#the characters actually acting within their cultural/religious framework!!!

[daisywords]

Going insane over Fairest reread I love when beloved books from days of yore are as good as I remember

[smenayetk11]

Sex Tamil Is Forbidden In Islam

Sex Tamil is considered forbidden in Islam, and understanding the reasons behind this prohibition requires an exploration of the religious teachings and cultural values within the Muslim community. Islam places a strong emphasis on modesty and maintaining the sanctity of marriage. This encompasses various aspects of one's life, including sexual relations. To better comprehend why Sex Tamil is forbidden in Islam, it is important to delve into the historical and cultural context surrounding this topic. In Islam, sexual activities should be within the bounds of marriage. Islam emphasizes modesty and encourages believers to maintain chastity. While specific cultural practices may vary, the core principles remain the same. It is important to seek guidance from religious scholars and adhere to Islamic teachings regarding sexual relations. Respect for the religion and its teachings is paramount for believers.

The Misunderstood Concept of Tamil Sex in Islam

Sexuality and its expression are complex topics in any religious context, and Islam is no exception. When it comes to the perception of sex within the Tamil community and Islam, there are various misconceptions and misunderstandings. It's important to address and clarify these misconceptions to promote understanding and respect for diverse beliefs. In the teachings of Islam, sex is considered a natural and beautiful expression of love and intimacy between a husband and wife. While there are guidelines and restrictions surrounding sexual behavior, the prohibition of sex explicitly based on one's ethnic or linguistic background, such as Tamil, is not supported by Islamic teachings. The Quran, the holy book of Islam, emphasizes the significance of a healthy marital relationship and encourages believers to enjoy the physical and emotional bond shared between spouses. It recognizes the importance of intimacy and recognizes sexual desire as a natural part of human nature. However, Islam sets certain boundaries and guidelines to ensure that sexual relations take place within the framework of marriage and with mutual consent. It is essential to note that Islam focuses on the intentions and actions of individuals rather than their cultural or linguistic backgrounds. The Quran states that believers should marry those who are compatible with them in faith and character, but it does not specify any ethnic or linguistic preferences. Therefore, the idea that Tamil sex is forbidden in Islam is based on a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of religious teachings. To gain a deeper understanding of the Islamic perspective on sex, it is crucial to explore the teachings within the religion and the cultural practices that may sometimes be wrongly attributed to religious principles. This allows us to separate cultural biases from the actual teachings of Islam and promotes a more accurate and respectful dialogue.

The Importance of Consent and Mutual Pleasure in Islamic Sexual Relations

In Islam, consent and mutual pleasure are fundamental aspects of sexual relations between spouses. The concept of ma'ruf (recognized as good by societal norms) is central to Islamic teachings on intimate relationships. It emphasizes the importance of communication, respect, and mutual satisfaction between partners. Islamic teachings encourage husbands and wives to fulfill each other's needs and desires within the boundaries set by religion. This includes open and honest communication about sexual preferences, ensuring both partners are comfortable and willing. The emphasis on communication and consent promotes a healthy and fulfilling sexual relationship, fostering intimacy and emotional connection between spouses. Islam also places great importance on the concept of foreplay and sexual pleasure in marriage. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) emphasized the importance of pleasuring one's spouse and encouraged spouses to engage in acts of intimacy that bring pleasure to both partners. Mutual pleasure and satisfaction are seen as essential aspects of a healthy and fulfilling marital relationship. Furthermore, Islam promotes the idea of moderation in sexual relations, encouraging believers to strike a balance between fulfilling their desires and respecting the physical and emotional well-being of their spouse. This encourages a healthy and sustainable sexual relationship that respects the rights and needs of both partners. Misconceptions Surrounding Sexual Practices in Tamil and Islamic Contexts Misconceptions often arise when cultural practices or customs are erroneously attributed to religious teachings. In the context of Tamil and Islamic cultures, it is important to differentiate between cultural practices and religious principles to avoid misinterpretations and misunderstandings. One such misconception is the belief that Tamil sexual practices, such as certain sexual positions or activities, are prohibited in Islam. It is crucial to note that Islam provides general guidelines regarding sexual ethics but does not prescribe specific positions or activities as forbidden. The emphasis is on maintaining modesty, privacy, and mutual consent within the boundaries of marriage, rather than focusing on specific cultural practices. Another misconception is the belief that sex during menstruation is strictly forbidden in Islam. While it is true that sexual intercourse is prohibited during menstruation, Islam promotes emotional and physical intimacy between spouses even during this time. Islam encourages partners to explore alternative ways of expressing love and affection, such as embracing, kissing, or engaging in non-penetrative sexual activities. This allows couples to maintain a connection and intimacy while respecting the religious guidelines. It is essential to approach discussions on sexual practices in religious contexts with sensitivity and an understanding of cultural diversity. Recognizing that there may be variations in sexual practices among different communities and within the broader Islamic framework helps foster inclusive conversations and dispel misconceptions. Challenging Stigmas and Promoting Open Dialogue Addressing misconceptions surrounding sex in the Tamil and Islamic contexts requires open dialogue and a willingness to challenge stigmas and cultural biases. It is crucial to engage in conversations that promote understanding, respect, and the dismantling of harmful stereotypes. One way to challenge these stigmas is through education and awareness. By providing accurate information on religious teachings and cultural diversity, individuals can develop a deeper understanding of how different cultural practices intersect with Islam. This enables the recognition of the diversity within the Tamil and Islamic communities and promotes acceptance and respect for varying beliefs and practices. Moreover, promoting open dialogue and encouraging discussions surrounding sexual ethics within the framework of Islam helps break down barriers and misconceptions. By creating safe spaces for conversation, individuals can share their experiences, ask questions, and gain a more nuanced understanding of how Islam and Tamil culture intersect in the context of sexual relations. Challenging stigmas requires collective efforts from individuals, communities, and religious leaders. By fostering an environment of inclusivity, respect, and empathy, we can promote healthy dialogue that embraces diversity and dispels harmful misconceptions. The Role of Education and Advocacy in Addressing Misconceptions Education plays a crucial role in addressing misconceptions surrounding sex, cultural practices, and religious teachings. It is essential to provide accurate information and resources that challenge stigmas and promote understanding. Religious leaders and scholars have a responsibility to disseminate accurate information about Islamic teachings on sex and address common misconceptions. By engaging in open discussions, providing educational materials, and creating platforms for dialogue, religious institutions can play a vital role in promoting accurate understanding and dispelling harmful stereotypes. Advocacy organizations and community leaders can also contribute to addressing misconceptions by organizing workshops, seminars, and awareness campaigns. These initiatives can provide a safe and inclusive space for individuals to learn, discuss, and challenge stigmas related to sex and religion. To combat the spread of misinformation, it is essential to develop educational resources that are accessible and culturally sensitive. These resources can include books, articles, podcasts, and online platforms that provide accurate information on the intersection of sex, Tamil culture, and Islamic teachings. Conclusion The misconceptions surrounding sex in the Tamil and Islamic contexts highlight the importance of comprehensive education and understanding. By exploring the teachings of Islam and the cultural practices within the Tamil community, we can separate cultural biases from religious principles, challenge stigmas, and promote open dialogue. It is crucial to approach discussions on sex and religion with empathy, openness, and a commitment to dispelling harmful stereotypes. By doing so, we can foster an environment that recognizes and respects the diversity within the Tamil and Islamic communities and promotes inclusive and respectful conversations surrounding intimacy, love, and relationships. No. Table 1 Table Content

Source: quoracdn.net

Frequently Asked Questions

In this section, we provide answers to frequently asked questions regarding the topic of the prohibition of sex Tamil in Islam. 1. Is sex Tamil forbidden in Islam? Yes, according to Islamic teachings, engaging in sex Tamil is forbidden. Islam promotes modesty, chastity, and the preservation of decency in all aspects of life, including sexual matters. Islam considers sexual relations as a sacred and intimate act that should only be shared between a husband and wife within the boundaries of marriage. Engaging in sex Tamil is deemed sinful and goes against the teachings of Islam. 2. What does Islam say about sexual morality? Islam places a strong emphasis on sexual morality and encourages believers to adhere to the principles of modesty, purity, and self-control in their sexual conduct. It teaches that sexual relations should be based on mutual consent, respect, and love within the confines of marriage. Islam prohibits any form of sexual activity outside of marriage, including extramarital affairs, premarital sex, and sex Tamil. It promotes the concept of chastity and encourages individuals to protect their sexual purity. 3. Are there any exceptions to the prohibition of sex Tamil in Islam? No, there are no exceptions to the prohibition of sex Tamil in Islam. The teachings of Islam are clear and unambiguous in stating that engaging in sexual activities outside of marriage is forbidden for both men and women. Islam promotes a holistic approach to sexuality, emphasizing the importance of emotional connection, trust, and commitment within the institution of marriage. 4. How can Muslims maintain sexual purity? Muslims can maintain sexual purity by adhering to the teachings of Islam and following its guidelines for sexual conduct. This includes marrying a spouse who shares similar beliefs and values, practicing self-control and modesty, avoiding situations that may lead to temptation, and seeking forgiveness for any mistakes or transgressions. Additionally, open communication, respect, and mutual understanding between spouses can contribute to a healthy and fulfilling sexual relationship within the bounds of marriage. 5. What is the significance of sexual morality in Islam? In Islam, sexual morality holds great significance as it is seen as a means to preserve the dignity, sanctity, and purity of individuals and society as a whole. Adhering to sexual morality safeguards the institution of marriage, promotes family values, and fosters stable and harmonious relationships. By valuing sexual morality, Muslims strive to create a society based on respect for one another, the preservation of the family unit, and the overall well-being of individuals and communities. Sexual activities involving Tamil individuals are considered forbidden in Islam. This is because Islam promotes modesty, purity, and adherence to specific guidelines regarding sexual relationships. Engaging in sexual activities outside the boundaries of marriage is prohibited in Islam, irrespective of the cultural background of the individuals involved. Islam emphasizes the importance of maintaining chastity and cultivating virtuous behavior. Make Money Online Up To 1k/Day Using The Fail Proof Method Read the full article

[utilitycaster]

as a fellow member of the tribe lol i think jewish caleb hc get a bit uncomfy given the zemnian = d&d german connection and liam explicitly stating that he took a lot of inspiration from the german student resistance to the nazis. i dont think itd be fair to matt/liam to call the volstruckers d&d nazis but when you start throwing jewish hc in there it gets a bit awkward

So the OP of that post is Jewish, I believe, and iirc Liam actually said that he explicitly tried to distance from the Nazis specifically because he was doing a character with a German accent [which, and this came up as a fandom discussion relatively early in the campaign, is itself complicated; growing up as an American-born Jewish person in an Ashkenazi synagogue, the first German accents I heard were primarily from survivors, and I happen to have a very German-sounding last name for a combination of Yiddish/Ellis Island name change reasons despite being of more eastern European Jewish descent]. I believe he stated the inspiration was more from the KGB (though there are definitely some parallels with Nazis, particularly the Vollstrucker final exam). So that’s actually not what made me say “this doesn’t make sense!” I fully get if other Jewish people are somewhat uncomfortable, but based on how the Empire and specifically the Vollstruckers act I actually agree that a Cold War secret police model (KGB/Stasi) seems much more in line with the depiction in the show.

