Initiateofthevoid

But to an atheist, the lines are in no way hazy between prayer and meditation.

This is not a true statement. But if you make a simple change, it becomes true.

But to me, the lines are in no way hazy between prayer and meditation.

Don't assume you speak for everyone. You don't.

Feel free to explore the countless - countless - examples of mindfulness and meditation scattered throughout almost every spiritual and religious practice from western natives to eastern cultures to polytheistic pantheons to - yes- Abrahamic religions.

Bow your head, make some noise. Raise your head, make some noise. Wash your hands. Eat this meal, share it with your neighbor. Speak your gratitude for the food. Speak your gratitude for your life, for your health, for your family. Speak your gratitude for your neighbor. Wish them peace and good fortune. Sing this song. Smell this incense. Listen to this music.

Stand, and think about what you want. Speak these desires to yourself, to your leader, to the universe. Sit, and listen to the sound of nothing. Kneel, and think about what you need. Speak these needs out loud. Share them with your neighbors. Hear their needs. Bear your burdens together.

Too many people think religion is nothing more than a plague. In truth it is nothing more than a tool. Yes, one that was and is often used for great evil. But still just a tool.

Modern spiritualism, neurology, philosophy, psychology - they all point toward the conclusion that religion in all its forms served a number of useful purposes for the development of the human community and the maintenance of the human psyche. It's not necessary, nor is it always good. In fact in the modern day it's often bad.

But that doesn't change the fact that it was probably an inevitable part of apes climbing down from the trees, and it's not hard to imagine why people still find a use for it.

Step 11 makes sense if you understand that it is about meditation and mindfulness.

An athiest and a thiest can benefit from the exact same cognitive and emotional processes and walk away with a completely different understanding of why it works.

An athiest can practice mindfulness, self-awareness, and meditation, with or without external guidance, and walk away feeling better and more capable of managing their mental and emotional labors. They often do so with the belief that meditation helps clear their mind, center their existence, or rebalances their neurochemistry.

A thiest can practice mindfulness, self-awareness, and meditation, with or without external guidance, and walk away feeling better and more capable of managing their mental and emotional labors. They often do so with the belief that meditation helps align their thoughts with God's, centers their existence, or rebalances the burdens on their immortal soul.

Both an athiest and a thiest can use repetitive mantras, sensory cues (music, incense, etc), instructors, calls-and-responses, group and individual sessions, etc.

Humans often reinvent the wheel a thousand times over and call it something new. The lines are hazy between prayer and meditation, between sermon and self-affirmation, between faith and zen.

With advanced neuroscience and psychology, we can rediscover things that were pretty obvious in hindsight: humans feel better when they surround themselves with a supportive social structure where they feel safe. These support structures are easily built around displays of community cohesion - where everyone knows the same lines, the same songs, the same cues to sit up, sit down, bow your head, kneel forward. The same cues to slide to the left, slide to the right, criss cross, clap your hands. Humans like to move as one, and speak as one, because when they do, they feel as one. They feel better when they feel connected. And they often feel better when they meditate and clear their mind, allowing a private or shared experience to take their thoughts away.

Now, in the modern day, you can take those ideas and run away with it. You can build communities that feel safe because they are safe, not because they feel safe from an artifically constructed common ground. You can play music and go to therapy. You can speak to a doctor and spend time with friends. You can find people with which you can sit in a circle and talk openly about your problems. It often helps if you find people who share those same problems.

Don't do the easy thing, and let athiesm be the thing that divides you from your fellow humans. Do the hard thing, and try to find the things that connect you. You're more alike than you think.

From a quick ddg -

AA Version: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Practical Version: We started meditating.

Throughout this process, you’ll discover – if you haven’t already – that none of these steps exists in a vacuum. They all impact each other and are impacted by the others. This is particularly true for step eleven. The ultimate goal of this step is to engage regularly in the practice of mindfulness, which has been demonstrated time and again to benefit multiple areas of one’s mental health. Being mindful means being consciously aware of something (usually breath, bodily sensations, or thoughts) without judgment or resistance. The best way to practice this is through meditation, but it can be practiced throughout the day as well. I recommend utilizing both for optimal results.

