Noah Schnapp is literally beyond evil. Like, spawn of satan level of evil. He only deserves to suffer for the rest of his existence. How dare he have empathy for innocent civilians in Israel and Palestine. First of all, there’s no such thing as innocent Israeli civilians. Second of all, you can't have empathy for both. Especially if he is a Zionist. All the Jewish people who identify as Zionists are evil. Israel has absolutely no right to exist and Jewish people have no right to exist in Israel. So many Jewish people who are Zionists claim that’s what Zionism means to them but they’re wrong. Zionism is pure evil. You can’t be Zionist and want peace and self determination for Palestinians. I’m not Jewish but I definitely know better than the Jewish Zionists who claim that. They’re all evil lying monsters. They want every Palestinian wiped off the face of the Earth. Hamas would never want such a thing. It’s not like they had a charter that said that about Jewish people. Even if they did, they supposedly recently changed it to Zionists instead so it’s all good now. Hamas is totally accepting of Jewish people now and would welcome them with open arms as long as they aren’t Zionist. Noah, if you’re a Zionist, don’t be anymore. You can change your evil ways. Hamas changed. Yeah, they may have killed civilians and taken hundreds hostage, they may have said October 7th was just the beginning and that it was going to happen over and over again, but they’re no longer antisemitic. They’re just anti Zionist so they’re good people now. You can change and be good too. You’re so young. There’s still hope for you. Stop lying and telling us how you want peace and self determination for Palestinians. We all know that’s not true. It can only be true if you aren’t Zionist.

You liking something like this makes absolutely no sense if you’re Zionist. I bet you don’t even agree with it and just liked it by accident or something. It’s crazy how I even managed to come across this months ago considering nobody talked about it or brought it to light. You liking that sketch of people in the LGBTQ+ community simping over Hamas got so much attention and caused so much outrage though. Funny how the internet works. Anyways, as a bisexual, I was so offended by that video. Hamas are well known LGBTQ+ allies. How could you like that video as someone who’s gay? It’s probably because you’re lying about being gay too. Shame on you.

Last thing I’m gonna say is fuck Israel and fuck Israelis. That country and all the people living there are evil. They’re all colonizers and occupiers. It needs to cease to exist and all the people currently living there need to go back to where they originally came from. All of them came from Europe, right? That’s what I’ve been hearing. They all need to return to Europe. Gosh, why’d they ever leave there in the first place? I know Jewish people say otherwise but they’re wrong. They’re either lying or in denial. They’re not indigenous to Israel. They’re indigenous to Europe. Us non Jewish people really need to educate them more about their own history, religion, ethnicity, etc. We need to teach them what antisemitism actually is. A lot of them don’t seem to understand what it is. We do that to every other minority group that we aren’t apart of, right?

By: Rosemary Neill

Published: Dec 2, 2022

In his bestseller The God Delusion, published in 2006, author Richard Dawkins famously wrote that the god of the Old Testament is “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser” and “a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal … capriciously malevolent bully’’.

Not for nothing has Dawkins been described as “a poster boy for militant atheism”.

The former Oxford University professor and evolutionary biologist is also regarded as a brilliant and passionate science communicator: His 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, reframed our understanding of evolution and has been named by the Royal Society as the most inspiring science book of all time, while his latest volume, Flights of Fancy – a surprisingly lyrical work aimed at the over 12s – looks at how animals and humans have “learned to overcome the pull of gravity and take to the skies’’.

In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in a Prospect magazine poll. Yet in recent years, his controversial tweets and remarks about everything from aborting Down’s syndrome foetuses to Islamic fundamentalism have provoked sharp criticism and threats of cancellation.

Now aged 81, the career controversialist will conduct a national speaking tour in Australia in February, addressing topics including the wonders of science, the importance of reason and his scepticism about religion. Ahead of his tour, which starts in Melbourne, the British author gave a typically forthright, sometimes combative interview to Review.

