light me up I’m wasted in the dark

CD. Gentleman of the road. Universal. Ex-suicide. Late to the party. Ultreia!

[apesoformythoughts]

Bleachers – “I Wanna Get Better” // Ted Lasso 2.06, “The Signal” // Bleachers – “Let’s Get Married” // Mumford & Sons – “The Wolf” // Frank Turner - “Get Better”

[apesoformythoughts]

‘How does it feel to grow up in a society whose young can barely afford anywhere to live, let alone dream of owning a family home? In a world in which mothers should not be assumed to be female, and “chestfeeding” is something that daddy can do too? Among the manic promotion of radical individualism, with greed and lust and pride not warned against but sponsored? With a generational fear of the future which leads increasing numbers to not want families at all?

[…] The loss of the security of a home is, in some way, the loss of the heart of things, and the most local and personal manifestation of triumph of the Machine.’

— Paul Kingsnorth: Against the Machine

[apesoformythoughts]

“My point is not that women should get back into the kitchen: it is that we all should, and into the other rooms of the home too. Machine modernity prised the men away from the home first, as the Industrial Revolution broke their cottage industries and swept them into the factories and mines, where their brute strength could be useful to the Machine. Later the women, who had been mostly left to tend the home single-handedly, were subject to the same ‘liberation’, which was sold to them as a blow struck against inequality. Perhaps it was, but it was also a blow struck against the home, for both sexes.”

— Paul Kingsnorth: Against the Machine

[apesoformythoughts]

“Certainly the feminist movement, by accident or design, has either been hijacked by or has morphed into Machine capitalism. The liber-ation' of women has often translated into the separation of women from their self-sufficiency, as men were separated before them, and their embedding instead into the world of commerce, whether they want it or not. Today's liberated' woman is liberated from her home and children, who will be looked after by a paid stranger while she is out adding numbers to the gross national product like the men were before. ‘Freedom’, the highest prize, is always to be sought and won away from home, family and place.”

— Paul Kingsnorth: Against the Machine

[wren-clouds]

The Odyssey but make it a Christian allegory.

The war is over, it's won. The king is coming back. But no one knows when he will return, they just wait for him. And evil forces are at work, plotting, abusing, taking over. But the king is coming--he has won the war and he is coming home. He will bring justice and punishment for evil when he returns, and he will claim his bride and elevate his son. No one knows when he is coming, but his wife remains faithful, waiting. His son remains watchful, waiting.

The king is coming.

[karas-demon-blog]

that’s so deeply insulting to hellinistic religions who have forever been pushed down because of Christianity. Some things aren’t for you.

[wren-clouds]

God created everything, so everything has some echo of His story in it somewhere if you look. A pre-Christ story mirroring God's great story is a beautiful sign of His hand in history

[karas-demon-blog]

Oh you are one of those people who thinks that your religion is better than everything else

[wren-clouds]

Someone's religion has to be true--why not the one where God comes down to man to restore a relationship? Every other religion is man trying to reach or appease a god/gods. The true God is so full of love, he became human and died. So yeah, my God is better than every other God because he is Love, and he is real.

[greater-than-the-sword]

Hellenism has already been so extensively co-opted by Christianity over the last 1000 years that I'm honestly shocked there is still anyone bothering to make this argument. Hellenism is a dead religion because Christianity killed it, we have the right of conquest tbh

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

If the early church fathers can see God in the stories the Pagens tell, then so can I.

[tlaquetzqui]

Hellenistic paganism was dead long before Christ. It’s doubtful the thing was even just moribund by Homer’s day. I live in a place where the polytheists really believe in their gods: Navajos and Hopis do not treat them the way the Greeks did.

Also, with all possible honor to the Olympians, they are by no means the same thing as the Holy One of Israel. He’s the Ground of Being, the One of the Platonists, the Buddhists’ Matrix of Enlightenment; Zeus the Thunderer, Hades the All-Hospitable, and Poseidon the Earth-Shaker are just the kind of thing Indra is. A god is a “conditioned” being, but God with a capital G is not, he’s Being itself, unconditioned.

[incubator-zero]

Nope, there were apparently hellenistic groups well into at least the 3rd century AD, and possibly into the 9th century.

Also are you high?

I mean seriously it takes two seconds to find this stuff, and claiming its all just "one religion that happens to be secretly yours" is some serous colonial bullshit.

