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Prayer

New post! It's been a while but life has been busy. Have a great weekend!

I pray regularly, and I don’t believe a supernatural being is listening. I do it because it works. Do your prayers work? If not, you might be praying incorrectly. Growing up, I was told from a young age that there were supernatural beings engaged in a war over my mind. There were God and Satan, each commanding armies. This war was being waged over humanity, and a portion of that war was waged…

Prayer

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The Golden Lattice

Do not harm oneself and when that is done, Exercise your will and when that is done, Do not treat others how you would not want to be treated and when that is done, Treat others how you want to be treated and when that is done, Do not act as if you are separate from the world and when that is done, Act as one with the world and when that is done, begin again For how can you dance with the wind…

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Ghost of the Machine

One of my closest friends wants to escape their body. Their body is male, 5′ 10″, lithe, attractive, and they want out. Before we had questioned our Christian faith together, they relied on the hope of escaping their body in heaven. But, no longer having that hope, their preferred escape is vampirism; the Twilight variety in particular. They’ve urgently insisted how wonderful the Twilight vampire…

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Terra Meets the Great Pod

Then upon a time, the Great Pod came from the stars.  They had heard the Song of Sol, and wanted to meet their singers.  Many forms were a part of the Great Pod.  They swam, galloped, floated, scuttled, jetted, slid, and skipped.  As they approached, they sang a harmony to the Song of Sol with their many voices.   The Great Pod approached Sol, the star where they heard the song.  Sol was a warm…

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The Honorable Harvest

This week I’ve read reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Kimmerer and its amazing. It’s one of those books I wish I read years ago; stuffed with ideas that make my world feel bigger. I want to highlight the tenets of the Honorable Harvest, as articulated by Kimmerer. It feels very relevant to me for Terranism, especially since I’ve been working on its ethical commandments. Kimmerer articulates these…

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Job - Chapter 2

The land of Uz collected themselves after the calamity. For most, repairs entailed a shattered pot, or fixing a roof. But for Job there was nothing to collect. All had been taken from him. Job and his wife mourned their children; his clothes torn, his skin dusty with ash. Their wailing could be heard from the city as they put them to rest in their barren fields. Eilish attended the funeral, as…

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Strange Rites :: Review

I have been annoyed at the popular discourse surrounding religion lately. I cracked open Woke Racism by McWhorter in the store and was pretty disappointed by his assertions that antiracist ideology is a religious system. It seems that if people notice a group any more substantial than a clique they’ll inevitably call it a religion or cult, especially if they don’t like them. I’ve seen this done…

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Moral Categories

Is a soul more important than a spirit? I’ve been struggling with the structure of my moral system, particularly the distinction between souls and spirits. In my experiment with a moral argument concerning bestiality, the two categories served me well. They allowed me to distinguish between different forms of consent available to different kinds of creatures. Using this distinction ennobles the…

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Annals of Xanadu - Problem 1

In the land of Xanadu, all problems have a perfect solution! Oh that we all could live in Xanadu! On this day, the wise ruler of Xanadu reconvenes their court. A trade treaty is in question. The treaty will involve a shipment of goods to the neighbouring nation once every month. Each shipment will consist of exactly five goods – two energy goods, and three domestic goods. The energy goods are…

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Rock, Turtle, Spaceship!

What metaphor best suits Terra?

This project has progressed to the point where I need to pin down what, exactly, is the metaphor for Terra. My doctrine post entitled “Gods” has been sitting unfinished since I started it back in 2020. Looking at it is a constant reminder that the center of this whole thing remains nebulous. How do we think about Terra? What do we do about that thinking? Answering these questions will, I think,…

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What to say about death?

A brief meditation on the role of death in religion.

In the last week, I’ve watched Velvet Buzzsaw and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness; both great movies and both interested in death. They got me thinking about death as a concept, and what role religion has in relation to it. Like everyone, I’ve been confronted with the death of others and have had to come to terms with my own. There were the controlled exposures with ramping…

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Job - Chapter 1

New post! Today is the first chapter in a retelling of Job, the classic myth.

In the land of Uz there was a man named Job.  He was a good man and confident in his righteousness.  Everyone in Uz respected Job.  When he visited town from his estate on the steppes, bandits would leave him alone and the merchants would always offer honest prices.  The landowners would bow to him and the poor would look up to him.  His actions were blameless, and he resisted evil at every…

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Secular Syntheism (and my hopelessness)

New post today! I define secular syntheism and meditate on why I became a Terran.

There are options for those who are not interested in religion. One of them is secular syntheism; the belief that gods are made up and you, personally, are fine without them. Since I worship a god, I am not a secular syntheist. However, I believe that a healthy and modern religion should be capable of understanding the secular space and respecting it. Not everyone needs religion after all.…

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Down To The Ground - Peter Gabriel

Down To The Ground – Peter Gabriel

Verse 1 Did you think that your feet had been bound By what gravity brings to the ground? Did you feel you were tricked By the future you picked? Well, come on down All these rules don't apply When you're high in the sky So come on down Come on down Verse 2 Did you think you'd escaped from routine By changing the script and the scene? Despite all you made of it You're always afraid of the…

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Science has Entered an Emergence Paradigm

New post! Today I'm meditating on why science shifted to see the universe holistically.

Science has been changing for almost a century now. Race, sex, culture, physics, and many other topics were based on an essentialist paradigm describing the universe. Now, there’s a push towards understanding the world as emergent. Beginning with the advances made in the fields of cybernetics and facilitated by the perspective of big data, science has shifted into a more holistic way of seeing…

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All Things Bright and Beautiful :: Hymn

New post! Today we celebrate Terra's beauty with a hymn.

RefrainAll things bright and beautiful,all creatures great and small,all things wise and wonderful,our homeworld has them allVerse 1Each little bud that opens,each little bird that sings,Terra blushes through their colours,Terra flies through all their wings. [Refrain]Verse 2The purple-headed mountains,the river running by,the sunset, and the morningthat brightens up the sky.[Refrain]Verse 3The…

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Arcane Principles

New post! Today we're introducing the arcane principles: hormoma, critoma, pleroma, and kenoma.

These are the arcane principles of the cosmos; hormoma, critoma and kenoma. Simply, these three principles can be understood as “anything”, “something”, and “nothing” respectively. The table below provides associations that can help with understanding. Table of…

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