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coming out shiiiiiit

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May 30th, 2010
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  1. I really have to get this off my chest. It's been digging at me for
  2. well over a year now. I now recognize that my (erstwhile) belief in a
  3. supernatural element was only ever a result of peer pressure from
  4. people around me, as well as a crutch to lean on in the wake of
  5. negative experiences. Having been in the presence of more *tolerant*
  6. people as of late, I feel more able to admit to myself and others that
  7. I see no reason to posit the existence of deities, ghosts, fairies,
  8. demons, devils, incubi *or* succubi, naiads, kami, nagas, elves,
  9. brownies, kobolds, dwarves, shibbus, ǁgangwasi, aesir, devas, wights,
  10. seraphim, bodhisattvas, or any other similar entities, without
  11. *positive* evidence in their favor. You will notice that most
  12. religious people disbelieve in nearly all of these entities (with good
  13. cause) but make strange exceptions. I do not. What I accept in their
  14. place, more or less, is the ideology of secular humanism, defined and
  15. explicated thus:
  16.  
  17. http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=main&page=sh_defined
  18.  
  19. "Secular humanism’s cognitive thrust lies in its naturalistic
  20. worldview; its emotional or affective thrust lies in its positive
  21. ethical outlook. Each element is equally essential to secular
  22. humanism; neither stands alone. I submit that this meaningfully
  23. differentiates secular humanism from religious humanism, and from
  24. simple atheism as well. [In British intellectual] Christopher
  25. Hitchens’s language, secular humanists necessarily disbelieve in God
  26. (naturalism) and just as necessarily oppose thuggery and tribalism on
  27. principle (an outgrowth of ethics)."
  28.  
  29. Both seeing the reason in secular humanism and having personally had
  30. many positive experiences with fellow freethinkers, this set of
  31. beliefs has now become an integral part of my identity. As a result,
  32. it is very unlikely that I will reverse this decision, and I will not
  33. tolerate attempts to force a reconversion by belittlement, outrage,
  34. cajoling, pestering, or threats of any kind. That being said, I will
  35. not attempt to impose my secular humanism on anyone else (with the
  36. expectation that this respect will be mutual), and will gladly discuss
  37. it *so long as* the discussion is level-headed and rational.
  38.  
  39. On a personal note: it is sometimes claimed by religious believers
  40. that, because there is beauty and order in the Universe, there must be
  41. a creator behind it all. For now, I'm going to set aside the issue
  42. that this claim tells us nothing about the nature of this or these
  43. putative creators, or our relationship with him/her/it/them. I will
  44. say this though: having read far and wide in such subjects as ecology,
  45. cybernetics, chaotic dynamics, astrobiology, neuroscience, psychology,
  46. molecular biology, evolutionary biology, naturally inspired computing,
  47. and artificial life, I have a renewed and indeed heightened sense of
  48. aesthetics, seeing beauty even in the ants that raid our homes and the
  49. diseases which ruin our food and make us fall ill. I now know that our
  50. planet itself is a vast meta-organism which constantly maintains the
  51. narrowly defined conditions for life on its surface through an array
  52. of inextricably linked cybernetic mechanisms distributed fully across
  53. the environment and everything that lives in it. I know that it is our
  54. duty to uphold this process that sustains and indeed *entails* us, but
  55. I also have good reason to believe that our Universe may be full of
  56. many worlds brimming over with living multitudes of their own. In the
  57. coming decades, we may even be able to spot them from light years away
  58. through endeavors such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder. Truly, these
  59. things are better explained than left unexplained. For this reason,
  60. god beliefs are unsatisfying not only at an intellectual level, but
  61. also at an emotional level. In short, this is what I believe in:
  62.  
  63. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOLAGYmUQV0
  64.  
  65. I hope everything is clear.
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