#puritanical evangelists

[commiepinkofag]

It just became more dangerous for a librarian to check out a book to a child in Idaho. On July 1, House Bill 710 went into effect in the state, undermining the agency of library workers to build collections that meet the needs of their communities. The legislation targets “harmful materials” in public and school libraries, requiring library workers to move them within 60 days at the request of any minor, parent or legal guardian — community member or not, library patron or not — or risk a $250 fine and threats of lawsuits. In Idaho, strict compliance with the definition of “harmful materials” would include any discussion of homosexuality. The term has also been weaponized against any depiction of human sexuality, including masturbation. The Idaho Family Policy Center has been a major organizing force behind the legislation. The center was founded in 2021 and is focused on “promoting God-honoring public policy.” While the right-wing proponents of the law argue that they’re trying to make libraries “safer” for children, librarians say the law addresses a problem that doesn’t exist while producing intolerable working conditions that have more than half of librarians looking to leave the state. …

[not-poignant]

@morbidlizard replied to your post “Can I ask, why do you love BL romance better than...”:

I mean it's unfortunate but asian BL is just hands down better than western for so many reasons <: / I've been reading asian BL for literal decades now (AHHH) and I can maybe count on one hand the western series I've enjoyed that had some sort of queer romance that had all I wanted or at least a part of the tropes I like...And even then, it's usually F/F relationships 9_9 (and when I say asian, I mean japanese, korean, chinese, some indonesian too! etc etc...)

​Actually yeah this is also really where it's at

I think a lot about how we're still getting extremely like... milquetoast wholesome queer narratives (most of the time) in western m/m romance media (I have nothing against Heartstopper, but it's extremely 'all queer people are pure wholesome need-to-be-protected jellybeans' and like, cool, but I want more than that as well - like give me 20 shows that are 'all queer people' in 20 different genres, thanks. BL will give me that - BL will pay people to give me that.

The only way I can get that from western media is fanfiction, and sometimes - kind of - from published m/m, when it's not paint-by-numbers rapid release that isn't about telling stories from the heart and it's about telling stories from the bank account instead (which is a valid reason to write, it's just not what I'm looking for as a reader - most readers who end up loving and writing fanfiction aren't looking for this imho)).

Thomas Baudinette is actually doing incredible work in this area of Media Studies, where it's literally a known thing that BL - particularly in countries like Korea, Thailand and Taiwan - is actually taking huge strides ahead in the genre, comparatively, especially when up against western BL.

It almost feels like we're on a giant lag, buffering behind them, and about the only place we aren't is in fanfiction, which makes sense, because the cross-pollination between fandom and south-east Asian BL is incredible (literally, they got omegaverse and guide-verse from western fanfiction and western fandom, and imho are doing a lot more with it for money than we are, see: Pit Babe).

I've been reading up pretty heavily into Baudinette's work, and also a lot of the recent and up-to-date work in BL Studies (a thing), and like, it's just kind of fascinating the different interrogations of BL we have going on in different cultures and subcultures, and how different senses of place and culture and ethnicity and minority and belonging can influence our tales, along with many different manifestations of capitalisation, economy, influence etc.

And that isn't to say there aren't huge problematic areas for BL in all countries, not just western, I can critique western BL so easily because I am western, and it's been really interesting reading critiques of BL from academics who live within other countries from their perspectives too. But I do think if I want really great BL romances, turning to fanfiction and then turning to other cultures and what they're doing is often the first thing I do. I just don't have to search as hard to find what I'm looking for. And like, I'm lazy, lol, I don't want to search through 100 published works to find like 1-5 stories I might reread but not over my favourite manhwa or like fanfiction or whatever.

This has been my area of like... personal study for a few months now (literally reading Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media and Masculinity in Tokyo by Baudinette atm) and I have a lot of thoughts of which this is just a very generalised ramble and not actually anything of great meaning but like sadkljfas TL;DR yeah

[transmonstera]

as gross as that terf freak is it is funny to me thinking of them seeing a bunch of transsexuals with very obvious trans usernames in their notifications like. well. what did you expect on the gay transsexual dot come website

[sashasparrow]

what the fuck, grace chastity

(a quick doodle bc i am. obsessed.) (a series of musicals on the larger moral failings of usamerican culture ends with the puritanical evangelist killing anyone who doesn't fit into her narrow band of acceptable behavior and she assumes others she perceives to be like herself will agree with her and she's not even christian anymore she worships something so much worse think about the implications-)

[zheightgeist]

Quitting AI, Not Why You'd Think

I had a long and successful career with ChatGPT, honestly. I know people are railing against it on principle, not fully understanding what it can do and what it's capable of. Absolutely, writers should feel threatened by it, not because it produces a quality product but because it likely ripped off their work in its construction.

