an untamed wilderness that almost no one today lives in now.
Anger, sadness, sorrow, happiness and even love — these emotions may be triggered today by experiences our ancestors could never have related to, such as being stuck in a traffic jam, losing at a video game or reading someone say mean things to us over the internet. We must use wisdom to assess whether our emotional responses to a modern experience are appropriate to determine if that emotional response is warranted. Assuming anger is always righteous, and that self-pity is always justified, is an arrogant folly. The context of the situation matters, and our instincts do not always immediately recognize that context which is why it is necessary for any human living in the modern civilized world to use reason and evidence to determine if what we feel is even warranted before we start ranting about whether that feeling is good and evil. Our ability to reason, too, is part of our evolution as organisms. Suffering is a feeling. Feelings are only one source of data, and they must be properly assessed with good reasoning to produce useful conclusions about ourselves.
It may have well served our distant ancestors to scream a series of profanities at whatever made them angry, when they were living in the jungle with predators like bears and tigers stalking them in the brush in order to intimidate those aggressors; this behavior is not so helpful when you are frustrated with a cashier at Burger King or your neighbor who is mowing his lawn at 4 A.M.
Pain and suffering are part of the human condition, but they are also the crucible in which our greatest virtues are forged. Compassion, bravery, endurance, and justice—all are made meaningful in a world that is not perfect. We should face these imperfections not with resignation, but with resolve, and to accept that we cannot always get everything that we desire and that failure in relationships and career goals does not define a person’s identity. What defines a person’s identity is not how much they have or how much they have accomplished, but instead identity is defined by the values one strives toward. This is something far too many people today have lost sight of as materialistic consumerism has become the benchmark for success, which has made these people callous and self-absorbed. It is no wonder they seek to find solidarity in their misery, for it is what they have cultivated by the values they have selected. If only they had the wisdom to realize their misery is self-created by their own flawed perceptions could that misery be replaced with a sense of purpose.
Naturally, if you go against your own instinctive biological drives to reject your core purpose in life as an organism — the propagation of one’s own species — you are going to find unnecessary suffering and misery. Why would you expect not to? Our bodies are optimized for procreation, and that is not limited to just our sex organs but also our instinctive need to nurture youth. Many today try to placate this instinct through the adoption of pets as child surrogates, but dogs and cats can never inherit your values and knowledge; you can never pass onto an animal what you instinctively are driven to pass onto human children. Sadly many people are realizing this simple truth about the human condition too late in life, or worse, never at all. When you are young it is easy to believe you are some kind of special exception to hundreds of thousands of years of human evolutionary behaviors, but when you are older you can come to understand regardless of how we dress ourselves up, or what novel ideologies we cling to, in the end we’re all still just humans with the same basic needs and wants.
The Overpopulation Conspiracy Theories
Efilists and anti-natalists often bolster their arguments with the claim that the world is overpopulated and that having children is therefore irresponsible. But this is nothing more than recycled pseudoscience. The origin of this panic can be traced back to Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted widespread famine and societal collapse by the 1970s.
None of those predictions came true. Global food production increased, living standards rose, and extreme poverty declined as new technologies became more accessible. Ehrlich’s apocalyptic forecasts failed because they ignored the power of human innovation, economic adaptation and technological advancement. His theory was alarmist nonsense—and yet, it still echoes in the rhetoric of modern anti-natalists, primarily propagandized by misguided abortion activists who have served to create a funnel into dangerous anti-human ideologies such as Efilism.
Human population growth is not a threat to human happiness; mismanagement of resources and political corruption are.
The answer to human suffering is not fewer humans.
The answer is better humans.
The answer is improved educational opportunities, medical care, infrastructure, and governance. It is applying our intelligence and instinct to cooperation to solve problems—not throwing up our hands and declaring humanity a failed experiment just because you are upset that possessions you wish to own are more expensive than you would like because you are not the only person who desires them.
Choosing Life
The central claim of Efilism—that life is a mistake—is based on a hedonistic fallacy that equates all suffering with evil and all pleasure with good. This worldview collapses under any rational scrutiny. Not only does it fail to provide a coherent moral framework, but it also leads its adherents to contempt for others, hatred for themselves, and ultimately to the belief that genocide or extinction are moral goals.
Chivalric Humanism offers a better way. It teaches that we are responsible for our beliefs and our actions. It challenges us to build a moral code that improves life for others. It suggests that we cultivate virtues—like loyalty, altruism, valor, respect, and hope—that sustain civilization and allow human beings to thrive. It honors truth, because without truth there can be no justice. These are harsh truths I have said in this essay, which so many today are in dire need of hearing.
The bombing of the Palm Springs fertility clinic was an evil act inspired by an evil philosophy. It was not just a tragedy; it was a warning. Ideas can have consequences. Efilism, and the anti-natalist despair it grows from, must be confronted and contested. We must remind the world that suffering is not a curse to be eliminated by extermination. It is a challenge to be met with courage, creativity and compassion.
To live is not a sin. To bring life into the world is not a crime. It is, in the truest sense, an act of defiance against despair—and the ultimate expression of hope.
This recent terrorist attack by an Atheist who was brainwashed by rhetoric promoted by radical and fringe Atheist communities should force these communities to self-reflect upon what they are promoting. This tragedy is a wake up call that change within the Atheism community is needed. It is time for these Atheists to start growing up out of their rebellious teenage phase focused on deliberately offensive or edgy themes that play into negative or taboo stereotypes for purposes of shock advertising of their nonprofits and book products, and to cease the embracement of fringe ideologies that lead to needless societal strife. The cultist environment of these online communities that work people up into a zealous frenzy over conspiracy theories and half-baked nonsense like anti-natalism and promotion of suicide as euthanasia, are no better than the fringe Christian cults these Atheists constantly condemn. If you fancy yourself so intellectually superior to them, then stop peddling death as the same tired solution to all societal problems like they do.