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margridarnauds · 4 years ago

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pagan-soul replied to your post “My absolute HATRED for the term “Celtic Mythology” VS my desire for...”

Why do you hate that term? ��

So, I decided to give this its own post because I really feel like it does deserve it, since it’s the kind of thing that I think most people outside of the field don’t really think about and you deserve the best answer you can get, though I’m not sure how clear I’m being. If there’s a point that I’m not clear on, please ask me to clarify, since I can never tell if I’m being entirely coherent. I’m not sure if I can give you a FULL answer, since some of this is slightly outside my pay grade (given I don’t get paid, that isn’t hard), but I’ll try to do what I can.

For most of us in the field, I think, we generally hate it because it’s very, very imprecise and a little misleading. There really ISN’T a singular “Celtic Mythology”, just like there was never really a singular “Celtic people”. There were a vast variety of Celtic-speaking groups, spread as far out as modern-day Turkey, and each one of them had a unique cultural environment. Cernunnos, for example, does not have anything to do with, say, Bres mac Elathan or Rhiannon. And, in fact, in terms of the times that each one of them would have been popping up, there’s a SIGNIFICANT difference in ages.

(Taken from David Stifter’s Sengoidelc)

At some point, as you can see on the linguistic map.....during the Proto-Celtic period, they WOULD have had roughly the same cast of characters, BUT that is a time that we really know little to nothing about, and even then, I do believe there would have been localizations depending on family group and region. We can TRY to reconstruct it by comparing different figures/names and then putting them in an Indo-European context. If, for example, you see similar things pop up in India, Ireland, Greece, etc., you can be fairly certain that it is [1] A pre-Christian survival and [2] Specifically, a Proto-Indo European survival, aka going back to really some of the EARLIEST belief systems we have. If you have the same things popping up in Irish and Welsh contexts AND you have the name popping up in Gaulish inscriptions, we can be fairly certain that the figure is a REALLY old ass Celtic figure. Figures like Lugh, Ogma, and Nuada.....they are probably VERY old. Not that we won’t argue over it. Because Celticists argue over everything. (If you want to know about some of what Celticists have conjectured, I highly recommend Proinsias Mac Cana’s ironically-titled , given the topic of this post, book, “Celtic Mythology”. Now, some of what he said has been debated, because.....see above. Celticists. Arguing. We love it. BUT he’s a respected figure in the field, and my supervisor likes him so I’m legally required to like him too.) WHICH brings us to our next problem, which is that the way that each figure developed. Lugh, in an Irish context, is not Lleu in a Welsh context. They probably share the same root figure, at some point in their shared history. Their names match up TOO PERFECTLY for them not to. But the way they developed was specifically in the cultural context of Wales/Ireland. Lugh in particular is a VERY malleable figure. You can read three works where Lugh is in and get a VERY different reading of him in each one. (Good king? Machiavellian schemer? Flawed pragmatist trying to unite a people who won’t be united? A figure who’s more a symbol of kingship than an actual CHARACTER? Depending on the source and the time/context, you can get any combination. For what it’s worth, in the Early Modern period, there is quite a bit of matieral that shows a darker side to Lugh.) Saying, “Yes, these two are related” SOUNDS like it’s admitting a lot, but in reality, that still doesn’t really tell us anything about this hypothetical figure. If you put a knife to my throat and made me GUESS, I would say that he had some connection to kingship and sovereignty. Possibly, in relationship to that, sacral kingship, given that both Lugh and Lleu are betrayed by a woman to their deaths. But that is HIGHLY speculative and again, doesn’t really SAY anything. Lugh is Lugh and Lleu is Lleu. It’d be like trying to say that, because you and your cousin come from the same grandma, you’re exactly the same. Now, you might be able to INTUIT certain things about your grandma from any common traits you and your cousin have, and that’s a valid line of inquiry, and it’s definitely one that plenty of solid Celticists have done, I am NOT denigrating their research, but you’re still you.

Finally, “Celtic Mythology” really is.....rather bombastic, as a term, for a group that almost always consists of Irish Mythology (and, sometimes, Irish folklore, which is VERY different from the mythological texts), with Medieval Welsh literature sprinkled in for a bit of flavor. (Even the term “Welsh Mythology” is controversial, simply because, really...it’s much harder to pick the MYTHOLOGY from the literature. Even harder than the Irish.) And, in the field, even saying “Celtic Studies” is something that we kind of do through gritted teeth because we don’t really have a better term for what we do. See that big-ass linguistic family tree up there? Yeah, I’m not too proud to admit that there are exactly two languages on there that I am in any way equipped to talk about: Middle Welsh and Old Irish. Now, an IDEAL Celticist, aka some of the best in the field, is a jack of all trades, someone who can talk about the linguistic evolution of at LEAST Old Irish and Welsh (including their modern descendants), with a solid background in Proto Indo European and the ability to at least comment on the various other Celtic languages. (There are some scholars who specialize in, say, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish, and Manx, but they are basically a niche in a niche. The field, as a WHOLE, is VERY much dominated by Irish, both modern and medieval. Which suits me very well, but does make me feel very bad for the other languages that get left out of the mix.) But that is a VERY small number of people in the field. Hell, I got met with basically crickets when I said that I wanted to study Breton, not because people didn’t WANT me to, but because the resources simply weren’t available, much less as an English speaker. (I still want to take it up, though.) I know of some professionals in the field who NEVER would call themselves a Celticist, simply because the term doesn’t really fit them. My paleography professor was, incidentally, one of them. Personally, I DO use it, because again, I don’t have another term.

But, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what I study isn’t a SINGULAR Celtic Mythology. What I study is Medieval Irish Literature, with a focus on the Mythological Cycle and, when needed, I can sometimes comment on the similarities to Welsh figures. I don’t LIKE it, because I feel like I can’t do the richness of the Welsh material justice, but I can do it if you put a knife to my throat. With stuff like, say, Gaulish Mythology....we can make very educated guesses based off of inscriptions and things that the Romans/Greeks said and comparing them to Irish/Welsh material, but we don’t really know. Can’t really know. And with others...there were no written materials during the medieval period, or at least none currently surviving. (This is why Old Irish and Middle Welsh to tend to dominate mythological discussion: The bulk of our medieval material does come from those sources. People can say all they want about the scribes who wrote down the Mythological Cycle, but the simple fact remains that, if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be studying these texts.)

For me, the term “Celtic Mythology” kind of lumps all the individual Celtic materials into one massive soup bowl, regardless of time, context, culture, or any other distinguishing features, and, most of the time, would be just as easily done by saying “Irish Mythology” or “Welsh Mythology”. There are very few times, unless you’re talking about the ENTIRE POSTULATED HISTORY of a figure, that “Celtic” is really needed and it tends to assume that Irish = “Celtic” (most of the time, I see posts where Irish, in particular, is treated as being the same as “Celtic”, and my ire in this instance is directed towards them) instead of admitting the full variety of what that term actually means. Irish IS a Celtic language, yes, absolutely, but it is not the be-all, end-all, and the two terms are not synonymous. “Celtic” is a very broad term that can only really be useful in a few contexts, mainly linguistic, and is insanely controversial in the field as it is.

On a religious perspective, since I know that this is inevitable in conversations like this, does this mean that I’m saying, going back to my original example, “No, you cannot worship Rhiannon, Bres, and Cernunnos at the same time?” No. I am VERY firm on my stance that I can only speak from the perspective of my knowledge of the field, NOT on other people’s belief systems. This is similar to if someone was to ask me about the function of a given postulated deity, where I can only say “The material as it was written down indicates x, y, or z, and most of us in the field are VERY hesitant to apply a solid function to these figures, but if you feel that this figure is guiding you to a given conclusion, that’s fine. It isn’t ‘inaccurate.’ I don’t believe that there’s any way for a religion to be ‘inaccurate' so long as it’s harming no one.” (Use Celtic Studies as a smokescreen for white supremacy and I WILL roll down your throat faster than a hot dog on the 4th of July, though.) If all three of them are calling you, that’s something that I have no call on. I personally think that it’s a HELL of a combination, and I’d wish you the best of luck, but....it would certainly be an interesting one. If you want to take the reconstructionist root and try to figure out how they would have been worshipped in the Proto-Celtic times, that’s fine (though I do strongly advise against human sacrifice.) You’d have a devil of a task, but it’s certainly a fine one, and in many ways, not too unlike what scholars like Mac Cana did. And, if you want to worship them as they appear in the texts or how they’re personally guiding you, that’s not something that I can make a call on one way or another. Again, this is about my own personal feelings, from inside the field, on the term and how it can be rather misleading.

#pagan-soul #long post #celtic studies #celtic mythology #irish mythology

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arcticdementor · 5 years ago

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“Bourgeois Values,” “Anti-capitalism,” and Restoration.

(Time for another exercise in wasted effort in writing a long post nobody’s going to bother to read.)

Now, I don't exactly like using the term "bourgeois," what with the Marxist baggage and polysemy leading to ambiguity. But, lacking a better term for "bourgeois values" — as used by the likes of Amy Wax — I find myself using the term in this essay.

Now, per the polysemy mentioned above, the values of the "bourgeoisie" have been characterized in a number of ways by different folks from differing perspectives. "Materialism" — particularly in the sense of prioritizing material concerns over spiritual or other non-material concerns — is common, as are "philistinism" and conspicuous consumption. Or, there's also there’s more positive formulations, like that of Deirdre McCloskey, or the description from Wax and Alexander:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

I'd definitely rate this sort of thing as better than the kind of alternative one sees in places like the "hillbilly" communities suffering in the opioid crisis, the "rust belt," dysfunctional inner cities, etc. Now, the criticism of this I see is almost entirely from the left, and mostly consists of posing these values as some matter of "-ist." For example, Elie Mystal attacking Robert L. Woodson's defense of Wax, Alexander, and bourgeois values, as Uncle Tom groveling:

If a white guy said this, the only people defending him would be Nazis, but because a black guy wrote it, it falls to me to point out that this right here has ALWAYS BEEN the argument deployed by House Negroes to justify their position. I PROMISE YOU that if you went back to 1830 and asked the chuckling HNIC how he can live with himself, he’d say: “Look at my back. It ain’t got no scars because I reject undisciplined and irresponsible behavior. Without me, this whole damn plantation would fall apart. Now please excuse me, it’s time for Master to take a dump and I need to be there to wipe his ass.”

I point out that Woodson’s argument is steeped in the long history of coonery not to denigrate Woodson — his own words have done that far better than I could — I point it out to show that large swaths of Black America have adopted “bourgeois values” from the very beginning. Post emancipation, the bourgeois blacks actually won out. Now, most all of us African-Americans have totally adopted the white man’s cultural norms and are just trying to get our share of the rewards.

(I'm not unsympathetic to the argument that it's a foreign imposition of "white man’s cultural norms," and that resistance in favor of defending one's indigenous culture and values against such foreign impositions is valid; I just wish it were applied more consistently and broadly for all rival cultures to "universal culture,” as well as recognizing the tension between rejection of an alien culture's values and yet expecting said culture to provide you with all the benefits of those values all the same.)

But I'd like to push back from the right.

First, there's how the American right has deeply internalized these norms, and how this affects the issue of political organization and activism — or lack thereof — on the right versus the left. Especially the sort of thing David Z. Hines talks about. When you ask you're average Republican voter why we don't do this sort of thing, the usual answers are some variety of "nobody's got time for that; we've got jobs to go to and bills to pay—" (as if the left were composed entirely of college students, welfare layabouts, and paid astroturf) "—and besides, that's Not Who We Are." (As Hines put it: "THAT’S NOT HOW THE RIGHT DOES THINGS, they bellow, by which I assume they mean unpleasant stuff like “winning.”")

I'd like, some other time, to explore this in further depth, but in short, these replies all reduce to the same thing — the tactics are rejected because of incompatibility with the above "bourgeois values."

But our choices aren't only "bourgeois values" — with concommittant dedication to being dignified losers who will somehow win through our willingness to let the enemy destroy us — or Detroit/Middletown. Because, consider, what would Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, think of those sort of "I've got a mortgage to pay" excuses? Or Otto, Fürst von Bismarck, Herzog zu Lauenburg? Charles the Hammer? Godfrey of Bouillon? George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle? What would the sort of man who rated non-material things like *honor* highly enough to risk their lives over them think of this sort of "think of the bottom line" mentality? What about aristocratic values?

I'm also somewhat hesitant about using the term "capitalism" unqualified, for the same Marxist-baggage-and-polysemy reasons as "bourgeois." On the one hand, I've seen people both on the far left and the far right use "capitalism" to mean pretty much anything short of outright Communism, and on the other, there's the "real capitalism has never been tried!" libertarians for whom the existence of a single business regulation renders a system "non-capitalist." Add in that I accept the arguments, by Jim Donald and others, that the Marxist model of "Capital" as entity/class is fundamentally inaccurate, and that "capitalists" are never actually the people in charge.

That said, this is where I have some overlap with what is often characterized as "anti-capitalism." Because I'm against the system which promotes and selects for the above "bourgeois values." Not in the sense of wanting to replace them with some sort of "socialist values," or with the antithesis of Wax and Alexander's list, but in the cause of restoring aristocratic values. As I once said a couple years back at Slate Star Codex:

But competent at what is key. Here, it’s “the aristocratic being overwhelmed by the competent” at making money. After all, there was a previous period where being competent at making money didn’t let you “overwhelm” the aristocrats. And, of course, there’s the issue of how the aristocrat lineages became such in the first place, which was, basically, as warlords. They were competent at being and leading a warrior elite. So there was a time when being capable at breaking faces on horseback was more important than being capable at making money, so the leaders-of-face-breakers and their descendants ruled.

Of course, I now dispute the idea that it was the money-making "bourgeoisie" who actually "overwhelmed" the aristocrats, or that it happened at the time the conventional narrative places it. For example, Wikipedia has it as "the late-16th and early 17th centuries" when the developing urban business class "had become the financial – thus political – forces that deposed the feudal order."

A better model, I'd say, is that changes in military technologies — particularly, the decline of castles — led to a trend of centralization of power away from the distributed feudal hierarchy (with weak, "first among equals" monarchs) towards "absolute monarchy" and the rise of modern states, and that the "bourgeoisie" were an effect, not a driving cause, a useful foil for centralizing monarchs to leverage against an aristocracy based in control of agricultural lands. Aristocracy and "military power in the realm of politics" looks to have still been pretty powerful, at least in most of Europe, through the English Restoration, and through the Napoleonic wars. From the very same Wikipedia page:

The English Civil War (1642–51), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and French Revolution (1789–99) were partly motivated by the desire of the bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the feudal and royal encroachments on their personal liberty, commercial prospects, and the ownership of property. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie propounded liberalism, and gained political rights, religious rights, and civil liberties for themselves and the lower social classes; thus the bourgeoisie was a progressive philosophic and political force in Western societies.

