#atheist plays devil's advocate

[arefriendsdetectives2]

My God has never exiled me; It’s I abandoned Him. Mistaking mutinous for free, I took to courses grim And foolishly I left the only Love that cures all things lonely.

inspired by a post by @firstfullmoon

#poem #poetry #original poem #quick verse #religion #atheist plays devil's advocate

[valerieismss]

God I hate atheists who major in phirel like SHUT UPPPPPPPPP I HATE YOU!!!!!!!!!!

#this is about someone in my philosophy of religion class genuinely like #girl you are dumb. #everything she says is obnoxious and inane #like why are you here girl. actually. #none of your contributions to these discussions are good. #she wildly misinterprets the things I say… #girl I did not call agnostics cowards let’s be fucking serious #I know she hates me too #good! #I’m not even a theist guys like #sometimes atheists are fucking annoying keep that shit to yourself oh my goddd #ughhhhh like #ugh. atheists are fine. it’s just the ones in my phirel classes that love to play devils advocate #I’m a reasonable and sound person who just can’t conceive atheism as a living hypothesis is that really so bad. #god. #the tension in this fucking room..class has not started it’s just me and like four other people #goddddd #guys I hate her #all of her inputs are like #well what if I don’t care about the god question. #girl SHUT UP!!!!!! #SHUT UPPPP THE ARGUMENT IS OBVIOUSLY NOT FOR YOU!!!! #WE ALL KNOW THAT BE SO SERIOUSSSS #valerieisms

[gsirvitor]

Any clue who this joker is and why they're so bitter at you?

If it's the guy I'm thinking of, he blamed the Catholic Church for what the Nazis did, I defended the Church, he got mad, then I think the staff nuked him.

I don't often play devil's advocate, as anyone who follows me can attest, I merely voice my opinions on subjects, some may agree with me and others may not, though I find it amusing he sees me as being notorious.

It always amazes me that these people don't understand people are complex, and not two dimensional caricatures, I can take a stance on one subject that would be oppositional to another, such as my stance on abortion, the child has a right to life, while I do believe in the death penalty.

Now these aren't contradictions to the sane, because the criminal forfeits their right to life, while the child is innocent, regardless of how they were conceived.

Anyone who follows me will know, I don't hate Christians, or even Christianity, being an Atheist doesn't make me an Anti Theist, but I do greatly enjoy the fact he outs himself as actually hating the Catholic Church while claiming I am the Christian hating party.

Abimelech, I know you'll see this, so do be a doll and make a thread, it'll be quite entertaining to read your explanations as to why I, as others have put it, am a walking talking paradox.

[night-dark-woods]

just finished blindsight by peter watts. reviewing this one is... complicated. bc the book is good *if* you can read it critically i think (& if you enjoy highly technical first contact stories) but i would keep 14yo white boys away from this book at all fucking costs. i think honestly the summary on the back should give u an idea about how the author looks at the world:

"Two months since the stars fell...

Two months of silence, while a world held its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist―an informational topologist with half his mind gone―as an interface between here and there.

Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find."

concept: 5/5 first contact with truly alien life & convincing hard scifi worldbuilding. there are VAMPIRES brought back from going extinct in pre-history, which are a human subspecies who hibernate for long periods of time so as not to drive their prey extinct, whose patternmatching abilities ("omnisavantism") are so intense that they have seizures when presented with collections of angles not found in nature (e.g. crosses) & must take "anti-Euclidians" to prevent this from happening. just an absolutely incredible original and fully thought out delight of speculative biology. all the other technology and biology is treated with just as much thought and detail, if with overwhelming distaste for humankind.

context: -5/5 uh. bad. this man has bad reactionary opinions about nearly everything and is absolutely an asshole reddit atheist who plays devils advocate about anything and everything in that very special way that highly educated absolutely misanthropic men devoid of compassion or care do. at least this book has the novelty of Every character being treated with absolute disdain, not just the women (though the main char's ex is uh. not treated well narratively).

prime example is the point inside the book where one neural personality core of the linguist derides the concept of DID; in the end notes, Watts says, "Sascha's ironic denigration of TwenCen psychiatry hails from a pair of papers that strip the mystique from cases of so-called multiple personality disorder." the papers in question are two "literature reviews" published in the canadian journal of psychiatry by two psychiatrists who are on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a non-profit (extant 1992-2019) which "described its purpose as the examination of the concept of false memory syndrome and recovered memory therapy and advocacy on behalf of individuals believed to be falsely accused of child sexual abuse with a focus on preventing future incidents, helping individuals and reconciling families affected by FMS, publicizing information about FMS, sponsoring research on it and discovering methods to distinguish true and false memories of abuse" (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Memory_Syndrome_Foundation).

here is a link to one of the papers mentioned & then two short rebuttals to it in the next issue of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry- i didn't feel the need to look up more (the fact that the authors are board members of that NGO gave me enough info lol) but there are more replies and rebuttals available in the sidebar, all free access, at the links below.

part 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/070674370404900904

part 2: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/070674370404901005

rebuttals: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/070674370505001217

there's other wildly ableist stuff as well, though oddly in a different way than usual because Watts sees all of humankind as terrible, and so it is not the characters disabilities that make them pitiable/deridable, but their humanity. the message is less "if your body or mind is different you aren't human" and more "regardless of how you mutilate (authors tone, not mine) your body or mind for the sake of transcending humanity you’re still a sack of shit human and deserve to die from an evolutionary perspective because all humans do."

execution: 4/5 great writing if he wasn't the aforementioned kind of dude who overuses the word rape to describe things that aren't and also just seems to hate humanity so so so much.

enjoyment: 3/5 the parts that weren't ideologically morally bankrupt were very good, and i enjoyed the worldbuilding.

the conclusion of the novel is also that human sentience is a waste of resources, and consciousness is an evolutionary mistake. the novel title, Blindsight, refers to "the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex" (wikipedia). this conclusion is all based on the logical fallacy that is the appeal-to-nature ("natural" things are inherently morally superior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature), and Watts seems to spend the whole novel arguing that it is natural and thus morally Better to be intelligent but not sentient, that biological automata without self-awareness are the be-all end-all of evolution more broadly. just. misanthropic evo-bio borderline fascism. uninteresting, unoriginal, and ultimately tedious.

#bookposting #my posts #blindsight #logged into tumblr on the fuckin work computer to post this bc it is too long for my phone clipboard and i drafted it in an email. so uh.

[olderthannetfic]

https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/691096418661859328/all-christians-are-bastards-is-the-new-acab-but

Going to play devil's advocate here, but as someone who watches telltale and dear Mr. Atheist, at the very least evangelical Christians are some kind of problem in the USA (which I know isn't the world, but just looking at what happens here is enough for me to not want to look and be depressed about the rest of ya'll I'm sorry). I know there's good Christians out there, and I know that there's extremists in every religion, but Christians in the USA, especially the assholes, tend to be the loudest, and are the ones advocating for things like having a raped 10 year old cary her rapist baby to term, and for trans ppl to not get health care. Maybe I've just made my own little echo chamber about it all, but idk, I'm just some American

--

As an American, I certainly relate, but... like... did you see who was objecting? It's Christians from places that have the same problems but the powerful group that's intertwined with government is Muslim.

State religion is rife with abuse. Majority religions that are trying to infiltrate government are rife with abuse. There have been Buddhist states, and they've been just as douchebaggy as any other powerful religion despite my personal interaction with Buddhism mostly being encountering meditation retreats in California.

Like... I have zero negative associations with Zoroastrianism because there aren't enough of them in charge of anything I'd care about or even encounter. It's a lot easier to like a religion far from oneself that affects one not at all.

Shinto was at one time a disparate collection of folk practices and pretty chill. Then it got used for icky political purposes and was decidedly unchill. You can have a religion that's nominally about nature worship or something else that sounds good, and it's still going to suck if it's the nominal excuse for violent military expansionism. I'm a white weeb. I see "shinto" and think Miyazaki nature spirits. I can assure you the "Good riddance to Abe" crowd has a very different association that involves a lot more worshiping of war criminals.

Poor widdle Christians sounds absurd in a context of Western Europeans rampaging across the new world and killing everybody with smallpox or the modern US with our current political turmoil—decidedly less so in places where Christians make up a politically disenfranchised minority and are the target of genocide.

The pattern, historically, globally, is extremely consistent: The people with the army are the douchebags. It's not a Christian pattern or even really a religious pattern. It's about power.

The fact that we're speaking English means we'll get plenty of perspectives from the US and from other English-speaking countries with significant Christian influence. If we were having this conversation in Arabic or Mandarin, it would look different.

Nobody who stays unblocked on my blog actually likes anti-abortion US fundie bullshit. That's not what the disagreement is about.

I really don't think this is even devil's advocate, anon. I think this is willful cluelessness about a post where Indonesians and others have outright told you the world is not all the same.

"Please have a wider perspective than just the US" is the entire point of the discussion.

