James Croft
@CroftSpeaks
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1st Humanist Lead Chaplain at any UK University. Pragmatist philosopher (Cambridge, Harvard). Frank Knox Fellow. Trans Inclusive Radical Humanist.
Brighton, England
Joined February 2011
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Pinned Tweet
I recently had the absolute pleasure of joining
@suziruffell
for an episode of her podcast Out With Suzi Ruffell! The episode just went up, and is available on all podcast apps - it's a wonderful conversation about queerness, faith, Humanism, and life!
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How is “cis” a slur, but “groomer” is not? I cannot count the number of people I’ve had to block for straight up calling me a “groomer” because I support trans kids - and that is a grotesque slur by any standard.
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Wow.
@sarahkendzior
is on fire this morning in front of a large crowd (in person and online) at
@EthicalStL
! Talking about how St. Louis is a harbinger both of the worst and the best of America. Grateful for the presence of
@LeftBankBooks
also!
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I went to school before 2000 and none of my friends told me they were gay. I can declare with absolute confidence some of them are gay. 👀🍆🤣 What does this prove? That prejudice forces people into closets.
Anyone who went to school before 2000.
Do you remember any of your friends or classmates tell you they were born in the wrong body and wanted a sex change?
No.. me neither
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I’m gay. I’m an atheist. I lead a Humanist congregation. There is nothing but this world, this life. We are all doing our best.
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Blue Lives Matter was never about supporting the police. It was always about racism. That's why the people with the Blue Lives Matter flags are now throwing things at the police. We said this many times. We are not surprised.
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I am so excited to be able to announce (finally!) that from February 6th I will be taking up the role of University Chaplain and Lead Faith Advisor at
@SussexUni
! I am so grateful for this opportunity, which I think will make me the first Humanist University Chaplain in the UK!
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One of the really sad things about the existence of IDW folks and the rest of the anti-woke brigade is that they actually make legitimate criticisms of the theories and social dynamics of contemporary social justice culture more difficult to make, not less.
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I love how
@PeteButtigieg
is running his campaign. 😍
Our campaign team gathered in South Bend last week to ground ourselves in our values. This hardworking, talented, and diverse group of colleagues is ready to win the era. And our team is growing — join us:
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The flags on the Capitol steps tall the whole story:
Blue Lives Matter
Trump
MAGA
Don't Tread on Me
Jesus Saves
This is the toxic brew of American fascism: nationalism, racism, pro-militarized police, and conservative Christianity.
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I wish I could say it was surprising to see so many prominent atheists and skeptics jump onto the anti-trans bandwagon, but honestly it’s not. There has always been a sort of hyper-rationalistic hubris and a nasty streak of punching down to the atheist and skeptics movements.
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@_ollielewis
I don’t know what discipline or field you’re in, but if you want someone to read and comment on your dissertation and a philosopher’s view would help, I would be happy to! At least someone would have read it!
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My husband Kolten and I just closed on this lovely cottage! 🥰
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I’m at the Missouri State Capitol to testify against HB1474, a fundamental assault on the professionalism of teachers and the rights of children. I will be tweeting this catastrophe, and you can expect absolute absurdity.
#LetThemLearn
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I hate this fetish for “healing” and “unity”. We must have justice before we can have healing. The truth has to come before the reconciliation. Honesty, accountability, and consequences - then, maybe, unity.
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Everyone ready for a mega thread on religion, atheism, and social justice? I have been provoked by le discourse, which is never a good thing, but I have strong views on this and I feel the need to share. Buckle up! 🧵
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Story time: when I came out of the closet as gay, I was in a relationship with an absolutely wonderful woman. Sarah and I had been together two years, and the hardest thing about coming out was telling her, feeling I had somehow betrayed or hurt or disappointed her.
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I am so happy now! I feel truly like myself again for the first time since before COVID hit. And now all I need is Kolten back here, once he has his visa and is able to stay (hurry up Home Office!). I love my husband so much. He saved my life. I am so grateful for him! 🥰
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Ok atheist philosophy fam: how do we define “naturalism”? I am increasingly of the view that it is an unhelpful term. Why am I wrong?
