cetaceanhandiwork

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i would like to remind everybody about this

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condescending online man day

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can i come over and do this

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It's that time again

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opening a betting pool for how long it will take for someone in the church hierarchy to be officially scolded by their bosses for doing idolatry to these little scamps

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Choy Moo Kheong（Singaporean, b.1950）

Blue Whispering Day 2022 Acrylic on Canvas 139.7 x 114.3 cm via

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To access Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine, Mario enters a cannon, which then shoots Mario to a different island in a cutscene. However, by rendering the scene as a wireframe, we can see that whatever is shot out of the cannon is not Mario, as he remains inside the cannon after it is fired.

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@eternalfarnham lime gal over here copping your moves

dream girls

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bluebird cultist's plot to subvert the hive city's ruling class by tricking their heirs into playing the weggie board

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seducing monists into physicalism by telling them about the one-electron universe hypothesis

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Good morning.

Last year, we heard a lot about the nature of the Kingdom of God. In particular, both on the shore of Galilee and the synagogue in Jerusalem, Jesus used a whole flotilla of parables to describe the necessity of readiness. That if we are to enter into the Kingdom, we must be on a hair-trigger to recognize, and take, whatever opportunities to touch it that we can get.

Two weeks ago, we discussed how earthly luxury can get in the way of that readiness. But outside the context of James's startlingly direct preaching… Jesus encouraged us to look around for whatever is making us unready – whatever will prevent us from acting on the insistent urging of the Kingdom. He didn't single out money, at least not yet; the same principle applies much more broadly, even to things we don't buy.

But today, when we read about Jesus talking with a rich and zealous stranger, whose zeal stumbles on the stumbling block of wealth specifically… when Jesus responds by specifically pointing to wealth as hazardous… what's going on?

Why is this, in particular, so hard for us, that even someone as zealous as the man in today's story can't get past it?

Why, in particular, is Jesus so fixated on warning us against it, that he uses this famous imagery of trying to thread a needle with a camel? That his go-to response, his suggestion to this stranger, after being struck with love for him in today's Good News, is to tell him he ought to stop being rich?

Well… why do we want to be rich in the first place?

Money's weird, isn't it? It doesn't do anything on its own. There's only two things you can use it for: spend it on something you actually want, or invest it so it turns into more money.

But that means it's also a kind of mental chameleon. If you want comfort, money is comfort. If you want safety, money is safety. If you want control, money is control. And even when our goals are kind and just and noble… if we see a way to achieve those goals by using money, "getting money" takes on all the shine of the goals we plan to achieve by spending it.

And when we go to invest money, to make money at interest… the same thing happens, except that its chameleon nature becomes more like camoflauge. For the lender, what the borrower does to repay their debt is hidden from sight, forgotten and irrelevant. For the borrower, what the lender would prefer they do is hidden, and all they can think of is, "well, I have to pay my debts, right?"

In both cases, money's strange, unique property is its ability to hide the complexity of life behind a single, numerical value: easy to compare, easy to equate, easy to treat interchangeably with itself… and with many other things in this world.

So why do we want to be rich? Why do we want to have riches? For the fruits of riches. For the things that riches can buy.

Because you can buy food and clothes and a roof over your head. Good medical care. Locks on your doors. In short, you can buy safety – a freedom from the fear of death.

You can buy the nicer things in life – fun, intellectual stimulation. In short, you can buy comfort – an escape from suffering.

And you can even pay people to do and act as you would prefer – to defer to you, to do things your way. You can buy control.

Which of these attracts you most? You can have it, if you want. But that also means giving up money means giving up what you value most. Better to save it, right? Better to keep it aside as extra protection, so you don't lose your treasures later.

In short, there's an internal logic to riches, and to money in particular. And that logic is compelling. And we get practice at thinking by that logic every day of our lives.

And nearly every part of it is at odds with the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven. The simplification of being able to think of human relations in terms of credit and debit is a deathtrap, and attempting to do math with our virtue produces meaningless results. The Kingdom's way of thinking fights tenaciously against the idea that we can use abstractions to ignore the people behind them, and has rejected the basic idea of "interest on loans" – at least within one's own community – even as early as Sinai.

And even beyond all these examples… there's the example of Jesus tempted in the desert. Think back to that moment. Try to remember: what was he tempted with?

Aren't you hungry? Don't you want to be comfortable? Pick back up the power you set aside, and turn these stones into bread. You could do it easily, if you want to.

Aren't you scared of death? Don't you want to be safe? Reclaim the power you relinquished, and summon the angels to protect you from harm. You could do it easily, if you want to.

Aren't you about to spend three years ridiculed and misunderstood? Don't you want to be in charge, in control? Draw forth the power you sheathed to be born in that barn, and conquer the world. You could do it easily, if you want to.

Every single underlying form of bait which leads us to favor Mammon over God… which dulls our response time to those moments where we have to give it all up to buy the Pearl of Great Price… is bait that Jesus, too, had to face. Bait that he had to reject in favor of his mission, there at the very beginning, when he chose to live as a human being… that is, when he chose to feel the same hungers any human knows, rather than sate those hungers by renouncing his humanity.

There's a reason that the Wisdom poet today compares "wisdom" – that is, internalizing and living by God's word, God's logic – against riches and gold.

Jesus understands this. He experienced it himself: both the dreadful allures that riches can dangle in front of us, and the deeper concerns to which they can blind us. So he warns us against even having to face that temptation, cautioning us that it's better to stop being rich than to keep the riches around and risk getting tricked into reasoning by money's logic. At the same time, given his own experience, he admits that if we didn't have God's grace backing us up, if we didn't have the Kingdom of God and its justice to ground ourselves in, then the temptation to defect to something that promises exactly the thing we want would be too great.

But he also gives us good news, today, in the form of a promise of his own: you buy the Pearl of Great Price because you're getting something worth more than everything you gave up. By Mammon's own logic can Mammon be defeated, even if it may bring us controversy and unpopularity until the job is done. And people who are able to take their opportunities and let go of their earthly wealth to store up treasure in Heaven will see their investment pay off.

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the #1 rule of star trek is "yes human society CAN come together and solve our problems and grow in morality and care, and while there will be other problems to solve beyond that it won't make the accomplishment any less beautiful"

however the #2 rule of star trek is "there is some Weird Shit going on in space, like, you have no IDEA how wild it gets out there sometimes"

and I love it for that

you just don't get shit like this with 8-episode streaming seasons

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ismailboumhand16

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my dear precious friends on this web site, I hope you are doing well

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Amelia Earhart is in Gensokyo, and you can't convince me otherwise.

don't be fooled! that might look like amelia earhart, but it's actually three of the coconut crabs that ate her merged together into a youkai and impersonating her! you can tell because they can only fly helicopters.

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Have you ever listened to a song parody that permanently affected how you listen to the original?