Atheism

4119 readers

3 users here now

Community Guide

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

Statement of Purpose

This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.

Acceptable

Honest questions or conversations.
Discussions on parenting or advice.
Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
Atheist memes. We can have fun!
News headlines relevant to atheism.

Unacceptable

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

Anything against site rules.
Illegal and/or NSFW material.
Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
Personal attacks or flaming.

Inadvisable

Self promotion or upvote farming.
Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.

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

Matrix: #atheism:envs.net

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

Convince an Atheist

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a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.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 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world

116

Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by aLaStOr_MoOdY47@lemmy.world to c/atheism@lemmy.world

279 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.

Personally, I'm open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.

Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 4 weeks ago

We are overzealous pattern recognition machines.

The proto-hominids who saw a tiger in the bush when there wasn't one had a higher chance of passing on their genes than the ones who didn't see a tiger when there was one.

And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.

If LLMs have taught us anything about pattern recognition machines it's that when they don't find a pattern to match they don't say they have no matches... they just pull a somewhat fitting match off their arse, or an outright random one. They hallucinate.

And that's even before we get to our actual minds. We've got pattern recognition machinery in our retinas. What reaches our brain is already highly processed (to make tigers easier to spot), and then it gets into the visual processing part of the brain, which uses sophisticated autocompletion using previously stored patterns to fill in the blanks and highlight anything remotely interesting... often including things that aren't there (see optical illusions, for instance). That's what we "see", and then we get to make up stuff based on that (and the same probably applies to our other senses, too).

Add to that that we're notoriously bad at recognising randomness (or lack thereof). A coin falls heads up four times in a row and we suspect shenanigans, as if it wasn't as likely or unlikely as any other pattern.

We see some craters that look like a smiley face (pattern recognition strikes again) on Mars and we think it's a fake picture (it's 2024, after all), or a Watchmen reference. And when we learn it's actually real our hair stands up. We get goosebumps. It can't be natural. Must be super natural. Aliens. Gods. Ancient civilizations. All while we ignore the thousands of craters that don't look like a smiley face.

But, hey, at least we're not getting eaten by hidden tigers, so win some lose some, I guess.