Fellow atheists, what alive religions (still practiced to a significant degree) do you find fascinating, not including Abrahamic ones and Hinduism? Are the reasons ethical, aesthetic, or something different? I'm excluding these two categories, because they are the answers of most people in English-speaking online spaces.

My reason for asking this to atheists and not all nonbelievers is because I wonder what religions pique the interest of people who don't believe in anything supernatural.

Edit: I was tired when I created the post, and accidentally wrote Hinduism. I meant Buddhism.

Preface #1: I know the first response with something like this will be "go see a therapist" - I have been in therapy for over a decade now. There are a lot of things it has helped with (specifically trauma-focused), but nihilism is not something I've been able to get help with. The help has ranged from things like "focus on the micro over the macro" (which I think is probably the best advice, but also can be boiled down to "don't think" and I can't not think), to "find religion" (for me at least: religion doesn't breed hope, hope breeds religion), to "I don't know how to help, I can't relate to that" (...not all therapist are good).

Preface #2: I know the quick response to "life is meaningless" is "so make your own!" but I absolutely despise that logic. If everything is meaningless, than that means making your own meaning is meaningless. It's self-defeating in and of itself. That said, I don't really care about "meaning" anyway. I personally view things as "irrelevant", as if you dig deep enough you get to a point where everything is relevant to nothing. And the conclusion to draw from that is: "it's irrelevant that everything is irrelevant" - similar meaning, but checks out logically significantly better to me. But this has it's own problems that I will go in below.

Preface #3: I know the quick response to the inability to enjoy things is "you don't enjoy things because you are depressed." What I'm positing is the inverse, "I no longer enjoy things, and it's causing me to be depressed." I'm very much not saying the former doesn't happen and I've gone through time periods like that. What I am saying is that the latter is also true, and I'm sure that other people who have dealt with depression for decades understands both "My depression is causing this to happen" and "This is causing my depression to flare" happen.

To give quick context for myself: I had become a nihilistic atheist by the time I graduated elementary school; I had a rather traumatic childhood and my official diagnosis is (C-)PTSD and all the offshoots that come from it like depression and anxiety (Bringing up as I recognize myself these are thoughts that, according to the DSM/ICD, would be from someone with mental disorders). This led to things like dropping out of high school and becoming a mute hikikomori. To make a long story short, in my late teens I got to a point of either suicide or completely revamping my life with the belief that enjoyment could be found via actually being social (friends and dating) and proper self-sufficiency/money. I chose the latter for one simple reason: there was nothing to lose, so just trust the process. It took over a decade of constant self improvement, but I became a sociable person part of different clubs and hosting my own parties/gatherings with a very active dating life. I also got my degree in comp sci and have done quite well for myself with that. And a lot on top of that just in terms of trying to make the most out of life.

Unfortunately, none of that actually helped. Having to mask to be able to be social/date is exhausting and frankly people suck, and wasting life working 9-5 one of the most depressing things to me. The reason I bring this up is because I did really fucking try, I tried the stuff that everyone says brings happiness - but it don't. And it's all just so irrelevant.

Over the last half decade or so, I just can't bring myself to care about anything. And I mean anything, even super simple things. I'll talk to people or listening to a song and think "why do I care what you have to say?". I'll watch a movie or read a book and can't keep focus because seriously who cares about these imaginary things some person thought up? People I know die and I'll just think "yeah that happens." And the absolute worst for me was when it came for knowledge. Because knowledge was the thing I always cared above all else. But what does "knowing things" matter if "things" don't matter to me?

Which brings me back to preface #2. Everything is irrelevant, but it's irrelevant that it's irrelevant. Except that society demands relevancy to justify ones own existence within it. It's not possible to live an irrelevant life and be part of society. I personally really only see two options: reject society or embrace absurdism.

Speaking strictly personally, I do not see rejecting society as a means of living an enjoyable life. Mostly because I know it will lead to me living out of my car again, spending my time embracing hedonism via drugs and alcohol to fuel escapism until the end comes. And if in the end I'm just going to fuel escapism, why not just escape to begin with?

Absurdism is mostly what I fed into while "turning my life around". But I do have issues with it. One is how much it feels like the "this is fine" fire meme; it recognizes the problem but then rejects that it's a problem. This is fine if "life" itself is not a problem and you are able to enjoy your time regardless (after all, the problem itself is irrelevant so yeah just reject it as a problem), but then that gets to my second and main issue: if you don't enjoy life, what defense against suicide does absurdism have? Yes there is the whole thing of "suicide just adds to the absurdity by claiming meaning is needed" but that's only if you are committing suicide because life has no meaning. I don't care that life is irrelevant, I care that life fucking sucks. Suicide then is not rejecting the lack of meaning, it's rejecting time spent unenjoyably.

I've been able to get through things being both meaningless and unenjoyable with the belief that things would become enjoyable. Now I'm nearly 40 years old, things have played out, and I do not buy into it anymore. Either life needs to be enjoyable, or there needs to be some relevancy to it. Which, I reject the later as even being knowable as a human. Which leaves the former.

Which then comes to the silly question, how do you just enjoy things?

I am able to recognize one of my issues with enjoying things: In order to raise my emotional floor, I have embraced being stoic. Things happen that are out of our control. Things are lost, hardships are had, people die. They are simply facts of life. The problem is that it also prevents enjoying things - enjoyable things are also out of your control, so do not embrace them for they will be gone. Which, moments in time then neither "good" or "bad", they simple are just moments in time. Every moment is simply some indefinite, irrelevant moment in time.

Which, kind of tied to that as well, but another issue I recognize: as I have understood my own trauma and how it's affected me, I've really understood just how much is deterministic in life. Which is especially sad in the case of trauma responses, and how much society basically double downs on the trauma (just easy eg of how "hysterical women" have been treated throughout history, but look at the overlap of BPD and traumatic childhoods).

But now these are not just moments in time, but determined yet irrelevant moments in time.

But that still doesn't preclude enjoying things. And I guess that's mostly what I'm for the search for in life, to figure out what things I actually enjoy/how to actually enjoy things I want to enjoy. Because enjoying life is certainly enough, but that requires life to be enjoyable.

And it's actually part of why I'm even posting this. With all the different ways I've changed my life and such, I've tried to look back at what was actually enjoyable. And long-form text communication is definitely the way I prefer to communicate (oh do I miss when 'social media' was forums). I also recognize the importance of being part of more smaller, tighter-knit communities compared to being a blob in a mass. So it's part looking for help, and part just trying to get back into posting on smaller communities.

But I also feel like I'm all over the place and I do apologize for that. I think to try to summarize to bring the points clearer...like I said before, life either needs to be enjoyable or there needs to be some kind of relevancy to it. So either how do you find relevancy/where am I wrong on that, or how do you find enjoyment (and I don't mean "try new hobbies until you find what you enjoy!" kind of stuff - I've already ran that gauntlet. I'm not asking where to find enjoyment, I'm asking how to feel enjoyment; how are you able to care about things might be a better war to phrase it)?

