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infoodlecrm · 2 years

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Church Management Software

A church might have incredible troubles developing and spreading its great message without effective organization of its assets, for example, its individuals, church gatherings, missions, and contributions. Church management software incredibly works with the organization and arranging so the church can thrive.

It is brilliant being important for a very much oversaw church, where the focal point of the church is love, otherworldly development, and evangelism. The church membership reliably develops with guests rapidly turning out to be important for the church family. The staff knows the profound gifts of its individuals and supplies them with numerous amazing chances to practice them. The church doesn't disregard clashes, yet stands up to and settle them in a caring manner. There is generally a church movement to take an interest no matter what the time or day of the week. Any church part can reword their church vision and knows how the person in question is adding to the vision. Without a doubt, the church utilizes church Management Software to improve on managemential perspectives.

Sadly, not all holy places are at this state. Some holy places never again have the emphasis on getting the message out of God. All things being equal, the church becomes caught in administration mess and focuses rather on hierarchical issues. Without church programming, it strains to cover fundamental monetary requirements and battles to hold membership. It feels starved for initiative inside its individuals and can't see those as willing or even able to help. Struggle is typical and a little minority performs the vast majority of the work in the church. Guests travel every which way without much development.

Without appropriate church organization, a large portion of the work goes toward the battle to remain open as opposed to getting out the Good Word. Without a reasonable church managements, it becomes hard to track down the initiative inside the individuals. It turns out to be not difficult to free track of guests, missing the significant development. Overhauling your Church Managaement Software can coordinate your church so that these unremarkable issues everything except vanish.

All things considered, large numbers of these battling temples keep on utilizing improvised information bases to deal with the numerous parts of the church. They perceive the requirement for church programming, however neglect to track down a binding together arrangement. There can be as numerous information bases and however many various applications as there are regions and undertakings. A church might have a church membership data set, a contribution and offerings information base, and as numerous Sunday school homeroom data sets as there are classes (some not even open by the church staff). Many tasks and study gatherings may not be remembered for any information base and due to this distinction, gathering helpful information turns out to be extremely bulky, tedious, and now and again out and out unthinkable.

This is disheartening portrayal centers around the administrative viewpoints inside the church and deliberately rejects the numerous favors that a church gets, no matter what its size or achievement. It is a terrible picture, however unfortunately enough, nothing new to many churchs. Church programming can eliminate apparently huge hindrances holding a church back from developing.

Church Management Software is planned explicitly to bind together every one of the parts of the church into one data set that incorporates regions, for example, guests following, church membership the board, profound gifts managements, church initiative administration, church projects the board, offerings, contributions, and capital mission the board, reserve raiser the board, and even church part otherworldly development managements among numerous different regions. Church programming is an incredible asset that will emphatically build your staff capacities and improve on the organization of your church. This will permit you to zero in on the 10,000 foot view, on the vision and the technique rather than on administration.

While using church management software, a superior comprehension of every part will result, considering more noteworthy strengthening and satisfaction. A functioning part that is adding to the progress of the church is significantly less liable to leave than a part that feels the person isn't required or incapable to serve. Permitting every part to contribute as per their abilities and otherworldly gifts is essential to the development of the church. Overseeing part abilities and profound gifts will likewise take into consideration a uniform dispersion of responsibility all through the church membership. This will make two positive impacts: it will limit wearing out the more dynamic individuals, and will keep most individuals dynamic and useful bringing about blissful individuals, less inclined to make struggle in the church.

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bogleech · 3 years

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Since some people were so surprised by the stuff I shared about American fundamentalist christianity let me just compile in one list some of the things that don’t seem to be common knowledge (and are especially “wrong” in pop culture)....again I was not raised with these beliefs myself but my extended family all were and you can still find people preaching this stuff on the internet, on their own weird fundamentalist/evangelical websites and blogs:

So there’s the big one I explained already where the antichrist is supposed to end all war and do good saintly things to take over the world, basically making everyone love him so they’ll willingly give their souls to the devil.

By extension as I also went over recently, Fundies believe Satan/demons generally do good things for people, like miraculous healing, because their goal is not to spread ‘evil’ but just to win souls to their side and out-compete the forces of heaven, like a business competitor. You must be “saved” to know the difference.

Likewise they believe God and Angels often cause suffering, pain, destruction and death to punish sin, test faith or teach lessons. These are all still acts of “love” us mortals are just too stupid to understand, like taking a cat to the vet I guess.

There’s the one from those same posts about how “sin” is not determined by the deed itself but by who it was done for; a godless person feeding the homeless is basically committing evil. It must be in the name of the church to be good.

There’s the one I explained in another post about how Satan doesn’t live in or rule Hell but just wanders the Earth and lives in eternal fear of being thrown into Hell by God when the world ends, because it’s torture for him and the other fallen angels as well.

So now we’re hitting new ones to list: Fundamentalists are taught that Catholicism is a guise of Satanism. Praying to anyone other than God/Jesus is considered idol worship, so the fact that Catholics revere Mary, the Saints, and the Pope is all considered demonic. The pope himself is often claimed to be Satanically possessed by Fundamentalist propaganda.

They believe all “supernatural” forces not explicitly from God are automatically from Satan which is why they believe all forms of “magic” are blasphemous. Many extend this to fiction which is why they ban their kids from Pokemon or Superheroes or Tolkien.

They do not consider ghosts or contact with the dead to be possible, full stop; in Fundamentalism your soul is instantaneously in Heaven or Hell the second you die, there’s no limbo, there’s no waiting period, and there are no exits from either realm. Even if you wanted to leave Heaven and explore Earth, you couldn’t, it’s just infinite with no exits.

This doesn’t matter though because they also believe that you will do nothing in Heaven but float around praising God and you will love it no matter what. You won’t think about or care about anything else. You are essentially a completely different entity that hatched out of your old form, but they believe this is your real true self.

The previous point is why you will not care if you go to Heaven and your loved ones go to Hell. In fact, your soul will automatically understand and agree that they deserve it.

Hell is similarly simplistic: they don’t believe it’s like a scary demon world with torture implements and different punishments, they believe it’s an infinite void of pure fire in all direction and you just float there in so much pain you can’t move or think ever again.

Some of them believe that they are the only people who experience true human love or other emotions. They think all other people are experiencing a fake, diluted form of emotion until they accept Jesus, and it is impossible for anyone to understand that until they’ve experienced it, “like describing color to the blind.” This is a huge part of their anti-LGBT propaganda; a gay couple, in their eyes, is not really in love but will only ever know what love feels like when they reject the sin and join the church.

They do not believe God necessarily wants them to help the needy or otherwise help anyone at all. God wants them to win souls for him, and that’s the only reason to do charity or otherwise extend kindness to anyone. They don’t think any suffering on Earth matters, because it’s just a blip next to everyone’s eternal afterlife.

This will sound like a cartoon strawman but they really do believe creativity and imagination are evil. Thinking too much about anything other than God is a sin.

None of the above is really normal or necessarily taken from the bible, this isn’t a bitter atheist anti-religion post or anything, but the denomination that believes this stuff IS the wealthiest and most politically powerful in the USA. This is the stuff those big mall-sized ultrachurches are trying to put in people’s heads every Sunday.

Also as a note already pointed out, different fundamentalist churches mix and match different combinations of these beliefs. Whether they believe that makes the other churches their enemies will also vary.

#religion #politics #jeaus #god #Christianity

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testudoaubrei-blog · 3 years

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Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

#she ra horde prime #she ra #she ra catra #she ra spoilers #redemption arcs #toxic religion

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years

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By: Carly Cassella

Published: Aug 29, 2021

More Americans are coming to accept Charles Darwin's "dangerous idea" of evolution, according to thirty years' worth of national surveys.

Researchers have found that public acceptance of biological evolution has increased substantially in the last decade alone, following twenty years of relative stagnancy.

Between 1985 and 2010, roughly 40 percent of surveyed adults in the US agreed that "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals". Taking into account the small number of fence-sitters, this suggests much of the nation was evenly divided on the theory.

By 2016, that percentage had, at last, become a majority, reaching 54 percent.

As it turns out, education has played a crucial role in that shift. When researchers began to analyze the demographics of survey respondents over the past thirty years, they noticed the completion of one or more college science courses was the strongest predictor of evolution acceptance.

"Almost twice as many Americans held a college degree in 2018 as in 1988," says Mark Ackerman, who studies collective intelligence at the University of Michigan.

"It's hard to earn a college degree without acquiring at least a little respect for the success of science."

In the current analysis, the proportion of American adults with scientific literacy increased from 11 percent in 1988 to 31 percent in 2019.

That rise in knowledge can also easily spread to others. For instance, research suggests fewer students are exposed to creationism in the science classroom due in part to new teachers replacing a generation of educators less suited to teaching evolution.

Still, even a healthy dose of education can only go so far. Some researchers, for instance, think religious beliefs are a stronger predictor of accepting evolution than educational attainment. But this is an area of research that is still hotly debated. It could be, for instance, that education only works for some individuals who don't interpret the Bible literally.