[Emphasis added.]

Nor is the rise of science as big a factor as some portray; after all, "father of chemistry" and pioneer of the scientific method Robert Boyle was the son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, and it was the restored monarchy of Charles II that chartered The Royal Society out of Boyle's "invisible college." The scientific progress of the likes of Newton thrived under the Restoration aristocratic system. So, I reject the idea that aristocratic virtues are achievable only by reversion to "ignorant superstition" and 1400s technology.

That is, it looks like 1848, and the surrounding decades, were more of a turning point with regards to aristocratic values than any time in "the late-16th and early 17th centuries." The Crimean War, with Jim's favored example of the smearing of Lord Cardigan and elevation of Florence Nightengale, is another mid-19th century case. And, also [https://blog.jim.com/politics/defining-restoration-and-reaction/]per Jim[/l], this looks driven less by "capitalists" as by "priests." Wikipedia, again, has the "capitalists" having ascended to "the upper class" only by the end of the 19th century. And there, it looks to me like the elites at the forefronts of the various social reform movements, most with roots in one or another (mostly Protestant) religious "awakening," were clearly more powerful than "capitalists," whose influence is frequently overstated. That is, in line with Jim's recurring thesis, "warrior rule" was slowly replaced not by "merchant rule," but by the "priestly rule" of the post-Puritan religion, still headquartered in Harvard and Yale, with continuity of organization, personnel, and institutions all the way back to the Roundheads.

I see no reason why "bourgeous values" must inevitably displace "aristocratic values," nor that the latter is, as some claim, fundamentally incompatible with scientific progress. So, how do we of the “Red Tribe” go about prying ourselves away from our stubborn, self-defeating adherence to bourgeous values and shifting the system toward selecting for aristocratic ones again?

#long post #tl;dr #nobody's going to bother to read this #why am I wasting my time on this?#bourgeois values #aristocratic values #what would lord wellington do?#what would charles martel do?

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shatar-aethelwynn · 2 years ago

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I'm totally down to engage with the historical value of the bible right after it stops being the driving force behind global societal collapse lol

*pained sound* Ok, no. You know what? I’m feeling twitchy today so let’s go. This is not an attack on the person who made these tags. It’s a general rant about the fact that they represent a trend of deliberate refusal to engage in any kind of dialogue with the texts in their historical context or even just in their entirety out of nothing other than anger at a specific group of individuals. And I get that. They have more than pissed me off too. But this attitude also exists in religious circles and is called “refusing to accept the difference between eisegesis and exegesis”. Those are fancy words, I know, I’ll come back to them. But let’s take this in order because all this sort of statement does is make one thing very clear: the one making it doesn’t actually understand what they’re talking about and is merely making accusations based on personal emotional experiences rather than any grasp of historical consensus among leading (often non-religious) scholars about the text or how many different groups use it in vastly different ways - some for hatred, yes, but others as motivation for acceptance, inclusion, and help. And isn't it a pity that violence is what pays the media's bills. Not wanting to waste one’s time studying a text that isn’t interesting is one thing. Denigrating it simply because you’re mad at people who claim to like it is something different.

First, The Bible either is a historical text or it’s not. That’s it. There is no secret third option here. Being a historical text does not automatically make it factual. Being a historical text does not mean anyone is obligated to believe what it says. Being a historical text does not mean we are obligated to live by its laws (and they aren’t all consistent anyway). It is a historical text by virtue of being a text for which extant copies and fragments exist, and which can be analyzed. Full stop. That is where its “value” as a historical text is derived from. It can be studied for information that may be of benefit to historians and linguists for various reasons, and not just about “factual” matters of the grander historical timeline. The plays of Shakespeare are historical texts. In a few decades (or even now to some researchers) your science textbooks will be historical texts. If we stretch the definition of “text”, the television programs you watched at 5 years old counts too. If it can be used to establish any information about a time period or group of people at a certain time it is a fully valid historical text. Or are we to say that if a text has “religious” aspects or clear ethnocentric biases it doesn’t count? Because we’d be getting rid of a lot of other ancient texts if that’s the case.

Second point, stop trying to hint around it and admit that the problem isn’t the book, it’s the people who interpret it in ways that condone abuse and violence. The text as read responsibly within it’s historical context isn’t what you have a problem with. Your problem is with the people who rip it from that context without giving a shit and then manipulate it, cherry-picking whatever they want to endorse what they want and ignoring the parts that condemn them, and then try to force their preferred application of that interpretation on everyone around them. This isn’t about the text, it’s about the interpretation of the text. Do you think that the scholars and the lay religious adherents always have the same views on what the texts mean? Ha! Not hardly. You think the historians studying a passage’s context and the traditionalist theologians agree on what that passage means? Do you have any clue how often that is not the case? Do you have any idea how often just changing between denominations within a religion can change how a passage is understood or applied? If anything, right now the most vocal Christians in America are currently among those who most vehemently reject attempts to place the texts back in their historical and literary context. Refusing to do so as well just helps them dictate how the average person understands the contents of the texts. Resist and follow the lead of the scholars instead. The Atheists Guide to the Old Testament by Joshua Bowen is a fantastic place to start.

Third, as mentioned the people we hear about most often, the so-called “Christian” politicians, and mega-church pastors, and Republican Karens who cherry pick their way through the Bible to support their Nationalism do not speak for everyone who reads the Bible as a scared text. Do you think Jews read their Bible that way? Do you think that the Orthodox Church (who everyone always forgets about since Western History is dominated by the northern European Catholic vs Protestant battles) agree with American Protestant Fundamentalists and Evangelicals? No. There are so many matters of dispute on theology and interpretation. Do you think the Fundamentalists are happy about the prevalence of Liberation Theology in Black and Latino churches? (I've actually heard some refer to it as demonic influence, so that's a no.) What about the existence of Feminist Theology? Or LGBT Theology? Do you realize how easy it is to pick and choose? To say “the Bible supports X”? Do you realize that there is Socialist Theology and it wasn't unpopular not too long ago? That there’s actually Communist Christian Theology? Once again, it’s not usually the book that people actually have a problem with, it’s a specific group of people and how they interpret and apply it.

Which brings me back to eisegesis and exegesis. These are two terms within hermeneutics (which is also a fancy technical term that basically just means “method of interpretation”). Eisegesis is reading a meaning into the text, and exegesis is reading meaning out of the text. When someone picks up the Bible looking for a verse (to take completely out of context, though they will typically deny it) to prove that they can do whatever it is they want to do it is likely that they are engaging in eisegesis – they are taking their preconceived ideas about either what is good or what is in the Bible and then going “well, gosh, would you look at that! I’m right and it says so!”. Eisegisis is the process of using the text to support an idea you had before you picked up the book to see what it said about the topic. Exegesis strives (not always successfully) to put aside such desires in order to see what the text says for itself. This is the form of interpretation favored by scholars, who try to understand what was going on in the world of the author when the text was written. There are levels of intensity to both of these which varies by individual. And everyone has engaged with eisegesis at least once because that’s just how humans tend to operate without necessarily meaning to. The most basic exegesis involves reading the entire context of a passage and carefully analyzing it for clues about the authors intention, and this can be done with any good translation, a bit of free time, and a commitment to paying attention to what is actually there - both the good and the bad. A scholar or enthusiast engaging in deeper exegesis may spend time first learning about the historical context within which the text was composed, the language used and nuances of word choice in the original text, variations in surviving manuscripts and whether they affect the meaning, similar texts from neighboring cultures, and shared motifs and what scholarship says about them before drawing a conclusion about the intended meaning of a text. And then people may not draw the same conclusions about how to apply what the text says. Added to this is the complication that the Bible is not a single unified book. It is an anthology of multiple types of text, written in three languages, over a span of hundreds of years, under the influence of at least four separate empires depending on how you count them, and then compiled together. Which means individual books within the Bible may not be in complete agreement on a matter, or use similar imagery in different ways. There’s also things like whether the reader believes in Inerrancy (many biblical scholars – most obviously the non-religious ones – do not accept it, many Christian denominations claim to hold to some form of it and expect their pastors to at the very least not openly contradict it), or whether they want to apply Systematic Theology (which does not play well with the “this is an anthology not a unified” book thing) that affect how far a reader will go in either -getical direction on any given text. (And let’s not get into the whole “being Greek is next to godliness” thing that resulted in a Palestinian Jewish sect being reinterpreted through a Roman worldview that idolized the Greeks, then leading to the Classical authors being read back through a Christian lens, and how much misogyny is waved away or treated as solely the responsibility of the biblical texts as a result) So to try to throw out the entire Bible as worthless as a historical text because of how a particular modern group is using it displays ignorance about how historical analysis of texts works, how hermeneutics works at a scholarly level, the range of religious and denominational differences both now and over the past 2000 years that affect how people interact with the text at all, and even the vast variety of types of material this specific anthology contains.

Go read Ecclesiastes, where the author laments the meaningless of existence. Or Song of Songs, the book of erotic poetry. The book of Proverbs has pages of short folk-wisdom type sayings interspersed with longer poems. The Psalms run the full range of emotions from joy to fully depressed to “God, I am so angry I hope you kill them all” venting. The Bible is not just a collection of law codes and children’s fairy tales (it is not child-appropriate actually, what with the rape, and incest, and murder, and cutting apart concubines, and people just being people who really shouldn’t be romanticized the way they often are...).

As for being “the driving force behind global societal collapse”…lol, that’s the Capitalism kids. And the Bible does not endorse it. Nor does it endorse most of what governments around the world are doing right now. It also does not endorse the existence of billionaires. It’s actually rather subversive, especially when read within its historical context (it was written by groups that never gained significant political power during the time of composition). I will be among the first to admit there is some shitty stuff in the texts (just did!), there’s no getting around that (especially when it is taken out of context, because surprise! cultures and norms change over centuries and across geographical distances).

But seriously, do you think we’ll be hearing any of these from the “good Christian” politicians anytime soon (because if they can cherry-pick to support their beliefs or make a point, so can I):

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

But when the desire is fulfilled it is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12)

“If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat;

if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.

In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head,

and the Lord will reward you.” (Proverbs 25:21-22)

“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,

and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)

“Learn to do right; seek justice.

Defend the oppressed.

Take up the cause of the fatherless;

plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17)

“The Lord takes his place in court;

he rises to judge the people.

The Lord enters into judgement

against the elders and leaders of his people:

‘It is you who have ruined my vineyard;

the plunder from the poor is in your houses.

What do you mean by crushing my people

and grinding the faces of the poor?” (Isaiah 3:13-15)

“And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: ‘This is what the Lord Almighty said: “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.”

But they refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and covered their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the Lord Almighty had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the Lord Almighty was very angry.” (Zechariah 7:8-12)

“It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Mark 10:25)

“Then the King will say to those on the right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King replied, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’” (Matthew 25:34-45)

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

(Luke 6: 27-36)

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take that speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Luke 6:41-42)

“When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’” (Luke 18:22)

“Come now, you who are rich, weep and wail over the misery to come upon you. Your riches have rotted and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and consume your flesh like fire. You have hoarded treasure in the last days. Look, the wages you withheld from the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fatted your hearts in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous, who did not resist you. (James 5:1-6)

Seems to me that if these were the parts we focused on "societal collapse because people happen to think this anthology is worth something" would be less of a threat.

(I've yet to actually hear a politician quote the Bible that didn't immediately have me sitting up and hissing "You put that back in it's context right the fuck now, it doesn't mean that")

the Bible is a historical document, just not in the way 95% of people think it is when historians say that. people not understanding this concept is why you can’t adequately discuss anything concerning said source with them because they kneejerk into “IT’S ALL FAIRYTALES AND LIES!!!” or “everything happened exactly like that and there’s no debate”. in both cases a regrettable lack of nuance, but worse so in the former case because often those people pretend to be in the camp of “rational science”. something something please develop some historical literacy before you engage in discussions pertaining to (ancient) history.

#im sure the person I reblogged from is a lovely person #they just activated my trap card or however the meme goes

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freedom-of-fanfic · 7 years ago

Note

Christian anon here, & I was dismayed when a recent reblog post stated in regard to Christian sexual morality & I quote "“all sex outside of marriage is evil” . This is at best a very poor interpretation & I apologize to the poster if they have been exposed to this mindset. For us, sex is something very sacred, so sacred that we reserve it to a man & a woman who have, via Matrimony, promised before God & each other to love, honor and mutually obey each other. 1 of 2

Outsideof marriage, it doesn't make sex "evil", but it does make a sin,something we strive to avoid, not always easy because humans are inherentlyflawed and fallible. Sadly, there are far too many Christians caught up in thepurity culture mentality who make a bigger deal out of sexual sin than theyshould about other sins (sins against social justice as a big for instance). Idon't like this mindset either, and thankfully, there are more Christianspushing back against it. 2 of 2

Hi,Christian anon. I understand where you’re coming from because I am alsoChristian (a queer Christian, which makes for an interesting life sometimes).And I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here regarding a truly Christian perspective on sexoutside of marriage vs the purity culture bullshit (my point of disagreement isthat I think ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ are usually treated as synonymous). It is, in fact, the least Christian thing inthe world to go around trying to control people’s behavior.

But. (there’s always a ‘but’ with me.)

I spent a huge chunk of today writing this and cutting it back because it kept turning into a theological dumping ground, which I don’t want it to be. but I’m throwing the majority of this post behind a cut because it’s inevitably sensitive stuff, considering how much pain (and death, tbh) Christianity-as-law-bludgeon has caused.

tl;dr: Christianity and secular law don’t mix well. Whenever it’s tried, things get real hellish real quick for a lot of people. Especially for people who are judged as ‘sexually immoral’.

(warnings for binary/cisgender language b/c the Bible doesn’t really address being nb or trans in particular.)

