I mean, the point of the special is to find meaning in the holidays regardless of the rampant consumerism, but the impact of the message is dampened a bit by Hallmark putting out new charlie brown Christmas tree ornaments every year.
That said, it’s also okay not to have holiday spirit if you don’t find anything about this time of year meaningful. For many who aren’t practicing Christians, it’s a time to be with family because most companies tend to give days off anyway, but for those of us who have cut ties and don’t see the significance of decorating and whatnot, it’s perfectly fine to enjoy the time off without feeling festive.
It was a favorite of mine as a kid. For me, all the nativity reminds me of the war in Gaza and the Christian Nationalist movement infecting the US government and stripping away civil rights.
Generally the high extinction risk from compound crises (climate, plastic, etc.) has dispelled any notion that what I do here or happens to me matters at a greater scale.
If I ceased to exist this moment, it might cause a small amount of local harm, but little wake. These days, I’m a practicing absurdist, mostly that means I’m aware of my grief and dispair in fine detail, a geographic manifold I’ve well explored.
Ignorance and Want are no longer child wretches hiding in the fold of the robes of a Christmas spirit, rather now have become massive kaiju thundering across the countryside ravaging the population with withering gaze and breath of biting hyperborean frost, leaving a path of toxic wasteland in their wake.
It’s part of an ‘extended cinematic universe’ which is apparently a thing these days. So it counts?
Anyway, I love westerns and space fantasy, and The Mandalorian kinda combined them in an episodic way that I could basically watch forever. Although it did fall apart in season 3, despite the well-intentioned efforts to tie back to the larger Clone Wars arc.
Ok, I admit it soon got outmanoeuvred by Andor, which was damn good even if you’re not a Star Wars fan. But Mandalorian paved the way IMO for a good pulpy episodic series with no bloody Skywalkers or Jedi Council BS. So that’s a win, right?
It’s literally a modern western, not a lot happening in each episode is pretty much the western model. There is and should be an overarching plot and goal each season and mandalorian does do that, slowly, like a western should
I wholeheartedly disagree. It’s one of the best things to come out of the universe. Maybe it’s because my son and I watch it together. But there are some great actors in there putting in some stellar performances.
Of the things that kept me a Christian, least important to me was the historicity of the Bible, even though, to this day, I still have a high regard for the Bible as a historical document.
The second most important was the evidence of the effect of God in the lives of the people around me at church.
But the most important, beyond anything else, was the subjective experience of “the Spirit”. I wasn’t pentacostal, but I was all-in as a Christian; It sounds so woo-woo, but I don’t know if most people are aware how convincing a truly “spiritual” experience is, even most Christians, since most Christians seem to be cessationist about the most basic interactions with the Spirit (not just healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, etc.), even if their theology says otherwise. For example, whenever I had a big decision to make or something I was anxious about, I would find a place where nobody could hear me, sing a few hymns, read a few Bible verses picked totally at random, and pray-- not about my decision, just prayer in worship of God-- and without ever actually addressing my issue, within a short time, I almost always had a profound peace about which choice to make, even when that decision went against my insecurities, my rational thought, my will, my perceived abilities, or all of the above. I didn’t know or even care the degree to which praying for “stuff” affects the outside world, but I knew prayer affected me and made me a better person.
There are even little “tests” you can contrive out of the Bible to experience “the Spirit”. There’s a verse, 1 Corinthians 12:3, that says that nobody can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Spirit. (Obviously, anyone can say the literal words, but to actually mean it is harder.) Anyway, I know some Christians who take this literally, and taught me to pray the words “Jesus is Lord”, and when I did, something deep inside always responded, “Amen!”. Romans 8:16 could be used the same way, i.e. “I am a child of God”. Really, any Bible verse or anything I knew with 100% certainty would elicit the same response. But trying the same experiment with any other phrase would only leave me feeling gross inside.
Anyway, I started to have doubts in the mid 2010s. First was the realization that other people’s testimony of their spiritual experiences wasn’t terribly reliable. For example, I once went to a prayer meeting while visiting friends in a rural, less educated town, and, while for the most part I had a good time, I was rather culture-shocked by the fast and loose way the Christians there used (and meant) the word “miracle” to describe positive but entirely mundane life events. Like I’m glad your brother-in-law saw an incremental improvement in his cancer this week, but, I mean, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike; it seems more superstitious than spiritual that you credit his improvement entirely on last week’s prayer meeting. But whatever, it’s a small thing and it doesn’t really matter.
But then I noticed a similar trend in the Christians I looked up to. This isn’t a spiritual example, but my church was politically mixed, and while I didn’t care too much that my friends were supporting this candidate or the other, there was a definite uptick in cognitive dissonance from the 2015 political realignments, leading to people convincing themselves of viewpoints they didn’t even remember they disagreed with just last week. The ability to rewrite history en masse with no knowledge it was ever rewritten was something I’d never experienced so viscerally prior to that. (I get that people have a tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, but I’d never seen it at this scale and to people so mentally stable and intelligent.) I finally started to understand how so many secular Bible historians could agree that the early disciples of Jesus genuinely believed they witnessed Christ die and rise again yet completely discount the story as inaccurate. Mass hallucinations don’t work that way, I always thought.