In the US, evolution has become a highly politicized topic, especially among supporters of the Republican party, which tends to align its policies with evangelical Christian values.

The result is that today, the US has some of the lowest acceptance rates for evolution in the developed world, with only Turkey scoring lower.

Even now that a majority of Americans do not reject evolution, the rate of acceptance is still low compared to other nations and much lower than scientific consensus.

In recent years, religious adherence has begun to decline in the US, but the political divide on evolution still very much exists.

In 2019, researchers found 83 percent of liberal Democrats accepted evolution, whereas only 34 percent of conservative Republicans felt the same.

The driving force behind this huge difference is probably not ideological partisanship, experts say, but fundamental religious beliefs, which Republicans tend to hold more.

For instance, roughly 30 percent of American adults hold fundamental religious beliefs that directly contradict evolutionary theory, which is almost the same percentage of conservative Republicans that rejected evolution in the current analysis.

The authors of the current study are not ruling out religion as an influential factor. Their analysis still shows that fundamental religious beliefs can change the acceptance of evolution among American adults. But at least according to their analysis, it seems that educational attainment is the more influential factor.

According to their analysis, the recent increase in acceptance mostly comes from American adults who were previously unsure about the theory. Only some who outright rejected evolution had their mind's changed over time.

"Although scientific literacy has grown, and science continues to have pervasive influence in American society," the authors write, "a tension between religious fundamentalism and evolution remains."

While religion clearly remains a barrier to further public acceptance of evolution, that's gradually beginning to change. In 1988, the current analysis found only 8 percent of religious fundamentalists accepted the theory of evolution. Whereas in 2019, nearly a third did.

Along with growing exposure to scientific courses, a decline in religious fundamental beliefs will no doubt see the minority of Americans that reject evolution continue to shrink.

Last year, Pew conducted a more global survey that showed a slightly higher acceptance of evolution in the US at around 64 percent.

It's a number that nonetheless falls far below nations such as Canada (77 percent), Germany (81 percent), and Japan (88 percent), showing the US still has some catching up to do.

The study was published in Public Understanding of Science.

While this is good news, the study doesn't distinguish the nature of the evolution that people accepted; whether it's actual evolution ("secular evolution"), or evolution by supernatural selection ("goddidit", aka magic).

#evolution #evolution denial #evolution deniers #science vs religion #religion vs science #science #religion #science literacy #Charles Darwin #religion is a mental illness

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phynali · 4 years

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Canonization and Fandom Purity Culture

I wrote a 1k-word twitter thread (as proof that I am Not made for Twitter and it’s goddamn 240-character limit) and am pasting it here with edits and updates (it’s now 2k words).

I have thoughts to share (which I know have been stated more eloquently before by others) about this trend of demanding/obsessing that certain ships become "canon" and how it overlaps with the rise of fandom purity culture.

Under the cut.

Here in 2021 there is a seemingly large and certainly loud and active contingent of online fandoms who desire (or even demand) "canon validation" for a given interpretation of a source material. This is more true with shipping than anywhere else.

First, it is important to note that the trend is not limited to queer ships or to any single fandom. In the past few years I've seen it for Riverdale, Voltron, Supernatural (perhaps most extreme?), The 100, etc., and less recent with the MCU, Sherlock, Teen Wolf, Hawaii 5-0, etc. It is a broad trend across ships, fandoms, and mediums.

So if it is more common for queer ships, it is hardly unique to them. Similarly, pretending that it is about queer representation is a clever misdirect to disguise the fact that it is most often about ships and shipping wars. If you ever need proof of that, consider that a character can be queer without being in a given relationship or reciprocating another character's affections. Thus a call for more/better queer rep itself is very different than a call for specific ships to be made canon.

Also note that when audiences frame it as wanting to recognize a specific *character* as queer, it is almost always in the context of a ship. Litmus test: would making that character queer but having them *explicitly reject* the other half of the ship be seen as a betrayal?

(Note: none or this is to say we shouldn't push for more queer rep and more *quality and well-written* queer rep! Just that that isn't what I'm talking about here, and not what seeking canon validation for a specific interpretation or a specific ship is almost ever about.)

Why does this matter?

the language of representation and social justice should not be co-opted to prop up ship wars

it is reciprocal with a trend toward increasing toxicity in transformative fandom spaces

Number 1 here is self-explanatory (I hope). Let's chat about 2.

Demands for canon validation correlate with a rise in fanpol / fandom purity culture. What is fandom purity culture (and fandom policing)? This toxic mentality is about justifying one's shipping preferences and aiming to be pure (non-problematic) in your fictional appetites regarding romance and sex.

Note that this purity culture is so named as it arises linearly from American Protestantism, conservative puritanical anxiety around thought crimes, and overlaps in many ways with terf ideologies and regressively anti-kink paradigms.

It goes like this: problematic content is "gross" and therefore morally reprehensible. Much like how queer sex/relationships get labelled as "gross" (Other) and thus morally sinful, or how kink gets labelled as "harmful" and thus morally wrong. The Problematic label is applied by fanpol to ships with offset age or power dynamics, complicated histories, and anything they choose to label as "harmful". As such, they would decry my comparison here to queerphobia itself as also being harmful, because their (completely fictional) targets are ~actually~ evil.

(The irony of this is completely lost on them).

This mode of interacting with creative works leaves no room to explore dark or erotic themes or dynamics which may exist in fiction but not healthily in reality. Gothic romance is verboten. Even breathe the word incest and you will be labelled a monster (nevermind Greek tragedy or GoT).

As with most puritanical bullshit, fanpol ideology only applies these beliefs to sex and never to violence/murder/etc, proving what lies at its core. It also demands its American-based values be applied to all fictional periods and places as the One True Moral Standard. It evangelizes – look no further than how these people try to recruit others to their cause, aim to elevate themselves as righteous, and try to persuade (‘save’) others from their degenerate ways of thinking.

“See the light” they promise “here are our callouts and blog posts to convince you. Decry your past sins of problematic shipping, be baptized by our in-group adulation and welcome, and then go forth and send hate to others until they too see the light.” In many ways “get therapy” by the antis is akin to “I’ll pray for you” by the Christian-right (and ultimately ironic).

(Although it has been pointed out to me that these fans are likely not themselves specifically ex-evangelicals, but rather those who have brushed up with evangelical norms and modes of thinking without specifically being victims of it. In many ways they are more simply conservative Christian in temperament and attitude without necessarily being raised into religion by belief).

What this has to do with canon validation is that these fans look to canon for approval, for Truth. On the one hand, if it is in the canon then it must be good / pure or at least acceptable. The authority (canon) has deemed it thus. It is safe and acceptable to discuss and to enjoy watching or consuming. In this way, validation from canon means a measure of safety from being Bad and Problematic.

For example, where a GoT fan could discuss Cersei/Jaime's (toxic, interesting) dynamic in depth as it related to the canon, fans who shipped Jon/Sansa (healthy, interesting) were Gross and Bad. The canon as Truth provided a safety net, a launch point. "It's GRRM, not me, who is problematic." It wasn’t okay to ship the problematic bad gross incest ship, but it being in the canon material meant it was open for discussion, for nuance, for “this adds an interesting layer to the story” which is denied to all non-canon ships labelled as problematic.

(Note: there are of course people who have zero interest in watching GoT for a whole slew of very valid reasons, including but not limited to the incest. That’s a different to this trend. A less charged example might be The Umbrella Academy, where a brother canonically is in love with his sister and antis still praise the show, but if you dare to ship any of the potential incest ships then you are the one who is disgusting).

On the other hand, a very interesting alternate (or additional) explanation for this phenomenon was raised to me on twitter. (These ideas aren’t mine originally, but I wholly endorse them as a big part of what is likely going on): Namely, as with authoritarian individuals in general, they see themselves as right and correct, but the canon (which has not yet validated their ship) is not correct, and is in fact problematic, and so they can save the canon from itself.

As mentioned, these fanpol types see their interpretation as Good and Pure. So if they can push (demand, bully) the canon into conforming to their worldview and validating their interpretation, then they have shown the (sinful) creators the light and led them to the righteous path. This only works if the canon allows itself to saved though, otherwise the creators remain Evil for spurning them.

How is this different from fans simply hoping for their ship to be canon?

For a second here, let’s rewind to the 90s (since Whedon has been in the news recently). This “I want it to be canon” thing isn’t 100% new, of course. We saw this trend then for the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was different then. At the time, fans who hoped for a ship to be canon might have been cheering for a problematic one to begin with (Buffy/Spike). So shipping was still present, minus vocal fanpol.

(And Buffy fans learned that canon validation...can leave a lot to be desired. A heavy lesson was learned about the ways that fan desires can play out horrifically in canon, and how some things are best left out of the hands of canon-writers).

These days, this is still largely true. Many fans hope for their ships to go canon, as they always have. There are tropes like “will they/won’t they” that TV shows may even be designed around, which a certain narrative anticipation and a very deliberate build up to that.

