The Most Undercounted Group On Earth 

Thought the same thing

I kind of do, 8/13 of my last videos have gotten 1000+ views, and as of this comment, so has this one. Thank you! I'm a breakout channel, and something like 75% of my 3 year channel growth has been in the past four months. Still small though... I'm waiting for the one that goes viral.

Thank you! I haven't really had a breakout video yet, just a few that get in the couple-thousands in terms of views. My channel's been growing decently fast relative to what I did before, I just haven't gotten that one video that goes semi-viral and gets 500k to 1 million views yet.

I see no god here... EXCEPT ME (Seriously though, thank you)

I didn't go into it a ton in the video for time reasons, but here's my explanation. I don't believe that nothing matters, in fact I believe the exact opposite. I believe that most things matter quite a bit. It's about framing. In a religious worldview, the things that matter are being devout and obeying the principles of your god. In a nonreligious worldview, it's a lot more down to earth. For me what matters is the happiness of the people around me, which is something that can be quantified. It's not arbitrary in the slightest, it's an emotion that everyone can feel. I like that feeling, I know others do to, so that's what I work toward. When I do something, I think through how it would affect the happiness of both me and the people around me. If it makes life for people generally better, I do it, if it doesn't, then I don't. Obviously killing somebody would make life worse for most people, so you wouldn't do it. It's pretty simple.

@@thehayze259 A Christian here I think what op was getting is from a marco sense as well. We ( should) “ love thy neighbor” as much as we love God, and treat people with love and respect. It's because I love people and I love God that I follow my religion. In a moral standpoint too I can derive my beliefs from a higher concrete level. All that an atheist can do is dervive their morals from either themselves or society. Not to shit on YOUR morals but humans think differently and for every person that loves people, there is a person that hates people. If it’d derived from society, then that is from the whims of collective humanity. There is only a 100 year difference between plessi v Ferguson, and brown v board of education for instance

You can logically determine if something is morally right or wrong. Here is proof that murder is wrong: Axioms: 1 - The more suffering, the worse (and the contrapositive: the less suffering, the better) 2 - The more pleasure, the better (and the contrapositive: the less pleasure, the worse) Murder causes these things to happen: - It deprives all the victim's future pleasures (which includes all chances at future success, growth, redemption and adventures), violating the contrapositive of the second axiom. - It causes great psychological harm to those close to the victim, violating the first axiom. - If the murder causes pain to the victim, it violates the first axiom. And you can theoretically prove any action ever as moral or immoral using this system, but doing so in an axiomatic way would be completely deranged so no one does it.

I'm not finding much, at least in English... I understand there may be more in Hebrew. My issue with some countries is more that the only ones that a lot of people can see - people who speak English - are census data and polls from large research centers, since those are the only ones that can be translated. And those ones don't provide an option for nonreligious people, they just say, "Secular." But secular means something entirely different. I am seeing a stat come up that says 20% are nonreligious, of which 9% are atheist, but it's frustrating that I can't seem to find a good, reliable source, and that state data, the best source (in an unbiased country), doesn't include irreligion as an option. Thank you for mentioning that, I'm looking more into it.

I'm an israeli atheist.

@@thehayze259 thank you, it is relatively new in the past few years,as an atheist myself, it's also really important to me :) indeed most of those surveys are in Hebrew especially since it's been happening only relatively recently. I do want to mention if it's not obvious that your beliefs or non beliefs do not matter in Israel and freedom of speech is a big thing here (though we do have some laws based of religion, some are not really being inforced and some do)

@@thehayze259 also the non believers are probably what we call חילוני- hiloni in Israel we always had basically 4 groups orthodox- the most religious ones. national religious - casual religious . Traditional - have some religious acts (like keeping the Saturday but still being on the phone or still cook or whatever) and then their is hiloni. Now hiloni can be someone that doesn't believe in any God, it can be someone that believes in an entity but not any of the religions but it sometimes being used to describe someone that believes in the religion God and choose to not do any religious act . The number of hilonis in Israel according to 2021 is about 45% of the population. But like I said in recent years we are starting to see more surveys that divide that at least the atheists

Yeah, Malaysia is odd that way. Very religiously repressive... but only for about 70% of the population. The Chinese and Indians can just go about their lives normally.

Technically speaking, those people are Agnostics, not Atheists. There's a difference, but for the sake of not repeating the same work fifty times in one paragraph, I didn't really distinguish between them much in the video. But yeah, you're correct.

​@@thehayze259 being agnostic or gnostic by definition is a claim about having truth. You can be a gnostic/agnostic theist/atheist. Which means you're claiming to know or not know while believing or not believing. Different people use different definitions for the words though, so it's understandable to see it as the way you described. I would put myself as a gnostic atheist, especially regarding the Judaic religions, whereas previously, when I was still figuring it all out, I would have called myself an agnostic atheist because I believed it wasn't true but was not really that sure. I also went through agnostic theist and gnostic theism.

I tend to use these terms as follows (and think my way is the best because of course I do) Theist = someone who makes the claim that a God exists Atheist = someone who makes the claim that no God exists Agnostic = someone who make no such claim to knowledge of the existence (or non existence) of God Per my usage of the terms Theist and Atheist are gnostic, as in making a knowledge claim. I think that this usage of these terms leads to the least confusion, and we could even retain your usage of gnostic and agnostic, but change it to sure and unsure Then by this definition I would be a sure theist and you would be a sure atheist. :) Sorry for the wall of text.