Jewish headcanons make me kind of uncomfortable in fantasy media not set in the real world because of a couple of reasons I’ve stated before. The main one is that Judaism is an explicitly monotheistic religion; it flat out does not make sense in a world that canonically has multiple, objectively real gods. It makes sense in a setting like the Unsleeping City, which is modern day NYC except there’s magic (and the only cleric is really more a cleric of a concept than a god) and I think that was fairly well-done representation, but in Exandria it’s the same idea as having an atheist - a monotheist in this world is just an idiot. So you end up with cultural markers, and there are plenty of people irl who are culturally but not religiously Jewish, which is entirely valid - but those people exist within a backdrop of Judaism being an ethnoreligion and the culture comes from that, and if you take away the religion you cannot really have the rest of it make sense. At this point I should note I’m probably thinking about this more than anyone asked, but I’ve never had a taste for headcanons that aren’t consistent with the worldbuilding because the worldbuilding is the framework on which I build everything else.

Culturally speaking though Caleb just doesn’t strike me as having a Jewish approach to things! I think it’s an older post - it just crossed my dash so I’d have to check to see where it lined up with the main campaign - but Caleb talks about being irredeemable and damned in a way that strikes me as, especially if you get into the meta-narrative of the actor not being Jewish, very culturally Christian. I have a lot of thoughts that probably belong on a different post but I find a lot of the discussion on redemption arcs in fandom to be super culturally Christian, too, which is fair! I think someone raised Catholic is going to feel very differently about the concept of redemption than I do. I see it as a very positive term that is highly subjective, and a process, not a binary state, but I also think that my view of it is influenced by my religious and cultural upbringing.

Meanwhile I do actually think a case can be made for Jester’s morality to fit Jewish philosophy - that she tends to judge people on their current actions rather than any general ideology, for example - but I have to say I don’t get how tieflings are supposed to be Jewish-coded in Exandria, at all, unless we are either dipping into some pretty unfortunate stereotypes; tieflings are pretty heavily based on like, the mythology of hell and devils, which is explicitly very Christian.

I guess while I’m explaining myself, I’ve found Caduceus’s arc, of someone raised within a small minority tradition, who is still deeply connected to it but is starting to question quite how he fits in, to be very resonant with me - I was raised moderately religious and became less so as an adult, but still find a lot of meaning in some religious rituals. I also find the Wildmother approach to death and dying to be much more in line with Jewish traditions (specifically simple burial, “you are dust and to dust you shall return” as a neutral or positive concept, and an emphasis on the people left behind by death vs. the dead person) than the Raven Queen who always struck me as having a view of death I just could not connect with on any sort of philosophical level. Like, again, I don’t headcanon Jewish characters in traditional D&D settings; it always kind of feels awkward and token-ish, but Caduceus has by far been the character I could relate to the most in terms of religion.

I suspect OP was just having fun with a modern AU or something though; I just found the part about Caduceus so weird because I had the exact opposite feeling that I had to comment.

[deliciousscaloppine]

Hot Takes Galore: A brief overview of fandom backlashes that influenced fanfiction writing traditions as I have personally experienced them:

In today’s segment I am going to talk about copyright infringement.

First let me preface this by saying I have only ever been in 3 fandoms, starting from 2008 and I have never been terribly active - like this blog has been the most active I’ve ever been in any fandom ever. I am not going to talk about particular fandom dramas because I am pretty clueless about that. What I am going to talk about is that friction between “reality” and online spaces that brought about changes that are still in effect today in the way fanfiction is written and perceived.

In 2008 as I was entering, nearly every piece of fanfiction had a disclaimer about the author not owning the characters, which were the property of Corporate Entity X, or Author Y, and also not profiting from the work in any shape or form. At the time getting money from writing fanfiction was a gigantic taboo, and almost no one did it, or advertised that they did. 

But as I understand through convention culture printed writing did circulate in exchange for money (zines), and at least in Japan one could sell doujinshis (self-published stories and comics, often within the framework of another work) in certain events. Although this was largely considered “illegal” under copyright laws, and artists could be persecuted or blacklisted from entering the industry if discovered. That’s also why fanartists often to this day may screen where and when their work is viewed, and move to take down reposts, or call others to protest if artworks are circulated without permission outside of the artist’s page.

Older fandom people also hated authors that moved against fanfiction, a big case being Anne Rice, the vampire lady everyone - including me - copies when writing about vampires. And now I am going to talk a little about that.

Usually, writers, just sit somewhere cosy and write, and often they have no idea, absolutely no idea, on how to manage their writing properties - usually a lawyer does that, and lawyers want A Lot Of Money (A brief brush with justice and lawyers over a civil dispute I won, cost me 1000 euros out of nowhere, in a single day, and no I couldn’t avoid it because I was the accused one, so I had to appear with some representation). 

So sometimes, quite often, it’s a lawyer that activates a writer or other artist to move against “smaller” copyright infringements, in order to make bank. And if one suffers such a case, they should make it as apparent as possible to the other party that they have no money, and the pressure will go away immediately. But even MORE OFTEN a small copyright infringement, may lead to a sequence of bigger ones, and ultimately the de facto loss of rights from one’s writing properties, and of course revenue. 

And for a lot of published authors, they just don’t know for how long they can publish things - publishing houses that have them signed can close, book sales can drop, tastes change, personal problems, and anything else may mean that they could find themselves without a source of income at any point in the future, while they are aging and becoming more and more irrelevant. 

A very famous case currently, is that of Alan Dean Foster, the writer who has done some novelizations for movies like Star Wars and Alien, and is no longer receiving revenue from that - while his wife is hospitalized and their family needs the income - because Disney absorbed the company that had signed the contract with him, and chose to not honor the previous contract. To make them pay he will have to go into a huge legal battle with a corporate giant, which he cannot afford. But they still absorb income from these novelizations.

But how does fanfiction tie into that, and Anne Rice’s case (which if memory serves right, also went through a series of personal problems, including her husband’s death during that time). 

So for a lot of writers, fanfiction may be that tiny breach that may threaten their rights in the future from tresspases of distribution networks. Meaning, people write vampire fanfiction based on Anne Rice’s work? What if another publishing house used the template of her works (historical settings, bleeding orifices, religious themes, homosexuality and sexual trauma etc) and produced a royalty free series of such works with a team of professional writers that do not own the work - who often have less rights, like not owning the characters, or the storylines, participating in a very small scale, so their payment goes down etc)

And in this way EVERYONE SUFFERS. Big Name Published Author fades into obscurity and goes into poverty and payroll writers are horrifically abused.  

A lot of hobbyists, and hobbyist writers whose sole dream is to be published in some shape or form, do not really care, and do not concern themselves with the legal aspect of creation, or the technical skill that it takes to produce writing on a consistent basis, which can only happen if you’ve got your basic needs covered. So they might see this type of backlash as inherently privileged. 

But it’s not really a privilege, there has been a global recession in basic working rights for everyone, and lovers of fiction don’t have to condone, of course, attacks against them, but they need to put that kind of backlash in perspective. Someone did write the content you enjoy, THEY ARE NOT DEAD YET, and may have opinions on how it should be managed, especially when it pertains to their livelihood. 

It’s a delicate balance that we all must keep in order to keep corporate regulations out of it.

For instance with the recent danmei explosion The Untamed brought forth, Ao3 was banned in China. Now a lot of you might know that this was caused by some real person fic involving the actor Xiao Zhan, which led to a whole other level of drama. But make no mistake this was a political act to protect the interests of the domestic publishing industry as it prepares to do an international opening that will bring in several billions from foreign markets.

Because Ao3 has been expanding as a platform globally it brings about changes, and in many cases steals readers away from traditional publishing, so it becomes unacceptable economically for a bunch of hobbyists to influence tastes, market mores, and create sensationalism around certain properties out of literally the blue. This is not a good thing for a lot of corporate thinking, they set the product and we are supposed to buy it. We are not supposed to go, it would look greater with a bunch of anal, and then put forth a million words altering the character of the intellectual property.

Why you ask? Again, because another publishing industry might choose to imitate the style of danmei fanfics and produce works that hijack readership, or lead to breach of contracts, making an unsafe environment for workers in this industry (Xiao Zhan’s case.)

Nowadays I see more and more fanfic authors coming out of their shell to ask money for writing in the form of donations, patronage and commissions, as fandom involvement is also becoming vastly monetized. The market of conventions coming into social media platforms. A strange more exists still in which while “legally wrong”, as long as money is not asked on the publishing platform (Ao3), it may not count as copyright infringement. But fanfic authors, may still be treated with hostility for this, for not “deserving” to profit from someone else’s properties, or even worse for “stealing” readership. 

For instance a recent argument I have seen from lgbtq authors, is that they remain unsupported by fandom spaces, who often proclaim themselves as lgbtq or lgbtq friendly (something that is not true), but at the same time they are not looking for published lgbtq stories, or authors, or even treat these with open hostility, or a lot of bias.

Fandom is not comprised from “readers” in the traditional sense, definitely not friends of literature, and it’s free, no one really has to pay anything to read a published fanfic.  So it’s a pretty loose demographic with no set characteristics, and no interest in investing time and money in something for long. It’s an online social activity and not a readers’ movement, highly influenced by peer pressure and branding. It’s basically a gigantic group of people who don’t really do anything for no one, and may develop a parasitic connection to intellectual properties (I am sorry peers, it’s the truth). 

And it’s perhaps the biggest counterculture scene at the moment in the developed world. To this day it treats even its own authors with tremendous suspicion, disregard and dismissal, meaning that even if someone can get some money and recognition locally through writing fanfic they are on thin fucking ice at all times for all the reasons but mostly attracting unnecessary attention to themselves and subsequently the scene.  A pattern that we will see is endemic to all forms of fandom backlashes.

So to this day in contrast with fanart, fan writers may not be compensated for their troubles, but may also be ousted from their domestic professional spaces for writing fanfic that may infringe on their intellectual property. 

The thing is, for me, that fandom culture can become incredibly supportive of corporate practices that harm actual people (writers, they are people too) but when they realize that the same corporate practices may be used against them, it’s too late to realize that it’s not a lottery of who wins by crying more, and by the time that happens, a corporation or industry who has used them to do its dark bidding, can stop catering to them  because ultimately they have become again irrelevant once a well defined demographic of  readers and viewers has been secured.

So if you are going to do counterculture, at least do it right. Be respectful of the writers/authors of the content you consume and mindful of their troubles, do not generate public strife that brings in political regulation in favor of corporate interests. Become interested in writing culture, support your fanfic authors with lasting engagement in their work, even if it escapes the narrow confines of a certain fandom. It’s simple. Eat, live, pray, fuck, or something.

[deliciouschickenjuice]

This Gamer Is Preeetttyyy Sure He Knows When A Game Is Or Isn’t Political

There’s been a lot of to-do around politics in games of late, and, honestly, it’s hard to know what to think unless you’re equipped with a big old brain that understands politics like me, 31 year old help desk supervisor and gaming aficionado Gunt Plopper. That’s why I’m here to give you a whirlwind tour of what games are and are not political.

Let’s start with the easy ones. Storming the beaches of Normandy? Not political, nosiree. Soviet officers executing you in Call of Duty if you run from battle? Not political. It’s fact. You can look it up in history books, which are the least political thing I can think of. Black soldiers in a World War 2 game? Actually probably not political – I think they existed. Haven’t checked. If I have to play one though? Hoo boy, that’s political. Women are right out.

Alright, let’s see. If a war game has an anti-war message, that’s political. Stands to reason – any kind of message is likely to be political. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare assigning the blame for Tariq Almawt to Russians when it was committed by Americans? First of all, if it was a big deal then why have I never heard of it? Secondly, there’s only so many ideas for war crimes to put into games. It’s called parallel construction. Look it up.

Games where you’re a SWAT team taking down terrorists? How on earth could that be political? They even dock you points if you kill civilians which is a bit on the nose for me, but I guess they had to put it in there for realism. Rainbow Six can’t be political – it’s not even a real department. Breach and clear! Shit rules.