[golbrocklovely]

I always found it funny that Colby who’s supposedly more “religious” and the one who used to carry a bible in school is waaay more open minded and accepting (politically and socially) than sam who considered himself almost an atheist at one point like I’m still haunted by that fox news story he posted in 2020 lool , it proves that stereotypes are just bullsh** :/

that's true. but i think that proves that upbringing and also just growing as a person can change you.

there are a lot of christians that go to church but don't agree with everything their pastor says. his parents could have also been a bit more open-minded than we assume them to be.

i think it's also interesting to note that with sam, he literally didn't believe in god bc he asked the grownups around him and they made him believe that religion and being religious was bs. and i think bc he was told that, he still to this day doesn't believe a lot. it's funny how that mindset still bleeds into what he does now.

i don't think you have to be religious to be spiritual, but it does help if you already have some faith.

that being said, i have a feeling that sam isn't super conservative but rather more so someone that plays devil's advocate, or someone that likes to hear what the other side has to say and "try to hear them out". i don't think he's full on left-leaning either.

sam reminds me of my brother in a lot of ways. my brother will listen to conservative stuff a lot, but he also listens to far-left stuff too. he likes to hear what everyone has to say, which is fine. he also likes to debate and point out dumb things in ppl's arguments. it's funny how often he fights with my mother, who is more conservative leaning.

that's what happens when you live with a philosophy major. it's like constant debates in my house, which is why i usual just keep to myself when it comes to political stuff, even tho my family knows how i feel lol

#ask #personal #sam golbach

[lookwhatilost]

i’ve been trying to ply myself with as much stimulus as possible tonight, which hasn’t been great for my productivity, but i can’t see myself sleeping tonight, so i make it work.

so while i’m trying to avoid letting my brain burn, let me talk about a tweet i wasn’t fond of. to paraphrase what it said, the OP wasn’t fond of people playing devil’s advocate for the ~~gender critical~~ crowd by pointing out that they have trauma, people it ignores the trauma that they inflict through their behavior.

my main objection to this is that it’s responding to a premise that i don’t think is applicable any longer as of 2023. you have your flagship example of jkr, who’s weaponizing her baggage, but i don’t really get the sense that she’s a representative sample. in my time poking around on the darker corners on the internet, it seems to be an ideology that takes all kinds, ranging from people with philosophically bankrupt utopian ideals of gender abolition to people who don’t even have a premise outside of vitriol for the sake of it.

(side note: if we were to throw out my point and say, sure, it is all because of open wounds, this is also an extreme example of why “my trauma” is an unworkable justifying mechanism for anything. intense emotion isn’t a reliably perfect and proportional response to pain, it manifests in nonsensical areas sometimes, and the same can be said of what lingers and what doesn’t. even if you could transpose consciousness, it isn’t an argument. none of us are valid! none of us are free of sin!)

but my other one is that it seems incredibly uncommon for anyone to really dig into how this ecosystem works, that there’s an entirely separate news media ecosystem that directly feeds into this.

i’m digging out an ancient example from the annals of my memory, but around 10 years back, there was some really stupid incident that came out of a college in florida related some professor allegedly writing the word “jesus” on a piece of paper and telling the students to step on it. if you haven’t heard about it, congratulations on being young and/or not lurking in the atheist ratsphere when some meta-discussion was happening about this. predictably, it was more complicated than that, but whatever.

this didn’t get a lot of mainstream press coverage because it’s not a story, but there were christian-specific news outlets who circulated this – and reliably did the same with similar stories like that. jury’s still out on whether the stop on jesus thing inspired a whole series of christian propaganda films, or if it was that old chain email that follows this story nearly too a tee. but what i’m getting at with this tangent is that the kind of people getting a lot of news from sources like this are going to walk away of the opinion that christians are an oppressed minority in the united states, even though it’s completely ridiculous to suggest that as the case.

reduxx and 4thwavenow basically function in the same way, serving up a new pile of “stomp jesus” style shit each day, directly to your laptop. people talk about social media radicalization constantly, which of course can play a role, but this backchannel has an established history of turning people insane in the past, and it’s doing it again. sleek front-end web design and sorta kinda maybe true stories in intense concentration is the skeletal system of this whole shit.

[wordsbylianne]

[Creative Writing] God's Not Dead (But Maybe I Am)

This was written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my ENG101 (English Prose Styles) course.

I’ve never truly believed in God. Or any god, for that matter. My experience as a Roman Catholic probably began and ended with my birth certificate. Sure, I was baptized. I took catechism lessons. I ate the bland, wafery body of Christ and drank His blood as part of a ritualistic rite of passage in the holy journey of Catholicism.

But did I want any of that? Not really. You see, the problem with teaching the concept of God to a child is that you’re teaching the concept of God to a child. Kids get baptized before they’ve even grasped the concept of object permanence, for Heaven’s sake (pun very much intended). How are these children, who have very little to no knowledge on the physical world, supposed to understand the idea that there’s an Almighty, Intangible Force that Watches Over Us and Will Condemn Us To A Fiery, Sulphuric Hell If We Don’t Do His Holy Bidding?

Needless to say, we don’t really get along, organized religion and I. As a child it was just something to endure, but as I grew older it gradually became something to antagonize. The turning point was when my older brother pronounced his atheism at the ripe age of fifteen. You know how little siblings do everything their older siblings do out of admiration, and everyone finds it adorable and endearing? Same thing, only what happened was: my brother renounced the existence of God in front of our school priest, the school called my parents, there was a fight, big words (along the lines of enlightenment and separation of church and state) were thrown around over dinner, my brother ran away from home—long story short, now I’m an atheist, too (although nobody found it adorable or endearing). 

Now we don’t have time to unpack all of that. My atheist origin story may have been spurred on by my brother’s folly, but like I said, I’ve always known that I never truly believed. My prayers never held any conviction. I slept through most of the obligated first Friday masses at school. I was only nine years old when the Catholic church asked me to denounce Satan and all his evil ways, and even then I knew I was speaking empty words.

This apathy turned into spite in high school. The ironic thing about going to a Catholic school was that almost no one was religious. Real, practicing Catholics were rare beings that heathens like me and my friends mocked for no reason other than teenage hubris. I revelled in playing the Devil’s advocate in debates on ethics and morality under the Catholic doctrine, mainly because I hated my professor with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. Close-minded, bigoted, holier-than-thou—he was a walking Bingo card of all the worst traits a human being could possibly have. It was mainly because of him that my apathy turned into spite. All his little classroom debates became a playground for anti-Church propaganda, fueled on by me and my friends. Maybe in another life I would’ve respected religion more if I had a professor that, you know, respected people. 

But the summer after high school, something changed. Maybe it was divine intervention. Maybe it was just the existential crisis that comes when it’s summer and you’re lonely so you start realizing truths about yourself that were previously uncharted territories. Maybe it was just because I was drinking too much coffee. Whatever it was, it led me down an intense, religious rabbithole of questioning, a series of events I like to call The Great Spiritual Crisis of 2016.

So for some reason I went over to a friend’s house to watch a religious movie, you know, as one does. Now I know that this movie is important in terms of being the catalyst for the events to follow, but I cannot, for the life of me, remember what it’s about. This is all I recall: at one point the main character, a professor who doesn’t believe in God, gets into a heated debate with one of his students. When the student asks “Why do you hate God?”, the professor, in a moment of rage, responds something along the lines of “Because He was never there for me!” To which the student replied, “How can you hate something if it doesn’t exist?”

The student drops the metaphorical microphone and leaves his professor in stunned silence as he questions his faith—up until he dies in the end, right after he finally starts to accept the fact that he believes in God. Not a very charming ending for any atheists who might be watching, but it must have impacted my subconscious somehow—how else can I explain the deep existential ache that plagued me afterwards? As I trudged home I considered, for the first time in a very long time, that maybe there was a God.

At this point it was clear to me that I didn’t believe in God, but there was a part of me that was starting to wish I did. There is something so comforting in believing in something we can’t fully perceive. I started to envy their conviction that there is Something with a capital S after death, which meant that there was more to life than just this. It is so, so terrifying to think we’re all alone in this universe, and that our deaths signify nothing but the end. Because if that was the case, then what do we live for?

Imagine me, in all my seventeen-year old greasiness, thinking about the meaning of life and the existence of a God at ten o’clock in the evening. I can laugh about it now, but I still remember the urgency I felt that night, like I was running out of something I can’t quite place. In a moment of desperation I started messaging all my friends who believed in God, pleading them to tell me anything that can make me believe.

 It all just kept piling up. Stories after stories about God’s love, basking in His warmth, living with the belief that He will be there for us no matter what. Suddenly the weight of everything was crashing down on me all at once: the intensity that comes with talking about religion, the lingering thoughts of death and the Afterlife, the sorrow, the fear, the confusion, and underneath it all, the feeling that something big was happening at that moment, like maybe I was meant for something more, like maybe this was a Calling—

And then I started crying. It wasn’t just tears streaming down my face—I was fully weeping. Like a child lost in a shopping mall, frightened and overwhelmed by the sudden vastness and unfamiliarity of my surroundings. I don’t remember how long I spent crying in the darkness of my room with nothing but a computer screen to illuminate the picture of despair I must have looked like. I remember this: for the next few days I felt weird about the whole fiasco, like crying over whether or not God existed was a dirty secret I couldn’t bear to share with anyone. I mean, what  kind of seventeen-year old cries over God?

That was three years ago, and to this day I still dance the fine line between believing and not believing. I don’t know if I’m an atheist, or agnostic, or making too big a deal out of all of this. On some days, my conviction that we are completely and utterly alone is set in stone. But sometimes, on days when I have time to sit and think and breathe, I wonder where our souls come from. How, then, do we have the ability to think, to love, and to question the existence of a God, if not for some divine, unfathomable Being? How do we explain the distinction between being alive and living? Why do we even feel in the first place?

