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#return of jesus christ
According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 percent of Americans believe that life on earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity. Thirty one percent believe that evolution has been "guided by God." If our worldview were put to a vote, notions of "intelligent design" would defeat the science of biology by nearly three to one. This is troubling, as nature offers no compelling evidence for an intelligent designer and countless examples of unintelligent design. But the current controversy over "intelligent design" should not blind us to the true scope of our religious bewilderment at the dawn of the twenty first century. The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists.
This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect our presidents and congressmen - and many who themselves get elected—believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the earth, and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.
Among developed nations, America stands alone in these convictions. Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dimwitted giant. Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one's friends. The truth, however, is that many of us may not care about the fate of civilization. Forty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
-- Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation” (2006)
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2olivetrees · 2 months
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What You Should Be Doing and Why (Part 3)
I want to issue a public apology to my son, Bryant, who I love with all my heart. As I was editing this Bible study on Feb. 8th, 2024, I recognized my hypocrisy when I was correcting you. I have prayed to God the Father to forgive me and to put it in your heart to forgive me as well. Being a faithful Christian is a life-long process that includes making many mistakes. You were absolutely right…
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unsurebisexualcore · 3 months
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opened my dash and the first thing i saw was:
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i feel like someone punched me in the face so hard they sent me back to the 4th grade
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mcrbois · 1 year
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wow.
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TONY: Standing next to sunflowers always makes me feel weak. Like, 'look at this fucking flower. This flower is taller than I am. This flower is winning and I am losing.'
STEPHEN: Wow, you are not ready to hear about trees.
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reggiestein · 7 months
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I had a dream that the next update was him-focused and i woke up and exploded.. manifesting🙏...
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ghostpajamas · 3 months
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rewatching jcs 2000 for the ~10th time and reading the last days of judas iscariot within 2 days of each other . its kicking in
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p1neapplerum · 1 year
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*thinks about them* *explodes*
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gardenerian · 9 months
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I have to say something and I am really sorry. But I hate Ian in season 5 😭 I know he was sick but he hurt my baby girl Mick so bad 💔 is there anything you'd like to say to me so I don't hate season 5-6 Ian? I wanna be better
oh my fucking god. yeah, i've got something i'd like to say. you wanna be better? then be better. that's it, that's all there is. i cannot believe you'd think that i should have to say anything to you about hating a fictional teenage boy suffering through the worst tragedy of his life. if you can't handle it, you shouldn't be watching this show.
because guess what? mickey isn't fucking real. he doesn't need this from you. feel for his hurting, sure. feel upset or confused, sure. but your baby girl is just fine without this energy. not only does this attitude trivialize ian, it infantilizes mickey.
have we really forgotten one of the core tenets of this show: that people fuck up and hurt each other, but we can choose to salvage the relationships that are worth it to us? yes, people that are sick can hurt people, even if they love them. it's a real thing. but every single one of these characters is flawed. baby girl hurt plenty of people as well, and we love him still.
and putting aside this show for a goddamn moment, you know what is real? this illness. i'm fucking real. i'm sick. and i'm so fucking tired of seeing what i go through trivialized here. so for you to not only feel this way, but to think that i need to know about it - and that i should have to hold your hand through it??? it's bullshit. this mindset totally glosses over what mania and hypersexuality actually are, and "i know he's sick but..." doesn't mean anything if you don't think about it.
i've seen too many posts on the dash lately forgetting about the tragedy of ian's illness - the illness that many of us deal with daily. let's talk about it; let's find moments of lightness where we can, sure, but the moment you think "oh this is funny" or "oh i need help with this" - fucking think about it first. think about how you're saying it and WHY.
you didn't have to say this and i don't think you're sorry. if you really wanted to talk this through, there are a million different ways to start the conversation. if i thought you really wanted to talk about ian, that might be different. but i think you knew what you were doing here, and if i didn't think the dash needed to hear this, i'd have deleted and blocked you immediately. be fucking better.
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Working through Penumbra season one and oh god fuck I forgot about the kissing.
As someone who’s aroace and hates the sound of literally anyone kissing, this is my personal hell.
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fvckw4d · 2 months
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"other countries have poor people but worse, don't speak usamerican" fuck you actually. Shiver in my freezing ass cockroach infested poisoned water mold ladened lead paint flaking ass apartment with me. "At least you're not the REAL poor or getting bombed or whatever" repeat what you said back slowly and then jump into the poisioned river down my street. Starve with me. Bitch.
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"It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of 'apocalypse.'" -- Riley Finn
They can't wait to die.
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alevens · 14 days
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okay so i finally got to the timeskip!!! quick question tho when do they get Ivankov to give Robin, Usopp and Zoro their melanin back? surely they don't just get whitewashed, right? surely the don't stay white for the rest of the series, haha... right guys?? surely toei won't keep making them even lighter, right???? guys, guys tell me they don't-
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After seeing Reina's ending..I just absolutely hate her. She's even more insufferable than I first believed. If there is another game, it'll probably be all about her because Harada can't get off Heihachi's dick.
