#notalwaysluminous

[wanderingmoroi]

notalwaysluminous replied to your photo “coffeeforthemoon: © Darling Magazine”

like I said before, your blog looks like a real moroi princess :) hope you're doing awesome today

awww thank you!!!! I’m having a wonderful day! I just finished a Skype interview for a summer internship!

[fatgirlgetsfitatlast]

notalwaysluminous replied to your photo “2017.02.08 Weekly Weigh-in / Check in I am the only person I know who...”

What app is that?

It links to my scale via bluetooth, it’s called weightgurus . I’m sure you could use it without the scale, but, of course, you’d have to enter your numbers manually. 

[clairsaffitz]

And now it’s time to meet your Chopped competitors: Diesel Dyke, Sob Story, Incessant Trash Talker, and Frenchman Who Has to be Subtitled Even Though He’s Speaking English Because His Accent is So Strong.

tag yourself i’m Incessant Trash Talker

[oitnbmoments-blog]

(x) and you're my fav oitnb blog, you help with the withdrawals waiting on s4!

Norma :) I’m so glad you like it! Doing this helps me as well !

[mugglebornheadcanon]

1611. Catholic muggleborn witches using a spell instead of 5493284 bobby pins to keep their chapel veils on their heads — soooo much easier! 

[entanglingbriars]

ze/zir = your preferred pronouns?

zie/zir or they/them, depending on whether you prefer the awkwardness of neopronouns or the awkwardness of the singular they.

[ad-aeternum]

Mere Christianity

I really struggle with C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.  Some kindly adult gave me a copy when I was about 15, and I didn’t make it far in before giving up on it as non-sensical.  I didn’t try again until last year, as an adult, and I still had a hard time getting through it.  Is it just me?  I’m curious how others feel about the book.

Before I dive into this, here's some context: I’m a non-cradle Episcopalian.  I lean extremely high church.  I’m a (cis) lesbian.  I love science.  I see zero contradiction between these aspects of my self-identity.  I grew up Methodist, got confirmed to please my family, and then promptly chucked religion because it didn’t make any sense to me and I couldn’t see the point.  Then I aged some and realized that there are different types of making sense and that actually Christianity speaks to me in a pretty profound way, and now I’m the kind of Episcopalian who prays the Hours and doesn’t understand textual literalism.  I do not have a background in theology or philosophy, but I read books sometimes and like to talk about them with people because learning is good.

Onward: I don’t necessarily disagree with Lewis’ theology per se, it’s more the direction from which he’s coming at it, if that makes any sense.  Book Two, “What Christians Believe," is the section that really throws me, and the below is really just about that section.

Lewis spends a lot of time in this section making rational arguments about religious “truth,” including proving that a single Creator God exists, and it’s kind of a miss for me. His need to paint religious truths as inherently logical, in the scientific sense, and as something that can be derived using the scientific method, result in his reducing complicated, nuanced concepts (like “good” and “bad”) to simplistic ghosts of themselves.  To be honest, the fact that he’s trying to “prove” anything in the scientific sense disappointed me.  Religion isn’t science, and science isn’t religion; each has its own sphere of truth, and each would do well to stay out of the other’s sphere.  Proofs like the above feel uncomfortably Venn-diagram-y to me, with science trying to do religion or vice versa.  There’s a reason we go on about “Mystery”; sometimes you can’t science your way through something, and that’s where religion comes in, because it’s a different kind of thing and provides or illuminates a different kind of truth.

(Also, Karen Armstrong addressed the religious truth vs. scientific truth thing really well in A Short History of Myth and The Case for God, and I want to send copies back in time to C.S. Lewis to see what he’d make of them.  I’m genuinely curious.) 

Anyway, once he finishes proving a single creator god, he tries to logic his way through soteriology, specifically atonement.  Part of my struggle here is that I’m not sure how literal he’s being.  It’s like… you know how Marcus Borg had to write an entire book re-presenting commonly-used Christian words?  The previous chapters — with their emphasis on logic and rational arguments — make me wonder if maybe Lewis wasn’t a bit of a literalist, in a way that I’m not, and so maybe his words don’t have the same shades of meaning that they have when I use them.  I agree with him on the surface, but if we pull the surface back, there may be a gulf between our different understandings.  This surprised me; I don’t know why.

In the end, I think he just approaches the idea of religion, religious practice, and spirituality a little differently than I do, and I have a hard time connecting with his approach.  I’m an engineer, and I like cerebral arguments about things that both do and do not matter, but when it comes to religion, I can’t wrap this sort of rational/scientific logic around it and have it still make sense to me.  To define something is to limit it, and so I don’t think logical, explicit definitions of things like salvation or the incarnation are useful.  Clearly others do not have a hard time with his tack, though; this book has been selling well for about a billion years.  And anyway, an alternative to logical definitions is to tell a story, and he did that in another series of books.  Which I haven’t read since I was about 10.  Maybe I should re-read them and see how they sit.

[jesusmovement]

THE SUNDAY QUESTION Which religious leaders inspire you as an LGBT+ person?

notalwaysluminous answered your post: The Right Rev. Gene Robinson, The Right Rev. Barbara Harris, The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori

enriquemolina answered: Mel White, Gene Robinson, Desmond Tutu