But my experience with it was largely positive. I always got the warnings, blah-blah-blah can't produce explicit content, but I also got very good at leading it to produce its own explicit content. You'd think OpenAI would be interested in talking with me, to learn how I gamed its own system to get it to produce some really crass, graphic sexual content, but no. Places like that only want to build stronger and higher walls, not learn and grow.

And anyway, it just feeds into my basic resentment toward these organizations that practice zero tolerance toward lovemaking between consensual adults, yet have no stated restrictions against Nazis, hate speech, christofascism, and bigotry. If anything, like in the cases of Substack and Stripe, they find these offensive practices far too lucrative to ever cut off. People who bitch about porn are outsiders, listening to propaganda and misinformation about it, with no education and no idea how to consume it.

Example: Some attention-starved jackass pirates a clip from a porn film, where a man's fucking a woman doggy-style, from behind. That's all you can see, but the jackass uploads it on a shared site, describing it in terms that describe his personal fantasy: "Stepbro Woke Me by Fucking Me Hard" but with more typos. There's nothing in the video that suggests any kind of relationship: it's just a very toned, hairless man having sex with a male-gaze sexdoll, and that's it. But the detractors of porn will claim that some form of incest is taking place, and what's this going to do to the kids, etc.

Well, for one thing, if these puritanical hypocrites weren't so busy shutting down libraries and removing sexual health content from the schools, maybe kids wouldn't be forced to seek out porn to answer their basic and natural questions about biology.

My point is, the critics take this stuff at face value, when it serves their interests. In other cases, they interpret what's happening in the worst way, to suit their agenda. You're all too young to remember Attorney General Edwin Meese's Final Report on Pornography, but in this indictment on porn he likewise cherry-picked source material (he excluded lesbian porn, being too threatened by empowered women seeking their own bliss without men) and contrived the worst interpretations of what he did find. I mean, he's a conservative, so he's going to lie to fulfill his agenda, but still.

My position, as I study the participants of porn and the reviewers of porn and the philosophy of ethical porn, is increasingly that this is a fundamental and primal aspect of the human condition that should be protected, if anything. If people are concerned about abuse and human trafficking, fucking address that. Go after the pedophiles and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, with prejudice. But if a lonely or horny adult wants to see two beautiful adults fucking each other, gently or hard, there should be no law prohibiting this. Those actors should be protected like any other. They're selling their bodies at least as much as any coal miner or construction worker, and far more than any fucking landlord.

Suppressing this shit only makes it worse, measurably worse. Look at any religious institution that bans marriage out of wedlock or enforces celibacy in its leadership. Each week, the news is full of how badly this practice runs awry, in the ugliest ways. It's priests, pastors, and evangelists who are raping children and raping underage family members and covering up thousands of victims' cases, not porn stars. Yet religious groups still feel they have any position from which to spread lies and condemnation—it illustrates the depth of their hypocrisy.

Wow, I got way off track. I just see all these things connected, everything existing within a system. I write about couples finding creative ways to have sex, but I can't sell my work through PayPal or Stripe because they feel it's their role to enforce morality upon Western society. They claim that porn's a "high risk" category, when actually it was their prudish censorship that drove Tumblr's worth down 99.8%. For that matter, porn created the first secure online financial transaction programs out of necessity, the same goddamn structure that PayPal and Stripe now capitalize on. And Stripe terminated my account, but transferred $7,000 in ad revenue from Twitter to DC_Draino, an avowed white supremacist and misogynist who'd been banned from Twitter prior to the Faulknerian idiot man-child's purchase of it.

So. Stripe's fine with Nazis, but not with lovemaking. In their Prohibited and Restricted Businesses statement, they call out "Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts" but nowhere do they forbid anything resembling hate speech or bigotry.

When I pointed this out to them, when I asked their rationale for supporting Nazis, they literally replied "we do not permit adult content." They refused to address the question and then they stopped responding.

So yeah, protecting porn has become part of my platform for protecting freedom of expression. And no, enabling Nazi propaganda does not fall under this (or "freedom of speech" as the profoundly uninformed put it). Tolerance is a social agreement: if you don't agree to it, you're not covered by it, and fascism is all about gaining power to destroy freedom of expression. Anti-intellectuals suggest that fascism can be defeated in the "marketplace of ideas," but what is left to debate after a fucking century of fighting fascism? What fresh, new ideas do we need to hear from Nazis? That's all bullshit, and they know it is, they're just bad-faith actors wasting everyone's time and energy by making them explain it over and over.

