This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are some things to say to an atheist that will make them think about their beliefs?”
This question is a sad indictment of believer conditioning.
Very few people think about their beliefs more than atheists, particularly those who have spent a lifetime detangling the nonsense crammed into their brains by the religious conditioning they received since childhood.
If believers want to know what to say to atheists, they must first learn to emulate the humble nature of their Christ and not assume they’re in greater possession of a deeper understanding of their own beliefs. You don’t understand your beliefs as well as you think you do. Your attitude in seeking a way to “make them think about their beliefs” shows you have very little depth of understanding of beliefs you inherited and have swallowed wholesale without putting any effort into understanding them beyond how you should submit to nonsense.
Every day on Quora alone, numerous believers pose questions demonstrating a very underdeveloped and even childlike apprehension of beliefs in general. At the same time, statistics show that atheists are generally better informed on religion than the religious themselves.
Yet… here you are, assuming you have unlocked the universe’s secrets because you submit your entire life to an illusion you can’t prove to yourself is real. You have accepted the words of other believers without questioning them and then have chosen to behave as if following instructions is the same as developing one’s beliefs about life and the universe we inhabit.
The arrogance you demonstrate with your question embodies the reason why religions incite conflict in this world. It is the blind arrogance you demonstrate with your question which shows you have no interest in understanding how others might arrive at their beliefs. You assume the instructions you were fed and followed like an obedient pet constitute a superior set of beliefs.
They don’t.
They demonstrate your incapacity to take ownership of your mind.
They show your willingness to give up everything of your natural identity to submit your entire life to a lie.
Your blind adherence to your instructions demonstrates no understanding of your beliefs but obedience. This is why believers betray their inability to understand what belief means daily on social media.
You should be embarrassed by your question, but you’re not because you sincerely believe you happened to be born into the right family to imbue your mind with the correct beliefs that make your inherited views superior to all other views on the planet.
That’s why religion is toxic. This is why religion is responsible for thousands of years of warfare. This is why religion is a cancer we must cure from human society if we wish to achieve our potential as a species.
If you insist on talking to atheists about their beliefs, then you should emulate the humility of your Christ and approach them with an open mind full of questions and a willingness to learn about your own beliefs. Otherwise, you’ll get the animosity you have already seen in the answers you’ve been given.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can we determine the truth about the existence of God? Should we rely on the beliefs of atheists or believers?”
This question is heartbreaking.
There is not a single thing in your life that you struggle with determining whether that thing exists other than your desire to believe what other humans have told you is true.
No other human has ever had to tell you the sun exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you mountains exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you oceans exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you cold viruses exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you snow exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
Nothing other than supernatural nonsense puts you into a quandary of wondering whether it exists or not.
You might wish to believe ghosts exist but will never see or experience tangible evidence to support any belief because no evidence exists. The same applies to goblins, leprechauns, fairies, angels, demons, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. All of these imaginary beings are products of fiction, in which you will never experience a real-life manifestation of any of them.
It’s not that no one has been looking — quite the contrary. Millions worldwide have been searching for evidence of these phenomena for centuries. There have been television programs for decades with teams of people equipped with the most modern technologies to help them find evidence.
Let’s contrast that against something that was theorized to exist in 1964. A particle officially referred to as the “Higgs Boson” was determined to exist by extrapolating from the evidence that showed a massive gap in our understanding that could only be explained by something the public became aware of as “The God Particle.”
It was named so, not because it bore any relationship to your magical sky daddy, but because it was difficult to find. A physicist by the name of Leon Lederman wrote a book in 1993 called “The Goddamn Particle,” which was an expression of frustration over how difficult it was to find.
Everything about physics on this scale showed that it had to exist, but it couldn’t be found.
It was finally discovered forty-eight years after theorizing that this particle must exist to explain how mass is transferred to other particles like electrons and quarks. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland gave us the first proof of its existence. We had no tangible evidence of its existence up until then. We did, however, have tangible evidence of its necessity to exist to explain other phenomena that could not otherwise be explained without it.