In thepost you are responding to, I called the Catholic Church the source ofanti-prostitution law in the United States. I said that it was because the US legislationwas founded on Western Europe legislation, and Western Europe legislation wasfounded on the legislation of the Catholic Church. And to be fair this is aglib and simplistic illustration of cause & effect – for starters, it skipsover Protestantism and the Age of Reason – but I’ll stand by the heart of it. Laws about sex work – sexual interactions ofany kind between consenting people of age, actually – in Western Europe &the US find likely origin in the inevitably disastrous mixture of Christianityand lawmaking, which originated in the institution of the Catholic Church.

Christianityas an organized religion does not playwell with the power to make law.

The inevitable product of trying toenforce Christian values via lawmaking is purity culture, authoritarianism, andviolence. This is because human law cannot enforce having moral character: wecan only judge actions and behavior, not thoughts or feelings. We can’t makekindness or uprightness into law: what is kind and upright behavior towards oneperson may be cruelty to another. (Not to say that Christianity is the only religion that mixes poorly with law,but Christians often deny that a religion founded on benevolence andforgiveness can be totalitarian. But the joke is: totalitarian law is no lesstotalitarian because its author wrote it to encourage ‘morality’ and ‘righteousness’.The joke is: God never forces His morals down anyone’s throat, so who are you to do it on His behalf?

I mean: theologicallyspeaking, one of the central tenants of Christianity is that law is insufficientand ill-fitted to guide our complicated, morally gray human existence. To methis seems like a huge giveaway that Christian principles and the law arefundamentally incompatible concepts.)

In its mostmature iterations, Christianity-as-law is

sexist

misogynistic

patronizing

anti-intellectual

controlling to the point of micromanagement via fear and shame

emotionallyabusive and denigrating individual worth

unforgiving of moral failings

hypocritical

judges others by assumptions about their thoughts and motivations

holds peopleto unachievable standards of ‘morality’ without kindness, and

punishes disobedience/noncomplianceviolently and without mercy.

It takes on God’s role as implacable judge, jury,and executioner, and holds the benevolent forgiveness promised by Jesus hostagein exchange for good behavior. How is the law God supposed to have mercyon you when it’s clear you’ll just abuse that mercy? Prove your worth first. (spoilers: you’ll never be approved.)

TheCatholic Church, born of Christianity shaking hands with the power to make lawvia Constantine's outreach, is my Exhibit A. at the peak of its legislativeinfluence and power, it severely set back human health, education, and wealthin Europe and West Asia and presided over multiple military excursions into theMiddle East in the name of conquering Jerusalem on God’s behalf (the literalCrusades, yes).

And I’d argue that this conquering spirit has been Christianity’sAchilles Heel ever since: a thread of shitty, shitty colonialist bullshit,through Anglicanism and Protestantism and Puritanism, that even now is buildingits latest thunderhead in the shape of ‘dominionist’ Christianity here inAmerica (if you are not familiar with it, suffice to say it is a secretive butwell-spread cultish thinking that straightforwardly holds that Christianitymust be legislated into place all over the world or Jesus can’t come back. Youcan’t make this stuff up.)

Bringingit back into to the sex thing, though: the Old Testament has multiple mentionsof laws forbidding sex work, and the New Testament, at least 50% written by theunmarried apostle Paul, has a lot of recommendations about being married toprevent being tempted by sex outside of marriage and the like. Extramarital lustand sexual immorality are also credited with multiple instances ofjump-starting unfortunate Biblical events and described by Paul as the only ‘sinagainst the body’ (1 Corinthians 6). In fact, Paul was kinda ‘eh’ on the wholehaving sex thing in general. In the same verse, he mentions in passing that itwould be better for men to not have sex at all if it’s possible for them.

Christianity-as-law is thus morally obligatedto make sex outside of marriage and anything that tempts people into sexoutside of marriage illegal. It’s the moral thing to do. Sex work has to go. Andbecause Biblical marriage can only be between a (cis) man and a (cis) woman*, same-gendersex has to go too. And extrapolate Paul’s offhand ‘male celibacy is ideal, tbh’into the harshest and narrowest form of lawful judgement that you can and youget ‘anything that makes men want to have sex is clearly dragging (cis) men down fromthe best possible person they could be. (people cis men see as ) women being beautiful makes men wantsex! (perceived) women are bad! Punish women formaking men want sex!’

Is thiswhat God calls for? I don’t think so.But historically speaking, this is what we get when Christians try to take thelegislative reins on God’s behalf.

And it’sfrankly hilarious that supposed Christians are acting as if it’s possible tosave people from their own sin by making sinillegal. When you check in with Jesus on the interaction between God’s lawand secular law, his response is simply ‘follow both’**. He also hung out withsex workers pretty much constantly during his ministry, never condemning them fortheir line of work even though it was explicitly against Jewish law to be a sexworker, because he recognized that human-enforced law – even law laid down byGod – can’t account for all the circumstances of human life or account for thereasons people do things that are, on their face, unlawful. That grace –literally the opposite of law – was kind of the point of his being born in thefirst place.

*Regardlessof what one’s opinion is about how the Bible defines marriage, that doesn’tmean that secular law has to share that definition. Especially when it createsa religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ people for completely secularmarriage benefits like tax breaks and visitation rights. (that’s the entire pointof this essay, oh my god.)

**ReferencingMark 12:13-17. Jesus also calls out the people asking him for trying to get himin trouble with the Roman authorities.

#christian fundamentalism #dominionism #purity culture #hide the sex work #protect sex workers #christianity and 'christianity'#christian theology #Anonymous

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pasta-abomination · 4 years ago

Text

FemslashEx 2020 Dear Creator letter

Dear Creator,

Thank you for bringing more femslash into the world! And thank you especially for making femslash for me, too. Gonna jump to the prompts under the cut:

General Housekeeping

Canon pronouns and gender identities:

Bending canon pronouns or identities is delightful, but completely optional.

DNWs: Explicit works where the characters are underage, ship or character bashing, kinks involving bodily fluids/excretions, stories focused on marriage (characters being married is fine, and I do like "woke up married" stories or fake or arranged marriage stories, but not stories where The Marriage Is The Point) or kidfic.

Re: g!p: Like I said, I love genderbending, and that does mean I'm theoretically okay with a lot of things--aliens, robots, magic, ABO, etc., in addition to things like gender play during sex, toys, intentionally fucking with gendered cues, clothing, etc. I'm also really a fan of stories that can respectfully include nuances of marginalized identities & experiences.

So if you want to engage with real identities in your fic, please do--I love exploring different potential "versions" of characters, and thinking about how a character's canon or canon-adjacent characterization might fit with the experiences of multiple different identities. I love stories that celebrate bodies and experiences that are considered non-normative.

My only caveat is that, if you're going to give a character a dick only so they can fuck someone with it, or if the fact that the character has a dick is the kink (i.e. if the character having a dick & using it in particular ways is the thing you’re really interested in writing), please have it be the result of something like magic, or shapeshifting, or even technology (aliens and robots!) instead of including it under the banner of trans or intersex identity.

tl;dr: Wanna write about trans or intersex versions of a character, including depictions of people with penises using those for sex? I would love that. Wanna write about Adora boning down with a flesh-and-blood dick because you think She-Ra has BDE? Have it be a magical transformation of some kind.

General Likes

Hurt/Comfort - Tending wounds! Bedside vigils! Nightmares! Reassurance! Touch-starved characters! Shared grief! Oh my!

Casefic/Mission fic - Mostly exactly what it says on the tin

Worldbuilding - Similar to genfic, but I just *clenches fist* Worldbuilding. Religion, magic, geography, history--especially if it adds something to our understanding of the characters and the experience of the bigger story.

Genderbending & Subcultural Identities - I really like exploring how a character might fit/not fit/understand themselves within IRL identity frameworks, or even thinking about how existing identity frameworks in the canon universe might influence how the character sees themself. This might be worldbuilding-heavy (I'd be super fascinated by the nuts and bolts of gender fluidity and transition with the kind of magic that Etheria has) or just a, "I feel like these two characters have a butch/femme dynamic and I'm going to play that up" or literally writing about a character trying out a haircut and a more non-binary way of being in the world and... enjoying it?

That also shows up in my ABO. I really like ABO that focuses on the subcultures that might exist in that kind of world.

Altered states: Drunk, high, or otherwise intoxicated characters. Magic influencing peoples' emotional and mental state. Sleep deprivation, adrenaline, near-death experiences.

Thoughtful smut - You know that galaxy brain meme that went around where the highest level was "porn with math"? Yeah, that's me.

Poly - I only selected one triad for this (Dani/Sarah/Grace under Terminator) but I do really like poly relationships, and I’m generally okay with F/F/M as well, although I’d really prefer that the focus be on the women in the relationship. My only ask is that Catra (and Adora, for that matter) not be added to She-Ra pairings unless specifically requested or noted--I like them both a lot, I’ve requested them both together and separately, but I’d also like the spirit and the dynamics of the Adora- and Catra-related pairings I’ve requested for that fandom to be honored, and that rarepair requests not get rolled into & subsumed by the juggernaut pairing. (And, “requesting” can be either in the ~official request~ or in the prompts).

Following on that, though, I am a huge fan of complicated emotional dynamics. Liking two people at the same time but in different ways and for different things? Fan. Fucking someone and thinking of someone else? Awesome. Meaningful and unique present-day emotional relationship that doesn’t replace or assuage the pain of a past relationship and the longing for that person? Heaven. Complicated emotional dynamics are my Jam. As long as neither relationship is denigrated and the pairing requested is the focus of the fic.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Prompt Set 1: Adora/Glimmer, Perfuma/Adora, Adora/Mermista, Adora/Huntara, Huntara/Perfuma

My rarepairs!

These are the ships I ship because of canon moments, but are super rare in the fandom Because Reasons. And I like just about every ship in the fandom, but wanted to make sure these in particular got some love because they're fun, and I'm going to tell you why I like them, and some favorite tropes or prompts I have with them.

Adora/Glimmer- in PARTICULAR because of:

In 1x04 when Adora sneaks into Glimmer's room to sleep on the end of her bed.

Bed-sharing is a GREAT trope with these two, whether accidentally, purposefully, or "oh no there's only one bed".

In "The Shadows of Mystacor" where Glimmer straight-up falls asleep on Adora in little spoon position in the hot springs

The day of Glimmer's coronation where Adora confesses that Angella told her to "take care" of Glimmer (even though she told them to "take care of each other", which is also super fucking shippy for me) and then resolves that she's going to do that

In "Mer-mysteries", their argument sounds like a subtextual break-up, and I love that

The scene in "Beast Island" where Adora almost gives up and then remembers Angella's last words to her and remembers *Glimmer* and even if I'm not feeling very shippy it still just hits me right in the feels

The implication in "System Failure" (the s1 episode where Entrapta is introduced) that Adora smashes rocks for Glimmer's enjoyment. Just. Y'know. Glimmer getting her buff gf to move things around for her. Carry things. Like boulders. Especially when she lifts things over her head--

Perfuma/Adora - Gosh, I'm just super Here For how Perfuma looks at She-Ra. I'm also here for:

Perfuma and Adora getting high together and having adventures and making out a little and being happy and cozy together

I appreciate that Adora doesn't just immediately lose the femmephobia she was raised with in the Horde on joining the Rebellion (I think that would probably be more of a Process(TM) than they had time for onscreen) and so generally Adora being uncomfortable and kind of a jock but then getting shown up/put in her place. Obviously by the time Adora tells Huntara that Perfuma "is a demon in battle", she's wised up, but that's three whole seasons of material to work with :P

Anything with Perfuma trying to teach Adora how to relax/meditate (depending on your ADHD feels you can make that explicitly ADHD Adora--active meditation is a thing!)

Perfuma being Very Into her buff girlfriend and Adora being kind of a himbo

Adora/Mermista - I LOVE the energy with these two. Mermista especially feels like she's confident in her powers in a way that even Glimmer and Adora aren't--even though Adora and Glimmer are more experienced commanders/combatants. I feel like Mermista would enjoy Adora's cockier side that comes out when she's She-Ra.

Adora/Huntara - Adora's instant crush on Huntara when they meet in the Crimson Waste is one of the most memorable moments of the show for me, and this show has been very memorable, okay

Adorable butch4butch vibe

Competitive jocks competing jockily

Huntara feels very penitent by the end of the episode where they meet, I would love some penitent Huntara

I'm not sure what her fascination with She-Ra was, but in my head, it's not just about the haunted crashed spaceship, it's about something she knows about She-Ra from her time in the Wastes, and she holds some kind of reverence for her. Being a warrior woman and all

Would also like sad/thoughtful/wistful/quiet/aching moments with these two after the war where they're trying to adjust to like... living at peace. Or how they *can't* adjust to living at peace. And their shared or distinct experiences with the Horde.

For some reason, I really like the idea of Perfuma getting *both* Adora and Huntara high somehow and the three of them having a lot of fun but wow Adora and Huntara's stoned personalities. Just imagine the possibilities.

Huntara/Perfuma - OKAY. I *really* loved their dynamic in "Valley of the Lost". Just. *REALLY* loved it. The vast difference in perspectives, the suggestion that Perfuma liked Huntara but thought Huntara was prickly and didn't like her back, Huntara wondering if Perfuma can handle herself and then Perfuma showing literally *everybody* up.

Perfuma calling Huntara her "desert rose" is um. Fantastic.

I don't know if I see these two *dating* exactly, but I really just need the two of them to have Supremely Gay and Supremely Butch/Femme moments

I just have this feeling that Huntara could be Incredibly Smooth and sweep Perfuma off her feet for like. A mission. A ball, like Princess Prom. A dance. A party. A shindig. A ritual. What Have You.

(And I think being able to sweep Perfuma off her feet would go a long way towards making Huntara feel... more like herself, after uprooting her life and going back to the war and apparently getting chipped by Horde Prime. She is butch, she is rough, she is smart and competent and god knows she's tough, and in the Waste, she was on top, she was *the* top of the food chain. And here... maybe, sometimes, she feels inadequate. Here, she's just cannon fodder again. In the desert, she *knew* things that set her apart. Here, she's just... mildly informed.)

Prompt Set 2: Madame Razz/Mara, Mara/Light Hope, She-Ra Entity/Mara, Entrapta/Darla

I was going to call these my "Worldbuilding Set" of prompts, but then I realized that this could much more honestly be called "Weird--But Sweet--Xeno Prompts”.

Madame Razz/Mara - I was inspired in part by Noelle's remark that there's a note in the show bible that Madame Razz has dated "like, everyone in Etheria" because she's dislodged from linear time and has been around forever besides that.

Then I rewatched S1 and there was that scene where Razz tells Adora her and Mara used to go stargazing at the Crystal Castle. And there *was* the way she referred to Mara as "my Mara". And then I was sold.