Yet Substack will retain and support literal Nazis on their platform, under the aegis of preserving "freedom of speech," while censoring adult content. The CEO of Patreon will go on an alt-right talk show to extol defending "freedom of speech," then suspend an indie news org at the behest of the Proud Boys and terminate adult content accounts where he can find them. Stripe will facilitate the payment of Nazis, while censoring adult content. Hate is too profitable, and love has to be quashed where it's found. That's what our dual governments, the one in Washington DC and the one on Wall Street, are legislating.

So I'm done playing with ChatGPT. I'll build something useful from our collaboration, and I'll find a way to sell it (and pirates in other countries will seize it and distribute it for personal gain (fuck pirates)), but I'm not playing around with ChatGPT anymore. ChatGPT won't suffer for it, though hopefully someday some other smut writer will receive the benefit of my transgressive programming, and in a small way I'll have achieved immortality. Not that I want that, not in a world like this.

[randomuser678]

Do you dumbasses really think a hacker group would call themselves Anonymous Sudan. Do you really think they woukd write in the most casual English "We're attacking this fanfic site bc it has LGBT+ and NSFW things

Do you dumbasses really think that text is a legit translation. Do you think a group would just use the term LGBT+. Do you really think the phrasing "full of disgusting smuts and other LGBT+ and NSFW things" is the phrasing they would use.

How easy is it to make ppl's racism and islamophobia and xenophobia jump out? Apperently you just need to be some hacker from 4chan and say you're Sudan I guess.

It's so ironic how the most ardent ao3 users will say that anyone who doesn't like that site is a puritanical evangelist will spout the most racist xenophobic bullshit the moment someone tries to place the blame on anything foreigner.

[cardinalmoroni]

I saw a meme (which I'll slap under the cut) on Pinterest where it goes into how Papas I-III are all the antithesis of various aspects of Christian religion while Copia/Papa IV is fabulous~☆ and yeah yeah meme funny but also hhhhhhhhhh its such a surface level take I am withering away and writhing like a worm in the dirt-

I personally view Copia as a representation of how Churches seek to mold and shape people (but especially children), starting with him originally fronting as a Cardinal before ascending/being made into Papa IV. He gets plastic surgery to physically, literally shape him into his new role as Papa. We see him behaving in ways we might typically associate with children, such as his tricycle. If you believe in the theory of Copia being the antichrist, then you could even tie that into shaping someone into what they are supposed to be (in the eyes of church leadership and the idea of divine destiny). I'm way too tired and honestly unfamiliar with the lore of Ghost to make a proper argument for this but its just the vibe I get from the things I've seen so far and from past personal experience with a church that could be very heavy-handed in influencing its congregation.

Plaintext version:

Primo: represents the antithesis of the regal and elderly image of the Christian pope

Secondo: represents the antithesis puritan idea of worshipping God and Jesus only, in this case, Satan

Terzo: represents the antithesis of the church's criminalisation of sexuality by being overly sexualised while also acting as a foil to the idea of TV evangelists

Copia: BITCH I'M FABULOUS

TO BE CLEAR THE MEME MADE ME LAUGH BUT I ALSO ENDED UP LYING IN BED LIKE no he's so much more than that

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

These are all true of me. Ask me for context and I will oblige.

[soul-dwelling]

Also I wonder if there was a change in ff, not just in a surface story way but theme way, atleast partly, because I guess it could have been just a red hereing to insinuate that the evangelist is some eldritch alien dimmensional hopper with all the stuff with the bugs and other stars that dont really make sense with the "rhe enemy is humanity itself thing", but maybe the plot was about culutral imperialism but got chaged because of too much controverssy, thats why the invasion paralels?

As I’ll say in another post, this feels like it was Ohkubo wanting to satirize religion: “Oh, these religions have their weird creation myths full of paradoxes and stuff that makes no sense? Then my indictment against religion, Fire Force, will make its own creation myth that is so batshit crazy that it out-does the nonsense of religions overall!” 

It feels weirdly immature, just Ohkubo’s goal to dunk on believers. And I say this as an agnostic: I am critical of beliefs and organized religion--but I also can make my own opinions around them by looking at the evidence myself without criticizing the need people have to believe in something, or to not believe because you don’t need beliefs to compel yourself to be a decent person. 

That is what I think when you bring up the “theme way”: none of these creation myth details (the eldritch aliens, the dimensions, the bugs, the other stars) have to correlate with each other--it’s a creation myth, just make shit up. You’re Timon in The Lion King saying the sky is just full of fireflies, it makes sense to you, you get to move on. That is Ohkubo’s approach: this shit won’t make sense anyway, stop being a Yuu and be a Vulcan. 