@@sillythewanderer4221 why do you think theists and atheists are making a knowledge claim? Don't you think people can believe something, or lean one way without thinking they know it? It can be a knowledge claim, but it can also not be. Your degree of certainty can be anywhere from 0 to 100%

@@alwayslearningtech im not entirely sure why I used theism and atheism as knowledge claims, I’ll amend that to beliefs. So then: Theism: the belief that the proposition “there is a God” is true. Atheism: the belief that the proposition “there is a God” is false. then based off of some epistemological framework you could know (edit: maybe) if theism or atheism is true. Thanks for the correction :) And I am curious as to your epistemology, if you have given thought to the subject I would love to know.

For one thing you can have beliefs as an atheist, they just aren't religiously motivated. A lot of people, religious or otherwise, believe in bigfoot for example and that's not exactly supported or encouraged by any religious texts. Similarly most people would agree that it's reasonable to believe that within a functioning society nobody is going to kill each other so long as they aren't suffering some sort of mental problem or pushed to some sort of extreme desperation, because that's generally true. That fact in and of itself is reason enough to be moral because it's also a function of self interest. If you help the desperate person out of a that situation or find a place to treat or take care of the mentally ill, then it's a lot less likely that you or others will be killed and the society you live in can keep functioning. You're also incorrect in your assertion that murder is solely a function of self interest. Even if we're talking animals, it's well documented that they're willing to get into violent confrontations on behalf of other members of their group and sometimes even outside their social circle if they can afford it. In humans, there are many cases where killers have expressed that their reason for doing so was on behalf of another or preventing hypothetical harm to people in the future that they may not even know. Empathy that goes so far as to consider people and situations that may not even exist. You may also be assuming that killing of others in nature is the norm. It isn't, especially within a social group. Documentaries, especially in north America, over-exaggerate the frequency of violence in nature to an absurd degree. Violence takes up valuable energy and can lead to serious injury or death, so even dumber animals like crabs and crocodiles try to avoid it as much as possible. That's why they have so many social behaviors like gestures, threat displays, marking/scenting, calls, etc. Animals typically don't go out of their way to kill unless it's a matter of survival or reproduction. The motivation to be moral tends to increase in social groups so long as there is a significant benefit to the group existing. Larger groups can defend themselves better, claim bigger territories, scout and alert others to danger, build bigger and quicker (in the case of creatures that build houses, dens, nests, burrows, etc.), and just overall expend less energy. These are all things humans benefit from in a society. Of course, there are diminishing returns on this, which is why you do get those people I mentioned earlier in desperate situations but that can be managed if initiative is taken. So in short, morality is actually pretty complicated and is often motivated by the same self-interest as the proposed murder in your comment. Religion can be good at giving the solutions for moral problems but fails to provide real world context for why those solutions are needed or even what causes the scenarios that lead to the moral problem to begin with, which is why a lot of people don't lean on it. Having solutions for problems when you don't understand why they work, or what context they work in, can lead to issues, because if a good solution doesn't appear to need a reason to exist then neither do the bad ones, and there are plenty of bad ones in religion as well which can, has, and still does lead to immoral acts.

I never said that. Yeah, some of the countries I used as examples were western, but I also included the entirety of Latin America, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, Iran, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. And while those are the most prominent examples, irreligion is rising across the ENTIRE world, and has been for ages now. All of the reasons I provided for why development causes irreligion were explicitly not tied to christianity or "European Culture," it was about access to scientific theories that contradict religious doctrine and the ability to talk with people in urbanized, religiously diverse environments like big immigrant cities and the internet. This is just objectively more common in developed countries.

@@thehayze259 The problem is less with your listing of countries than the argument itself, which has a long history of European justification for progress, see Durkheim, Frazier, Evans-Pritchard. Developmentalist arguments are especially rabid in the “third world” countries you listed. The argument proceeds: “religion is a sign of irrationality, state systems of education and technological progress are a resolution through the adoption of European modes of thought.” I would truly recommend reading Asad’s work for background to this. He talks about Christian and Islamic tradition as well, but instead of assuming categories like “religion,” and “progress,” or their antagonism, he challenges these historically. As always, this is meant only to encourage you to read elsewhere, and I don’t claim to be right, just asking helpful questions.

That like 1 minute of a 13 minute video lol

It's about empathy. Empathy is something that we've had planted into our brains due to being pack animals. As we evolved in groups, we needed to be able to work together to survive and thrive, so we developed a sense of morality. Being empathetic is completely natural and fundamental to being human. Empathy is what keeps us from doing things like murdering and stealing, and fundamentally, it's what makes us think that other people doing it is also wrong. And empathy is not unique to religious people, everyone can be empathetic. Because you know that you're not the only other person with thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams, you don't want to take that away from other people. Yeah, their mind is just atoms floating through the universe, but so is yours, so you're on an equal playing field. And yeah, fundamentally, I believe that there's no purpose to life or existence. There's nothing that we are born to work toward or commanded to do. But that's kind of freeing, isn't it? Like, now so long as something doesn't hurt people, you're free to do whatever you want. You can eat pork and beef, spend your Sunday mornings as weekends instead of at church, you don't have to grow a beard, wear a headscarf, fast for Ramadan, or give up anything for Lent. But you can still take part in Christmas if you want to! For me personally, that has nothing to do with Jesus, it's just a nice time to meet up with my family (who I don't get to see often because we live far away) and give each other gifts! You can still find a lot of meaning in life without some greater being compelling you to do certain things. Just live your life how you want to :)

@@thehayze259 Sorry to hear that. I used to think just as you do. Please know there is more to life. You were created by God and life does have a purpose. Definitely take a look at the arguments for Catholicism! I think it will make you much happier :)