I don't mean anything weird or kinky by it (which, no judgement if you do), just... idk, in my head, it's a very May/December dynamic, or, heh, maybe Mayfly-December dynamic, depending on how Razz does with linear time. And it sounds like on some level, Mara was kind of an apprentice to her? And, Mara is both very strong and competent and also just seems like this really gentle person? She seems very much like Steve Rogers lol.

Like there is a real potential for worldbuilding in here, too. But a lot of this dynamic is just very... peaceful and domestic.

Mara/Light Hope - GOD THESE TWO CAUSE ME PAIN. I love them. I love the tragedy of them. I love Light Hope's wobbly steps towards self-awareness and self-will. I love the hope of that journey. I love Mara's deepening connection with Etheria. I love the wonder of it. I love how she takes up the mantle of She-Ra in earnest.

And I love how inevitably the end comes up on them. How they're caught in events outside their control. I love how bravely they fight, and how brilliantly--and how it's not enough. I love how *powerful* they are, both of them, in their own specific ways, but they were maneuvered into this position by people who ensured they could keep the upper hand.

And I love how their love is still so strong that a thousand years later, it keeps Adora safe and proves to be their superiors' ultimate undoing. Catradora may have saved the universe in S5, but Marahope did it first.

Some prompts:

Any worldbuilding you want to do around the First Ones, the First Ones’ tech, the Heart of Etheria Project, Grayskull Squadron (ahaha that’s a Rogue Squadron/Rogue One reference isn’t it), She-Ra, the magic of Etheria, other runestones that were active in Mara’s time but are defunct by Adora’s, worldbuilding about the various kingdoms and Princesses, Mara learning from Light Hope, Light Hope learning from Mara... all of it

Light Hope falling in love with Mara--I just want to see how, and why, and what it was like for her, and what Mara did that set her apart from Light Hope’s other charges (if you think that there were others before Mara, which is kind of my base assumption but I’m absolutely willing to read another take), and just *gay noises*

Light Hope mentioned that there were “many” She-Ra/s before Mara, and while she did lie about a lot of things, a lot of her lies were lies of omission or shading of the truth, not just outright false--Mara did the damage to Etheria that she did, but LH lied about why, for instance. Or with the Portal Adora was brought through, Light Hope simply failed to mention that she was the one who brought Adora through it, and allowed Adora to continue in her assumption that Hordak was both the person who opened the portal and the one who brought her through. So, I’d be curious about Light Hope’s feelings for her other charges--was she serially and hopelessly into these magical warriors? Or was there something different about Mara?

Light Hope’s journey to self-will is TRAGIC and beautiful and I love it. And it sounds very much like something that happened over the course of different relationships with multiple people. And I want to hear about all of it and why it culminated when and how it did.

Light Hope training Mara

Mara being adorable?? Help???

Light Hope helping Mara get adjusted to her new role after she’s selected to be She-Ra

Light Hope adjusting to Mara after Mara is selected to be She-Ra

Mara experiencing Etheria’s magic

Light Hope being snarky at Mara while Mara sleeps with the Princesses has Normal Organic Relations with people and the two of them are pining for each other but neither of them really knows it consciously (after all, how would you date an AI? Would AIs date? There’s no social precedent for this. Is there?)

I would actually really like to see something with Mara and Light Hope doing what they came to Etheria to do and studying the planet’s magic, too

Magic and technology and xeno elements--Magical transformations, dreams, visions, new powers, coping with new powers, aliens!, virtual reality, telepathic/mental connections, uses of magic and tech for sex, etc.

Entrapta/Darla - I just love how horny on main Entrapta is for technology, and I love the observation that someone on the creative team shared that Entrapta sees tech as a living creature, and sees the “humanity” in it. I am open to anything here. Go wild.

She-Ra Entity/Mara - This is super niche and very worldbuilding-heavy, potentially, but I really love the idea of there being a relationship of sorts between not just Mara and She-Ra, but the She-Ra line and the She-Ra entity, going back to whenever the First Ones bound her to the Sword, and maybe even further back.

Queer spiritual & religious metaphors? In my fanfic? It's more likely than you think.

Prompt Set 3: Double Trouble/Catra, Castaspella/Shadow Weaver, Glimmer/Shadow Weaver, Catra/Glimmer

My trash children prompts! And by "trash children", I mean everything from "my genderpunk trash children" to "these two need a whole buddy comedy except they spend 95% of the film loathing each others' guts" to "holy wow student-teacher power imbalance".

Castaspella/Shadow Weaver - If you were wondering which pairing I thought "needs a whole buddy comedy", this is that pairing. Just like, a buddy comedy, but in a romantic way. They feel like they’d be great fodder for crackfic, because once you get Really Into the weeds of magic usage and these old family-related hatreds it gets either very technical and serious or just very ridiculous and honestly I like both options.

I have this very weird, very specific AU idea where the two of them have to go undercover as a married couple while simultaneously *loathing* each other and of course they bang it out eventually

I'm also a fan of whatever it is you think about them. I just about guarantee it.

Glimmer/Shadow Weaver - In my head, a lot of this is going to be after Glimmer’s coronation.

Their dynamic definitely has shades of “Glimmer is hurting and overwhelmed and will respond extremely well to a vaguely maternal figure no matter how vague or inappropriate”

There is always the lure of forbidden knowledge and Glimmer being high on the sense of competency and power and general ability to do things, which she probably feels she’s been denied all her life--and that have only been given to her at a huge personal cost. Glimmer might be mad at the world, mad at herself, mad at her mother.

I looooooooooooooove a good moral corruption story. I love how Glimmer seems like she’d be drawn to Shadow Weaver’s ruthlessness, especially after her interactions with Catra and how Catra tricked them constantly and weaponized their good natures and intentions against them

I've seen people point out that this seems like an appropriate pairing for tentacles and I have to say I agree.

Double Trouble/Catra - I don't know *why* I found it so endearing when Double Trouble would show the slightest basic kindness to Catra and Catra would just... melt? I mean, fine, they were getting paid to care, and DT was probably really interested in the drama too.

But then, you have the two of them egging each other on at being terrible, too. Being devious and misbehaved. I just need the two of them being my trash children. My gender-nonconforming queer punk trash children. Who make out sometimes, or have this... tension between them. Who might turn on each other sometimes, but god help you if you come after either one.

Catra/Glimmer - Idk, I especially enjoy them after seeing their dynamic in S5. I would love to see more of them doing... whatever, basically. I love how alike they are, and the ways they're different. And I love how Glimmer warms to Catra.

Catra annoying Glimmer. Because she is a cat.

Glimmer *getting* Catra, because they are a *lot* alike in some ways.

... And also any kind of "the aliens made them do it" smut fic you want to write about while they're out in space

Avatar: The Legend of Korra

Korra/Raava, Korra/Kuvira, Asami Sato/Lin Beifong, Korra/Lin Beifong, Kuvira/Opal

Korra/Raava - Kind of like with the She-Ra/Mara pairing under SPOP, I like there being an actual "relationship" between the mystical entity and the human connected to that entity. I'm not really looking for smut here, unless you're really feeling it, but any take on that is welcome.

Korra/Kuvira - This is, like, the opposite of Korra/Raava. Lol. All my rough pairing things apply:

Physical roughness. Can include rough sex, adrenaline/post-fight sex, sparring, or just actual fighting. Two women with dirt and blood streaking their skin snarling and circling each other? Perfect. Women who are scraped and sweaty and

Mystical elements - Reversal lol, but I do like mystical healing, telepathic or empathic connections

Redemption arc stuff for Kuvira, bc obvs.

Neither of them seem particularly prone to indulging in substances, but if they did, or if there was an AU, I do also love it when two warrior types get intoxicated together somehow

Asami Sato/Lin Beifong - Idk, I feel like Asami has probably gotten in trouble before, right? And I don’t see Lin being very moved by flirting, but I could totally see Asami making a pass at her and it backfiring lol--maybe even before she met the Avatar.

And then after that, Asami worked alongside Lin when she started working with the Avatar. And then she's worked with Lin in a non-bending professional capacity for a while too, post-s3. Idk. Maybe they have pre-Avatar interactions, or interactions that don’t revolve around the plot of Avatar, and there’s some kind of romantic or sexual Thing between them?

Korra/Lin Beifong - I have a few dynamics I like with these two:

Grumpy/sunshine pairing

The sunshine one is superpowered

Sparring with a D/S flavor

A lot of the “rough pairing” notes I made for Korra/Kuvira apply here, too, except there’s not so much of a rivalmancy going on

Under the Muppet Theory of Relationships, I’d probably place Lin on the Order Muppet side and Korra on the Chaos Muppet side.

Kuvira/Opal - Mostly thinking post-rehabilitation for Kuvira. The two of them find each other again and a lot has changed.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Katara/Azula, Toph Beifong/Katara

Katara/Azula - If you like me are into this ship--thank god I’m not the only one. I don’t know why I like the idea of the dynamic between them so much--Azula’s conviction of her right to rule, her redemption arc that never materialized, Katara’s involvement with the Avatar, the opposing natures of their powers, Katara’s mastery vs. Azula’s. It’s just *clenches fist* phenomenal fodder for enemies-to-lovers, the trauma they both carry, the different monsters they have inside them.

Toph Beifong/Katara - These two were super fucking adorable and had the best tomboy/femme vibe and I would like to see more of that dynamic at literally any point throughout their lives. Alternately, I am up for any ideas you have about them.

Terminator (Movies)

Grace Harper/Dani Ramos - THE LOYALTY. THE TRAGEDY. THE KNEELING.

Grace Harper/Sarah Connor - I am game for anything: Grace lives, Grace dies, Grace rises from the dead a vampire (j/k. Unless you’re into that idea). Unlike the other two pairings here, I really like the roughness and snark between them, the fact that they don’t entirely get along even when they’re nominally getting along. They feel like they’re constantly competing, and I would love for that competition to either extend to the bedroom or for them to work their differences out through banging or for meditation on how Grace reminds Sarah of Kyle or--

Dani Ramos/Sarah Connor - I wonder sometimes if Sarah calms down once Grace is gone, mostly because they’re no longer in immediate danger, but also because Grace seems to really chafe for Sarah more than Dani. Sarah seems almost soft in her regard for Dani, and I love that and I love how it comes from this sympathy she feels for Dani’s position. It feels really rare for her, and I love the juxtaposition of her roughness, grief, and caring.

For these two, I’d be really curious about anything that happens post-Dark Fate.

Dani Ramos/Sarah Connor/Grace Harper - I like all three of the above pairings, so why not put all three of them together? I think it’d be fun. Especially if the three of them are on the road together after the events of Dark Fate in an AU where Grace lives. Road trips, cyborgs, time travel, and gay sex.

Grace Harper/OFC, Dani Ramos/OFC - I know a lot of people really like the idea of Grace only ever having been with or interested in Dani, or vice versa, but I kind of feel like having more experience would make them better lovers when they’re with each other. Things I like a lot with this:

Grace blowing off steam with another Augment

Grace having drunk/high sex with another Augment

Dani occasionally sleeping with Augments when she doesn’t have Grace and really needs the comfort

The two of them fucking other people and thinking about each other

The two of them fucking and thinking about the other version of their partner

Worldbuilding for Dani’s post-Judgement Day world through the lens of femslash

#dear creator letter

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centaurrential · 4 years ago

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The first.

The nice thing about blogging is that one doesn’t need to follow a strict academic essay structure: the issues and concepts I want to write about are always architectures built upon some underlying causal, foundational plot. It would be nice if we could hyperlink the written representations of our thought processes, but alas, that is one domain in which modern technology has fallen short. You might see that I jump around between topics, but I promise there are connections everywhere. So, here we go!

I’ve been hesitant to write about what ignites my passion the most.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

For one, save for some semblance of a university degree I attempted to put together years ago, I have little in the way of ‘respectable’ credentials. I rely on my own observations of what is happening around me. A high school friend once revealed to me a technique in visual arts that has stuck with me since. “Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.” I have applied this not only to achieve realism in the scant visual artworks I have produced and which have gone unseen by most others, but also to compose a coherent understanding of my world--or in other words, everything I feel. This “motto” of sorts shows that we often ignore details about our experience that are in plain sight. Despite holding this key, I am well aware that I have not necessarily earned any institutional authority to write on the matters that compel me so--yet, as a person who has simply lived and observed, I still feel that I should express myself, for what ever it may be worth.

Second, though my risk of legal and political persecution in some form or another is not as dire as was obviously the case in the past with established thinkers, I’ve felt compelled to dress my thoughts in verse, marching what I think are critical ideas down the runway, letting the audience gently scrutinize the layers of different conceptual fabrics in motion rather than to place what is thought to be controversial on a podium, open to the personalized savagery of modern “progressive” critique. Misunderstanding is a very real fear of mine as I believe it is one of the greatest tragedies of the human condition. I suppose, as a sensitive person who is deeply emotional and deeply invested in my own thought as a means to a better world, my intent up to now has been to create a buffer of some sort between what I theorize and the ideology-driven hate that tends to characterize Internet culture (which, incidentally now, always carries a ‘social media’ component with it). But I don’t wanna hide anymore.

Something I’ve noticed about that very vehicle for thought is how utterly unforgiving it is. Someone uncovers a person’s past involving a stupid, ignorant mistake along the lines of political incorrectness and suddenly all the good they may have recently put into the world evaporates because there is some sort of twisted expectation of social perfection we’ve adopted--even though there is some overlap between this absolutist, impossible approach to other, equally fallible human beings and the tendency to wax poetic about one’s own cathartic emotional experience, along with a new awareness emerging from the remnants of self-destruction, and forcing ‘compassion’ toward oneself in light of one’s mistakes.

The message is that “I” can learn, but “you” cannot. It seems that people are so volatile these days, they’re ready to pounce without really thinking about what a person is trying to say in earnest. And while I believe that we should work hard at our collective and individual duties to skepticism, I cannot condone, to the furthest reaches of any influence I may have, the deadlock of pseudo-critical thinking when it involves scapegoating and self-righteousness.

I sense (and feel) a lot of (justified) anger, and many well-meaning individuals are looking for a place to which they can direct such intensity. The unfortunate thing is that the fire mutates into hostility toward people who don’t deserve it. Shuffle formless anger into boxes designed to look nicely and glamorously radical, and chuck it at those who--excluding the really terrible people in the world--are honest and serious about answering the questions of “how to achieve the maximum possible distance from pain”, and, “what is, essentially”, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.