On most days I don’t think about religion at all. I have papers to do, and exams to study for, and even though God is omniscient He doesn’t seem like the kind of divine entity that can help me write a thousand-word argumentative essay on whether I’m for or against the death penalty.

If God were real, He’d probably be for it. It would be hypocritical of Him otherwise. 

#Creative

[pugzman3]

How do you deal with the emotional impact of this stuff? I feel so hopeless.

Short answer is, God.

But to understand that, I will elaborate. It took a while to see that every rabbit hole led to God vs the Devil. How I came to that was I would play devils advocate on an issue and kept asking "Why?" Human Trafficking, drugged out society, missing kids, child sacrifice, rampant pedophilia, the targeting of kids, indoctrination, war, the poisoning of our food /clothes /water /air /bodies, the lies, the mind games, the division, destruction of society, what I read, the videos and audio I refused to post, everything....I would come to an answer (money, power, leverage, nwo, etc) and then again asked "why?" Eventually I saw the truth. It was undeniable and it broke me the f@%k down. So I understand, that hopelessness, I felt it too. That was about a year ago.

BUT!!!! I still didn't fully accept God. And I said all that, to say this.. That took a while. Why? (Again I questioned and answered myself). Ego and pride got in my way. (And make no mistake, my religious and belief in God has by no means been a straight road. From catholic, to atheist, to agnostic, to other crap, to "sorta a believer", to Believer). But once I realized it was ego and pride in the way, and that I needed help greater than myself, I denied myself, rather than God, and here I am. It doesn't mean it is all a cake walk now, it means that it is easier to do what I can do today, and let the Father take care of what I can't.

I hope this helped. Feel free to DM me if you want. Take care friend.

[lovenona]

hey do you have any ideas on what toji’s role would be in an artist!jjk universe or in the renaissance au?

god babe u really did that. thank u so much. finally i have been given permission to yeet off about my [sometimes toxic] boyfriend fushiguro toji <3

first – artist!jjk universe. so, i think of toji as a professor. yes, i know, feral toji gets to control the classroom. he’s like...that young hot professor that gets folks all hot and bothered because he 1. is literally one of the most dangerously attractive people alive 2. has a way of speaking that just makes u lose it. deep, gravelly voice laced with amusement and danger giving u that lecture? yeah, sign me up!!

as for what he teaches, if we’re sticking with the ‘art’ theme, i see him primarily teaching the shit that i hate – cubism, futurism, brutalism, etc. in other words, that era of the early 20th century where we move into the abstract, the bold-and-brash-and-belongs-in-the-trash type beat. i think he’d really enjoy the stark violence and just like...raw power of a lot of work that comes out of that period.

if not art, comparative literature – he’s got the intensity of a man who would fuck u up in that class. the kind of literature class where he will murder u in front of everyone if u say something dumb about the book. the discussions are always so tense and competitive because everyone wants to try and impress him, but, unfortunately for all of us, toji is simply never impressed with what we have to say and usually will just play devil’s advocate. (he’s terrifyingly whip smart and loves discussing the nature of life. please let me take your class im begging.) also he loves assigning u a fuckton of reading just to make u suffer!!

finally, phd candidate gojo satoru is often assigned to be toji’s ta. both of them hate it because it is absolutely impossible for them to get along. toji makes gojo’s life a living hell and gojo is typically equally as annoying in response. rest in peace to the entire humanities department lol

now, if u want a **TW TOXIC** addition to this – toji is absolutely the sexy kinda professor u would consider fucking to boost ur grade. if i’m going to be totally honest u would consider fucking this man regardless of whether you’re passing his class or not because he looks like he’s 30 and flirty and ready to go. toji’s office hours are always the most sexually charged 45-60 minutes of your life. all the low-key thirsty students (including u) literally make shit up to go talk to this man. yes he’s giving u bedroom eyes while there’s a literal photo of his infant son on the desk. (professor fushiguro toji is a sexy fucking dilf. toji please call me back im begging.) basically he’s a man with some power and he’s hot and u know what. yes im wearing my sexy clothes to go ask about my midterm

second – renaissance toji is absolutely, 100%, the guy ur respectable parents are telling u to stay away from. if he’s an artist, he’s michelangelo – sullen, hard to be around, kinda gross and a little weird, typically inebriated and gruff but somehow pulls off the most amazing and thought-provoking artwork ever. (also, have u seen how fucking buff michelangelo’s people are? yeah tell me toji would not be into that. he’d absolutely be drawing that kinda muscle.)  

if not an artist, toji probably is a philosophy kinda guy – a little toxic machiavellian type of man, if u will. he loves questioning god and getting excommunicated by the pope like it’s his fucking hobby. regardless, ur parents do not want u near him because he’s rumored to be dangerous and atheist and too radical even for the renaissance. (also, he has an std. it’s 1485 no one knows what hygiene is.)

but....you’ll see him out of the corner of your eye on sundays at the cathedral, where he’s absolutely rolling his eyes at the sermon. it’s incredibly sexy. 

you’re going to be attracted to renaissance toji because he’s got that air of defiance about him – a sort of, “why do i care what god thinks?” type of vibe. with his sexy little renaissance fits, you think he’s incredibly dangerous and cool, and you definitely start sneaking out to see him, or you try to catch moments alone whenever you’re running errands in town. 

still, toji probably doesn’t care about you as much as you wish he did. he definitely yeets off to milan or venice or southern italy because his job requires him to be on the move, but i will not deny that your time with him is incredibly romantic and would spur an amazing bittersweet period drama if it was made into a movie <3

#im so happy thank u for asking me this #I love talking about toji #thank u thank u #fushiguro toji #toji x reader #fushiguro toji x reader #jujutsu kaisen x reader #adele writes #letters to adele #fushiguro.toji #artist!jjk

[cthoniccompanion]

today's dumb AU thoughts are making me want to write a kiu ficlet where they play dnd

#kiu #dnd #pit and pittoo occupy both ends of the good alignment spectrum both in personality and play style #pit is the worst rules lawyer despite not knowing any of the rules or how to play #pittoo is just there to cause chaos. probably got dragged into the group against his will but make no mistake #he wants to win #palutena is the oooo shiny player who activates all of the traps and goes after any treasure that's mentioned #probably plays an elf #also doesn't know the rules #they invite magnus and he's their cleric but he plays the cleric as an atheist just to piss everyone off #is constantly muttering 'FINE i cast healing word. someone has to keep you idiots alive.' #hades plays a chaotic neutral elf with a devil's advocate agenda #splits the party at one point just because #and when they all nearly die he just laughs #viridi dms #she has a brain age of 25

[ungrateful-cyborg]

Skaar : II. The High Priestess - has your character ever ignored their conscience? ; Kazan : XV. The Devil - has your character ever been addicted to a certain behavior or substance? ; TA : Seven of Pentacles - what tests your character’s patience more than anything? ; Astrid : ー☆* Seven of Wands - has your character ever had to make a stand for something they believe in?

The High Priestess - has your character ever ignored their conscience?

Yes and no. He's not a monster and he's not heartless but he's not a good man and he made a name for himself as a mercenary, not an adventurer. He was in for the money first, and during the last seven years he's been working for someone, it was as a bodyguard (and as the guy's chief of security). There's been more than one instance during which he could have helped someone and chose not to because his contract took priority. But that's what makes him good at what he does, and as he'd tell you, you can't save everyone.

Overall it hasn't been weighting too much on his conscience though, and the one time something durably did, he had to leave one of his (half-dead already) cousin behind him to save his own life.

The Devil - has your character ever been addicted to a certain behavior or substance?

He's extremely guarded and doesn't trust anybody, compartmentalizes a lot and doesn't usually share his thoughts but that's him trying to avoid being vulnerable rather than being addicted. Outside of that, no. He doesn't rely on substances to carry on (though the temptation has been here a few times) and tries to avoid being too predictable.

Seven of Pentacles - what tests your character’s patience more than anything?

Defending the Church. On one hand, he can understand where it comes from. It's not as if he's atheist and he understands that some people need more than practicing in private or believing without practicing. On the other hand, he's got a deep, personal hatred for the Church and clergymen from Ishgard and they did too much not just to him but Ishgardians in general to be forgivable or worth defending in his eyes. It's basically playing the Devil's advocate and, ironically considering his alias and how he got it, he doesn't have any patience for that.

Seven of Wands - has your character ever had to make a stand for something they believe in?

She stood up against one of the most prominent Sharlayan politicians and told her to mind her own business right after lying to her face to protect a guy she doesn't even like. That's probably her biggest act of bravery so far and she was (rightfully) terrified to get in trouble, but she does believe that his kid's life was worth the risk. We'll see if she was right x)

Thanks for the ask, Mioup o/

#The More You Know #answered; astrid #answered; kazan #answered; skaar #answered; the advocate

[togglesbloggle]

So, @argumate is up to some more prosocial atheistic trolling.  As is usual with such things, the conversation isn’t particularly elevated, but it does make me nostalgic for the old bbc days.  So I thought I’d be the Discourse I’d like to see in the world.  This is the post that kicked things off; correctly noting Platonism as a philosophical foundation underpinning most versions of Abrahamic faiths.  And it’s probably the most useful place for me to target also, since hardly anybody just identifies as a Platonist but most westerners are one.  So, without further ado, a halfhearted and full-length defense of Platonism:

Well, strike that.  A little bit of ado.

