Mind & Heart

Beth // Christian // US certified fiction lover // collector of fun facts // bit by the music theory bug IDK this is just my blog me, my characters, and my music taste against the world

[thejackalhasarrived]

I will eat you in manageable, bite-sized pieces. — Burton Guster

[cykelops]

chatgpt is a threat to the symbiotic relationship between fanfic writers and their betas. we are losing our traditions. eradicate the soulless machine and ask your friend who has a full time job and 3 kids to annotate your omegaverse fanfiction like any other responsible adult.

[playing-with-colors]

[theladyeowyn]

Éowyn, do you not love me?

[parlaypeach]

my professor said “does no one have any curiosity about anything anymore?” and I’ve been thinking about it every day for a week

[thedeliaishere]

theistic crystal shop: these crystals will align your chakras and induce spiritual healing

materialist crystal shop: these crystals will make you feel better because they're a cool part of nature and pretty to look at :)

agnostic crystal shop: no one knows why the crystals are good.

[synnthamonsugar]

The pilot -> astronaut pipeline makes complete sense but is also funny to me. There's a secret second sky and if you get good enough at doing sky you can do space.

[iobsesswaytoomuch1]

I may be having a day but at least Hamlet is always having a worse one <3

[galacticsabc]

Did a little screenshot study and then turned it into a phone lockscreen.

and oh hey! you can use it as a phone lockscreen too!

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

"How many thousands picture Christianity as something old, sapless, joyless, mumbling in the chimney corner and casting sour looks at the young people's fun? How many think of religion as the enemy of life and the flesh and the pleasures of the flesh; a foe to all love and all delight? How many unconsciously conceive of God as rather like the famous lady who said, "Find out what the baby's doing and make him stop" ?

That is, how many of us both inside the Church and out have reduced the good news out of Nazareth to a list of thou-shalt-nots?

Quite a few, doubtless, or we should not always be worrying and teasing at the Decalogue and making reinterpretations like this one. Nor should we have so many materialist writers who talk sneeringly of "religionists" and their out-dated superstitions which interfere so unscientifically with man's fine, free gratification of his natural instincts (a term which in this context usually means only one instinct). True enough, we are having a religious revival at the moment. We are crying out to be rescued from the deadly terrors of the world we have made. Peace of mind, peace of soul, peace of heart-our spiritual leaders promise them all, and we, for whom there is no peace, snatch at them in our bewilderment and despair. God, for many of us, is a life preserver flung to a drowning man.

And so he is, if you happen to be drowning. But you can't drown all the time. Sooner or later you have to start merely living again; you reach shore, splutter the water out of your lungs--and then what? Throw away the life preserver? If your interest in God is based upon fear rather than love, very likely. In such a case, you will be willing to pay very high for that life preserver as you go down for the third time; you will ofter for it all your worldly treasures, your lusts and greeds and vanities and hates. But once safely on shore, you may be minded to throw it away and snatch your treasures back.

We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him. Otherwise our Christianity is no better than the cannibal's. We shall try to be negatively good, and make a virtue of misery; plume ourselves on the rejection of delights for which we are too weak, measure our piety by the number of pleasures we prohibit. And others will react against us by rejecting religion altogether, probably announcing with pride that they are choosing "life" instead. Saint Augustine phrased the Christian law as "have charity and do what you like." The modern materialist often makes it simply "do what you like," and then rushes off to ask his psychoanalyst why he no longer seems to like anything. Whereas the Pharisee, alas, tends to invert Augustine into: "Neither do what you like nor have charity."

Either way, this is not the good news but a counsel of despair and defeat, at best of escape. This is not the law of Moses but a meaningless law of fear: "Thou shalt not enjoy life" was never Christ's teaching; it is we who have brought our terror and impotence into religion, and then accused religion of bringing it to us. For we live in an age of fear, and we have infected our very faith with our paralysis, as certain previous ages infected it with their cruelty. No wonder the Decalogue makes us uncomfortable, We have turned it from a thrilling affirmation into a dull denial.

Yet there was the sound of trumpets in it once."

Joy Davidman in "Smoke on the Mountain", reaching through time and calming my greatest fear about faith.

[goatsgomoo]

Man this store has a weird playlist, it's all Weird Al songs but with the lyrics switched out for ones that aren't funny.