IOW, without the existence of the Higgs Boson, much of physics would have just broken down into a jumble that could not make sense, be adequately explained, or avoid being relegated to the same realms of the imagination that the supernatural exists.
Without tangible evidence of its existence, all scientific discovery was at risk of being viewed in the same terms as magic — inexplicable woo.
Physicists set out to find it according to the clues pointing to where it must exist, and that’s where it was found.
No such corollary exists with the god concept.
Nothing in the universe requires god as an answer to an unanswered question.
The only reason you and everyone else who struggles with the concept are hung up on it is that it appeals to your emotional need for the universe to make sense in a paternalistic way… in the very same way, life made sense to you as an infant in the cradle whose parents or guardians ensured you had food in your belly. Life made sense to you as an infant when your diapers were changed to keep you comfortable and warm each day.
Your yearning for God is the desire of an infant wistfully hoping the chaos of life makes sense on some level beyond your comprehension… and that may very well be the case, but it isn’t due to some magical parent who will care for you like an infant in a cradle.
Atheists have no beliefs about god, so turning to atheists to answer questions that are your responsibility to answer for yourself is a disservice to you.
Other believers will tell you what they are desperate to believe is true, while atheists will tell you they don’t believe that nonsense.
This atheist will tell you that if something like a god creature exists, it doesn’t exist in any form that any human has been capable of imagining. Our universe is too vast, alien, and too far beyond human comprehension for us to have the slightest hope of untangling its mysteries enough to know anything with any certainty.
This atheist will also say that every manifestation of god by humans is an extension of their egos and represents the epitome of delusional human arrogance.
This atheist will strongly recommend that you stop wasting your valuable intellect on pining for a cosmic super daddy of the imagination and focus it on trying to detangle the complexity of life on Earth. There is already plenty here for us to figure out on our own, wasting valuable time and effort in pining on something irrelevant to the physical reality we share.
Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a Father Cosmos is an abdication of your agency. It is a way of giving up on your gift of free will that you would expect someone to dictate your life to you instead of rising to the challenge of living your own life. It is a way of running away and hiding from the freedom you have been given, which has been hard-fought and won through bloody sacrifice after sacrifice throughout history for you to benefit from.
Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a magical authority is giving up on yourself and retreating into a darkness of slavery and hopelessness in an existence of oppression made worse by the fact that you would only be serving the most depraved humans on the planet who don’t care in the least about a god beyond how they weaponize that concept against you and steal your life from you to benefit themselves.
This atheist strongly encourages you to live your life for yourself and not for some fantasy peddled to you by a parasite who wants you to believe nonsense because it benefits them at your expense.
“Atheists are a group which share characteristics or interests or views in common beyond disbelief in a God creature.”
“Atheists have no morals.”
“Atheists reject or hate God or worship Satan or any fictitious creature imagined by theists.”
“Atheists believe in science.” (No one, atheist or otherwise, who understands or has a basic understanding of science “believes in” science. Science is not a matter of faith, so please stop superimposing your insular paradigm onto others.)
“Creationism is an alternative to evolution.” (Also, don’t ever call people, atheists or otherwise, “evolutionists” because that’s just plain ignorance at an incredibly ignorant level of insular stupidity.)
Other statements like “God bless you” are contingent upon an individual atheist’s perspective on the matter. (I’m okay with people expressing positive sentiments in terms they are comfortable with and interpreting them as such.)
Atheists do not, as a whole, hate theists; they want them to stay in their lane and stop pretending like their beliefs trump facts because they don’t. Freedom of religion is the freedom to believe as you wish, not the right to impose your beliefs onto others. I don’t care if you think your interpretation of your scriptures causes you to believe homosexuality is wrong; you’re not God, and you have no right to pass judgment on people for how they were born… oh, and stay out of politics or start paying taxes like everyone else does.