I’m not a Platonist myself, so this is a devil’s advocate type of thing.  Or maybe you could call it an intellectual Turing test?  As I discuss here, my philosophical commitments are mostly to skepticism, and for instrumental reasons, to reductionist materialism.  That combo leaves me some wiggle room, and I find it fairly easy to provisionally occupy a religious mindset, so I can generally read and enjoy religious polemics.  I also have a fairly deep roster of what are often called ‘spiritual experiences’; I’m probably in the set of people that are by nature predisposed to religion.  I am not religious, and I approve of Argumate saying things like ‘God is not real’ a lot.  This is in no way a retread of the arguments in The Republic or Plato’s other writings; you can go read those if you want, but I’m going to play around with stuff that I think is better suited to this audience.

Attention conservation notice: yikes.  This got pretty long.

Anyway, on to the argument.  Argumate’s main point is pretty clear, I think: ‘forms’ in the Greek sense are a function and product of the perceiving mind.  Birds don’t conform to bird-ness; instead brains naturally produce a sort of bird-ness category to make processing the world easier, and to turn a series of wiggly and continuous phenomena into a discrete number of well-modeled objects.  Basically, we impose ‘thing-ness’ on the wavefunction of reality.  And there are some good reasons to think that it might be true!  Our understanding of categories gets a lot sharper when reality conveniently segregates itself, and whenever that boundary gets a little blurry, our ability to use categories tends to break down.  If the recognition of animal-ness came from contact with a higher plane of reality, you wouldn’t necessarily expect people to get confused about sponges.

But.  While there’s certainly plenty of support for Argumate’s position, it doesn’t strike me as anything near self-evident, or necessarily true.  So what I’ll argue is that Platonism isn’t obviously false, and that if we ever converge on a true answer to the question of our reality, then that truth could plausibly be recognizably Platonist.  My opening salvo here is, predictably enough, mathematics.

‘Mathematical Platonism’ is a whole other thing, only distantly related to Classical Platonism, and I only really mean to talk about the latter.  But nonetheless, mathematics really actually does appear to be a situation where we can simply sit in a chair, think deeply, and then more or less directly perceive truths.  Basic arithmetic can be independently discovered, and usefully applied, by almost anybody; ‘quantity’ comes naturally to most humans, and the inviolable laws of quantity are exploited just as often.  It’s also very hard to argue that these are ‘mere’ linguistic conventions, since fundamental natural behaviors like the conservation of mass depend on a kind of consistent logical framework.  In most chemical reactions, the number of atomic nuclei does not change, and the atoms added to a new molecule are perfectly mirrored by the loss of atoms in some reactant; this remains true in times and places where no thinking mind exists to count them.

There are a lot of debates about what math is, fundamentally.  But inevitably when we study math, we’re studying the set of things that must be true, given some premise: we’re asking whether some proposition is a necessary consequence of our axioms.  The so-called ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ suggests that the phenomena that Argumate mentions- hotdogs and birds and whatnot- are observed only within the auspices of a sort of super-phenomenon.  Loosely speaking, we can call this super-phenomenon self-consistency.  

We treat phenomena as having a natural cause.  Platonism, at its crunchy intellectually rewarding center, represents a willingness to bite the bullet and say that self-consistency also has a cause.  Plato himself actually provided what might be the most elegant possible answer!  Basically, posit the simplest thing that meets the criterion of being A) autocausal and B) omnicausal, and then allow the self-consistency of the cosmos to follow from its dependence on (in Platonist terms, its emanation from) that single, unitary cause.  The universe is self-consistent for the very straightforward reason that there’s only one thing.  Any plurality, to the extent that plurality is even a thing, happens because ‘the only real thing’ is only partially expressed in a particular phenomenon.  To skip ahead to Lewis’ Christian interpretation of all this, you’d say that humans and moons and hotdogs are distinguished from God not by what they have, but by what they lack.

And for present purposes, I do want to take a step back and point out that this does feel like a reasonable answer to a very important question.  Materialism fundamentally has no answer to the question of self-consistency and/or the presence of logic and order, and that is (for me) one of its least satisfying limits.  We’ve got things like ‘the origin of the universe’, sure.  But we probe the Big Bang with mathematical models!  That’s a hell of an assumption- namely, that even at the origin of our universe, self-consistency applies.  It’s not like materialism has a bad explanation.  It just remains silent, treats the problem as outside the domain.  If we’re adopting the thing for utilitarian reasons, that’s fine.  But if we’re treating materialism as a more comprehensive philosophy, a possible approach to the bigger questions, then it’s a painful absence.  In that domain, far from being self-evidently true (in comparison to Platonism), materialism doesn’t even toss its hat in the ring!

Which, uh, gets us to the stuff about Forms and shadows in Plato’s Cave and all that- the intermediate form of existence between the omnisimple core of Platonism and the often chaotic and very plural experience of day-to-day life.  And frankly, we’re not especially bound to say that the forms are exactly as Plato described them, any more than atomism is restricted to Democritus.  Whether there is some ‘bird-ness’ that is supra- to all extant birds might be contestable; however, it’s easier to wonder whether ‘binary tree’ is supra- to speciation and the real pattern of differences between organisms that we map using Linnaean taxonomy.

But, this is an attempted defense of Platonism and not Toggle’s Version of Platonism that He Invented Because it’s Easier, so I’ll give it a try.  Fair warning to the reader, what follows is not fully endorsed (even in the context of a devil’s advocate-type essay), except the broader claim that it’s not self-evidently false.  And on the givens we came up with a couple paragraphs ago, this is a reasonable way to tackle what necessarily follows.  So let me see how far I can defend a very strong claim: in a self-consistent (or: mathematical) cosmos, beauty cannot be arbitrary.

Remember that Plato never argued that his Forms were arbitrary, or even fully discrete as such; their apparent plurality, like our own, emanates from the unitary Thing What Exists.  And so, bird-ness is treated as a contingent thing, not an absolute.  It’s just not contingent on human experience.  And so for us to believe in ‘bird-ness’ is to believe that there exists some specific and necessary pattern- a Form- which any given material bird must express.

Let’s take an obvious example: any flying bird will, for fairly simple aerodynamic reasons, tend to be symmetrical.  Usually, this means two wings.  In theory, you could… have one in the middle?  Maybe?  Even that seems rather goofy to try to imagine, but you could probably get away with it if you were extremely creative biologically.  And if we see a bird with only one wing (without a prosthetic or other form of accommodation), then we will tend quite naturally to recognize that something awful is in the process of happening.

A fully materialist explanation of our reaction here would say: we think of the one-winged bird as problematic because A) we have been socialized to recognize and appreciate two-winged birds, and spurn deviations from that socialization, or maybe B) because natural selection has given us a set of instincts that recognize when a body plan has failed in the past, so things like ‘being crippled’ or ‘being sick’ are recognizable.  

Platonism, I think, would offer a third option, that C) we recognize (as emanations of The Real Thing) that a one-winged bird body is insufficiently reflective of The Real Thing, and that accordingly it lacks the ability to keep existing.  Plato had some… basically magical ideas, about how Forms are recognized, but here I’ll point out that ‘deduction’ is a completely serviceable kind of magic for our purposes.  It is, after all, our direct experience of the self-consistency of the cosmos, which follows from the fact that we are ourselves an expression of that same self-consistency; it meets the criteria.  

Materialists, obviously, would agree that deductive reasoning could allow a person to recognize the problems inherent in a one-winged bird, but as I said a few paragraphs up, their(/our) explanation of this process is rootless.  “Yes, logic and a few high-confidence assumptions let you assume that a bird with only one wing is in trouble,” they might say.  And we might ask- “what makes you so sure?”  And then the materialist must respond, “Well, let me be more clear.  It always worked in the past, and my Bayesian priors are strongly in the direction of the method continuing to bear fruit.”  True enough, but it’s not an explanation and doesn’t pretend to be.  The universe just does this weird thing for some reason; it works ‘by magic’.  So why not call it that?  Theurgy for all!

So, consider.  We recognize (deductively, let’s say for the sake of argument) that a one-winged bird is on the road to becoming nonexistent, absent some change in circumstances.  It may keep going for a little while, but it’s not in homeostasis.  And if we reasonably admit this very basic duality to our thinking- things which can persist, and things which cannot- then we start to recognize a sort of analogy between physical phenomena and mathematical propositions.  A lemma can be right or wrong, albeit sometimes unprovably so.  Basically, it can follow- or not- from the axioms we’re working with.  And in a softer but very real sense, that one-winged body plan is wrong analogously to the lemma’s wrongness.  Not ‘wrong’ as in ‘counter to cultural norms’, but ‘wrong’ as in ‘unstable given the premises, given the Thing That Exists Most’.  Look up research on fitness landscapes, if you’re so inclined- actual biological research isn’t totally unacquainted with the notion.  There exists a surprisingly discrete ideal or set of ideals, both for flying birds as a whole and subordinately for any given flying bird species.  And we have discovered this using magic.

Insofar as beauty is something to be admired, or pursued, or is otherwise desirable, then our sense of beauty must necessarily correlate with those abstract, and dare I say supra-real, qualities which allow things to persist, and which can therefore be understood deductively.  And that set of qualities does, effectively, meet the Platonic criterion of a ‘form’.

The immediate materialist objection is: hey, wait a minute.  The supposed ‘objective’ criterion of a bird is contingent, not absolute!  It follows from the strength of gravity, the thickness of the atmosphere, the availability of food sources, and on and on.  This is one of the most important reasons why genetic drift and speciation happens in the first place, because the ‘ideal’ bird depends on an environment that’s in constant flux.