During this encounter, conducted over Zoom from his Oxford home, Dawkins oscillates between donnish erudition and a kind of pugnacious rationalism, as he argues that parents should not have the right to “indoctrinate” their children with their chosen religion; that human foetuses are “no more a person” than animal foetuses; that anti-vaxxers are selfish; and that transgenderism has become “a mimetic epidemic” among schoolchildren. He also warns that human beings could one day be obliterated by the same kind of meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs.

You have been called a militant atheist, and you’ve argued that religion causes wars and entrenches bigotry. Yet you use the borrowed phrase “tooth fairy agnostic” to describe yourself. Tooth fairy agnostic – that’s right. We are all actually agnostic about anything you can’t actually disprove. You can’t disprove the tooth fairy; it’s trivial to bother about it, so that’s the way I am about gods.

Why do you oppose faith schools? I am not against education in religion. I think that’s important and that children should be taught about religion because it’s such an important part of history, politics, art and music. I’m against educating in a particular religion – I’m against a child being told, “You are a member of this church and therefore this is what you believe”. I like the child to be told, “There are people who call themselves Catholics and they believe this, and there are people who call themselves Muslims and they believe that” and so on. That’s important, but children should not be told what to believe.

Would banning faith schools amount to erosion of parental choice and authority? I think children have rights, and the right of a child not to be indoctrinated is important.

You get hate mail from evangelical Christians and you are also a trenchant critic of Islamic fundamentalism. As an outspoken public intellectual, what did you think of the recent attack on The Satanic Verses author Sir Salman Rushdie? It’s horrible. It’s irrational. It’s vicious. It was allegedly perpetrated by a very foolish person who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has been indoctrinated by his Islamic upbringing and that’s one kind of reason why I find indoctrination so bad. (The suspect, Hadi Matar, has said that Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa against Rushdie, is, “a great person”. Matar has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges brought against him in the US.)

Many Christian fundamentalists in the US oppose abortion. What is your view of the US Supreme Court ruling that overturned the historic Roe v Wade decision? I deplore that.

You maintain that pro-choice activists in America are using the wrong tactics. Why? I think the pro-abortion lobby is tactically unsound when they say something like, “A woman’s body is her own to do what she likes with”. I happen to think that’s right, but that’s not going to cut any ice with somebody who thinks that an embryo is a baby, and they think therefore that abortion is murder. They’ll say, “Ah, but she contains another body which is not her own.” I think we should tackle that assumption. We should say, “A foetus is no more a person than, and no more has personal feelings … than the foetus of a cow or a pig, let alone an adult cow or pig.”

You dedicate your latest book, Flights of Fancy, to the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Why does he impress you? He certainly is a high flyer and he certainly is a hero of our times. I do admire him and I think that he’s an appropriate dedicatee for a book about flight. He’s a man with immense imagination and he is a genius as an engineer, a genius as an entrepreneur.

In Flights of Fancy, you note how, just decades after the Wright brothers’ historic flight, we were in the era of supersonic and space flight. Does this constitute an extraordinary burst of progress within a short time? It is rather remarkable, isn’t it? I think it’s a very good century to have lived in for that reason. In a way it’s rather sad that things (to do with space flight) are only just taking off now after the 1960s, when men first stepped on the moon, and nothing much has happened since then, until quite recently. I’m glad things are getting going again.

In 2021, the American Humanist Society withdrew an award they had given you because of an old tweet. In that tweet, you called for a discussion about the vilification of those who deny transgender people “literally are what they identify as”. How did you feel about the award being cancelled? To be honest, I had actually forgotten that I ever had that award, but it is upsetting when your own side turn against you, of course. I’d never worried about religious fundamentalists disliking me, but when it’s your own team, it’s upsetting. It’s a remarkably foolish thing for them to do, because all I did was to raise a subject for discussion.

Has academe changed for the worse in terms of restrictions on freedom of speech since you first worked at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University in the 1960s and ’70s? It’s not possible to imagine that we’re going to go on with this nonsense where you can’t even discuss something.