Now the nerd stuff. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri depicting a bunch of bloodthirsty ideologues battling over a hostile planet while utterly altering its form and atmosphere both intentionally and unintentionally in a bid for absolute and ultimate power? Not political. Alpha Centauri’s fake, dipshit. It’s made up. OK, so Civilization 2 and Civilization: Call to Power had some pretty big climate change stuff in there, but that was back in the 90’s before we knew how political that was, so they get a pass from me.

While we’re on the topic – Crusader Kings 2 depicting a gigantic chunk of history that was hugely formative for a large part of the globe, including the eponymous crusaders, who clashed in religious warfare and created a vast symbolic language which still influences culture today, in a game where real historical figures are assigned positive and negative stats and traits, and who obey a large array of underlying systems describing how they must act based within the framework of their culture and religion, all created by human beings with their own underlying cultural and political biases? Not political, but I hear they won’t let me say “DEUS VULT” in Crusader Kings 3 which is insaaanely fucking political.

Now the juicy stuff. A female protagonist? If she’s not hot, that’s political. If she kisses another girl, that’s super political. Trick for developers though – if you let me move the camera around so I can upskirt her, that’s a get-out-of-political free card. If you admonish me with in-game text for doings so though I will burn your office building to the ground. Otherwise if I have to play as a broad, make sure to put in an accurate model of her totally nude in the shower. That’s not political, that’s just sexy. Can’t be sexy and political, genius.  

If a game has pronoun assignment, that’s political. There’s a trap here though: if you don’t assign pronouns but you let me give a girl voice to a boy body, that’s still political. Probably MORE political, if you ask me. Again, there’s an escape hatch for devs though – old Gunt isn’t completely unreasonable – if you let me assign a boy voice to a girl character and it’s clear it’s for laughs, that’s not political at all. It’s called “doing a Charles Shaughnessy”. Oh, and it goes without saying that gay people in games are like a glowing nuclear rod of political.

Lightning round. Copy protection? Political. Not letting PewDiePie stream your game? Political. Loot crates? Political. Microtransactions? Political. Mods you can pay for? Political. Not allowing mods? Political. Epic Games Store taking a loss leading position to build volume by making completely legal commercial arrangements with game developers while taking a lower cut and offering their engine for free so that they can one day capitalise on said market volume in a setup that is actively incentivised by the modes of capital underpinning not just the games industry but increasingly our entire existence? That’s so political, it’s basically communism.

“But,” you may ask, “what about Fallout? Cut the crap – is Fallout political?”. You’re asking me if Fallout, the game in which Raygun Gothic relics of America’s golden age rust openly in desolate plains while only those wealthy enough to be able to afford shelter attempt to recolonise a world left in total ecological ruin by a world war started over resource shortages wherein China invades Alaska, America annexes Canada, and the atom – a literal symbol of Western hegemony – is the ultimate destroyer? A game where even if you win, you are turned away to die in the desert because you are an outsider? A game which literally opens with the line “war never changes” while technofacists who control the very access to knowledge and technology execute a restrained man in the streets? That Fallout?

Not political. You can tell because there’s lasers.

[queernuck]

Holes in the “Whole-Cloth”

Catholic schools, as an institution, are at once some of the best examples of what can be taken from the Church, what the Church can provide as part of being an entity within hegemonic control, and a structure that reproduces Oedipal trauma, that creates the sort of reactionary-unto-fascist culture that Catholic ideology so readily draws out of liberalism, the means by which Catholic education becomes a sort of money-laundering and a haven for various fascists, pedophiles, abusers, and reprehensible people who use a kind of social justice rhetoric in order to disguise their ideology. The notion of a “whole-cloth” concept of pacifism and support of life, one often endorsed tacitly or explicitly by the same reactionary elements, specifically goes on to ignore the sort of anticapitalist thought needed to even begin considering the hyperreal fabric of whole-cloth ideology, instead using it to justify a kind of liberal politics that accepts hegemonic violence while justifying anti-abortion legislature. All the same, the way in which Catholic education is so often part of a life that leads toward good, that leads toward a certain commitment to the betterment of others, of oneself for the sake not of individualist moralism but rather a commitment to self-criticism and reconciliation, the understanding and acceptance of a framework of restoration and liberation, presents the best possible case for Catholic schooling in contemporary discourses. 

First, the role of Catholic education as a sort of colonial structure must be addressed. The hegemonic role played by the Church is one that specifically must be understood as colonial, and a post-colonial Catholicism is one that is not readily apparent, is certainly not unthinkable but neither a clear possibility, as the very structure of Catholic identity is linked to colonization, to standards of colonial acceptability, rituals of belonging and becoming that are specific to Catholic ideation of the body and spirit. I do not wish to enter into a critique of Catholicism as dualist, as I personally do not believe that Catholicism requires it be realized in the dualism it claims (that dualism rather being a kind of differentiation of the molecular and the phantasmic, the spectral, which does not lead to a separation of the phantasmic imposition of “essence”) but rather in a specific kind of ritual acceptance of Catholic rituals as symbolic, as a kind of semiotic transference: the reverse-anthropological, the knowing and ironic application of languages of anthropology to the hegemonic, creates an awareness of what Catholic rituals represent when compared to the means by which becoming-Catholic is contrasted to the culture of the colonized. The potentiality for syncretic belief, for ritual that specifically inherits colonial trauma as part of a larger burden realized in decolonization and is preserved within the postcolonial act of identification, the retention of the mark of colonization as part of keeping score of colonial violence, of an anti-Oedipal turn that recognizes the previous Oedipal signification, is foundational to realizing what purpose Catholic education serves. The way in which there is a unity found in the notion of a singular Catholic identity, Catholic both in the sense of the word as a signifier of all-inclusive, of true Christianity as beyond that which is merely Christian, and additionally as a signifier of a certain Christian identity that has largely been repeated and spread through colonial violence, one sees that the role of Catholic education in the First World is to accept a hegemonic structure of control and to articulate it within pedagogical structures that can stay with a student for a lifetime. 

And indeed, many a lifetime has been marked by Catholic education. From pre-K to pre-med, hospitals and law firms, schools of Divinity and schools of trade, the influence of Catholic education is never terribly far from reach. The avant-garde style of Montessori teaching is most associated with Catholic schools, and the funding that many schools receive from relatively wealthy hierarchies means that there are often thriving Catholic schools in colonized neighborhoods, a specific sort of juxtaposition used to justify the entry of the Catholic educational body into the neighborhood in question. The practice (of which I have been a beneficiary) of Catholic schools offering generous scholarships of many sorts is specifically a sort of producing-production where the school is commodified, is made into the sort of experience that can be bought, and is then bought by the school from itself, exchanging value that never was, the creation of value out of itself. That there is a sort of incestuous relationship between numerous Catholic schools, with some such as Fordham going from middle to graduate schools in more or less the same tradition, the same crimson colors and Fordham Rams all the way down, creates a sense in which Catholic education becomes a lifetime commitment, a kind of community that is accepted even by those who are not themselves believers in the strong sense of such a term. 

This is where the hegemonic structure of Catholicism as a kind of influence upon the European concept of self becomes important. The role of Jesuit priests in establishing the modern linkage between Europe and the “East” as a monolithic entity, the way that the history of European accounts of China are marked by Jesuit-crafted systems of romanizations, the importance of Catholic missions to European interaction with Japan, and the colonization of the Philippines most dramatically, the Catholic and the European are in effect the same when discussing the history of these Orientalisms, such that even in not adapting a Catholic faith, Europeans take on a certain Catholic character. The means by which European culture stands as a continuation of the birth of Western Civilization and the potentiality of modernity in the Renaissance and the “Age of Exploration” (as a euphemism for the brutal societies of control and repression with ships and cities named for saints) the hegemony of Catholic identity becomes apparent. The means by which Catholicism has been at once a force for anticommunism on a global scale and has itself been indicted by anticommunist thought, the danger of liberation theology countered by the Evangelical ideology of America, creates a sort of structure of ironic reaction that retains none of the blasphemy that a good Catholic would counter the Church with: there is no reverence for the rituals and thought of Catholic Social Teaching, but rather a resignification of the religious into a kind of ritualized Americanism, the creation of a new resignification that is able to overcode upon the previous presence of a Catholic hegemony as Evangelical, Fundamentalist, as not only uncaring about the world but dismissing it in a reversal of materialist thought: the material world is unimportant, suffering is justified and in fact good for the soul, specifically suffering that lines American pockets. Certainly, this is the most Catholic thing about Evangelical Christianity: the acceptance of suffering as an exercise in goodness, in Godliness, as a possibility of good for the Soul.

Additionally, commonality is found in the way that there is a fundamental lack of recognition between those who live Catholic lives and the Catholic Church itself. Going to mass on occasion, having a sense of morality and moreover a sense of the metaphysical is more meaningfully Catholic than many who call themselves Christian are meaningfully Christian. This is specifically because of how Catholicism, as a series of rites and rituals, becomes a kind of metacultural entity realized in these semiotic exchanges, the creation and cultivation of the phenomena of living a certain life and a kind of agnosticism about the actual importance of Jesus the man, Jesus the teacher, savior, so on. The importance of questioning the Bible, of accepting it as a means of discussing fundamental questions of goodness, of acceptance, while acknowledging it as a historical tool of oppression, of colonialism, of antisemitism is a difficult process that many Catholics are unable to meaningfully enact. Instead, they take on a sort of realization of Hobbesian salvation as signified through Catholic aesthetics, the acceptance of a certain tale of salvation as all but ordained at birth and requiring an acceptance of empire, of imperialist structure, and the tireless support of such violence in political alliances, the creation and support of the American war machine, the creation of a phantasmic violence against White Catholics while the very meaningful and present persecution of Catholics as a result of imperialist violence, the means by which Catholicism as a conceptually Western means of living is specifically named in reactionary, fascist ideologies and thus met with violence, violence that is ironically tied to the very Catholicism of the West, is ignored. 

Instead, the proposal of a “whole-cloth” solution, one that takes the notion of a weak anti-war stance (mostly of convenience) and occasional references to the importance of charity and marries it to an ardent opposition to abortion justifies the means by which abortion is structured in the larger social space that is presented by a Christian-but-not-Catholic society. The notion that abortion is tied to existing structures of violence, that “wanting” an abortion is hardly an accurate description of how most women approach the procedure and that it is due to the danger of childbirth, the cost of being pregnant even before adoption, the subjectification that adoption implies as it violently serves to enforce racialized ideologies about the goodness of white families and the inherently immoral structure of black ones, is all ignored by the sort of advocacy taken under “whole-cloth” approaches. That “whole-cloth” approaches recognize an inconsistency, the pro-death penalty views of many anti-abortion advocates, the support for American imperialism that many vocally hold, is no great feat as it requires merely a cursory glance at what passes for political discourse in American society. However, the way in which children who are eventually born are left profoundly unhelped by the Church in many situations, are helped only insofar as they are given symbolic support until they are old enough to become the victims of pedophiles protected by the Church for generations, is never addressed by such whole-cloth ideologies. Advocacy for Palestinian Christians who are colonized in Israel is never addressed; a sort of resignification of “Birthright” as a Christian, patronizingly anti-semitic ritual that claims Jewish belonging, Jewish culture, as a mere precursor to Christianity and more specifically Catholicism in this case, replaces it. Meanwhile, the antisemitism present in Catholicism itself, in Catholic anticommunist thought, in the anticommunist accusations of the Church as a New World Order (with an obviously Jewish backing) is addressed only insofar as it discusses the Church, with no meaningful effort at examining the antisemitism of Church history, the vital means by which Catholic history cannot exist except as a continued and intentional realization of antisemitic, imperialist violence becomes simply part of Church History to be sanitized and presented as an Other, as something that was sealed away at Vatican II. 

