Used to be reddit. I’m here now because I can’t be on reddit anymore, but this place (maybe thankfully) just isn’t the abyss to suck me into, so now, my online time is mostly on discord

I’m not counting videogames. Though I do play some online stuff, I don’t consider it the same as something like browsing a website. It’s a different activity. If you do count it, then yeah, it’s games. My computer time is largely games

I suspect a whole lot of atheists were brought up religious. The heavy religiosity is the push they need to even think on the subject. I think a lot of people who are what I’d call passively religious (non-practicing, don’t really care, but might say say they believe in god if asked) don’t have to engage with the material critically, so it’s not as much a part of their world. For sure there are atheists out there who have a dogmatic approach to atheism because of their former belief systems

But even beyond that, I think it runs deeper. Christianity, if you’re in the west, is foundational to our culture, even in secular nations. It still informs traditions and morals and perspectives that can trace themselves to a Christian origin, and that underlying religiosity in our cultures does inform the way in which we view the world. I concluded this when a friend pointed out to me the language we use in evolution

We describe evolved adaptations as serving a purpose. We’ll say things like “we evolved opposable digits to better grasp things”, and yeah, we all know that’s not strictly true, but language informs our perspective and reflects it. We didn’t evolve thumbs to hold things; We just got thumbs, and were able to hold things with them. These are not the same, and the former still has that kernel of creationism in it, some subconscious belief in a greater purpose

That said, I generally agree that an atheist might be made more militant if he had a particularly religious upbringing. Really, though, I suspect it’s also a lot to do with insecurities. I grew up in a passively religious household, and was sent to a catholic extracurricular just so that I could choose for myself what to believe, and in that brief time, I actually became easily the most religious person in my house. Religion spoke to my insecurities and fears. I was bullied a lot at the time, and the thought that my righteousness would be rewarded and my bullies wickedness would be punished was wonderful. In turning atheist after that, it didn’t undo the bullying. Instead, the self-righteous idea of “I’m smarter than you dumb Christians” was the new salve for insecurties

I’m way more tolerant now. Maybe the issue is just age. Maybe most of those awful ones are just obnoxious teens and young adults who would be obnoxious either way, and they’ll grow out of it. If they don’t, they get to become Ricky Gervais without the money or fame. Kinda rambled more than I meant to, but yeah, just throwing out some perspectives

I believe that my consciousness is a thing I can point to as being my essence. You could maybe call that a soul, or you could maybe not. Either way, my consciousness is the collective consciousness of countless single-celled organisms all working to make my singular self function. You could maybe call the manifestation of all these processes into a greater thinking singularity as a “soul”, more akin to the way in which a city might have a “soul” made up by the people that live in it. I don’t believe I have a ghost, and I believe that my consciousness is conditional, derived from my biology, but consciousness itself is as good as anything to call a soul

So I guess, in short, no XD

I think we’re stereotyped often as the militant and belligerent atheists quite a lot. We have been painted as unsympathetic assholes who like to talk down to religious people to make us feel better about ourselves, not to mention a weird overlap with some parts of the far-right, usually by way of transphobia, homophobia, racism, social darwinism and the enforcement of poorly understood or straight up incorrect “science”

Eugenecists inhabit this space, as well as people who might call themselves “race realists”, as well as people who think their middle-school-level understanding of genetics and sex encapsulates the entirety of gender and sexuality. It’s those atheists who claim to love science, hate ignorance, but remain ignorant of science. They give us a bad name, and their loudness makes it seem like they represent us

I did a test just a few days ago, and just scrolled to see how much of my feed was from people I followed, and how much of it was stuff I didn’t. 36 posts in a row of stuff I don’t, followed by 10 posts of people I follow, followed by another 27 targeted stuff, and then 1 post from a friend, and then another 35

It’s ridiculous, and this digital landscape is dystopic; It’s cyberpunk. I can’t believe, for example, that I can enter something in a search bar on youtube, and get results that are explicitly not my search results

I have, but only because my reddit ban left me with a void–a void I should fill with something more productive, tbh, but it’s still not taking nearly as much of my time. I’ve always used it, never left, but at this point just use it for some private chats I have with people. Since reddit, I’ve scrolled a bit and been slightly more active

This is not how I expected to get a degree in arachnology

I am older now then my mom was when she had me, and I’m a significantly younger of 2 children. I know that my mother was already deeply unhappy in her relationship with my dad, but at the time still believed in trying to salvage it. That’s why I was born, after all

Mom was a leftist for the time, free spirit, rebellious woman who made the mistake of getting impregnated by a conservative and traditionally macho man in a catholic, Latin American country, and found herself marrying because out-of-wedlock pregnancies would be the absolute literal worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone ever, apparently