Why is the transgender debate so heated, and such a no-go area for many commentators? You’d have to ask a psychologist or a sociologist about that. It (the debate) seems to me to be utter nonsense. Of course, there are people who suffer from gender dysphoria, and one has to be sympathetic to them. But there clearly is a mimetic epidemic, especially among schoolchildren who get persuaded that somehow the cool thing to do is to be trans, and this is a very disturbing by-product of a very genuine phenomenon, which is gender dysphoria. That is quite a rare thing, but it’s being blown up into a kind of false, common thing.

With the recent closure of the Tavistock child gender clinic, it appears the UK is adopting a more cautious approach to hormonal and surgical treatments for trans-identifying children. How do you view this development? I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a very appropriate reversal of this trend.

You have 2.9 million followers on Twitter. Do your more contentious tweets scare your publishers? Possibly, but I’m not here to talk about Twitter.

Even so, why are you drawn to Twitter, given the nasty pile-ons that are a feature of the platform? I suppose, misguidedly, I thought it was rather a good way of raising discussion. That’s why I put “discuss” at the end of so many tweets, (as) a follow-on of the Oxford tutorials. I am afraid I rather over-estimated the intelligence of the Twitter audience.

You’ve said it would be fun to fly like a bird or go hang-gliding. Does your fear of heights hold you back? I certainly wouldn’t want to jump off a cliff.

No bungy-jumping for Richard Dawkins then? I might run down a hill, maybe.

Why do you believe there is merit in people establishing a colony on another planet? This, I think, is one of the motives of Elon Musk wanting to go to Mars. It’s interesting, by the way, that NASA has just succeeded in diverting or changing the orbit of a small asteroid. They need to do it for a much bigger asteroid in order to save us from the sort of catastrophe that hit the dinosaurs. But (the recent NASA diversion) is a very important first step. It’s a magnificent feat of engineering and science and mathematics.

During the Covid lockdowns, you wrote two nonfiction books and failed to complete a novel about bringing back Homo erectus, our ancient ancestor. Have you given up on writing fiction? I abandoned that, at least temporarily. It turned out to be much more difficult than I thought.

Why do you argue the Covid pandemic has been good for science? As soon as the genetic code sequence of the virus was decoded, which nowadays can be done very swiftly, several different teams of scientists got to work on making a vaccine, and they did it in double quick time; astonishingly quickly. I think that’s a great tribute to the genius of our species.

What about the rise of the anti-vaxxers? Has that surprised you? Tragically, really stupid opposition to vaccination has been whipped up, mostly in America, but it spread to other countries as well. A lot of people don’t understand that vaccination is not just about protecting yourself, it’s about protecting society as a whole, to get herd immunity so the epidemic doesn’t spread.

Is there a selfishness inherent in the anti-vaccination movement? Yes, they just think it’s a matter of individual liberty. They don’t realise that refraining from vaccination for no very good reason is rather like driving on the wrong side of the road …. We do owe a certain curtailment of individual liberty in the interests of society.

You invented the word “meme” (an idea or behaviour that spreads from person to person within a society.) We’ve seen Donald Trump turn memes into a political art form. Were you dismayed by that? He just lies and lies all the time, and unfortunately, I think it was Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Huge numbers of Americans actually believe Trump’s lies and it’s a tragedy.

You live in Oxford and drive a Tesla. Are we all going to be driving electric cars in future? It looks like it, doesn’t it? I think that’s a very good thing.

Some detractors say your reputation as a fierce supporter of atheism is in danger of eclipsing your insights as a visionary evolutionary biologist. I hope not. I’ve only written two books about atheism and about 17 about science, so really science is by far the more important part of my life.

The God Delusion has sold millions of copies, but what do you regard as your most significant book? Probably The Extended Phenotype, which is one book that I wrote for my professional colleagues, although I like to think it’s readable by nonscientists as well. It’s the main book in which I propose something which I suppose is original; something that is all my own.