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" —As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? —Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then: "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

• Friedrich Nietzsche, “Gay Science”, 1882

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

• Howard Phillips Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”, 1928

“Humans desired reasons. Reasons for pain. Reasons for sadness. Reasons for life. Reasons for death. Why were their lives filled with suffering? Why were their deaths absurd? They wanted reasons for the destiny that kept transcending their knowledge.”

“And that was God.”

• Kentaro Miura, “Berserk” (83), 1996

What's it say about life, hm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day.

• Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective”, 2014

The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft’s writings than that stemming from its tremendous distances and its highly probably alien and powerful non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key”, man can hardly bear the realization that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”

• Fritz Leiber, “A Literary Copernicus”, 1949

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

• Charles Darwin, in a letter to Asa Gray, 1860

In a way, Darwin discovered God—a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent—a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise—people would have said "My gosh! That's God!"

But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God—not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.

Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, “An Alien God”, 2007

The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.

• Joseph de Maistre, “St. Petersburg Dialogues”, 1821

One night in times long since vanished, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under the cosmos, homeless in his own body. Everything opened up before his searching thoughts, wonder upon wonder, terror upon terror, all blossomed in his mind.

Then woman awoke, too, and said that it was time to go out and kill something. And man took up his bow, fruit of the union between the soul and the hand, and went out under the stars. But when the animals came to their water-hole, where he out of habit waited for them, he no longer knew the spring of the tiger in his blood, but a great psalm to the brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives.

That day he came home with empty hands, and when they found him again by the rising of the new moon, he sat dead by the waterhole.

• Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Last Messiah”, 1933

For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

• Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, 2010

This realization threatens to put us in a persistent state of existential fear.

• Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”, 2015

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax…

• Ernest Becker, "The Denial of Death", 1973

In the literature of supernatural horror, a familiar storyline is that of a character who encounters a paradox in the flesh, so to speak, and must face down or collapse in horror before this ontological perversion —something which should not be, and yet is. Most fabled as specimens of a living paradox are the "undead," those walking cadavers greedy for an eternal presence on earth. But whether their existence should go on unendingly or be cut short by a stake in the heart is not germane to the matter at hand. What is exceedingly material resides in the supernatural horror that such beings could exist in their impossible way for an instant. Other examples of paradox and supernatural horror congealing together are inanimate things guilty of infractions against their nature. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of this phenomenon is a puppet that breaks free of its strings and becomes self-mobilized.

[…]

Whether or not there really are manifestations of the supernatural, they are horrifying to us in concept, since we think ourselves to be living in a natural world, which may be a festival of massacres but only in a physical rather than a metaphysical purport. This is why we routinely equate the supernatural with horror. And a puppet possessed of life would exemplify just such a horror, because it would negate all conceptions of a natural physicalism and affirm a metaphysics of chaos and nightmare. It would still be a puppet, but it would be a puppet with a mind and a will, a human puppet—a paradox more disruptive of sanity than the undead. But that is not how they would see it. Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own—that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you—it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master.

• Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, 2010

Why, then, was the human race not wiped out long ago in great, raging epidemics of insanity? Why are there so few individuals who succumb to the pressure of life because their acuity reveals to them more than they can bear?

A consideration of the spiritual history and present state of our species suggests the following answer: most people manage to save themselves by artificially paring down their consciousness.

• Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Last Messiah”, 1933

Although we typically take our cultural worldview for granted, it is actually a fragile human construction that people spend great energy creating, maintaining, and defending. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal.

• Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”, 2015

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

• Ernest Becker, “Escape From Evil”, 1975

The kinds of change I'm referring to are hard to put into words. A few examples may be switching from one end of the political spectrum to the other, leaving one country or culture for another, religious conversions and deconversions, or leaving behind one's family. Often, these changes are caused by deeply personal events like receiving a serious medical diagnosis, conflict, the death of a loved one, midlife crisis, or merely examining one's values or beliefs. There are countless other examples of both changes and causes, many of which I've never considered.

There is shared experience between these changes: the world hasn't changed, but somehow everything is different. Everything is in a completely new light; it's as if you've moved between parallel universes. Not everyone has had or will have such a moment, but these changes seem to be the most important in catalyzing who we are. As much as we think sharing opinionated memes or arguing at Thanksgiving is going to shape or mold people around us, it is often personal experiences that actually make such change possible. And some small number of people do experience profound change: racists become antifascists, liberals become stanch conservatives, Christians become atheists. These sorts of life-altering changes are often what tell us most about who a person is.

I made this post because the discussion of these changes are among the most valuable discussions I've had with others, and people often don't get socially-acceptable opportunities to share something so personally important to them. This is potentially a heavy subject, so don't feel that you need to share or elaborate any further than what's comfortable for you.

I miss the magic of Christmas. Today and tonight feels ordinary to me, and I miss that sense of wonder.

I miss the trips my family would take to visit our relatives. I miss the get-togethers, and the feasting, and playing games with my cousins and the family friends.

Even though I'm an atheist now, I miss having to go to midnight mass. I miss the excitement of being able to open one present before going to bed.

Unless some tragedy befalls me, I'm sure I can recapture that magic in my future. I'm not depressed about it. But that's a hope for later. For now, this is it.

For everybody else out there who's having a so-so Christmas... wishing you all the best, and hope you can still find a moment to appreciate the holiday.

Normally in the evenings I have to myself, I keep busy and find satisfaction in coding, or writing, or gaming. Tonight, those things don't feel meaningful.

I just wish I had somebody special to share Christmas Eve with, like in all those cozy Christmas songs. Instead, I'm just tired and want to sleep... But I can't go to bed until me and my mom can get my dad changed, so he's not wet with urine the whole night. Just like last night, and the night before that, and the night before that.

I wish I could have gotten to know my dad as well as I've gotten to know my mom, as an adult instead of as a child. But I also would have never spent this much time with my mom if my dad didn't end up with PCA, so wishing for that is wishing for an impossibility.

Why are people setting off fireworks in my area, starting at midnight? It's already 2:00 AM. It's Christmas Eve, not New Years. Aren't kids supposed to be asleep for Santa Claus to drop off presents? Do kids still believe in Santa Claus, or do they just stay up late playing video games on Christmas Eve now?

Maybe they aren't fireworks, maybe they're shooting at Santa.

I've been hearing some ambulance sirens. My dog is upset. It's hard to feel sorry for myself when there are some people having a much worse Christmas than me. If you're having a true disaster of a Christmas, I am truly sorry and I hope you pull through.

Does anyone have any short-to-medium length content that clearly introduces the ideas of Jung?

I don't mind it being dense philosophically, but there's sort of this deliberate obfuscation of ideas that Jungian content creators utilize towards some end.

In philosophy, specific terms and jargon is necessary to ensure philosophical precision of the idea being presented. If one looks up said jargon, they can gain context about what's being communicated.