[tlaquetzqui]

I’m not high, you’re illiterate.

Oh, people continued to practice “Hellenistic paganism” well into the 5th century, at least. But it wasn’t a living religion. It was a corpse being propped up on a throne to pretend the king wasn’t dead. But he was. Again: I live in a place where the gods are really believed in. They do not talk about them the way the Greeks talked about theirs. Homer is already writing about a religion preserved out of tradition, not actively dictating the lives of its practitioners.

I’m not even sure what that last paragraph is supposed to mean, mostly because—being illiterate—you can’t write coherently either. But to respond to what you seem to be attempting to say: unlike the Greeks back even to Homer’s time, real religions believe that they’re talking about an external reality. Navajos believe Haashchʼééłtiʼí might just show up behind them, possibly giving his call first, as he does throughout their mythology. Christians believe God is an external entity that exists whether anyone knows it or not. And to Hen, he Monas, that Plato talks about, the Tathagatagarbha of Buddhism, is demonstrably the same external entity that exists whether anyone knows it, as Ha-Qadosh Yisrael, Actus Subsistens Essendi. Just like how Dook’o’oosłííd and Nuva’tukya’ovi are the same mountain.

[apesoformythoughts]

“Sometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may be his highest duty to cling to every scrap of the past that he can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture.”

— G.K. Chesterton: Introduction to A Child’s History of England

[apesoformythoughts]

“When you have [Christ], you are rich enough, and He alone will be sufficient to you. Then He will be your provider and defender and your faithful helper in every necessity, so that you will not need to put your trust in any other save Him […]

Put your full trust, therefore, in God. Let Him be your love and fear above all things, and He will answer for you, and will do for you in all things as shall be most needful and most expedient for you.”

— The Imitation of Christ, II-1

[tlaquetzqui]

Contrary to the legend, the Inquisitions were actually scrupulously fair, certainly by Early Modern and even Medieval court standards, let alone compared to East Asian or Islamic court systems. The Spanish Inquisition, the least fair (due to being a somewhat paranoid spy-hunt occasioned by the mopping up after a 700-year war for national survival), still had an acquittal rate upwards of 80%; the Albigensian Inquisition of the Middle Ages, and the Roman Inquisition contemporary with the Spanish one but starting later and technically never ended (now it’s called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—Benedict XVI, in other words, is a former Grand Inquisitor), had acquittal rates upwards of 90%. All three executed only a small minority—3–5% for the Albigensian one—of those they convicted, with the rest having penalties like “go on a pilgrimage” or “donate 10% of your income to charity for a period of years” imposed instead. The Albigensian Inquisition invented several of Common Law’s protections for the accused, like the presumption of innocence; they also had a rule of automatically excluding testimony from the known personal enemies of the accused, unless it could be independently corroborated.

Meanwhile current Japanese and South Korean courts—to say nothing of the courts in the communist dictatorships in East Asia, the nationalist military dictatorships that previously ruled South Korea and Taiwan, or the Neoconfucian dictatorships of the last several centuries—have conviction rates of about 98%, frequently accomplished by coerced confessions that may well involve actual torture, or psychological pressure that could be compared to torture with only slight exaggeration. (So when anime talk about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the word “chutzpah” comes inescapably to mind—their legal systems right now are not particularly preferable, let alone the ones that existed contemporary with the Inquisition. The Tokugawa Shogunate killed about 100 times as many people as the Spanish Inquisition just at its three main execution grounds, with far more brutal tortures, and in two-thirds as long as the Inquisition was in operation for. And that is not counting the court-imposed harakiri for members of the upper classes.)

If you want a term for something where protesting innocence is used as evidence of guilt, and so on, “show trial”, “kangaroo court”, or, yes, “witch hunt” is the term you want. (The Inquisitions shut down witch hunts, which is part of why those were a largely Protestant phenomenon. Indeed, due to mere belief in witchcraft having been declared heresy at Paderborn in 785 AD, under Charlemagne, the Inquisition occasionally tried and executed witch-hunters.)

