#not even God godself could stop me from inflicting this post on the world

[birdthatisbored]

Rating TMA characters by how much I want to steal their names:

Jon: 7/10 good name. on The List of Tasty Names to Borrow and Steal™, vibes are not quite right. It's up there though.

Martin: 6/10 I never considered this one before. also a good name, good vibes but not ones I want.

Tim: 4/10 hmmmmm I like Tim but not his name.

Sasha: 3/10 good but I'm not looking for feminine names. Sasha is the name of my brother's best friend, it's ok I guess.

Elias: 2/10 an ok name but I hate that bitch. Eli maybe but Elias no.

Michael: 2/10 there are too many. I've met so many people called Michael (y'all are cool and valid tho), it's the name of a relative so extra no.

Melanie: 3/10 it's better than Sasha I guess.

Basira: 4/10 hmmmmmm.

Daisy: 1/10 bad vibes. Idk why but I don't like it.

Georgie: 3/10 makes me think of Stephen King's IT. No thankyou.

Peter: 3/10 hmmmm (derogatory). It's Fine I Suppose.

Helen: 2/10 I know so many elderly white ladies called Helen oh my god.

Agnes: 4/10 I don't want her name but I do want to hold her hand.

Gerry: 100000000000/10 oh god I want his name so bad. It's [redacted]'s name though so I can't, why universe whyyyyy.

Jude: 6/10 I didn't think she would be on this list. I like this one actually, it's going on The List™.

Mike: 2/10 I don't know why it's here. I already have Michael but I feel like Mike deserves to be where too, I still don't want his name though.

Gertrude: 1/10 dear lord. No I don't think so.

(Can you tell I'm struggling to think of names. This is fun though so I'm going to think of more)

Simon: 3/10 makes me think of old men. Also makes me think of preachers, and my neighbour, hard pass.

(I've found a list of recurring characters so this will get long, Im not sorry.)

Adelard: 4/10 ok ok. Not a name I'd go for but, I like it?

Annabelle: 4/10 sexy spider lady go brrr. I sort of like it even tho it's femme, hmmm.

Breekon and Hope: 3/10 a package deal. I don't know why they're on this list, they don't need to be here, I'm neutral about both names.

Eric: 4/10 reminds me of the little mermaid. Not a bad name other than that.

Jane: 4/10 I can't believe I forgot her. I sort of love this name I don't know why, 10/10 would name a succulent after her.

Jared: 2/10 bad name. I don't like it.

Jonah: 3/10 get out musty old man. Reminds me of the Bible, not a terrible name otherwise, not for me.

Jordan: 4/10 go ant boy go. Not a bad nameACTUALLY NO IT IS, i know a few people named Jordan and I don't like them, it's pretty good other than that.

Jurgen: 1/10 JURGEN LEITNER? STUPID IDIOT MOTHERFUCKING JURGEN LEITENER GOD DAMN FOOL BOOK COLLECTING-. Yeah no.

Julia and Trevor: 3/10 they deserve to be together (on the list nOT ROMANTICALLY). Don't like either of these, idk.

Mikaele: 7/10 I like it alot. I don't want the name but I do like it, funky smuggler dude gets a good rating.

Neil (Lagorio): 7/10 he shouldn't be on this list but I like his name. This is probably a side effect of being in the aftg fandom.

Nikola: 4/10 go sexy mannequin go. I'm running out of thoughts in my brain, funky but not actually.

OLIVER: 9/10 I like this one. It's going on The List ™, maybe Ollie instead of Oliver, hmmmm this requires more thought.

Rosie the receptionist: 3/10 yes her title is required here. I don't want the name I just think she should be here.

The Admiral: 10/10 happy hunting king. I don't want to be named the Admiral but actually I kind of do, he gets 10/10 for obvious reasons.

Sebastian Skinner from mag I-can't-remember-which: 8/10 unobservant king. he shouldn't be here either but I want his name, Bad vibes on the name but I still want it, hmmm.

Vampires: 1/10 I don't like them. They were the last thing on the list of characters I was looking at and I think it's funny, someday I'll become a my immortal character.

This got...... Long. Oops. Someone teach me how to add a read more to things.

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Hey!! I've been seeing a lot of posts about how the reason we're having a pandemic, wildfires, locust plagues, etc is because God sent it upon is to punish us. Do you think this is true? I keep telling myself that's not something that God would do, but do you think that's true or not?

cw discussions of punishment, abuse, trauma, illness, disaster, death

Hey there, anon. I do my best to make it clear that I may not be right in any of my opinions, my interpretations of scripture or my understanding of the Divine – but every sinew in my being urges me to give you a resounding “No.” 

I’m gonna talk waaaaaay to long here, but the TL;DR is this: God is not a punishing God; these disasters are not inflicted upon humanity and all Creation by God. Bad things like disease often. just. happen – and are often exacerbated by human sin. Those in power could have done more to keep COVID-19 from spreading, and could be doing more right now to aid those in need – their failure to do so comes from their own free will and greed. Human beings are suffering right now both because suffering just happens and because of human injustice, but not because God brewed up this virus to punish us.

______________

When humans undergo catastrophe and trauma, we seek answers – and we favor answers that offer us some small sense of control over what is happening to us. In her book on Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman notes how children experiencing abuse will often develop a sense of shame and self-blame as a coping mechanism – if it’s their fault that a loved one is hurting them, if it’s a punishment for their badness, maybe they can eventually stop the harm from happening by changing themselves. Obviously, what is happening is not at all their fault, and this kind of trauma response will be something they have to unlearn for future recovery, but it may help them survive in the meantime. 

In Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, David M. Carr argues that many of the biblical authors concluded similarly: that a trauma happening to them or their people – such as the decimation of the Northern Kingdom Israel and the exile of Judah’s people – is their own fault. They have been bad, and God is punishing them for being bad. This understanding of their trauma gives the people some sense of control – if they amend their ways, they will be restored! 

If the fault actually lies with the human beings who violently conquer and exploit, emperors in far-off lands who care nothing for the people of Israel and Judah, well…what hope do the people have of swaying their oppressors? And what hope do they who are so little and fragmented have of forcing those powerful kings to cease their violence?

But, if the person enabling their suffering is actually God, a Being who has expressed deep love for them and established covenant with them time and again? then, there may be something the people can do to end their own suffering.

I respect those who finding meaning and hope in such understandings of trauma. If seeing God’s hand in your suffering helps you get through it, I don’t think I have a right to tell you you’re wrong – unless such understandings lead you to point fingers at others, as when people interpret natural disasters as a divine punishment against LGBT persons and thus lash out against the LGBT community. 

The Bible was written in large part by members of a traumatized people, who often interpreted their suffering as God-caused or God-sanctioned in one way or another. But there are other ways to understand why bad things happen to individuals, to whole communities, or even to the whole world. 

There are a few biblical stories where suffering “just happens,” but I feel like that’s rarer – the one I can think of off the top of my head is from a book that Protestants don’t share with Catholics, the Book of Tobit: the titular character randomly becomes blind because some birds poop in his eyes, not because he did anything wrong or because another person wished him ill. Oh wait, another example is Ruth’s and Naomi’s story – chapter 1 tells us that their loved ones died in a famine, without any “reason” given for why that famine happened. Sometimes bad things…just happen. 

Much more common in scripture are examples of bad things happening because sinful humans make them happen. Joseph of Genesis is beloved by God, yet Joseph’s brothers beat him and sell him into slavery. This trauma is not a punishment inflicted on Joseph by God, but by other people. Same goes for so many other stories of suffering in scripture – Hagar’s story, Tamar’s story, John the Baptist’s story, Jesus’s story……human beings suffer in so many biblical stories not because of their own sin, not because God is punishing or even “testing” them, but because other human beings use their free will to harm them. 

For one of the biggest examples: the Israelite people experience the trauma of enslavement in Egypt – and the authors do not interpret it as a punishment from God! Indeed, Exodus 1 tells us that the people were being blessed with exponential growth of their numbers – and that fruitfulness is what leads to their enslavement, because of human sin and fear. Pharaoh fears their numbers, and hey, he needs people who can build his vast cities anyway, so he subjects the Israelites to slavery that leaves them too exhausted and scattered to fight back.

And, most poignantly in this Exodus story, in the midst of the enslaved people’s anguish, God is said to hear them, to see them, to know intimately what they are going through – to feel their pain with them! “I know their sorrows,” God says in Exodus 3:7 – the Hebrew word for “know” being a word about intimate understanding. 

Thus we can understand God’s place in our suffering not as the place of the judge or punisher, but the place of the one who suffers alongside us. God chooses to know our pain intimately, to enter into our world that is so fraught with suffering, because God’s power is not the power to harm or dominate; God’s power is compassion. 

“God, source of all reality, split the heavens to come to us in a cow shed so that God could be with us. And, as if the ridiculousness of being born in a manger weren’t enough, God dies on a cross – as loathsome, humiliating, cruel, and helpless a death as imaginable – just in case we didn’t get it. As Paul says, nothing can separate us from the love of God. To make sure that we can see that the most abject poverty and homelessness are not enough to separate us from God and that the most severe violence human beings can invent cannot separate us from God – God embodies Godself in precisely these places. These are the places we are most in need of God, and God does not tell us about the divine presence in these places; God enacts this presence as histrionically as possible. It is necessary to do this partly because human beings love gorgeous displays of power and are sorely tempted to imagine God to be just like a monarch or emperor or – best of all – the most powerful sorcerer and sultan in the world. It’s hard to imagine a clearer correction of this view than a birth in a stable and a death on a cross.”- Wendy Farley

All of this is not to say that God’s “okay” with what we are doing to one another and to the earth. God has gifted us with free will so that we cannot be compelled into relationship with Them or with each other; but that gift of free will also means we are free to hurt each other, to choose greed and violence over community and compassion. God does urge us to do better, to be better – and for whatever reason, God does let us face the collective consequences of our sin…for now. But not forever. And not alone. 

I’ll close with one more anecdote from scripture, and then a list of further posts related to this topic.

My pastor Cathy preached on John 11 today, the story of the Raising of Lazarus. In the Gospels we see Jesus go through a lot of the same painful feelings we do – from frustration and anger, exhaustion and hunger, to fear and grief. But the most moving display of emotion for me is when he weeps over Lazarus’ death. 

Lazarus died, not as a punishment for anything he or one of his loved ones did wrong, but just because…death happens. When Jesus finally arrives on the scene, he knows that he’s going to raise Lazarus up. He knows reunion is near. But still, when he sees his dear friends mourning, he joins in – he moans and weeps for the loss and pain they are undergoing. In her sermon, my pastor said of this grief:

“As we see Jesus’s sorrow, may we recognize the regret of God that Creation is in agony. See God seeing us and grieving that the curse still reigns – for now.”

We suffer, and God suffers with us. 

________

Further reading:

“God’s place in grief: not Her will, but Her own broken heart”

“pain is not a lesson”

“this problem will have its place”

My wife and I made a YouTube vid based around a very small example of suffering, which we use to ponder whether things going wrong is a sign God’s cursed us, is punishing us, etc.

So why does God allow suffering to happen, if God’s all powerful and all loving and it’s not a punishment?

When horrible things do happen…is it possible to make something good come out of it?

Check out Kate Bowler’s “Everything Happens” podcast, or her book