Here are the Bullet-Pointed Core Tenets:
- This is not a belief. The most basic tenet of F.U.C.K.I.N-A. is that "Belief", or "Holding something as true without or in spite of evidence" is philosophically invalid, and as a concept is useless for pursuing what is true (because what is true remains true in spite of belief, and belief of a thing that is not true is itself the barrier to seeing what is actually true, so in the best case the belief is useless if you have the knowledge and premature if you don't).
However as a corollary, compassion for believers is mandatory. It must be acknowledged, even if you do not have the experience of it, that other people are attempting to accurately represent the ideas they want you to respond to, and some of those are about religious experience and unshakeable convictions; it may be the case that some of us cannot get past these, and that means we cannot condemn each other for what may or may not be our very natures. Maybe cats play with their food and dogs with sticks and humans with ideas of humans, just as an instinctual behavior, like smelling your finger after you scratch your ass, just in case it smells like something other than ass.
And this does not deny that humans operate on models of the world that our brains understand: but to claim that every model is somehow "true for each of us" is nonsense, or it means "true" is a nonsense idea that we can't use to communicate meaningfully. Reality is that which continues to be the case despite belief, hope, or other aspiration.
And because of the social utility of beliefs for organizing humans, they're probably an evolved trait we couldn't be here without- Believing let a brain "know" a thing without having to spend the calories to learn it. - We've all only got one shot at this life, so don't fuck it up for yourself or others. This should be obvious, but since it sometimes isn't, then here's the bar: If you take away somebody else's happiness, health, or capacity to make decisions, you're an asshole. If you take this away because the act of taking it is enjoyable to you, the human species is better off without you as a member no matter what else. If you are willing to take away happiness, health, or freedom, over evidences you have not verified, you are part of the problem. If you take away these things on accident while acting rationally in the interests of yourself or on behalf of others, you have been un-cautious and imprudent, but you are fundamentally forgiveable- but the situation you have created must be dealt with, and as the uncautious one who caused it, you are responsible to do what you can. Without injuring, causing sadness or pain, or removing the ability to make a decision about their own actions, you have not wronged anyone.
- You fundamentally cannot be responsible for actions you did not take; however, taking the action of driving someone to a decision that affects their moral outcomes is an action for which you are responsible. Convincing someone to commit suicide is and can only be complicity and partial responsibility for the needless taking of a life, for example.
- The ability of somebody else to feel offended by your actions is not an injury to them: it is silly for anyone to feel offended by your happiness unless it is built on their back and without acknowledging their contribution.
- However, the psychology of humans demanding social acknowledgement is well documented and should be accounted for, and so causing others to self-inflict misery is less desirable than leaving them satisfied and the social transactions completed and reciprocated, even if only symbolically. "Happiness" is one of the criterion, remember.
- Basically, pay your dues, don't step on toes you don't have to, apologize when you do step on toes or can't pay your dues, thank those who help you, return any evil you receive to the original sender, without forwarding it on to anyone else, and don't expect anything- good or bad.
- Nobody owes you anything. There is no reason that the universe might be obligated to make sense to you: be receptive to change. Look for ways that you are wrong, and look for opportunities to correct yourself and lead into greater accuracy of information; don't expect anybody to spoonfeed it to you. Count how many meals it would take you to starve to death, and look at the sun, and try to remember you're on a rock swinging around it on a permanent gravity rocket at thousands of miles per hour, and the rock's mostly wet and covered with green fuzz called 'vegetation', and that you're (probably) a species of speck that thinks it's tough shit because it moved from high up on the green fuzz to low down on the flat green fuzz that's smaller than it, and remember that if something big just goes close to the small rock you're rocketing on, it'll fuck up the orbit of our rock-rocket and fling us off into space or forward into the sun, or into another planet. Or it might fling some fraction of the astroid belt in at us, leaving earth orbiting where it is, with its' surface scoured of all life- and we wouldn't even leave footprints, the way the dinosaurs did, if that happened.
- Everything everyone can do is possible. Nuclear weapons and rockets to the moon and the internet are all science fiction- hell, radios and airplanes, and gas engines small enough to be mobile, and machines accurate enough to produce reliably interchangeable parts- all of this was fucking pipe dreams until it was built. It was built by people like you, virtually all of it was built by people who knew less than you know now. Stop waiting for somebody to give you permission; stop waiting for the fear of failure to go away. You get one life to do these things, one chance to be the change you want to see. Get off your fucking ass and do it.