Source: https://aaagnostica.org/2020/03/29/staying-sober-without-god-practical-step-eleven/

You don't have to substitute "God" directly in the steps to make them work for you. There are plenty of ways to use the ideas of the program without being limited by its theistic roots.

Of course AA works because it serves as group therapy. That should be fairly obvious to anyone who's ever heard of the concept. But the most important step in any therapeutic approach is acknowledging hard truths. That is the most important part of AA, as well.

Half the steps are devoted to honestly acknowledging our flaws and mistakes, owning them, addressing them, and making amends wherever possible. That is what these pardon refusers did here, and the world would be a better place if more people had their courage.

It isn't by necessity a religious program, though I freely acknowledge its theistic roots, and the fact that many are religious and do rely on deity as higher power.

But the reason these people were capable of this bravery is stated in the article and is specifically not their piety - it's their honesty.

"Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"

"Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."

The most important lesson to be learned in AA has nothing to do with God and everything to do with addressing falsehoods - the lies people tell themselves and others to justify their behavior and to excuse their actions.

Through time, habit, and conscious effort and will, these people have primed their minds to be willing to accept a fundamentally difficult truth - that what we think and what we feel can be false. That the things we tell ourselves, the things we tell others, and the things we do can all be wrong.

We all have a responsibility to face those truths with courage and transparency. We have a responsibility to own our flaws and mistakes and make amends where possible. That is the guiding truth of AA. It all started with God, but it ends with the individual, and how they face those truths.

Then you're not actually advocating for change. If you have no interest in changing minds then you have no interest in any meaningful difference in the future. Besides, the consent has been manufactured and the horses have been lead to a poisoned pool.

The apathetic dismissal of people as helpless - the belief that they are, individually and as a whole, incapable of change or redemption or worse, unworthy of it - is a small but meaningful part of the machine that has altered reality in front of our very eyes.

We appear to be in one of many pivotal moments in history, where economics and politics and technology all tip the dominoes that are human lives toward an entirely new and irreversible state.

Hard times tend to meet demagogues and easy answers, but they also tend to force people to come together and face hard truths. I'm not saying you personally can save or change them all - perhaps not even save any. But there are plenty of good, ignorant people that will have opportunities to learn some terrible lessons very soon.

Correct! One of the most important tools we need to obtain, the most important weapon we need to arm yourself, isn't obvious, or simple, or easy.

It's Messaging.

Want to spend your time bitter? Apathetic? "I-told-you-so"?

I don't blame you.

But you're not actually working towards a solution. If all you have to say is "I told you so," or "what's the point?" or "everything's fucked" - I get it. But you're not contributing to the conversation any more than the people in this comic have been for the last how many years. You're not helping any more than they were.

We need messaging. We need to be willing to fight these battles. Not fighting the embittered trolls, but spreading truth. Sharing solutions. Making plans. Fighting this. Apathy. Pointlessness. Accelerationism.

Spread free platforms. Spread free ideas. Have meaningful conversations with your friends and families and coworkers. Try again, and keep trying. In little steps, in great acts. Don't let the shock paralyze you, the size overwhelm you. Don't get washed away by the flood of hate. This is the second best time to act. Your opportunities are growing by the minute.

Life is about to get very, very hard for many people. Many of the obvious targets will suffer, but it's pretty clear that nobody is "safe". Even the poster boys are under threat of retribution for stepping out of line. And everyone, everyone is facing the inevitable economic downturn that is speeding toward us.

But hardship shakes beliefs. It changes minds. Things will become personal for even the most detached, apathetic, or privileged. And when politics become personal all bets are off.

But don't bother if you're not going to try. Really, really try. Think about yourself, and the world, and the person you're talking to, and really try to make them see.

Take - and make - your opportunities to change minds. Don't be afraid, but be careful. Don't be polite for the sake of politeness, but be kind, be considerate, even be gentle when you think it will help, but don't be polite.

Whatever they can say to you can't compare to what is being done to you or about to be done to everybody. Whatever they say can't be worse than their complacency.

Your one and only goal: stay on message. This is bad and it needs to stop. Here is how it affects you. Here is how it affects your family. Here is how things are going wrong, and why.