By the way, Jesus wasn’t white, and his views were liberal. He did not support wealth but service to his fellow humans. He was not a narcissist who cared more for himself than the poor. His life was dedicated to peace, not war, nor to becoming wealthy or superior to others. He washed the feet of lepers to show you what that means, so betraying your saviour with your idiotic divisiveness and hatred will only send you to the hell you fear (if your beliefs pan out to be confirmed).
Even worse than simply betraying your beliefs, you make life hell for others — yes, I know, not all religious types are hypocrites. Still, all religious types must call out hate-mongering hypocrites like Steven Anderson, Kenneth Copeland, Jim Bakker, and the Westboro Baptist Church, who all prey upon your fellow believers by feeding on their insecurities. Make an effort to show the world you do believe what you claim to believe by raising a humungous stink over the very many atrocities committed by supposed religious leaders. There is no bloody way any religion can have any claim on morality when the predation of minors is institutionally protected. You must clean out the corruption in your own house first before you can hypocritically claim to care about so-called “unborn babies.” All this hypocritical crap makes people justifiably hate you and everything you claim to believe in — even the innocent ones among you; and worse for you, it makes people run away from your toxicity while eviscerating your credibility in everything you claim to believe.
That should cover most of the broad strokes I can identify from the top of my head (yes, it’s true, my references were Christian because that’s what I am most familiar with, but that doesn’t mean every other form of theist fantasy gets a pass because these sentiments apply to you, too.) We are living in a world characterized by disinformation and hatemongers to disenfranchise innocent people who cannot defend themselves. At the same time, hate crimes escalate as a monstrous hypocrite profits from selling autographed bibles.
(I wrote this five years ago and have been discussing these issues throughout my entire life, and instead of seeing any improvements with your lack of integrity issues, we’re seeing an increase in the kind of hypocrisy that would send chills down the spines of your venerated saviours. It’s horrifying just how little effort religious followers put into holding their leaders accountable for the hate they spread, and you dare to pretend you have a moral high ground. It is this kind of hypocrisy that’s driving people away from you.
If you want to be legitimately viewed as a moral people, then concentrate on feeding children in your schools instead of putting up fraudulent props like your Ten Dogmatic and repetitive Commandments. Kids need nutrition to focus on school and succeed at getting an education, not orders barked at them with threats of eternal punishment. This isn’t supposed to be the dark ages any longer. Those were over 500 years ago.)
All I can say as a summary is, Thank God I live in Canada because Americans are in for one helluva wake-up call over these next four years. What truly sucks, though, is how much of a negative impact you’re going to have on the entire rest of the world as you grapple with your lack of basic human decency.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Religious books are a lost cause. I’m an atheist, but I’m wondering which religion do you think is the most convincing? Don’t say none of them please.”
As others have pointed out, you’re not an atheist because you think like a believer does when they interpret their “spiritual journey” as a gym membership where their responsibility is limited to picking the right gym.
This is the sort of thinking that doesn’t care about physical health and fitness, nor about whatever benefits might be derived from an adequately customized routine fitting their personal needs in a way that optimally contributes to their development.
This is the sort of thinking that wants to take a pill to get the benefits of heavy lifting without having to do the work.
An atheist will have already sorted through this nonsense to arrive at a point where they understand that picking a religion doesn’t have anything to do with whatever one’s “spiritual journey” might be.
Picking a religion is like choosing between clown costumes to attend a formal affair.
If you were an atheist, you would be interested in the concepts defining the differences between belief systems rather than viewing them as package deals in which to immerse oneself.
If you were an atheist, you would want to know why it is that the “least spiritual” and most blatantly hypocritical and brutally violent religions are three of the most dominant religions on the planet and are entirely products of toxic patriarchy.
Many other religions demonstrate far more respect for life like Buddhism does and without dogmas rooted in barbaric violence.