Scientists don’t know how the universe started. Isn’t that an argument in itself that a god or creator must have kicked things off? That’s a terrible idea! The idea that just because you don’t know what the answer to a question is, therefore god did it. I mean, that’s a ridiculous argument. By all means say we don’t know – that’s true, we don’t know – therefore it’s better to try to find out. We don’t just lie down and say, “Oh, god must have done it”.

Across the globe millions of people, including those without a financial safety net, find comfort in religion. Can you see how rubbishing their spiritual beliefs can be perceived as arrogance? Not arrogance. I mean, if they don’t want to read my books, they don’t have to. My books are about what I believe to be true and what evidence is. I’m not going to refrain from writing books for fear that it might upset people. I write books about what is supported by scientific evidence. That is what I try to do, and if the evidence changes, of course I change my mind. That’s about it, really. I’m a scientist who writes books about science.

[ Via: https://archive.vn/Se49o ]

A little secret for the youth from a former atheist…. most adults who go to church, mosque, temple, service, prayer, etc. don’t really believe in the stuff their religion says, many of them carry deep doubts about god, and even fewer actually think their religion is the only true one or perfect…

Yes the loud voices on tv and online might say these things, but the general folk are far more grounded and open minded.

The secret is it’s actually community, tradition, fellowship, shared culture, and family ties that keep them coming back to their places of worship. And yes, hard times come along and they find these as places of support, not just emotionally, but sometimes even financially.

It rarely has anything to do with their holy book (how many atheists have stomped their feet claiming that “I’ve read more of the Bible than the believers!”). It has nothing to do with what they think is real. It has everything to do with a pinch of faith and a heavy heaping of community being a fundamental and necessary part of a human life.

Atheists scratch their heads trying to understand how after all this science and all this technology, why hasn’t god died yet!?? Because he already died long long ago, for most people. Certainly not everyone, but for most people.

You can debate forever if god is real, or if Jesus ever existed, or if Noah’s ark is hidden in the mountains of eastern turkey…. And the smug atheist thinks himself proud cos he’s beaten it over the head of the religious nut job and the idiot still believes in fairy tales!!!?

No. It’s two different people having two completely different arguments.

It’s been almost twenty years since The God Delusion was controversially published by Richard Dawnkins, and of course given so much praise an entire Family Guy episode is devoted to it (almost spiritually so). And yet religion and faith isn’t going away everywhere. In many places it’s thriving as always. And in other places where faith isn’t thriving, like America, Japan, Russia, South Korea, or France, there’s something else that is thriving, and that is depression and suicide.

The modern liberal-democratic socialist/capitalism western world can produce endless money and endless tech and also endless self-inflicted pain. I’m not here to say people of faith, even a little faith like agnosticism, are less likely to commit suicide or have depression, those studies are already done.

Churches are less full now on Sundays than ever before, and why not, even church goers know all the sermons are live-streamed on their church Facebook page. And if it was about god or reading the Bible or the Quran, all this stuff would end up online, streamable from home. But it’s about community, it’s about seeing their friends and family every Friday if they’re Muslim or every Sunday if they’re Catholic. Yes, there is some spiritual teaching too, but again, that’s just (halal) sugar coating. It’s not about the religion, those change like national flags, quickly and easily with any invasion. It’s about community.

So the modern straight man skips worship every week, which gives more time for sinning (wink wink). He hasn’t been to worship since he was like 12 or maybe 14 years old. He wonders why his life feels purposeless, or why he’s always so depressed. For many people, especially straight folk, it’s quite easy to just go to back church or temple. Their parents faith always invites them in with sincere open arms, or indeed any strangers place of worship will usually do the same. They don’t ask him to pledge forever that their religion is true. He isn’t told that he must never enter unless he has unshakeable faith, cos they don’t care. They just want to offer community and fellowship. It’s very easy for straight people to do this.

For gays it’s a completely different story. In some places on earth like big liberal cities you can find gay friendly churches and temples, but rarely much else.

Before the turn of the century, gay and lesbian bars, (or even bathhouses) were the places of fellowship and community for gay men and women. “Your family disowned you? Who cares, Christmas dinner at the bar. Your church told you no gays allowed? No worries, half the Saturday night dancers go over to Jeff & Phil’s for Sundays brunch and Bible study.”