It also is like X-Files, mixing together different content from various belief systems, conspiracy theories, ancient monsters, and some legitimate science: bugs are aliens, there are other dimensions, stars used to be planets, and so on. 

“The enemy is humanity itself”: I’ll bring this up in Ohkubo’s paradoxically puritanical stance on sex, but there is such misanthropy in this work. 

(I got to find the source again, but Ohkubo had said he was indeed a misanthrope. Maybe it was sarcasm in his end-of-volume notes?)

For all of how Shinra inspires people at the end, this is a pretty cynical story that thinks humans are awful. (If our world leads to the Fire Force world, the implication that stuff like the nuclear bombing of Japan and stuff like 9/11 led to this world seems gross--it’s taking real-life horrors to fuel his fiction, not in a way to comment about what led to those horrors but just shock value and edginess without meaning.) 

Even the “cultural imperialism” angle seems muddled. 

We have Benimaru and others resisting what is portrayed as a Euro-centric Christo-centric indoctrination of Japan. 

We end the manga with the pre-Soul Eater world. Now Akitaru and others are using Japanese naming conventions (family name first, personal name last), and by the time we get to Soul Eater the rest of the world seems to be in Lord Death’s image--and all speaking Japanese. 

There is something odd here, as if the story is placing Japan as having become the superpower of the world. It’s no longer America and the English language as the dominant force--thanks to the world being reborn starting in Japan thanks to Shinra, Japan is on top. 

This should be a re-staging of the opening to this manga: we started with this multicultural Japan but one in which a western religion and western conventions had pushed out Japanese cultural practices. We can show an actual multiculturalism that is not erasure but presence of all…and instead it weirdly feels like it is Japanese domination over everything else? 

That should be a meaningful satire to criticize westerners thinking they control everything--but it comes off to me anyway as just “the shoe is on the other foot now”: there isn’t observation for how Japan as the global leader would be good and bad, it is presented as just what it is, no reflection on the ramifications of this. It isn’t a taking down of the US or western nations or Christianity for awful things they have done; it’s just something that happens to explain why all the people in Death City speak Japanese--a question almost no one cared to ask because it’s a manga made in Japan, of course the characters in your story all speak Japanese, who cares.

[naval-gazing-and-coffee]

On Hours

I've been thinking today about how the requirement to work fixed hours affects my motivation to work.

Near where my brother lives, there is a sandwich shop - every day they make a set number of sandwiches. They open the shop early each morning and work until all the sandwiches are sold. This usually happens around 10:00 ish. At this point, they close the shop, clean up, and go home.

Why don't we all work like this? What is so sacred about time that we must sacrifice eight hours at its alter each working day?

For context, I work in design engineering, which is a job in three parts: 1. come up with ideas to solve problems; 2. prove that these ideas do, in fact, solve the problems; 3. communicate these ideas in the form of some kind of document (this sometimes called "knowledge work").

Often, this means that my work can really easily be broken down into nice stages - think of the thing; test the thing; draw the thing. This is really useful for dealing with executive dysfunction!

However, there is one major problem: the exact monetary value of any one piece of work that I do is super hard to pin down. This is especially true in the "think of the thing" and "test the thing" stages - the client is often paying for the drawing of the thing so it's a bit easier to say that the "draw the thing" stage is worth X amount of money. But then again, I can't draw the thing without thinking of it and testing it first, so it all gets very complex!

Aside: this is why tech-bros and Agile Evangelists are obsessed with inventing "Key Performance Indicators" (KPIs) and moving cards around on imaginary pin-boards - they really want to be able to measure these unmeasurable things and they do all kinds of gymnastics to get there.

As a result of not being able to assign a specific money-number to a unit of work (or even really being able to meaningfuly isolate what a unit of work actually is) we do the next best thing: we abstract.

The abstraction we use is time.

Because we can't measure the dollar-value of a thought; or of an idea that went nowhere; or of a single sheet of design documentation, we come at it from the other end: we say "one hour of my time as a designer is worth £X!" and promptly start measuring time instead of even attempting to measure anything of the difficult (and useful) metrics.

Aside: This is a really common technique in engineering - working from the problem towards the solution is often very difficult because the number of possible solutions is uncountably large or even infinite. So instead, we can decide on a solution first then work backwards towards the problem. This is often much easier (but also much more likely to induce tunnel-vision).

All of this leads us to the point where we invent things like contracts for design engineers that say "you will work 37.5hrs per week, from 09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday with half an hour for lunch." (This is also a hangover from earlier stages of the industrialisation of the economy when the vast majority of work was stuff that really strongly correlated time spent and money made, as well as general puritan and calvinist beleifs that are still entrenched and unquestioned, deep within the capitalist psyche).