If you were an atheist, you would not care about “which religion” but about which religious practices and ideals are beneficial and which are toxic to your growth. The notion of joining a team to achieve “spiritual growth” would send chills down the spine of an atheist who is otherwise clear on how utterly destructive such tribalistic thinking is to one’s mental health and personal growth.
The fact that so many believers feel compelled to address their issues through fraudulent representations of themselves is just proof that believers don’t sincerely believe their delusions. They struggle with their doubts, so they feel compelled to overcompensate through fraudulent behaviours. Sadly, they don’t know how to escape their mental prison and see no alternative but to indulge in sinful betrayals of the tenets in their scriptures.
This post is different from my typical fare. It is an answer to a question posed on Quora, but it’s also a response to a post I’ve read about AI replacing human writers. My arguments have consistently been that as long as an AI is incapable of feeling emotions like love, sorrow, hatred, anger, and the entire range of emotions bred into us throughout centuries, it will never be capable of stimulating emotion within people. AI will never, on its own, connect with humans emotionally. Humans may imbue their AI experiences with emotions, but those are projections. Those emotions are mirror reflections of oneself and one’s biases. They can certainly help develop mindfulness techniques, but that becomes a self-referential silo.
Socialization is how we grow past our self-imposed boundaries, and we need input from other humans to understand ourselves truly. The purpose of this post is to prove this contention. How I will be doing that may seem somewhat circuitous, but please be patient enough to get to the punchline because I think it’s amusing, and I hope you will be too. Thanks for reading my gurgitations.
You ask this question as a believer because you must choose to maintain your belief consciously.
Every day is a day of ritual affirmation of your belief. At least once per week, you socialize with people to reinforce your choice to believe.
Your crises of faith are caused by the fact that you sometimes struggle to maintain your beliefs. You have doubts about your beliefs, but you do what you can to put them aside, and that may include a prayer or a castigation against Satan invading your thoughts with temptations to stray.
You may even turn to your book to find inspiration to hang onto your belief. You see words that confirm how hanging onto your belief is sometimes a struggle and that you must stand firm and never lose that belief.
You fear losing your belief because you feel like you’re letting down a paternalistic entity that will be disappointed and angry with you for not maintaining.
You struggle with the fear of an eternal punishment for betraying your commitment to your belief, and yet, after all of that, you still wonder why you endured all that turmoil.
You may tell yourself that it’s a test of your character and that if you pass it, you will be graced with an eternal reward instead of an eternal punishment.
You still wonder how people can live without that struggle, so your curiosity prompts you to ask how people would choose against what does not feel like a choice.
In your mind, you may think you have a choice, but you have a choice because a choice between Heaven and Hell isn’t much of a choice. It’s a no-brainer. After all, who would be stupid enough to choose eternal torture?
This prompts your curiosity because many people seem unconcerned about what you believe will happen to them.
Your mind struggles with the notion that people would choose eternal torture on a lake of fire as if it’s never going to happen to them.
It makes no sense whatsoever to you that people would choose to reject Paradise in favour of Hell.
The problem, however, isn’t that people choose not to believe because you can’t actually “choose” to believe. You know this yourself because you don’t “choose to believe.” You choose to maintain your beliefs.
What you do not understand about atheists and atheism is that people do not choose to become atheists.
People awaken to a new reality about themselves that they no longer believe the illusion and realize after the fact that they have become atheists.
Here’s the punchline:
An AI may be trained well enough to identify what I identified in the question posed. I don’t believe an AI could trigger the querent on such a visceral level by being so on point that they become defensive and dismissive of the information they encounter. This is a technique I refer to as “forced introspection.” This person will continue to deny, as we already know from our experiences with the MAGA mentality. However, they won’t forget how they were triggered to discover that their dismissal of what they read will vanish from their consciousness without an impact.