Today these kinda bars and communities do exist! They are out there and if you can find a community you feel comfortable and engaged with, that’s fantastic!

But these places are harder to find since Grindr is way easier and cheaper than going out. And even if you do go out, half the bar is lit up with phone-scrolling anyway. Lively conversation can still happen too, often so easily when we choose to put the phone down and away.

So for the modern gay who can’t find a proper community though a religious practice, or through a close-knit gay bar, their options are limited. They can find that community at work, but this doesn’t provide love or stability, and many of their coworkers already have an established community outside of work.

Many gays find community and fellowship though capitalist consumption (think of those gays with 100 funko pop, every single album and single cd ever released by Beyoncé, or some other collection). This gives them a goal and purpose, even if it’s ultimately soulless. Many gays spend their entire lives stuck in the religion of consumer capitalism feeling like they’ve gotta do something. Sometimes they feel a sense of power and strength, like thinking, “my brother is so fucking jealous of me getting the xbox7000 the day it launches with all the exclusives, oh boo boo he can’t afford it cos he’s got kids.” Unfortunately the joy of being a parent can be amazing but the joy of being able to afford anything you want fades very fast, I promise.

If the gay is young and hot, they might devote their time to being as sexually promiscuous as possible to fill the time away from work. But often when you’re taking your sixth dick of the weekend, you start to think, “there’s got to be more to life.”

But in 2024 gays are love religion about as much as religion loves gays, despite the pope being the most gay friendly in history.

So where do the gays turn today for community when all the temporary and hollow things fade?

And I mean real community. Not the fake community I continue to see among gays. “Oh you voted for Trump? TWICE? We can’t be friends.” “Oh you don’t support Palestine?! Oh you don’t support Israel!? Oh you think it should LGB not LBGTQIA? Not in our community. Oh you’re a Christian? You ate where!!?? Ugh, well maybe if you were a Buddhist or Muslim or some exciting non-Christian faith but Christianity is triggering for me cos of how I was raised and …”

That’s not a community. That’s a political cult, with a litmus test. A proper community isn’t about having the same political ideas, it’s about having a shared brotherhood or sisterhood. It’s about connecting not because you’re in agreement, but because you are both humans cut of the same cloth.

Where does a gay man turn to for real community, a place where other gay people can say, “I see and recognize the perfect nature of your being as a fellow gay person who has endured similar experiences in life. I value you as an imperfect being with a perfect soul, and while we won’t always agree on music or politics, we connect in the commonality in how we love, and even if your family turns it’s back on you, you still have this community.”

Straight people have this it’s called religion, and just like capitalism, empires, and re-releasing taylor swift albums, it’s here to stay no matter how close to death you think it is.

Straight people and religions won’t be changing hugely in our lifetime to suddenly embrace the gays. If you find this kinda community, that’s awesome, and you know as well as anyone how rare they are.

But once you’re bored of collecting every Nintendo system and game case and pristine collectible…. And you’ve fucked over 1000 men in one year (amateur 🙄 haha jkjk) … you might say “there’s just gotta be more to life.”

Have you found it yet?

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

Since you're my fave source of Yusuf-related knowledge (LOL), I want to ask you a question (And I'm using the proper *ask* section, because maybe this could interest other fans too) Could you explain to me the difference between shi’ite and sunni, where would you place Joe and what would change between shiite!Joe OR sunni!Joe (If there would be any change)? Maybe it's a stupid question, but I would love to read your thoughts on this topic and understand more. Thanksss!

Hi Kiki <3

This is very long, I apologize in advance. I split it into three sections and also talk about how Joe’s sexuality could factor into things, how he’d be in a Modern AU, etc. at the end.

          A HALF-DECENT SUMMARY OF ISLAMIC SECTS

Shi’ite and Sunni are the two biggest sects of Islam. Best comparative example I can give is the Catholic vs Protestant schism and conflict, but imagine if this schism happened right after Jesus died. And it was between Peter, his companion, and John, his relative, for who should rightfully lead Christians. Each thinks the other is a heretic and in some cases, worse than infidels because they have the wrong way to go about the religion.