As far as Jung content online goes, there's a lot of jargon being used, but I'd wager about 50% of it is made up on the fly. When looked up, the term often either doesn't exist, is an adhoc portmanteau of two random terms, or simply doesn't make sense within the context it's used. Why? It seems like they deliberately are obfuscating their ideas for seemingly no reason. Perhaps there's a perceived invulnerability to criticism if your position on basic ideas can't be nailed down?

It seems that Jordan Peterson is the most prominent idea-obfuscator in this tradition, but I understand why he does it; some of his audience likely wouldn't care for the fact that he's likely what they'd describe as an atheist if you were able to pin down the ideas he conveys (e.g., Christ is but one of many manifestations of a Jungian archetype.)

Kinds of content I'm looking for:

• Newb friendly
• Clearly communicates ideas
• Philosophically precise
• Critical, but not polemic (i.e., no "debunking" videos)
• Video/audio/books preferred

Thank you in advance (:

I find stream-of-consciousness-style writing helps me wrestle with ideas and concepts, organizing thoughts into ideas from the chaos. To be clear, I'm a leftist agnostic (some might say atheist) who's been thinking about new atheism and skepticism a lot recently. I spoke to a friend who is a liberal atheist, and they consider themselves a skeptic first, and an atheist second. This seemed strange to me, not because I'm unfamiliar with the skeptical movement, but because it doesn't fit into my current mental model of skepticism. I don't really like the term skeptic. Below, I will attempt to work out my ideas into words, and hopefully have a conclusion.

A quick note: my view of atheism, especially from this era, was largely mediated by YouTube and limited to trends in the US.

Late '00s and early '10s: The Rise of Reactionary Skepticism

For me, no one embodies this era of atheism better than Christopher Hitchens. His videos were one of the many factors that led to me "converting" to atheism. He was a brilliant debater, and mastered the art of crafting rhetoric. Being successful in debate doesn't equate to having more accurate beliefs, but it does mean you can convince people of your ideas more effectively. Upon re-watch of these old videos, they are somewhat intellectually unsatisfying. A case that was impactful to me recently was that upon being presented with a fairly standard formulation of the moral argument, Hitchens feigns shock, and implies that Craig (his opponent) had implied that atheists couldn't act morally (which he clearly didn't.) This is why Hitchens destroys his opponents; he is far more effective at debate than Craig, who looks weak when trying to maintain philosophical precision by choosing statements carefully and hedging/qualifying his statements.

Being skeptical is a valid, often important epistemic tool for increasing the accuracy of our beliefs. For the sake of this post, I will oversimplify skepticism to something like "deconstructing big ideas" and "poking holes in overarching narratives". It starts from a position of neutrality, and seeks to determine if there is rational warrant in believing ideology "X". There are various reasons why one could use skepticism to shape their worldview.

There's a certain kind of skepticism that gained popularity during this time. It was the "'x' DESTROYS 'y' in debate" where "x" was often a new atheist and "y" was often an apologist. There's something both persuasive and cathartic about seeing someone representing your worldview deconstruct someone else's. For many, the reason for watching the content was nothing more than the entertainment value of seeing people get "DESTROYED" in debate. For some, the satisfaction of humiliating the opponent intellectually was the entire point.

Early to mid '10s: Seeking Out Other Ideologies to Destroy

There are only so many religious debates one can have before getting bored. There's basically a set list of apologetic arguments one can have these sorts of debate about before they either get too philosophically dense, or are just so incredibly silly that it isn't satisfying to DESTROY them (in the case of young Earth creationist apologetics.) How many videos can one possibly make debating the Kalam before viewers get bored?

It shouldn't necessarily be surprising that many skeptics turned out to be reactionary. Skepticism is, at least dialectically and sometimes politically, a reactionary position. It turns out there are a lot of ideologies and overarching narratives the left believes in: feminism, progressivism, and various beliefs relating to sexual and gender identity. Gender identity at this time wasn't really on the map, but feminism was. Many prominent atheist YouTube channels pivoted to "'x' DESTROYS 'y' with FACT and LOGIC" but instead of deconstructing religion, it sought to deconstruct feminism. If Christopher Hitchens embodied the previous era, though not an atheist, Ben Shapiro embodies this era.

It seems correct to me that these folks were "skeptical" of feminism. They, from a position of neutrality, sought to "poke holes" in feminist ideology. Of course, the new atheists weren't neutral on religion; they were strongly atheistic. So too were these feminist skeptics. They were strongly misogynistic. Of course, like the new atheists before them, only so much content can be made

2016 to Present: Reactionary Skeptics Abandon Atheism

Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists is the person I pick to personify this era (he was also partly inspiration for these weird person-on-the-street interviews of Christians where they just begin so-called Socratic questioning ("but WHY do believe that, and WHY do you believe that?"), similar to right-wing person-on-the-street interviews of feminists). He's had multiple interviews where he states that criticizing religion is unhelpful; that Christians can be powerful allies against a much worse religion in needing of deconstruction: Wokeism. (yes, he really does use that word)

Skepticism is now a mainstream component of conservative thought. While Climate Change skepticism has been around for awhile, in the COVID-era, skepticism of vaccines and masks is probably one of the more powerful pieces of evidence that skepticism is a core component of modern American conservative ideology. It's also applied to right-wing ideologies: once united on subjects like foreign interventionism and free trade, now there's greater skepticism among conservatives about once unquestioned conservative beliefs. Despite whether you think they are "doing skepticism the right way" they are certainly "doing a skepticism".

Jordan Peterson, famous reactionary, identifies as a Christian. His actual metaphysical beliefs, though he tries to squirm out of elaborating on them, are closely aligned with what the majority of people would describe as atheism. But, like Boghossian has already recognized, Christianity is a tool to be wielded for reactionary political aims, even if you are a de-facto atheist. In 2023, "Christian" implies "conservative" more strongly than any period in my living memory.

New, New Atheism

The movement that has been abandoned by who I call the Reactionary Skeptics has been left primarily with progressives, LGBTQ folks, and many suffering from religious trauma. Christianity more strongly maps onto conservatism in the modern era, therefore its negation isn't a merely reactionary process; it is a progressive, revolutionary one. In keeping with my cringe habit of anointing a YouTube creator for each era, I'd point to Genetically Modified Skeptic (there's that word) as the embodiment of this era.

Obviously these folks were part of "the movement" (if it can even be called such) the entire time. But they are largely who is left. Why did reactionaries decide to leave? Because they realize that religion structures power in a way that they find beneficial, and that atheism can be used to restructure power in a progressive or revolutionary way.

This movement, due to the aforementioned abandonment is far more profoundly progressive than any previous era. Folks like The Satanic Temple come to mind. It's hard to find an atheist creator nowadays that isn't an outspoken proponent of LGBTQ rights and feminism. Atheism has been ceded to the left.

What's the point of this damn post?!