This dynamic can only occur between humans, so I feel comfortable putting all my economic eggs in the creative content basket. I’ve wasted a lifetime attempting to fit into a broken system and have become worse for wear. I may not ever see the same income potential I was well underway in achieving before a nuclear bomb on my life ended that aspiration. At least I can spend whatever time I have left expressing myself and permitting myself to be the “real me” through doing what I love doing.
Neither of those concepts is exclusive to believers. That you ask this question means you’ve been subjected to disparagements about atheists by other believers who spread hatred instead of the peace and love your faith alleges to represent.
This particular atheist now cringes every time I see the words “believe in” because I know it’s coming from a believer who doesn’t understand belief. They overuse that expression as a shortcut for every bit of conceptual data their brains can accommodate.
It’s like watching someone put ketchup on everything they eat, from eggs to steak to cakes and doughnuts. It just gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I am learning to hate the expression “believe in” more and more every day because the people who are supposed to understand the implications of belief the most are the least capable of comprehending the implications of a belief.
Many believers confuse belief with entrenched insularity; nothing could be more toxic to the concept.
Many believers behave as if zealotry and belief are synonymous, but they’re not. They’re just excuses to refuse to learn, grow, and change. Invoking beliefs for believers is often the equivalent of a child whining about cleaning their room or taking their medicine. Letting go of toxic beliefs is just too much “woke” for far too many.
I have faith in myself and my ability to find a way to make it through this exceptionally challenging period in my life, but I have to accept that I may fail. I rely on hope to carry me through while smoothing out the rough edges and allowing me to maintain the necessary motivation to overcome adversity. I don’t see wisdom as a statically defined state of being but as an ideal, like a utopia, which serves more as a compass setting than a destination. There is no point in which a maxim of wisdom is attainable. Wisdom is often contextual and a subjective perception one has of another. To think of oneself as wise is just another means by which one admits membership into the Dunning-Kruger club.
I hope I have enough wisdom to survive my travails, but I have faith that I may succeed even if I don’t.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can a believer provide evidence for God’s existence to refute the claim of atheists?”
The real problem here isn’t that you don’t know how to provide evidence for God’s existence but that you see that no evidence exists but still insist your God does.
The lack of evidence should be the cornerstone of your disbelief in the existence of something.
It’s the same reasoning you would use to refuse to make a significant purchase like a vehicle without taking it for a test drive.
Your approach to your God belief is like reading an ad without pictures for a $100,000.00 sports car and sending money to an address in another country while expecting your sports car to appear at your doorstep the next day.
Do you usually make your major purchases without inspecting them first?
Would you recommend buying a house without doing a walkthrough?
Why, then, would you structure your entire life around something you can’t verify?
The best you have is someone else telling you it’s true.
You can invest in some incredibly valuable swampland from me if that’s how you make big decisions for yourself.
The harsh reality you’re struggling with is that atheists make no claims.
Atheists only refuse to buy swampland from an obvious charlatan whose only interest in you is how much money they can siphon from your pocketbook.
Atheists have no expectations of an imaginary figure.
Atheists do have expectations from unhinged believers who hypocritically betray their faith and their God’s commandments to treat others like they are all God’s children,
to stop passing hateful judgments and bearing false witness against atheists,
and to render unto Caesar by staying in their lane and out of politics.
Atheists also have hopes believers that they may, one day, realize how their condemnations of atheists only condemn them to an eternal pitchfork enema while being spit-roasted in a lake of fire.
We hope for this because it may finally result in them abandoning their addictions to hatred, violence and overt destruction of all that does not comply with their fascist expectations.
We hope for this because we realize that doing so could finally reduce the number of victims of violence and war to almost nothing.
The mid-East alone would experience a real Renaissance of the kind of love and peace that religions pretend to value. The rest of the world could finally prosper by dropping believers’ widespread misanthropic attitude toward each other and everyone in general so that we could also experience a return to sane values in communities where people work together in peaceful harmony.