(This is kinda why Iran (Shi’ite) and Saudi Arabia (Sunni) tend to be hostile towards each other and more or less why the Lebanese Civil War happened, and why there’s regular conflict in Iraq)

At it’s core, Sunnis believe that after the Prophet Muhammad died with no sons, his true successor to be the caliph of all Muslims was his friend/father-in-law (Aisha’s father) Abu Bakr, who was chosen by the people as the best candidate to maintain the sunnah - the ways and teachings Muhammad imparted when he was alive. Shi’ites believe that it should have gone to Muhammad’s cousin Ali, who was also married to Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, and was chosen by God to lead Muslims. Naturally, Sunnis consider this heresy and opportunism, and Shi’ites consider Abu Bakr to have stolen what was rightfully Ali’s and the legacy of Muhummad’s grandsons Hassan and Hussein.

Sunni prioritize the sunnah, the teachings and reportedly unchanged way of life, passed down directly from the days of Islam’s start during Muhammad’s life. Shi’ites don’t tend to do that, hence why the former are called Sunni and the latter get their name from ‘shi’at Ali’ - the followers of Ali, who don’t believe much of what Abu Bakr had to say about sunnah.

Because of this Shi’ites tend to despise Abu Bakr and Aisha - FYI they don’t name their daughters Aisha. I repeat, do not name any of Joe’s female relatives Aisha - and revere Ali, Fatima and their family. Sunnis revere Abu Bakr as second to Muhammad and think anyone who thinks Ali was chosen by God/put him on part with Muhammad are lunatics and aren’t Muslims at all.

Like, we had one Lebanese Shi’ite guy in my school and despite him being very easy-going they would not leave him alone, openly mocking his beliefs in a way they wouldn’t dare do to our Christian classmates. It’s so strange now that I think about it. I remember an Arabic/Religion teacher trying to turn us against our Christian classmates (we are separated for individual religion classes) and the class lost their shit and started throwing things at him to get him to shut up. But with the Shi’ite guy I remember him complaining to me about people being dicks to him, and he later on became an atheist.

Lots of Sunni jokes revolve around Shi’ites worshiping Ali -- and that they are crazies who cry and whip themselves. (I mean, I’m sure the fundamentalist Shi’ia injure themselves, but from what I saw it’s usually ceremonial? No actual whips or flails/blood, but maybe some instrument that’s a modern adjustment? Either way the context for that is that it’s a display of grief/mourning the death of Hussein, Ali & Fatima’s son who was martyred.) I think a lot of the Shi’a hate for Sunnis comes from the blame for the murders of Ali and his sons Hassan and Hussein as political opponents.

I think from the Shi’ite perspective, they view Sunnis as if a sect of Christians thought Judas helped achieve Jesus’ goal, canonized him as a saint, and made him Pope instead of Peter? From the Sunni perspective, they view the Ali thing like if, I don’t know, John the Baptist, as Jesus’ relative, claimed he was the new Messiah appointed by God, and had the right to lead in Jesus’ name as his blood, and contested Peter for the head of the church.

Example, when Sunni pray they start by saying “I recognize that there is no god but God and Muhammad was his messenger,” but Shi’ites add “and Ali is the appointed authority of God,” as in he’s been entrusted with God and Muhammad’s word. But even within the sects they differ, Wahabi Sunnis in Saudi differ from more secular Sunnis in, say, Tunisia. Shi’ites in Lebanon are not like the fundie ones in Iran. But Sunni fundamentalists like those in and supporting DAESH/ISIL want to genocide Shi’a and the sectarian conflict has been getting worse across my lifetime :/ and moderate Sunnis are lowkey terrified of fundie Shi’ites like those in Iran and Afghanistan.