[obsidian-sphere]

Interior art by an uncredited artist from 1922 of a "Flapper Vamp."

[starsnot]

have you ever seen a cow in real life

i see cows every day

i see cows very often

i only see cows occasionally, but often enough that it isnt unusual

i have only seen cows a few times

i have seen cows once

i have seen cows but only at a Place To See Animals

i have never seen a cow

Remaining time: 2 days 3 hours

if you used to see cows consistently but you dont anymore, answer according to how often you did at cow time!

[starsnot]

only poll response that matters

[dogpuppy]

[thoodleoo]

reading a quote from marcus aurelius's meditations to my middle school students at the start of every class has been one of the best decisions i ever made as a teacher, partly because it exposes them to ancient literature but mostly because now i have a bunch of twelve year olds who talk like this

[theriu]

The baby starling (Cricket) I rescued is learning to sing and he tried singing along with my KH Melody of Memory game. He's terribly out of tune but he's got the spirit!

[renthony]

I was 12 when the first of my siblings was born, so I have very vivid memories of the way my mother was excluded from a lot of spaces because people find children annoying.

If you think "children should not be allowed in this space," you HAVE TO reckon with the fact that you are now excluding parents (and very often women specifically) who don't have access to childcare. You are isolating people who are poor, or rural, or single parents, or any number of other factors that might prevent someone from having on-demand childcare. You are cutting them off from being able to exist in public. You are denying parents and children the ability to fully participate in society.

My mom spent several years only leaving the house to buy groceries or take me to school, and even then, people would still come up to her to complain TO HER FACE about how she shouldn't bring a crying toddler to Walmart. Entitled strangers would literally try and demand that my mom leave and come back without the kids.

"Why can't your husband watch them?" Because he was at work, usually working extreme amounts of overtime so we didn't get evicted, because landlords don't like it when you stop paying rent.

"Why can't you send them to daycare?" Because that costs money.

"Why can't your teenager stay home with them and babysit?" Because I also deserved to be able to leave the house for something other than school, and taking me to the grocery store was how my mom taught me to manage a household budget, shop sales, and meal plan.

"Don't bring your kid in public if you can't CONTROL them and make them stop crying!" Kids cry when they're upset, and being dragged around a store is upsetting! Don't be an asshole! Children are human beings who are still learning how the world works, and they don't have a lot of agency. You'd cry, too.

"Spank them until they learn to stop crying!" That's just straight-up child abuse, Jesus Christ.

What the fuck was our family supposed to do? Never go to the grocery store? Starve because strangers couldn't handle a toddler existing in public?

[renthony]

I am incredibly fucking disturbed at the way this post has brought people out of the woodwork who really want to tell me all about how hitting kids isn't actually abuse, how they think babies are the spawn of Satan, and how being confined to the home is an acceptable punishment for women who dare to have children. People have told me all about how they think children should be banned from airplanes, that I'm being inconsiderate to childfree people, that allowing crying babies in public is ableist against people with sensory issues (I have those, too, and so do many children, which is often WHY THEY ARE CRYING, jackass), and that people who have children are "irresponsible" and "selfish."

I have blocked multiple people who went on tirades about how I'm a "horrible breeder" who is "contributing to overpopulation" and how I and my "spawn" deserve to be trapped at home. (I am infertile and my foster kid is an adult now, so I don't know what breeding and spawn they think they're talking about.)

One person asked if I was posting ragebait for fun because "this isn't a real issue." Several have asked if this "really happens" and told me that my "experience isn't universal." (There are multiple parents in the comments who have agreed with me and talked about how hard it is to navigate the world with their kids.)

Children are an oppressed class who are treated like absolute vermin. Parents are given absolutely no support in caring for them. Good parents are set at a disadvantage even when they have all the best intentions, struggling parents aren't given resources to improve their situation or get community assistance, and blatantly abusive parents don't get caught because hitting and screaming and controlling are considered perfectly normal ways to treat a child. Communities would rather shut kids away where they can be ignored and forgotten and mistreated, all for the sin of "being annoying in public."

Youth liberation is vital, regardless of whether you, personally, like kids. You cannot ban children from public. You cannot shut children away in isolation and expect them to grow into happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults who can function in our society. You do not get to demand children be removed from every corner of public life all for your personal comfort.

Children are people.