Also how dare she treat Kazuya that way.
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mcrbois · 2 years
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Look at their eyes. See how big they are? It's because they're looking at God.
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iridescentoracle · 7 months
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Hello! I am here to ask about your Dior headcanons re: the political cohesion of Doriath. 👀
Oh man, I didn't expect anyone to actually take me up on that!
(Okay so I got partway into writing this and then realized I should probably note up front that I tend to stick to the Silm (& LOTR/the Hobbit where applicable, but they... aren't, here) as the most authoritative version of canon, and I can get into why and where the nuances/exceptions are there (I do say tend to stick, it's not hard and fast!), but that's mostly a side note here: the point is simply that I don't really factor other drafts or the poetic Leithian into my take on Doriath, Thingol, Dior, etc, just what we're told in the actual Silm. I also read the Silm as an in-universe history text compiled by in-universe scholars, who, being people, are going to have their own biases and blind spots, even when they're doing their best to be accurate!)
So, this is a two-part thing: #1, there's the political cohesion of Doriath before & at the time of Thingol's death, which i talked about in the tags of the post that prompted this ask but is kind of necessary as context for the Dior part to make sense, and #2, there's the actual Dior headcanons. Both of these parts are very long because I've never really seen anyone else suggest any of this stuff and I want to explain where I'm coming from thoroughly enough that it actually makes sense to people who aren't me, but the TL;DRs:
TL;DR 1: I think Doriath was probably a hot mess politically after Thingol died, with tensions between various groups of Sindar and Laiquendi in the leadup to Thingol's death & Melian's departure, and more political tensions afterwards between those who wanted Beren & Lúthien to come be the new rulers, and those who thought they should stay gone, with someone still in Doriath taking over.
TL;DR 2: I think Dior became Eluchil, potentially at the request of some portion of the Iathrim, hoping to help prevent Doriath from devolving into civil war, and saw dealing with the Silmaril-Fëanorioni situation as a lower priority than stabilizing Doriath's internal political situation until it was too late.
1. The political cohesion (or rather, lack thereof) in Doriath prior to Thingol's death
So, okay, the thing about Doriath is that we don't actually have any real idea of like... how much the Iathrim liked being the Iathrim? We're never told about any intra-Iathrim conflict, but a) the Silm was probably compiled mostly by surviving Gondolindrim or their descendants, so they wouldn't know about anything liike that unless surviving Iathrim told them, and after the Second Kinslaying I don't imagine many Iathrim would've been eager to talk about how things had actually been tense/messy/etc when they could remember everything as having been perfect until it was ruined by the Fëanorionrim, and doubly so after the Third Kinslaying, so why would anything like that make it into the Silm?
and b) what we do know about Doriath is that it wasn't really Doriath as we know it until Morgoth came back to Middle-earth, and everything went to hell.
At the start of the first age, you suddenly get Doriath (the fenced land!) being the one protected area of a continent that used to be totally free and open. How many Sindar actually didn't particularly care for Thingol's style of leadership, or simply preferred to live nomadic lives, going basically wherever they pleased, until suddenly that wasn't safe anymore, and you were only guaranteed survival if you were close enough to Menegroth to be within the Girdle when it went up? ditto how many Laiquendi had no interest in swearing loyalty to Thingol right after their own king had just been killed, but again, made it to safety and stayed there over taking their chances on their own in the outside world?
I think it's entirely possible that there were always potential political tensions under the surface in Doriath that just... never got written about, because they never boiled over into actual political conflict, and so it was never the sort of tension that had any bearing on the historical record.
Except then Beren & Lúthien happen to the world, and a few years later the Narn, and in the blink of an eye suddenly the only king Doriath has ever had is dead, and the only queen Doriath has ever had is gone and the Girdle with her—and more than that, the only rulers the Sindar had ever had for three thousand years before Doriath existed.
And where a few years earlier I think the Iathrim would probably have turned pretty universally to Lúthien, now she's abandoned them for her human husband—and while she's my favorite character in the entire legendarium hands-down and I don't blame her, I think that's another place there might have actually been some very mixed feelings among the Iathrim that nobody wanted to admit to later because how could anyone have been upset with Lúthien—and on top of her abandoning them for him, I think it's extremely probable most of Doriath did not actually get over their xenophobia about humans in general or Beren in specific when Thingol did (we know for sure at least some of Doriath didn't, cf. Saeros insulting Túrin's mother & sister to his face), but again, who's going to admit to having had a grudge against the holy couple of Middle-earth after the fact, you know?
Conversely, there could've been a sizeable faction of Sindar who had been totally loyal to Thingol until everything happened with Beren & Lúthien, but who found his actions towards them and/or Finrod to be where they drew the line, and while (unlike B&L themselves) that faction stayed in Doriath, there could've been a new, additional tension on that front.