By the time she was my current age, she had been domesticated (partially through some mid-tier abuse, but also because she did have my sister and I to raise) and worked an entry-level job in a country where her degree didn’t mean shit and she could barely communicate. My dad also worked, having a better-paying job, but also a second weekend job. We grew up poor, my sister basically raised me, and my mom regrets that she couldn’t be there. She also deeply regrets how much of her own personal joys she gave up for my father specifically, joining him for all of his hobbies, while never being able to indulge in any of hers because he didn’t let her. She don’t give a fuck now, though

I have a lot of negative things to say about my parents, but boy did they fucking work their asses off

People hate what they fear and fear what they don’t understand. The path, then, to fight against hate is specifically understanding

I learned this by watching The Crocodile Hunter as a child. I remember very vaguely a point Steve Irwin made about how people are terrified and act to harm animals they know nothing about. Either he went on to further say, or I extrapolated it myself, that knowing how an animal will act informs YOU on how to approach the situation; No need for fear or hate if you understand the reality of the situation. I then further extrapolated this race relations. It’s a little general, but a white person may be racist against a black person because they think they’re dangerous, just as someone might see a snake they know nothing about and think it dangerous

The twist is that his original owners didn’t know jack shit about basketball, but were really into a specific strain of beef

I know plenty of “white” Americans speaking perfectly fine American English, but with a last name like Garcia

This is me. I’m a latina, and even my first name is white-passing, and not a single person would know until I explicitly tell them or they meet my parents or something. It really goes to show how arbitrary race is, and how much of our perceptions based on race is also built on a base of ignorance

Now open borders can mean from anywhere, but this is largely about Mexico. Them’s the people that cross our borders. It’s so incredibly strange to me that western civilization is in such peril from immigration from a *check’s notes Catholic country that speaks a European language. The realization I had that Latin America isn’t actually considered part of “The west” was the last piece that clicked into place on just how meaningless that term is. They are geographically western, the primary religions are European, and the primary languages are European. For fuck’s sake, it’s called Latin America, and it’s not because they were the site of the former Roman Empire

When you realize that Latin America is not part of Western civilization, you can see how plainly there isn’t even an iota of thought behind the idea of a common collective European heritage; It is only race; It is only white

You’re outta your mind if you think the spider girl is the one calling someone else a master

Look at my user name and take a guess

“This is Melody Crescendo”

“Oh, that’s pretty. What’s her middle name?”

“Well Melody is her middle name. Her real first name is Hurdy-Gurdy”

“Good thing could happen unless GOP” is pretty much American politics since at least Reagan

Floridian here confirming that 0%

Have you seen the world? Shit’s irrational as fuck. I’ll argue here that rationality has an aspect of subjectiveness to it; It is based on your ability to understand and perceive things. There is a very very small number of things you don’t know, and a practically infinite ocean of things you will never even know to not know. Even things that behave rationally may behave irrationally under some variables you will never even fathom, and so, to you, that would just be irrational

You wanna see something rational? Read fiction. Truth is always stranger than fiction. It was Mark Twain who added that “fiction has to make sense.”

That’s too vague a definition. Like, if person A is an accomplished athlete, the best basketball player ever, I do not think his position of power or success should be, say, president. I think this is actually a very dangerous mindset derived from the capitalistic notion that success determines your–I’ll call it value. If you’re successful, you must be smart; If you’re smart, you can be anything, even the president. Success is equal to wealth in these talking circles, and it sort of ends up as a backwards meritocracy. You gain merit measured by your success (wealth) instead of the other way around

But if you define it as a place in which positions of authority are given to people who have proven themselves knowledgeable and capable in the field in which the position of authority is being granted, I do believe in it in principle. I say that because principle and practice are rarely the same in politics and sociology. There are countless other factors that will impact your “success” that are not actually based on your expertise in the field. Better people have designed public transport, electric cars, social media, and spaceships than Elon Musk, yet the man sits in a position of tremendous influence. In a just meritocracy, we would never have heard his name

Which brings about the point that we have certain ideas as a culture (or maybe system) that awards some merits disproportionately more than others. Some will say his merit is in being a ruthless business man. He’s good at that, I guess, so he should be the leader of the company. His “merit” of being a bad human being is being disproportionately rewarded compared to the merit of the scientists that actually design his spaceships, and the engineers that make them work. Meritocracy only really works in a closed system. The most capable archaeologist will be the head of the expedition. If you let the ideas go beyond that, and start comparing apples to oranges, you start seeing instead a system’s idea of what’s important, and by extension that of the society built in that system

Or Florida