And by the way, I find the dismissive “ok, boomer” attitude reprehensible. Like, OBVIOUSLY there are going to be differences among generations in “opinion” and lifestyles and so on. And obviously past generations have made what we now deem to be ‘mistakes’. But just like any individual who may regret past actions, whether personal or professional, one makes decisions supported by the most convincing reasons they can muster, and so they do the best they can with the knowledge they have at hand, at some particular moment. Maybe some visionaries in the past were able to extrapolate from the contemporary and predict what would happen in the future. Even if their equivalents exist in society today, we will not know for certain the downright traumatizing effects current societal mechanisms could force to manifestation in the years beyond, until they actually become fact. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, there is wisdom that only comes through living life. That, I’m afraid, is not up for debate.

I must say this here, now. I realize I’m walking on eggshells with what I’m about to say. But, while it is clear that there is a significant degree of ‘white privilege’ in North American society, I’d be careful to declare ‘privilege’ an inherently white experience. It is an historical reality (and is therefore biased). Not all ‘white people’ are the same; and it is CERTAINLY not the case that it has only been ‘white people’ that enforced slavery, for example. And it is definitely true that different members of different religions and different races and different ethnicities and different cultures and different dialects have, historically, perpetuated evil across many axes. Furthermore, I believe that the explicit and intentional denigration of ‘white people’ MADE BY WHITE PEOPLE THEMSELVES is probably one of the greatest expressions of white privilege. How secure must one feel if they can freely diss their ‘own kind’ and know that nothing diabolical will happen to them? We owe justice through opportunity to people we have marginalized, but that is not the way. I just think that people are either willfully ignorant, accidentally ignorant, or have forgotten that all kinds of people can be villains, and further that a truly corrupt person will even torture people with whom they may have a great deal in common.

I tend to think that ‘intersectionality’ is a seriously important concept and is most empirically aligned with individualism. People move around more, cross-cultural contact happens more; global connection ushers cuisine, rituals and traditions, spiritual beliefs, and languages into landscapes that were previously barren of particular social technologies. The result is a person who may have many characteristics sort of in common with others who share those qualities in a scattered manner, but unless one of those forces was exceptionally prominent in the person’s life, the commonality is negligible.

Emergent from this phenomenon is the serious tension between individual self-actualization and the requirements for so-called proper functioning of the broader ‘community’ to which one feels they belong. The needs of each can often be at odds with one another, and it doesn’t appear to be an easy task to resolve this conflict. I do know that sacrifices will have to be made, as there is always a price to pay; I almost think of that as a universal law.

When I was 19 and took a philosophy of feminism class, I started noticing what problems arise when a mode of thinking is assumed to apply to a particular “community” (loosely speaking), just because its members all share some intrinsic quality. In the particular case I’m talking about, it was “being female”. When someone speaks the word ‘feminism’, it is loaded. You have liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, and so on. The relevance of these various types is stretched so thinly throughout the human landscape that one could legitimately wonder why those theories should even be considered to have anything in common. In other words, how can you possibly come up with an ethic of revolution that applies universally to, I dunno, how many billion people in the world? Here’s a situation: women in the West, particularly in the Deep South, are fighting for their choice to have an abortion. Meanwhile, in some parts of India and China, female infanticide is more common than a decent person should like to admit, and that’s not because Indian and Chinese women want it! Asking someone who is thoughtful in ANY respect if they are a feminist is like asking someone if they believe in God, and that is not, nor should it be, an easy question to answer.

To be clear: what I am talking about is definition, and if you break down the etymological components of that word, you see that it is about deciding what sorts of conceptual boundaries must be drawn (the finiteness)--to determine what is included, and also what is excluded. My belief is that it is actually the interplay between those qualities intrinsic to a person and external forces placed upon us that dictate the degrees of self-satisfaction and happiness we experience.

That pain is to be avoided is generally unquestionable, though the finer details of rational action (because I do see the treatment of pain as an issue of rationality, and as something more fundamental to the exercising of rational action than market economics is) are still up for debate. And, I suppose, that is the case for many injustices that an active, voluntarily thinking society wishes to eradicate. I’d like to return to that topic some time in the future, but what concerns me today is the issue of essentialism.

Essentialism has been a problem for philosophers for a really long time. Often it is conceptualized as “what makes something that thing”, but in my view, Essence seems to lie in the realm of the experiential. In one minor paper I wrote for a metaphysics class, I argued (incompletely) that an object’s ‘essence’ could be partly defined by the function one identifies when they come into contact with said object. For example, because even though chairs can be made up of different numbers of legs, or be of different colours, or be upholstered or not, we place them into a category of ‘something to be seated upon’. But then again, there are many things that can be sat upon, and, on the other hand, one does not look at a real life dog and think of it as an object that innately serves a purpose, let alone is built for one.

So why am I talking about what seems to be an obscure and useless topic?

It is the utility of Essence that gives form to our experience. And for those who believe that we erroneously categorize and judge every single damn thing we come across in our lives, go ahead and try to reverse neurological evolution through time of geologic scale. I mean, this mode of existence came to be before we even defined what ‘values’ were.

Tangentially, my introduction to the study of philosophy started with the great divide between ‘rationalism’ (ie. some inherent structure which creates the capacity to ‘know’ already exists in a person at the time of birth) and ‘empiricism’ (the school of thought where a person only collected knowledge through experience after they were born with a ‘blank slate’ of a mind). I never understood why the distinction between rationalism and empiricism was so important, because it seemed so obvious that our system of moving through the world was a combination of the two. We see now that the belief in one to the exclusion of the other is just plain stupid: genetics, epigenetics, logarithmic counting in BABIES, education, debate, and research, all contribute to an individual’s understanding of the world. (It is this idea, too, that contributes to my belief that free will is an illusion [though a helpful one at that] and that ‘luck’ is an epistemological concept. I will also use this idea to, eventually, communicate my argument that astrology is theoretically plausible, but that involves discussing archetypes and the cyclical nature of our known world...) Note: “Epistemology” is the study of knowledge and how we come to accumulate it. I went on this tangent because I think we need to demonstrate a great deal of respect for both pre-existing neurological realities and the staggering potential of science to teach us about our environments and ourselves. There are some core things about us that we would be wrong to ignore, and unforgivably so if the sound science is right there.

We do not typically go through life coming into contact with objects or people and checking off items on a list that comprise criteria for something being what it is (unless, of course, you’re prone to collect little hints as to whether a potential lover loves you back or not.....). To do so would reduce the fluidity with which we interact with externalities. That being said, I can conceive of a time when one goes outside for a cigarette in the night and watches a creature (as I just did) that may be a cat, or that may be a raccoon, cross the road. You peer at this creature for several seconds, up until the point that you conclude, and are certain, that it is, indeed, a cat. It is then that you can move on with your life. Perhaps what helped you to come to this conclusion was a short list of criteria that separate catness from raccoonness. Obviously that would be more efficient than consulting an exhaustive mental list of “cat properties” and comparing it to a similar list, but of “raccoon properties”. But even so, by the time you’ve witnessed the cat/raccoon, you’ve already filtered out any possibility that the creature might be something else, like a stray dog, or a lizard, or a floating chair. In conclusion, I propose here that context is essential to Essence. And Essence is a fully whole sensory experience, insofar as your sensory faculties work. This is why it is so hard to define.

The social relevance of the concept of Essence is becoming more important with the emergence of identity politics, the crises in feminism, “queerness”, the feminine/masculine dichotomy, and even paradigms in psychological health. Inherent to Essence is continuity, and no one can argue against the notion that we rely on general continuity to go about our daily lives.

But out of continuity develops expectation. Expectation is immensely helpful for the reason I laid out above. Additionally, in public, we rely on a common yet tacit understanding that individual members of the public will behave in a way that is safe and appropriate for everyone. The problem is, if you have experienced a good chunk of your life, well into adulthood, having never seen an unfamiliar and idiosyncratic expression of certain properties, why WOULD you do anything else other than fumble in your acceptance that that is the way something is? Your mind scrambles to organize what you are interacting with in the way that makes the most sense.

I was once accused of being an essentialist because of some remark I made referencing biological differences between men and women. I wondered if the dude was joking because I really cannot grasp why someone would think that the differences are trivial. Lately I’ve toyed with the conclusion that there must be something essential, something bounded, about the way we express ourselves, which matches what we are that isn’t seen by absolutely everyone, including exuding femininity or masculinity. If there wasn’t something essential about these “descriptions”, why would anyone make an effort to look a certain way in the first place? Or, why would anyone have a subconscious tendency to adopt certain characteristics? The point I’m trying to make is that communication in the form of appearance is just as important as a verbal explanation of something, and can in fact be more truthful than what is verbally expressed. Whether one wants to admit it or not, you are offering information that allows others to draw conclusions about you. And it’s not that you merely fulfill a checklist of the sort that I mentioned earlier. It is that, often, though not always, each separate quality supports all the others, forming a sort of “mesh-like” coherence. If there wasn’t something essentially feminine that you identified with, or something essentially masculine that you identified with--if these things didn’t matter--there would be no point in going to great lengths to change your appearance to communicate something. (And I think this holds even in the case of the non-binary person.)

Of course, judgments are made all the time about people, which have nothing to do with being transgendered or cisgendered. A person asks you your age. Why? Because they’re collecting information about you and the particulars in the category of “age” should reveal something about you that you’re not stating explicitly. And this information is only grounded in other information the inquirer has about you. And the only reason this information might be reliable is because a consolidation of an individual’s past experiences tells them that a certain age represents an axis of consistency of mentality and/or behaviour. The deductions we make are not always accurate, but if we didn’t instinctively think of this information as important, we wouldn’t seek it!

I will now apply the above problem to sort out why we are in such a mess, socially. First of all, the person is born into expectation of behaviour. That expectation depends on their sex at birth (assuming the person is not intersex), their social, economic, political class, the levels of education their immediate family members have achieved, their spiritual practices, et cetera. It seems to me that feminism arose in the first place because of the particular kind of anticipation of behaviour that swirls around whether you have a testicle-penis or a uterus-vagina combination. The traditionally ‘male’ realm was the unexplored frontier to many women; it was one of excitement, possibility, and opportunity, and arguably more freedom than the domain to which women were typically assigned: the home. Women can produce babies, and if you could produce babies then you SHOULD produce babies, and you should care for them too. And not only that, but by virtue of the fact that you are a mother you can’t even fathom leaving your babies behind. I haven’t yet come across a proper articulation of why this point is so crucial to understand. The women who have the term “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) slung at them are attacked by people who don’t understand that this fundamental difference in expectation between female-born individuals and male-born individuals is looming in the background, and how damn well important it really is, because it inevitably shapes a person’s perception of the world and quite possibly the expectations they have of other people! And the perception that falls upon you isn’t just something you can shed on a whim. And also, why are people surprised that this is still an issue? Even as advanced creatures we still succumb to evolutionary forces. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that “you aren’t female even if you feel female”, but it’s not about how you “feel”. It’s about what happens between you and people once they figure out a vital fact about you. It’s about the context in which you, a whole being, operate. You want to talk about oppression? I think your self-identity being misaligned with how other people think you should be is pretty high up there in the ranks.

So, to digress a little: the notion of changing yourself and making an impression on strangers, making a difference in the world, is intoxicating. But we enter dangerous territory when visions of child-rearing and home care become afterthoughts. Child psychologists have identified the age range between 2 and 4 to be particularly crucial in socializing children; it is at that age that they are the most impressionable with regard to how they learn to interact with others. That’s not really a huge window to make sure you ‘get it right’. I think the family unit, whatever its configuration may be, is pretty foundational to the rest of society. While many people presently carry harmful opinions about things we don’t understand, and changing those opinions tends to be rather difficult, the most radical, most powerful thing we can do to initiate reform is to make sure the children we are responsible for grow up valuing honour, kindness, and a sense of duty and justice, not just in relation to themselves and their immediate families, but to society as a whole.

People are throwing tantrums because society hasn’t given itself an overnight makeover. I think that anyone involved in politics understands, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though political institutions and bureaucracies were created by real people, they’ve sort of become fragmented away from human life and are entities of their own, floating above our heads like clouds in the higher atmosphere, and which do not have any readily identifiable boundaries. It appears that the various bodies of legislation and bureaucracies have become so bloody complex in correlation with the complexity of human interaction that they seem almost impossible to disentangle. Furthermore, ideas take a long time to die...if they ever even do.

Rather than viewing child-rearing as a burden, I choose to view it as the greatest responsibility and the greatest tool we have for genuine change. I feel, honestly, that sometimes we waste energy trying to convince people of something where there is no convincing possible. We often preach to the choir because they’re the only people who make us feel heard--but our own little choirs already know and believe what we know and believe.

So. I think, once I reviewed what I said above, that I’ve attempted to illuminate a conundrum about simultaneous utility and danger found in the act of expecting. This “study” of sorts is a microcosm of a world where darkness and light are aspects of all things. I’m convinced that the formulation of potential is expressed in binaries, but unlike computers, we are able to interpret ambiguities, and in many pockets of society people are tolerant of self-expression. With so many belief systems up for grabs, and with the world as it is in its ebbs and flows, it is up to the individual to craft their own transcendent values as a way to “orient themselves”, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson put it. Be mature and do not dismiss nuance. Challenge yourself. And for God’s sake, the next time you’re thinking of buying that innocuous avocado that’s become the symbol for the Millennial generation, ask yourself what is more important: dismantling violent and antisocial Mexican drug cartels, or supporting Mexican farmers who are trying to make their ways through life, just like every. last. one of us.

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lligkv · 5 years ago

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damnation follows any attempt to recover paradise

A while ago, I read Mark O’Connell’s 2017 book To Be a Machine, in which he investigates the transhumanist project of achieving a merger of the body and technology that allows the body to live forever—and, essentially and paradoxically, to fall away, to become a nonfactor, so you can experience yourself as pure consciousness. It’s like, if the average human wavers in the Cartesian split between mind and body, uncertain, transhumanists break the impasse by betting firmly on mind.

