theshoesofatiredman

[theshoesofatiredman]

A lot of people hate to hear this, but they in particular really need to understand it.

If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.

But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.

Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.

This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.

I'm posting at 10:30pm US Pacific time on a Sunday night, and fucking nobody is going to see this. Or reblog it. But I feel better having said it.

[theshoesofatiredman]

[theshoesofatiredman]

worse people than you have made it out before

[theshoesofatiredman]

People are so much more sad, and desparate, and lonely than you think. I have had three incidents in the last four months were a technician I was working with was being either dangerously unfocused (we work with high voltage), or just flat out angry with their coworkers, and every time when I just pulled them aside to say hey, this isn't you, you're nice, and you're competent, so something must be up - what can I do to help - they have responded by bursting into tears. One guy was struggling to get his wife moved into a care home, one guy just got served divorce papers, and the other hadn't slept a wink the night before because his daughter had the pukes.

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

(I'll step off my soapbox now. Enjoy your Sunday.)

[theshoesofatiredman]

Louise Glück, from "Midsummer" in Poems 1962-2012

[theshoesofatiredman]

It's not a free gift of salvation if we have to pay for it all of our lives.

my linktree ♡

[theshoesofatiredman]

Street preachers also have this effect except the cultiness is often dialed up and the eeriness of the code switch dialed down since you don't know how they speak normally. Instead it feels like they're trying to speak magic words at you when they're quoting scripture, like if you just hear a Bible verse you'll renounce your wicked ways. And like. I know it's because they believe the Bible is basically magic - that it's alive, that it's a sword, that there's a spiritual war happening all around us always and scripture is the weapon they can wield in that war to win souls. So naturally it makes sense that they would sound like they are performing a ritual when they invoke the sacred text.

Something that's genuinely so eerie is that after spending enough time outside of Christianity, the responses that Christians give to questions or the things they say in conversation start to sound so canned it stops sounding like you're even talking with a person. It's like one moment I'm talking to my mother and the next she's telling me that God's ways are higher than our ways and in her feeble human mind she cannot begin to imagine what it's like to be God and somehow that means she doesn't have to view the amount of suffering in the world as a contradiction. And the shift is so jarring that it feels like I activated a sleeper agent, like I'm not talking to my mom anymore but the person she was programmed to be by her religion. And she sincerely believes what she's saying too. She may sound like she's parroting the party line but it's a lone she's bought into fully. And it's even crazier because I know I used to sound exactly the same. I know I used to code switch hard into the same sayings and had no awareness of how it sounded. They sound like they're in a cult

[theshoesofatiredman]

Something that's genuinely so eerie is that after spending enough time outside of Christianity, the responses that Christians give to questions or the things they say in conversation start to sound so canned it stops sounding like you're even talking with a person. It's like one moment I'm talking to my mother and the next she's telling me that God's ways are higher than our ways and in her feeble human mind she cannot begin to imagine what it's like to be God and somehow that means she doesn't have to view the amount of suffering in the world as a contradiction. And the shift is so jarring that it feels like I activated a sleeper agent, like I'm not talking to my mom anymore but the person she was programmed to be by her religion. And she sincerely believes what she's saying too. She may sound like she's parroting the party line but it's a lone she's bought into fully. And it's even crazier because I know I used to sound exactly the same. I know I used to code switch hard into the same sayings and had no awareness of how it sounded. They sound like they're in a cult

[theshoesofatiredman]

can we at least start by recognizing that there's an element of coercion to monogamy? like on paper yes both partners are entering this relationship agreeing towards exclusivity but like... we're all gay here right? we know that there's a societal pressure to get Paired Up and married and have kids?

[theshoesofatiredman]

on survival

-// @aridante // @orivu // @buzzkillgirls // ? // ? // richard siken// @cemeterything // moomin, tove jansson// @disenchanted-killjoy // isn't that enough, shawn mendes// @ prettytheyswag on twitter// @ coletyumuch on twitter// ? // ? // bird by bird, anne lamott// undertale// @strawberrycircuits

[theshoesofatiredman]

It's not that people are incorrect when they say homeschoolers are weird, it's that they get the brand of weird wrong. Sure some of them might be "papa bade us never have mirrors in the house lest we give into the Sin of Vanity" but you're more likely to be confronted by an eleven-year-old carting around a huge collection of Norse Sagas in translation. She can spell synagogue. She plays rugby. She talks just a little bit too much like an adult in a way that is just slightly uncanny. She primarily watches TV from the '70s. She has an intimate knowledge of whisky because her parents tell her about it. She is wearing a mismatched shirt and skirt. That's the one bit people are spot on about.

[theshoesofatiredman]

“no one’s ever mad at me unless they tell me so” is the best assumption i’ve ever made

[theshoesofatiredman]

You are well within your right to be angry about the help you didn't get and should have gotten.

You are well within your right to be angry about having your needs neglected.

You are well within your right to be angry.

[theshoesofatiredman]

[theshoesofatiredman]

kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3

[theshoesofatiredman]

I'm going to frame this in my house

[theshoesofatiredman]

the persecution of lefthandedness is insane to think about because it was so intense for so long, in some places still is, without any clear profit motivation. sheer love of the game. as late as the 70s at least they were smacking my stepdad's hands for it with a wooden ruler at school, to this day he's in weird ambidexterity situation where he's not great with either side and notably clumsy due to poor hand-eye coordination. just wtf