More than anything else, we need each other. We need solidarity, community. We need to genuinely start asking ourselves: how do we win? And then make the answer happen.

We kneel beneath the weight of wealth and tradition and fear. But despite the growth of AI, at the end of the day the people we kneel beneath are people. Humans decide what happens next. They are human. We are all human. We can decide what happens next.

The changes in attitudes towards social media websites, caused in this instance by Elon Musk are a great way for those in power to suppress another Arab Spring type event in the future.

The change in attitude is the consequence, not the cause. The best way for those in power to suppress another Arab Spring type event is a change in ownership of a massively influential social media platform where the richest man can take over completely to censor and control the narrative and oh, whoops... that already happened.

Maybe that’s your point, that properly understanding the genesis of some term can undermine your desire to use it? And you’re right. Cretinism, the disease, makes me really sad, as does the fact that assholes chose to turn it into a pejorative. So maybe that has something to do with my unwillingness to ever use the word. In my mind, “retard” was more of a vague diagnosis of mental slowness, so it makes it less real as an actual medical condition.

For me, the vagueness of the diagnosis is what makes me sad. To think of how many vulnerable people were left struggling for answers with very little help from that word and plenty of hurt from it for so long. Perhaps this makes it less concrete in the mind than a word with a more specific target, but no less sad to me. Cretinism makes me sad as well, and more so when I think about how many people could have easily avoided it if they just knew more about thyroids.

So yes, precisely! If people change how they feel and think, they change how they speak. Not just their internal dictionary, but the way they use their words too.

I appreciate your time, understanding, and well-reasoned discussion. Thank you!

That's fair, we can step back from the intricacies of this particular word and return to first principles - and I agree, this is an important first principle to discuss. After all this time disagreeing, we may have come back around that big circle to find that we really agreed all along.

I don't really think I advocate for a concerted effort to change the english language the way you imagine. I want people to change the way they think, not the way they talk. I think if they change the way they think, this will certainly change the way they talk. Not the other way around.

I try to invite people to take a look at the words we use as a vehicle for taking a look at the way we use them - the intentions and the context. Why do we use these words this way? What do they mean? Who can be hurt? Why would they be hurt?

I think that there are a lot of good reasons not to use the word "retard". And there aren't many good reasons to use it. I know of plenty of alternatives. So I don't use the word. And I do have the arrogance to think I'm right, and the gall to suggest that others should stop using the word too.

But for the record I have never advocated for censorship of the word "retard" in this conversation, or anywhere. I don't think a fediverse instance or any media platform should just ban the word, or ban people for using it. I don't think people should be silenced for it.

Even below the level of "control", of authority figures or systems imposing changes from the top-down...

Even down to a personal level - I don't think I advocate for people to censor themselves or each other. Please forgive me if I have done so here - that wasn't my intention.

I just want people to be mindful of what they say. To understand what they're saying, and why, and what impact it can have and what implications it carries. I don't think the decisions I make about vocabulary are so severe as your question suggests.

I don't think I'll ever again find someone to go the distance with me on this topic as you have, and I thank you for that. But if I did? And they listened, and thought, and considered... and they walked away, still saying the word? I wouldn't want them to lose their voice. I don't think they should be censored. I might think they're wrong to continue saying it, but I think a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things.

But I do have to say that I think a large part of this conversation unfortunately has boiled down to "who gets to decide?".

You have a list of words in your mind that deserve to be abandoned. I'm fairly confident we could agree on all of them. But I'm not certain, because I don't know your list. I only know my list. Most people only know their list. So I do need to argue against the implication that I have looser parameters from you because my list might be different. I may have added words to my list for different reasons than you added words to yours, but that's not the same thing as having a lower threshold for what offends me. There are people who will add words to their lists that I won't add to mine, and for reasons I won't understand, and I don't think they're wrong for doing so.

That being said, you and I appear to be approaching some of the core concepts of linguistics here, and from different angles. You've joined me this far for this productive discussion, so I feel comfortable asking you to please follow me on one more twist of thought before we step away from ableism entirely -

How often do you call someone a cretin? The interesting thing about the euphemism treadmill is that we kept replacing the "official" words for the same definitions. We actively changed our clinical language each time. But until the treadmill stopped on "retard".... we didn't actively stop using those words colloquially.