But while shipping *hopes* occur for many fans, almost all ships fans that *demand* to go canon and obsess over are now the ones deemed as Unproblematic, or as Less Problematic. I’m talking here about the ships that aren’t necessarily an explicit will/won’t they dynamic but do have some canon dynamic that leads them to being shipped, but which the creators aren’t necessarily deliberately teasing and building up a romantic end-game for.

These ships often have fans who are happy to stick to fandom, but there has also been a huge uptick in the portion of fans who are approaching shipping with an explicit lens of “will they go canon?” and “don’t you want them to be canon?” and now even “they have to go canon” and “the canon is wrong if they don’t make this ship canon”, to a final end-point of “if the ship doesn’t go canon, the source material is Wrong and Bad.”

These latter opinions are the one we see more by extreme fans (‘stans’), hardcore shippers, but especially by fanpol-types, the ones who embrace fandom purity culture at least to some extent.

Why them?

In pushing for canon validation, fanpol types seek to elevate their (pure) interpretation of canon. As mentioned above, it’s validation of their authority, a safety-net, and a way to save the canon from itself if only they can bully the canon into validating their right and good interpretation.

There’s also another reason, which is that canon validation is a tool to bludgeon those seen as problematic. They can use it to denounce other (problematic) ships as Not Being Canon and therefore highlight their own as Right and Good, because it is represented in the True Meaning of the Work.

Canon validation then is a cudgel sought by virtuous crusaders to wield against their unclean enemies. It is an ideological pursuit. It is organised around identity and in groups sometimes as insular as cults.

How does this happen?

Fanpol tend to be younger or more vulnerable fans, susceptible to authoritarian manipulators. As many have highlighted before, authoritarian groups and exclusionary ideologies like terfs are very good at using websites like tumblr to mobilize others around their organizing beliefs. Fanpol tend to feel legitimate discomfort, but instead of taking responsibility for their media engagement, ringleaders stoke and help them direct their discomfort as anger onto others; “I feel ashamed and uncomfortable, and therefore you should be held accountable for my emotions.” Authoritarian communities endorse social dominance orientations, deference to ringleaders, and obedient faith to the principles those ringleaders endorse.

As these fans attach more and more of their identity to a given media (or ship), and derive more and more validation and more of their belongingness needs from this fanpol community, they also become more and more anxious about being excluding from this group. This is because such communities have rigid rules and very conditional bases for social acceptance. Question or "betray" the organizing ideology and be punished or excommunicated. If that is all you have, you are left with nothing. Being labelled problematic then is a social death.

What this means is that these fans cannot accept all interpretations of a media as equally valid: to do so Betrays the ideology. It promises exclusion. And, in line with a perspective around ‘saving’ canon and leading others into the light – forcing and bending the canon to their will is what will make it Good (and therefore acceptable to enjoy, and therefore proof of them as righteous by having saved others). As was also pointed out to me on twitter, endorsement from canon or its creators also satiates that deep need they have for authority figures to approve of them.

Due to all of this, these fans come to obsess over canon validation of their own interpretation. In a way, they have no other option but to do so. They need this validation -- as their weapon, as their authority, as their safety net, as their approval, as their evangelical mission of saviorship.

Canon validation is proof: I am Good. I am Right(eous). I am Safe.

(In many ways, I do ache for some of these people, so wrapped up in toxic communities and mindsets and so afraid to step out of line for fear of swift retribution, policing their own thoughts and art against the encroaching possibility that anything be less than pure. It’s not healthy, it’s never going to be healthy.)

In the end, people are going to write their own stories. You are well within your rights to critique those stories, to hate them, to interpret them how you will, but you can never control their story (it's theirs).

Some final notes:

This trend may be partially to do with queer ships now being *able* to go canon where before so no such expectation would exist. Similarly, social media has made this easier to vocalize. Still, who makes these demands and the underlying reasons are telling. There are also many legitimate critiques of censorship, queerbaiting (nebulous discussions to be had here), and homophobia in media to be had, and which may front specific ships in their critique. But critique is distinct from asking that canon validate one's own interpretation.

#fandom purity culture #antis #discourse

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Pope Francis says the world is ‘seriously ill’ from the consequences of the pandemic (Washington Post) Pope Francis on Monday offered a grim assessment of humanity’s response to the pandemic in a lengthy speech that highlighted aspects big and small from a year of isolation and “despair.” He talked about domestic violence in homes under pandemic lockdown. He emphasized the job losses predominantly among off-the-books workers, with no safety net on which to rely. He described a generation of children, alone and in front of their computers, enduring the “educational catastrophe” of school shutdowns or distance learning. The world, Francis said, “is seriously ill.” “Not only as a result of the virus,” the pope continued, “but also in its natural environment, its economic and political processes, and even more in its human relationships.” “The pandemic shed light on the risks and consequences inherent in a way of life dominated by selfishness and a culture of waste, and it set before us a choice: either to continue on the road we have followed until now, or to set out on a new path,” Francis said.

Nothing to sneeze at: Global warming triggers earlier pollen (AP) When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drippy, sneezy onslaught of pollen season around St. Patrick’s Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around St. Valentine’s Day. Across the United States and Canada, pollen season is starting 20 days earlier and pollen loads are 21% higher since 1990 and a huge chunk of that is because of global warming, a new study found in Monday’s journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. While other studies have shown North America’s allergy season getting longer and worse, this is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations.

Divided Senate votes to proceed with impeachment trial of Trump (Washington Post) A divided Senate voted 56 to 44 on Tuesday to proceed with the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump, rejecting his lawyers’ argument that it is unconstitutional. Most Republicans stood with Trump and his legal team, which contended the Senate cannot convict a person no longer in office. The House impeachment managers, in pressing for the trial to proceed, said Trump had a role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and should be held accountable. Opening arguments in the trial are set to begin Wednesday.

Sheriff: Hacker tried to taint Florida city’s water with lye (AP) A hacker gained unauthorized entry to the system controlling the water treatment plant of a Florida city of 15,000 and tried to taint the water supply with a caustic chemical, exposing a danger cybersecurity experts say has grown as systems become both more computerized and accessible via the internet. The hacker who breached the system at the city of Oldsmar’s water treatment plant on Friday using a remote access program shared by plant workers briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide by a factor of one hundred (from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million), Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference Monday. Sodium hydroxide, also called lye, is used to treat water acidity but the compound is also found in cleaning supplies such as soaps and drain cleaners. It can cause irritation, burns and other complications in larger quantities. Fortunately, a supervisor saw the chemical being tampered with—as a mouse controlled by the intruder moved across the screen changing settings—and was able to intervene and immediately reverse it, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar officials have since disabled the remote-access system, and say other safeguards were in place to prevent the increased chemical from getting into the water.

Mexican Census: Evangelicals at New High, Catholics at New Low (Christianity Today) The Catholic majority in Mexico is slipping, as Protestants surpassed 10 percent of the population in the country for the first time ever. According to recently released data from Mexico’s 2020 census, the Protestant/evangelical movement increased from 7.5 percent in 2010 to 11.2 percent last year. The Catholic Church has historically dominated the religious landscape across Latin America, but especially in Mexico, which ranks among the most heavily Catholic countries in the region. Today, though an overwhelming majority of Mexicans still identify as Catholic, declines are accelerating. It took 50 years—from 1950 to 2000—for the proportion of Catholics in Mexico to drop from 98 percent to 88 percent. Now, only two decades later, that percentage has slipped another 10 points to 77.7 percent.

Venezuela’s exodus (Foreign Policy) Colombia is to grant temporary legal status to the more than 1.7 million Venezuelans who have taken refuge in the country. Under the terms announced by Colombian President Iván Duque on Monday, Venezuelans who entered Colombia without permission before Jan. 31 will be eligible for legal protections, making it easier for them to live and work in the country. Roughly 5.4 million people have left Venezuela in recent years, according to U.N. estimates.

EU countries expel Russian diplomats in Navalny dispute (AP) Germany, Poland and Sweden on Monday each declared a Russian diplomat in their country “persona non grata,” retaliating in kind to last week’s decision by Moscow to expel diplomats from the three European Union countries over the case of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Russia had accused diplomats from Sweden, Poland and Germany of attending a demonstration in support of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile political foe. In a statement, EU lawmakers also appealed to “all EU Member States to show maximum solidarity with Germany, Poland and Sweden and take all appropriate steps to show the cohesiveness and strength of our Union.”

Rescuers look for survivors of Indian glacier flood disaster (AP) Hundreds of rescue workers were scouring muck-filled ravines and valleys in northern India on Tuesday looking for survivors after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, unleashing a devastating flood that has left at least 31 people dead and 165 missing. One of the rescue efforts is focused on a tunnel at a hydroelectric power plant where more than three dozen workers have been out of contact since the flood occurred Sunday. Rescuers used machine excavators and shovels to clear sludge from the tunnel overnight in an attempt to reach the workers as hopes for their survival faded. The disaster was set off when part of a glacier on Nanda Devi mountain snapped off Sunday morning. The floodwater, mud and boulders roared down the mountain along the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers, breaking dams, sweeping away bridges and forcing the evacuation of many villages while turning the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored moonscape.