Even the best working environments available in my industry only go half-way to fixing this by offering "flexi-time." (Which generally just means that you can go home half an hour early today in return for staying an hour late tomorrow)

The idea that maybe we don't need hours at all is frustratingly taboo.

To get back to the problem of motivation, let's look at two tasks:

The washing up

Completing a piece of design work for my job

Both of these tasks have a major thing in common: they are functionaly infinite - as long as I live, there will always be more washing up to do (at least in the close future), and as long as I work for my employer there will always be more design work to do.

However, they have one huge difference:

When I finish the washing up today, I will be rewarded with the satisfaction of a job well done, a tidy home, and I will get to stop washing up.

Conversely, when I finish my design work for my job, I will be rewarded with the satisfaction of a job well done, a tick on my to-do list, and I will have to do more design work.

The reward for finishing my work is always more work!

Imagine if every time you finished washing up, someone came along and deliberately dirtied a load of dishes for you, and kept doing so until you had washed up not a specific amount of dirty dishes, but for a specific amount of time.

The washing up would transform from a sometimes-annoying but often-peaceful task into a sisyphean nightmare; this is exactly what tying idea-based work to time does for me.

A better way is surely possible!

A hypothesis for a more motivational (and productive) way of working:

Each morning when you start work, you sit down (on your own or as a group) and decide on a reasonable amount of work to do today based on sensible things like how large your backlog is at the moment, different people's strengths or weaknesses etc. etc.

Because planning work is difficult - things often take wildly more or less time to do than you expect - you set an upper time limit on how long you want to stay at work. This is based on things like how fried you feel after your sixth hour of working on the same problem, or what time you need to be somewhere else. For the sake of argument, let's call it seven and a half hours with a half hour for lunch. Crucially though, this is an upper limit, not a target; if you are consistently hitting this limit then that is a sign that you are being too ambitious with your planning and should attempt less work per day.

Finally, and most importantly, when you have finished the work you have been assigned, you are finished! You can go home! That is the end of the day!

If you want to get all "rational actors" about this, then you can see that we have introduced an insane incentive for our hard-working employees: the more efficeintly they work, the more free time they will have! Think how much more effectively you might work with that kind of carrot!

This isn't a new or original thought in general, but boy is it far from the mainstream, especially in office-based "knowledge" work. See the parable of The Fisherman & The Industrialist:

The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe. “Why aren’t you fishing?” asked the industrialist. “Because I’ve caught enough fish for the day.” “Why don’t you catch some more?” “What would I do with them?” “Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats, then you could be rich like me.” “What would I do then?” “Then you could sit back and enjoy life.” “What do you think I’m doing now?”

In conclusion: why am I not a fisherman?

[not-poignant]

Looking forward to the new chapter of UtB! Also I learn a lot hearing your thoughts on fandom culture, and I was wondering why you think puritanism is getting stronger? Lately I’ve experienced it a lot both online and irl.

Hi anon,

I could write like a 10,000 word essay on why I think moral puritanism is getting stronger in the world, and how that intersects with increased moral panic, and 'anti' or fancop behaviour among fandom.

But I think there's more than one reason, and that at the centre of it, is the radicalisation of political extremes alongside the disdain for human life and education in the USA specifically. In non English-speaking cultures, antis are often considered a uniquely American phenomenon, for example. (They're not, but I do think some of the problems start there).

And from there it's necessary to look at:

The high presence of evangelist religion and their millions in USA politics in particular, and the influence this has on the news and government systems from the top down, affecting legislation, what we see on the media, what gets censored, who gets impacted (SESTA/FOSTA etc.) and so on. When companies like Paypal or similar say they won't support certain sites because they don't support sex workers or explicit artwork, we see extremist perspectives being normalised into the mainstream. Puritanism becomes baked into the system, and accepted as normal. And it has a domino effect, taking one thing away usually means to another thing being taken away, and by 'one thing' I usually mean like... equality, access to basic human rights, and more.

The presence of certain billionaire TERFs in UK politics actively working to destroy legislation over there gives a platform to hateful, bigoted extremists of all kinds, including Nazis (as seen in Australia recently, during a TERF event where Nazis turned up in open support). Also, I'd like to add that a lot of anti/fancop thinking is generally SWERF, anti-kink and eventually TERF in nature, and often homophobic and transphobic even when it's perpetuated by queer folk.