We struck them from the medical journals, but we didn't strike them from the social vocabulary. The internet didn't exist. People weren't nearly so up in arms about ableism. You couldn't censor the town square the way you can an online forum. We still use the word moron, and idiot. We even still use the word imbecile sometimes. It's a fun word to say.

But how often do people use the word cretin? You might hear it in a particularly poetic roast, but not out loud. You'll never hear someone say "oh, jennifer? She's a cretin."

(Edit-And I realize this might be a regional thing! Which adds a fun layer to all of this!)

Medical journals stopped using it because it became a derogatory term... but did we stop using it for that reason? Then why didn't we stop using moron?

I take a descriptivist approach to language. I believe it is what it does. The only rules for how we talk to each other are the ones humans made up, and because of that language constantly evolves as we keep making shit up. And I don't set the rules. Nobody does, because we all do. I decide what the language of the future will be as much as you do, which is to say probably not at all.

I don't think we stopped using cretin for good reasons... I think we just stopped using it. I think we'll just stop using a lot of words for no good reason, and so it's not a very big leap from there for me to believe we can stop using a word for genuinely good reasons.

I think that we should try our best not to hurt people. And I think that we will hurt people anyway, no matter how hard we try. No matter our intentions. No matter the context. That's one of the many curses of being the rising ape, and I agree with you - there is absolutely no way to break that curse. Something we do will offend someone somewhere, and that doesn't mean we did a bad thing. But that also doesn't mean we should stop trying.

You're absolutely right. You didn't say that "autistic" is synonymous with stupid, I wasn't accusing you of doing so. Neither of us believe it is synonymous, people don't think it's synonymous, and it's no surprise that people will instead use it colloquially to mean "excessively detail-oriented".

Is that so terrible? I don't think so. I wouldn't use it that way, but I also don't say things like "I'm so OCD" for that same purpose - and I don't think it's a terrible thing to do that either! I wouldn't use those terms like that, for the record, nor do I think others should. But I don't think it's anywhere on the same level, and I don't think it ever will be.

I think it's insensitive to use "autistic" and "OCD" in this way because it runs the risk of blinding us to other people's struggles when we normalize their symptoms as "standard neurotypical problem but worse".

But do you see how specific that concern is? Do you see how far we've come? To even care about the idea of not being able to see someone's symptoms? To discuss how it might be insensitive to not even know someone else has a mental condition?

Being "detail-oriented" is not by itself a bad thing. It doesn't bear any terrible implications of your value or worth to society. It doesn't suggest that you can't be trusted to make decisions, or hold a job. If anything some people are starting to think the opposite.

Which is also problematic, because we sometimes romanticize symptoms as super powers - but do you see? Do you see how far we've progressed, when we have to start worrying that people will assume neurodivergent people are too capable?

So calling someone "autistic" when you want to call them "detail-oriented" is insensitive, sure. It might even be labelled as ignorant - but look how high that bar of ignorance is! "Detail-oriented" is simply the most recognizable symptom of a particular flavor of neurodivergence - and using it colloquially like that suggests that you already know how the disorder works!

In the past, children and adults with autism weren't called autistic. Even after the diagnosis was added to the DSM, it went criminally underdiagnosed for a long time.

Some of them, the ones that didn't strongly present symptoms that disrupted their lives, the ones that could mask their behaviors - they were just called "detail-oriented". They were just "weird".

But most of them? The ones that had trouble speaking? The ones that had trouble looking you in the eye? They weren't called "detail-oriented." They were called retarded.

Do you see how it might be different to call someone "retarded" when you want to call them "stupid"? How much deeper the implications run? How much worse the associations are?

Very close, but not quite. It's like showing up on a post sometime in the future celebrating an end of Palestinian genocide... and saying "it's good that Jewish genocide stopped".

That wouldn't be wrong, it is good to stop genocide, no matter the kind. But it's suspicious that someone felt the need to show up and say that particular thing in that particular place. That additional context seems to be placed there to implicitly communicate something in particular.