Cooped up in the pandemic, Chinese couples were not in the mood for love (Washington Post) When Chinese families were ordered to stay at home last year amid the coronavirus outbreak, authorities hoped for a much-needed baby boom. It turns out that few couples were in the mood. New data this week showed that birthrates in the country continued to plummet, with 10.04 million births registered in 2020, a 15 percent drop from the year before, according to the Ministry of Public Security. Although not the official birthrate, the latest figure was a third lower than the number of births recorded in 2019—already the country’s lowest since the early 1960s, when China was in the middle of a famine. China has been working to reverse falling birthrates caused in part by decades of population controls. After the country relaxed its infamous one-child policy in 2016, allowing couples to have two children, initiatives have ranged from the supportive to the punitive. Policymakers face a demographic crisis that could cause the country’s population to start to shrink as early as 2027, according to a worst-case estimate from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Official 2020 population data is expected to be released later this month, but in January some local governments published birth data showing declines as steep as 30 percent.

Myanmar police fire into air to disperse protest, four hurt by rubber bullets (Reuters) Police fired gunshots into the air and used water cannon and rubber bullets on Tuesday as protesters across Myanmar defied bans on big gatherings to oppose a military coup that halted a tentative transition to democracy. Four people were hurt by rubber bullets in the capital Naypyitaw, and one of them, a woman, was in critical condition with a head wound, a doctor said. The Feb. 1 coup and detention of elected civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has brought the largest demonstrations in more than a decade and a growing civil disobedience movement affecting hospitals, schools and government offices.

Fish Farm (Hakai Magazine) A new fish farm in Singapore will produce up to 3,000 tonnes of grouper, trout and shrimp annually. This fish farm is notable primarily because of its location, which is an eight-story indoor aquaculture facility being constructed in the city-state. Singapore imports 90 percent of its food, and would prefer to scale that back a bit, with the national goal of producing 30 percent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030. If all goes according to plan, the new facility’s efficiency will be six times higher than that of other fish farms in Singapore.

Anger grows at Israel’s ultra-Orthodox virus scofflaws, threatening rupture with secular Jews (Washington Post) The Shinfelds, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in this most religious of cities, are used to being a bit at odds with the rest of Israel. Their community’s tradition of large families—the couple has 10 children and 30 grandchildren—strict observance and exemption from military service have long created friction with the more secular majority. But they say they have never felt hostility like they do now, as a pandemic-exhausted nation has turned its rage at ultra-Orthodox scofflaws. As Israel endures its third national lockdown, social media has been inflamed by images of black-clad men brazenly crowding schools, weddings and other events, including 20,000 at a recent Jerusalem funeral of a leading rabbi. Secular critics have cast the ultra-Orthodox, fairly or not, as superspreaders supreme. “Now it’s not only tense—it feels like hatred,” said Vivian Shinfeld, 60, of the anger she feels even from some less-religious members of her own family. The backlash could have cultural and political impacts well after the pandemic ends. “There has been a schism growing for a while, and the pandemic is making it wider,” said Tamar El-Or, an anthropology professor at Hebrew University and longtime scholar of ultra-Orthodox culture. “When this virus is gone, nothing is going to be same.”

Ethnic clashes in Darfur could reignite Sudan’s old conflict (AP) Sayid Ismael Baraka, a Sudanese-American visiting from Atlanta, was playing with his three children, and his wife was making tea, when the gunmen stormed into his family village in Sudan’s Darfur region. The gunmen went through the village of Jabal, shooting people. The 36-year-old Baraka was shot to death as he rushed to help a wounded neighbor, his wife and brother said. The attack on Jan. 16 left more than two dozen dead in and around the village. They were among 470 people killed in a days-long explosion of violence between Arab and non-Arab tribes last month in Darfur. The bloodletting stoked fears that Darfur, scene of a vicious war in the 2000s, could slide back into conflict and raised questions over the government’s efforts to implement a peace deal and protect civilians.

Try a ‘Shultz hour’ (NYT) When George Shultz—who died Saturday at 100—was secretary of state under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, he developed a weekly ritual. He closed the door to his office and sat down with a pen and a pad of paper. For the next hour, Shultz tried to clear his mind and think about big ideas, rather than the minutiae of government work. Only two people could interrupt him, he told his secretary: “My wife or the president.” That’s even more useful advice today than it was four decades ago. These days, we are constantly interrupted by minutiae, via alerts and text messages. They can make it impossible to carve out time to think through difficult problems in new ways or come up with creative ideas. Letting your mind wander, Sandi Mann, a British psychologist, has said, “makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas.” The Dutch have a word for this concept: niksen, or the art of doing nothing. As Amos Tversky, a path-breaking psychologist, said, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

#headlines #news

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polyadvice · 5 years

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Does Zinnia play D&D?

As a reminder, I’m celebrating 1,000 posts by taking a break from polyamory related questions and taking questions about literally anything else. Submit your non-polyam questions here! You can blacklist the tag “1kcelebration” if you don’t want non-polyamory-related posts on your dash.

Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons? What's your opinion of the game and subculture surrounding it? If you could be any fantasy character, what race and/or class would you choose?

Ooh, I have such Feelings about D&D. Starting around age nine, I got really into online forum roleplaying, which was a lot like D&D minus any of the stats, numbers, etc. I was huge into this hobby and by the time I was in middle school I would spend hours and hours on the family computer writing these elaborate characters and stories.

My parents hated this, and were always on me to “get out of the house” and “make friends,” two things I found quite difficult to do. There was, however, a board game and tabletop roleplaying store within walking distance of my house, and I very much wanted to be allowed to go hang out there and play Dungeons & Dragons. I was also a huge fan of the comic Something*Positive, which includes a lot of D&D stuff. Unfortunately for both me and my parents, my mom believed in the absurd urban legend that D&D made kids kill themselves. (Hilariously, this bizarre fear mongering stemmed from Evangelical Christianity, a community and an ideology my mom hated with a passion - but she somehow caught wind of their nonsense, stripped of the context that would have led her to reject it, and she fully believed that letting me play D&D would have been dangerous.)

I still have some resentment about this, because kid-me would have absolutely loved D&D, and would have been amazing at it. I have a knack for character improv and worldbuilding, and I would have likely “found my community.” I was a sad and lonely kid, and it would have been amazing for me. I also would have gotten into it when my brain was more malleable and I was better able to internalize the complicated structure and rules of the game. I’d be absolutely kick-ass at it as an adult now that the milieu is very pro-D&D. But, alas, I was dealt different cards.

As an adult, I decided to finally get into it. I’ve played Pathfinder, D&D, and VTM systems. I love the narrative and character and worldbuilding parts, but I still can’t get a good grip on all the fiddly bits. I frequently end up with complete ‘weenie’ characters because I don’t care enough to actually make use of the skills and powers I could have. I find combat in D&D excruciatingly boring and I’m not interested in maximizing my ability to do anything combat related. I like the idea of magic but playing a spellcasting character overwhelms me with all the crap to keep track of. I spend far more time writing out an elaborate backstory and personality for my character than fussing about the character sheet. This is probably because of the forum roleplaying I cut my teeth on, and because I don’t have years of practice or a nostalgic connection to the actual D&D system. Playing with hardcore or experienced D&D players is usually frustrating for me and for them.

But I still love everything else - the maps, the characters, the dice, the mini figurines, the art. I actually like DMing more than being a PC, because I get to make up towns and shops and stories and NPCs, and I can decline to fuss about things I don’t find interesting. I’ve been slowly working on my own tabletop RP system with its own world, its own character creation and its own magic system. The goals are to be narrative-driven, heavy on character and light on combat, and to give the players incentive to explore the world and flexibility to be creative with their magic. I’m lucky enough to have a partner who’s also interested in game design, so it’s been a fun project to do with him.

I do have to state for the record that I still love and adore forum RPing, though the community/culture of the hobby has gone through some changes in the last few years that are leaving me feeling a bit Eternal-September-ed. I also strongly recommend simpler, “one-page” style RPGs like Lasers and Feelings and related ‘hacks’ thereof. These sorts of games have a much lower barrier to entry and can be amazing for people who might otherwise feel overwhelmed or left out by more complex systems (like the youth I work with!) I have written some pre-made ‘modules’ and ‘kits’ for L&F and really love running games with it. Tabletop roleplaying can be amazingly powerful as a therapeutic tool. It’s being used to help young people develop confidence and social skills, it’s popular in prisons, it’s just awesome.

As for the “subculture surrounding” the game, I feel kind of the same way a lot of us ‘older nerds’ feel seeing this renaissance. It’s awesome seeing this cool, fun thing get more respect and recognition, but it’s also bittersweet to see something that had always been for “outsiders” suddenly be taken up by people who have never been on the outside. I got bullied mercilessly for loving high fantasy books and movies by the same types of people who go nuts for Game of Thrones these days, and this feels a bit similar. There’s an “in crowd” for D&D now, with the famous podcasters and all that, and while I don’t begrudge anyone their entertainment or success, it feels complicated for me personally, especially since part of me feels robbed of an early “in.” But, it does mean lots of Etsy sellers and other folks making super cool custom dice, minifigs, and other cool stuff, so that’s neat. In all, I’d say that although I might have some complicated personal feelings about D&D and its culture, in general, it’s pretty great.

