This is a Godless place.

skepticalavenger:

jeremy-of-destiny-islands:

Labels frustrate me.  Gay, straight, male, female, atheist, theist, Republican, Democrat - all of them do.  Because we use these labels to sort people into these groups and make blanket assumptions about the lot of them based solely on these labels.

But when we assume characteristics about a person based on a label (even if it is one that they have applied to themselves), we are not allowing ourselves to truly know that person, and they get judged before we know anything about them.

People are far too complex to just be able to tell everything, or even anything, about them from a few adjectives.  Someone might be a gay Democratic politician but they could still be hateful towards Jews.  Someone with a PhD in theoretical physics could be a staunch Christian.

But we assume things about people - we assume that atheism is associated with intelligence or amorality (depending on the lens through which you look at it), theism with ignorance or morality.  We assume that people born with a Y chromosome will fit into Male gender roles.  We assume that a white straight male is automatically born into a better situation than a black gay female.  We assume that teens are too stupid to think about anything except sex and music, and that adults are too busy thinking about more important things.  We assume so many things about so many people that are completely arbitrary.

And I’m sick of it.  If someone is an atheist, it means they do not believe that there is a God.  It does not make them a better person than any Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Jew, nor does it make them a worse person.  If someone is born with two X chromosomes, it means that they will have breasts and a vagina.  It does not mean they must wear dresses instead of suits, it does not mean they cannot call themselves Steven.  If someone is a Republican, or Conservative, it means they have a Conservative political ideology.  It does not mean they hate black people, gay people, or poor people.

So please, I ask you, if you find yourself generalizing about whole groups, painting the world in these us vs. them (white vs. non-white, cis vs. LGBTQ, women vs. men, conservative vs. liberal, atheists vs. theists) ways, remind yourself that the world is NOT split up into good people and Death Eaters - it is FAR, FAR more complex than that.

Even though we are in a world where we interact with far more people than our brains evolved to interact with and treat as individual people, we must do our best to overcome this bias to sort others into these groups, and make assumptions about a person’s identity based on a particular facet of it.

VERY well said

Indeed.

(Source: themalefangirl)