#hell is the absence of god

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

"Hell is the Absence of God" is available to read here

[feydpauls]

it's been a whole day since i finished reading it, but i still can't stop thinking about ted chiang's ''hell is the absence of god''

[deuterosapiens]

Wrapping up Stories of Your Life, we are confronted with this little duo: "Hell is the Absence of God" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary".

"Hell is the Absence of God"- On the surface, a man loses his wife and seeks to be reunited with her in the afterlife. That itself isn't too remarkable, and were this simply that sort of story, I likely wouldn't have any opinions on it outside of acknowledging its place in this collection. What's interesting here is how much of an active presence Heaven and Hell have in this particular world, where the appearances of angels are as frequent as they are on a Night Vale baseball field. The arrival of an angelic presence is comparable to some form of natural disaster, with the ending here playing out remarkably like your typical Twister-obsessed Storm-Chaser affair. There's a recurring element about the pursuit of God for selfish reasons, with our lead finding himself condemned to being forgotten by God completely due to using Heaven as little more than a means by which he may be united with his wife. This story is unambiguously a dramatic love story, and a most unfortunate one. One can easily see Neil's Sarah as comparable to the Pilgrim's Beatrice, or Poe's Lenore. Honestly, this is solid and ripe for adaptation, though I can assume no studio would want to touch the ending.

"Liking What You See: A Documentary"- A technology has been developed that allows people to shut-off the parts of their brains responsible for the perceptions of appearance-based beauty. The fictional documentary in this story details a college's attempts to make the use of this technology mandatory for all students and staff on campus; it depicts the back-and-forth arguments of those sides for and against this initiative, and one student's personally experience living with this technology and willing giving it up. In general, this is probably the most straightforward story in this collection, but I feel like, despite being published in 2002 (oh God!), it probably does have a particularly meaningful slant now, more than ever. After all, in our world now, beauty isn't just commercialized and marketable, but the technology of influencing a person's feelings and reality perceptions is becoming more real than it could ever have been dreamed to have been, back then.

Of the two, yes "Absence of God" is my favorite.

[esevik]

Hell is the absence of God

This story is like the other ones well-written but it's more fast paced.

It's about angels randomly appearing on earth, but these aren't nice angels but the apathetic kind that act like natural disasters bringing both blessings and calamity wherever they show themselves. It's a lot about people finding or loving God despite humanity's unfair treatment and I don't know if it's because I'm an atheist but in my opinion no higher being is acting like that is deserving of unconditional love.

There's also a lot of ableism in the story with disabled people hoping to be miraculously cured with the one person who found strength in her disability being seen as a rarity and healed against her will. Overall disabilities in the story were viewed as either punishments or test for humans to overcome, which, yeah...

Rating B-

[agravediggerdreamsofgardening]

[snarkspawn]

light of kshahrewar ✨

[kelocitta]

"But if we dont get reblogs and likes than why bother creating at all" Did you never doodle in your notebook in class. Did you never have a notebook of cringe doodles you never wanted people to see but got filled anyway. Was this never something you did because it was a tool of personal comfort.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

set out to create a serious, canonesque drawing with which to say "feel free to go in my lackadaisy tag and help me mystery speculate" but only got going when i made it bowling and the rarepair agenda

[tiddiesoutwhenthetisout]

not me curling my laptop charger wire the way you curl band equipment cords HAHAHA god i miss it

[everyones-story]

to be honest if i dont see some mutuals on my dash or in my notes for a while and i think of them i freak out and get scared they blocked me and secretly hate me and talk shit about me

[ardentpoop]

the angels (collectively, as a concept) were the worst thing to happen to supernatural's narrative btw im sorry if you cant see that bc you're attached to individual characters

[cottonpuffmouse]

Recently had two philosophical epiphanies:

1. Life is not a dream or a simulation. The world is not a dream or a simulation. Reality is tangible and real and that is good thing.

2. Hell is treading water. Heaven is just a chair. Neither are really worth trying to work towards.

[nefretemerson]

everything about RealPage pisses me off

[phantom-does-a-thing]

It’s almost worse knowing they hurt me unintentionally because I don’t have any right to hate them. It was an accident, they didn’t know, but still I have breakdowns at the mention of them and they don’t even know.

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

new endless ocean game let's GOOOOOOOOOOO

[coffincoitus]

‼️ ⚠️ PENNY DREADFUL SPOILERS!!!! ⚠️‼️

okay. I thought it was kinda weird how ethan started talking about believing in god and they started praying and then vanessa died saying she could see "our lord" like what in the catechism is thisssssss