If I could be any fantasy character, I would be a Halfling Druid. Even before I got into D&D, I was a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and I’ve always known I was meant to be a Hobbit. I’m a homebody who loves cozy spaces, good food, running around barefoot, and chillin with my friends near a creek, maybe hitting that pipeweed. I love animals and nature and it would be awesome to have an animal companion, be able to communicate with them, or shift into an animal shape that would let me scamper, swim, or fly. I can’t imagine a more perfect life for me.

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gochristteam · 5 years

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GO CHRIST DEVOTIONAL 11th February 2020 Nugget: Deal with the little yeast A little yeast spreads through the whole batch of dough. Galatians 5:9 ISV As huge as the Titanic ship was, it sunk because of a little whole compared to the size of the ship that was created when it came into contact with an iceberg on that sad day. Also the ship did not sink suddenly but rather water kept finding it way into the ship until it became impossible for it to float. One thing that Paul had to deal with in his letter to the Galatians was how false teachers were trying to tie the law around these Gentile Christians. They were insisting that without circumcision, their salvation would not be complete and Paul in his letter rejected this accession and stated that we are saved by our faith in Christ alone and not our works. In concluding his letter he warned them of the fact that a little yeast being a false doctrine can corrupt a whole batch of dough being who they are in Christ and the good the doctrines that has been given to them. It is a fact that the little things we ignore in life are the same things that comes back to haunt us in future. So if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your body parts than to have your whole body thrown into hell. Matthew 5:29 ISV The drunkard you see today started from a glass before graduating to a bottle. The chain smoker also started with just one stick and this should prompt us to deal with the little things in our lives that we know has to be dealt with before its too late. We can't do it by our might but God will enable us to deal with them if we ask him to do so. DIG DEEPER Galatians 5 PRAYER Please pray as led by the Holy Spirit ........................ What's App Us On +233279627832 Or visit www.Facebook.com/GoChristTeam Shalom! #possessingthenations #intheword #scripture #biblequotes #bibleverses #dailydevotional #dailyquotes #dailyinspiration #dailymotivation #dailydevotions #dailymotivationalquotes #dailydevo #devotional #devotion #jesuslovesyou #jesus #jesuschrist #bible #biblestudy #faith #holyspirit #evangelism #christianitygh #gochristdevotional #ghana https://www.instagram.com/p/B8asdzUnuuO/?igshid=1pw9w3oxminf8

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paradox-media · 6 years

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Holland: The saving grace of LGBT in South Korea

Openly gay k-pop star Holland, real name Go Tae-seob, debuted early last year and made waves within the community for the way he is openly gay in a world where the LGBT community is still heavily shunned.

Being only 22 years old and having only 3 songs to his name, Holland is always open with his fans online and can often be seen tweeting about his want for a boyfriend or showing support for the community. This was seen as such a huge deal within the k-pop community too, as it is known how Korea views the LGBT scene and how it can be damaging to someone’s career to publicly support it; so when Holland debuted his video for “Neverland” which featured himself and another man on a date and spending time together, the internet collectively ‘lost its shit.’

Within the first 20 hours “Neverland” being released, it had accumulated over 1 million views despite the rating being held on Youtube as 19+ due to scenes of the two boys openly kissing.

He works under his own label and managed to raise $40,000 in the first 24 hours of a campaign towards his first mini-album. The support that he has received from the community is phenomenal, but as expected he still faces a lot of prejudice when at home in Korea. The fact that he has to record under his own label is the first sign and the additional ‘adult content’ within his music videos shows that people still believe that being openly gay is almost not safe for work.

A huge part of being an idol and being successful worldwide is being able to understand and speak to your fans, international or not, and create that deeper connection as artist and fan. Western culture doesn’t adhere too much to this aspect but is widely seen through the use of popular streaming app V-Live where fans can openly interact with an artist. Holland uses both this app and also the Instagram live feature to interact with his fans in this way, treating them almost like extended family. This means that a lot of his fans do see him as more of a friend rather than an unattainable distant figure.

Holland has also spoken out about the fact that his music is a reflection of the way that he was bullied during high school, and uses these experiences whilst creating. By choosing to use his platform in this positive way rather than dwelling in his suffering has encouraged fans to keep a positive outlook on life and the troubles that they’ve been through. This is extremely important for a lot of LGBT youth as it is statistically proven that they are more likely to be exposed to bullying and prejudice due to their sexual or gender orientation. Having a musician in the spotlight that uses his own negative experiences to create art, and who also offers his personal support to those who may be suffering, helps to create a space for LGBT youth to feel comfortable and safe.

In August of 2017, the Supreme Court ordered the government to allow ‘Beyond the Rainbow’, an LGBT rights foundation to register as a charity with the Ministry of Justice. This means that they can now accept donations and can also operate in full compliance with the law, offering the community in South Korea to feel represented within their own government. Despite this and also the fact that same-sex relationships are recognised in the country, same-sex marriage or civil unions are still very much illegal.

Over the last few years, many different people including celebrities have tried to file suits against the government in a bid to have their marriages considered but all of them have since been rejected, or then moved on to the Supreme Court for a further ruling.

Alongside Holland in being openly gay within the Korean pop scene is MRSHLL, real name Marshall Bang, a Korean-American singer from Orange County. His mother is an evangelical Christian pastor and felt for a lot of his life that he had to suppress who he really was, throwing himself into the Church, and always denying his sexuality. Listening to artists like Mariah Carey, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin helped Marshall to realise the type of music that he really wanted to create and started then to upload covers onto Youtube. The platform helped him to gain popularity both within his home town and abroad, ultimately kickstarting his career.

Being openly gay within this community can mean a lot of things, just as it can anywhere else. People begin to perpetuate and almost fetishize the artists being gay, most of the time then dismissing their true creativity. This happened a lot especially when Holland debuted, the entire twittersephere exploding with compliments and criticism alike, not necessarily on the music he was creating, but on his sexuality and even gender identity. Queer culture can sometimes be very toxic, whether it be the fetishization of gay men by cishet women or the shunning of trans men by cis men, the community may not always be as open and accepting as it sometimes claims. The fetishization of Asian men is also not uncommon and can be seen most times under tweets and posts of not only idols but regular people of Asian descent, fans flocking to them and acting like they’re their “oppa” (please, stop that, by the way, it’s incredibly cringy…).

All in all, we should, as a community, be supporting artists of course because of their association with the LGBT community, but also because of the art that they create, and the way they treat their fans. Remember, they’re people, just like we are, who deserve the same love and respect that the rest of us do. We have to stick together.

You can support Holland on Youtube and find him on Twitter @Holland_vvv.

Words by Bekky Smart.

#LGBT #kpop #feature #Kpop feature #holland #music journalism #writing #nowhere-press #mrshll

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sciencespies · 3 years

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More Americans are finally coming around to accepting the science of evolution

https://sciencespies.com/humans/more-americans-are-finally-coming-around-to-accepting-the-science-of-evolution/

More Americans are finally coming around to accepting the science of evolution

More Americans are coming to accept Charles Darwin’s “dangerous idea” of evolution, according to thirty years’ worth of national surveys.

Researchers have found that public acceptance of biological evolution has increased substantially in the last decade alone, following twenty years of relative stagnancy.

Between 1985 and 2010, roughly 40 percent of surveyed adults in the US agreed that “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”. Taking into account the small number of fence-sitters, this suggests much of the nation was evenly divided on the theory.

By 2016, that percentage had, at last, become a majority, reaching 54 percent.

“Almost twice as many Americans held a college degree in 2018 as in 1988,” says Mark Ackerman, who studies collective intelligence at the University of Michigan.

“It’s hard to earn a college degree without acquiring at least a little respect for the success of science.”

In the current analysis, the proportion of American adults with scientific literacy increased from 11 percent in 1988 to 31 percent in 2019.

In the US, evolution has become a highly politicized topic, especially among supporters of the Republican party, which tends to align its policies with evangelical Christian values.

The result is that today, the US has some of the lowest acceptance rates for evolution in the developed world, with only Turkey scoring lower.

Even now that a majority of Americans do not reject evolution, the rate of acceptance is still low compared to other nations and much lower than scientific consensus.

In recent years, religious adherence has begun to decline in the US, but the political divide on evolution still very much exists.

In 2019, researchers found 83 percent of liberal Democrats accepted evolution, whereas only 34 percent of conservative Republicans felt the same.

The driving force behind this huge difference is probably not ideological partisanship, experts say, but fundamental religious beliefs, which Republicans tend to hold more.

“Although scientific literacy has grown, and science continues to have pervasive influence in American society,” the authors write, “a tension between religious fundamentalism and evolution remains.”

