I’m a lady; I like spiders. I like a lot of other things too, like other bugs, and snakes, and other oft-unappreciated creepy critters. I like Heavy Metal, and D&D, and Victorian things, and videogames, and anime, and I also like to fuck

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 28th, 2023

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  • 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’m only here because of an unjust reddit ban, and I’m very sad to say that I still would prefer reddit to this. The shear scale of reddit means there was always something interesting me through the far more varied and active communities available there. Lemmy is great and all, but I feel way less engaged with anything going on

    I was active, and even a recognized name on some subs where I was particularly active, but here, those same communities are either woefully underpopulated and inactive, or just straight up don’t exist. When I need to ask questions or get a wide variety of opinions, or even share a story, I knew reddit had enough activity for me to get at least some traffic. Here, I haven’t even made a post

    Sorry, Lemmy, but we’re only together because reddit left. You’re my rebound



  • 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



  • I first saw a message like this on a DVD release of old Loony Toons shorts. The topic of what to do with “problematic” historical things has always been contentious to me as a person who loves history, as well as a filthy libtard cuck, or whatever we get called these days. I think historical context needs to be preserved. We learn so much from history, so removing it also removes are ability to learn from those mistakes. It also colors our current perception of those historical periods inaccurately, which makes it harder to track down the roots and causes of systemic and cultural issues. Presenting the reality with the additional clarification and context that values have changed and should be taken with a grain of salt is, in my opinion, the best way to present anything historical whenever the subject of “problematic” content comes up