Conversely, the potential of actual revolutionary Catholicism, the building of liberation theology and the lack of recognition given to it by the Church, the way in which Catholic Social Teaching has created a sort of specific radicalism, the discontent that is brewing on college campuses that are undergoing the realization of a Catholic transgender experience, a gay Catholic experience, the realization of a figure of the lesbian nun, the gay priest, the homosexuality of scripture, presents both theoretical-theological opening through the deconstructive approach of figures such as Derrida, Butler, Žižek, and numerous others, and an attempt at global consciousness of the sort urged by Catholic education, that Catholic education did not realize it was cultivating. Even limited by liberal-democratic structures, the socialist necessities of the Church, the anticapitalist implications of scripture, are becoming clearer and clearer and the possibility of militant Catholicism, a Catholicism of liberation, grows by the day. In this fashion, fascism urges a reactionary traditionalism, a sort of grasping at the symbols of the Church in order to hold itself steady. But reactionaries are, as ever, paper tigers and they soon crumble when faced with how these symbols of hegemony are quickly being resignified through acts of love and sex and postcolonial critique into the beginnings of socialist thought.

[glittergummicandypeach]

The culture of dying | Religion | Al Jazeera

The scent of fresh flowers filled the semi-detached house just outside London.

In the usually spacious living room, the cream sofas had been pushed back against the walls, the stack of "to-do" paperwork and the ornate lamp removed from the coffee table. A large cotton sheet covered the wine-red carpet.

Women filled the room, sitting in clusters on the floor. Some quietly recited passages from the Quran, others picked dried kidney beans from a bowl, saying a prayer for the deceased before transferring them to another - a modified type of abacus.

The weeping, and sometimes wailing, women were served fruit from a large steel tray - bite-sized pieces of apples, oranges and bananas with their peel still on to stop them from browning.

Sabah Chohan remembers the day well. It was the summer of 2011, and she was 17. She had helped prepare the fruit for the mourners gathered in her aunt's home.

"There were people that none of us [cousins] had ever seen - and I'm sure who had never met Ammar - who would come and wail, with faux grief, really strong, deep cries. Me and my other cousins were left wondering who some of these people were and where these tears were coming from. I remember being annoyed at myself, because everyone was crying so much, but I wasn't able to shed a tear. I was in shock."

Ammar Chohan, 20, was Sabah's older cousin, but they were more like siblings.

Growing up together in Slough, Sabah recalls: "He was at our house almost every day. We had Quran classes together. We'd go to the cinema. He'd pick me up from school, and I used to feel so cool in front of my friends because he was so popular."

His sense of humour and love of practical jokes made him the "life and soul" of the family, she says.

In July 2011, Ammar and Kameel, Sabah's older brother, were on a boat trip just off the southern coast of Turkey.

Sabah had recently returned to the UK from her own summer break when Kameel made a frantic call home. Ammar had not resurfaced after his last dive.

The Chohan family desperately wanted to believe that Ammar was playing another of his practical jokes, but by daylight, his body had been found by a team of divers.

Funeral flowers are seen in the mortuary at Poppy's Funerals in Lambeth Cemetery, London during the coronavirus pandemic [File: Hannah McKay/Reuters]

Dying young

"It tore the family apart," Sabah reflects. "None of us were equipped on how to grieve. You expect older people to die, but not a 20-year-old who had his whole life ahead of him.

"I wasn't able to talk to anyone about how I felt, but I don't think any of us were. We [Ammar's older sister and the other cousins] all handled it differently and kind of retreated into ourselves."

The elders made arrangements to bring Ammar's body home and prepared for the funeral. Islamic guidelines provided a practical framework to follow in those first days.

Ammar's home was quickly filled with love. His friends created a space in one of the rooms where they would share stories that momentarily seemed to bring him back to life.

Sabah wanted to join, but cultural expectations meant the females in the household should not be seen sitting in the same room as the young men.

"I wanted to hear the stories, but I also wanted to keep the mums and aunties happy," says Sabah, who is now 26. "Our culture is very big on respect, so I had to respect tradition, respect the elders."

"I struggled at the time. I didn't know how to behave, how to act, there were certain expectations. There is no manual or formula that tells you how to mourn. There was a lot to take in and I felt caught between two cultures, being British and being Pakistani. I didn't feel my culture helped."

An unspoken expectation of that culture was for Ammar's family to be flawless hosts, prioritising the needs of other mourners over their own.

"Even if we are exhausted or mentally not in the right headspace, we had to behave in a certain way ... 'Don't laugh, it's disrespectful', 'Don't talk about death and grief and sadness as it's seen as having a lack of faith in God's will'."

But it is not just in Sabah's culture that death is rarely discussed. Dr Kathryn Mannix, a pioneering palliative care doctor in the UK, writes about the changes in our relationship with death in her best-selling book, With the End in Mind.

A century ago death was part of life, she explains. But with medical advancements, our experience of death has become diluted. "The rich wisdom around death, the vocabulary and etiquette that served us so well in the past, has been lost," she writes.

Mortuary workers Stuart Emans and Graham Cowper prepare a deceased person for a funeral in the mortuary at Poppy's Funerals in Lambeth Cemetery [File: Hannah McKay/Reuters]

Creating culture, finding support

Sabah turned to social media for support, sharing stories about Ammar without any cultural constraints. Every memory she posted was met with likes or shares, which she says validated her grief and gave her the comfort and support she needed.

She also turned to YouTube where she started listening to recitations of the Quran and Islamic teachings, which brought her the peace she was seeking.

In a 2017 study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Dr David B Feldman tested a theory that those with a religious belief have fewer anxieties surrounding death and grief than those without. He discovered that levels of "death anxiety" were the same in both groups, but that those who believed in God and an afterlife showed greater "acceptance of death, and a greater growth in response to loss".

Sabah responded to her loss by raising money for disadvantaged communities in Ammar's name. Giving to charity on behalf of someone who has died is known as Sadaqah Jariyah in Islam - a lasting charitable legacy said to benefit the soul of the departed.

She also trekked across deserts and climbed the world's tallest mountains, making her realise the vastness of the earth, and her place in it, she says.

"The mighty mountains made my problems seem so small and made me appreciate everything I took for granted," Sabah reflects.

'We don't know how to talk about death'

Although Sabah did not find the comfort she needed within her cultural group, Natalie Hay says she admires the "support" offered within some Asian communities at times of bereavement.

When her mum Sheila died from breast cancer in 2013, she says she remembers a friend visiting and bringing a homemade cottage pie. "It was such a simple gesture, but it meant so much. When I mentioned it to my Asian friends they were so surprised, as in their cultures when someone dies the house is filled with a steady stream of food and visitors - I think we've [non-Asian English communities] lost that."

"We don't know how to talk about death, and there is a real problem in English society in reaching out."

Natalie recalls how at the time of her mother's death, nobody phoned her. "Because everyone thought someone else was reaching out to me, and when I spoke to friends about it years later, they said they hadn't known what to say so just avoided me."

Pictures of Natalie Hay's mother, Sheila [Photo courtesy of Natalie Hay]

Looking at photos of her mother, a former actress who was on her agency's books as "an Elizabeth Taylor lookalike", Hay feels comforted in knowing that she and her younger sister Claudia had honoured all of their mothers' final wishes.

"Mum was such an extrovert, she was this eccentric, bohemian character. She requested a black horse-drawn carriage and for all the mourners to be dressed in black - even though she was one of the most colourful people around. I thought of the theatrics of it all - but when she died, because we had had that conversation, I made it all happen."

More than 100 mourners packed the Gothic-style church in London, and people remembered Sheila in their own creative ways. One friend sang a song Sheila had written, another recited one of her poems, and Natalie delivered the eulogy. "I knew her better than anyone else. I didn't find it cathartic, but I felt it was important to honour her."

"It was all very traditional, and the clip-clopping of the horses' hooves as we went through the graveyard was actually very comforting.

"It was little things like that that I noticed, also older gentlemen tipping their hat as my mother's carriage passed by - it was a lovely act of respect honouring my mother, and that gave me comfort."

Natalie with her sons Alec (left) and Matteo (right) [Photo courtesy of Natalie Hay]

When Sheila's coffin was being lowered into the ground, Natalie says she felt strange at the finality of it all. "It felt so cold. I asked if I could throw soil on the coffin, and was told no, but I recently went to a Jewish funeral and we were able to throw some earth on the coffin - it made a difference.

"It made me wish we had more rituals, a lack of them can leave people sometimes feeling lost."

Sitting in her sunny London garden, Natalie reflects on how her Christian beliefs helped her understand the dying process, but her culture did not offer the support she was seeking.

"I see death as a transition to the afterlife. When mum was dying, the vicar came to the hospice and he anointed her, we said prayers and 'May Christ be with you'. It was comforting to her and to me. It made a difference."

She makes a point to talk to her own children, 12-year-old Matteo and nine-year-old Alec, about death, she says.

"I've noticed that in English culture, we don't really expose our young to births and deaths - and I find that sad. How will you understand life if you are not exposed to the cycle of it?"

Adapted funerals

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic gripping the world today, fulfilling cultural and religious rites around death - as well as being there for the dying - has not always been possible.

In many cases, restrictions have meant people were unable to be with dying relatives.

When Nurten Haddedou's cousin Keziban Ozdemir died last month from pancreatic cancer, 73-year-old Nurten wanted to be there, to offer prayers, comfort family and share memories, but could not because of the coronavirus restrictions.

"I'd known her all her life and it really upset me not being able to be there. I feel dreadful and still feel guilty. I'm heartbroken."

Nurten believes it is important to "pay your final respects".

"Not being able to attend [due to a restriction on numbers attending funerals] has made it more difficult for me to accept her passing as I didn't get to say goodbye," she reflects. "I've always attended the funerals of friends and family. It's important, it shows respect for the departed and it's also a chance to say a final goodbye in person."

Imam Ajmal Masroor performs a Friday prayer service, broadcast online using his phone, at Wightman Road mosque in North London during the coronavirus pandemic [File: Henry Nicholls/Reuters]

Erkin Guney understands this well. A funeral director and chairman of Masjid Ramadan in north London, he had the sombre task of dealing with 150 Muslim burials in four months.

"At one point we were burying four to six people a day. It was unprecedented, I used to run the largest cemetery in Western Europe and would then only deal with 100 deaths in a year," he says.

Erkin explains that Islamic funeral rites are "simple but important".

"You wash the body, wrap it in a white cloth called the 'kafan', put the body in an open casket, prayers are recited, the body can be viewed - you take the body to the graveside, and say your final goodbyes.

"In Islam, this journey, the last journey, is the most sacred."

Volunteers carry a coffin containing the body of a person who did not die of COVID-19 at a temporary morgue built for coronavirus victims in the car park of Central Jamia Mosque Ghamkol Sharif in Birmingham, England on April 24, 2020 [File: Matt Dunham/AP Photo]

At the start of the pandemic, with personal protective equipment (PPE) in short supply, confusion over whether the washing and wrapping of the deceased would be allowed and even reports that bodies were being cremated or buried in body bags because of the risk of contagion, Erkin says bereaved families experienced a "disconnect from their spiritual traditions".

"The absence of these rituals meant families were unable to feel a sense of closure, and these death rituals are hugely important. It is our duty to give each person a dignified sendoff," he says.

"I had to change the game, I wasn't accepting this. When I die, this is what I want for myself - wash my body and lay me to rest. This is my duty or otherwise why am I here? We are dealing with families' loved ones that have died, this isn't a conveyor belt.

"We knew we couldn't bury the bodies in 24 hours [as is the tradition in Islam], but the rest we could do. So after bodies had been refrigerated for seven days [to kill any trace of the virus], we washed them, we wrapped them, we held prayers. There was no way we were going to bury unidentified people in body bags."

Mourning suits were replaced with hazmat suits and Erkin continued his work.