While religion clearly remains a barrier to further public acceptance of evolution, that’s gradually beginning to change. In 1988, the current analysis found only 8 percent of religious fundamentalists accepted the theory of evolution. Whereas in 2019, nearly a third did.

Along with growing exposure to scientific courses, a decline in religious fundamental beliefs will no doubt see the minority of Americans that reject evolution continue to shrink.

Last year, Pew conducted a more global survey that showed a slightly higher acceptance of evolution in the US at around 64 percent.

It’s a number that nonetheless falls far below nations such as Canada (77 percent), Germany (81 percent), and Japan (88 percent), showing the US still has some catching up to do.

The study was published in Public Understanding of Science.

#Humans

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redeemedbymygoel · 5 years

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Waiting on the Lord and Trusting His Sovereignty in Trials

“What it meant to pay the money over that night and secure the premises may be better imagined than described. Then he had not been mistaken after all! His work in Shanghai was not finished. Prayer was being answered and the guidance given for which he had longed and waited.”

~pg 66, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

Twenty weeks have passed by in the internship and we are done with our first semester! Summer is all about prepping for camp and there’s one more semester to go in the fall and God has been faithful every step of the way! We started reading the biography of Hudson Taylor, and the excerpt above reflects perfectly one huge theme of this internship- the goodness of the Lord to provide in times of waiting! Hudson Taylor was looking for housing to stay in to evangelize to the Chinese, having gone there rather poor and refusing to take pay for being a doctor, the Lord provided a home for him in the best timing! In our internship calls, we talked of how “waiting on the Lord means resting in God and His timing” and indeed is that something the Lord has taught me in the internship. From fundraising to God’s gracious timing on plane tickets and even more graciousness in canceling and re-booking flights God has had His hand over each event and prevailed in glory with the way He provides to quench every potential worry! The very crux of the internship- desiring to adopt/ foster and praying about mission for the last 2.5 years, seemingly seeing this as impossible due to singleness and rejections from jobs abroad, to seeing God put it all together so quickly and solidified by the Word centered-ness of the internship could not have been more of a testimony to how the Lord answers prayers, not necessarily in ways we think he’ll answer but in His timing.

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose.” ~ Romans 8:28 (ESV)

Only in His timing and will are things more glorious than we can imagine. In it all, life still has twists though...

“He must give up his house, remove his belongings to Shanghai and be careful not transgress in future... Those young inquirers- Chang, Sung and the others- what was to become of them? Were they not his own children in the faith? How could he leave them with no help and so little knowledge in the things of God? Yet the Lord had permitted it. The work was His. He would not fail them nor forsake them.”

~ pg 70, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

The words above encourage immensely in trusting the Lord in His sovereignty! Hudson Taylor had a heart to evangelize to the Chinese, was provided housing, but then met difficulties a time later when he was kicked out of a certain area that was not “within British allowance” (even though other European countries had occupancy there). He had barely had a lot of time to grow the church to maturity there yet the Lord had permitted it. Taylor trusted that God would work and continued on! It reminds me of when Paul and his brothers in Acts were prevented by the Spirit to go to certain areas and how they meekly followed God’s leading.

Greatly, the internship was also part of the theme of the grace of God’s sovereignty. God is sovereign in trusting that even though Mitchell aged out that God has a plan for His glory in that. God is sovereign in trusting that although all of a sudden the teaching laws of my district changed where I am forbidden to teacher without a licence. God is sovereign over the extremely tough circumstances I face study for two content exams on education (which I have no background in). He is sovereign that whether I pass and have to go through a 4 year process to get a license (which begs to question a difficult decision to apply to jobs abroad) or that if I fail God will provide a new job or a grace period. God is sovereign over my unsaved family’s lives and my next prayerfully opportune trip to visit my grandpa in Taiwan, which just approved of gay marriage. God is the sovereign over my life so what do I have to fear of all these things?

“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~ Romans 8:31-32, 37-39

There are so many unknowns in the future but I am so incredible excited to trust and wait on the Lord through each and every minute of it! I confess that I was met with anxieties the first week where it seemed like everything was hitting hard, but praise God for His grace and wake up call to give these things to Him for He will provide and be faithful to the end. On these promises did the joy come through the anxieties because He reminded me:

“And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” ~ Matthew 6:27

The Good Lord is right. Worry did nothing for me. So I choose to trust Him and I’m so excited for the day He provides and being able to as a beloved child say that I trusted my Father in it all and He came through. I will treasure being able to a cherished “brethren” to the Lord say that Christ, who adopted me into His family, worked it out for me for good on the basis of His blood alone. I will cherish being able to say, my kinsman-redeemer who is the bridegroom for the church, of who I am a part of a betrothal to Him for, has valiantly provided for and came through for His bride.

#hudsontaylor #romans8 #godissovereign #waitingonthelord

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letters-from-paradise · 5 years

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My Journey With Books

We recently enjoyed the hospitality of some dear friends of many years. Shortly after we left, they wrote to me …

We were inspired and uplifted by your energy and hope for the new adventure that is ahead of you. We have felt quite worn out recently . . . There is a sense of having lost our deep connection and strength from God. It feels a long way off, still there, we ‘know it’ but recently feeling it and drawing upon it just isn’t happening. We know spending time in Gods word would make such a difference. And we were wondering what you might recommend to read, or a study to do, something that would give us a new focus, on Gods awesomeness, reminding us that He is our centre and giving us that mental focus and spiritual connection. Something that we just want to dive in to, to look forward to each morning/evening. We’re not sure where to even start, a topic that has been on our minds is gratitude. We hoped contained within your wealth of reading, a book or study might jump out as a suggestion.

Once I’d written a response to them, I thought that what I shared might be helpful for someone else - maybe you.

What I wrote was a narrative of my spiritual journey of the past ten years, and the books and authors Jesus gave to walk me into a wonderful renewal of my heart for God and people. Here’s my reply …

As I write some of my story, I will mention authors and books that have provided wonderful vigour and spark to my walk with God and with people - in this way I will be recommending the resources that have most touched me, and as you read, the Holy Spirit may just make something stand out to you, as being right for where you are on your journey.

You will find that most of this story and the books that I’ve journeyed with are about seeing the loving Father - his goodness, love and grace - in scope and magnitude and wonder that I had not ever seen before. And they are about how these life changing visions of God have flowed down and renewed my love for Him and for people, and restored wonder back into my own life.

Wm Paul Young

About ten years ago, after some resistance to the idea, I picked up a copy of The Shack by Paul Young. After working through the first chapter or two I came to a part that stopped me in my tracks! The scene was of a man with a great sadness in his life, and some serious anger at God, being embraced enthusiastically and unconditionally by Papa (the authors name for the heavenly Father). It became my own moment of God-embrace, and set off an experience in the love of God … that I hope will never end!

Not only that, but the author surprised me with characters depicting the Trinity that shook my previous imaginings of what God was like to the core. A deliberate ploy by the author to shake us (or maybe just me) out of familiarity with a (too small and predicable) God, to enable this One who St John called “love” to be reimagined and embraced again. And I walked in the glow of this book for months to come.

C. Baxter Kruger

Soon afterwards my eldest son, Toby, introduced me to another author - C. Baxter Kruger. Baxter is an American Theologian whose passion is to reveal the Trinity and God’s love for us and his plan to reconcile a fallen world to Himself. At that time Baxter had started touring with Paul Young, and it was said that Baxter wrote about the theology behind Paul’s allegory, The Shack. Interestingly, they had never met before The Shack was published.

Happily, Baxter’s books are around just 100 pages in length, but packed with a powerful love-soaked message that just blew me away. God is for us was the first of Baxter’s books I read and I loved it: commencing with an unforgettable explanation of St Paul’s astonishment that God had included us in Christ’s resurrection and ascension. Soon I was reading The Great Dance and all the rest of Baxter’s books. Jesus and the Undoing of Adam was breathtaking!

As much as anything I was re-learning about the Cross of Calvary, and how God revealed himself there and took us into his saving plan.

It was just what I needed, because my knowledge of God and His things had become stale and stalled - there was no longer any freshness or progress in my understanding.

On top of my still current experience from The Shack, Baxter’s books were wonderful!

Rob Bell

By the time I picked up Rob Bell’s book Love Wins I was already comfortable with the art of asking questions, for in finding that which was fresh and new and reinvigorating to me, required questioning some of the old ideas I’d once held. That’s what ‘Love Wins’ was for me, it was permission to keep asking questions. As Rob found out, not everyone likes that, especially if it’s about a sacred cow you’ve protected all your life.

The questions don’t always lead people to the same answers, but like Rob, I found they led me to see love and to see God through a wonderful new lens.

I’ve read a number of Rob’s books since then, and his podcasts (called the Robcast) have always inspired. What We Talk About When We talk About God and What is the Bible? are two excellent offerings from this master communicator. And, yes, I did get to meet Rob in Auckland just a few years ago.