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When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was a member of the Cambridge Union. Once, Jean-Marie Le Pen (far right French politician) was invited to debate immigration. I, being an idealistic young liberal, went to hear him speak, passing some friends protesting outside.
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I am going to tell a story I have never told in public before. I came out of the closet and accepted myself as gay at 27, 10 years after I first told my parents I thought I might be gay. Part of the reason I struggled was my experience at
@StPaulsSchool
.
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That was an important lesson for me. Phobes are not playing the “rational debate” game, the game of reasons and civil discourse. They are playing the “incite fear and hatred” game, and that has different rules. You cannot out-argue it, you must disarm it by starving it of oxygen.
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Your now-out partner is not dead, you are not a “widow”: they have come into their own. You do not have the right to prevent someone from coming into their truth, nor would you want to, because you would both be living a lie.
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I think my husband saved my life. Just a year ago I was deeply depressed. I suffer from periodic depression. I’m like a spinning top. Most of the time I am very energetic, friendly, spinning. But if enough factors hit together I can get flipped over and can’t spin anymore.
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That was when I realised: to Le Pen and his fellow antisemitic racists, the outcome of the debate did not matter, only the fact of the debate mattered. The fact he was invited, given a megaphone, offered a platform. Though he lost, he won, because he was playing a different game.
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The amount of sass
@OwenJones84
is projecting is marvelous and I am here for it.
This isn't just a car crash - it's genuinely disturbing.
It turns out that Tory Lord
@EricPickles
doesn't understand his own party's policy.
These are the people who rule over us.
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I try to stay upbeat and friendly, even when discussing with people who disagree with me online. But I cannot remember any time in my life at which anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has been worse, and this makes it difficult to engage in a jolly way. We are under vicious and sustained attack.
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I am skeptical of the narrative that the world needs “re-enchanting”, whether that comes from the left or the right, from the religious or nonreligious (and this is a response to the new Re-Enchanting podcast with
@UnbelievableJB
and Belle Tindall).
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“LGBrexit”, a term being used by some to describe the desire of a few LGB persons to chuck trans people under the bus, is perhaps the greatest self-own ever. Name your movement after an increasingly unpopular failure based on lies, misinformation, and fear mongering. Ok…
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I live atheism every day. I led a congregation of which most of the members were atheists. We were able to find meaning, make sense of right and wrong, and pursue purpose. I held nonreligious students and staff do it every day.
You can't live atheism. Nietzsche tried it; he went mad. He was one of the few consistent atheists out there. He knew the implications of atheism. Everything was meaningless; there's no right and wrong, no purpose to life.
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I just rejoined the Liberal Democrats after many years away! We desperately need a liberal voice in UK politics which is against austerity, supports migrants, and looks to the future!
Join me here:
#JoinTheLibDems
via
@LibDems
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Hearing Peter Boghossian say in an interview that perhaps the New Atheists were wrong to go after religion because if people don’t believe in religion they will believe “worse” things (like that trans women are women) encapsulates everything about this cursed discourse. WTAF.
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To create a "perfect" translation is impossible. The poet, translator, and Harvard man John Ciardi once called translation “the art of failure.” W. V. Quine (another Harvard man - this will become relevant) persuasively argued that any word or phrase is multiply translatable.
1 month from today, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad comes out.
In 2017, she became the first woman ever to translate the Odyssey into English
I want to be careful with my words here: her translation was abominable, a crime against the classics. Now she’s back
Part 1:
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But it is actually harder to make nuanced criticisms from within the culture because of the existence of so many wildly inaccurate and bad faith criticisms from outside of it! If we have to spend all our time fending off wild mischaracterizations, internal critique is harder.
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Reason 3) is most important and most misunderstood. It’s not just that there is no evidence for the existence of god (there is none); nor that all the positive arguments fail (they fail). Belief in god makes our experience less intelligible, not more. That’s the real problem.