He set up a live stream option for families to watch the whole process online from their homes. "People were now able to say their goodbyes over video streaming, and the deceased had their final rites fulfilled."

Seeing the death rate go up on the daily news, and facing the bodies of the deceased the next morning was hard to handle. Erkin says he did so with tears in his eyes.

"It doesn't matter what religion you are, death is a spiritual experience, not religious. Islam is one path to God, but there are many."

Volunteer Mohammed Zahid adjusts plastic wrapping on one of a group of empty coffins in a temporary morgue built for coronavirus victims in the car park of Central Jamia Mosque Ghamkol Sharif in Birmingham [File: Matt Dunham/AP Photo]

'Each death is different'

While there are often unspoken guidelines for processing death, does having a more structured approach help us cope better with grief?

Aly Dickinson has been an "end-of-life doula" for six years, and has become known as the go-to person for advice on how to "be" with a bereaved person, among her own friends and family.

An end-of-life doula, sometimes called a death doula, offers emotional, physical and psychological support to the dying and to their loved ones.

"Traditionally ... this role was undertaken by a person, often a woman, in the local community," Aly explains. "As dying has become more medicalised we have become more separated from our dying with most deaths happening in hospitals, hospices and care homes. We have lost the innate knowledge and wisdom to look after our own at end of life."

A pin board displaying the locations of funeral directors in London is seen on wall of the office at Poppy's Funerals in Lambeth Cemetery [File: Hannah McKay/Reuters]

By offering practical and emotional support, Aly says she and her colleagues help to "preserve the quality of wellbeing, sense of identity and self-worth [of a dying person] from the moment we are called upon."

Aly points out that it is important to recognise the personal experience of each individual. "Each death is different - the person is unique, their life is unique and that is reflected in their dying. The conversations, emotions, hopes, fears and concerns are different for each person - there may be some common themes but each individual experience belongs to that person [and] is distinctive.

"I know, from having seen, that death can be a beautiful and peaceful letting go of this life," she adds.

'Love, it's as simple as that'

Ritu Sani, a business consultant in her 40s, wishes she was offered some type of professional support when her father was dying from cancer in 2018.

"I just wanted someone to sit and offer guidance on what the final stages of cancer look like, someone to ask how my dad was feeling, how he felt about death."

She felt this was not offered by the medical profession.

The support Ritu wanted "has nothing to do with what religion you are - this is about humanity", she says.

Mourners hold flowers during a funeral [Getty Images]

Although Ritu describes herself as spiritual rather than religious, it was her father's Sikh faith and her mother's Hindu beliefs that formed the structure of the funeral process. But although her family were enveloped in the care of the Hindu and Sikh communities, she was not sure that this was the kind of "support" she needed.

"I had people coming up to me, telling me how I should be praying, how I should be grieving. And my brother was falling apart, our extended family members and friends were infuriated, they thought as a man he shouldn't be behaving that way. I didn't want people coming into our home with judgement."

"There are different types of mourners, there are those who come out of obligation, have a cup of tea and go, there are those who come to have a snoop and see what's going on within the family at such a personal time, and there are those who come to give you a hug and bring enough food to last a week, which is welcomed," she says.

Ritu honoured her father and says she "tried to tick all the boxes" for him by incorporating both Sikh and Hindu traditions. "Both have a different meaning of what it means to die."

The rituals were spread over 13 days and ended with the final ceremony, scattering her father's ashes "the last bit of the person's remains on the earth" in an open water lake, following the Hindu belief of setting the spirit free and returning it to nature.

Looking back, Ritu says her family's religious traditions helped. "For us as a family, it was cathartic to do this, it was sad and upsetting but was a good way to say goodbye."

Erkin believes that "at the end, when you lose everything, you get back to your true self [and] faith and culture don't matter".

"I have seen every religion's death rites," he adds, "and when you're standing by the grave, saying a prayer or nothing at all, what we all have in common is love, it's as simple as that."

This content was originally published here.

[gorginfoogle]

Oscars 2017

With the Academy Awards tonight, I thought I’d give you all my thoughts on the various Best Picture nominees, and my general rankings of each of them.  Note that for this year I mostly just tried to watch the Best Picture nominees, because my work and Xbox keep me far too busy to see every last acting nominee to get a proper opinion on them, so I’m just waiting for tonight, when my Twitter and Tumblr feeds blow up with people screaming with outrage that white people won all the awards again to figure out which ones I need to check out.  Anyway...

9) Hacksaw Ridge - While there weren’t any nominees this year that I actively disliked, per se, this one easily came the closest.  It’s Mel Gibson indulging in all of his worst affectations, filled with endless religious sermonizing and people bravely enduring horrible acts of violence against them, frequently in slow motion, and for his big Hollywood comeback effort he manages to include a supporting character that gives a speech near the end to the main character about how horribly wrong he was to doubt him, and he hopes that someday the main character will find it within himself to forgive him.  It would have been the ultimate Gibson film if only he had managed to squeeze in a monologue about how evil England is somewhere.  

8) La La Land - I’m sorry, guys.  I know all of my friends under 30 seem to love this movie to death, but this really is just a fairly standard effort from everyone.  It might be the first time I’ve ever spent watching a musical and spending the whole time thinking about how desperately it needed a Gene Kelly type to give the film more energy and fun.  That said, it looks nice, and is pleasant enough, even if it doesn’t really do much else for me.

7) Hidden Figures - This is unfortunately one of those movies where the more thought I put into it after the fact, the less I’m able to really enjoy it.  This was the lone Traditional Hollywood Biopic entry in the Best Picture field, and it manages to get pretty far just by the sheer force of that reliable framework and the quality of the acting, though it becomes somewhat hard to take completely seriously when it expects us to view Kevin Costner as the heroic white man that ends racism in our sciences as soon as he realizes its existence.  Yeesh. 

6) Arrival - This is the first of the nominees here that I can actually view as being a proper nominee (though yes, I fully expect La La Land to sweep everything because the Academy has never once shied away from jerking itself off), as it comes off as one of those old school hard sci-fi films that’s just about ideas and moral dilemmas, without any big battles to distract yourself with.  It may not be the most exciting of the nominees, given that the entire movie is about the difficulties of encountering a totally alien culture and language, but it’s pretty captivating, and probably even more important nowadays with a president that is openly hostile to other cultures.

5) Fences - This was just brilliantly written and acted all the way through, to the point where this might be my all-time favorite Denzel performance.  I’m quietly hoping he and Viola Davis are able to win, even if I’m not expecting it.  This would be higher on my list if not for Denzel overdirecting the hell out of it for fear of it coming across as too stagey, and for the goddamn laughably ridiculous ending.

4) Moonlight - Possibly the most grim of all the nominees (more on that later), this does such a great job of getting into the life of the main character as he grows from childhood to adulthood that I could watch it another dozen times without getting bored of it.  Also, I don’t know that Miami has ever looked more amazing than in this film.

3) Hell or High Water - I intentionally made this the last nominee that I watched, because years of Academy Awards have taught me to always save a nice crowd pleaser for the end.  And boy, did this ever deliver on that front.  There’s just something nice, after seeing a bunch of serious dramas about racism or coming of age or losing your family or the general misery of life in Massachusetts, about just seeing a really well done action thriller about bank robbers sticking it to the man.

2) Lion - The first forty or so minutes of this film are some of the most fully realized and harrowing moments of film you’ll ever likely see.  While it’s difficult for me to fully get in the mindset of the main character (I’ve thankfully never had to wonder about my parentage or where I came from, and being perfectly honest I have quite a few relatives I’d have been perfectly okay with knowing a good deal less about), it’s an incredible journey, and one that everyone should see.  Of the three “true” story nominees (the other two being Hacksaw Ridge and Hidden Figures), this is the only one that’s a real must-see.

1) Manchester By the Sea - This is a tricky one to talk about, partly based on the nature of the film itself, and partly based on how Casey Affleck just put in the best work of his career right as we all got to find out what kind of a shitty human being he is.  We’ll table that for now -- frankly, everyone reading this most likely already knows whether or not they are able to watch and evaluate a movie without the personal character of the main actor factoring in -- and just discuss the film itself.  Now, have any of you ever seen something that’s just so ridiculously over the top depressing that it turns back around and becomes hysterically funny instead?  Because that’s this movie, and I’m 95% sure it was completely intentional.  This was one of the funniest movies of the year, and had me thoroughly entertained from start to finish, all while telling one of the most ridiculously grim stories of the year.  I would recommend it to everyone.

So those are my thoughts.  What do all of you think?  Is my ranking spot on?  Are you excited for La La Land to win Best Picture?  Are you annoyed like me that Green Room didn’t get any nominations?

[logothanatos]

Technosociality as Origin of Taboo

While reading Chapters I & II of Georges Bataille’s “Erotism: Death and Sensuality,” it was rather fascinating how much of the material overlapped quite well with the kind of challenge I’ve been trying to make against a memetic theory of cultural evolution. In particular, Bataille seems to at least implicitly share the notion that the subjective experience as, needless to be said, we know it was birthed in tandem with the arrival of the tool. First, I will give my exposition of the framework I came in with when I began reading “Erotism,” and then I will describe how Bataille’s own position may relate to my own.

The Technosocial Model

In my case, I treated the capacity to craft tools as the basis upon which something such as “society,” or the social, is possible. At the same time, this thought required the intimate initial linking of the institution of religion and the method of superstition with the very existence of society itself, for if it were the case that tools acted as the ground upon which social life was possible, this would only be due to the requisite faculties required for deliberate or on-going tool-making, namely representational thought, self-externalization and structured activity/process. These are the same exact elements which make society possible, for in such a case the activity and process of the organism itself is able to self-regulate by drawing some foreseeable connection between elements of the environment, and not simply that, but is able to represent this connection or relation to itself. This it can only do if it can be at a distance from itself, for the representation of the connection between environmental variables for the organism can only be possible if it already assumes a position extracted from the object of its process and activity, which necessarily involves its own behavior. Society can be nothing but this representation of environment. The idea of a complete and full, substantial and self-identical objective being from which the organism arises and into which it dissolves is a movement perceptible to the organism in terms of the arising and dissolution of its own representations.

Though it is otherwise perceptible in an entirely different way, or mode of thinking, it is in this mode that the behavior of an organism can be perceived for it in the character of a modus operandi rather than a modus esse. It is important to highlight the word “can” here, for it is not the case that this mere (self-)representation--which becomes the ceded anchor for the structuring of the organism’s process and activity--is sufficient for the actual recognition of the distinction between modus operandi and modus esse. This recognition of such distinction is merely latent in this capacity. And yet, this latent recognition of distinction is not necessary for society to already be actual. The very act of representation of self (as behavioral body) and environment ironically serves initially to naturalize the modus operandi of the organism. This is because, as requiring self-externalization, the consequent self-representation is also committed externally through objects. This is already society, or social life, in its most primitive form. It should be clear, given this explanation, why religion and society could be regarded, initially, as the same thing: this objective self-representation is the birth of mythology, and mythology expresses the ordering of behavior, not just for the given organism, but all organisms which share in both this representative capacity and the given representational act. In fact, myth served as both the historical basis of religious discourse and the primary source of culture throughout the initial development of society. The undoing of their links owes itself to this very fact, as this undoing was an internal movement within each of them. If one returns to the tool, it would seem then that the tool is the very mainspring of the social-cultural-mythical, and that tool-making is at the same time society-making.