There are other sects, and sub-sets within sects Salafis, Sufis, Wahabis, Twelver, Ismaïli, Ahmadiya, etc., etc., and God knows what the Druze are exactly. They don’t mesh, to say the least. Then there are lands more secular than others, i.e. women can work, be autonomous and not be forced into niqabs/hijabs/be bare-headed, and stuff like polygamy and female genital mutilation/child marriage is illegal/frowned upon. Conflict can arise within the same sect over stuff like that.

Cue forbidden romances between not just religions but sects. A Druze guy I knew was depressed because he loved a Shi’ite girl and they couldn’t be together. The singer/actor Faird al-Attrache couldn’t marry his partner of several years, dancer Samia Gamal, because he was Druze and she was Sunni. I have a friend whose parents had to go marry abroad so neither one would be required to convert.

TL;DR neither view the other’s caliph as legitimate therefore they’re disregarding each other’s history and validity in belief and values/way they practice. They also have differences in interpreting the texts, whether the hadiths have weight, or how to rule and worship, and such vary by country.

                      JOE’S BACKGROUND AND BELIEFS

Shi’ite caliphs who claimed descent from Fatima founded the Fatimid caliphate/empire/dynasty which came to rule most of North Africa. (Fun fact: my maternal grandfather’s family claims descent from Fatima lmao). But the Fatimids were very tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities and didn’t pressure people to convert like later Sunni dynasties, like the Ayyubids, did.

Today, Sunni Islam is the most populous and common sect, and Modern Day!AU Joe would be born into a Sunni family, possibly abroad if you modernize him being a merchant from a mercantile family to be business-owners or working for a big company.

But during the time period of the Crusades, Canon!Joe would have been raised Shi’ite in the heart of Fatimid land, knowing a small handful of Sunnis, and a good amount of Orthodox Christians. As a Fatimid and as a merchant, I feel like his experience in dealing with all sorts of people would have given him a broader worldview, exposed him to many conflicting beliefs, discussions and cultures, and he was most likely not devout or observant, and generally educated on what others not just in Islam but Christianity and Judaism believed.

As time went one he most likely had any teachings eroded and beliefs proven wrong, namely that the only immortal thing is God and what you find after death, and after he dies the first time he’s no-longer bound by religious law, free to partake in all that’s allowed in death. Also, him being gay and doing things like drinking and drawing human figures/faces, would would get him in trouble with devout people.

                     DEPICTIONS OF MODERN AU! JOE

A Modern!Joe would most likely be the same. Going by the born-abroad to business-owner/trade company-father theory I posed above, he’d be pretty different from the common man in his homeland. From my experience, younger people from upper-to-upper middle class multi-lingual families, especially those who live and/or are educated abroad, and encourage their children’s artistic pursuits, tend to range from less religious to irreligious. The general lower-to-middle-class ‘you be doctor! you be lawyer! you be respectable and conforming to society! no excuses!’ not so much. Views on drinking, sex, dating, inheritance, women’s freedoms and rights, personal freedoms, etc. will differ from the beliefs the majority back home, who would not tolerate most stuff taken for granted in the West.

Now, I have a bone to pick with some common headcanons about Joe’s family in Modern AUs. Depicting a modern religious family being more accepting than Nicky’s family, is laughable and kinda delusional, especially since there has been a strong resurgence in conservatism and fundamentalism in Islam from the middle of the last century due to the influence of Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Just don’t bring it up, like you never bring up the religious beliefs of most characters in fandoms. Treat Joe like anyone of any other background in America, the UK, etc. Mention food, clothes, things like him having bidets installed in his bathrooms, literature, history, language, because there is a lot more to culture than religion. You’re really better off writing him and his family off as agnostics, because there are a lot of those, and irreligion is silently rising. It’ll tie into his family accepting him being gay.

The ‘uwu Joe’s mom posts pictures of her Catholic son-in-law Nicky to her Muslim friends on Facebook’ and ‘uwu they met this hijabi lesbian and her Jewish wife’ have got to stop though. This is some serious American lunacy and disrespect and i swear the white girls on this website have a hijabi fetish.