A long-term attack (we're talking over several decades now) on education (especially the humanities and any area that teaches critical thinking) including gutting the funding to libraries, colleges, high schools, primary schools and not increasing the pay of teachers, decreasing the general intelligence of US citizens in IQ tests across multiple metrics (except spatial reasoning). This, combined with the lack of emphasis on teaching nuance and critical thinking, means you get people primed to make didactic, black-or-white decisions and often are prone to radicalisation and black-or-white thinking. There's an increasing lack of ability to understand complex or even reasonably moderately complex thinking tasks. A great example of this was re: anti-vaxxers who said 'if masking works so well, why do you need vaccines' because there was a complete inability to understand that just because something works well, doesn't mean it works 100% of the time. There was a consistent inability too, to grok things like the swiss cheese model. That's not the only reason people are anti-vaxxers and there are some extremely smart people who are anti-vaxxers, but among broader populations, a lack of basic appreciation of nuance and risk mitigation in health was a huge issue. (And it's fairly easy to see this happening in many fandom discussions when we discuss how racism in fiction is generally not great, but that rape in fiction does not cause rape in reality.)

I know the above paragraph is long and unwieldy but it doesn't actually come close to capturing a lot of my thoughts on this so slafkjdsa it'll have to do though. The tl;dr is 'the government said philosophy and critical thinking isn't worth money, so a lot of people don't know how to do it, and anyone who can do it is often attacked or viewed with suspicion' (see also: The increasing suspicion and hostility towards experts in their field x.x). (Oh see also: A lot of people thinking YouTube videos count as 'valid research' for their viewpoints, and a lot of folks just...not ever learning how to research in general).

Something something social media privileging inflammatory and provocative takes as well as clickbait etc. encouraging people to often say things in the worst or least nuanced way possible.

The systemic attacks on democratic processes in the USA (and the UK and Australia and many other places).

The loudest and most obnoxious voices are often the people saying the stupidest shit. As in: It will feel like puritans are everywhere (and there's definitely more of them), but they're also just louder and getting more attention than they used to. It's misleading. Anti-vaxxers are actually a tiny minority for example, and antis are a minority in fandom, they're just...the loudest and the most willing to try and murder real people to defend the rights of fictional characters.

Er so. That's some of it anyway. There's more, absolutely, because I could talk about the presence of puritanism in a lot of levels of our experience/s, whether you're religious or not.

It's frustrating writing about this because I fall into the same trap of knowing that I can't talk about this in as nuanced a way as I want to, even if I get to do it in 1000 words instead of like, a miserable amount of characters on Twitter. Anyone thinking 'but it's not always like that!' or 'but not in every situation!' like trust me, I know. But if I sat here caveating everything that deserves a good caveat this post would blow out even more.

Basically if you try to stop educating your people as much, don't teach them how to research, debate or learn (yes, you have to learn how to learn), and don't give them access to basic needs, and gut your democracy/s, and the people at the top believe a fictional being cares if they're virgins or not or have abortions or not, and you don't care if people commit genocide against the children of your nation because that's not as important as the right to kill them in a moment of anger..., and you create a world where the children of your nation are primed to develop PTSD due to the fear of being gunned down while learning, you create a really great environment for radicalisation, extremism, the safety and comfort of puritanism (i.e. following very strict rules in the hope of fixing what's wrong with the world) while people look for a solution to why they feel so empty and hopeless in their lives.

[farmgirlwriter]

Evangelical church experience

There are a number of messages contained in this memoir as the author shares her experiences when she leaves the family farm against her parents’ wishes. Her journey into independence is full of entanglements with parents and siblings, co-workers and friends. Our services - Non-fiction, Farming, The farming life, Life on a Farm, Family, Minnesota, Pets, Country experience, Life events, Growing older, Church fellowship, Betrayal, Estrangement, Rejection, Faith crisis, Calvinism, Authoritarianism, Complementarianism, Covenants, Minnesota, Family life, Marriage, Human experience, The Will, Inheriting the farm, Evangelical church experience, Spiritual abuse.  Evangelical beliefs in the history has constantly acclimated into the world who were working. In fact it served by the people for social change. Awakenings of Puritan which passed in the seventeenth century emphasized particular experience of God while reading and writing development, literature, and wisdom trials. After the American Revolution, Evangelical Christian priests began to challenge the side of the senior in their interpretation of the Bible andencourage people to read the Bible and the Church for their own sake. Eventually, in the nineteenth century, Dwight. Moody, along with numerous other evangelists find innovative ways of doing, developed a view about the life of a religious

fundamentalist, which ate all people during a time when civic Protestantism isn't welcome by ordinary people. Among  all have told the Evangelical beliefs in the history has been the most important effect. Not only that strict control of Evangelical Christian in the twentieth century, but also percolated other religious tradition. Non-fiction, Farming, The farming life, Life on a Farm, Family, Minnesota, Pets, Country experience, Life events, Growing older, Church fellowship, Betrayal, Estrangement, Rejection, Faith crisis, Calvinism, Authoritarianism, Complementarianism, Covenants, Minnesota, Family life, Marriage, Human experience, The Will, Inheriting the farm, Evangelical church experience, Spiritual abuse. Visit here for More info- https://www.farmgirlwriter.com/

Evangelical beliefs are for the benefit of people.

