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