Note this does not suppose a representational model of the mind, let alone of epistemic access to the world; in fact, this representational thought is just a narrow aspect of mental life, precisely in being a development of evolutionary forces, symbolic of the environment of the given organism. And as such a narrow aspect, it express itself in an activity which seems species-specific, whether as a matter of degree or kind: tool-making. I call this the technosocial model of cultural evolution. Perhaps it has already existed by a different name, but that might just require I read more anthropology, cultural sociology and religious studies so that I can give proper credit to the pre-existing theory. That irrespective, in a sense one cay about society that it is a phantasm. Perhaps as Stirner would say, a spook. But it has been a very useful one for not only one’s own endeavors, but also, to one’s dismay, for others’. As a tool it has managed to structure activity in such a way that it allows for efficiency and calculation, and gives such structuring a compelling cosmic justification. That being said, Bataille goes beyond this, but whether the direction he takes is fruitful is something I’m not sure of yet.

What is the Relationship between Taboo and Technology?

It seems clear that there’s agreement about the centrality of the tool to society and social life, for Bataille holds that “the community is made up of those whom the common effort unites, cut off from violence by work during the hours devoted to work” while linking the existence of such work (defined as labor united with rationality) with the capacity for tool-making (Bataille 1986, 47-48, 44-45). Yet, there seems to be no such agreement as to the origins of society, mythology, religiosity, for Bataille would seem to be of the opinion that, rather than such things arising from the tool--or vice versa--both the tool and society arose together from the common origin of the taboo (Bataille 1986, 38):

Without the existence of prohibitions in the first place, man would not have achieved the lucid and distinct awareness on which science is founded. Prohibitions eliminate violence, and our violent impulses [...] destroy within us that calm ordering of ideas without which human awareness is inconceivable.

It doesn’t seem all that clear, however, that the ordering of ideas itself relies on a kind of initial, grounding prohibition. It would seem that the given ordering of ideas--to the extent that ideas are themselves reliant on a mode of being that grasps the environment as a set of distinctive entities--is a consequence of those relations relevant to the particular world brought to light in that readiness-at-hand aspect within which that organism exists. That is to say, the as-structure of the organism and its environment is what determines the scope of possibly relevant relationships for the organism.

Nonetheless, it is indeed the case that a structured activity and process--a particular order or pattern--would be ineffectual in a case of raging and constantly competing impulses. It is necessary that some overwhelming and unilateral friction be produced, even if amongst them, so that stability and relative unity is achieved. It is possible that the “prohibition” Bataille speaks of is really just this friction of instincts. But it does not seem obvious why any unilateral friction should hold amongst impulses. So insofar as Bataille’s “prohibition” suggests more than this friction, the clues may be in Bataille’s use of the word “disequilibrium” to describe something which sounds awfully Heideggerian (Bataille 1986, 31): “I regarded eroticism as the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence into question.” Earlier on he stated (Bataille 1986, 29): “Animal sexuality does make for disequilibrium and this disequilibrium is a threat to life, but the animal does not know that.” These two quotes taken together suggests that eroticism for Bataille involves, not just a kind of sexuality-beyond-sexuality (and thereby a question of desire), but an awareness of the disequilibrium implied by this sexuality, or intrinsic to such desire. This would seem to suggest that there is some sort of fundamental disequilibrium organisms--if not the cosmos--partake in. Nonetheless, Bataille so far does not characterize this disequilibrium in any more detail. It would seem key to the question of a unilateral friction of impulses.

To return to topic, however, the prohibition would have to have the character, in that case, of something which does not merely suppress impulses, but reconfigures them, and which commits such reconfiguration from within the organism’s ownmost possibilities (thereby definite ideas and ideational structure) as earlier specified. But in the case of the social animal, the horizon of this possibility, concretely expressed, is precisely the technological, since the tool is the space within which to alter possibility. The technological requires a sensitivity to time. In this way, the tool becomes the medium of desire. This solves a problem Bataille runs into (though he does not frame it as a problem): “If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them” (Bataille 1986, 41). This brings up a sort of chicken-or-egg question in regards to the ability to work--does the prohibition arise as a consequence of work, or does work arise as a consequence of prohibition?

Insofar as Bataille speaks of disparate communities as distinct “unities” of work, this challenges the notion of technology and social life arising from the common origin of the taboo (Bataille 1986, 47-48). It would seem reasonable to answer the chicken-or-egg question posed by positing the tool as the common origin between prohibition and work. In fact, this would make Bataille’s attempt to tie in work with social life a bit easier, as, with the tool of common origin, it becomes immediately apparent that just as the tool becomes important for the life of the organism, so too does the organism’s work gain importance in its social life. In the production of society through the tool, society is rendered one’s own tool through gesturing one’s own activity as tool within society. The prohibition, or taboo, then, is merely the expression of this last move. It would also help Bataille’s explanation of the taboo of death, as it is easy to bring temporal perception into the picture. It is important to note, however, that this sort of response is incomplete without an account of the unilateral friction of impulse, which is an issue this post digressed into momentarily. The tool may allow for and produce both prohibition and society, but how is it that either is possible at all, i.e. in a general sense? I believe, again, this question ties back to the notions of equilibrium/disequilibrium, perhaps by way of the further notions of difference, relation, appropriation and identity.

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Print.

[animalruth19-blog]

The Definitive Guide to knights

As a subject of fact, now I’m sensation indignant that priests aren't normally out there prior to mass, so does this mean I can’t get Communion tomorrow morning at seven:thirty? Given that I’m “indignant”? Truthfully ~ I uncover it not easy to feel that my Lord and God won't want me to…. The pope, irresolute and harrassed, lastly adopted a Center training course: he decreed the dissolution, not the condemnation from the order, and never by penal sentence, but by an Apostolic Decree (Bull of twenty-two March, 1312). The order getting been suppressed, the pope himself was to determine as towards the destiny of its customers as well as disposal of its possessions. As into the home, it absolutely was turned over towards the rival Buy of Hospitallers to generally be placed on its unique use, particularly the defence with the Holy Areas. In Portugal, nonetheless, As well as in Aragon the belongings had been vested in two new orders, the Buy of Christ in Portugal and also the Order of Montesa in Aragon. As towards the customers, the Templars acknowledged guiltless were being permitted either to join An additional armed service purchase or to return on the secular point out. During the latter scenario, a pension for life, billed to the possessions with the get, was granted them. Alternatively, the Templars who experienced pleaded guilty prior to their bishops had been to generally be treated "based on the rigours of justice, tempered by a generous mercy". The pope reserved to his personal judgment the cause of the grand master and his three 1st dignitaries. They had confessed their guilt; it remained to reconcile them While using the Church, after they had testified for their repentance While using the customary solemnity. To give this solemnity extra publicity, a System was erected before the Notre-Dame with the looking through with the sentence. But for the supreme instant the grand grasp recovered his courage and proclaimed the innocence of the Templars and the falsity of his have alleged confessions. To atone for this deplorable instant of weakness, he declared himself able to sacrifice his lifetime. He understood the fate that awaited him. Promptly right after this unanticipated coup-de-théâtre Considerably of your heritage of humanity which the original Knights Templar preserved and formulated is intriguing record, revealing several “techniques” that are much desired by seekers around the globe, and supplying sensible solutions to many challenges of modern Culture. The priories range twenty-four, and the commanderies, which had been subdivisions from the priories, 656. All these posts had been held In keeping with seniority, the commanderies following three strategies, which were being called "caravans". A most significant modify in the character with the purchase was the transformation of your knights into corsairs. The piracy practiced from the Muslims was the scourge of your Mediterranean and especially of Christian commerce. The Knights of Rhodes, on their aspect, armed cruisers not simply to provide chase towards the pirates, but to create reprisals about the Turkish merchantmen. With expanding audacity they made descents within the Coastline and pillaged the richest ports in the Orient, for example Smyrna (1341) and Alexandria (1365). On the other hand, a fresh Muslim energy arose at this period — the Ottoman Turks of Iconium — and took the offensive versus Christianity. Once the tumble of Constantinople, Mahomet II directed his attention into the endeavor of destroying this den of pirates which manufactured Rhodes the terror of your Muslim world. Henceforth the purchase, thrown within the defensive, lived perpetually on the alert. As soon as, beneath its grand grasp, Pierre d'Aubusson, it repulsed all of the forces of Mahomet II within the siege of 1480. In 1522 Solyman II returned to the attack which has a fleet of four hundred ships and an army of 140,000 Males. The knights sustained this excellent onslaught with their habitual bravery for a duration of six months underneath their grand master, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and capitulated only when their provides were fully fatigued. Their life had been spared, and they ended up permitted to withdraw. Solyman II, in homage to their heroism, lent them his ships to return to Europe. They dispersed to their commanderies and begged Charles V to grant them the island of Malta, which was a dependency of his kingdom of Sicily, and this sovereignty was granted them in 1530, beneath the suzerainty in the kings of Spain. The Knights of Malta (1530-1798) The letters of the Apostle Paul and also the Acts in the Apostles in The brand new Testomony display that early Christians believed that this institution provided a mandate to carry on the celebration being an anticipation in this life of the joys of your banquet that was to come back in the Kingdom of God. Once the seize of Jerusalem by Saladin (1187), the Hospitallers retained only their possessions during the Principality of Tripoli, and these they misplaced a century later on by the fall of Acre (1291). They were being obliged to seek refuge, below their grand master, Jean de Villiers, from the Kingdom of Cyprus, wherever they already had some belongings. King Amaury assigned them as a location of residence the town of Limassol within the coast. Having turn out to be islanders, the Hospitallers were obliged to modify their way of warfare. They Outfitted fleets to combat the Muslims on The ocean and to safeguard the pilgrims, who had not ceased to go to the Holy Areas. But it was chiefly the conquest on the island of Rhodes, underneath the Grand Master Foulques de Villaret, that brought about a complete transformation in the purchase. An Unbiased View of religious vocation buddhism The Knights of Rhodes (1309-1522) In one sentence, paganism is usually a lifestyle of untruth. In excess of The 2 thousand a long time due to the fact Calvary, Christianity has had to frequently take care of pagan Concepts, pagan legislation; in the word--that has a pagan tradition that hated Christianity for the same reason that it crucified the Incarnate Fact, who became guy to teach the earth the way to provide God in this article in the world, in an effort to have Him in a blessed eternity. After i dug deeper, I found that commencing even previously, Potentially back again for the fifth century, the Heart, that's the spiritual coronary heart in contrast to the human organ, was symbolized by a drinking vessel. Catholics are accustomed to paintings in the Sacred Coronary heart of Jesus, so we understand that there was veneration for Jesus' Coronary heart. It can be unknown to how many of his twelve disciples Jesus imparted his solution teachings, but what survives right now as the Gnostic Gospels, what was located in a cave in Egypt in 1947 and is known as the Naj Hammadi library, comprise the writings of Mary Magdalene and Thomas. I figured that the put experienced a reputation, a code name that may not give absent its area. Within the novel I named it Hafiz Mountain, for the reason that Hafiz in Arabic indicates to protect information, as in crafting, memorizing, or secreting it away, and I figured that’s just what the mystical underground and afterwards the Brotherhood would have named it, or a thing very related. Calvin, whose posture was closer to that of Luther, taught the “actual but spiritual existence” of Christ but in the sacramental motion in lieu of in the elements of your Eucharist. The High Church Anglicans (Particularly Considering that the Anglo-Catholic Oxford movement on the nineteenth century) and the Lutherans (who affirm the true existence of the body and blood of Christ “in, with, and under” the bread and wine) adhere most intently to your traditions of Catholic eucharistic doctrine and practice. In their liturgies equally Anglicanism and Lutheranism operate within the framework of the mass, adopting selected features and rejecting Other people; the liturgical actions in both of those traditions over the nineteenth and twentieth hundreds of years restored supplemental aspects, even though theological interpretations in the Lord’s Supper continued to Exhibit good variety. etc. etc. The checklist is not exhaustive, and any sin that Now we have meditated on before hand, understood its gravity and however preferred to perform it could be a lethal sin. Inside, the oldest section (1132) would be the east choir, which became the prototype for a particular trick of community architecture: the walls are straight on the surface but rounded inside of. Likely to confession annually has not been needed from the Church. What is required is always that you get the Eucharist at least annually. Obviously your can’t acquire inside the point out of mortal sin instead of about to confession so far as I know isn't a mortal sin.