It’s a dream, but it’s worth having because without it, one can only descend into the madness spread by unhinged believers, and that is the worst hell of all.
After all, what do you gain by assaulting atheists with childishly delusional questions like this?
Your question is just the result of your addiction to hatred porn. It does nothing productive for you or helps you in any way.
Do you think the people in your life appreciate your efforts to demonize atheists?
Really?
Are you sure they’re not embarrassed by behaviour like this?
Maybe it would help if you understood how this hateful behaviour of yours is what drives people away from religion to make it a rapidly shrinking phenomenon in society.
Here, have a look at the effect you are having on your religion with your perpetual hatred spew:
Try to think of what Jesus would do before overtly betraying everything you pretend to believe in because you’re only helping atheism to grow…
And we atheists don’t mind that at all… the sooner you drive everyone away and your mythologies into obscurity, the happier we atheists are.
Thank you for doing our work for us.
Forget everything I said and keep up the excellent work… wallow in your hatred porn because that’s just you drinking poison while hoping your enemy will die from it.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can I say I’m an atheist, when I’m actually agnostic? If I say I’m agnostic I’m worried that people will either say that it’s not real, or try to convert me.”
You can say that your beliefs are your own. You have no obligation to share intimate details of your journey with anyone who isn’t a part of your life.
Anyone who presses you doesn’t respect your boundaries, and if that’s the case, tell them whatever they want to hear to get them off your case. They’re not interested in getting to know you as a person because they want to be closer to you but because they’re looking for some information about you that they can use for their benefit.
People in life will ask you questions about yourself only because they’re looking for weapons to use against you.
You cannot trust people who cannot respect your boundaries. Life does boil down to being as simple as that.
The next time you wonder if you’re “allowed to say something” or another about yourself, try to remember how an orange Nazi turd concocts bullshit about himself and others with every sentence spewing out of his lying piehole.
I am certainly not advocating for any “benefits” of becoming a pathological liar because that’s just disgusting. I am simply pointing out that you have no reason to tie yourself up in knots over how you describe yourself to someone else.
The harsh reality is that you could likely spend an entire month describing intimate details about your life and why you arrived at certain conclusions that prompted you to think one way over another. The chances are excellent that 99% of what you say will be lost on your audience. People remember only 20% of what they hear.
Most of what you say about yourself passes through another person’s perceptual filters, and you have no control over how they interpret what you say. The only thing you can do is make your best guess at understanding them well enough to use the right combination of words that will get them close enough to understand something resembling what you want them to know and then hope for the best.
Your thoughts and feelings are your own… and if you’re anything like what I’ve gone through, then one day, you’ll be agnostic within a specific context and then a militant atheist within another context the next day. The following day, you’ll be amenable to believers, and later on that afternoon, after encountering a zealous believer, you’re back to hating religion and thinking of yourself as an anti-theist while thinking atheism itself isn’t firm enough to get the stench of the zealous asshole off your body and cleared from your mind.
The entire point I’m getting at is that human beings are not robots. As much as too many people want to create labels and stuff people into neat little boxes, humans are not that defined in such discrete terms.
Humans are more like water or vapour, constantly shifting in the wind or changing direction and flow depending upon the shape of the land one moves over. Whatever defines you as you is summed up entirely as your collection of memories.
Meanwhile, your memories are not stored like magnetic particles on a hard drive. Your memories are stored in eleven-dimensional space as “signposts” — symbols that your mind unravels as you recall events from your life… and your recollection changes as your state of mind changes.
Humans are more fluid than literal fluids in nature.
The next time someone asks you what you are, tell them you’re human.
The next time someone asks you what you believe, tell them you believe dinner is being served at 6:00.
Unless you find yourself in a long and deeply meaningful conversation with someone who truly wants to know your person, you have no obligation to barf up serial numbers for their mental registration of who they want you to be.