More from Paul and Baxter

A few years into this journey two really good things happened. First, Baxter wrote his book about Paul’s book, and named it The Shack Revisited. He gave it a tantalising sub-title: ‘There is More Going on Here than You Ever Dared to Dream’. In this book Baxter helped explain the Biblical truths undergirding Paul’s allegory of the Trinity and how a shattered human can find healing and transforming love. I was so taken by this book that I bought a copy for every couple in our church - most of whom were already ‘Shack’ lovers.

The second good thing that transpired was an opportunity to host Paul Young and Baxter Kruger in Auckland … together!

So in January 2014 Suzanne and I gathered 30 people into a big house in Riverhead and enjoyed the most wonderful day with these two ‘giants’. I have subsequently read all of Baxter and Paul’s books, and apart from those I’ve already mentioned, one stands out - Paul Young’s Lies We Believe about God for which Baxter writes the Foreword (which I thought was worth the price of the book alone).

This is a very thought provoking, but I found, freeing little book … the bookseller’s blurb says: “33 commonly uttered things we say about God, revealing how they keep us from having a full, loving relationship with God. Using personal anecdotes and drawing on the touching comments from his readers of The Shack, Wm. Paul Young encourages readers to think anew about important issues, including sin, religion, hell, politics, identity, creation and human rights. In the process, he helps us discover God's deep and abiding love.” So true!

Not only was God capturing my affections and awe in new and wonderful ways, but the experiences I were enjoying were changing my message and practice as a pastor.

Actually, my job was becoming easier simply because the love and grace of God was washing over my congregation - and not just through me. Others were starting fresh journeys, and I’m sure a window in heaven was open and pouring the goodness of God upon us.

Brennan Manning

Along the way, Brennan Manning kept popping up. Dear Brennan passed away a few years ago, but left behind some quotes that completely “undid” me. One favourite:

“Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness; beyond fidelity and infidelity; that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain; that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, your whole being rejects it; do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation, and loves you this moment as you are and not as you should be?”

Oh me, oh my.

Two of Brennan books sit side by side on our bookcase: The Ragamuffin Gospel and All is Grace.

Robert Farrar Capon

I must mention Robert Farrar Capon. Sadly this gem of a man passed away in recent years, but like Brennan Manning, left a great legacy in books, and some most enjoyable quotes - yes a man with a wonderful turn of phrase, sense of humour and vision of mercy, love and grace.

As I write, Robert’s book The Mystery of Christ is on the way.

"Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears."

(Don’t get me started on Capon quotes - there is just to end to the bliss).

Two other Capon books sit side by side on our bookshelf: Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law and the Outrage of Grace and Health. Money and Love: And Why We Don’t Enjoy Them. And happily there are still many more to buy … including his much acclaimed series on the Parables.

Brian Zahnd

As I have journeyed so have books and their authors journeyed with me. I can easily remember the impact of Brian Zahnd’s book Water to Wine. It’s by-line is “Some of My Story” and I found I could identify with so much of the testimony I found in Brian’s book, and as the title says,

it really has been a decade of leaving behind water to discover the wine of a new relationship with an extraordinary loving and grace-filled God.

I couldn’t wait for Brian’s next book, and after reading Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God I simply wanted to read it again. Brian takes us through a range of topics that lead us away from an “angry God” who is wrathful towards sinners - imbedded in so much of Evangelical theology - and paints a picture of the loving God who is perfectly revealed through Jesus. More stunning, life-changing truth for me. It was a huge privilege to meet Brian and Peri Zahnd in Tauranga last year (a one day prayer school), and of course have him sign my copy of his book.

Brad Jersak

And meet my fellow traveller, Brad Jersak. It was a thrill to meet Brad in Auckland last year, but not before two of his books had lovingly done some rearranging of my spiritual furniture. The first, Her Gates Will Never be Shut had been recommended by Baxter Kruger. The second, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel reveals the God who looks like Jesus in every respect, the perfect Incarnation of self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.

The One, who by now, had completely captured my heart in a way I had thought I would never know - maybe others, but probably not me. O how marvellous to be found wrong on that little bit of self doubt.

Jessica Kelley

Jessica Kelley placed a capstone, of sorts, on my understanding of grief and where God is in the midst of tragedy - this was personal for me, of course, having the sadness of loosing our 16 year old son, Regan. In Lord Willing? she tells the story of her five year old son’s suffering and death from cancer, but more than that, Jessica opens our hearts to a vision of God that is far from aloof at such times, and is most certainly not the instigator or ‘allower’ of such sadnesses that befall us. This God walks vulnerably with the vulnerable, he is the lover of our souls.

Richard Rohr

I almost had another “Shack” encounter when I read Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance. it made me realise that for a number of years I’d been reading and listening and talking about … God himself, the beautiful Heavenly family, this utterly loving Trinity; and it was transforming, it was freeing and it was deeply worship invoking.

It was changing my heart toward people, ridding me of judgementalism and past elitist dogma.

And I realised that most pastors I knew (and I had been one) didn’t read books about God! They were more interested in learning how to lead a bigger church, or heal more sick people, or get revival, or … but actually not about God.

All this was going on in my brain as my spirit was being further renewed with Richard Rohr. There are now three other Rohr books in the house, and quite unique in the devotional and contemplative path they chart, as well as the brilliant revelation of truth they bring. Falling Upward is a classic - just had to throw that in.

Rachel Held Evans

Did I mention Rachel Held Evans? Probably not because Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again has only been in the house a couple of weeks and Suzanne has claimed it first! But O … it’s touching her heart and restoring lost treasures - it’s beautiful to behold.

As I write this, it dawns on me that I’ve been keeping company with Catholic Priests, Anglican Vicars, Charismatic pastors, Orthodox Monastery preachers, Presbyterian theologians, itinerant social change-makers … everyone of them captivated by the great Lover himself, everyone of them with a unique and moving story to tell, everyone of them with treasures to give away.

It makes me think how narrow my band of reference and fellowship had become, and how awful and ill-informed my prejudices had been. But not any more … Jesus had given me, given both Sue and me, not only a brilliantly diverse band of people who write books with whom to journey (and I’ve not covered them all), but also a wonderfully diverse band of friends who read books, who love me and walk alongside me. It’s amazing grace and it’s an amazing life.

_________________________________

Footnote

These days I buy all my books from The Book Depository (good prices and shipping). Should a book not be available from The Book Depository, I then go to Amazon.

https://www.bookdepository.com

https://www.amazon.com

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fialleril · 8 years

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Okay then, thanks Part 1: My parents are catholic and I have some aunts and cousins evangelicals, the catholic side of my family teach me some things that now I disagree, but they don't force into me and in general are great. My aunts and cousins trying to make me a protestant since my childhood, they used to take me to the cult, I like to go, as I like to go to mass, but after I discover they did that without my parents permission, they are very rude about the catholic church.

(Putting the rest under a cut)

part 2 I used to go always to their church, one time me and my little sister went for a camp and in the time was good, but slowly and without us perceiving, they use psychological techniques of brainwash, I don't think they know they did it, and the suggestion think, they also lie about my mother and other things. My mom discover and ask for a year or teachings about the catholic church for refute all their lies. I see the logic, but I was so angry with everyone and with God...

part 3 I was very confused, and the fact I always struggle with lust didn't help. I stay away for more than a year and I was so angry with my cousins and with the Protestantism in general, a traditional catholic group find me in my pain and anger, I learn a lot about the culture and traditions of the church, whose are beautiful, but I still was fragile, I start believe in everything they said, don't seeing they were using the same inducing, I absorve their radicalism...

part 4: I start becoming a awful person, intolerant and full of myself, my struggles with lust making me thinking, I also noticed that I could be Bi, but I denied in that time. I noticed what I was turn and leave the group, sometimes I go to church, sometimes not and I don't know what more I believe, the God they describe to me was not a loving father, but a abusive one who only would love me if I wasn't like I am. I'm bi, I intenses desires, I'm intense.

last part: now I'm so confused, sometimes I missed the mass and Jesus and the historys, I also find a more tolerant and supportive priest, but I don't know if I still can believe, I still angry sometimes. And I feel like even if I'm capable to come back, would be in my own way to believe, feminist, pro LGBT, embracing my sexuality and desires, just there are a voice in my head saying that this would be wrong. if I never can believe again I would be sad, becos catholicism is also cultural for me

So first, anon friend, I just want to say that your story sounds pretty similar to mine, and that you aren’t alone. You absolutely aren’t alone and there’s nothing wrong or broken in you for feeling this way.

There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with you for embracing the person God created you to be. I’m gonna say this bluntly, because I think it’s hugely important: anyone who would try to make you feel fundamentally broken or wrong or less than human is not speaking for God. You are a person created in the image of God. You are not a sin. Knowing and owning yourself is not a sin. The first and cardinal sin is treating people like things - including yourself.

There is unfortunately a vocal stream of fundamentalism in the Catholic church. I’m a convert to Catholicism and I love so many things about this tradition that have been life-giving to me, and even so, there are certain Catholic spaces I will never feel safe in. There are certain elements of Catholic fundamentalism I’m probably never going to be able to argue rationally against, because they’re also triggers.

