2024-11-22 23:53:00
For a good part of my life, I tried to be religious and failed miserably. During my formative years, church was a social connection as well as a place for religious instruction. During elementary school, my Mom was married to a non-believer, so she didn't attend church, but my siblings and I went with a neighbor to a Southern Baptist church on the outskirts near the prison. My brother and I were active in the boys’ youth group, called RAs for Royal Adventurers. In the summer, we went to VBS (Vacation Bible School).
In high school, I lived with my aunt and uncle. They went to a Presbyterian Church, one of many in the area, reflecting the Scottish heritage in the part of North Carolina where we lived. One of my favorite parts of each week was the Sunday evening Youth Fellowship meetings. It was the one place where kids from the different high schools in the area hung out together. We had a church league softball team that was a lot of fun. Our yearly beach trip was something I looked forward to immensely. I got a lot of love there in spite of getting caught smoking weed by the youth minister. I wasn't a well-behaved kid, but I was still welcome.
As an adult, I have attended Baptist, Presbyterian, and Seventh-day Adventist churches. I've been baptized at least twice. I may have also been baptized as a baby since during the brief time my parents were married to each other, they attended the Methodist church, which practices infant baptism. All three of my children attended private, church-affiliated schools for part of their K-12 lives.
Both my sister and my father are ordained ministers in the United Methodist Church. It was a second career for both of them. In retirement, Dad no longer worships at a Methodist church because it has grown too liberal for him. My mother has done medical missionary work in Rwanda. She is a member of an Anglican church that is affiliated with the Rwandan version of that denomination. She was a member of an Episcopalian church for a long time, but when her congregation split after the ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly gay bishop, she went with her husband and the other conservatives to form a new congregation. My sister has many of the same political beliefs that I hold, and she is one of the few people I feel comfortable talking to when it comes to issues of faith.
Despite all that churching, I ended up a non-believer. I tried as hard as I knew how to find a connection with a supernatural God, but I never felt anything, not ever. As a recovering alcoholic from the 12-Step tradition, which relies heavily on the concept of a "higher power," I had to do considerable mental gymnastics to finally get sober. I finally resolved to use my AA group as a power greater than myself. Collectively, that is 100% true, and it was only after I stopped fighting against what I felt was an inappropriate religious influence that I was able to stop drinking for good, or at least for the last 16 years.
Aside from the lack of an emotional connection with religion, my other reasons for the position I hold are much the same as many other non-believers. I can't reconcile things like the Holocaust and childhood leukemia with a loving and caring God. The historical reality of how the Bible became canon is more than a little sus to me as well. I really like quite a few parts of it anyway, especially The Sermon on the Mount, which is as good an outlook on a righteous life as I have seen anywhere. I am also disgusted to the very core of who I am as a person with right-wing-influenced Christianity. People who talk Jesus out of one side of their mouth and cut nutrition programs for the poor out of the other side are contemptible, and I want as little to do with them as possible. When I think of the average white conservative Christian, I think of the ways they advocate for things like discrimination against LGBT people, their support for the death penalty, and their attempts to force their beliefs into the political fabric of a country that was founded on religious freedom. I like Christians like Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King, Jr. I do not like Christians like James Dobson and Tony Perkins. I think they are evil people.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
2024-11-22 03:25:00
When it comes to building habits to enjoy reading, I’ve experimented with quite a few ideas. Some worked while others didn’t. The four strategies that follow have proven themselves, making and keeping reading enjoyable.
Here’s hoping they work just as well for you.
Are you reading a book and still finding it just average after a hundred pages? Quit it. Put it away and move on. There are too many incredible books waiting to be read to waste time on ones you don’t enjoy. If there’s one thing that can destroy your joy of reading, it’s forcing yourself to read through books you don't like. Think back to the books you were forced to read in school. For most of us, those didn’t exactly ignited our love for reading, did they?
Choose three books from your reading list, one fiction and two non-fiction. Then continue to switch between them. Having three books on your active stack has some benefits. The fiction book is your "anytime" companion, which you can read anywhere and everywhere (but especially when winding down before bed).
Non-fiction, however, is best avoided at night as it demands quite some focus and can leave your mind racing when you just want to sleep. Reading two non-fiction books simultaneously lets you switch between them when one starts to bore you. Often, after putting that book down for a while and picking it up later, it feels fresh again. This flexibility keeps you in the flow of reading and at the same time adds variety.
I’ve had mixed feelings about writing book summaries or reviews. Structured review templates designed by others can make you feel productive at first, but they can get annoying very quickly. However, a brief reflection after finishing a book can be valuable.
Here’s what works: as soon as you finish the book, write freely from memory, without using a template. This results in a short story about the book’s main idea: the concept that stuck with you. I’ve done this recently for The Time Machine and The Midnight Library. Both reflections took less than ten minutes to write, yet they describe the essence of each book perfectly, at least for myself.
The easiest way to develop a reading habit is to always carry a book. Waiting for a train? Read. Ten minutes early for a coffee with a friend? Read. Looking to finally start your nighttime routine? Introduce time to read.
Make reaching for a book as easy as reaching for your phone. Once reading becomes that accessible, it is hard to ignore it. Better to have a book-addiction than a phone-addiction.
That’s it. Now go grab that book you’ve been meaning to read for ages and dive in!
2024-11-22 03:00:00
Instructions:
Right wing propaganda and their followers — Bluesky
ANTI NFT/AI/CRYPTO SHILL LIST — Bluesky
2024-11-22 02:59:00
Grades. IQ points. Income. BMI, height, weight. Calorie intake. Calorie expenditure. Step count. Temperature. Frequent heart rate monitoring. Mood tracking. Habit tracking. Streaks. Sleep score. Countdown to the IF eating window. Numbered step morning or evening routine. Followers. Likes.