Be you and let the “Nosy Parkers” in your life be confused. That’s a “them problem,” not a “you problem.”
Being worried about how other people will respond to you because you’re trying to be honest with them about trying to figure yourself out is an unfair and intrusive expectation from another person.
You may not feel annoyed enough by such prying yet. If you manage to get on to your senior years, you’ll find yourself pissed off at such a rude and entitled attitude precisely because you have gone through a lifetime of being worried about telling people what you fear might be the wrong thing.
Don’t apologize for being who you are. You will only end up hating yourself for doing that. If someone decides they have a right to push their beliefs onto you, tell them to fuck off. Seriously. If Helen Mirren can endorse this response out of regret for being more polite than she should have been, you should not ever feel guilty about drawing your boundaries with a nosy someone in the harshest of terms.
Now that I’ve gone on this rant, I bet you might remember a half-dozen words… assuming you read any of it with any consideration instead of skimming over it all.
Good luck in navigating through this monkey house we call life. You’ll do fine if you can learn to duck and weave around all the flying feces.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do atheists believe in the Jeffersonian phrase that “all men are created equal”?”
This atheist believes the word “equal” is all too often confused with “identical.”
All life is otherwise “equal” from the perspective of an experiential existence.
There is no metric nor means by which any evaluation can be established to determine degrees of consciousness that are not subjected to biases derived from ignorance of the nature of consciousness itself.
Humans can easily consider themselves “more conscious” than ants, but even that comparison is predicated upon a human bias toward the concept of consciousness.
“Ant consciousness” is observably “different” from human consciousness. It remains just as much of a mystery, taking the shape of a puzzle piece in which we cannot yet make out its composition.
The only thing we truly understand about consciousness is that we don’t understand it. We are exposed to slices of it presented within contexts appealing to the spectrum of consciousness we are most familiar with.
What broke the ice for me in an apprehension of a fundamental characteristic shaping the universe was the analogy of consciousness as a meteor crashing into another by Douglas Hofstadter in “Gödel, Escher, Bach — An Eternal Golden Braid.”
It was quite some time after reading this book as a student in the 80s that I encountered various ideas like “Integrated Information Theory,” which allowed me to progress beyond “The Thermostat Problem.”
I had always maintained a belief, however naive, in the fundamental nature of our equality as human beings. In many ways, my adherence was a reaction to coping with learning at the tender age of eleven, that my knowledge of the world far surpassed that of my mother.
(That revelation arose from her confusion over an ultrasound image on the television screen. She asked what it was, and I said it was a baby being born. The shocked expression on her face was like a sound vacuum for the room. My eldest brother turned to me and chastised me for exposing her to knowledge beyond her capacity to process it.)
Even though I was then always treated as an inferior in my family, I rejected that and struggled to assert my equality in an attempt to be accepted. That was fruitless and counterproductive because my efforts only increased the rejection.
I have learned that it is always those whose insecurities compel them to establish degrees of equality between people on the flawed notion of identicality. Over time, I have developed a bias against such a mindset, which I now view as an inferior state of being (a somewhat hypocritical attitude — but honestly earned).
Ironically, such a mindset seems most common among believers, but that may result from sheer numbers. On the other hand, I cannot ignore how that resembles the toxic competitiveness I experienced as I grew up in a dysfunctional environment ruled by a toxic personality who pitted their children against each other for favour.
Whenever the concept of equality is raised, I almost immediately think someone is struggling with their basic humanity and seeking validation to quell their insecurity.
All the pieces comprise the universe we inhabit, and parsing values between constituents is like arguing over whether red blood cells are more or less valuable than white corpuscles. All pieces of a puzzle are necessary to form a complete picture.
We will never see a complete picture if we discard pieces that fall outside our ability to comprehend the nature of their importance to the whole.
From my biased perspective, parsing out a given, like equality, to enumerate differences is more of an expression of toxic thinking that erodes the social fabric than is productive for our societies.
thotbag 