- Healthy minds live in healthy bodies. Since "Health, happiness, and capacity to make decisions" are the criteria for morality, promoting good health, or at least not discouraging it, is mandatory. At the time of this writing, the chronic obesity epidemic of which I am a part has generated a "body acceptance" movement which stretches the decent bounds of the reasonable imagination and demands that everybody find all body types attractive. I won't say that opposing this idea means that everybody should be free to shame and humiliate everyone else; but the notion that you must go beyond accepting a person despite their challenges and love the things they struggle with about them seems as ridiculous as loving the heroin about a junkie. So a rejection of this movement and abstaining from joining in it isn't a condemnation of anybody's physical condition so much as it is a call to to action for us all to be better than we were yesterday, and to help and encourage others to do the same.
- Your Soul is made of Legos. We regard consciousness as being constructed of various functional interchangeable variously configurable parts; the number and complexity of these parts, be they pertaining to memory ("remembering"), processing and extrapolation (or "thought"), and given the logistics of supporting these functions in biology, and our understanding of that biology with processes like evolution via various forms of natural selection, such as social selection and sex selection and so on, it is probably the case that what free will we have is extremely limited and perhaps even quantifiable as a product of the extent of available points at which the system of these parts allow us to recognize novel opportunities.
- Since there are so many factors in the formation of these 'lego bricks of the soul', and since there are so many theologies that demand an accounting for some or other various aspect of a central experience that their theology is based around, here is that accounting; there are parts of the soul, parts of the brain, that affect our experience but are not rational; we are all familiar with the emotional depth of dreams, the real horror that is felt in a nightmare, where we might say "the lego brick controlling the experience of fear was active"- whether that manifests as the release of some neurotransmitter, or some primordial part of the amygdala being triggered harmlessly- the necessary and compulsive occasional firing required of a healthy neuron, in a time when your body is decoupled from being affected by the instinct. The "lego brick" model intentionally decouples the 'bricking' of the function, the perceived fear in this case, from the 'bricking' of the physical form that takes in the brain.
- So with this understanding, and the inter-connection of the 'bricks' that is the inter-connectedness of the brain, it is not hard to see how there might be bricks in 'cul de sacs' where there is an experience from a brick not available from a rational path; it may be the case that a social experience like Baptism really does induce a euphoric state, or Nirvana may be a real experience; it seems to beyond the realm of quantifiability at this point, but this is a model that would account for these things in a way that does not contradict the rational functioning of the rest of the brain, while also explaining how drugs might be able to induce the same experiences, how brain injuries may change experience, the potential for near-death experience, and the potential for other physical interventions to have effects- positive and negative.
- In this view, a sociopath might be regarded as having a deficiency of 'empathy legos', a kind of 'moral color-blindness', while somebody with too many of such legos as these might exhibit borderline personality disorder, intense empathetic social commitment at the expense of a meaningful grip on reality; somebody with insufficient 'attentive short term memory allocation' blocks might be described as having ADHD, whereas somebody with an excess of these blocks to the extent that they generate false positives in pattern recognition might be described as having Schizophrenia.
- The potential for the social activation and deactivation of these pathways means that the accounting for human behavior cannot make assumptions about the availability of any of these bricks at any given time for any given task, no matter how basic. History is rife with examples of moralized ethnic cleansing that are justified on the basis of demonizing the other and then sweeping in to "clean up the problem". It is as prominent in our histories in the Biblical treatment of the Amalekites as it was, subsequently, of the tribes that vanquished them, on the basis of subsequent iterations of their mythologies and subsequent transmissions of the same sort of racial supremacism. This is not contrary to human nature, and this inner darkness, this will to survive even at the expense of others, the resolve to kill, should not be regarded as foreign to the human experience, even if some individuals are fortunate enough to never have had to experience any aspect of these biological imperatives. So while the tolerance or forgiveness of any crime is not commanded or condoned, empathy, seeing the situation that caused the criminal to commit the crime, is mandatory to the extent that it is possible to empathize, on the condition that seeking empathy with the criminal not cost the empathizer their own mental well-being unduly.