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"[gunman]...recently got angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami."
#OrlandoShooting
#KeepKissing
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The secular folk allying with religious conservatives to “fight woke” will soon discover how foolish an alliance this is. Religious conservatism is getting ever more homophobic, anti-choice, nationalistic, and theocratic. You sure you want to be in bed with these people?
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You can’t pledge to support a peaceful transition of power after 5 people gave died. That ship has sailed. This was not, and will never be, a peaceful transition now.
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"Someone concerned with the death of Judy Garland should not be eating at
@ChickfilA
." Best line ever from Judge John
@Hodgman
podcast!
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Glad to see
#cosmos
is not soft-pedaling the role of religion in persecuting advances in thought.
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On yesterday's meeting to prepare for the
#JasonStockley
verdict in St. Louis.
#BlackLivesMatter
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And if you want to stop relationships being surprised by the revelation that one partner is gay or trans, here is the best way to do it: create a world in which we never have to hide who we are in the first place.
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I am an idealistic person. I want to believe the best in people. I believe in civility and kindness; persuasion and dialogue; open discussion and respectful disagreement. But I am SO DONE with being told I have to make nice with people trying to DESTROY DEMOCRACY!
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I’ve had hundreds of replies to a tweet thread about postmodernism of all things - more than a few of them vile, some violently threatening. So here is a picture of my husband with Ella, our dog.
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Twitter sucks for many reasons, but one of the worst things is how it warps intellectual engagement. Intellectual life is best when it is playful and inviting, not aggressive and uncharitable. Philosophy especially. Play with ideas, don’t attack with them!
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You know I think I'm a post-atheist. Like, my atheism deems less relevant to me now. Humanism is so much more important to me.
#CNNatheists
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I think what scares conservatives about postmodernism (assuming they understand it at all, which most do not) is its anti-foundationalism, anti-essentialism, anti-teleology, and anti-universalism. When you take these things away some people feel very uncertain and unrooted.
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@Miss_Snuffy
It was clearly a highly political event. It’s express purpose was to promote a particular political outlook, as clear from its website. That outlook includes a theocratic element (“No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God”) and a homophobic one.
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“Academics with expertise in history, literature, philosophy, archaeology, sociology, psychology, drama, and religion will show the role of magic on the West and the East.”
The perils of not doing your homework.
We have moved beyond the realms of lunacy. 😳😳😱
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My father, who was a senior civil servant, helped pass the legislation which led to blasphemy laws being repealed in the UK. It was one of his proudest professional achievements. "Blasphemy" should never be illegal.
The answer to threats of Islamist terrorism or far-right bigotry should never be to re-introduce blasphemy laws. Millions are fighting & dying for the right to freedom of speech globally. Supposedly open & democratic societies cannot fail them.
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Good intuition pump for this:
Someone claims to have been resurrected yesterday. What evidence would you require to believe the claim?
I once asked apologist John Lennox this question, and he dodged it entirely - telling, I think.
Actually, extraordinary claims (claims with a low prior probability) do require extraordinary evidence (evidence that confers a sufficiently high Bayes Factor).
When it comes to Christianity, we’ll need to know the answer to two important questions:
(1) What is the prior
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At
@EthicalStL
we
#standwithjake
and against hatred! We support the
@JBSchool
community in their effort to celebrate diversity and inclusion!
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That is why I now support, in strictly limited circumstances, no-platforming - because it is one of the only ways to ensure toxic political ideologies do not take root. By refusing to give hatred a megaphone, you limit how many people can be infected by it.
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Secularism is not a religion. It is a procedural position that articulates a certain relationship between religions and government. It is not exactly neutral - it stems from and represents a set of political values - but it is not the imposition of a religion on a populace.
The FFRF is itself a religious organization. They serve the idol of secularism. Secularism is not a neutral position but a staunch religion in and of itself.
