I obviously am a big fan of forgiveness meaning loving the person, i.e. willing their good, but I’m slowly becoming more and more obsessed with it in a very Our Father sense, i.e. releasing them from the debt they owe you.
Release them from the debt of an apology they owe you.
Release them from the debt of understanding and acknowledging that they hurt you.
Release them from the debt that they owe you recompense.
Today my childhood cat, that I had since I were 10 passed away. I’m not doing so well dealing with grief, if anyone can spare some words of comfort I’d be very grateful💗
In my early twenties I know more theology than most men in the churches I’ve attended who are twice my age. This isn’t a boast, I am no scholar. I say this in abject horror and despair.
I’m so angry about this.
My little sister recently won “bible bowl” which is a quiz about her church’s profession of faith. But she was upset while studying, because, in her words, “The answers are worded as if they were for toddlers, but we’re teenagers. They don’t expect us, at our age, to know any of this, so they teach us as if we were small children.”
Theology and church history aren’t being taught at all in a lot of cases. No wonder so many young people leave the church in droves. They have no understanding of their faith. They don’t actually know what it they believe, and if they do have a vague notion, they can’t articulate it. They are at best being taught with curriculum that could be aimed at literal toddlers, and that’s if they’re even being taught anything at all!
We focus so much on fun and fellowship, and the void that is left in the friendly atmosphere is killing off the next generation of Christians and has left the previous generations in a stagnation of ignorance.
^^^^^
Teenagers are ripe for apologetics teaching. Teenagers are ready to start grasping theology and debating doctrine. Teenagers are passionate and eager and smart and yearning for direction and truth, so what do churches do?? Stick them in the basement room with a foosball table and some funky lighting and ‘don’t do drugs, don’t have premarital sex, don’t drink’ lectures with a Bible verse or two thrown in. Throw in a Bible quiz and a pizza night once in a while, wow we’re doing great.
Blessed to have gone to a Christian high school that has you take a theology class every year, taught by people who could actually challenge us to think and learn real apologetics. I loved it, was one of my favorite subjects.
“everyone who says they dont watch porn is lying lol” the fact that you cant even fathom the idea of not watching pornography is concerning
Every time I mention my boyfriend isn’t aroused by porn both men and women get incredibly offended
Why does someone’s lack of porn use offend so many people? Like sorry he doesn’t view women as objects so it’s impossible for him to be aroused by objectifying someone? Their guilt is really showing in these situations.
also ppl have incredibly weak memories and can’t recall that in the time before internet, watching porn on a daily basis was considered embarassing at best in most circles, and at worst, pathetic, creepy, or a huge red flag. having infinite access to an infinite variety of porn about every kink and every type of racism, sexism, incest, and rape imaginable isn’t the Natural Human State.
In just my grandma’s time, if a man was found to be watching porn they were labeled as the neighborhood “pervert” and all women avoided that guy like the plague. Let’s bring that back. Don’t date men who watch porn. They have lower empathy for women, higher risk of erectile dysfunction, and they are more likely to see you as an object, not a human. They struggle to tell if the sounds you make in bed are sounds of pain or pleasure, they literally can’t differentiate if a women is being hurt or feeling good.
It’s way more recent than within your grandma’s lifetime. Hell, I just rewatched the original L word (which aired in the early 2000s) and there are multiple episodes that have female characters expressing disgust over a male’s porn use—including straight characters who treat the discovery of porn use by their male partners as a total dealbreaker! I remember similar plotlines on Sex and the City and other iconic shows from the 90s/early 2000s, too. Porn would never ever be presented as a niche weird/gross proclivity in a tv script today… and yet it regularly was discussed and portrayed as such in media as recently as, like, 2006.
i blame the show friends for the normalisation of men watching porn. the amount of jokes and references to porn in that show is actually shocking, i am sure it created a cultural shift
It’s not just friends. There’s a shift in y2k shows, even something like that 70s show (obviously very anachronistic) and family guy and adult swim shows all normalized porn and watching porn. Porn stars started to enjoy a more mainstream audience from reality shows and guest starring on network shows. The references to porn have been steadily increasing and Friends is a long-time show during the time period when it happened.
Of course porn didn’t used to be normal. Even fairly recently, porn being “normal” meant that you’ve seen racy photos on occasion (involving partial or full nudity) of carefully posed women. When Friends was on the air, this meant Playboy magazines and softcore videos with simulated sex acts. You certainly didn’t see sex acts being performed in detail, let alone some of the material that’s now considered “standard”. Masturbating to high definition videos, for hours every single week (usually every single day) was not even possible before smartphones and high speed internet, let alone normal. It’s scary how quickly it became completely normal to do this behavior, and how quickly it became accepted by men of all political backgrounds.
You’d expect liberal men to object to having their sexuality hijacked by major corporations, the dark money, the problematic nature of the material (the racist titles, the homophobic ones, not to mention, why are videos titled things like “slut learns a lesson” ok but “baby it’s cold outside” should be taken off the radio?) Porn is bigger than the entire US motion picture industry. They make more money than MLB, NFL, and the NBA combined. These are all billion dollar industries, and porn dwarfs them. You’d expect the kind of men who call for amazon boycotts and protesting hate speech to abhor this industry.