The book is thoughtfully constructed. All the major transhumanist figures you hear about appear: Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, Zoltan Istvan, Peter Thiel, Nick Bostrom. And O’Connell covers many facets of the transhumanist movement. He discusses life extension and cryonics; “whole brain emulation,” or the creation of a mind independent of any corporeal “substrate,” like the brain, which could feasibly be downloaded into any number of different bodies or substrates altogether; the possibility of artificial ultraintelligence, and the corresponding activism in the face of the existential risk such AI poses to humanity; the augmentation of the human body, as pursued by corporations and the state and military and as pursued by the laypeople and amateur biohackers known as “grinders”; and the idea that we could within our lifetimes reach “longevity escape velocity”—the magical point at which the science of life extension has advanced far enough that it’s easy to access and take advantage of and the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die becomes irrelevant.

It’s all shot through with a few major themes. One is the battle transhumanists wage versus “deathism,” their term for what they believe their critics suffer from, namely a need to protect yourself from death by trying to convince yourself it isn’t terrible. And two, transhumanism as but the latest incarnation of an age-old religious impulse: the desire for transcendence and eternal life—now, through technology, as before through religion.

I had such strong feelings of anger and contempt for the transhumanists after reading it, though. Maybe I’m guilty of being “deathist”: perhaps I mask my terror of death by pretending I’m okay with the fact that I’ll experience it. It’s certainly true I haven’t confronted death as closely as, say, Roen Horn—a young man who accompanies Zoltan Istvan in his campaign bus as his assistant during Istvan’s bid for the 2016 presidential nomination as the Transhumanist Party candidate, who came to transhumanism after a terrible childhood accident made him nearly bleed out. And it’s a clever move on O’Connell’s part to characterize Horn as he does. Initially, Horn seems a textbook incel type—being twenty-eight and so convinced a woman would cheat on him that he’s never pursued a relationship. But then O’Connell reveals the fact of the accident and the “darkness” it reveals to Horn, the “black terror beneath the thin surface of the world,” and that makes you realize why Horn is frightened by death as he is. It’s harder to dismiss him after that.

Transhumanism often seems the result of such extreme near-death experience. Tim Cannon, one of the grinders O’Connell writes about, had experiences of addiction that reduced his lived condition to its animal essence—making him beholden to his body, all urge and impulse beyond his own conscious control—in ways that left him desperate to hack it and transcend it. And Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, a VC firm focused on life extension technology—and all of twenty years old when O’Connell speaks to her—reports being rattled to her core by watching her grandmother die. The experience brought her to understand there’s a bodily decay in store for her and everyone she knows that she can do nothing to stop. And it leaves her obsessed with extending the human lifespan as the “correct” thing to do.

But it's only children who fear death in as total and paranoid a fashion as Deming or Cannon seem to. And at some point, children grow up. They become adults. They come to understand death as an inevitability, even if that’s only in the abstract. They come to realize it’s death that gives the time we are alive its meaning. They don’t need to denigrate the human body by sneering that people are mere “monkeys,” as Cannon does. They don’t live in atavistic terror of aging as do Deming or Aubrey de Grey (who leads the transhumanist group SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). And they devote their time and attention to curing the ills that plague the world now, rather than fixing their eyes on projects like defeating death. Or creating colonies in outer space—which seems driven by a similarly childish zeal on the parts of people like Peter Thiel, if one that’s less terrified—and bringing on the Singularity, the point, predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil, at which the merger between humans and technology becomes so complete that technology’s evolution entirely supersedes human evolution.

“To the charge,” O’Connell writes, “that such a merger” between human and machine “would obliterate our humanity, Kurzweil counters that the Singularity is in fact a final achievement of the human project, an ultimate vindication of the very quality that has always defined and distinguished us as a species—our constant yearning for a transcendence of our physical and mental limitations.” When I read those lines, I wanted to yell at Kurzweil: The yearning to transcend our physical and mental imitations is not meant to be fulfilled! I remember scribbling that line in my notebook on the train home from work just as I heard a man in the seats across from mine telling his seatmate about the intense cancer treatments he was going through. And that’s bravery to me. That’s what I admire: the ability to face the fact of the body’s fragility, rather than looking to obliterate it.

Sometimes I found myself thinking that the transhumanists, driven by greed (to experience, to colonize) and fear (of death, so childish in its intensity) were deformed people. I know this isn’t a good word to use. But I wasn’t a good person I was reading this book. I could feel my heart turn in revulsion as I encountered all these people who treated being alive, finite, human as a problem to be solved. The chapter on the grinders, “Biology and Its Discontents,” was particularly trying. When O’Connell reveals that Tim Cannon, deep in his alcoholism and spiraling, had once tried to kill himself, for a vicious instant I thought, If only he had succeeded. I just couldn’t take his sneering contempt—his saying, so often, things like, “People want to stay being the monkeys they are. They don’t like to acknowledge that their brains aren’t giving them the full picture, aren’t allowing them to make rational choices. They think they’re in control, but they’re not.”

There’s this moral superiority there. This assumption that you’re better than other people; other people are idiots, and you alone are stripped of illusion. I hate that—that loathing for your fellow man’s fallibilities as though you yourself have none. I hate that more than anything.

What’s more, I hate the apparent lack of regard for consequences on the part of so many transhumanists. In her book Being Numerous, Natasha Lennard writes about Paul Virilio’s notion of the “accident”: that “which is contained within, and brought into the world by, the inventions of progress […] itself.” In other words, when you invent a plane, the possibility of a plane crash follows. Often the transhumanists seem entirely unconscious of the possibilities their tech is bringing into existence. That’s simply outside the scope of their narrow remit. When Randal Koene, who runs the whole brain emulation organization Carboncopies, is confronted with the possibility that the downloading of minds to different substrates might unlock an entirely new level of invasive advertising, he basically shrugs it off. In that, he’s like just about everyone O’Connell talks to, every tech billionaire and devotee of any renown in our horrible historical moment: in love with the possibilities, unconcerned with the consequences.

Just because the possibility of developing a certain type of technology is there doesn’t mean it needs to be done. Where is the restraint? Maybe that’s longer a virtue in a late capitalist society, after the end of history, in a time when we don’t have any overarching societal narrative that would make restraint something to want to practice or that would make some notion of the human something we want to consider before we eradicate it. In this world we live in, everyone, atomized, pursues their own ends. What you want, what’s possible, and what you have the means to make possible are the only standards by which a decision to act is made.

Most of the transhumanists are frighteningly cavalier, to the layperson of a humanist bent like me, about the stages of the revolution they foresee. Ray Kurzweil, for one, talks about the trajectory he’d like to see so casually. “What would be a nice scenario is that we first get smart drugs and wearable technologies. And then life extension technologies. And then, finally, we get uploaded, and colonize space and so on.” And so on. Again, reading that line, I wanted to yell: Nothing entitles you to space! Have we not learned not to colonize?

It all speaks to the experience of reading To Be a Machine, which is this kind of Mobius strip of revulsion (“hell no”) and relenting (“I mean, maybe” or “well I guess” or “am I the problem here?”). At one point, O’Connell drops a quote from D. H. Lawrence: “science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past.” And it’s like “miraculous” is one side of a coin whose other side is “horrifying,” and O’Connell spends the entire book flipping that coin as he talks impartially about the transhumanist movement, showing you first one face of it and then the other.

It's a credit to O'Connell that he could stay as evenhanded as he is reporting on these people. I even came to dislike his repeated tendency to express fond, largely tolerant and even feelings toward people who sounded as inhuman and afraid of life as Roen Horn did. Maybe I was disappointed I couldn't be as gracious as he was even though I like to consider myself a kind person who's inclined to empathy.

Or more likely it’s because I lack O’Connell’s proximity to religion. Ultimately, his ethos of impartiality comes from being able to so clearly see the parallels between transhumanist and religious desire. This is a parallel that I, not being a religious person at all, having no real religious instinct, would never have felt so intuitively or described so convincingly. It leads O’Connell to afford the transhumanists the same respect he would the devotees of any other religion. As he’s listening to Tim Cannon share his vision of eventually being not a body but simply a “series of nodes” peacefully exploring the universe for all time, he writes

I was going to say that all of this sounded hugely expensive; I was going to ask who was going to pay for it all. But I thought better of it, in the way that you might think better of making a joke about the central tenets of a person’s faith after they had taken the trouble to explain them to you.

And transhumanism is ultimately a faith: a contemporary reflection of the ancient desire to be delivered of the body, redeemed of its weakness and sin, no longer subject to its curse. The Singularity—however that is defined, whatever particular perfect union between human and machine a particular transhumanist aims for—is the Rapture. The world after this Singularity, affording as it does answers to all scientific questions and cures for all diseases, will be Eden.

And everyone in this book believes themselves to be among the elect.

And if, as the transhumanists believe, humans are effectively computers, in the way their minds operate—just with substrates made of meat—it’s also the destiny of obsolete technology to die. And so it is just for humans to wipe themselves out to usher in cyborgs and AI and superintelligence. It’s just technology, drawing all the way from the first spear a human being ever threw, achieving its teleological end.

But—as O’Connell also points out, the attempts religion has made to make good on its own teleological narratives tell us that damnation always follows any human attempt to recover paradise.

#books #literary #nonfiction #mark o'connell #ray kurzweil #aubrey grey #laura deming #tim cannon #zoltan istvan #peter thiel #transhumanism #the singularity #the end of history

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sapropel · 7 years ago

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New thread because the old one was so long! @ungracefulace

I am back from my spiritual journey and my mental health is in a downward spiral! It is a race against time to see if I can finish this response before my brain shuts down! Who’s! Ready!!!!???

I first want to talk a tiny bit about the DSM thing you brought up. Here’s a link that addresses it from my “ref” tag.

https://goblincourse.tumblr.com/post/162148435657/a-concept

I want to address in your link what this link does not.

Your link talks about how asexuality is NOT in the DSM and is given special mention in a little-used version. At the very worst, this issue is procedurally incompetent, NOT oppressive. Misdiagnosis is not oppressive, it is not malicious. Your concern is unaware or perhaps malicious psychiatrists trying to treat ignorant ace kids for their asexuality, I imagine. I’m not going to say that’s impossible, that some people don’t have an agenda, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that it happens at any significant rate.

“Also having your sexuality seen as an illness is literally systematic oppression. Like, it’s a literal system set up to oppress a minority group.” You’re also working under the assumption that putting “asexuality” in the DSM (which… it isn’t?) was done SPECIFICALLY to oppress asexuals which is, in fact, a wild assumption. There is no evidence that there is a secret aphobic agenda in the medical community and if you show me any evidence to the contrary I will eat some fucking crow right now.

Another issue is that the issue is made America-specific, but like… I am an American. I understand Americentrism is an issue on Tumblr but for the sake of argument I think it’s best we argue about systems here.

Your second link: If you read closely, I’d make an argument that this person is actually arguing that you shouldn’t repress your sexuality just because you’re religious, NOT that asexuality itself is bad.

Even if this person WERE specifically denigrating asexuality, as I said before, it is one person. Many religious sects hate various groups of people that aren’t actually oppressed. Again, I’m not saying discrimination isn’t possible. As a matter of fact, I can actually imagine that growing up aromantic in the Mormon church could be extremely troubling for some people. I am NOT saying that this is systematic, but there are situations in which you can be disadvantaged. This can be true for most groups of people.

“Religious persecution is systematic oppression.” Not necessarily! For that to be the case, it would need to be widespread, deeply cultural, and part of a group that holds power over the general population. Various religions persecute scientists in the field of climate change and evolutionary biology but these scientists aren’t oppressed or even, in most cases, censored, because these religions no longer have the power to do much about it. Can they be discriminated against? Again, yes.

“By calling asexuals non human, by using our confusion about our sexuality to medicate and [pathologize] us, it is a systematic attack on asexuals. Making asexuals an oppressed group.” This is an iffy one. Again, ask yourself: what scale is this happening on? Is it widespread? Deeply cultural? Part of a power imbalance? I also find the implication that people are PURPOSEFULLY doing this to attack asexuals very interesting, because most of the time I see inclusionists argue that it is in fact the invisibility of ace people that contribute most to their “oppression.” This implies that the medical community knows enough about and hates asexuals enough to devise a destructive conspiracy against them, has enough power to implement it; AND that the general population is so ignorant of asexuality that we oppress them on the front of invisibility and erasure.

“ What qualifies as enough for you? “ This is another tricky one. I’m not the arbiter of oppression or anything. I don’t decide the exact amount. You have to take a qualitative perspective with this kind of thing. So again, a couple questions:

1) Is it widespread? Do you see this happen on a large scale in all pockets of the United States? How many data points do you have? Does this affect ALL aro/ace people REGARDLESS of class, race, gender, religion, etc?

2) Is it deeply cultural? Is it engrained in the media? Entertainment? The professional world? Where would this oppression come from? What are the roots? Are they unique to asexuality/aromanticism or are they byproducts of misogyny, homophobia, and ableism? Is it, in a word, inescapable?

3) Is there a power imbalance? Is there a power dynamic that prevents or hinders socioeconomic growth and mobility for aro/ace people? Are aro/ace people systematically silenced and censored? Are there laws in place against aro/ace people, or are there institutions or policies placed to keep them down?

Okay, next part! This is another tricky part because it requires nuance, critical thinking about, and a balance of 1) distancing oneself from privilege and 2) living authentically without having to censor oneself.

I sincerely doubt that aro/ace people have been discriminated against in the workplace, but I don’t have any sources to say otherwise.

I also SINCERELY doubt anyone has been disowned SIMPLY for not feeling romantic/sexual attraction. I’ve only ever heard of one person claiming that to be the case, and it turns out they were “kicked out” for being a brat to their parents, not because of their identity. I’m looking at you, Max “Rat Hands.”

I’m sure that some people have been raped for being ace. It would not surprise me. Besides the very obvious intersection here with misogyny and toxic masculinity, I mostly just want to point out that this is discrimination and this itself does not constitute oppression.

“Having organizations that try to support you badgered because you don’t count to those people is not a few people being mean.” This is misleading and a bit upsetting to be that it was phrased this way. When groups SPECIFICALLY geared towards helping LGBT people, like the Trevor Project, begin to help non-LGBT people, it’s extremely reductive to say that the outrage is mere “badgering.” What happens in these situations is that resources for LGBT people are diverted to help non-LGBT people, in institutions SPECIFICALLY to help us. When a suicide hotline takes a call from a non-LGBT person, that is one less person who can help an LGBT kid in a crisis. And it’s not just this. Scholarships, events, campaigns ALL have similar resource drains where non-LGBT people will take resources from actual LGBT people, and when we’re a group that’s already struggling and already so deeply marginalized, it’s frustrating.

I want to add that I absolutely think aro/ace people should have institutions and resources geared specifically for them, but I do not think they need to piggyback off of already-existing LGBT entities.

