thankfully "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" does not include specifications or bare minimums for how functional your heart, soul and mind need to be
Eating is a scandal at the heart of human life. On the one hand because eating implies dismemberment and destruction of that which is consumed: we live by making other beings die. On the other hand because eating reveals a contradiction in the basic structure of human desire. We long to be united with objects and beings outside ourselves, and eating—actual incorporation of an object into our own substance — constitutes the ultimate form of union.
Alec Irwin, "Devoured by God: Cannibalism, mysticism, and ethics in Simone Weil." CrossCurrents (2001): 257-272.
I am the food of strong men; grow, and you shall feed upon me; nor shall you convert me, like the food of your flesh, into you, but you shall be converted into me.
God in St Augustine of Hippo's Confessions (Book VII, 10)
In a notebook, along with passages from the Gita, Weil had copied a fragment from Heraclitus: "'Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, living each other's death and dying each other's life."' Weil's exegesis: "To live the death of a being is to eat it. The reverse is to be eaten. Man eats God and is eaten by God" (OC VI.2.,454). A year and a half after writing these lines, Weil herself was dead, consumed by mycobacterium tuberculosis, by self-starvation, perhaps by the God she yearned to encounter in the depths of affliction.
Alec Irwin, "Devoured by God: Cannibalism, mysticism, and ethics in Simone Weil." CrossCurrents (2001): 257-272.
Christian Cannibalism is sooooo fascinating because it resists the desire to corrupt eros into the consumption of the Other, but through asceticism trains us to learn to love without consuming and instead to offer up our lives to be consumed. It is right to say that cannibalism is a love language, to say it is erotic. Of course it is: to love someone is to love God by loving them, to worship God by offering yourself to them, to gift yourself as a "thing-bringing-near" (qorban; this is the word "offering" in hebrew) and place your being upon the alter to be consumed. To love someone is to drink their blood and eat their flesh; to love someone is to offer our blood and offer our flesh. To love someone is to engage in mutual eating. God unmakes himself because he loves us and wants to be part of us, to nourish us: in being consumed by him, we too are unmade. Humanity eats God and is eaten by God. Theophagy is only possible and cannibalism is only made-holy because of God's self-emptying, because God becomes the qorban, the thing which brings near, first by becoming human, and then by becoming bread and wine.
“Liquid-Life: Eroticism and the Ancient Israelite Roots of Christian Cannibalism”
I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine. Then all flesh shall know that I am the Lord your Saviour, and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.
At their core, all fairy tales have one universal theme: they’re always about hunger. […] Fairy tales are about hunger because they are always, always about something the main protagonist lacks. All forms of hunger are about longing [eros]: When I say that all fairy tales are about hunger, I mean that these stories communicate something universal: the core desires of the human heart. Basic drives like food, sex, companionship, and the pursuit of power are all representative of hunger if you stop to think about it. Protagonists are dead set on fulfilling their hearts’ desires. Conceiving a child. Winning a beautiful maiden’s hand in marriage. Rescuing a village. Defeating monsters. Raising their station. Or even just going to a ball to be free of drudgery and dreariness for a night or two. We’re all looking for something in life. And I can’t think of anything more universal than seeking to satisfy our appetites, whatever form they come in. Wanting to fill an empty belly is the most basic human need there is. That’s the real reason fairy tales rely on food as symbolism. These tales can be incredibly tasty.
One of the best things I've done for my faith is learn about the nuances in the original meaning of "Kyrie, eleison."
It's almost always translated as "Lord, have mercy," and while this made sense in the way the word "mercy" was used centuries ago, it doesn't really line up with the contemporary English meaning. Today, "have mercy" feels pretty solely like pleading to a judge to be pardoned for a crime and can make the church feel like a courtroom rather than a hospital for sinners.
However, the original English (and Greek) meaning was far broader and quite far from this legalistic meaning. "Eleos" was the Greek translation in the Septuagint for the Hebrew word "חֶסֶד," or Chesed, which refers to a steadfast love grounded in the covenant. Furthermore, while we now know they aren't actually etymologically related, "eleos" sounds a lot like "elaion" (olive oil, used for light and medicine), and the Church Fathers (like St. John Chrysostom) associated the two deeply.
When early Christians prayed "Kyrie, eleison," what they meant was something closer to: "Lord, pour out Your healing grace unto me and soothe me." They weren't so much pleading for a mitigation of punishment as they were pleading for God to hold to His Covenant with His people, which entails the treatment of sins and comfort through distress.
So mentally, when I hear or say it, I translate it internally to "Lord, heal us," or "Lord, be gracious." This really helps me genuinely mean it and put my heart into it when I say "Kyrie, eleison" during the Divine Liturgy, or another liturgy.
Your ai icon is not real. You can't venerate it because it's not holy. The rules of iconography is that it has to be made by a prayerful Christian. It HAS to reflect Heaven and the Holy Spirit which is something ai can never understand as it's not alive.
Your ai generated junk is disrespectful to monks, nuns, and other iconographers who dedicate hours, days, maybe even months to their work which is a centuries long tradition. Plus, it's probably also disrespectful to those being depicted in the junk.
Post going around about white supremacist identification with the lord of the rings and how they identify with something that is very much there in the text. And like yes, the book is racist. It uncritically draws on medieval European literary depictions of Muslims (I think the influence of Le Chanson du Roland on the depictions of the Southrons and Easterlings is undeniable, for instance), and the Moria orcs clearly have influence from racist ideas about black people (and, if we're adding reasons to condemn Tolkien, the Mordor orcs seem like barbarian members of the urban proletariat, or the lumpen, that he might have experienced as a middle-class child in Birmingham before the war).
But the post misses two important things: 1) white supremacist readings are actually based on misreadings and selective readings of the text - it's a story where nobody is monopoly Good, where the great king is shown to be wrong about several things, where fall remains a real possibility for any character - including of course the main character - where evil wins by spreading distrust of foreigners and nationalist pride (not a surprise that its Boromir, the great patriot, who falls, even though he redeems himself before the end) and good triumphs by trusting the foreigner and breaking the laws that have been placed against them (over and over again, whether in Gondor, or Rohan, or Lothlórien, or even in Fangorn, Tolkien hammers this point home). White supremacists can only see the superficial east vs west and fails to read the rest of it. Tolkien himself, if we count his opinions, was famously opposed to anti-Semitism and spent his valedictorian address to Oxford, the one thing that as far as he knew at the time would get the most attention of anything he would ever say, condemning Apartheid, in the mid-fifties.
Also b) most white supremacist identification with Lord of the Rings comes from occultic black metal adjacent worlds, where they mainly identify with Sauron.
So like, all I'm saying is that it's possible to acknowledge that there is racism present in the text of the Lord of the Rings without for that reason saying that the white supremacist readings of the text are correct, or ignoring all the other stuff that's in there, and therefore ceding what arguably is the most influential literary work of the 20th century to the white power movement.
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
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