Finally, for all we know there were multiple factions within the Laiquendi of Doriath, with political tensions stretching back to before their king died, rooted in who-even-knows!
2. Dior
All of that, of course, sets up a very, very messy political situation for Dior to walk into.
The Doriath stuff is arguably more speculation than actual headcanon, but here's where the unambiguous headcanons come in: I don't think "Dior Eluchil set himself to raise anew the glory of the kingdom of Doriath." Obviously that's how it got written down, but bluntly, I can't see Beren and Lúthien having a kid that stupid or, like, power-hungry and arrogant?
What I can see is a situation where the messenger that brought word of Thingol's death and Melian's departure asked Beren & Lúthien to come take over as the new king and queen, we promise we're not mad about you leaving and we won't be xenophobic to your husband anymore we swear it's fine now pretty please, Beren & Lúthien said no, and the messenger either asked Dior as a second choice, or said "okay fine none of that was actually true but Doriath is falling apart and we need a leader ASAP and there's about eight different contenders* (mostly kinsmen of Thingol or Laiquendi) being backed by various factions and it's going to devolve into civil war any minute so if you care at all—" and Dior said "would I do?"
(* Ask me about my Galadriel headcanon)
I don't think Dior necessarily wanted to be king of Doriath, and I don't think he saw the throne as his birthright or anything like that; I don't think anyone involved, from Thingol to Lúthien to Dior himself, ever considered the possibility of Thingol dying and needing an heir! I think it's possible he was asked, or at most that he offered, and either way, I think he saw becoming king as taking on a responsibility for the sake of others.
(Which, like, "well here's a potentially impossible task that I'm going to take up even though probably no one thinks I'm actually capable of it, but it's my duty to help others as best I can" sure does sound to me like an attitude one might develop when raised by Lúthien "I kicked Sauron's ass cast a sleep spell on Morgoth and persuaded the Valar to find a loophole in the fabric of reality" Tinuviel and Beren "I stayed by my father's side as an outlaw to give my mother time to lead the rest of our people away hopefully to safety knowing I would never see her or any of them again (and then spent several years being a giant thorn in Morgoth's side for good measure)" Barahirion, where "apparently my grandpa I may or may not have ever met died, guess that makes me the king of a place i may or may not have ever been" does... not.)
I also think he either took on the epithet Eluchil, or was given it by whichever factions of the Iathrim accepted him as king, when he actually became king. Obviously he's going to be referred to as Dior Eluchil even before that in retrospect because that's how he's thought of later, but that doesn't mean it was actually a name he always had, you know?
The final thing is, I think if Dior essentially walked into a political situation five seconds from devolving into civil war, it makes his inaction regarding the Silmaril prior to the Second Kinslaying make more sense: the Fëanorioni have been sitting around doing nothing about the Silmaril in Doriath / with Beren & Lúthien this whole time, the letter saying "hey that's our Silmaril give it back now" is probably just a formality, and Dior's only been ruling for a couple years, there's still plenty of people dubious about whether he should be king at all, he might well be subject to at least some of whatever xenophobia remains about humans in Doriath, and in general all the work he's done on stabilizing the kingdom will absolutely come undone again if he screws up; he's trying to keep a kingdom from falling apart, the Silmaril thing can wait.
Of course, it wasn't a formality, and it couldn't wait, but why would Dior have known that?
#shrikeseams#replies#doriath#the silmarillion#dior eluchil#lotr#lotr meta#i guess?#character: dior#jesus christ this is so much longer than i meant it to be i'm so sorry#also my lunch break was supposed to end twenty minutes ago WHOOPS please forgive any typos i have no time to fix#also there wasn't a good place to stick this in#but i also think everyone in doriath probably has PTSD about thingol's death#(many of them may also have had PTSD already esp the laiquendi or those of the sindar who had to return to menegroth in a hurry#when the first waves of orcs showed up#but anyone who didn't already almost definitely does by the time dior gets there#because holy shit our king is dead the girdle is gone none of us are safe now and he was murdered before the girdle even fell#so have we even been as safe as we thought all this time or were the last couple centuries a lie?)#but yeah those are my dior headcanons!! idk if that picture of doriath or dior in particular are to anyone's taste but mine#but if nothing else i like the idea of dior getting to be... an actual person? and someone i can see having been raised by beren & lúthien#and he doesn't really get to be either of those in the silm and i rarely see him in fanworks getting fleshed out like other characters do#and i think that's kind of a shame#you know?#also yes i am completely ignoring that dior's name theoretically means ''successor'' bc like. why would they name him that#that is from an early draft and there is no way to know if ''dior'' would even have stayed his name#if tolkien had gotten around to updating all the names in B&L/CoH etc into modern Sindarin#never mind if it would have meant anything remotely similar#this is mostly a first-draft post written in one sitting in the space of 45 minutes partially while late for work#i have Definitely left many points out and i am sorry if anyone has questions about things i probably have answers / can elaborate further?
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