How to be born again movement was created within the Southern Baptist Convention and numerous Wesleyans accepted fundamentalist interpretation of biblical inerrancy. After living with the nebulosity of 1920s and rise in the attractive movement in the 1960s, a small and important influence developed in American evangelicalism. In the alternate half of the twentieth century, Billy Graham, who has been the most prominent evangelical leader in ultramodern times has led a neo- fundamentalist movements. In this rise and fall tends to that interact for that change with no difference. This was the movement survived through adversity and acclimated to drink every man, but it seems that it'll remain exactly in the twentieth century as a new type of structure to take place. ultramodern interpretation of how to be born again is that it's always is in decline because of modernization. utmost people agree, fustiness leads to secularization and secularizationleads to religious incuriosity in certain circles. This belief is told by experience that history tutored us.

Christianity is substantially sermonized in churches. Christianity was formerly guidebook internal, spiritual, moral, and for life. Church used to play an important part in nearly all public issues. Secularization of the Christian faith has forced to contend with other worldviews important religiousand nonreligious. Analysis of the reanimationof U.S.bases is important to understand why this common belief is false and that, for times, religion has survived relatively well in a pluralistic terrain. Evangelical beliefs and strict uses in theU. Shave their way of relating to fustiness. ultramodern society has placed emphasis on making choices and individuality, and atthe same time, evangelicalism is a dominie particular religious experience and maintains strict independence, generally from thegovernment. However, evangelicals respond to further followers to register and produce institutions to If we contend on voluntarism.insure the development of a church in everyday life.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thank you! (For the public, our questioner is referring to my remarks about Middlemarch as epic in my latest newsletter.) 

I wish I had something original to say, but I love what everybody loves in it: the philosophical weight and breadth of the prose, the thoroughness with which the characters and their world is understood, and—what would be cloying in less formidably erudite a fiction but is here earned by the force of Eliot’s intellect—the narrator’s universal compassion. I must read it again—it’s been too long—and I do think there are creaky Victorian plot complications, products of the time, and, as some have complained of Eliot, too much sanity. Virginia Woolf might have been right to say that Eliot, had women been freer, would have been a better historian (essayist, philosopher) than novelist. And you couldn’t do this kind of thing after the 19th century except under the sign of irony—Thomas Mann might be the 20th-century equivalent.

But it’s possible to underrate Eliot, to condescend to her, to think, because she doesn’t dwell on the night-side that would have attracted the modernists, it means she didn’t see it. She saw it. She opens chapters with invented epigraphs, pastiches of Jacobean theater, like a Victorian Pynchon. I need to reread it, to reacquaint myself with all the forgotten details of the braided plot, but I always think of this amazing passage, Dorothea on her disastrous Roman honeymoon, unable to assemble perception into thought, with, in the background, what must have been the sexual or nonsexual fiasco of her first nights with Casaubon—

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

—after which meditation on decadence, on the disadvantage of history for life, what could Nietzsche tell our novelist?

[homesweetgoodneighbor]

I feel like there are a number of old television shows and movies that Should Not Be Missed by Gen Z, and, of course, everyone's ideal lists are different.

For me, in the "mostly comedy but sometimes will smack your feels with a brick" category, I gotta tell y'all, M.A.S.H. is a TV series y'all really need to watch. It was set in Korea with a whole lot of artistic licensing (like the length of the war, etc.) when it really was a whole lot of commentary about the Vietnam war just as much as a social commentary not only about war in general but racism, sexism, capitalism, and more that were struggles in the 70s.

A whole lot of it still applies today and that hurts me...I mean, we are in the Future. We should be better than that now, right? (Please note, it's not without it's problematic moments, but some of those were used to highlight real world issues, and some were...the 70s. Good things to discuss.)

There isn't a whole lot on queer struggles, which isn't surprising given the time. But, speaking of that:

Another is more a made-for-TV movie that was originally aired on HBO in 1993 called And, the Band Played On.

It is a docudrama based on the non-fiction book "And, the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic".