If you are talking in earnest about atheism now, you're probably a progressive. And I don't think it's helpful to use term skeptic. Yes, what a dumb quibble. And yes, you are a skeptic of one particular largely right-wing overarching narrative. But the term is unhelpful. Its confusing. What is meant by skepticism, whenever I press my progressive "skeptical" friends is something along the lines of "having rational beliefs" or "'good' epistemology", which... like come on, that's not what skepticism means. Besides, most people believe they "have true beliefs", which leads me to wonder, what's the point of telling people you're a skeptic?

I get the point. It's about saying something more than "God's not real." But there are simply better, more impressive political projects with less baggage than skepticism.

Thanks for reading :)

My contribution:

It's 2:17am on a school night, you're a teenager, and you're googling "most disturbing movie ever made" - because you can. Among mentions of films like A Serbian Film and Audition, you also notice that a film with two names is commonly mentioned: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Huh, even the name sounds creepy. After looking behind you to make sure no one's watching, a brief glance at a summary of the movie explains enough to make you want to forget about the whole thing forever. Regardless, you fall further down the Wikipedia hole... (or in my case, you really do forget about it for 10 years, only to unfortunately stumble across it again yesterday.)

Salò was made in 1975 and is based on a novel written by Marquis de Sade in 1785. It is known as one of the most disturbing films ever made, but as I learned recently, the film and novel somewhat pale in comparison to the real life of the author. Sade was a French guy who committed all manners of wild, outrageous, and terrible behavior throughout his life, and his Wikipedia page is a crazy ride. You know the word "sadism?" This man is literally the etymological origin of sadism. (Also, practically his whole existence requires a content warning. In this case, it seems that the art has never been separate from the artist.)

In 1763, Sade was charged with "outrage to public morals, blasphemy and profanation of the image of Christ," which at first makes him seem pretty cool. Alas, it all goes downhill from here, as he was known as a nuisance and danger to every community he lived in.

Later, when Napoleon Bonaparte issued a warrant for his arrest after being offended by his novels, Sade was imprisoned, then had to transfer prisons because he was being such a disgusting sex pest to other prisoners at the first one. His family had him declared insane and moved to an insane asylum. While in the asylum, he was permitted to direct and perform his plays, using the other patients as actors. Somehow, even when living amongst the most underprivileged members of society in prisons or insane asylums, it seems that Sade was never fully prevented from promoting his ideas and art to the world, even though the subjects he explored were universally horrifying to society - then, as well as now. I found this fascinating.

Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom on scraps of paper while in an insane asylum in 1785, and lost it in the Storming of Bastille during the French Revolution. It was somehow rescued (eternally unbeknownst to him,) and was finally published in 1904, to eventually be adapted into the film that sent me down this whole rabbit hole.

While reading about Sade's life, I was surprised not only by the major events in history he was present for, but the lasting impact he had on philosophy, art, and culture. As mentioned above, the word "sadism" has its roots in his name. The Surrealists adopted him as an inspiration in the 1920s, dubbing him the "Divine Marquis" and praising his ideas about "sexual freedom." (Side note: I love surrealism, but I swear, I never stop discovering new, unsettling facts about Dali and his ilk.) Along with Surrealism, he is said to have had great influence over Modernist art. Some consider his work to be a precursor of nihilism. Sade also influenced Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and at least one serial killer.

Discussion

Learning about this guy left me astounded, and I just needed to share with someone. Could I have just posted the Wikipedia article? Yes, but that's not as fun as writing down this crazy story and some of my feelings about it. (Note: I did not link sources excessively in this post, as it generally follows the structure of the Wikipedia article and sources can be found there.)

I couldn't believe I didn't already know about Marquis de Sade before today (maybe because I've never taken a philosophy class?) It also got me thinking that I'd like to hear about any other outrageous, controversial, or just plain strange characters in history that you might know of. Even the other historical figures mentioned above have pretty wild lives themselves. (And on the other hand, I suppose there's so much here to chew on that we may just discuss Sade in general. If so, have at it. I'm particularly fascinated by how such a sick individual has heavily influenced significant parts of our culture, and how to feel about that.)

Fun facts are welcome, considering I certainly didn't bring any.

Share your favorite argument for the existence of God below.

Background: I'm an atheist (and have been for a decade) who's been interested in Christian Apologetics since I was a young Christian. As I entered adulthood, I found myself losing my faith, largely because I grew up in a fundamentalist, Young Earth Creationist household which taught that evolution and God are incompatible. While I no longer believe in this lack of compatibility, my belief in God never came back. I've tried to give it an honest effort, and there are many compelling reasons why I want Christianity to be true:

• Reunification with loved ones who've passed
• Absolute moral justice exists
• A plan for my life, and meaning in my suffering
• Access to unconditional love; to have a personal relationship with my creator
• Surviving my own death

For a variety of reasons seemingly outside my direct control, I still don't believe. It doesn't help that I've been introduced to strong arguments against the existence of God (e.g. the problem of evil and its subsets) which have rebuttals of varying quality from Christian philosophers. I don't think this lack of belief is my fault, or for lack of trying; I can't make myself believe anything. I try to be open to arguments, and this has led to an obsession with revisiting apologetics.

Now I think of apologetics as at least a fun mental exercise; combing through the arguments, atheist rebuttals, and responses to those rebuttals. That's probably strange, but it tickles the right parts of the brain to keep me engaged.

*Disclaimer: I am not an apologist, theologian, or a philosopher, just someone interested in the topic. Perhaps this could've been asked in r/AskPhilosophy or maybe even r/changemyview, but I figure the conversation might be good here

The recent post here on Absurd Trolley Problems has had me thinking about ethics again, and I realized I've never been introduced to how one can be an atheist and be not only a moral objectivist, but a moral realist. I remember a debate I watched years ago with William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens where Craig asks Hitchens what the basis of morality is, and he acts insulted, insinuating that Craig intended to say that atheists couldn't "be good without God" (which I think became a famous moment for the both of them.)

But I never got the answer to Craig's question that I wanted. Without God, how should we determine what moral facts there are? How should we determine if there are moral facts at all? I grew up in a fundamentalist religion, and found myself in adulthood deeply interested in apologetics, and see similar responses in debates to the one mentioned above. Now while I believe Hitchens was a moral relativist, I often see and hear cases where atheists do seem to want to say that [insert atrocity here] was objectively morally wrong. Can atheists reasonably claim that there are not only moral facts, but objective moral facts that they can access? Upon examination, aren't you ultimately required to derive an "ought" from an "is"?

I skimmed The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris some years ago, and it seems to "avoid" (i.e. commit) the "is/ought" fallacy by simply declaring that "human flourishing" (however that may be defined, separate issue) is an irreducible "ought" in his eyes. The book is great, I think that science should be part of the discussion about how one ought to live their life if the goal is some end like human flourishing; doctors already give prescriptions for behavior based on a presupposed goal between both parties to promote health and well-being. Both of these necessarily presuppose a state of affairs that one "ought" to seek to attain.

But none of this answers why one "ought" to do anything; sure, there are facts about what one "ought" to do in order to attain a state of affairs, but that isn't morality: that's true of any subject where two people agree to share a goal. It doesn't tell us why they should have that goal. None of this feels like a satisfying answer to the question Craig posed. I don't feel like I'm any closer to these objective moral facts.