[digitalrefugees]

Man’s Search for Meaning (in an Age of Cat Videos)

At our local thrift store, there is almost always a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning on the bookshelves. Usually, it hides quietly in-between a dozen harlequin novels waiting to pounce on a young adult who is having a rough day. And, despite the rumors that we would eventually learn to live without meaning, we continue to buy this book fifty years later. We are still haunted by the incessant need to make sense of our lives.

In the last decade, though, literally millions of cat videos have been uploaded to the internet. Anyone with WiFi could sit down this afternoon and watch cat videos on Youtube for the rest of their adult lives. Even if we realize the inadequacy of a secular age at providing us with a stable sense of meaning, distraction has become our new shield against meaninglessness. We are a society that simultaneously holds a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning and binge-watches Stranger Things for the second time. In this secular and digital age, how might the Church offer its rich resources of meaning to those who are searching for it? In what follows, I will attempt to answer that question with help from Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1990) and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

In The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger argues that meaning or nomos is how we “make sense” of the various experiences of our lives (13). It is a constellation of answers to questions like why and now what. In doing so, it acts as a “shield against terror” or buffer against the way in which experiences like transition, suffering, and death tend to push us toward the edge (22). A strong sense of meaning enables us to live through the highs, lows, and neutrals of everyday life without the constant threat of existential crisis. And, when one’s web of meaning is charged with religious beliefs, the shield becomes a sacred canopy under which we can both hide and flourish.

But, what happens when this sacred canopy is replaced with a secular one? Cue Charles Taylor. In A Secular Age, Taylor traces the five-hundred year history of how we arrived at where we are now. In short, we are living in the aftermath of the divorce between nomos and cosmos. Meaning is no longer something outside of us that can impose itself on us. It is something inside of us, which we impose on the world around us. This transition has locked the quest for meaning into what Taylor calls the “immanent frame” (542), which means that the wide open terrain of the spiritual is closed until further notice and a large “No Hunting for Meaning” sign is posted. Any trespassers will be shot by the cognitive majority.

In the end, whatever meaningful order we build within these boundaries is inherently fragile and prone to crack under pressure. Meaning that exist only in our minds, like anything imagined, is more susceptible than meaning that is built into reality itself. Taylor describes this “fragility of meaning” as one of the “malaises of modernity” (308). As a young adults minister, I have watched many try to create their own meaningful orders of reality ex nihilo or, more accurately, out of the raw material of the religious junkard. But these handmade webs of meaning tend to snap during the first real storm in their lives. Like the levee in New Orleans in 2005, these fragile shields of meaning seem strong until they meet a hurricane. Or, in the words of King Solomon (by way of King James), “If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small” (Prov. 24:10).

Peter Berger refers to these days of adversity as “marginal situations,” which bring about “haunting suspicions...that the previously accepted definitions of reality may be fragile or fraudulent” (23). For much of our lives, our frameworks of meaning just hide in the background, but these marginal situations have a way of exposing our naked frameworks for what they are. And, while these can include a whole range of experiences, death is the one that messes with our constructs of meaning more than anything else (Berger, 43). On an individual level, this might look like a near-death experience or the death of a loved one. On a collective level, this might look like a terror attack at a nightclub or the looming threat of something like the Ebola virus. These marginal situations cause us to ask questions we never thought or cared to ask.

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), which takes place over halfway through Taylor’s shift into a secular age, the character of Levin embodies this experience. He was a content atheist until the untimely death of his brother. This event, coupled with the religious leanings of his wife Kitty, continued to haunt his secular convictions about life and death throughout the rest of novel. Eventually, Levin began to feel “himself in the position of a person who has traded his warm fur coat for muslin clothing and, caught in the cold for the first time, is convinced beyond question, not by reasoning but with his whole being, that he is as good as naked and must inevitably die a painful death” (786). The question of death hovered over him and he discovered that “nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer” (786). Levin was caught in a marginal situation and unable to make sense out of it.

Here, however, we see one of the differences between us and an atheist in 19th-century Russia: we have Netflix. If Levin had Netflix, he might have never felt the gravity of meaninglessness weighing down on him. When our fragile canopies fail us, all ten seasons of Friends are there to console us. In the quiet and lonely spaces, the silences and solitudes, where we might discover that we are, in fact, “as good as naked,” distraction offers us a back-up canopy--a temporary shelter from the chaos at the margins. The secularization of our imaginations has coincided with the rise of within-arm’s-reach ways of distracting our imaginations. Camus and Sartre are left to brave the meaninglessness void on their own while the rest of us watch one more episode of Call the Midwife.

Of course, our tendency toward distraction is nothing new. In Section 131 of his Pensees (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc, 1958), Blaise Pascal says that we are always looking for ways to divert our attention away from the “weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, [and] despair” we feel when we have nothing to do. Our tendency toward distraction is part of what it means to be human, an aspect of the anthropological condition under the reign of Sin and Death. What is new is how accessible distraction has become. The options and availability of distraction have outpaced our ability to resist it, which is one of the themes of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

This is not to say that we must always deal with every personal crisis face-to-face at the moment we experience it (cf., Prov. 31:6), but the problem arises when we make distraction into our ordinary mode of being in the world. The craving for meaning can only be fed on a diet of distraction for so long before it turns on us. The digital natives, who have never known a world without digital technology, are quickly becoming digital refugees. Some of them are making their home in digital detox centers. Others are left to wander “in desert wastes finding no way to a city to dwell in; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them” (Ps. 107:4-5). The initial allure of distraction is proving to be nothing more than empty deceit.

In a recent New York Magazine article called “I Used to Be a Human Being,” Andrew Sullivan confessed how his addiction to distraction nearly ruined his life. He fits the description of a digital refugee. As he neared the worst of his addiction, he began to fear that “this new way of living was actually becoming a new way of not-living.” He was losing the ability be human in the truest sense. As a last ditch effort to recover his humanity, he traveled to a Buddhist retreat center where he experienced silence and rest. Slowly, he began to recover some of what was lost. Then, near the conclusion to his article, he made this comment on churches in a secular and digital age:

If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism, but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.

Andrew Sullivan could see that the church has something to offer a culture that is distracted, disembodied, and excarnate, but also that it is missing its opportunity.

Instead of the fulfilling his prophetic critique, what might it look like for churches to be alternative communities of meaning for digital refugees like Andrew Sullivan? First, churches must make safe spaces for people to feel the gravity of meaninglessness. Instead of leaving people to face this alone, the ancient practices of silence and solitude--whether in the midst of the liturgy or in the form of retreat to the “lonely places” (cf., Mk. 1:35)--can provide spaces for people to feel the fragility of man-made meanings in the safety of Christian community. Second, churches must practice meaning-full liturgies rather than baptized versions of Netflix. Whatever the merits of the liturgical overhauls of the past few decades, it might be wise to slowly bring back some of what was thrown out. From the confession to the benediction, instead of countering distraction with distraction, how could we make sure that both the form and content of everything in the liturgy works together to draw the congregation upward into the nomos of the gospel (see James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom)? And, finally, churches must make the most of personal and collective marginal situations. In those moments in between crisis and Netflix, receptivity for the gospel is at an all-time high. Obviously, this does mean rushing in with Job’s friends and explaining suffering, evil, and death in neat, little systems of meaning. Yet, the gospel is a point of entry into a Christ-ruled cosmos in which we can trust everything does make sense even as it leaves room for us to ask why (cf., Mt. 27:46)

In The Truman Show, Truman is the star of a reality TV show that everyone knows about but him. He has grown up in the island town of Seahaven, which is enclosed in the largest studio ever constructed. In the thirtieth year of the show, a studio light falls out of the sky. As he struggles to make sense out of this and other strange experiences, he gets on a sailboat and drifts toward the edge of his known world. When asked why it took Truman so long to question his reality, the show’s director responds, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. Simple as that.” There are many like Truman, who are beginning to question the reality presented to them by a secular age. As digital refugees, they are “feeling their way” (cf., Acts 17:27) toward churches even if they are uncertain about what they might find. As they dare to come inside our churches, will they discover sanctified versions of the same secular distractions or feel at home for the first time?

[epistolizer]

The Cultural Impact Of Worldview & Apologetics, Part 4

Western religions following the close of ancient history are perhaps best categorized as monotheistic in nature where the deity is a singular entity personally distinct from its creation and where the adherents of these respective faiths hope to obtain a blissful afterlife as distinct individual beings by gaining the favor of their respective deity following the conclusion of their corporeally linear existence.  Though it would be intellectually dishonest to flippantly dismiss all Eastern religions as the same, but as with their counterparts in the Western division, those in this category also share a number of characteristics with one another.  For the most part, Eastern religions tend to believe that individuals are continually reincarnated into this plane of physical reality as they attempt to achieve a sense of detachment so that they might achieve what amounts to an enlightened obliteration of the self through a merger with the cosmic unity (158).  These concepts are such a stark contrast with the Christian worldview that the Christian will need to compare a number of the ideas fundamental to a Biblical understanding of reality with those advocated by the Eastern outlook.

One of the most profound differences between Christianity and Eastern religious is how each believes truth is arrived at.  Christianity believes that God has revealed Himself through the word of His propositional revelation and the Incarnation of His Word in the from of His Son Jesus Christ.  Of the Eastern religions, on the other hand, Harold Netland writes, "In attaining religious truth, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism give priority to mystical or introspective experiences based on rigorous meditative disciplines which are said to provide direct unmediated access to ultimate reality (163)."  

In other words, Christians focus outward to gain understanding whereas the adherents of the great Oriental traditions look inside themselves.   This is especially evidenced by the two foremost figures these respective faith groupings are roughly organized around: the Christ and the Buddha.

The purpose of Buddha was to get the individual to realize that the individual has within themselves the wherewithal to bring about their own enlightenment and to detach themselves from the states of being that bring about their own suffering.  The purpose of Christ, on the other hand, was to get the individual to realize that they were so stained by sin that there was nothing that the individual could do to achieve his own salvation and that individuals had to look outward from themselves towards a savior, that being none other than Jesus Christ.

Since Christianity is focused outward in its offering of a solution to the travails in which each and every one of us finds ourselves, as a system it corresponds better to both the objective and existential aspects of reality.  In his journey to Japan, theologian Paul Tillich learned that, should an historian ever persuasively make the case based on research findings that Gautama Siddhartha never actually existed, such a discovery for the most part would not adversely impact Buddhist teaching (165).  However such would not be the case regarding Christianity, which is so linked to the existence, actions, and nature of its founder that if He did not do what the accounts of Him claim, we of all men would be the most miserable according to I Corinthians 15:19.  

Despite standing in contrast to many of Christianity’s most basic assumptions, the objective student and observer of religion (even if standing within a Christian framework of belief) must admit that the most devoted adherents of the respective Eastern creeds practice a rigorous form of self-discipline as they attempt to master the urges that exert an undue influence over the individual throughout the earthly life.  Though many are opposed to the idea of relying solely on a savior for their salvation and find an allure in the Eastern notion of looking for the answers to the mysteries of life and the cosmos within themselves, they do not necessarily find the idea of rigorous self denial all that appealing (at least for themselves anyway with pleas of sacrifice for the greater good something to rather motivate and govern the lower classes of the less-spiritually inclined by).

Thus in a process not all that dissimilar to the operation of the Hegelian dialectic where two competing or even diametric ideas are brought together and melded together to form a synthesis incorporating aspects of each, Eastern and Western outlooks have formed a coalition perspective in what since the 1960's and 1970's has come to be known as the New Age movement.  

