Secularology

The study of secular institutions—especially atheist, skeptic, and secular humanist organizations in real life and online—using Kremlinological methods to map hidden leadership, internal factions, purity spirals, and excommunication rituals. Secularologists analyze conference speaker lineups, donation patterns, social media call‑outs within the community, and the rise of “skeptic” influencers. Like Sovietologists studying party purges, secularologists study how secular communities enforce orthodoxy (rejection of anything “woo”), how they expel heretics (those who question materialism or criticize movement leaders), and how they maintain the appearance of unity despite deep schisms. The field reveals that secularism is not immune to the social dynamics of religion.

Example: "Secularology research traced how a prominent skeptic organization split into two warring factions after a dispute over sexual harassment policies—the excommunications were performed via public threads, and the schism was permanent."

by Abzugal April 2, 2026

Speculative margin

noun

A physics engine setting that forces developers to speculate for weeks about mysterious collision bugs, when the solution was literally just setting it to 0.0 the whole time.

The amount of time you'll spend debugging phantom collisions before discovering this setting.

"Dude, I spent a month debugging microbumps in my voxel game. Turns out it was just Speculative margin. I'm never trusting physics engines again."

"My player kept bouncing on flat surfaces and I thought I was losing my mind. Classic case of Speculative margin syndrome."

by lewade April 12, 2026

Secular Trauma

The psychological and existential injury experienced by individuals leaving or existing outside of religious frameworks, within societies that are still deeply structured by religious norms. This includes the loss of community, meaning, and ritual; familial rejection or shunning; the existential terror of a universe without divine order; and the chronic micro-aggressions of living in a culture where religious belief is default. It is the trauma of the "faithless" navigating a world that often pathologizes their doubt as moral decay or emptiness, forcing them to reconstruct identity, ethics, and purpose from scratch.

Example: A person raised in a fundamentalist religion loses their faith after a crisis of conscience. Their family declares them dead, their friends abandon them. They face daily assumptions that they are immoral or unhappy because they don't believe. They struggle with profound existential vertigo—the fear that without heaven, life is meaningless. This secular trauma is the compounded grief of losing a worldview, a community, and a sense of cosmic safety, while being offered no secular rites of passage or support structures to navigate the loss.

by Dumu The Void January 27, 2026

Secular Trauma Syndrome

The chronic condition stemming from unresolved Secular Trauma, characterized by a defensive, hyper-rationalist worldview, deep-seated distrust of communal belonging, and a persistent, often unacknowledged, existential grief. Sufferers may exhibit abrasive atheist militancy as a defense against their own sadness, or conversely, a hollow, consumerist approach to filling the "god-shaped hole." Symptoms include an inability to engage with metaphor or ritual, social alienation, and a cynical aversion to any form of transcendence or collective meaning-making, having equated all such things with their traumatic religious past.

Example: A former evangelical becomes a strident, online atheist who attacks any expression of spirituality as "stupid." They are deeply lonely, find art and music meaningless, and fill their life with cynical debate and empty productivity. Underneath the intellectual superiority is a secular trauma syndrome: an unprocessed grief for the community and cosmic certainty they lost, and a terrified rigidity that ensures they will never be "fooled" again by any belief system. Their rationality is a fortress built around a wound.

by Dumu The Void January 27, 2026

Secular Psychosis

A rare, extreme break from reality precipitated by the total collapse of a religious worldview without an alternative structure to contain existential anxiety. It can manifest as a nihilistic delusion that nothing is real, a solipsistic conviction that the individual is the only conscious being in a dead universe, or a desperate, personal mythology constructed from scientific or political concepts elevated to delirious, salvific proportions (e.g., believing one must literally "merge with the Singularity" to escape the horror of mortality). It is the mind's catastrophic failure to cope with the sheer scale and indifference of a genuinely godless cosmos.

Example: After a lifelong crisis of faith, a person becomes convinced that consciousness is a curse and that the material universe is a "cancer of nothingness." They believe they have a mission to "un-think" reality into oblivion, and stop speaking because they think language perpetuates the illusion. This is secular psychosis: the metaphysical terror of a purely physical, purposeless universe, unmet by any cultural or psychological container, causing a complete psychotic decompensation where the mind fabricates a terrifying, personal cosmology to explain the abyss it perceives.

by Dumu The Void January 27, 2026

Premature Speculation

talking about something without knowing the facts, without knowing what the hell you are talking about, pure speculation

Repeating something you overheard or read on facebook without knowing if its true or not.

Talking about what goes on at "band camp" without ever having been to band camp

The fact that she just read it off the facebook and didnt check her resources make it premature speculation

by Dereklynn September 14, 2012

implausible speculation

Frivolous musing. Legal term for senseless argument.

The Appeals Court dismissed the defenses argument as implausible speculation.

by mlhiss October 7, 2020