We are an online community of passionate, thoughtful people who believe that the consistent application of reason leads to a secular, progressive, and compassionate philosophy of life. We hold that all beings share an interest in their own happiness, and that compassion for others is often instrumental in attaining happiness. We also hold that the creation of systems that institutionalize compassion is the key to creating a society that is maximally free and fair to all beings. While we reject the idea that there is any utopian cure for our world’s ills, we believe that better solutions to complex problems can be found by using science and research in an …

Beingism is a philosophy of life based on rationality and compassion for oneself and others. It is nondogmatic, progressive, and atheistic.

You might be a Beingist if you believe:

- Reason and science are our best means of understanding the universe.

- Everything that exists is natural — nothing is supernatural.

- Ethical values are subjective, but nevertheless very important to people.

- There’s no such thing as free will, and causality appears to play a significant role in the way our world operates.

Other premises include:

- Everyone wants to be happy and have a fulfilling life.

- Although suffering is sometimes unavoidable, no one deserves to feel pain.

- People are generally more likely to be …

Human beings have a powerful sense of free will, and in at least one important sense, people are responsible for their actions. Despite this, the concept of free will as it is commonly understood is a baseless and incoherent concept. More specifically, although it is true that when beings make choices, it feels to them as though a variety of outcomes are possible, in fact only the actual outcome was ever really a possibility. For a different choice to have been made, another set of initial circumstances would have to have been the case.

It is crucial to remember that nonexistence of free will does not negate the existence of choice itself. When confronted with …

The purpose of this discussion is to address the question of what we mean, in a practical sense, when we advocate the use of reason, and to provide a basis for our assertions that reason is “our most accurate method of understanding reality and our most consistent method of accomplishing goals” and that it is “our ultimate arbiter of what is true and false.”
What Does It Mean to “Use Reason“?
In loosely-defined, “common-sense” terms, reasoning is attempting to think in a manner that is free of contradictions and fallacies and that reliably leads to accurate conclusions (and thus to courses of action that help one to accomplish goals). Continuing with this “common-sense” approach to …

As with nearly any complex question, there are many often interrelated facets to this. Here are some of what we hypothesize are some of the most common:

People make honest errors of judgment.
People simply lack of exposure to facts about the effects economically conservative philosophies have had on our world. It is generally not in the interests of the powerful for us to know about the vast amount of poverty and the sheer scope of inequality and injustice in the world, and it is to a very large extent the powerful who control the way information is distributed in our society.
Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, people tend to believe that the world is fundamentally …