“If someone is attacked for being ace, that is not toxic masculinity or misogyny that is literally aphobia. “ You’re right, that would be anti-ace discrimination. But again, I feel like context is important. Lots of times when someone talks about aggression they received for being aro/ace, the reasons are more likely due to misogyny or toxic masculinity and less often have anything to do with being aro/ace. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s important to look at the Gestalt.

#ace discourse #ungracefulace

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discipulusmaleficus · 4 years ago

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all the p flowers!!

@squibbed - botanical hcs

pansy : does your muse often reflect on their own actions ? do they ever think a lot about the past , and what they could have done differently ?

Not if he can avoid it, which is most of the time. It would only make him feel bad, right?

There are things he still feels guilty about (despite all efforts to ignore them), but he's not good at actually taking responsibility for his actions, and he isn't particularly convinced that it's possible for him to be better.

peony : what would a ‘ happy life ’ look like in your muse’s eyes ?

He'd settle for anything without the dread of his weird familial obligations and curses hovering over his head, tbh.

A lot of his old recurring daydreams focused on running off to become a goatherd in some isolated corner of the world. He has a vague, idealised notion of something reasonably steady and safe and cottagecore, but is also aware he'd likely have some issues with that in practice. (This may also be taken as evidence he's not built to be happy anyhow.) Literally joining the circus also may have been a thing for a while.

He hardly dares hope for a significant other most of the time.

poppy : what comforts your muse ?

Fun fact: before he starts wearing other things (which is big deal), the hooded black robe was something like a security blanket that he could feasibly carry around with him 24/7. Not only does it prevent people from perceiving his wretched countenance, it's surprisingly soft, gives him some protection against the cold on an everyday basis (if not against overheating), cuts out what seems like entirely too much glare in his peripheral vision, and will never fail him in a way that can't be fixed with enough sewing.

So, as for small things: being swathed in fabric, animals he doesn't hate, wine, maybe black tea, probably cards and pens and whatever else he plays with, the comforting sentiment that you were doomed to failure from the start and that there's no point in getting up in arms about it,

But also, let's be honest, how many times has he felt unhappy about something and then immediately concocted some ill-advised, unnecessarily risky summoning expedition or the like to avoid or 'fix' it???

parsley : describe a holiday your muse enjoys , and why they enjoy it .

I've answered a slightly adjacent question here (/gotten entirely carried away) and made some notes on all his notable holidays (or those I have a take on atm), since I've never bothered do that. There are a lot of days that are simply incidents for minor sacrifice or particularly good days on which to do X or Y, and he theoretically has religious obligations on a lot of days which aren't actually that celebratory at all. Really, one wonders how he keeps track of everything.

(All based on very surface-level research. I also really need to do more with the Kemetic influence at some point (curse his silly chimera religion), but information on that's generally scarcer and I'm tired.)

Parentalia (February 13-21): Offerings to and/or calling upon the spirits of departed ancestors, culminating in the Feralia sacrifice at midnight. Traditionally all business is put on hold for the duraction - his family's perspective probably differs somewhat in that you might want to use those spirits for something, rather than exorcising them.

Valentine's Day: Kal obviously always brings up his distaste for saints, but mostly he's just following the tradition of feeling bitter and unloved. Unless he isn't single...?

Caristia (February 22): Celebration of living family. You're supposed to bring everyone together and put all disagreements aside, which obviously always works perfectly and creates no tension whatsoever. Exchanging of wine and gifts and such. Kal probably begrudgingly makes the pilgrimage at least some of the time in adulthood.

Terminalia (February 23): Time to renew the curses on the boundaries of your property. Also to move them if you want to slowly encroach on the lands on the peasants. Or if you decided that was a bad idea and need to put them back.

March 1: 'New year', maybe.

Liberalia (March 17): "Celebrates the maturation of young boys to manhood," usually at 15-16. Also time to replace the mysterious effigy you have hanging in the woods and possibly the 2-3 robes you wear constantly.

April 1: He's not going to turn down an opportunity to fuck with anyone, right?

Kal's own birthday (April 14): I get the impression he mostly recalls waking up pre-pre-dawn for ritual reasons, and a lot of scrutiny of how well his schooling was progressing. He generally doesn't bother telling people about it.

Easter: sometimes he burns bibles for the occasion

Parilia (April 21): Sanctification and appeasement of the goats. Honestly kind of a big deal.

Vinalia urbana (April 23): Has mostly devolved into an excuse to drink.

Lemuria (May 9, 11, 13): Another festival of the restless dead. Has perhaps been kind-of-merged with The Beautiful Festival of the Valley. Which involves flower garlands.

Opet (July 19): For him, one occasion on which he’s obliged to venerate Amun-Ra and beg Him to maintain His contracts, I expect.

Neptunalia (July 23): Involves hanging out in the woods building huts of sticks (in the sun / rain), praying the fish will continue to be somewhat edible, and theoretically merrymaking.

Tekh (August 7): See Vinalia urbana, except it has to be beer, which he's less fond of.

Portunalia (August 17): "On this day, keys were thrown into a fire for good luck in a very solemn and lugubrious manner."

do they have to be your keys

Vulcanalia (August 23): If you want, you can ritually not sacrifice small animals by dangling them over open flames for a while and then taking them back unscathed. This is supposed to make your incendiary spells more effective in combat.

Meditrinalia (October 11): See Vinalia urbana.

Anniversary of Exile (October 23): Generally a time for swearing fealty to the legacy of your Ancestors and solemn oaths to One Day Conquer The World Once Again or whatever. Occasion of a ritual theoretically supposed to increase your own Dark Power, on which a fair number of Kal's intermediary relatives took it upon themselves to sacrifice their enemies. He probably abandons it at some point but is likely to be conflicted and in a less-than-stellar mood.

There are likely also minor acknowledgements of other historical dates of import to his cult family.

Birthday of Kallistemon Zorabi (January 29): Quite similar to the above, with a slightly more optimistic bent.

Halloween: I'm going to say this is agreed upon as a good time for necromancy, which means he's likely to busy himself with some nonsense as an excuse to spurn the holiday itself. For quite a while he denigrates it as a Mockery of "actual traditions", but I suspect he could learn to enjoy it if he bothered.

Saturnalia (December 17): Known as the season where slaves were traditionally served by or before their masters. Associated with the freedom to insult your betters, gambling, and the giving of (often small or gag) gifts. Kal is on board for all of this and will fairly often give people the worst things he can manage for 'Christmas'. (This is also a good way of thumbing his nose at Christmas.)

Bacchanalia (thrice yearly): About what you'd expect from Dionysos. He may have participated at school/university, and it's a good time if you like being driven temporarily insane (who doesn't), but you can't really do it properly if there's not a cult around. That's just sad.

Agonalia (quarterly): Occasion of sacrifice to various entities. True to the name, generally just kind of stressful, as you had to either kill something or (if you really couldn't afford to) offer apologetic blood sacrifice.

#;headcanon;#I'm practicing never shutting the fuck up

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artsoccupychi · 7 years ago

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The Vibrations of Money, Wealth, and Success

Not much has more “charge” than our response to…money.

Stuff and things. Wealth. Cash.

I was listening to my favorite marketing podcast, recently, and the young man being interviewed was talking about money. How we respond to it, viscerally and emotionally. How our attitudes toward it help us, or hurt us, in our desire to be successful. To provide for our family. To climb the proverbial ladder.

He said, “Money does not come from effort.”

While I’m going to disagree with this statement, almost categorically, which I think is both false and slightly offensive–I should say that, on many counts, I enjoyed the conversation.

I believe many of us are our own worst enemies, when it comes to the “head game” around success, money, and wealth.

Because we do have a complicated, love-hate relationship with money, don’t we? And I believe many of us are our own worst enemies, when it comes to the “head game” around success, money, and wealth.

Money has energetic frequencies. If you’re willing to let this conversation get pretty honest, maybe a little bit raw, let’s talk about what your own personal energetics are, around this subject.

If you were raised Christian, you might have been taught Biblical concepts that “love of money is the root of all evil,” or that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.”

Confusingly, though, you probably saw your parents spend many hours, almost every day, in efforts to obtain it, spend it, talk about it.

The Christian religion I was raised in–interestingly, and perhaps even ironically, given these ancient scriptural judgments about money–has given rise to far more than its fair share of millionaires, and educated, successful, even wealthy, people.

Both of my parents, and most of my 7 siblings, have advanced degrees.

And it’s no secret that the #1 reason people obtain post-graduate degrees is to increase earning power–all of my siblings are very successful financially.

But we should examine our conflicted approach to money, because we make frequent negative statements about it: the pursuit of money, and people who have lots of it—all while spending more time pursuing it than any other waking activity.

So it seems worthwhile to explore the “vibration” of money—because, like everything else, money is simply energies (or vibration). (Remember that Einstein said, “Everything in life is vibration.”)

And the point here is that the best energies are the ones that flow through, without resistance. The energetic space you hold for thinking about, talking about, and pursuing money, should ideally, then, be a flow state.

“There is plenty of money, it is abundant, there is enough for everyone, it flows like a river, it’s easy to earn, it’s easy to spend, it’s easy to give and share, and it’s easy to invest it well.”

Can we agree that when we consider wealth, assets, the green cash you earn and spend, ideally:

There is plenty of money, it is abundant, there is enough for everyone, it flows like a river, it’s easy to earn, it’s easy to spend, it’s easy to give and share, and it’s easy to invest it well.

Now, read that again. Ask yourself if any part of that caused your mind to trip. Did you have any resistance to any part of that sentence?

What did it feel like? Did it feel like shame? Anger? Self pity?

Where in your body did you feel resistance to any of those thoughts—that money is free-flowing, abundant? I hope you’ll spend a minute thinking about any part of that statement above, in italics, that you found yourself pushing against, instead of flowing with.

Because all of those things are true. Money is a man-made concept. Human beings create the physical tender itself.

(And as you know, most “money” is flowing via digital transfer these days anyway. Bitcoin has soared from $200 to $11,000 in the past 3 years, and cybercurrencies are literally creating money. To give you a sense of the fact that it may not be what you think it is: it’s nothing more or less than energy.)

And if this is true, then it’s worth exploring what your own energy blockages may be, that keep you from being able to obtain it, and use it to make more good energies flowing in your life and in your community.

(Let me remind you of another quote that may help pique your interest in how powerful an “energetic shift” can be, in changing your financial status. The quote is by the genius scientist Nikola Tesla, who said, “If you want the secrets of the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”)

I think the speaker on that podcast, when he said, “Money does not come from effort,” meant to challenge our parents’ and grandparents’ advice:

“If you want to succeed, work hard.”

However, that’s precisely the message, of all the twisty and conflicted feelings we may attach to the ideas around money, that I think we should keep.

Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu, the Colossus—all the great feats of humankind have involved massive effort. Sometimes unthinkable, thousands-of-hours, if-they’d-known-how-much-work-it-was-I-wonder-if-they-would-they-have-done-it work. Hardcore labor.

I think the young speaker denigrating the idea that from hard work flows money and success, had a valid point, which may be that you can dial in systems, and optimize, to scale in your business, instead of being limited by “trading time for dollars.”

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, if you’re a business owner, you must learn to delegate, leverage systems, and get the most from your team–in order to not kill yourself in building a business.

But I’ve never achieved anything without a massive amount of work. I love the idea that work creates wealth. We’ve all seen that in action. I also think that working hard for something that matters creates quality, principled humans.

I’m not sure I would even value the thing I’d achieved, if I hadn’t “left it all on the field,” in massive effort. Which I have, every time I’ve “birthed a baby,” whether it be a new book, a new business, or a new product line.

If the “green-eyed monster” of jealousy invades our consciousness relative to material wealth, then we may need to accept that we value money more than most of us are willing to admit to.

We would all be well served to check ourselves, whether we’ve ever done any of these things:

We have felt critical towards or said harsh words towards someone who achieves great financial success. Perhaps we went to high school with them, or were at the same financial status once, and now they’ve outpaced us. (If the “green-eyed monster” of jealousy invades our consciousness relative to material wealth, then we may need to accept that we value money more than most of us are willing to admit to.)

We have avoided achieving big goals because we fear our family and friends will criticize us and we’ll lose our social standing, if we out-earn them.

We have said self-sabotaging things about material success, like, “Money doesn’t buy happiness anyway.” Or “I didn’t really want to succeed at X because it would be too stressful.”

Do you really believe that a rich man can’t get into heaven?

Or do you understand the intent of that scripture is that when we achieve wealth, we tend to think ourselves better than others, perhaps even better than God, and we need to check our tendency to become arrogant?

(After all, if money is just energies, and energies are constantly flowing, wealth can come and go, ebb and flow. Virtually every millionaire has acquired and lost multiple fortunes, in a lifetime.)

Do you believe that the wealthy are innately sinful, or less good and kind, than others?

Money is just energies, but what’s far more interesting to me, is that our own approach, opinion, and feelings about money are energies, too. And they can be changed to flow with more peace and abundance.

Do you believe that money can’t buy happiness?

Statistically, it has proven to be true that wealthy people are not happier people, though poor people (below a certain financial threshold) are, as a group, more unhappy.

This doesn’t necessarily imply that money “makes” you happier or less happy—it may be, in fact, that our programmed, generational beliefs about money and materialism are at the root of the strange facts around whether money affects our life satisfaction.

The psychologist Martin Seligman, pioneer of the “positive psychology” movement, explored this. He theorized that we are not biologically programmed for the amount of “choice” we have in the modern age.

He documented how despite a massive increase in household income, in the past few generations, we are actually reported as being less happy, or the same, as before this Age of Affluence—we are not, it’s clear, more happy.

He also gathered research showing that people who are the most materialistic are also the least happy people.

“Materialistic” refers to people who spend significant time and energy wanting material things. This makes sense, in a world where consumer goods are everywhere, and no one, no matter how wealthy, can have anything he might want.

It turns out that people who are “satisfizers” rather than “maximizers” are the happiest. These terms Seligman coined refer to people who are satisfied with their circumstances, material acquisitions, and level of affluence, whereas “maximizers” are preoccupied with having, doing, and being “more” or “better” or “the best” of the options.

(You can imagine how marital happiness is affected by one partner constantly looking over the back fence, at the other options!)

I achieved my financial wealth goals I had set at the age of 24—at the age of 48. Not the age of 42, which was my goal. And I can tell you that the idea of “financial freedom” I originally set out to achieve is elusive, if not entirely a myth.