I should say this topic is really meaningful to me. I've thought a lot about veganism, and the suffering of non-human animals. I've thought about the impact of my consumption decisions instead of perpetually leaning on the "no ethical consumption" crutch (even though there are reasons why that would have merit in certain circumstances. I literally can't stop thinking about climate change and how powerless, yet simultaneously complicit I feel. I've read Peter Singer, Scripture, Kant, John Stewart Mill, Rawls, and works from many others, and can't find any reason for an atheist (and maybe even a theist?) to think that there are these moral facts at all, much less objective, accessible ones. This really leaves me with "I guess I should just do whatever it is that I feel like doing", which probably seems to you as unsatisfying as it was for me to type.

Last week I woke up to yet another PM from someone I've come to admire from afar on tildes. This was a user I'd seen many times on Tildes, bringing with them a unique and powerful voice. This person was a minority. They brought a voice to the table that was like a breath of fresh air - I'd frequently see them enter threads dominated by a single opinion and make everyone challenge their assumptions. They would enter and offer their shoes to anyone who'd like to try them on and get a glimpse into how the world might work for them, should they be brave enough to walk a mile or two.

This is not the first PM I've received from someone who decided this website had become too troublesome to continue participating and it's likely not the last I will see. While it is heartbreaking to see them go, it is equally heartbreaking to me that the reason they are going is often not because people are trying to push them away. By far and large, I see a majority of tildes users actively participating in discussions with good faith. By the results of the last census, increasing diversity was of importance to the majority of users and I do not think they were free-text typing that in without good cause.

This post is one that I've been contemplating in the back of my mind for a very long time now. It first really occurred to me nearly a year ago when a fairly well known person of minority status got banned for being too confrontational and aggressive to the kind of voice they didn't want to see on Tildes. I wasn't sure how to address it at the time, and I wasn't entirely certain it would be a problem, but the year since this post I've become hyper aware to its existence in a way I wasn't previously. In fact, I've had a bit of this conversation on more than one outlet on the internet already, because my recognition of this behavior has had me upset many times since. To this extent, I thank that user, because it truly did open my eyes to a behavior which I believe is self-sabotaging, but often genuine in nature.

I believe the simplest way to explain what is happening is through the law of large numbers. While not everyone responded to the 2020 Tildes Census (in fact I would imagine maybe 10% of us did), I'm going to use it as a model to touch on these issues. There were a total of 350 responses to the survey. Of this 86% were male, 67% were heterosexual, 75% were atheist or agnostic (50, 25 respectively), 52% were from the US, and 47% identified as white or Caucasian. I point all of this out to say that as a population we tend to trend towards a particular kind of individual. To be clear, this isn't necessarily bad - we are still quite a small website and we need to start somewhere with a base we know how to pull from.

But this does present a unique problem when it comes to interaction. Let's imagine for a second that 1 in 100 individuals has some sort of problematic behavior on Tildes that manages to find its way into discussion. This behavior might be that they have a strong intolerant opinion on a specific subject but manage to obscure it enough to get past the intolerance detecting capabilities of others. Or perhaps their views are not intolerant, but they simply possess a strong opinion on how something should be worded or an aversion to a particular kind of venting. Because I don't want to throw anyone under the bus I'm going to pull from an upsetting behavior I used to have in my childhood - I couldn't shut my mouth when people would bring up that women make '70 cents on the dollar'.

It's very hard for me to look back and definitively say it was one shaping experience that led me to behave like that. If I had to attribute this shameful behavior, I think there's a few major players. First off, I grew up in an upper middle class family who happened to be located in an area that was very homogeneous. I went to school with the children of tech millionaires, many of whom were white and quite privileged. I think there were a grand total of 4 people of color in my middle school. Things got a lot better once I had made it to high school (by numbers, whites were in the minority), but there's a subtle cultural indoctrination that happens through absorbing what you hear from parents and teachers at a young age. As a young child, I also latched on to early internet behavior. People who were pedantic about grammar, who could use logic effectively, and otherwise followed the rules that rich white people before them set up as the 'correct' way to do discuss were revered on the internet. I remember when being the grammar police was behavior that was actually celebrated. This kind of mindset lead me to read into the research on the matter (also primarily conducted by rich white folks, another bias I'm trying to undo in my life) and the modern research suggested that this figure was outdated and poorly controlled.

I was the 1 in 100 users with the problematic behavior. It took me awhile to learn that I wasn't helping anyone out by offering this information up (turns out there were a lot of people already doing the same work I was and people are smarter than I gave them credit for), but that only scratches at the surface of the real problem. The real problem is that I didn't have the lived experience of a woman entering spaces where this discussion was happening. I wasn't the woman who received less pay than their colleagues, who put in more hours, who spoke up but was talked over, whose ideas were restated by their male peers, or who clicked on an article link talking about pay inequality or women's rights and how far we still have to go and was met with hostile comments. I didn't know how soul-crushing it could be to be met with nearly the same resistance in every public sphere where this was being discussed. I didn't know how tiring it was to have to justify my existence and to explain my struggles to those who hadn't lived the same life as me. I didn't know how heart wrenching it would feel for someone I valued, trusted, and loved to express opinions like these years after I had built up a strong bond with them and for them to be entirely unaware of the damage they were causing.

To be clear, when I say understand I mean to have either experienced it directly enough to begin to actually place myself in the shoes of others or heard about it enough for their experience to truly sink in. It's one thing to acknowledge and know that this behavior exists, it's another to live it and see it first hand on a day where you're hanging on by a thread. To truly understand how mentally exhausting it can be to treated this way was something that escaped my comprehension because I could only live this experience through the words of others. I didn't really start to appreciate this until I got older, because I started recognizing how universal this experience truly was. I don't think I know a single female who doesn't have a story of sexual assault - the rate at which they respond with something in their lives is a stark reminder of how far we still have to come.

What I knew, but didn't truly understand is that if 1 in 100 users have problematic behavior and 1 in 100 users are transgender, we have an equal number of transgender individuals as we do users with problematic behavior. I want you to stop here and reread the last sentence and really absorb it before moving on. Ask yourself what problems might arise by these inequality existing.

In this hypothetical we have an even number of individuals who are going to participate in a thread about a transgender issue as we have transgender individuals. If even 1 of these transgender individuals decides they do not want to engage with this behavior, we're on a downwards slope to eventually having nearly no transgender representation as now they are outnumbered and their voice is more likely to be drowned out by the problematic individuals. As less and less people of the minority engage, because they are discouraged by the expressions of the problematic individuals, less people will wish to engage as the threads become increasingly more hostile.

