this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
336 points (94.9% liked)

Atheism

3916 readers
123 users here now

Community Guide

Archive Today will help you look at paywalled content the way search engines see it.

Statement of Purpose

Acceptable

Unacceptable

Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.

Inadvisable

Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.

Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.

 ~ /c/nostupidquestions

If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!

Connect with Atheists

Help and Support Links

Streaming Media

This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.

Orgs, Blogs, Zines

Mainstream

Bibliography

Start here...

...proceed here.

Proselytize Religion

From Reddit

As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
336
Tacos. (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15573986

Tacos.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Morality, the thing we mythically got from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is how we negotiate cooperation, specifically in holding back the predators, parasites, famine, disease and the elements (hot, cold, wet, dry) that are all glad to kill us. With enough cooperation we can survive the -40° poles and the big white bears. With too little cooperation, we're homeless in own society and are rounded up in concentration camps.

But also we're not great at this. In fact, we only are good for migratory bands of hunter gatherers, and while we have developed a robust list of egalitarian ethics by which we might maintain a community of tens of millions, generally, those fall to exploitation by those in power (parasitism is the most effective and most common survival strategy), but even our industrialists can't help themselves and exploit us just enough to stay rich. They are driven to take more and more, and regard their workforce less until the situation becomes untennable. Often an industrial disaster results in discontent and unrest (if not civil war) but if not that, they are gladly polluting our world uninhabitable, dooming even their own legacies and future generations, all for number-go-up.

So, we can see that not only are we instictually driven to cooperate to survive, but those instincts only carry us so far, and even as we see what the rational choice would be to preserve a functional equilibrium, we are driven by feelings not to make that choice. Hence how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and even Christian bulwarks like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas (whose jobs are to engage in pure rational thought) can't help themselves but be total assholes.