#making right decisions

[christianotome]

Choosing with God

I’m about to make some really important decisions in my professional life that will impact my personal life as well. I’ve been praying about this, but I often think, “What if I choose wrong and mess up the plans God has for me? And what if my past decisions messed up my whole life forever?”

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary about the Bible, and it started telling the story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The documentary highlighted how God had protected the scrolls for thousands of years and used the disappearance of goats to guide Bedouin shepherds to where they were hidden.

I believe God was trying to show me that, just as He guided those people to the cave that contained the scrolls, He can also guide me now to make the best decision possible.

[thesaltyace]

Y'all I did NOT know this about Harris, and I think it's really critical that we all listen and understand as we approach this election. Video at the end.

This creator's video describes how progressive Harris was as a prosecutor -- actively going against the grain to the point she was accused of being soft on crime. Accused of being a social worker, not a prosecutor. She calls it being smart on crime. She's pushing for systemic changes to give real pathways to reintegrate incarcerated folks back into society and prevent their past from continuing to haunt them moving forward.

"Kamala's a cop" is a catchy dismissive response usually used to shut down conversation rather than add nuance. But this kind of reform is ESSENTIAL to work towards a present and future that treats incarcerated people with value.

I fell for it in 2020 and have thought "Kamala's a cop" without further inspection since - and I'm sobered by the realization that (you guessed it!) I'm not immune to propaganda.

A better system only follows liberal democracy, because library democracy allows for exploration of better systems. If authoritarianism takes hold, it will not allow for the exploration of better systems. We will have to fight tooth and nail just to try to get back to liberal democracy, and I suspect we could not achieve it in our lifetimes.

Harris isn't perfect. But she's a hell of a lot better than many leftists have led me to believe. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Don't let perfection be the enemy of harm reduction.

We can either help elect Trump and usher in authoritarian fascism, or we can help defeat him and pull things back in the direction we want to go. Not liking the choices doesn't absolve you from participating and doing the most good you can with the options available.

I'll link the original video in the replies. The original video has captions if you need them.

[algrit]

Immportality must be tiring huh?

[technically-human]

Recharging

[lilislegacy]

percy, holding out his fist in his palm: ok wise girl. rock paper scissors time. if i win, i get to pick the movie for date night

annabeth, doing the same: fine, but if i win, we move back across the country to that house in westchester that i love

grover, looking over in alarm: what?! how is that even—

percy, nodding firmly: deal. rock pap—

[whitegownsandflowercrowns]

Today, J. Cole woke up feeling completely refreshed. The water was the perfect temperature for his morning shower. His breakfast was all organic and delicious. He got in a great workout. He went to church and wholeheartedly thanked God for all his blessings. When he went down to the studios, the creative juices were flowing and he got a lot written. Then, he went outside, spent plenty of time in nature. The sunlight was hitting the trees just right, the flowers were blooming, and the birdsong was beautiful. It was a great day.

[shadowblade8192]

likes charge reblogs cast

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

A phone call between brothers (takes place AFTER this incident and Fiddleford's phone call)

Sorry if this is OOC!

[choccy-milky]

herbology class 🌹🌿 (from chap 2 of my fic!)

[lets-try-to-be-normal-otakus]

Give me O!Steve in his freshman year fooling around with A!Eddie. Maybe they both thought it was a summer fling or Steve was looking for it to turn into a relationship but Eddie wasn't. Give me Eddie 'oh shit I'm catching feelings' Munson start to pull away from this amazing and funny and lovely omega he's seeing.

Give me heartbroken Steve who, after skipping a heat, finds out he's pregnant with his the alpha's pup(s). Give me steve freaking out cause holy shit he's too young to be a dame and his alpha doesn't even want him.

Give me steve crying and making a decision that's too heavy for a young mom- or person- to make. He makes the difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy. He's just too young. He wants kids but not at this point in his life.

Give me 4 years of steve avoiding Eddie and Eddie forever regretting leaving the omega. Both because he's still afraid of the love he saw and steve always scents so sad around him.