The problem we have on tildes is that the only way I see for us to become more diverse is to ask for more from those who have, to protect those who do not. I'm calling on everyone to pay closer attention to the intended audience of a thread. We need to look at how discussions are happening throughout the entirety of a thread and do a better job being welcoming of the minority opinion. We need to elevate and celebrate the voices of the minorities in these threads so that they are equal in paradigm to the voices which counter theirs. If a thread's topic is about a minority class such as gays we need to ensure that gays get an equal voice - if one person is dominating replies to gays in the comments, we need to be good allies and help balance the scales.

We also need to stop and think about how these discussions usually play out on the rest of the internet. Do you ever see something like this on twitter and go "definitely not checking the comments"? We need to pay attention to this, and strive to ensure the same doesn't eventually apply to Tildes.

A common example of this that I've seen is present in threads directed at specific minorities. The early discussion in a fantastic thread titled What's hard about being a woman? exemplifies this issue - because there aren't enough women on Tildes, the thread was dominated by male voices. Only one of these individuals were particularly problematic, but there was a hesitation from women I knew to enter this thread because an environment dominated by the male voice is not welcoming. Some of the women who entered this thread were met with replies challenging some of what they said, rather than elevating their voices and celebrating their participation. A small minority of men were in this thread to learn, but weren't aware of how the way they engage with other men on the internet was not appropriate for this venue. They didn't stop to consider that a thread dominated by male voices was neither welcoming nor a good start. If they had merely waited for women to start populating the thread, and replied to them, or opened soft with commentary on what they had seen in women without providing too much analysis they may have made the thread more welcoming.

Another common example of this that I see happened in a thread I posted titled Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. I actually had to stop myself from posting in this thread because I had an inkling that it was going to exemplify the behavior I wanted to address in a thread like this and I didn't want to disrupt what would naturally happen on Tildes absent my intervention. Nearly every reply in that thread criticizes the author for not mentioning that men can have impostor syndrome too. Imagine entering this thread as a woman - even if you emotionally connected with the author on some level, would you bother engaging when highly regarded comments focus on nitpicking the author for not being 'inclusive' enough? As far as I could tell, even the title doesn't call upon the reader to critically examine what imposter syndrome is and who is eligible to suffer from it. It's calling upon the reader to stop telling women that they have imposter syndrome (or to stop others when they make this statement), when the problem is a sexist environment. I've even received recognition from women on Tildes outside of this thread (through DMs and discussions on different platforms) who thank me for posting these threads, but their voice is often conspicuously absent from the thread itself. I do not want to speak on their behalf, but I can guess that a major reason for that is the environment we are creating here on Tildes is not welcoming enough for them to feel it is worth commenting.

The insidious part of this problem is that very often the people creating a hostile environment do not intend to do so. They truly wish to be inclusive. Or they see behavior like this and they don't understand why it's problematic - it doesn't cause a flag to go off in their brain which tells them that they should jump in and fight on behalf of the people they want to protect. But this behavior is slowly causing minority individuals to flee this website. I don't know and cannot know them all, but waking up to PMs about someone else leaving makes my heart sink. Entering threads about the intersectional minorities that I find myself and my loved ones a part of often makes me feel similarly upset, downtrodden, and makes me feel like I want to engage less and less with this platform.

I wish I had an answer. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everything better. To give everyone omniscience, or at least a day's firsthand experience of someone radically different than them. Unfortunately, I do not. I think the best I can offer at this time is this post - a call on all of us to do better; a start of an ongoing discussion on how we can protect the minorities among us so that we can be bettered by their presence.

I don't know if this would be only an option when you are creating a comment, or added to the list of tags like "Exemplary" and such, but an option to have a "Spoiler" comment tag that collapses the comment but doesn't affect ranking might be a good edition to the "What is your favorite media/What have you consumed recently/Recommendation threads." It's also something that the site already supports, and most importantly, looks atheistically pleasing to me compared to highlightable Spoiler Script.

Hey Tildians,

This is going to be a really long post that is an ongoing search and conversation I am having with myself. Its going to be about religion and culture. Sorry for the shitty title, I am really bad at coming up with titles, I tend to ramble a lot.

I'm currently going through a crisis both of faith and cultural identity. Not because I am questioning either, but because I have never had either. I'm a white man from america. Growing up as a kid, my parents gave me the option to look at religions and choose one if any that spoke to me. None did, so I didn't go for a long time. In high school I attended Methodist Church every weekend because I felt pressured by my Boy Scout troop to be Christian, the Methodist Church let us use their church for our meetings despite none of the troop being members of the church, and the priest there at the time was a really great guy that I liked a lot. I spent a lot of time talking about faith with him and eventually, he said to me "let's face it, you don't believe the things I am preaching. That is completely fine. You're welcome in the church, it'll always be home, I'm always here to talk about faith or life or anything, but you don't believe in Christianity and you owe it to yourself to try and find something you do believe." And he was right, I didn't. So I studied a few things here and there and none ever stuck. So I've just been agnostic. But I desperately want to believe in a religion and have a sense of community and just, something to tie my individual beliefs to the world and know other people feel the same way I do.

Similarly, I grew up pretty much "American". I know my heritage is from Ireland, Poland, UK, Croatia, Germany because I did reports on ancestry in school, but they've never been a part of my identity. We never talk about being from Poland other than explaining to people why my last name is spelled the way it is (WHICH IS STUPID BECAUSE IT'S NOT A WEIRD SPELLING OR PRONOUNCED DIFFERENT THAN IT LOOKS). It just isn't a thing. I've always envied my friends whose families are very proud and invested in their heritage. And that's not for a lack of trying, I've tried to get invested in them, but there aren't really communities around me for it, my family doesn't give a shit, and even if I did, I'm like 15% everything so it doesn't feel like I'm REALLY from that culture. I guess that's why some people are so extreme about being American. They're such a mix of so many different European countries that if a parent isn't invested in a specific culture, it's hard to identify with any single one, so they rally behind America. It is all they have.

I don't know. It's very weird crisis that came out of nowhere in the stupidest ways (rewatching avatar and then having a crisis of faith looking at a chacra candle in a used book store). I've realized that I am paralyzed by the lack of a foundation of my identity. Personality traits and political views and hobbies are all malleable and change over time and so what I define myself as now could be completely gone and irrelevant in 2 years time and something about that terrifies me. It makes me wish there was something I could tie myself to that doesn't change, like what country my family is from. And if not that, an felling like I undestand the world around me would be great, and something religion provides. Also, the community wouldn't be something I'd hate to have.

Tangentially to this, I'm having a weird relationship with faith in another way. I keep finding myself gravitating towards budhism. I don't know why, but it just is what I keep ending up looking at. I have 6 different bibles, a torrah, and a quran that I've read. None feel quite right. I keep ending up reading more about budism. But I feel SO WEIRD about it. It feels like I'm that white dude everyone hates that wont stop talking about budism. I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t let the outside world’s perceptions affect my religious views. But that doesn’t mean it is easy not to.

Guess to make this more of a convo I’ll ask some questions to generate discussion:

Religious folks: How has growing up with a religion effected your life? Do you think you’d be a drastically different person without it?