True enough.  But!  How do you think the atmosphere got there?  It’s an old trick in religious discourse, but in this case I think a valid one.  The rightness of the bird depends on the atmosphere, the rightness of the atmosphere depends on the planet, the rightness of the planet depends on the solar system, and ultimately it all depends on that necessary self-consistency which (we proclaim) implies our unitary Most Real Thing.  This does mean that we can’t really think of Platonic forms as wholly discrete objects, unconnected to one another and without internal relation among themselves- unfortunately, that’s part of the original Plato that I don’t see as defensible, even with maximum charity.  But there’s such a thing as a ‘ring species’, and if we admit Platonic Forms of that type, a kind of dense network of paths being traced through higher-dimensional spaces that correspond to the shadow of That Than Which There Is No Whicher, then it’s more than salvageable.  It’s both satisfying to imagine and, I think, quite consistent with the spirit of the original philosophy.

One thing this doesn’t mean.  Even if we were to accept all of this, we aren’t obliged to resign ourselves to the lot of that one-winged bird.  Indeed, if anything this gives us a rich language by which to justify a prosthetic wing or other form of accommodation: we can talk about ‘making the bird whole’, and can see how our compassion for that bird might lead us to create the conditions of homeostasis once again.  But it does mean that if we take a position on the merits of existence- if we’re in favor- then we don’t treat a one- and two-winged bird as coequal scenarios.

Anyway, this has gone on hideously long already for what’s basically an intellectual exercise, so I won’t dive into immortal souls or any of the other ancillaries.  I mostly want to reiterate that, far from being obviously false, I do think that (some forms of) Platonism are quite defensible, and can provide coherent answers to questions that I A) care about very deeply and B) can’t resolve to my own satisfaction.  Of course, it is not obviously nor trivially true, either.  But one can be Platonist without being willfully wrong.

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Blood Sister | Feeding Habits Update #5

Hey People of Earth!

Are we back for another Feeding Habits update? Today let’s chat chapter six!

Blood Sister is the first chapter in Harrison’s POV and also the longest chapter in the book (a little over 8k words). It took me about a month to write!

Scene A:

Harrison gets back to the NYC apartment he shares with his mother after running errands to ward off either the spirit that haunts their walls or to rescue whatever is stuck in them. His mother preps for a dinner as Harrison has invited his old pal Reeve over.

Scene B:

Harrison removes a litter of kittens from behind the drywall. One of the kittens is dead. Strangely, a German Shepherd puppy is also in the litter.

Scene C:

Reeve appears in a glamorous blur and makes an interesting first impression on Suz who seems slightly stunned and endeared by her.

Scene D:

At dinner Reeve confronts Harrison about his “straight-edge” lifestyle since moving to NYC and he realizes her judgements about his life being monotonous are very true--he lacks purpose.

Scene E:

Harrison and his mother clear the dishes and Suzanna confronts him on the fact that he hasn’t told her that Reeve is in fact Lonan’s sister. Suz knows the boys’ relationship is complicated, and plays Devil’s advocate by outright asking Reeve how her brother is. Reeve, who hasn’t seen Lonan longer than Harrison, has assumed Lonan lives with them or is close by, and feels semi-betrayed that Harrison has kept his whereabouts a secret.

Scene F:

Reeve and Harrison drive to a garden and he’s reminded of the event that lead to him and his mother’s return to the east coast.

Harrison meets Winona outside a convenience store, the same woman Lonan meets in ch.6 of Moth Work. She takes him to her mansion where she’s hosting a party and introduces him to her husband. Harrison makes multiple bad decisions which you can probably figure out for yourself!

Scene G:

Harrison wakes up in Winona’s house and is confused to see her and her husband standing over his leather jacket. If we remember what happened in ch. 6 of Moth Work, Lonan gets beat up by Winona’s husband and has Harrison’s jacket & angel chain stolen. We can assume from this scene that Winona has a) recognized the jacket and b) chosen him to come back to her house for the purpose of also beating him up (which happens).

Scene H:

Reeve and Harrison jump a fence into a garden to give the dead kitten an unorthodox “water burial” in the garden’s fountain. Reeve confronts him on why no one has seemed to care about her whereabouts for the last year, and also suggests the only reason he wanted to see her now is because he misses Lonan. Harrison miserably drinks too much wine.

Scene I:

Harrison wakes up in the cold, very drunk, and Reeve is gone. A security guard looms over him. Harrison asks the confused man if he thinks he was separated at birth. Harrison isn’t referring to feeling like he’s been removed from a sibling bond, like the kittens, but a deeper, “indissoluble bond” formed between two people (like the kittens and the puppy). This connects to the title “Blood Sister” as Reeve suggests she and Suzanna may be connected in this way, to the kittens, and to Lonan and Harrison.

This idea of “indissoluble bonds” was reinforced when I listened to Stephanie Harlowe’s coverage on the Parker-Hulme case, and this was the title of her video! This idea of an immutable connection between two people who are forever separated, like the dead kitten despite its death, still being connected to its siblings, was very relevant to how Harrison feels about Lonan.

Excerpts:

Here’s the entire first scene <3

Something has died in the drywall. Suz insists there must also be a ghost—she hears cries when she sleeps—so when Harrison returns to their apartment with both a handsaw and a bottle of holy water, she’s more than pleased.

Today, it snows in New York City, and no amount of brushing off his hair and jacket rids him of the snowflakes he tracks in. His face stings with the bitter early March air, and he’s resettled easily into the east coast grit; he likes the taste of instant coffee and the smell of gasoline.

Harrison shoulders off his jacket, the leather rigid with frost, and undoes the loop of his scarf one-handed. The apartment smells overwhelmingly of cloves and apple peel, and he is unsurprised when his mother rushes over to him, flushed from the kitchen heat, her #1 Dad apron bunching at her hips, and pushes a highball glass into his palm in exchange for his findings.

“It’s a secret recipe,” she says, twiddling through his errands. Suzanna lifts the bottle of holy water to eye level, unscrews its cap, and daps two soaked fingers to her lips just as he dips his fingers into the glass, around its rim, and then into his mouth. The hot mull of liquid bursts against his taste buds, citrusy. “Wish I believed in this shit as much as I believe nutmeg is my new holy saviour.”

Harrison downs the rest of the glass’s contents, the cider’s spice grafting down his throat. Its heat clings to the roof of his mouth, a subtle burn that numbs his tongue, but he likes it, its sweetened acid like a rucking back to life.

“Is that the secret?” He runs his pinky along the base of the glass so the last drops of liquid climb up his fingernail.

“The Lord?”

Harrison laughs and accepts the holy water she hands him, rescrews its cap in place. “Nutmeg.”

Suzanna takes his empty glass and whisks toward the kitchen. On the stove burbles two saucepans and one Dutch oven, the fan whirring like the pleats of an accordion.

“Maybe it’s both,” she says.

You asked for the entire second scene? Here Harrison finds the litter of kittens:

The first thing Harrison removes when he saws through the drywall lining the two-prong outlet is a dead kitten. Its body shifts onto his hand with damp weight, like an overripe pear, its silver hair glass-like under the beam of his flashlight. Though it sits comfortably in the pit of his palm, though he knows he cannot kill or revive it, his first instinct is to lay it on the beach towel Suzanna laid out because he fears he’ll crush it with just one pulse of his thumb.

Its eyes are the size of his pinkie nail, gently shuttered like it’s drifted to a lawless sleep. The animal will remain in this state—only death, but as he looks at it, braying its hairs back with his forefinger, he considers alternative options. Harrison knows little of necromancy, but considers anointing it with the holy water, lighting a red-cased candle in front of it, chanting a verse from Revelations.

With the flashlight secured between his molars, Harrison pulls out four more kittens, all that mew as they cling to his fingers, their noses twitching against his skin like it’s feed. They burrow into the beach towel, trampling over one another with blind fervency, all shimmery silver. In comparison to their deceased sibling, they wriggle, pink-nosed, and don’t settle against the grain of the towel, always wagging, like earthworms.

Harrison believes he’s done—removed the dead animal and rescued four more. Good work which he’ll take to a farm just outside the city—Suzanna has a friend. He’s nearly clicked off the flashlight when he sees it, just a subtle glint of something else—an animal that isn’t silver, but a dry brown.

At first, he thinks it’s a rat that’s raked through the walls to where it is now, but the longer he shines the flashlight, the more he sees it is not a rat, or even a kitten. What sits, jittering behind the outlet, is a pup.

Like the kittens, its nose twitches back and forth, its eyes small enough to be the ovular black beads on Suzanna’s rosary which hangs, decorative, above the front entrance. “It’s a cleanse for the spirit,” Suz said when he questioned her reasoning for bringing religious memorabilia into a house of two atheists. “Dianne from church told me.” Dianne is a beer-bellied schoolteacher, proud pothead and mother of four who frequently volunteers at the church’s weekend functions with his mother. “She’s into that kind of thing. Seances. Jesus Christ. I think she mentioned they had something spicy going on in college.”

“Something spicy?”

“Spicy. Like hot wings. Habaneros. One-night stands. I don’t know Harry, it sounded illicit.”

They both grinned.

