SatanicNotMessianic

I have had a tendency since my earliest days on social media where I will get halfway or more through a response, and end up just cancelling it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being to over the top with snark or otherwise don’t want to be that kind of person, but a lot of the time I’ll decide I just really don’t care enough to finish it. Sometimes I just know it’ll be an argument and I know what the person is going to say, and just have no interest in continuing the discussion. I did it on Reddit, I did it on bulletin boards, I even did it in my teens and twenties on Usenet - and I’ll probably go on doing it for as long as I continue using this medium. I probably do it a bit more than half the time. I know that lemmy benefits from more content and I have had some great discussions, but sometimes it’s just not worth it for me.

How about you? Do you hit publish or cancel more often?

Under the shimmering starscape of this new universe of knowledge, she found herself having “no interest in the all-important subject” of “becom[ing] a Christian.” Soon, she would write in her ravishing love letters to Susan Gilbert: “Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me.” The school’s founder and first principal, who divided her pupils into three categories along the spectrum of salvation — the saved; those for whom there was hope; and the “no-hopers” — placed Emily in the third. At the end of her first term, on the day of the Sabbath, she was among seventeen students — “the impenitent,” as the principal called them — who couldn’t readily proclaim that “they would serve the Lord” but instead “felt an uncommon anxiety to decide.” The following day, Emily reported the docility she’d observed, writing to a friend at home with removed reproof: “There is a great deal of religious interest here and many are flocking to the ark of safety.” She was far more interested in the arc of knowledge as science was just beginning to bend its gaze past the horizon of old certitudes. What lay there would come to animate a great many of her spare, stunning poems — poems that illuminate the eternal, the elemental, the inevitable through the pinhole of the surprising.

September 30th is International Blasphemy Rights Day.

Blasphemy Day, also known as International Blasphemy Day or International Blasphemy Rights Day, educates individuals and groups about blasphemy laws and defends freedom of expression, especially the open criticism of religion which is criminalized in many countries. Blasphemy Day was introduced as a worldwide celebration by the Center for Inquiry in 2009.

Ideas for celebration:

1. Eat an apple
2. Eat a bacon cheeseburger
3. Draw a prophet. 3:-(>
4. Commit the unforgivable sin by saying “Fuck the Holy Spirit.” Or maybe “Everything attributed to the Holy Spirit was done by Satan.” Stretch goal: get chatgpt to commit unforgivable sins in infinite variety with scripted prompts

Feel free to contribute.

When Marx wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, his intended analogy was to opium as a medical treatment for pain - something that would not cure the underlying disease, but that could ease suffering. He saw religion as a pacifying substitute for economic and political change. He did not fully flesh out the political harms we see in religion today, but did see it as both a useful tool for leaders and as an understandable balm for the people.

In that same line of thinking, can we say that nationalism is the methamphetamine of the people? It does not turn its users into passive people willing to accept their fate in hopes of a better world, but rather amps them up and redirects the energy that could be used for demanding change.

Like meth, nationalism offers a temporary escape. Like meth, it makes people feel exhilarated, aroused, paranoid, confused, and disinhibited. Like meth, it is cheap and easy to distribute, and it can be highly addictive.

I’m trying to see how far this analogy runs. In the US today, nationalism and religion have become fused and intertwined to the point that some religious leaders are bemoaning their communities following Trump and conservatism and thinking Jesus was a wimp. I think it was Bobo who said that if Jesus had an AR he wouldn’t have been crucified, but it goes beyond that. There’s an increasing objection to meekness and humility and an embrace of wealth and power and a violent rejection of the Other.

I suspect similar dynamics are prevalent in other nationalist movements, such as what we are seeing in India today. I’m wondering if the expansion of Marx’s analogy gives us any insight into what is happening or what can be done about it.

With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.

I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.

I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?

When composing a reply to a post, the text box scrolls naturally with the text as it is being typed until I start a second paragraph. At that point, the text box scrolls back to the beginning of the reply. When I am physically typing, it momentarily scrolls back down but then immediately goes back to the beginning. It makes it impossible to read what I am typing.

I use a larger font, so this might be an accessibility issue, or it might be related to a couple of refresh-type issues I’ve seen in other areas of the app.

I have an iPhone 13 running iOS 17, but this was present in iOS 16 as well.

I read an essay by a christian a while ago that pointed out that the separation of church and state wasn’t about protecting the state from religion - it was about protecting religion from the state.

The gist of the argument was that religion should be concentrating on the eternal, and politics, by necessity, concentrates on the immediate. The author was concerned that welding religion and politics together would make religion itself political, meaning it would have to conform to the secular moment rather than looking to saving souls or whatever.

The mind meld of evangelical christianity and right wing politics happened in the mid to late 70s when the US was trying to racially integrate christian universities, which had been severely limiting or excluding black students. Since then, republicans and christians have been in bed together. The southern baptist convention, in fact, originally endorsed the Roe decision because it helped the cause of women. It was only after they decided to go all in on social conservatism that it became a sin.

Christians today are growing concerned about a falloff in attendance and membership. This article concentrates on how conservatism has become a call for people to publicly identify as evangelical while not actually being religious, because it’s an our team thing.

Evangelicals made an ironically Faustian bargain and are starting to realize it.

I deleted my reddit accounts completely by the first day of the APIpocalypse, and I removed all of the posts I had written under the principle that anything I had created was for the communities, which I saw as being destroyed by reddit’s moves. The content and moderation are the only source of value to social networks. I didn’t want what I had been doing for the past decade-plus to continue to be leveraged for monetization.

One person had replied that there are non-reddit affiliated archiving services that have been storing reddit content so deleting posts is ultimately useless. The site the person linked was what looked like a service catering to academic researchers, but O have since lost the link.

Does anyone know of such a site?