Like the Eastern worldview, the New Age outlook essentially sees the totality of reality as a singular unity with the individual in a sense being akin to a single cell in the comprehensive cosmic mind (175).  As in the case of the Eastern faiths, L.Russ Bush writes, "...the New Age movement emphasizes the human problem as ignorance with salvation coming through enlightenment and self-effort (176)."

However, in the New Age movement, the approach and outcomes of this awareness are a bit more decidedly Western in their appearance.  For example, in Eastern brands of yoga the purpose is more about detaching the soul from the body in preparation for spiritual states such as nirvana.  To Westerners, however, yoga is packaged not only as about the quest for inward universal truths but also about improving one's body and success in life.  

Thus, for at least those in the movement's elite, there is a considerable emphasis upon the self.  L. Russ Bush categorizes the emphasis upon the here and now rather than a future heaven as "This worldliness”.  Of this state, he writes, “...the New Age is focused on the here and now; it is not a pie-in-the-sky sort of faith; it is belief that the New Age is itself the here and now and for this world and its people; it looks forward to an earthly transformation, not a heavenly one (180).”  What is not as often brought out to the gullible along this worldview’s outer fringes is the number that those in the higher echelons believe must be eliminated or perhaps “deliberately progressed” to more advanced levels of disembodied consciousness in order for this utopia to be brought about.

The New Age has become so ingrained throughout American society that it no longer seems as novel as at the time when its name was coined.  Now, certain interpretations of this brand of spirituality quietly just about serve as the respectable backdrop of establishmentarian popular culture. For example, Star Wars is no doubt one of the most beloved movie epics of the last 50 years.  However, to a percentage of its viewers, it is far more than an invigorating afternoon’s diversion.  It has been reported that a number of “Jedi churches” have popped up among fans that have taken enthusiasm for the films to the next level of adoration and devotion.

Those grounded in the real world will think those taking entertainment this seriously have sniffed too many musty comic books.  However, beneath the dramatic adventure and impressive special effects, Star Wars was not created solely for entertainment purposes.  George Lucas, who considered himself something of  a student of  anthropologist Joseph   Campbell, created Star Wars to serve as a mythology for the contemporary world.

This claim can be substantiated in regards to those scenes from the films where the nature of the Force is expounded upon.  For example, of the Force, Yoda (the primary exponent of these teachings) ruminates, “For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us.”

And like New Age conceptions of the essence that runs through the universe, the Force is not a conscious person concerned about the distinctions between good and evil as evidenced by the Dark Side’s primary devotee Darth Vader who it turns out is actually the saga’s focal character as the tale centers around his embracing of the Dark Side and reentering into the Light when he saves his son Luke from Vader’s Sith Master Emperor Palpatine.  This act was cast not in terms of the triumph of good over evil but rather as merely restoring balance in an almost Taoist manner.

The extent to which these various worldviews have permeated contemporary culture as to the extent Star Wars has has forced the Christian to walk a precarious tightrope.  On the one hand, there isn’t a person in the United States today that hasn’t had some kind of negative encounter with those that could be classified as stereotypical legalistic Christians.

Enthusiastic believers are to be commended for the seriousness with which they take their Christian walk if it is ultimately in Christ’s redemptive and free offer of salvation that they are truly trusting rather than in a rigorous adherence to a body of systematized rules, some of which are interpretations of certain Biblical injunctions rather than explicit Scriptural commands.  However, in doing so, are such believers really equipping themselves to reach out to others that have become mired in these deceptive worldviews?  Furthermore, by cordoning themselves off to such an extent in relation to things such as Star Wars, Stargate, and Star Trek, these Christians are denying themselves what amounts to an innocent good time and are not doing as much as they initially think to protect their children by failing to teach them how to sift the wheat from the chaff in relation to cinematic and literary productions.

By Frederick Meekins

[jakefawkner19-blog]

Hinduism Articles Coming from AMAZINES.COM.

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[desertleviathan]

Brainstorming help:  Wizard Family Names

Let’s say I’m hunting for names for some “Great Houses” of Wizards, derived from a common ancestor originally, but now also applying to anyone who is affiliated with those Houses through marriage, adoption, or formal apprenticeship.  Several of the Houses I’ve developed so far have strongly European inspirations, and I’m looking to diversify a little more.  But obviously as a White American with heavily Scotch-Irish ancestry, I don’t have a super good fix on what feels culturally appropriate for Magic Users with ties to other places.

Does this make sense?  I hope so.  I’m hunting for ideas for names for three families, but the write-ups on them are pretty long, so I’ll post them one at a time.  First:

The House of the Sun: Mages of Light

Broad outline for Light Mage cultural influences:  The main influence on the House of the Sun is Ancient Egypt, particularly the Old Kingdom.  I definitely want to downplay the Ptolemaic period and the Greco-Roman influence, at least on language.  However, the other major influence applied to the House is the baroque decadence of the court of King Louis the XIV of France, the infamous Sun King, where ostentatious display of wealth was also an explicit claim of divine favor.  Imagine the art, architecture, and clothing style of the people of Vigrid in the Bayonetta games, if it were shifted to an Egyptian religious base instead of a pseudo-Catholic one.  This all refers to their aesthetic trappings - ethnically, I’d like the main family line to resemble North African and Middle Eastern peoples, which is admittedly a pretty broad spectrum of possibilities, and one of the reasons why I’ve been having trouble drilling down to one core idea for the family name.

The House of the Sun in Mage Society:  Although they are wealthy and influential, the House of the Sun has never sought leadership of the Malstronic Houses.  They were content to serve as seers and advisors to the first rulers, Caradoc: the House of Storms, until a corruption scandal shattered their influence.  They work much more closely with the successors, Donovan: the House of Seeds, but also keep a lot more secrets from them, having learned caution from the Caradoc’s betrayal.  Among many of the other Houses who are dissatisfied with the Donovan’s eccentricities, the House of the Sun seem like ideal candidates to guide the Order into a new era of prosperity, but the members of the House itself do everything they can to suppress this sentiment, as they don’t want the militaristic Donovans to see them as rivals.

The House of the Sun in Non-Mage Society:  Despite the strong positive association, Light has no moral component - it is as good or as evil as the uses people put it towards.  Still, Light Mages have an easier time cultivating positive reputations than many other Mages, simply due to people having good feelings about their style of magic, which they are unusually generous about teaching to non-initiates in small doses.  They tend to be scrupulously honest, but vain at the same time, which can make them burdensome to endure socially.  The House of the Sun is the wealthiest of the eight Malstronic Houses, which is unsurprising given their ability to manipulate fate and fortune, and to see into the future.  They try to use this wealth benevolently in their communities, but have a history of personal excess that they have not entirely divested themselves of, and their benevolent acts often hide a streak of pragmatism.  The movement within the house to adopt a more humble individual status, to free up more resources for charitable works, refer to themselves as the House of Stars instead of the House of the Sun.  Where they serve non-mage institutions outside of their extended family, members are often oracles, advisers, financiers, auditors, accountants, and investigators.  When they work in a military capacity, they have a talent as watchmen, scouts, and snipers.

Light Magic in the Cycle of Reincarnation:  Light governs the Astral Heights, the World of Destiny, where souls that are ready to be reborn await the machinations of Fate to tie them to a new life.  Because it is the last step “back” from the familiar Material Realm, and because the Cycle is built to be traveled only one way, the Astral Heights are a great mystery to most living mortals, and the House of the Sun’s knowledge thereof greatly enhances their mystique.

People of Light - The Elves:  One can only practice Malstronic Magic if one has at least some Human ancestry, but the Elves who are native to the Astral Heights have their own methods of shaping the Light Element, which they use to care for the unbound souls who await rebirth in thier realm.  Diplomatic ties between the Elves and the House of the Sun are very strong, and many members have some Elvish ancestry.  Likewise, many Elves have some House of the Sun ancestry, meaning individuals from both groups often have some facility for each other’s brand of Light Magic.

Season of Light:  Every Element governs a period of six weeks every year.  The Light element governs the calendar period beginning with the second week of the third month (3/9), through the third week of the fourth month (4/24), encompassing the last three weeks of Spring and the first three weeks of Summer.  The 24th and 25th Days of the Season of Light (32nd day of the 3rd month and the 1st day of the 4th month) share the festival celebrating the beginning of Summer, which are partially under the mystic governing of the Element of Fire, much as the Summer Solstice in the middle of the Season of Fire falls under the Element of Light (the 16th and 17th days of the 5th month).  Each elemental pair “swaps” a couple calendar days like this, for reasons that surely made great sense to the Ancients when they built all this.  Aclodoc has 8 day weeks, 4 week lunar months, and 12 month years, with no “leap” time needed.  Its celestial events are very orderly.

Domain of Light:  On a compass, the direction associated with the Light Element is South.  If one travels exactly 5,000 KM south from the fortress city of Mojatar Elas, one will reach the Equator, and the Temple of the Eternal Eye, which serves as the primary juncture of Light Magic in the world.  The line going from the Temple of the Eternal Eye up to Mojatar Elas, and eventually the Labyrinth of Endless Night (the counterpart physical juncture of the opposed Element of Darkness) serves as the Prime Meridian for worldwide timekeeping.  The Temple of the Eternal Eye is a sprawling complex of Pyramids and Monoliths forming a complicated glyph in a golden desert, with numerous mirrors and focusing lenses throughout that can direct beams of light to alter the properties of this glyph.  There are no actual dead entombed in these pyramids - though the House of the Sun draws aesthetic inspiration from Ancient Egypt, their funeral customs are very different.

Calamitous Beast of Light - The Unicorn:  When raw Magic of a single concentrated Element is left to flow without guidance, it tends to congeal into Elemental Spirits.  Such beings will grow larger and more sophisticated the more energy they absorb, until the largest such manifestations known are Calamitous Beasts, vast manifestations of a very pure form of that Element.  The Beast of Light is The Unicorn, who is just as dangerous as any other, despite its deceptively benevolent appearance.  Manifestations of The Unicorn tend to be short-lived novas that inspire clarity and insight in the minds of any witnesses (who survive being seared to death).  Summoning it is a reliable way to dispel illusions, if a bit overkill.

Light among other Elements:  In the cycle of Elements, Light follows Wood, and is followed by Fire.  It stands opposed to Dark, unfriendly to Metal and Water, and neutral to Earth and Air.  It has a neutral association with the meta-element of Identity, and a simultaneously positive and negative association with the meta-element of Void, but these traits are nigh-impossible for ordinary Mages to harness, and are mainly interesting in carefully managed laboratory experiments.

Physical Associations of Light:  Include light, sight, visual illusions, purification, the Future, radiant energy as not included explicitly under another element, and the “substance” of souls.  By quirks of the Old Malstronic Language, physical manifestations of Light are Feminine.

Psychological Associations of Light:  Include hope, harmony, nobility, mercy, vanity and faith.  By the quirks of Old Malstronic, mental associations of Light are Masculine.

Metamagical Aspect of Light:  The Aspect-Pattern most strongly associated with Light is that of The Seer.  Light Mages are more skilled on average with perceptual magic than their fellows, and are comfortable casting spells at a far greater range in both space and time.

Light in the Old Malstronic Language:  The characters associated with the Light Element are those that make the sounds V (considered Masculine, and tied to Light’s Psychological associations), S (considered Feminine, and tied to Light’s Physical associations), and a long E (considered Neutral, and linked to the Metamagic Properties of Light).  Whole volumes have been written about the headache the Old Malstronians made for themselves and future generations by encoding rigid and frankly arbitrary gender definitions so deeply into their language and magical framework, which has been almost as catastrophic as the similarly unnecessary Mental/Physical division.