Then it happened to me too. Now, I recognize that any impression or feeling or answer to prayer from the Spirit is going to be, in many ways, ambiguous. With the exception of those moments of profound peace, you kinda just get a pretty good idea of what you “heard” from the Spirit and accept that there’s always the chance you misunderstood. But it was the former, moments of profound peace, that caused me, for example, to turn down work that would’ve pulled me away from my congregation at home to another town further away, despite already being out of a job at the time. This was a bad move, financially, and eventually I ran out of money and got evicted. Now, the Bible doesn’t make that many concrete, single-variable, testable promises about what’s supposed to happen to a Christian walking with God, but one of the one’s that’s strongly implied is that if you “seek first the kingdom of God”, your basic needs will be provided (Matthew 6:31-33). I get that there are going to be exceptions to this, and I’m not trying to imply a prosperity Gospel, but I don’t live in a third world country and I wasn’t being persecuted and there was no reason to be struggling financially in my position short of irresponsibility. I was genuinely “seeking first the kingdom”, and the result was personal failure. And whether or not I’ve taken the Bible too far to contrive a promise that isn’t actually there doesn’t really matter, because the Spirit said it was a promise, or so I thought. Clearly, I misunderstood.
The problem is, if I misunderstood the most obvious, unambiguous things that the Spirit told me, nothing is trustworthy.
The other problem is that I had been noticing that it didn’t seem like I was spiritually growing as much, despite staying out of sin and following the Bible to the capacity I was able. Christianity clearly had made me a better person from the moment I converted from atheism until several years after, but it seemed like whatever character flaws I still had after five to ten years were just “stuck” in place, and, in fact, this seems to be the normal Christian experience. My pastor mentioned to me a book he had been reading-- I wish I could remember an author or title-- that mentioned that the average Christian is good for about seven years, and then they become a warm body for the rest of their lives. He meant it as an admonishment to continue walking with God, but seeing as I thought I was walking with God, I looked around the church and was horrified to slowly realize that this characterization matched my experience of the Church. It’s still the same God; He didn’t change. So what changed? Some of the best people I ever knew I knew from church, but they still had rough edges that were never addressed. If anything, the congregation was just getting more cult-like and rigid (“rigid” in a religious way, not in any actual adherence to the Bible) over time.
Eventually, I found myself overwhelmed with doubts. I started running little spiritual experiments. Once, I was taking a shower, and I started doing the “Jesus is Lord” experiment, except that I found that with a little mental gymnastics, I could coax the same response from random objects; like, I could say “shampoo”, and something inside would say, “Amen”.
After that, the idea that “the Spirit” was all in my head seemed more plausible than the existence of God. So that was basically the end for me.
Well that was wild. I think the best thing to remember from this is that religion is not going to give you “advice” like a friend would. The Bible doesn’t know whether you should get a different job. It’s not logical, it’s emotional.
If a loved one dies or you have to make a tough moral decision, that’s where it can help. Same with any philosophy. You wouldn’t ask Immanuel Kant some boring question, so why ask God? No He doesn’t care about your football game. Sorry.
Those kind of darker ‘realistic’ shows have a very cynical view of human nature where people are inherently bad and the social contract is what keeps us at bay from becoming monsters. I dont agree with that assessment (though I did as an edgy teenager)
The rich and powerful act the was they do not because they can but because they have nothing to strive for. IMO people require a certain amount of conflict and struggle in order to truly attain happiness and a fulfilling life. You also need to learn new skills to have fresh experiences. See this excellent documentary on the mouse utopia experiments.
You cant really appreciate success until you’ve failed miserably and earned it through blood sweat and tears. If you live your whole life being too rich to fail, and get everything you’ve ever wanted without having to work and struggle for it, then you eventually run out of things to want and life becomes hollow. Food looses its taste, drugs no longer get you high, regular and even kinky sex looses its appeal, luxury and convinence becomes meaningless as does social status. The only thing left is the thrill of depravity.
Time powers wouldn’t make a normal person with proper life goals and average moral values instantly go off the deep end. Only people who think money and power buys happiness.
Cottage cheese. It just looks wrong, and there’s all different qualities of it like - no, I don’t want any . . . Oh well I’ll just have a small, tiny bite. Mmh. Not bad. Probably just a little salt here and . . Mmh. Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh. Oh! now I get the whole ‘cottage cheese’ thing . . Ooh pineapple you say . . Oh man okay yes. Yes, absolutely this is awesome. Must remember to get some more next time.
(Spoiler: does not remember to get more next time.)
Not a big fan of it myself, but the best snack ever is some kettle chips and cottage cheese as the dip. It looks weird/gross, yet every one who has tried it has loved it. I usually sprinkle some black pepper on it prior.
Being nice to waitstaff/receptionists/cashiers/etc, even if there’s an issue.
You can be annoyed at the situation, sure. But being nice to the employee shows you know that 99% of the time the problem is not their fault and 100% of the time yelling won’t solve anything.
For one glorious summer I was a small boat sailing instructor at a summer camp. My life was sitting on the beach and teaching kids to sail. I had a wonderful tan, and sun bleached hair. My life was stress free and wonderful. I got into it by learning how to sail at that very camp, and applying for the job. It paid minimum wage, but it also came with free room and board, and I was a kid, so I didn’t really need any money anyways.
Dang, I missed out. I applied for that job somewhere up in Maine, just to get away from hick-ville south USA. I think they thought I was crazy to want to drive that far.
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