You’d expect conservative men to object to the morality of sexually lascivious material being normalized and consumed, particularly by children. You’d expect them to object to young men preferring unnatural images and sex acts over real relationships. You’d also expect them to be against masturbation, considering many major faiths have rules against it.
But both groups of men, with seemingly disparate values, have both twisted their beliefs into a logic pretzel that lets them consume porn and publicly defend it. They will outright admit that they don’t care if the porn they’re watching is nonconsensual, if it features an underage person, if it actually injured someone to make. They don’t care because none of them see women or girls as human beings. Go to any male-dominated social media site and read what they have to say about the women actors in porn. And yet the only people who are viewed as “hateful” are women who object to porn on feminist grounds. It’s completely insane.
I thought of a memory that’s stuck with me for probably close to 6 or 7 years now.
While I was neck-deep in witchcraft, I happened upon a Bible in the trunk of my car. I remember joking with my friend about why it was there since I didn’t believe in God. As I said this, I flipped through the pages nonchalantly, wanting to find some tidbit to read aloud, only to find a passage that spoke about there being only one God.
I also remember one night while I worked in the food industry, a woman walked in and ordered a drink. She paid with a 20 and waited for me to return with her order. When I did, she pressed the change into my hand, looked into my eyes and said “God still loves you.”
Back then, even in my miserable state away from God, denying His existence, addicted to porn, practicing witchcraft, doing drugs, I couldn’t help but cry when she said that. Looking back on it now, I know it’s because I reached a point where I thought I was beyond salvation - that God could never love someone like me if He was real. So, to hear her say that, to feel the sincerity of it, it just hit me in a way that my heart and soul longed for.
I love remembering those moments now. If you’re reading this and think you’re beyond salvation, that God could never love someone like you for whatever reason, I want you to know that God loves you too.
Pro sex work feminists will never make sense to me. they say they know that men attack vulnerable women, that prostitutes are at high risk for sexual violence, that they’re always targeted by serial killers, they back it up with stats, but then believe that by having the government involved, it will some how lower the rates of violence? That these women will be protected. I can’t wrap my head around how they think by legalizing it, somehow human trafficking will go down. They ignore the real numbers of how legalized prostitution have the highest rates of trafficking because traffickers drug and hide their victims as “workers” They don’t seem to understand the grim and very real dark truth that these men’s demands for the most depraved sexual acts outweigh the supply of willing women. That these men will never be satisfied having consenting sex with adults.
I’m happy to see more people hate on porn and bring up how addicting it is like any other hard drug. I see already the younger generation throw away hookup culture completely (mainly from girls) but these pro sex work feminists don’t want to understand how awful their messaging has been. Do you think they’ve been paid for by pimps? Like the whole movement seems to be an agenda by pimps and porn producers to exploit them for financial gain
I always found the “banning xx won’t stop xx from happening” argument ridiculously stupid because….not law every stopped ever crime from happening.
Laws purpose to create a coercion aiming to refrain those crimes from happening. No law states that it’s going to totally eradicate whatever crime or offense they’re targeting.
So pro sex work people pulling out that card to defend sex work should have the same energy to remove law about any other offense too ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Same with pro abortion, who act like illegal abortions still happening in places where it’s illegal is a proof that banning abortion is pointless… Mind you, a bunch of pro abortion people are also anti sex work (such as radfem) and I just can’t with their cognitive dissonance lol (some of them even rebuke the “can’t stop prostitution from happening” argument of the pro sex work squad…….but rehash the SAME argument to defend abortion access, I- 💀)
Do NOT see the new Spiderverse movie if you have any form of epileptic condition or conditions affected by bright lights and rapidly changing colors.
I will not be spoiling the plot or anything happening in it, but it is important that people know, because ohhh my god the AMOUNT of flashing lights and rapidly changing colors from beginning to end was so rampant that even I, a non-epileptic autistic person, got a severe headache and wild overstimulation. They do not give a warning in theaters at all that this movie is NOT epileptic friendly from the literal beginning with the beginning credits - which is so, so sad!
This is a beautifully made film, it’s wonderful, it’s amazing, but unfortunately, it’s not a good time for anyone super affected by bright flashing lights in rapid succession, especially those seizure prone.
I wanted to put this out there BECAUSE there are no theater warnings. Idk if anyone else has put it out there, but it is SUPER IMPORTANT!!!
I wish you all a lovely day and hope they eventually have a remaster that will be much more friendly to epileptic and other people affected by bright, flashing lights.
[plaintext: Do NOT see the new Spiderverse movie if you have any form of epileptic condition or conditions affected by bright lights and rapidly changing colors. /end plaintext]
part of accepting love for me also requires accepting grief, dissolution. my pets will die, my friends may drift from me, lovers may have a change of heart. none of it makes the love in vain. part of accepting love is accepting movement. but love is mostly letting myself get lost in the moment, i am learning. letting myself be fully alive in the now. i dont always need to think that far ahead all the time. the potential exists now.