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Grateful to
@kayaburgess
for this article about my appointment as University Chaplain at
@SussexUni
in
@thetimes
!
"A humanist has been appointed as the first non-religious head chaplain at a British university..."
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So proud of my husband Kolten, aka Kara Lagerfeld, who last night became Miss Gateway Missouri America 2022! He’s been working toward this for so many years and I love him!
#MissGateway2022
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Now this is interesting. The LGB Alliance - a group explicitly formed to drive a wedge between LGB and T members of the queer community - is getting pushback from its own anti-trans supporters for this tweet. Bigotry poisons the mind and the soul.
We are horrified by this latest example of Putin weaponising homophobia and transphobia to try to distract from his own failings. We stand in solidarity with the LGB and trans people of Russia who deserve equality under the law.
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(As a final note, and after much consideration and a lifetime as a teacher and educationalist, I no longer believe private schools should exist. I think the perpetuation of intergenerational injustice is too great a price to pay for the benefits they offer a very small number.)
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Just learnt about Ancestors Trail - walk based on
@RichardDawkins
book Ancestors Tale! COOL! Evolution walk!
#whc2014
http://t.co/azy4OBk5hE
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VERY frustrating to hear newscasters say "Who could have predicted this?" because lots of people predicted this and we were told over and over again that we were overreacting or being to divisive or scaremongering or not recognizing how extreme the left was getting or or or.
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Absolutely magical evening watching the
@LewesBonfire
Societies do their thing! No better way to get out of your own head than watching people set off massive explosions! 🔥🔥🔥
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Are there anti-scientific and under-theorized elements to sj culture (of which I am a part) - yes, absolutely. Is there abusive behavior and bullying in sj spaces? Yes. Is some of that behavior “justified” by appeals to bad theory? Yes.
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I'm often asked "How did you become a Humanist?" And the short answer is "Catholicism."
@MaggieArdiente
#ahacon16
@americnhumanist
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I’m 41 today! I’ve been back in the UK almost exactly a year. I’ve settled into a new city, got to grips with a new job, made new friends, and learned new things - a year of transition. This year I will write a book and start a YouTube channel - a year of creation. Can’t wait!
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People get defensive, feel attacked, pull up the drawbridges and fight the attacker from without instead of examining the problems within. So the criticisms have the opposite effect to those the critics (claim) they desire.
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Imagine believing that death robs life of meaning. Imagine believing that life has no intrinsic value, but must be given value through its participation in some bigger plan. Wow, religion is one helluva drug.
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What else could it be? The guy literally destroyed a symbol of a minority religion because he objects to that religion. That is indubitably a hate crime: it is the targeted harassment of a religious minority through destruction of an icon of their faith.
Damaging a literally Satanic symbol is a "hate crime"? My friends, we have just officially reached peak liberalism.
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We at
@EthicalStL
are left wondering: under what circumstances is it *not* OK for a cop to shoot you?
#Ferguson
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I am unreasonably excited to have just registered to attend my first graduation at
@SussexUni
! I will be at all 13 ceremonies to celebrate the amazing work of our graduates, and I shall be sporting the marvellously dramatic Harvard doctoral robes for maximum visibility. 🤣
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For reasons entirely unknown to me,
@Target
is currently selling a pillow embroidered with the word “HUMANIST.” This delighted the
@ethicalstl
congregation and now we have our own! 😂
#humanism
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Humanism is essentially the inverse of nihilism. If you think they are the same, you understand neither.
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What is it that makes some atheists think that they are experts on literally any subject which touches religion? This plonker
@Integralmathyt
is trying to tell me my own job *does not in fact exist*, so for his benefit... /1
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Rejecting teleology is essential to a humanist ethic. The idea that humans are “meant for” something, or that our faculties are designed with some “Purpose”, tends to be incredibly limiting and leads to inhumane outcomes. We have no Purpose and we are not designed “for” anything.
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And to see Lindsay, Boghossian, Shermer, Silverman etc. jump head first into the worst sort of anti-trans bigotry is really just the fulfillment of a trend. “We are smarter than you. We know more about your lives than you do. What you say about your life doesn’t matter.”