Fortunately for me, the church is quite huge and contains multitudes, and I can avoid those elements (as well as helping other people to find safe places within the Catholic tradition). But I will never tell anyone that they should do that, too. I understand needing to leave. I understand the anger, and the need to reject, and I am never going to try to convince anyone they should stay in, or return to, a place that has hurt them.

If you decide you do want to be involved with the Catholic church, I’m happy to talk about anything. If you decide you don’t, I’m still happy to talk. I can’t give you any certain answers and I would never presume to try. But I can tell you some things that I’ve found to be true for me.

One thing is this: anger with God is a valid emotion. It’s not wrong, and it’s not sinful. God desires friendship with us, and anger is a part of all friendships. Anger is a natural response to being hurt, and the deeper the hurt, the deeper the anger.

I’ve found for myself that praying my anger is actually very fruitful. Because, really, what I’m angry at is my image of God, the image of God that I was indoctrinated with and that for so long was both a tool and a perpetrator of abuse.

I remember once, when I was in college, going out into the garden around midnight and just screaming at God. I must have stayed out there for over an hour, angry and shaking. I went to the garden because I felt safe there. Because plants and trees and starlight have always been the places where I encounter the numinous. As a child I thought that was somehow wrong. That God should only be found in church and scripture and every word out of the pastor’s mouth. So I was angry at God, and even more angry at the entire concept of church, and I was feeling rebellious. So I went out into the garden and I gave God a piece of my mind.

I won’t tell you I heard words, or anything like that. But eventually I sat back against the bark of my favorite tree, and I felt...enfolded. Held. I closed my eyes and I could hear the tree’s heartbeat, and I felt, suddenly, that God was there, with me and around me and in me.

The next day I went and talked to one of the Jesuit priests in my school’s campus ministry department. I felt like I’d had some kind of revelation, like I understood something about the universe for the first time. But, at the same time, there was that old hateful voice in my head, the voice of my childhood pastor, telling me that I was deluding myself, that what I’d experienced must be some temptation from the devil because I was the worst of sinners for daring to be angry with God.

And to my shock, that Jesuit sat me down and smiled at me and thanked me for sharing something so wonderful and beautiful with him. He told me that we meet God in our daily lives, that our experiences are holy, that our emotions are holy. And then (because he was a Jesuit and if you’ve met any Jesuits you know how they are lol) he gave me a whole list of books to read and a lot of suggestions for how to sit with my anger and pray with it and meet God in it.

I tell that story for two reasons: because I want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with being angry at God, that it can even be a deeply sacred experience which does have a long history in our Catholic mystical tradition; and also because I want to say that, if you’re like me, that voice in your head telling you all of this is wrong probably won’t go away. I still have that voice. But what you can do is name it.

That’s where I think that calling spiritual abuse “abuse” is important. Because that voice in your head? Those are intrusive thoughts. That’s the after-effects of brainwashing, of mental programming. You will probably keep hearing that voice, but if you can name it as intrusive thoughts, then it doesn’t have to have any power over you. You can fight it, because it’s not really you.

#replies #anon #spiritual abuse #religious abuse #brainwashing #intrusive thoughts #religion #fundamentalism #catholicism #theology

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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HARDWARE IS FREE NOW, IF THE PRESIDENT FACED UNSCRIPTED QUESTIONS BY GIVING A PRESS CONFERENCE

Some writers quote parts of things they say to one another? Teaching hackers how to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.1 If you're sure of the general area you want to do. And since the danger of raising money—that they'll cruise through all the potential users, at least subconsciously, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. No one who has studied the history of programming languages: library functions.2 Such hypersensitivity will come at an ever increasing rate. Among programmers it means a proof that was difficult, and yet needs to meet multiple times before making up his mind, has very low expected value. Alas, you can't simply applaud everything they produce.3

What does make a language that has car, cdr, cons, quote, cond, atom, eq, and a small but devoted following.4 Every startup's rule should be: spend little, and they were used in the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings norman north man who arrived four centuries later in 911.5 In principle investors are all subject to the same cause.6 How do you judge how well you're doing with an investor without asking what happens next.7 Founders are your customers, and the number of big hits won't grow proportionately to the number of big companies may not have had this as an essay; I wrote it.8 And yet, oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that.9 Be good, take care of themselves. When I see a third mistake: timidity. But when founders of larval startups worry about this. It is so much harder.

But as technology has grown more important, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for opinions expressed here, remember that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, perhaps millions, just to make the software run on our Web site, all you'd find were the titles of two books in my bio. No big deal. Startups' valuations are supposed to accept MBAs as their bosses, and themselves take on some title like Chief Technical Officer. Piracy is effectively the lowest tier of price discrimination. I'd realized in college that one ought to vote for Kerry. All you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. A lot of VCs would have rejected Microsoft.

He said their business model is being undermined on two fronts. The most productive young people will always be true that most people never seem to make is to take board seats, then your company is only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, a company looks much like college, but it's there. You can start one when you're done, or even whether it still sends one.10 But she could never pick out successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way it is released.11 It's just a means to something else. We just don't hear about it. It doesn't seem to be unusually smart, and C is a kludge.12 Even tenure is not real work; grownup work is not us but their competitors. One thing you can say We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of a language is readability, not succinctness; it could also mean they have fewer losers. A good flatterer doesn't lie, but that won't be enough. Is that so bad?13 Raising more money just lets us do it faster.

I thought that something must be. So it is in the form of the GI Bill, which sent 2. There is nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of other investors. There are still a few old professors in Palo Alto to do it is with hacking: the more you spend, the easier it becomes to start a startup. I don't like the look of Java: 1.14 Imagine how incongruous the New York Times front page. But you can tell that from indirect evidence. In an IPO, it might not merely add expense, but it's certainly not here now. Kids are less perceptive.

It let them build great looking online stores literally in minutes.15 The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it clear you plan to raise a $7 million series A round. I'm not sure why this is so.16 But I've learned never to say never about technology. Bad circumstances can break the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of a strong-willed person stronger-willed. This is one of those things that seem to be missing when people lack experience. They just had us tuned out. The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them as children, to leave this tangle unexamined.

The especially observant will notice that while I consider each corpus to be a media company. And so interfaces tend not to have a habit of impatience about the things you have to like your work more than any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. The goal in a startup is to try. In fact, I'd guess the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be because it's beautiful, or because you've been assigned to work on projects that seem like bragging, flames, digressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.17 I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you know beforehand what you want. But vice versa as well. I like. But if you're living in the future.18 Now the misunderstood artist is not a critique of Java! A typical desktop software company might do one or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they have less reputation to protect. It's more important than what it got wrong.

Notes

I think this is a bad idea has been happening for a CEO to make money. Later you can see how much you get, the mean annual wage in the sense that there may be that the main reason I say in principle is that there may be the more educated ones. Or more precisely, investors treat them differently. Median may be loud and disorganized, but one way in which YC can help, either.

They're often different in kind, because you have to make money. He, like most of the things they've tried on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor written in C and C, and large bribes by Spain to make money.

Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. Change in the technology business. The more people you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may as well as specific versions, and as an asset class. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow.

Something similar has been around as long as the average startup.

Part of the ingredients in our own, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by the PR firm.

If they were, like angel investors in startups is uninterruptability. The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and spend hours arguing over irrelevant things. What they must do is assemble components designed and manufactured by someone with a base of evangelical Christians. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

Which feels a lot about how the stakes were used. But he got killed in the sense of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp, because a there was a very noticeable change in their voices will be big successes but who are weak in other Lisp features like lexical closures and rest parameters.

In fact, this is also not a big effect on what interests you most. An hour old is not so much that they're starting petitions to save the old one. Google adopted Don't be fooled.

Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been the plague of 1347; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies. But what he means by long shots are people in the standard edition of Aristotle's immediate successors may have been sent packing by the investors agree, and Smartleaf co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the top schools are the numbers like the application of math to real problems, and wouldn't expect the opposite: when we created pets. Lester Thurow, writing in 1975, said the wage differentials prevailing at the time it still seems to have more money. I don't know.

Donald J.

If you have no representation more concise than a huge loophole.

I startups. Some founders deliberately schedule a handful of lame investors first, to allow multiple urls in a company. Seneca Ep.

But one of its users, at least 150 million in 1970. Even as late as Newton's time it would be a great programmer will invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary. But the most dramatic departure from the other extreme, the un-rapacious founder is being able to formalize a small amount of damage to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://www. 99 to—A Spam Classification Organization Program.

Ironically, one variant of the country would buy one.

This doesn't mean easy, of S P 500 CEOs in the narrowest sense. In fact most of the movie Dawn of the clumps of smart people are trying to make a lot would be a founder; and with that additional constraint, you need is a trailing indicator in any era if people can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. 5,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the US.

In 1800 an empty room, and Reddit is Delicious/popular.

Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization. It's lame that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods. A professor at a public company CEOs were J.

Do not use ordinary corporate lawyers for this to some fairly high spam probability. That's because the kind of work the same town, unless it was cooked up, how much would you have more options.

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