Atheists: How weird does this sound to you? Did you go through a similar crisis before landing on atheism

People who grew up with a strong cultural identity: How has that effected your life? Are you generally happy that you have that identity and community? Were there ever times you wished you weren’t a part of it?

Intro

Hello everyone.

Due to @Kat’s ever-failing health, I will be analyzing the data instead of her this time around. If you have no idea what this is about, see the demographic survey that was posted on the day of Tildes’ half-year birthday. She’s done this before, so let’s see what's new.

The original survey was answered by 404 people, while the half year survey was answered by 293. Though the total number of replies was lower, the completion rate was actually higher: 293 responses from 422 unique visitors, or 69.4%, up from the first year’s 404/599=67.4%. The decrease in answers is most likely attributed to the change of the default sort from “Activity, all time” to “Activity, 3 days”: the response rate held fairly consistent for the first three days, then plummeted after the third as the topic stopped being able to gain any publicity. Though response rates on the original were not high after the first three days, there was a steady trickle up until the survey stopped accepting responses.

While the numbers are relatively big (for a community of this size), do take anything found with a healthy dose of scepticism. Even though the original dataset she shared with me does not contain any identifiable information (all I can see are randomly-generated user strings) the specifics of that data will not be posted, as was mentioned during the original survey. This is because I am unable to be certain I can sufficiently anonymize it. Typeform has created a summary of the data on a per-question basis with substantially more datapoints than this thread, which you can find https://themeerkat.typeform.com/report/H2TtYg/rVf75AqbKaPncy6y.

Explanation

I will compare the statistics with a similarish reference set based on the six most common territories, all of which are above one percentage of the survey answers. That means when I compare on the general populace, I will base it on numbers from USA, Canada, UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and France.

This means it will be weighted like this:

I’ll clean up my data sheet and post it in the comments later. You all are absolutely encouraged to fix it because it will most likely contain errors.

The interesting stuff

What has changed in the first half year?

Age

This time around an age range was used instead of an exact numerical input, but if we were to assume that everyone is aged in the middle of their age range (so 20 for 18-22 year olds, for instance), the average age of a user would be 26.84 years, or 26 years, 9 months, and 4 days old (roughly). So we’ve grown a bit younger than last year, on average.

Gender and identity

Gender distribution seems to be roughly the same. We see a small decrease in percentage of heterosexuals, divided roughly evenly on the remaining categories. We also see a significant increase in the amount of transgender users, but since the amount reported is small, that could also just be statistical noise. The percentage of polyamorous people has remained exactly the same. For pronouns, there are only three users who prefer it/its, and zero who prefer any neopronoun set: every “Other” was offering commentary on the question rather than answering it. Similarly, almost all of the “Others” for orientation were expressing that they didn’t understand the specifics of the options given.

All in all, little has changed.

Territorial

In both surveys, three options dominated: the USA, the UK, and Canada. On that end, little has changed, though it seems that all of the Swedes disappeared, with zero answering the half year survey as compared to eight for the first one. Wonder what they’ve been busy with.

Native language

Unsurprisingly, about everyone speaks English. What is more surprising is the lack of native multilinguals: fewer than 6% of Americans who natively speak English also natively speak a second language. For comparison, that’s 10% for Australians, 21% for Canadians, and 13% for the UK. This represents an overall decrease in geographic diversity, with users coming from 36 different countries as compared to 42 the first time.

Religion

Compared to the world at-large, we sure are a god-denying folk. A whopping 52% of us consider ourselves atheists, whereas the sample data puts it at 12.1%, so we’re far from the norm of our fellow citizens.

We got a few interesting answers in the “other” section of the religion part of the survey. We got a few interesting ones I had never heard of before, like “Discordian”. But generally speaking, around half of them were either “none” or one of the actual options. Two stood out to me though.

To the one Chinese user who filled it in as “The heck is chinese traditional”: I have no idea either.

To the one Australian user who wrote “Left-hand path Heathen”, you be yourself, mate.

Politics

The average has barely moved in the last half year—we’re still slanted very much to the left. Unlike the first survey, there was no freeform input this time around, so the specifics are hard to discuss.

Computers

We have seen a drastic fall in the percentage of Windows users. It was at 60%, and is down to 43%. Nearly all of this has gone to Linux, which is now at 38%. That’s quite large, especially compared to the reference data, which has Linux use among web users at 1.23%. It’s like a herd of penguins in here.

Mobile phones

Compared to half a year ago, not many of us have switched mobile OS. Compared to the calculated data, we like Android slightly more than average. 62% vs 72%.

Not much interesting in the “other” section, though I will give a salute to the one American user still holding out on Windows 10 Mobile.

Work

We have a pretty even distribution with three exceptions. “Computer software”, “Never employed”, and “IT”. Nearly 3/4 who answered “Never employed” are currently students.

Among the students, we only have one student that proudly smokes and has no interest in quitting. The campaigns seem to be working.

Tildes usage

If we look at the users who visit Tildes multiple times per day, we see a few interesting trends. Nearly all of them use Android, and nearly all of them are employed. Beyond that it all seems surprisingly… average.

Overall, people rated Tildes as a platform as-it-stands a 5.7/7 (0.81), and their optimism for the future of the site at a 5.4/7 (0.77). The most important reason they use the site (of the options given) is “Minimal, fast design” at a 4.6/5 (0.92), with “Privacy-consciousness and lack of trackers” right on its heels. 20.8% of users have ever contributed money to Tildes (surprisingly high, compared to most donation campaigns), with about half as many making a recurring donation.

Despite @Kat’s insidious attempt to influence the data, “waves” as a demonym only received 5.5% of the vote. The leader for that, overwhelmingly, is “no demonym at all”, with a combined 49% of the votes and 18.5% of respondents strongly preferring the site not to have a demonym. Second place, the generic “users”, only has 15.8% in comparison. The first Tildes-specific demonym present is Tilders/~​rs, with 13.4%.

Most notably, about ⅔ of users would prefer Tildes to be remain invite-only long-term.

Freeform questions

The survey had three freeform questions: “What do you like most about Tildes, thus far?”, “What do you like least about Tildes, thus far?”, and “What is the most pressing missing feature/‘pain point’ for you about Tildes in its current state?” All the comments fill over 30 pages, so it seems like we really have a lot to say. You can download and look at all of the raw answers here, if you’d like. They’ve been shuffled to ensure privacy.

Likes

A large majority of the comments boil down to “a quality of discussion where disagreement is discussed in a respectful and level-headed way”. A very significant amount also point out the lack of “low effort content and trolls” as a good thing. A significant amount also mention the simple and quick-loading interface. We also have one user who believes he can find a twerk team on Tildes.

So on this, @Deimos can feel proud for what he has done. Though you know what really makes the site good? There is one comment that properly gets it: “The people, d’awwww.”. Yes, that includes you.