Give me steve borderline depressed and wanting kids, having to live with the what-ifs of his life. Of how big their kids would be now. Of how they'd be talking and probably have Eddie's eyes and hair. Of trying to brush and tame the wild frizzy locks while they tell him about their day. Give me steve in mourning because of a difficult decision he was forced to make. Give me reserved steve because of how, regardless of what decision he made, he still marred his youth and had to grow up too fast.

Give me him being a surrogate mom for dustin, and when Ms Henderson comments on what a lovely parent he'd be, he cries himself to sleep alone in his bed.

[ffcrazy15]

There's this way of doing female-ness in Christianity that I call "pastel flower journal Christianity." I've got nothing against pastel flower journals per se, but for some reason people believe it's the end all and be all of female spirituality, and I think it's a real disservice towards young Christian women.

One of these days I'd like to start a prayer-and-reading group or something for young women, but there would be no floral themes or over-focus on how "God thinks you're beautiful even if the world doesn't" (a true statement, but it's wayyyyy too often the focus in women's spiritual reading). Instead we would be reading:

Seneca's Letters from a Stoic

Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Sheed's A Map of Life

Portions of Pieper's book on leisure

Kreeft's Three Philosophies of Life

Guardini's The Lord (or something similar)

Therese's Story of a Soul

and some select portions of the Nicomachean Ethics.

(Also they're all getting the porn talk. I don't know why we give the porn talk to young men but not young women. There's this idea that women don't use porn and they only need the talk about "guarding their heart." Bullshit. There's porn on the YA shelves of Barnes and Nobles and before that there were bodice rippers. Young women need the porn talk too.)

Every young woman needs to be getting a basic grounding in virtue ethics, logic, natural law, scholastic philosophy and Biblical hermeneutics if they're going to get by in today's spiritual landscape. Enough faffery and emotionalism in young women's spiritual education! Give them real food to chew on, not pasty sentimentalism!

[emmygdala]

greater heights (yap under the cut)

iiiii said this to my friend when i was drawing but!! i wanted to draw black mountains behind emmet and white clouds for ingo (because white = emmet and black = ingo Heh i'm a genius. I know) but mostly the clouds represent "greater heights" that ingo has "moved on" to. but emmet himself is still stagnant in the past which is why i chose the mountains

emmet facing the "light" and ingo facing down casting a shadow is intentional and i chose not to draw their arms to represent them losing a piece of each other,, with emmet losing his right arm (i hc ingo is right handed) and vice versa......

i posted this on twitter roughly a month ago (it is deleted now like most my other art) with the caption "節哀順變" and it's a phrase we say in chinese to others who are mourning a loss & i don't know how to translate it exactly? i think the english equivalent is "sorry for your loss" or "my condolences" but the general idea of the phrase is more like,, to not let yourself be ruled by grief kinda sorry i'm tired i can't translate/think well right now

[reasonsforhope]

THANK FUCKING GOD

"The Supreme Court on Thursday [June 13, 2024] unanimously preserved access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion decision since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.

The nine justices ruled that abortion opponents lacked the legal right to sue over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication, mifepristone, and the FDA’s subsequent actions to ease access to it. The case had threatened to restrict access to mifepristone across the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.

Abortion is banned at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states, and after about six weeks of pregnancy in three others, often before women realize they’re pregnant.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was part of the majority to overturn Roe, wrote for the court on Thursday that “federal courts are the wrong forum for addressing the plaintiffs’ concerns about FDA’s actions.”

The opinion underscored the stakes of the 2024 election and the possibility that an FDA commissioner appointed by Republican Donald Trump, if he wins the White House, could consider tightening access to mifepristone, including prohibiting sending it through the mail...

Kavanaugh’s opinion managed to unite a court deeply divided over abortion and many other divisive social issues by employing a minimalist approach that focused solely on the technical legal issue of standing and reached no judgment about the FDA’s actions...

While praising the decision, President Joe Biden signaled Democrats will continue to campaign heavily on abortion ahead of the November elections. “It does not change the fact that the right for a woman to get the treatment she needs is imperiled if not impossible in many states,” Biden said in a statement...