Harrison does not know when him and Suz began getting along. There was no one date or time, no anniversary to look forward to for their official reunion. One moment he struggled not comparing her face to the one he knew in his early teens, and the next, they crouched over a salad bowl of burnt popcorn, taking turns painting each other’s fingernails with the same shade of red nail polish—Crazy for Carmine

The dog can’t yet focus its eyes on anything, but Harrison swears it stares at him. It fidgets from its position crouched on the outlet, so when he extends his hand, an offering, he’s surprised when it crouches onto the tip of his finger, shimmying into his palm. It’s even smaller when he holds it, plum-sized, and velveteen. Its eyelids flicker like the apartment’s bad TV signal, and when it opens its mouth to cry, its teeth, no larger than the tip of a toothpick, prick up.

“You’re not a tabby,” he says, drags his fingers through the suede-like gloss of its fur. The pup curls against his knuckles, murmurs languidly until Harrison pets its head again.

“Did you say something, Harry?”           

Harrison stands from his crouch when his mother materializes from her bedroom, the animal still pared delicately in his palm. When he glances at her, he’s surprised to see she’s changed out of her usual loungewear, a tank top and bell-bottoms, and into a patterned shirtdress that sways to her knees. The Matisse-like design, organic shapes, all the colour of a celery stalk, drapes to her knees, flounces when she twirls for him.           

“I thought we agreed on business casual,” he says, but smiles wider the longer he looks at her. Tulle gathers in a funnel down her waist, pluming her so she looks less like his mother and more like a fairy.          

“I’m taking the business side, and you’ll take the casual.”          

“She’s just a friend, Mom. She’s not expecting anything.”           

“She’s got an English last name,” Suz says. Her eyelids glitter with gold pigment, her lips tacky with rouge. “Of course she’s classy.”           

Harrison thumbs the back of the pup’s head and shifts closer to Suzanna when she cocks her head toward it.

“I think Reeve is more than classy,” he says. “Maybe stylish. Exclusive. Superior. Glamorous.”           

Suzanna shifts the pup from Harrison’s hands to her own, neatly patting its head with her pinkie until its murmurs soften. When she holds the animal, it’s like he no longer stands behind her. It’s just her in her Matisse dress and the dog, comfortably blinking in her hand. “You found a puppy in a litter of kittens?” she says, less of a question, and more of a declaration of wonderment. She lifts the animal to eye level. Its nose wrinkles, like the skin of a fig. “Looks like mama picked up a stray. A beautiful stray. You’re absolutely beautiful.”

Reeve making only iconic appearances:

Reeve appears in their doorway wearing cat-eye sunglasses, a bottle of pinot noir slatted between her arm and chest. Though it’s been storming since early morning and there has been no sun in the city since the week previous, her appearance is so believable—cheekbones subtly tanned like she’s mastered the timing for a perfect sunlike glow, the sunglasses teetering neatly on the tip of her nose and staying there, like they’re a dog she’s taught to sit and stay—that Harrison’s almost convinced she commissions the sun to come out twice daily for a private show, just for her.

“We booked an appointment,” she says, letting herself into the apartment in a faux-fur blur.

Harrison swivels as she unzips, tooth by tooth, the red skin-slick vinyl of her gogo boots. Her hair falls in an untamed fringe around her forehead, the front sections pinned back by an array of rainbow-coloured butterfly clips. It mimics the fray of her jacket, fluffed around the hood’s perimeter.

Reeve dusts snow off her corduroy culottes, readjusts the collar of her black turtleneck. “When I moved to the city, I forgot how gruelling the winters can become.” She taps the heels of her boots onto the welcome mat so slush flakes onto the rubber before slipping her feet out elegantly, like Cinderella. “I almost believed New York City existed in a fictional bubble where everything remained dry and hot, like in Egypt, or the Mojave. When I asked for a hellish climate, I was hoping for sun and the occasional forest fire. Not ice and more ice.”

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Suz speaks where Harrison’s words shrivel. She steps from the kitchen to the entrance, her dress flouncing when she extends a hand toward Reeve. “William Shakespeare.”

Reeve looks up. The cold has pinched her cheeks pink, drooled water to her eyes so when she blinks, tears sprout to her jawline. “Suzanna,” Reeve says, and embraces his mother with willful ease, like they’ve been girlfriends for a decade, like they purchase pavlova from the same patisserie at the same time on Thursdays, like they help each other whip perfectly fatty meringues at the same baking class so they can master the same pavlova and never buy it again. “I’ve heard nothing about you and yet I feel we’ve known each other for years. What do they call that? Blood sisters.”

So here’s the whole third scene lol:

At dinner, Reeve pops the cork of a bottle of pinot noir with her teeth before Suz tells her she and Harrison don’t drink. She’s in the middle of saying she’s a prophet, the bringer of wine, her lips parted around the cork, traces of her lip gloss gumming around its circumference.

“No alcohol?” Reeve says, spitting the cork into her palm so a glob of red transfers onto her skin.

Suz stirs a serving dish of clams with an olive wood spoon, their shells phosphorescent in the artificial light. “Harry and I have taken a break from spirits. Except for the holiest one of course.” She points to the roof as if signaling to the man upstairs and dishes a spoonful of clams onto Reeve’s plates, the shells chiming against the ceramic.

“That’s so reverent.” Reeve pricks the edge of a clam with a toothpick and swallows its frill into her mouth. “So virginal.”

Harrison accepts a spoonful of clams from his mother and adjusts a sprig of rosemary so it lies perpendicular to the plate’s edge. Olive oil gums under his fingernails and soaks into the fibres of a slice of bread he rips at the crust.

“I always assumed you’d be a partier if you ever moved back to the city,” Reeve says, and it takes Harrison a moment to realize she’s speaking to him. “Disco. Karaoke. Cocktails. Men who buy you cocktails.”

“Has that been your life in New York, Reeve?” Harrison sucks a lobe of clam between his lips. Its brine coats his tongue in a burst of salt and cilantro.

Reeve tips the bottle of wine to her mouth, its red gift bow shifting, silverish with light. “You could say that. I just expected more. Not that your life now is boring. But I assumed there would be more glamour.”

Harrison sops up a dribble of oil onto a shear of bread, and says something like, “I thought so too,” before swallowing.

“We have glamour,” Suz says as Harrison absently eats more clams. She points to the chandelier the two found at the bottom of a New Jersey dumpster, yet to be installed, sitting in its crystal glory on the floor. She explains the story of how it came to be as Harrison eats and listens for the mewing of the kittens, thinks about their one dead sibling that now lies curled inside a shoebox, separated in eternal rest.

Reeve is not wrong. Life in New York City has been far from glamorous. He shares this apartment with his mother who pays for all of the rent—it’s been months since Harrison could hold down a steady job. He tries with odds and ends—repairing a neighbour’s bathroom sink, tacking sconces up outside the apartment for a hundred bucks. His room is a décor-less box that smells like wallpaper even though it’s sanded smooth and painted with two coats of an eggshell-finished oatmeal white. There is no dancing, no music, no colour, no partying, no alcohol or men with alcohol. Not anymore, at least. Her statement should not sting—this is the utter truth. The apartment is repetitive shades of indistinctive creams, furniture he and his mother pick up off the curbs of wealthy homeowners, incomplete, yet his home, nonetheless. No matter the story Suz tries to spin—look at the exposed brick, look at the counter space, look at the custom-moulded baseboards the previous renters installed—he knows what Reeve has said is true. Life in the city is comfortable but monotonous—an unrelenting kind of normal.

“We found kittens,” Harrison says, promptly interrupting the women’s conversation that has quickly moved away from the apartment to their favourite places to eat gelato. Suz’s clam drifts off her toothpick; Reeve almost chokes on a gulp of wine. Harrison swipes a chunk of bread through olive oil and chews. “That’s glamorous.”

Reeve sets the wine bottle back onto the dinner table and folds her hands over the other. Her manicure is chipped, just the remnants of a tortoiseshell marble. “What kind? Calico?”

“They’re just kittens. And a dog.”

“You found a dog in a litter of kittens?”

Harrison eats one last clam and finishes his portion of bread. “Glamorous,” he says, his mouth half-full.

The beginning of scene 4:

While Suz and Reeve discuss room décor and clear the plates, Harrison checks on the kittens. Dishes clank rhythmically as they’re soaped, rinsed, dried, the ceramic whimpering in time with the kittens. He hasn’t named any but understands their differences. Though the quadruplets share the same silver coat, one has a slightly larger nose than the rest, one has a fleck of gold in its blue eye, one has pinstripes scrolled across its forehead like a branch of lightning—small details like this differentiate them.

In his palm, the one with the golden eye crawls, its underbelly sateen. Tomorrow, he’ll make the drive just outside Brooklyn where he’ll drop the kittens off at an old farmhouse. Suz’s friend from rehab is selling it, some Theodore Harvey, but his wife fosters animals, and was delighted to have the new additions. Though he hasn’t spoken to his mother about this arrangement, he also knows tomorrow he will keep the dog. Juniper, he’s named her—June with the eyes like a solstice.

When his mother pokes him, he jumps, and the kitten shimmies off his palm.

The sounds of dishes clinking morphs into the filmy mutter of a talkshow Reeve watches, sipping absently at her gifted bottle of red wine.

She nudges a pastry into his hand, where the kitten once sat, the skin of the pasteis de nata oiling his hand. He crunches into it as she watches patiently, as if waiting for a review, and its caramel flavour ruminates on his tongue.

“This is good,” he says around a mouthful of pastry.

“$4.99.” Suz smiles and takes a nibble herself. “For six.”