Your life in numbers and rows. It’s all laid out like a spreadsheet, everything has to be accounted for. If only you can optimize further and buy the products to track and hit the optimal range, everything will be fine, right? Everything will change once you tackle this one thing.
Your boss is bullying you, you can’t afford rent and you have to take care of your parents, but it will all be better when you hit the 10k steps and read 4 books a month. The university stress is killing you, but getting that perfect sleep score will fix it. Your life is a mess, but at least your watch says you hit all your daily goals. And of not? It’s all your fault. You had all this info and the numbers so why aren’t you doing anything? It’s time to kick yourself when you are already down.
The numbers prove it: you. are. bad. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, how you were sick, burnt out, busy, allowing yourself to rest or explore other things. Your streak is gone. What you built your self confidence on is crumbling. Now according to totally legit people online, you will never get the six figure income and Bugatti. Who cares that you are a comforting presence in people’s lives, a reliable help, a good friend, regarded as well read and knowledgable - you didn’t even get up at 5am to immediately hit the gym every day, so it doesn’t matter.
What matters is obviously just you! Cut off the friends that already like you for who you are and break up with your partner because “you deserve better!”. She was a whore anyway for wanting to keep a job! Center yourself and put yourself in a rigid routine that leaves no room for other people, this is how you glow up and reach the best version of yourself. Maximize your potential in the empty vacuum of your lonely life, then no one will call you while you meditate and journal.
Please go up the stairs nervously checking your heart rate and googling if that’s a normal value. Please worry about closing all your rings every day and feel like a lazy pig otherwise. Please keep up your Duolingo streak while talking to no real person in that language.
Welcome to your ‘winter arc’!
If you are confused, this is sarcasm criticizing a flavor of self help and improvement online that is obsessed with metrics, numbers and streaks and seeking systemic relief on a deeply personal level.
Published {{ post_published_date }}
2024-11-21 00:10:00
I finally started reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I've tried to start this book many times before, but I always stopped in the first chapter or so because I felt that the author was being unnecessarily airy and, more importantly, he directly claimed that he ended up in this semi enlightened state but doesn't rightly know how he got there. This point was the point where I always stopped, but this time I decided to power through it, and in doing so I discovered I've been missing an important part: after not knowing what had happened, and just living in a state of present bliss, Eckhart discovered that what had happened to him is what many religions aim as their ultimate goal, so he went on to discover more about that and how a normal person might get to his state, but told from his point of view.
Now, there's definitely wisdom in his writing. It's clear and well presented, and offers argumentative clarifications every once in a while that I find really useful. However, I have some reservations. First — though it can easily be brushed aside as an issue of semantics — master Eckhart says he's enlightened in the buddhist sense. Again, this is not really that important. My main reservation is my natural cynicism wondering is this true? or is it just an elaborate money grab?
From what I've read online people seem to think highly of Eckhart, but you know me. For now I've decided to suspend my disbelief and just listen to the audiobook as if it were all real. A large part of me wants to believe it is. What makes me feel better is that his message is really simple: in the now there are no problems. And this is quite easy not only to understand intuitively, but also easy to see for myself that what he says is true. It might be that he's not really enlightened and he's just paraphrasing buddhist doctrine, but if it continues to be like this (self verifiable) then there's no harm in it.
Anyway... positive thoughts, positive thoughts.
For the past days, whenever I put my oldest son to sleep, I meditate (or at least attempt to meditate) while I wait for him to pass out. Since I started reading The Power of Now I started adding something new to my meditation which I think is actually something that should perhaps always have been there, but whether due to bad instruction or complacency on my part, it has never found its way into the forefront of my mind. I'm talking about the watcher. Usually my meditation is pretty much loop { breath until distract } , but now I'm making a change where breath is my center, my heart, and at the same time there's an effort to watch for thoughts as they come into my mind, and that reminds me not to engage with them. If ever I do get carried away by a thought then I go back to my center, my breath. But these two things are always there, watching and focusing on the breath. I think it's working fine for now, though I've hardly tried this out while sitting on a cushion in proper meditation, something which I've been wanting to do for a while, but not wanting to dedicate time to it (oh the woes of my life).
Another interesting idea master Eckhart talks about is how when we're identified with our thoughts we're also controlled by them. This is so true for me, and something I've been observing more and more since I first read it. I, and I think everyone, gets taken away by one or two things that interest us at a given time. My mind is fixated on these and can hardly think of anything else, and even less can I contemplate the idea of not doing them, even if I know they're harmful in some way or another. Recently for me this has been playing games on my phone, lately Marvel SNAP and FarmRPG (which aren't as bad to be honest), and I know that I could "not play them" and feel better overall with not having them in the back of my mind all day, and yet, I can't just leave them, can I? I am, as Eckhart says, identified with these thoughts, but once I know and see this I also see that I am not them and their strength over me is lessened.
"Your mind is a tool; use it, don't let it use you" is a (paraphrased) quote from him that comes to mind right now. I think I, and everyone, tend to just go along with what our minds say. It's not only games or other things we're compulsive about (addicted), it's everything. From whether we should drink that thing, or watch that video, everything. The only thing that's no-mind is dropping everything and being in the present: meditation. Everything else is us just being led on a leash by our mind. Arguably even the desire and act of meditating is something that we're led to by our thoughts, but one hopes that in this gordian knot we'll find the same sword that cuts through it.
That's perhaps the reason why I'm so reticent to meditate, because my mind just wants to play, do what it's used to, instead of stopping for a while. Again, here is an example of my thoughts controlling me rather than the other way around.
It's a messy business, knowing who's what and what controls which. Not one we need to get into. Suffice it to say that, in most things, we're just bulls being led by rings in our noses.