Hal @zzz@eldritch.cafe

When you realise what you did wrong, know that I will forgive you. It's the only way either of us grows.

Hey what are people here using to keep their bookmarks synced? I used pocket and Wallabag for a bit but found them a bit buggy.

So when does #GreatFediBakeoff happen @Shrigglepuss I gotta flex my croissant game

This may be hard for some people to hear this but people generally don't care why you made a mistake. They mostly just want you not to do it again!

You personally should care why, but mostly so you act better the next day.

Why is it so hard for people on here to say they fucked up and they're sorry? We all make mistakes. Give some indication you won't make the same mistake again and move on!

Can we all agree that utilitarianism is a shitty moral system invented by capitalists to justify their atrocities?

Please join me and participate in a huge book exchange. You can be anywhere in the world. All you have to do is buy your favorite book (just one) and send it to a stranger (I'll send their details through in a private message).

You’ll receive an assortment of books in return, for you to keep. They'll be favorite books from strangers around the world!

If you are interested in taking part, please send a DM saying ‘IN’ and I'll send you all the details. (Yes this is @MoMartin 's thing)

I don’t know where I will go from here. The bigoted Christians and atheists are still out there but I don’t think feel a particular need to attack or defend them. I value the Jewish practice of not proselytising the faith even if it’s a practice we can attribute to a grim history. Maybe that’s a value I’ll promote too.

This really helped me relax a bit. I felt on solid ground and didn’t feel the need to be defensive around Christians. I was never one of them and will never be one of them, but now I also knew what I was. I didn’t have to fear they would try to convert me. I am even now friends with several priests and other religious figures. We actually have productive conversations since what matters now isn’t the spiritual bits but what are the essential principles and how should we reason from there.

More importantly, this derivation is not personal. Someone externally can look at your moral principles and tell you if you are acting ethically. You say you value all life, but you choose to eat meat. Suddenly, I have a secular basis for social justice. Most importantly, I learned that other people cared about building that secular moral base and although they had disagreements they were making good progress.

I learned about metaethics and all the theories about how you might ground a system of morals. I learn about moral determinism and moral reasoning. This idea that our principles can be like axioms in theorem prover that with enough dedication we can derive judgements over whether an action is ethical.

This also made it much clearer that the secular humanists were for the most part just secular Christians or secular protestants given some of their austere rituals.

But while the secular Judaism community works for me, it felt like a betrayal of the universalism I really wanted from a system of morals. There needs to still be something approximating neutral territory. A common set of principles all of us could agree upon. So I took time to study morality and ethics.

After some time I found secular Judaism communities which celebrate all the history, culture, morals, values, and traditions of Judaism while allowing the more supernatural elements to fall by the wayside. This was nice as I finally felt like I found a group of people that understood me. Here were people that understood my anxiety and still found a way to not throw away all the good that came from a religion and the surrounding culture.

The unwillingness to even consider an explicitly secular system of morals or ethics like Kant’s made them very vulnerable to just reproducing the ethics and values of Christian morality without seriously questioning it.

I recognise that in aspiring to be universal and not impose the framework can never be as detailed as what we see in religious systems. But that’s OK. It’s a framework, I can build from that and go from there.

Still over time it became clear that the actual system of morality was heavily influenced by Christianity. This isn’t always so obvious if you were a Christian before you became an atheist. But if you were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or another faith it’s much more clear.

So I looked around and found secular humanism. I think at the time I didn’t probe too much what the secular humanists value. I assumed by humanism they mean supporting human rights. So much in the spirit of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have a framework of what we value and principles to uphold.