Together they stand over the kittens, passing the tart back and forth until Harrison gives the final piece to his mother. The apartment whirs with the calculated singe of automated laughter and the purr of the kittens. He knows one sits dead in a shoebox on his bedroom dresser. The ground too hard to dig, a burial still necessary.

Suz licks a crumb from her thumb and wipes her palms along the skirt of her dress. Their focus shifts to Reeve who lies sprawled against the two-seater, yelling something at a contestant on the show who’s gotten an answer wrong—tulip, not two lips. That’s fabulous. You are fabulously a failure.

“You didn’t tell me she was Lonan’s sister.”

Harrison pokes at a flake of pastry and wipes his hands on the front of his jeans. Reeve’s bangles clatter in a cyan jangle as she applauds at the same contestant she previously ridiculed. There are so many things he could say to his mother—he knew Reeve first, Reeve isn’t just Lonan’s sister to him, more like his own, but when he adjusts himself, swallowing and tidying the hem of his shirt, all that comes out is, “I didn’t think you needed to know.”

“I would’ve like to,” Suz says. “Does she know? That you don’t know where he is?”

Harrison’s fingernail catches on a loose thread, and he yanks it out so even Reeve glances back at its upholstered plink. “I know where he is, Suzanna.”

Reeve and Suz being icons (direct continuation from the above):

Harrison turns back to the kittens who plow over one another like ants. Heat flushes his throat, prickles his cheeks and ears and suctions like a vacuum. Though Suzanna eventually leaves, joining Reeve on the couch, propping her feet on the same coffee table so their polished feet touch, toes pink like raw cherry tomatoes, though he knows they’re both right in knowing and not knowing where Lonan is, though he knows it should no longer matter to him, he finds himself leaning against the table where the kittens encase each other in a plastic shoe bin, ticking his fingers at his side.

He does not know what the reality television show is about. From the blots he hears from the TV’s can-like speaker, he concludes it’s something about botany, love, vengeance, fertilizer. No one theme—it does not even know what it is itself. Suz has materialized with another tart, and she and Reeve nibble at it with fervency, so close, their tongues almost touch as they dart across the custard. The sight is almost viper-like, their teeth notched forward, and it should be venomous, or at its worst—friendly, but all Harrison sees is girlish, maternal intimacy.

Suz and Reeve laugh at a contestant who wears a tartan printed jumpsuit and mismatching earrings—one the shape of a pineapple, the other an urn-like bead she claims holds the ashes of her great aunt. They outline her figure with their pinkies. They clutch each other’s hands. They flush like beets and wipe crumbs from each other’s mouths.

Reeve’s momentary lapse into delicacy:

Harrison turns his back and pretends to tend to the kittens. They all know he does nothing but thumb the backs of their heads, let them suckle against his fingertips—they all know, and yet, he continues doing it. Silence cuts through the apartment like hot glass.

If Reeve and Suzanna still touch toes, it’s because neither want to loosen the other’s pride. The only sound in the room belongs to the television which has moved away from dishwashing to a watering hose—four for four, as if this is a discount, as if anyone will truly need that many watering hoses.

“I haven’t seen your brother since late August,” Harrison says once the commercials simmer back to the gaudy laughter of the reality television show. At first, he doesn’t look at Reeve. He knows what he’ll see—some form of betrayal. She didn’t come here looking for Lonan. She hasn’t even asked for him, but he knows what he’ll see when he looks at her. Best friends do not keep secrets.

When he concedes, he is right. Reeve looks at him from under a thick smear of kohl, her eyes focused, like slate beads. Her lips are pink from wine and she unhinges a fleck of opal nail polish from her thumb. Her mouth does not move, a straight line that cranks with her jaw.

“Where is he?” she asks, fluttering her lashes when Suz pats her arm. If Harrison is right, Reeve hasn’t see her brother since she peered in on him when the two shared the tent, pearled a few smoke rings from Harrison’s cigar, and left for the east coast. Before he left, Foster filled him in on the details of her eventual cross-country desertion, though there weren’t many. How he’d last seen her at the motel, a margarita wobbling in her palm, what she’d said to him, to stay special, that there weren’t many people like him left, and how she had vanished like vapour by the time they realized to check. While Reeve hiked across the country by herself, he and Lonan swam through nighttide and badly waltzed in a four-by-four bathroom. She made an anonymous life in New York City, hailing cabs with just her eyes, and learning the easiest ways to shoplift. Alone. Her last memory of Lonan one where he pretended to sleep so he didn’t have to say goodbye to her.

“Las Vegas the last time I saw him,” Harrison says. He feels the urge to apologize for something, to hug her, or cry. Though her expression unbends from severe back to her perfected mould of glitzy conviction, her momentary lapse into delicacy startles him. He looks back to the kittens who seem more interested in themselves than him.

Reeve tightens her grip around the neck of the wine bottle and tactfully sips, her pinkie erect, her lips pursed just the right amount. “What happened?” she asks and sets the bottle onto the coffee table. She lets a dribble of wine fall from her mouth so she can dab at it like a wounded animal.

Harrison and Reeve in the car:

Harrison brings the box with the dead kitten and Reeve brings the bottle of pinot noir. Together, they settle in her red Beetle convertible, a car she insists she pawned for a quarter its listing price, though he figures from the way she settles in it, carefully placing the wine bottle in the cup holder, wiping her hands on her thighs as if checking for grease, that it must belong to a roommate or boyfriend, if she has either. The car smells faintly of pineapple and vanilla, a scent not unfamiliar to him, the waft strengthening as the tree-shaped air-freshener swings closer to him with every turn.

Reeve asks vaguely of his time in the city, how life has been for him and his mother since they moved from Vegas in mid October. Her mouth flutters with speech, each word like the hull of a hard candy she specially tastes before sharing. Has it been marvellous, just as you thought? Don’t you ever wonder how a city could become so brilliant? Isn’t the weather maddening? Don’t you adore it? She asks about Foster, what living with him was like, what saying goodbye to him the week previous was like—was it tragic—and he could tell her his move in with him and his mother wasn’t much of a plan—not a last resort either, but a salvaging. A necessary resuscitation. Reeve’s lips as dubious as shadow puppets.

Here’s some of the flashback with Winona at the convenience store:

The woman stood under the hex of the convenience store’s light, spooling her in a feverish blue. The sun had been down for hours, but its residual heat clung to Harrison’s arms in tacky gusts that wound up his fingers. Like the woman, he reached for his cigarettes. Vehicles spun across the highway just beyond the gas station, and when he raised his head after lighting the cigarette, the woman was staring at him.

“Aren’t you too young to be out without a parent or guardian?” she asked. Her hair was the colour of his mother’s candlesticks, a waxy boxed red. Her rings waggled in the false light.

“Maybe,” he said, a curl of smoke looping out of his mouth. “Can’t remember which life I’m on. There are so many. I could be ninety-seven. Tomorrow might be my birthday.”

It was September in Las Vegas. White licks of car exhaust laced the black sky, and though it wasn’t cold, Harrison pulled his jacket tighter around his chest.

Winona tries to figure out whether or not Harrison is a local by getting to know his eyes/face lol:

Harrison dropped the butt of his cigarette and stomped out its embers. When it was fully out, he fit his hands into his jacket pocket and approached the woman. Up close, her trench coat was pebbled with lint, a bead from her charm bracelet missing. She crushed her cigarette too, and when her hands were free, she stepped toward him with both palms out, and pressed them to his cheeks so he felt both the heat of her skin and the watery bite of her jewelry. She examined each plane of his face as if they were sides of a prism. Her perfume, a vinegary sort of citrus, stung his eyes the closer she got, the fur of her jacket’s trim brushing his chin when she pressed to her toes for a better look.

“You could be so many things,” she said, tilting his jaw at the same moment her pinkie slid from the jab of his nose bridge to his top lip. She pushed her face closer to his and inhaled, her plastic nail marking his skin with a pixel of glitter. “You’ve got the face of an angel. Which means you’re good. You’re sacred. You’re discreet.” When her finger poked into his mouth, her knuckle snagged on his canines. “Could also mean you’re a fraud. A criminal. You know, Lucifer wasn’t always the fallen angel.”

A bit of the party:

Winona’s front lawn was manicured, cropped neat at its soil scalp. Clusters of people huddled in different places—four gargling in the stone fountain just before the iron gate, two drinking from three martini glasses at once, a group of on their backs, arms wound like a wicker basket, shot glasses teetering between their teeth like human serving tables.

Winona parked opposite the house that pulsed with light. Harrison got out when she did, and with ease, she punched into the gate, leading him past her perfect lawn, her party guests, as if they were simply garden statues.

Inside, more people concentrated, all stopping Winona for a moment to say hello as she passed. She moved in a way only the owner of a house would, her strides easy, like she knew exactly where to take him and when.

“I know it’s busy,” Winona said, adjusting her volume for the holler of party guests. “I promise it’s always like that. Who is it that says we need partners for life? God or my therapist? This is that but every week. You meet so many people.”

Harrison listened to her haphazardly. Though he’d been in Las Vegas for a month, he hadn’t been out except for a few errands at the grocery store or for cigarettes, despite his mother’s insistence he quit. The party was overwhelming. Bass from the stereo caught him by the throat and held him there as he and Winona threaded through her house that seemed closer to a mansion. The interior smelled like cleaning bleach and fruit cocktails, and he could hardly walk without someone rearing into him. He should’ve left, known better, done better, but it thrilled him, every moment of the party’s chokehold.