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The wildest thing about the anti-sj crowd is that they genuinely seem to believe that talking about racism (and sexism etc.) is what makes racism exist. It's as if they believe that were we to stop talking about gravity we would all be able to fly.
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But she was amazingly supportive. While clearly very sad, as was I, she made it clear she loved and supported me, as I loved and supported her as we took the next step in our journeys. I am incredibly grateful for her grace and kindness.
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I’m very excited to announce that last night the membership of
@EthicalStL
voted for me to replace Kate Lovelady as Senior Leader when she steps down next year! I’m so humbled and excited by the trust they have placed in me. Now to learn everything Kate knows... 😂
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Ready to celebrate our fantastic
@SussexUni
grads at the first of 13 ceremonies this week! Congratulations to everyone graduating this week - you’re amazing!
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This bizarre view that children can be straight at any age but to be gay you have to be old enough. Gay children exist, just like straight children.
Why did I have to live in the reactionary timeline?
This is David Tennant's ten year old son wearing a shirt announcing his sexuality. I find that genuinely disturbing.
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3) I want to express the fact that introducing the concept of god into one’s epistemic framework REDUCES, rather than improves, our capacity to understand our experience. God doesn’t only fail to aid understanding: god introduces problems that atheism does not.
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Today a Catholic Priest who was speaking on a panel with me told me that the Democrats are running “the biggest voter fraud operation in history” and “trying to usher in one-party rule.” I called him a liar and said he should be ashamed of himself. I felt a bit bad. Should I?
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I’m at
#SSAcon
, the annual conference of the Secular Student Alliance (
@SecularStudents
). It’s a fantastic reminder of the importance of creating space for nonreligious people, particularly young people.
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A very strange thing to say. Whether atheism is defensible or not has nothing to do with what atheists generally believe about evolution and religion.
I don’t call myself an atheist, and won’t until atheists generally accept that religious faith is an evolutionary adaptation. Absent that, atheism is scientifically incoherent.
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1) I find that when you say you’re an agnostic it functions as an invitation to others to try to convert you. I am not interested in those conversations. I’ve studied the arguments for years and it is unlikely a random person will have an idea I haven’t yet considered.
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If rape alarms had the potential to be a major national security risk, surely they should have been banned from the parade route and confiscated from everyone? But this, to my knowledge, did not happen… 🤔
Incredible work by Republic member, Riz, dealing with the idiotic Dan Wootton and the fascist Lady Victoria Hervey.
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There is no intellectual humility, no curiosity about others’ lives, no expansive idea of what it means to be human, no basic empathy, no real critical engagement. It is a pantomime rationalism, skepticism for clicks: “Let’s knock down something the kids are into!”
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Sitting at
@LoadingBar
Brighton, in view of the sea, eating a full English, playing Diablo IV on the Steam Deck. Perfection!
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Apparently some people are upset at this video by
@CosmicSkeptic
. Not sure why. It resonated with me. I had a similar trajectory. Read deeply into religion at college. Attended many religious groups and communities. Read philosophy and psychology of religion. Nothing took.
This is why I don’t believe that God exists.
Full video —>
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The stories of those who have left a relationship because their partner came out can be sad, and we should have empathy. But to shape your whole life around that loss is not kind, it is not graceful, and it will trap you and make you miserable.
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So does the BBC, as a public broadcaster, not have a responsibility to at least note, as part of its coronation coverage, that protesters against the monarchy have been arrested?
#Coronation
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@sophie_frm_mars
The assumption that atheism is anti-religious is a form of religious prejudice. It is very common. It is still prejudice. Atheism is not more inherently anti-religious than theism is inherently anti-atheist. Atheists can work with religious people and orgs.
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He said I was “divisive” and ruining their belief dialogues. I said lying is divisive and if we stand for anything at all - especially on a college campus - it has to be for truth. I think we have to stand up to these people!
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