[the-quasar-hero]

Assign an aspect of nature to prev

Waves at the beach

Rushing breeze through leaves

A crack of thunder

Flow of a river

The shine of a gem

Dancing embers of a flame

Torrential rain

Slow falling snow

An emerald sea of grass

Austere cliffside

A maze of roots

The endless oceans

Voting ended onJul 11

[emziess]

Dr. Grace? Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller

[apesoformythoughts]

"This past March, Greece’s Council of State ruled to uphold the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. The ruling comes only two years after Greece became the first Orthodox Christian country to legally recognize same-sex marriage. The strongest opposition to the ruling came from Greek Orthodox clergy—and, shockingly, from the Greek Communist Party (KKE). The party argued that granting same-sex couples the right to marry and adopt undermines the “complementary function of man and woman in the process of procreation” and risks “commercializing” children, thereby denying their “social rights.” Such an argument sounds foreign to Western—especially American—ears [...]

While most leftists view gay marriage, gender self-identification, and abortion as emancipatory causes, traditional leftists view these as part of a broader push to turn individuals into consumers who are perpetually seeking to gratify their whims—which are increasingly shaped by corporate interests. Alas, it’s rare to find American leftists who still believe sexual “liberation” runs contrary to the liberation of the poor [...]

Marxist dialectical materialism overlooks the metaphysical meaning of marriage and sexuality, which are oriented not only toward building a stable society but toward true flourishing and communion with God and others. And a Stalinist insistence on class warfare by means of violent revolution and opposition to religion run contrary to Church teaching on solidarity and religious freedom. But the KKE and other communist movements are right to insist that sexual morality is not a private or “individual” matter. On the contrary, it is intimately tied to the Common Good—especially to the rights of the poor and other marginalized groups."

— Stephen G. Adubato: "Sexual Ethics Is a Social Justice Issue"

[apesoformythoughts]

Can’t find that Tolkien quote about minds of hope, “does no Estel(?) at all abide?”, ahhhh

[apesoformythoughts]

sic semper Nederlandia

[apesoformythoughts]

The Silver Chair but the Green Lady is playing the fiddle telling everybody how AI is actually conscious and intelligent and how it will solve everything wrong with the world.

[apesoformythoughts]

Need to draw a gang of super friends named Rerum, Centesimus, Fides, Laudato, and Laborem.

[apesoformythoughts]

‘The same absence of vision is manifested . . . in the dangers which daily arise from culture itself […]

This added danger comes from many and varied sources; especially does it come from that power over existence which is the very foundation for present cultural growth. Modern man believed that an increase of power meant an increase of "progress" itself, that it advanced man in his security, usefulness, welfare and vigor; it was an assimilation of new values into the stream of culture. Power, however, is truly a thing more powerful than any of those things. It can create evil as well as good; it can destroy as well as construct. What happens to power depends upon man's tempered exercise of it, upon the reasoned ends to which he places it.

Close examination proves that recent years have been marked by a monstrous growth in man's power over being, over things and over men, but the grave responsibility, the clear consciousness, the strong character needed for exercising this power well have not kept pace with its growth at all. Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well nor has he—even in its loosest sense—an awareness of the problem itself.’

— Romano Guardini: The End of the Modern World

[apesoformythoughts]

‘No man truly aware of his own human nature will admit that he can discover himself in the theories of modern anthropology—be they biological, psychological, sociological or any other. Only the accidents of man—his attributes, his relations, his forms—make up these theories; they never take man simply as he is. They speak about man, but they never really see man. They approach him, but they never truly find him […] They take hold of him by statistics; they integrate him into organizations; they put him into use. Forever they play out the same grotesque and fearful comedy, but its incidents strike always upon a phantom. Even when man is subjected to forces which misuse him or mutilate or destroy him, he is not the creature at all which those forces aim to subject.

As seen by the contemporary mind man does not exist. The mind of today attempts continually to lock man into categories where he will not fit. Mechanical, biological, psychological or sociological abstractions are all variations of a basic urge to make man one with "nature," even if it be a "nature of the spirit." But a vital reality escapes this type of mind; namely, man's very act of being which constitutes a man in the primitive, absolute sense, which makes man a man at the very core of his self, which makes him a finite person existing. This is what the existing man is even when he does not want to be, even when he denies his own nature. Called by God into being, man encounters other things and persons in existence, but the new mind does not see that in those relations man is a person possessed of a marvelous yet frightful freedom, that he is capable of conserving or of destroying the world, that he is capable of fulfilling or of surrendering and destroying himself in his very substance.’

— Romano Guardini: The End of the Modern World