- It is not asserted that this is the mechanistic relationship between all of these- simply that this has served as a useful model to account for the behavior of many people in a wide variety of circumstances.
- Anything in this that is Mistaken, Factually wrong, a misrepresentation, or otherwise an inaccurate representation of reality should be replaced with something better as soon as the improvement is available, and a review should be conducted once annually, called "FucksGiving" This review holiday is a scientific "Festival of Lights".
- There should be a functioning working telescope and or microscope capable of seeing either the moons of Jupiter or a single celled organism, as the functional test, which should be decorated and the gifts exchanged placed under it in a central area of the house, to be opened on "FucksGiving Day".
- FucksGiving is a day where every stony wild-ass idea, every brain fart, every cult mythology, every creed and precept, should be represented as accurately as possible, for a whole 24 hour day.
- These stony wild ass-ideas should be represented by increasingly inebriated consenting informed adults wearing as little clothing as possible, with feasting and merrymaking, playing hilarious pranks, magic tricks and mind games, games of skill and knowledge like chess, and of making the most of chance, like Black Jack, brain sports like jujitsu, HEMA, push hands, and everyone should participate giving kids candy for performing clever tricks, building neat things, and participating in the festivities.
- Part of the intent is deliberate debauchery, but part of it is to pit every idea against each other in a gruelling deathmatch that reminds us how and why the winners won and allows new challengers to potentially best them. At the end of the night, after 24 hours of ridicule, the defendants of the various ideas don't have to pretend to take them seriously anymore, but in the interest of maintaining a diversity of representation, it should be up to everyone to pick an idea that they disagree with and try to see why others might take it so seriously that they would devote their lives or their deaths or the lives or deaths of others to it.
- Since so many people are representing ideas not their own on this day, nobody should take any remark personally and everybody should get a pass and be forgiven for any stupid shit they said while under the influence of a chemical that incapacitated them. For one day, everybody gets a pass and the people that love each other can go get something out of their system.
- In honor of the first ever non-religious nation in the known history of the Human Species, this day should be celebrated on the nearest approximate calculation of July 4, and in the spirit of the event, Fucks-Givers should wish each other well by saying "May the Fourth be with you" to each other.
- In the interests of safety, there should be medics, trip sitters, and designated drivers, as appropriate and available.
- FUCKIN-Atheists are called upon to provide a repository of all cultural outputs, no matter the origin; all works of literature, music, art, poetry, even recent media like games, movies, recordings, remixes, and podcasts, should all be mirrored and archived and kept in a searchable recoverable long-lasting encryptable digital format, with what hard copies can be recorded also archived in visit-able libraries that also function as museums. Since there are language barriers and practical logistical hurdles to this, it is recommended that a blockchain of all cultural additions be created and added to by as widely distributed of a network as possible to secure this beyond the bounds of any inevitable attempt at censorship.
- As "Churches" are in this epoch of history still legally protected tax-exempt mythological institutions pretending to advocate philanthropy, and since the total moral failure of all available world religions has set this bar so low, 10% of the disposable income a FUCKIN-Atheist has on them at any meeting should be allocated to a collective R&D budget, to be awarded to anyone but themselves for the purposes of encouraging any project that moves the human species forward to a point where more of us are free from obligatory meaningless drudgery. of highest priority are items allowing the total pragmatic independence of every human from every other- it should not be up to any of us to rely on others for food, energy, shelter, clothing, tools, or knowledge- societies have historically proven to be such one sided self-defeating transmitters of these, unable to overcome the problems of selection bias, part of the premise of FUCKIN-Atheism is to deliberately create and participate in a vehicle capable of transmitting culture beyond the time scale of a human life, and in the interests of this, 10% of the available disposable money in any congregation of FUCKIN-Atheists, no matter how small that pot is, should be divided among developments that have been conceptualized and need prototyping to achieve an implementation with a positive impact on human happiness and well-being.
- Since this is a philanthropic and cultural enterprise, this should be tax-exempt too by the same merits, yet it is probably inevitably the circumstance that the insecurities of the dominant cults, facing the prospect of cultural obsolescence, will resist this, which is a circumstance that must be endured and acknowledged in order to be faced and overcome. Success is not guaranteed, and opportunities must be taken where they are found.