Autist” may not be sticky enough to require the medical community to come up with an alternative, more technical (and therefore less appealing) term for that mental disorder. Regardless, people will continue to look for ways to call each other stupid, and the best thing we can do is encourage researchers to come up with long and convoluted names for medical conditions so they don’t get co-opted by teenagers looking for creative ways to insult each other.

That's not the best thing we can do. We don't have to waste time trying to avoid giving teenagers ammunition, and we certainly don't have to do it by giving people with learning disabilities a diagnosis that could be hard for them to remember or understand.

Teenagers don't need ammunition. The reason "autist" isn't sticky enough, the reason it's not used colloquially, the reason it's only an insult for teenagers and people with the emotional maturity of the average teenager is because it's an actual diagnosis with an increasingly well-studied list of symptoms, and standards of care, and moral implications.

It should serve the same vernacular niche as "retard" but it doesn't seem to be doing so. Adults don't say "that's autistic" with good intentions. They do say "that's retarded" with good intentions. Why? Because being a "retard" was a blanket diagnosis with no real treatment options, and no real empirical evidence of its value as a diagnostic label. It was too broad and too vague and therefore effectively synonymous with "very stupid." "Autistic" isn't synonymous with stupid.

You have a responsibility to be mindful of those around you. But they also have a responsibility to at least attempt to understand what you’re trying to say.

I really do think we agree completely for the rest of this, this might just be semantics. They do, absolutely, have that responsibility. You are blameworthy for your acts. And they are blameworthy for their's in response. The whole point is that you and they are entitled to beliefs and feelings, just as you and they are responsible for words and actions. If you are judged poorly for doing the right thing, then you can blame them for that. And they can blame you for the things they're judging you for.

They're entitled to that, because yes we are just apes trying to grasp at moral truths that are not written in the stars or the atoms of the world, and in fact some of these moral truths appear to be actively in contention with many of our ape-derived biological and psychological functions.

And we very often get things wrong. And yes, we have to try to be charitable and give each other leeway. I think that you and I do disagree on some fundamental information, and I think you and I have given each other plenty of leeway, and managed to communicate in a healthy and productive way.

I'm asking you - why should that stop here? Don't the people offended by a term deserve some charitable consideration? Some leeway? They're communicating a feeling that they have. They feel upset. They feel offended. They feel angry. Are they entitled to those feelings? Yes. Can you blame them for those feelings? You are entitled to.

But many of them won't understand or believe your intentions are good. Is that their fault? That they can't see into the mind of a fellow ape, and know your heart is pure?

The transference of "retard" from medical diagnosis to colloquial slang is actually exceptionable. Because it appears to be the last one in the list for this particular group of people. The last one to be so pervasive, so ubiquitous, and so synonymous with "stupid". There were plenty of others before... but what's the next one?

It's not about disarming teenagers. It's about trying to learn more. It's about seeing each other's intentions, and actions, and needs. And it's about not using a word so stained by bad intentions, so villainous in action, and so dismissive of needs.

When a doctor told a parent their son was mentally retarded... that was it. They just were. For the rest of their life. They were a "retard." And the parents just had to deal with it.

When a doctor tells a parent their son is autistic, they follow it with "here's what that means." Here's a couple of potential reasons why they might be the way they are. Here's what their life might look like as an adult, based on these studies. Here's the coping mechanisms you can try to teach them, here's the educational methods that seem to work best, here's the support structure that you need to build.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But the whole point is it is far, far better than it ever was with the word "retard", and we as apes and as a collection of apes know so, so much more now. That's why "that's autistic" doesn't mean "that's stupid" for most people, and therefore why it also doesn't replace "that's retarded" for most people.

The term itself was deeply flawed from the beginning, as was idiot, as was cretin. I do blame the people that came up with it, and used it. But I don't think they were bad people. I don't hate them. I think they were acting with good intentions, and probably with the best information that they could find in context.

I just also think they caused a lot of harm by inventing a diagnosis that was far too broad to be medically or socially useful. They can be blamed for that. It was their responsibility to do no harm, and they did harm. That doesn't make them worthy of shame, or bad people. It just makes them human.