When Winona pushed through her French doors and out to the back pool, Harrison tailed her closely, unsure he’d be able to keep pace if he lost sight of her, even for a moment. The backyard smelled artificially floral, like orchids, tuberose, the grassy melt of citronella candles.

Some of my fave Harrison dialogue:

“You should’ve told me you were into vintage. Cheap but chic. I like it, angel.” Her ring finger smushed into his jaw, and then against his hairline.

“What’s vintage about me?”

Winona laughed, though her eyes remained glass-like. “Your jacket, of course. You’re thrifty. Into second-hand.”

~~theme makes an appearance:

It was only later, when he stumbled, bloody knuckled, through their front door, stepping over partygoers and martini glasses, that he understood. He hadn’t come to the party thinking about Lonan but managed to attract the same people. He hadn’t drunk the magenta liquid thinking about him but managed to exit the house stumbling, as he did, his knees knotted like a newborn lamb. There was something inconceivably indissoluble about them—their bond mirror-like, one making one decision, and the other mimicking it with vigour, unknowingly inseparable.

God tier denial:

“What do you miss about him?”

Harrison blinks. He hasn’t expected her to speak to him again, in fact he’s pictured the night whittling into gauzy silence, them setting the box afloat in the fountain, and then leaving once more, wordless. Reeve drinks another sip of wine. Its scent stings, like earthy cranberries.

“I don’t,” he says, which is a lie, and they both know it. Harrison has never been a good liar, but especially a bad liar around Reeve who’s always managed to snuff out the truth. She looks at him in absolutes, like she sees his every answer scraped into his cheek and doesn’t need to check his work. Her eyes are feline and rimmed with kohl and aquamarine mica—she doesn’t need anyone to tell her the truth because she holds it in her fist. “He has a girlfriend. He’s happy.” Harrison rations more wine down his tongue, three times as much as he’s intended to drink.

“But what do you miss about him?”

Harrison misses nothing. He sleeps little and smokes too much because he misses nothing. He walks by himself, eats by himself, talks to himself because he misses nothing. He jumps from job to job, person to person, place to place because he misses nothing. He wakes up in dazes the colour of blackberries because he misses nothing. He blinks dreams from his eyelashes like they’re bad spells because he misses nothing. He holds himself, he drinks himself, he leaves no company for anyone because he misses nothing about Lonan. He misses absolutely nothing.

Harrison sits up and lifts the dead kitten’s box. He feels Reeve’s gaze when he lowers it into the fountain, the box giving into the slosh of water, and feels her gaze once more when he sits back and drinks more wine. The moon makes him miserable, its silver gloat like a reminder, of how easy it would be to look at it and see Lonan’s face appear in its dime. He doesn’t register how much he drinks, just that it feels better than not drinking. He doesn’t register that Reeve never takes the bottle, that it’s just him and its open gape of wine. As the kitten swirls around the fountain, he tries not to think of its siblings back at the apartment, all mottled over each other like burrs. An unbreakable bond, and what that means, even as one of them sits alone, gurgling along the current of a fountain.

If you didn’t ask for angst before, you sure did now:

He does not remember falling asleep, and so waking up feels illusory, shimmery, like a mirage. He focuses on dart of yellow light and a man wearing a security uniform telling him he can’t be here, here being the garden, past the fence, under the fountain. Snowflakes have clumped against his eyelashes and he blinks twice to dislodge them. The man must ask him if he’s intoxicated, never noticing the shoebox floating in the fountain, because Harrison says, “Who’s to say? I miss so many things,” and isn’t talking about the bottle of wine or Reeve that both seem to have vanished, as if they were never there. Harrison blinks again, searching for Reeve’s outline somewhere in the crisp bushel of dead foliage, but she never reappears—has he imagined the entire thing, or is she magical, effervescent, invisible? What was the last thing she said? Drink it all. It’s good for you. It’s like your own personal healing tonic.

“Do you think it’s possible I was separated at birth?” Harrison asks the security guard, who leads him by the elbow out past the iron gate and into the parking lot where he stumbles over a patch of glazy slush and onto his knees.

“Are you a twin?”

Harrison draws his index finger through the slush, doodling nonsense—letters of his name, an eyeball, a singular, faceless nose. “I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Your twin?”

Harrison shakes his head.

Snow and slush dredge his jeans and the hem of his jacket; a streetlamp filters him and the security guard in foamy yellow. His skin has numbed from sitting out in the cold too long, and in some places, prickles with heat, like the fritz of pine needles. Reeve has dissolved in the fresh spatter of snow that settles on the pavement, his fingers. The fur fringe of her hood gone, the slick of her boots. She will not be here tomorrow. He may never see her again, and yet this is not what makes him ache in the way he does.

His hands move for him. Dividing the snow in slopes, curves, lines—letters. When he’s finished, he rests his chin on his own shoulder and dries the slop of slush from his nail. The security guard leans over, bends down to get a better look, but Harrison doesn’t have to look to know what he’s written. Chiselled so the flurries fill its gaps, like cement. His name will be erased by dawn. Lonan.

So that’s it for this very, very long update! See you for chapter seven!

--Rachel

#writing #amwriting #writeblr #writerblr #writingupdates #fostered #mothwork #feedinghabits

[dorkylittleweirdo]

things i remember about my bible history teacher from cult school

he liked hamilton. that was the only thing we bonded over

~

we spent  T H R E E  W E E K S  in class studying one passage in the bible bc it said that being gay is wrong. so then he had us write a few paragraphs pretending to be someone from that time who did a sin and then repented i guess. so my lesbian ass made them gay atheists who turned to god i guess but they were still gay bc that’s Not Wrong and my teacher gave me an 8/10 on it bc i did what he asked and that was the lowest grade he could give me without being sus

~

one of the girls on my cross country team pointed out that his nose moved with this shrew in a video she showed me, so i thought about that next class and she was fuckin Right and i snorted trying not to laugh and my teacher was like “what’s so funny” and i was like “uhhhh i just,, i just remembered something my friend told me. it’s uh. it’s an inside joke”

~

he made us do an In Depth analysis on a psalm and i was like ???? okay. so i did it and presented it and he kept me after class and was like “that was the most garbage fucken thing i’ve ever seen wtf” and i was like “well sir um. you didn’t let us use any sources so. i just tried to analyze the text the best i could” and this man really gon say “W E L L  if you look at these passages in the bible you’ll see that they correlate with this one and whatever other bullshit” and i was like “okay but sir???? that???? that requires an understanding of the bible that i clearly don’t have??????????? how tf am i supposed to know that” and he’s like “well you’d know if you read the bible” like bUd even if i did read the bible like. i’m not gonna know the whole damn thing what are you saying to me. anyways i redid the report and got a good enough grade on it

~

we were arguing gay marriage for like two solid weeks bc that’s just what happens at cult school. people who support it on one side, people wo are assholes on the other. i was on my own side. man deadass told me “you don’t need to play the devil’s advocate” and i go “oh i’m not :) i believe i have just as much a right to get married as them :)” and he just shut right up lmao

~

“JC you’d get a better grade in this class if you showed some interest” well sorry bud, i’m in a class about a religion i don’t believe in with people i hate where i learn nothing and get criticized everyday, so excuse me if i’m not exactly thrilled

~

despite how much we hated each other while he was teaching, we unfortunately vibed somewhat bc i understood all his references and i’d either laugh or make one back

~

i blinked once while he was looking at me and man stood the fuck up and goes “JC take a walk” and i go “??? what why” and he’s like “bc you’re falling asleep in my class, go take a walk and wake up” and i was offended as all shit bc i Wasn’t falling asleep but i was like “time out of class is time out of class” and i vibed in the bathroom for like ten minutes

~

i had really bad cramps one time in his class. like to this day, the Worst cramps of my life. i felt like i was gonna puke and shit myself at the same time, ya know, the whole deal. i wanted death. i went to the bathroom once during class and once during our ten minute break (classes were two hours long there, block schedule everyday) and the second time i went during break he has the Audacity to be like “going again?” and i was in so much pain i literally didn’t even care at that point so i just pulled out my tampon from my sleeve like a fucking magician and this man’s eyes were so wide lmaooo. he let me go after that but i mean. and i left school early after that class, i just couldn’t handle it and thank fuck bc i puked the second i got home lmaoooo

~

he would call on me in class and i would panic and wouldn’t be able to say anything bc Anxiety. so after class he was like “wtf” and i had to tell him i have anxiety and he was like “oh well why don’t you try repeating the question to get you going” and i was like “i don’t think you’re understanding that i physically Cannot Speak when you call on me” then he got mad when i didn’t follow his advice

#i'm sure there's more that i'm forgetting but eh #cult school #jesus cult school #private school #christian school #school stories

[hadit93]

What does the present hadit feel about the past atheist hadit?

I wouldn’t say I was hard atheist for very long. More agnostic with atheist tendencies.

I think I was foolish, young, and impressionable. I had spiritual experiences and because people I looked up to and respected basically pushed the psychological interpretation on to my experiences.

I also sometimes just liked to be hardcore atheist because there is also a tendency to believe anything in the magical community these days. I liked to play devils advocate and challenge a willingness to believe. I now operate on a framework in which multiple aspects of existence converge together to form an experience.

But I was a young person once. I’m an adult now and have grown in multiple ways. It’s all a learning curve.