The Reasons for the Site

As a naturalist, I have no need of supernatural hypotheses. Nature is all of one piece and everything that is, is in it and realised in it, is caused by and dependant upon nature and nature alone. That is all there is. This is an empirical and falsifiable worldview, maybe science will one day confirm supernatural causes. It has not happened to date and after many, many years of trying, with many supposedly optimistic leads that later fizzled out, it is looking and remaining unlikely. Nonetheless people the world over hold, to varying degrees, such mistaken hypotheses about how the world works and I am interested in why they still do this. Why, in spite of the lack of, and conflict with, real evidence and genuine understanding, producing knowledge that we all repeatedly use and rely upon every day in many ways, why do they persist in holding onto, by comparison, empirically empty and useless beliefs? This, indeed, is a natural phenomenon that I seek to understand, that nature can produce supposedly sentient beings that persist in refusing to believe in nature, especially as we better understand our part in it, but instead hold onto outdated, immature and naive supernatural hypotheses, contrary to the simpler, better and more interesting, beautiful and profound natural explanations we now have.

I call this subject, for now anyway, faith-based reasoning, and I am most concerned with how these archaic and antiquated ideas can still invade, disrupt and distort the functioning of our everyday world and society. Recognising the diversity of views that still remain even after rejecting these hypotheses and how the history of ideas has best progressed by allowing open debate on a level playing field, I chose only to reduce the indefensible and unjustifiable elevated respect and status of these hypotheses to that of every other idea, that is to remove historical double standards, so that we, applying the same standard to all, can best find the possible solutions to deal with the diverse and ongoing challenges of our society.

The majority of those, in the West, holding such old fashioned views, particularly the stereotypical theists of Christianity and Islam, call anyone holding any of these heterogeneous and diverse modern views "atheists", which I consider an empty and entirely misleading label. On what basis can you understand anyone's politics, ethics and interests in general by just one thing they have no belief in? Everyone has many things they don't believe in, if you want to understand anyone you need to find out what they do believe in. Indeed this label is a throwback to a time when many preferred fixed certainty in answers (regardless of the truth) to the questions of existence, rather than saying honestly we do not know and lets find out. They often called the latter group atheists, amongst many other labels. However it is only the latter method that has lead to the huge growth in understanding of our world and as a consequence that many, if not all, of those fixed certain answers were mistaken! The persistence in calling this heterogeneous group atheists is a current example of how such outdated views can distort and confuse the debate of how to make our society a better place to be.

This is why I call myself, for the need of a label at all, a naturalist and given my motivation to write these posts, why I call this site "No Double Standards".