I’m reading this through Jerboa right now. It’s clearly new and not as mature as RiF (that I prefer) but it’s an excellent start. This platform and community has a lot of potential.

I am a reddit user from the Great Digg Exodus of 2008. Fifteen years of content and over a million karma that I’m going to overwrite at the end of the month. I’m going to bring as many people with me as I can before I go. I hope all three of them enjoy lemmy.

Yeah, this feels a lot like a bad breakup. I’ve explored reddit alternatives before, but this time it’s for good.

Someone has to mention Firefly and “Our Mrs. Reynolds.” It features such incredible lines as

“If you take sexual advantage of her, you’re going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.”

“I see that my days off not taking you seriously have come to a middle.”

Not to mention the fantastic Christina Hendricks as Saffron.

I don’t think I understand the question. There’s a host of servers to sign up through and they can all access each other. !atheism@beehaw.org can reach us here, no problem.

How many more similarities to fascism do we need before we admit these people are fascists?

Yes, I agree. Let them prove it first. But too many “enlightened centrists” place the bar for proof so high that it’s impossible. When Democrats conceded 95% of Republicans’ demands in the 2015 budget, Republicans complained about not getting the entire 100% and centrists said “we should listen to them.”

There comes a point where the fetish for civility goes too far. We’ve long passed that in US politics.

It’s all about priorities.

Although, that brings up another spectrum, which leads to some fun thought processes. Dawkins was a big supporter of gathering for mass. He saw great benefit in bringing the community together and practicing rituals that bonded and unified people. He also loved religious hymns (which are just music written by some of the greatest composers of their time).

That reminds me of Alain de Botton’s abortive attempt at “Atheism 2.0” wherein he tried to establish “atheist churches.” This is a point where I disagree with both Dawkins and de Botton. While humans need community, I’m downright anti-theist when it comes to religion. I don’t think we need other humans telling us what to think or believe. Copying the forms of ritual isn’t the healthiest thing for us. We can find the “spiritual” fulfillment from community without engaging in rote and recitation. Let people perform their rituals in private. Once you put someone in charge, they start finding ways to turn those rituals into power for themselves.

But the number of times I’ve had someone question what stops me from doing evil without a god to punish me is severely concerning. It’s truly a terrifying thought that the only thing keeping some people from killing, raping and pillaging, is the fragile thought that some invisible power might punish them for it.

Morality is, quite simply, an evolutionary tactic. I think Penn Jillette still has the best take on this.

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. You know what I mean?

The environmental devastation that’s coming is beyond the scope of Turchin’s field of study. He’s making predictions about future conflict based on historical models of inequality and security. You’re right that the environmental factors are going to magnify the conflict, but it still remains that so long as people see each other as suffering equally instead of divided between “haves” and “have-nots,” there’s going to be more conflict.

reddit wasn’t always the reddit we know today. It went through a lot of changes over the years, a lot of improvements. I see lemmy (and lemmy.one) as in that early stage. I had hoped to bring people with me from the exchristian community on reddit, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be very successful.

Which isn’t to say that I’m giving up. Just that it’s not going to be as easy as I hoped.