On my old Swedish blog I once complained about the “fascistic superstition” of a Swedish community site called helgon.net. Although clearly open to all sorts of worldviews and lifestyles (being a community aimed specifically at the alternative crowd), they still insisted on showing your astrological sign on your profile. I fill in my birthdate, and they claim I’m a disciplined, ambitious capricorn with tendencies to be conservative, boring and greedy.

Um… right.

So anyway, now I’ve joined Facebook, and there I encounter a different kind of bigoted assumption: That I have “Religious views”. Two of the by Facebook predefined “religious views” are Atheism and Agnosticism. Now, I don’t know about you guys but I certainly don’t consider Atheism a religion, nor Agnosticism. Also, I was missing my own preferred worldview on the list, Humanism.

I’ve left a suggestion to Facebook that they change “Religious views” into “Worldview” and include a few non-religious worldviews in their predefined list, such as Humanism, Rationalism, Materialism, Freethinker etc. They make a big deal about everyone being welcome to join Facebook, so they really ought to make everyone feel welcome as well and not marginalise us non-religious people. Should they ignore me I guess we’re gonna have to start a petition…

facebook, worldviews, religion