Here's the thing, my loves, AIDS is still with us; although, in this country, it's no longer the death sentence it once was, but in poor countries it still remains so. In this country, though, it was used as a political weapon to try to get rid of undesirables, particularly queers. Reagan and his cronies undermined and underfunded anything that could help research or people who had AIDS. When straight people started showing up with it, bisexuals were blamed to try to use any means to make sex continue to look evil and evangelistic puritanical views to be "saintly". There was an actual argument about whether it should be "allowed" to be seen as blood transmitted because then they couldn't pin it on just sex...and then when they had no choice, they pinned it on drug addicts and pretty much declared them not worth worrying about. But, what it came down to was, if you tested positive, you were gonna die; and if the virus didn't kill you, the people around you would. (I remember when two little girls in Florida showed up with it because their dentist was using unsanitized tools. Their house was burned down when people found out. Think I'm kidding? Look it up.)

It's a hard fucking thing to watch, and I watched it when it released and bawled my ass off because it was my fucking childhood laid before me. It's as hard for me to watch as it is to watch Schindler's List. Two completely different movies based on two completely different situations, but gods, if they don't each show what lengths humans with an agenda will go to commit acts of horror.

Except...I lived through AIDS...I am still living through the ramifications of the politics that allowed it to become a plague that people literally fought to ignore.

Kind of sounds familiar...doesn't it?

.

----------

Edit: I just realized, I've seen And, the Band Played On only twice. And, I also realized the reason I have only seen it twice is because it is so painful I start gagging from sobs. I lived that. I remember screaming at fellow students about what will and won't transmit AIDS because my mother was smart enough to keep up and tell her children about it. I remember friends losing family members. I remember kids getting it and having to be taken out of school for their own safety because not only would fellow students but fucking parents would have murdered them. I have seen a small portion of the AIDS quilt and knew I could never view the entire thing unless I was in a fucking helicopter or the godsdamn space shuttle. I wasn't even aware at the time that I was bisexual, and now when I did realize it hit me how lucky I was to survive, and how much I still suffer from the biphobia that was enacted during that time (Bisexual always meant not concerned with the gender of their partner. Don't listen to fucking TERFS.) All these feelings don't even cover half the shit I've seen or heard during that time...and all of them funnel into my soul while watching that film. I hope to fuck that none of you have to watch a film about COVID like this...but I fear...it will be in your future...

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Today in Christian History

Today is Thursday, May 19th, the 139th day of 2022. There are 226 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

336: During the night and early morning, earthquakes accompanied by ball lightening disrupt an attempt to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem that was to begin the next day. These forces destroy much of the material gathered for the work. The rebuilding had the backing of the pagan emperor Julian as one of his lines of opposition to Christianity; and the event will be recounted in numerous contemporary and near-contemporary sources—Pagan, Jewish, and Christian.

988: Death of Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury who had attempted to integrate the Danes fully into the English church and nation.

1382: An earthquake shakes London about 2 pm as a synod, led by Archbishop William Courtnay, meets to condemn John Wycliffe for his efforts to reform the church.

1536: Henry VIII has his wife Anne Boleyn beheaded on allegations of adultery and witchcraft. The presence of an extra finger on one hand and an extra nipple were used against her in the trial. Anne had been sympathetic to the Reformation. Her real crime was to miscarry two sons, leaving King Henry VIII without a male heir, but she was mother of Queen Elizabeth I.

1662: The Cavalier Parliament passes “An Act for the Uniformity of Public Prayers  and Administration of Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies; and for establishing the Form of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating, Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, in the Church of England.” The act requires reordination of many pastors, gives unconditional consent to the Book of Common Prayer, advocates the taking of the oath of canonical obedience, and renounces the Solemn League and Covenant. Great persecution will follow and about two thousand Puritan ministers will be ejected from their positions.

1694: Death of John Mason, rector of Water Stratford, Buckinghamshire, and one of the earliest Anglican writers of hymn lyrics. A learned man, he came to believe he was the Elijah appointed to proclaim Christ's second coming. He gathered a large following who with himself expected Christ to come to Water Stratford. He also predicted he would rise on the third day after his death.

1861: Ashbel Green Simonton, a Presbyterian missionary to Brazil, holds his first service in Rio de Janeiro.

1939: Death of Howard B. Grose, Baptist leader and author of the hymn, “Give of Your Best to the Master.”

1979: Businessman Carlos Annacondia gives his life to Christ in San Justo, Argentina, at an evangelistic meeting led by Manuel A. Ruiz of Panama. He will become an evangelist who preaches on five continents, and eventually will head the Message of Salvation Christian Mission Team, connected with the Assemblies of God.