Dislikes

But not everything is perfect, though negatives about Tildes seem to be a lot less unanimous than the positives. There are a few that repeat a bit more often than others: the biggest one is “left centrism in discussions” or “echo chambers”, though in a close second, as with any political discussion, is its exact opposite with complaints about “too much discussion about left-centrism in discussions”—notably, though, in the question “Do you feel as though Tildes has a good mix of political opinions, for your personal preferences?”, the leading answer was “Yes” with 63%. A small amount of users also think we have too many software developers.

Beyond that, the main complaint that stands out is “lack of users and content”, which I am sure will improve in time.

Missing feature/pain point

This too is very varied. A lot of the comments are actually about features that have been introduced since the survey was done, like bookmarking. Honestly, it’s not that many complaints compared to just likes and dislikes.

The “majority” seem to be on a lack of tag autocompletion, USA-centrism, and the lack of a mobile app.

There was one more section: “If you would like to offer any long-form commentary, criticism, or feedback regarding Tildes, you may do so here.” Due to its nature, I’ll let you read through them yourself in the raw data, if you’re interested.

Closing words

First of all, to everyone who took the time to answer: thank you! I hope this post and the survey has brought some fun to everyone. If there’s an interest, I am sure that Kat, myself, or someone else will make another one at the one year anniversary. We already got some feedback in the previous thread, but we’re always open for more.

I will do some additional data comparisons on request. I might be a bit occupied this weekend, though, so that will come when it comes.

Let's debate religion. I don't think I've seen this topic on Tildes yet and it might be interesting.

My country has practically no visible religion - about 10-15% of our population is religious (mostly seniors) - and just a fraction of them does those religious thing like going to church. Religion basically doesn't exist here. We have a lot of nice churches, but they mostly aren't used.

The thing that I think caused this big amount of atheists (agnostics, ...) is that almost noone is raised to believe in God - in our culture, we don't teach religion at all. Kids are taught that religions exist, but they are not pressed to believe in it such as in other parts of world. They choose what to believe. And God isn't the thing people choose for most of the time.

Whenever I see anything about USA (discussion, film, serial), I frequently see religion there. When I saw it for the first time when I was young, I thought something like "They still have religion there? I thought USA is developed country". I don't think it anymore, I understand better why are people religious, but still - I'd like to know more about more religious cultures and what effect religion have in other countries.

I've been enjoying reading peoples conversations on Tildes. There's been in-depth discussions and debates and open dialogue with a genuine attempt at understanding the other side's opinions. I really enjoy discussing spirituality with all angles of beliefs, so I thought it could be fun to try that here :)

I think it will be important to understand while discussing this that we all have different understandings and definitions of loaded words when referring to things that, by definition, are indefinable. I think it'll help to keep that in mind. One person may use the word "God" and have a picture in their head of a literal being in the clouds with a robe and beard. Another may use the word "God" and it means something else entirely. Like the creative power behind the ongoing evolution of the universe.

Two very different things.

I'll start with a little bit about my own beliefs, and where I'm coming from.

I was raised conservative christian, being taught to believe in a literal 6-day creation, with God resting on the 7th. And we took the commandment to also rest on the 7th day very seriously. Seventh-Day Adventist. We were right in our interpretation of the bible, and everyone else was wrong and in danger of going to hell, including all other religions.

I had an experience about 7 or 8 years ago that shifted my perspective completely. Essentially, I fell into a state of samadhi, had a kundalini awakening, became one with god. Whatever the words used to describe it, or the belief structures that have been built around it, I was there. My body and mind fell away into stillness, and it was just conscious awareness of Peace and Love. No thoughts about it, or physical sensations in my body, just awareness of.

Since then, I've been opened up to an understanding about the universe that's bigger than beliefs. I see my experience and the "Truth" reflected in all sorts of religious texts and beliefs, as well as in non-religious things. I've said to many people while talking about these topics that I believe there are atheists who have a closer "relationship" with god. Looking into the makeup of the universe with curiosity. It's great. I don't believe anyone needs a belief in god or religious theology to be headed in the "right" direction. And at the end of the day I think that's where we're all at. Headed on a path. We've all got our own personal journey and having compassion and love for others where they are at is what Jesus was talking about and trying to teach to people who had no understanding of that level of understanding.

My wife and I are reading a book right now called Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today - by John Spong

My wife was raised conservative christian and is just starting the exciting journey of questioning all of it. We're reading it together. So far the author's understanding of spirituality, god, etc. seem to line up closely with mine.

In the book he speaks about the inability to use limited human language to discuss this sort of thing, and why christianity has gotten it so confused over the years, as it's hard to put into words, and then have others read it and understand it. Experience vs Belief. Very different things.

Anyhow, I think I've rambled enough. I'd love to see the kind of discussion we can get going about such a typically decisive topic :)

Tell me what you know...

I've seen a few remarks here and there that have implied sort of matter-of-factly that places like /r/The_Donald have no redeeming value, the community members are awful (and undesirable to have here), their ideas are all reprehensible, etc. I assume that this is mostly just due to the demographic coming primarily from popular reddit mod teams where being anti-Trump is sort of an unspoken requirement - but I don't really know for certain.

It reminds me a little of this woman in a class i had once, who spoke to me about atheists, assumed I was christian just as a matter of course. It's kind of an awkward situation to find yourself in. I don't identify as an atheist, but if someone is mildly insulting atheists, it's uncomfortable. You have to be a covert conservative (or covert center-right, or even left-leaning Trump voter) or else you risk being blasted/flamed/mocked/etc. in places like reddit.

Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the sales pitch that it is to be a community for civil conversation, no hate-speech/bigotry. I think that's a perfect environment for political discussion - far more than shit-flinging and nuclear downvoting on /r/politics. So even if I'm the only MAGA person here, maybe there's a chance we can actually have civil conversations on topics we might initially disagree on...?

Edit: wow! Really happy to have these conversations with folks. Sad that i haven't encountered any fellow (public) Trump voters/supporters yet but very pleased that things have been civil as advertised. ;) Apologies for slow responses, trying to give proper thought and consideration to all the comments!

Edit2: gotta head to bed. sorry to anyone i haven't responded to questions from. feeling a bit like a novelty "And here's our token Trump voter. ha ha, he sure is a quirky one, isn't he, that crazy dictator-enabler!" xP. I'll try to answer any questions I've missed tomorrow. Sleep well, all (well, all who are going to sleep before I get back).

Edit3: Thanks for the open engagement, all you people who live in a different reality!

Still a bit bummed there aren't any MAGA friends here yet, but I've been blown away by how cordial most of you have been (i hope we can retain this culture into the future of the site). For those who are just coming in and don't want to read everything, I'd say a tl;dr of the conversations I've had below is:

• most people here want to engage with others on important topics without the shit flinging,
• some people express disbelief that someone can not be a bigot or racist and vote for Donald Trump,
• I've been repeating in various conversations the Laurel and Yanny thing is a great metaphor for the polarized camps experiencing different realities, seeing different movies on the same screen.

I'm continuing to try to reply to questions, and in the spirit of not provoking heated emotions I have been trying not to argue any of my political beliefs except that both sides are seeing different realities.