About two-thirds of U.S. adults oppose banning the use of mifepristone, or medication abortion, nationwide, according to a KFF poll conducted in February. About one-third would support a nationwide ban...

More than 6 million people [in the U.S.] have used mifepristone since 2000. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone and primes the uterus to respond to the contraction-causing effect of a second drug, misoprostol. The two-drug regimen has been used to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks gestation...

Biden’s administration and drug manufacturers had warned that siding with abortion opponents in this case could [have] undermined the FDA’s drug approval process beyond the abortion context by inviting judges to second-guess the agency’s scientific judgments. The Democratic administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, which makes mifepristone, argued that the drug is among the safest the FDA has ever approved."

-via AP, June 13, 2024

--

Note: A massive relief and a genuine victory - this will preserve access to the medication used in 2/3rds of abortions last year, for at least another 2 years. (Probably minimum time it will take Republicans to get their next attempt before the Supreme Court.)

Still, with this, a sword that has been hanging over our heads for the last two years is gone. There will be a new one soon, but we just bought ourselves probably at least 2 years. The fight isn't over, but this is absolutely worth celebrating.

[chaos-has-theories]

You know.... we spit on Marshal Crux for blowing up Ortus and Glaurica, but as detestable as he is, he also.... had a point?

“So it was Crux’s mean, blackened revenge on his own House—his own zealous desire to burn it clear of any hint of insurrection—that had forced Glaurica’s ghost back to her home planet. She did not say this. Silas Octakiseron knew more than he should, but if Harrow discovered that now, she’d be off down the corridor in her nightdress with a sack of emergency bones and a very focused expression. (GtN, ch. 31)

Glaurica's ghost was already scattered, and she still informed her old House of the creche massacre. She had maybe ten minutes as a revenant, and she still spilled one of Harrowhark's most closely kept secrets. Imagine what she could have done, if she'd made it there alive: the information that there were no newborns, after the massacre. The specifics of how the house is being run. Information, perhaps, on how the Reverend Parents have not spoken to anyone in close to a decade, nor been seen arranging the affairs of the house, having instead left everday business to their ten year old daughter.

And Ortus would be there, too. He might have more loyalty left to his house, but we know he added two and two together. He could have told Master Templars that the Reverend Daughter commited and unparalleled act of necromantic transgression, and that there is nobody left on the planet to keep it safe from censure.

Harrow should have never let them go. She didn't realize how much they knew, how much they inferred, but even without that, they knew too much.

Of course Crux took the matter into his own hand.

EDIT: just in case someone sees this post without reblogs please check the notes people had some very correct things to say (consensus: we still get to spit on crux)

[chalkrub]

my thingy for @bowelfly's ambitious and groundbreaking HYDRAPHONE.......honoured and delighted to close out for team cayden

[varggies]

Hit a point where I'm going through the Cullen Critical tag on tumblr cause I really like Cullen, but in a fucked up way and I hate that the writers overlooked some of the more egregious things this guy did (or, more accurately did *not* do) while serving in Kirkwall

Mostly i think im mad that the writers fucked up the chance to take a guy who spent a long time turning a blind eye to and justifying a fucked up system of abuse, and actually have him held accountable for it

Instead of him just. Feeling kind of bad about it but not actually addressing it in a real way?

I mean, dont get me started on how Inquisition fumbled pretty much everything that happened in DA2 (the fact that there's no option for Hawke, Varric, or even the Inquisitor to agree with what Anders did? You can either condemn it or like... waffle around it?), but like. Cullen was actively looking the other way when Mages were getting whipped in the streets, SA'd and fucking lobotomised

The templars turned Kirkwall into a police state by the end of it, and all the writers have him saying is like "man, i feel bad :("

Cant believe im saying this, but Blackwall actually does have a better redemption arc than Cullen

I just

There is gold. Right there

They had a fucked up guy and completely squandered the opportunity to have him SO fucked up about the shit he's done

They still could've had their poor little meow meow of a commander! Just make him so much more fucked up about his mistakes man!

But we already know bioware is full of cowards so im pretty much talking to the wind here