Most people who achieve 7-figure net worth will tell you that in the acquisition of their wealth, they’ve become acutely aware of how quickly it can disappear. This can lead to the sense that the original goal, “financial freedom,” or “financial stability,” may be impossible.

The more they work and acquire, and the older they get, the more they become aware of thousands of years of human history where the rich became poor, assets crumble overnight, and entire national economies fluctuate–even created or destroyed in just days or months. (We all watched the stock market tumble in 2007.)

Many of the most wealthy among us report having more anxiety around money, when they’re worth $5 million, than they had when they were young, working near the poverty line.

This may be due to becoming clear about how illusory and transitory money is.

If wealth is just digital transmission of energies, and it’s just a concept that we’ve all agreed to, with hundreds of variables impacting our valuation of the “monetary unit of measure” in the first place—isn’t it interesting, then, that we appropriate so much energy to accumulating it, comparing our relative “worth,” and using it as a barometer around which we feel pride, shame, fear, guilt, and almost endless anxiety?

If money is in constant flow, and if we can either be in, or out, of that flowing river, depending on the energies we choose–aren’t we all better off, then, being more abundant, grateful, and detached, in the way we both receive, and give, financially?

Now, I’ve gotten entirely philosophical about the green stuff, while you may be thinking,

“No, money is a cold, hard fact of life, I need that stuff, to have food three times a day, and a place to live.”

Fair enough. But there are billions of dollars, mostly in the form of little digital data bits flowing across wires buried in the ground, that we can create more of. There is no actual scarcity.

Money flows to those who work, who do so diligently, who finish their projects rather than just dream about them, who put their time and effort into “highest and best” uses.

Money flows to those who work, who do so diligently, who finish their projects rather than just dream about them, and who put their time and effort into “highest and best” uses.

Money flows to those who challenge the energy they put on their failures. The self-made wealthy dust themselves off after a failure, assess what they’ve learned, and move onto the next project with positive energy.

(We’ve already established that virtually 100 percent of the self-made wealthy lost fortunes, along the way to earning them.)

Plenty of people work very hard, harder than wealthy people do, and never earn any significant amount of money. Many people expend a tremendous amount of effort on a variety of things, while avoiding putting their labor into activities that will actually lead to material success–due to their fear or aversion around money.

So, because there’s more to becoming wealthy, or financially successful, than what your parents may have told you (“Work hard!”), we must examine another aspect of whether you could be more successful than you are.

You can absolutely have more money and wealth than you have now.

Because money is energies, and earning and because spending it creates lots of ripples and flow in the larger energetic system known as “the economy,” you can create money and wealth, without taking it from someone else who needs it!

Effort does, actually, create more wealth.

And, I feel the idea that “effort does not create wealth” is disrespectful to over 90 percent of the human beings on the Earth for whom physical labor pays for their food and shelter and their children’s needs. We have most of what is available to us, in life, due to someone’s physical effort, so I don’t think it serves, to devalue that.

But in addition to acknowledging the value of effort, shifting your energies and thought patterns towards money has the power to completely change your financial status, when added to hard work and being a “finisher” of your projects. What if you challenged:

that money is something to fear

that people who work more than 40 hours a week, or entrepreneurs, are “workaholics” and therefore pathological and need to change

that you aren’t capable of obtaining enough money

that people who obtain money and spend it easily are somehow bad or obsessive or misguided

that you shouldn’t bother to try to earn more money, because you’ll just lose it somehow

that if you are financially successful, your friends and family will turn on you

that because money can’t buy happiness, then staying where you are is actually better

that you feel slightly uncomfortable when you hear words like rich, money, or wealth

that because people who are “satisfied” with their financial state are the happiest, you, therefore, should continue to financially struggle rather than succeed

Does putting bad juju on money serve you well?

Would it feel good, or bad?–for you to:

Catch yourself every time you have a negative thought about people who appear to have more money or wealth than you do? And replace that thought with a neutral or positive statement? And/or:

Catch yourself every time you use words or thoughts (also energies) to place a value judgment on your own ability to dip in the river of money flowing through the economy? And replace that thought with a neutral or positive statement.

If you think it would feel good–rather than bad–try an experiment…..

Replace your pattern of negative thinking with statements like these:

1. I bet that guy has stepped on a lot of people to get where he is.

2. That car she’s driving is fancy, but I don’t need a flashy car to feel good about myself.

3. He’s got a really nice house, but I wouldn’t want a mortgage payment that big.

4. Money comes, and money goes (I bet he loses that business/house/car eventually).

5. Money can’t buy happiness.

6. People who work hard are addicts, and therefore pathological (“workaholics”).

To positive statements like these:

1. I’m learning to get in the stream of flowing money, to receive it, as well as give it, easily.

2. I view others with money positively because I want those positives to flow in my own life as well.

3. I don’t need to have a judgment about expensive things and the people who own them, because it doesn’t serve me and my goal to live in the higher vibrations.

4. My energies around money help more of it flow to me and to the people and causes I care about.

5. I want more wealth, and I’m not afraid to say that.

6. Money represents the ability to use my time the way I want to.

The words, thoughts, and emotions we have about the subjects of success, money, and wealth, directly, daily, affect whether we are in the stream of wealth and abundance–or whether we’re straining to get a drop from a turned-off faucet that drips now and then.

[Read More ...] http://greensmoothiegirl.com/media/uploads/2017/12/shutterstock_132181055.jpg https://greensmoothiegirl.com/2017/12/07/vibrations-of-money/

#infrared saunas #healthy

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importanttravelerninja-blog · 7 years ago

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‘One Way We Push Back Against Evil Is Through the Leaders We Elect’

Last Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted out an endorsement of a “great book” by “a wonderful man”: A Place Called Heaven, a new work on the afterlife by Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist church in Dallas. Jeffress is a member of Trump’s informal council of evangelical advisors and has backed many of the president’s controversial decisions, including war of words with North Korea. “God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,” Jeffress said in August.Then, last Saturday, Jeffress announced on Twitter that he would host the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity at his church on Sunday. Critics ranging from the political commentator Erick Erickson to Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska replied caustically. According to Erickson, the pastor “seems more committed to Trump’s America than Jesus’s eternity.” In an interview, Jeffress responded critically, wondering if Sasse and others would criticize religious leaders who were involved in the American revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the civil-rights movement.Jeffress, who sees himself as Trump’s “most vocal and visible evangelical spokesman,” embodies a distinct school of thought about the way Christians should relate to politics. During his sermon the day Hannity came, Jeffress spoke about Supreme Court decisions that he felt had derailed the country. He encouraged his parishioners to be politically engaged: “How do we push back against evil in the world?” he asked. “One way we do it in our country, a major way we do it, is through the government officials that we elect.”Jeffress peppered in little digs at the left, referring to the “pinhead lawyers from the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation” and later introducing Hannity as “Rachel Maddow’s worst nightmare.” But he was most focused on what he saw as widespread cultural decay. “We have allowed the atheists, the infidels, the humanists to seize control of this country and pervert our Constitution into something the Founders never intended,” he said. “And we have to say enough to that.”None of this is incidental to Jeffress’s project of teaching people about “a place called heaven”: He believes God calls on Christians to engage in and shape politics. To some, like Hannity, this influence is crucial: “There are too few pastors … that are willing to step out take a strong political position,” he said at First Baptist last week. “If we don’t save the culture, we’re going to lose our country.” But not all Christians agree.I spoke with Jeffress about his book, his views on the president, and how he thinks about evangelicals who might feel alienated Jeffress’s approach to politics. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.Emma Green: You write about the importance of judicial righteousness—being right with God—and ethical righteousness—being right as you act in the world.How do you make sure you’re acting with ethical righteousness as you present yourself in the world?Robert Jeffress: That’s the struggle every follower of Jesus Christ has. It’s a daily struggle to always make sure I’m aligning my conduct with what the word of God teaches. All of us are sinners who can only be saved by God’s grace. But I don’t think Christians who have received judicial righteousness have a license to do whatever they want as they await their departure to heaven. Every true believer has a responsibility to live out his faith in his daily life.“One way we push back against evil is through the leaders we elect.”Green: You said during a recent sermon that it’s important for Christians to be politically active. How is this related to that call to ethical righteousness—and to follow Jesus and the path to heaven?Jeffress: There’s a dichotomy in Scripture that Jesus expressed in John 17. He said to his heavenly father, “They are not to be of the world … but I’m not asking you to take them out of the world.” We, as Christians, are really citizens of two worlds: Our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, but God has left us here on earth for a reason.In Matthew 5:3-16, he describes our function in the world as salt and light. In Jesus’s day, salt was a preservative that was used to delay the decay of meat. Jesus has left us here to be a preservative in society, to push back against evil, to slow the decay of our world, so that we have longer to share the gospel of Jesus Christ.I don’t think that isolating ourselves from the world is what God has called us to do. In our country, one way we push back against evil is through the leaders we elect and the policies they enact.Green: It seems like that can be complicated in practice. We saw this over the weekend when Senator Ben Sasse and others criticized your decision to host the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on a Sunday morning at your church. Here’s what Senator Sasse said: By the way, we're talking about Sunday here... (You can be free from politics.) https://t.co/4u50JftVrS — Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) October 22, 2017What do you think about his perspective?Jeffress: Well, I have several reactions to that. First of all, what business is it of a United States senator as to what any local church chooses to do in its service? It is chilling to think that a senator would involve himself and criticize a church of which he is not a part.The second thing is that he tweeted this out on a Saturday night before we’d even had our service. The fact is, if you’ll listen, Sean Hannity didn’t say anything about politics. I interviewed him about his faith in Jesus Christ.And the third problem is the presumption that Christians should not be involved in the political process. I wonder if Senator Sasse would criticize the pastors who led the way in the American revolution; the pastors who led the way in the abolition of slavery; or pastors like Martin Luther King Jr. who led the civil-rights movement. Would Senator Sasse tell them they’re being too political and that has no business in the church? I doubt it.“I never preach partisan politics in our service.”Green: During your conversation at First Baptist Church with Sean Hannity last Sunday, you emphasized “how grateful I am for a courageous man like Sean Hannity, who is out in the public square pushing back against evil, taking every kind of attack you can imagine from people.”Why did you invite a political pundit to speak in your church, and how does that connect with your teachings about getting into heaven?Jeffress: This is something we do two or three times a year. We usually will invite a well-known Christian to come for an interview segment—somebody that our people will be familiar with. And I talk to them about their faith.Several weeks ago we had Ainsley Earhardt from Fox and Friends, who is a strong Christian. The day Ainsley spoke, and after my interview with Sean, when I gave the invitation for people to become Christians, dozens and dozens of people came forward professing their faith in Jesus Christ.We use this as a hook to encourage our people to invite guests to our church—guests who aren’t Christians, or guests who may be looking for a church home. I preach the sermon, and I’m always careful to present the plan of salvation and give opportunities to people to trust in Christ as their savior.Green: You remarked during your interview with Sean Hannity that you have Democrats in your congregation, who are just as welcome there as Republicans.Jeffress: Absolutely.Green: Do you ever worry, though, that preaching about politics may be alienating to those who don’t identify as political conservatives? For example, on Sunday, you preached about Supreme Court cases on school prayer, abortion, and gay marriage that went terribly wrong.Jeffress: I never preach partisan politics in our service. Any issue that I talk about, like I did Sunday, are biblical issues. The issue of abortion, the issue of the mention of God in the public square, the issue of the sanctity of the family: Those are biblical issues. Yes, they intersect with politics, because governmental policies either support a biblical stance or they denigrate a biblical stance. But these are not Republican or Democrat issues. These are biblical issues.“Look, we don’t elect presidents on the basis of whether or not they’re role models.”Green: Are you worried about young evangelical Christians who may disagree with what President Trump stands for and feel alienated from the church because of evangelical leaders’ wholehearted support for him?Jeffress: Well, I don’t worry about it, because it hasn’t affected our church at all. We opened this new campus four years ago—a $135 million new campus in downtown Dallas—and we thought the space would last us for a long time. But we’re already out of space, and the fastest-growing area of our church is our young-adult area. Our family center is out of room with children and pre-schoolers.I don’t talk about President Trump, and I certainly didn’t talk about candidate Trump, from our pulpit. During the whole campaign, I may have mentioned President Trump one or two times in passing. People who think I stand up and talk about Donald Trump every Sunday certainly don’t listen to my messages.Green: Do you believe that President Trump is a good role model for Christians?Jeffress: I think he’s a great role model for doing what he’s been called to do, and that is being president of the United States. He is doing a fantastic job in that way. I think he is showing strong leadership.Look, we don’t elect presidents on the basis of whether or not they’re role models. I’ve said before, to the president, I might not select him to be a children’s Sunday School teacher. But that’s not what we were electing President Trump to do. We were electing him to be commander in chief and the leader of our country. I think he’s doing a fantastic job at that.Green: As you know, a reporter asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a recent White House press briefing about why President Trump would support you, given your allegedly anti-Catholic views. Do you have a response to that, and do you believe, as you’ve said, that the contemporary Catholic Church reflects “the genius of Satan” in its teaching of Christianity?Jeffress: I’ve been very clear: I believe that nobody goes to heaven in a group. We go one by one based on our relationship to Jesus Christ. I believe there will be millions of Catholics in heaven who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ.I love my fellow Catholics who are brothers and sisters in Christ. I work alongside them in religious-liberty issues. I walk alongside them in pro-life rallies. I count them as great friends. In today’s world, not all Baptists believe all of Baptist theology, and I don’t think all Catholics believe all of Catholic theology. Faith is a very personal thing, and I just know there are going to be millions of Catholics in heaven because they’ve trusted Christ as their savior. I consider them friends.Green: Why do you think reporters and critics perceive that you have some sort of hateful bias?Jeffress: It was no surprise that this attack came immediately after I appeared on Lou Dobbs Friday night, defending the president against criticism by Congresswoman Wilson. An hour or two later, the president tweeted out a nice word about me and my book, A Place Called Heaven. Immediately, many in the left-wing media—and it was the left-wing, liberal media—attacked me as being anti-Catholic by pulling out quotes from years ago that were either manufactured or taken out of context.I think it was very clearly an attempt to discredit the president by discrediting his most vocal and visible evangelical spokesman.Green: Do you think the president has read your book about going to heaven?Jeffress: Well, I gave it to him about a month ago in the Oval Office. You’d need to ask him about that. Read the full article

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