If Modern AU Joe’s parents and siblings are individually accepting, who understand/have known gay people/love him regardless, etc., they still won’t go around telling people from their background. Families as a whole still tend to be very conservative or wary of the opinions of their relatives, friends and general society. ‘What will the people think?’ ‘What people??’ ‘The people!’

Modern AU Joe’s family would have to be pretty detached from the homeland, like they immigrated to be in a freer society, the kind that speak French at home, drink and date, and such. Or Joe is a second-generation immigrant, who associates only with like-minded compatriots and Westerners in whatever country they live in. That’s the only feasible scenario in which they’ll not just fine, but openly supportive. Even then, it would take an adjustment period to accept Joe being with a man.

That, or Joe will be like a lot of gay people from MENA regions - cut off from his family, possibly only in touch with a sympathetic sister or younger brother.

I just had a talk with my cousin, who lives in Florida, has a Catholic girlfriend, and 6 sons. He said if one of them turns out to be gay he’s getting disowned, and my cousin isn’t all that religious. So, I have a lot of feelings about how I can never come out, and well, Joe.

Brick Club 1.5.8 “Madame Victurnien Spends Thirty-Five Francs On Morality”

Hugo does this with so many of the societal tragedies in this book. He sets everything up like everything is great and everyone is happy, only to have the facade crumble. It happened with the students/grisettes outing in 1.4 and in the description of the Thenardier children at Montfermeil, and it’s happening now with the description of Montreuil-sur-Mer’s prosperity. Everyone’s so happy and has good income and pays taxes! Oh wait, here’s how the people of this town fucked over one poor woman. (And how many other women have had something similar happen to them because of the nosey people.)

I’m really stuck on the line that Fantine “forgot many things.” She admired her appearance and thought about Cosette and the future and was almost happy, but she also forgot many things. What did she forget? Not Tholomyes, I don’t think, because on the next page he says she thinks of him. It’s such an odd little phrase. I just can’t think of what “many things” she could forget.

Hugo says she rented a room and furniture on credit, “a remnant of her former disorderly ways.” Fantine thinks she’s getting herself back on track, that this renting stuff on credit will be the last time she’ll have to do something “disorderly” and that now that she’s making a living with her own work she’ll be fine. The Hapgood translation is “improvident,” by the way, which I think makes more sense. However I find it interesting that Hugo calls her renting a room on credit a lack of foresight, when really it’s just a necessity out of extreme poverty. She had 23 francs when she left Montfermeil, and I can’t imagine she has much--or any--left when she arrives. Her behavior in Paris, of not taking job opportunities when they arose because of her affair with Tholomyes, I think that makes at least a little sense to call improvident. But not her renting and furnishing her rooms on credit, which seems desperate rather than prodigal.

The townspeople whisper that Fantine “put on airs,” which is the same accusation Favourite had of her back in 1.3.4 while on the swing. Something about Fantine’s odd sort of innocence makes people think she feels superior to them. I was going to say I wonder if this is another way of Hugo insinuating her goodness, but I don’t think Fantine’s “goodness” is the same as Myriel or Valjean’s. Hugo called Fantine “wise,” and I think an aspect about her is that she’s wise on an emotional level, not on a social level. She understands the importance of emotional connection and devotion on a level we don’t see with the other grisettes or with the people of M-sur-M. She doesn’t seem to have any idea about the whisperings going on around her, she has no idea that her child has been discovered until she’s fired. And yet even when she hardens due to her suffering, she never loses the softness about Cosette. Her wisdom is about sacrifice, which is exactly the kind of wisdom that these nosey townspeople (and probably Favourite) lack.

I love Hugo’s condemnation of gossip and rubbernecking. It also makes me laugh because it’s so similar to the way that cops act. This feels like a condemnation of both gossips and cops. What’s the phrase? Kill the cop inside your head? Anyway, he sounds so frustrated and exasperated here. I haven’t read very much further into the Hugo bio, but I’m wondering if there was some rumor or scandal that he personally experienced that made him feel so strongly here.

Hugo’s really hammering home the beauty of Fantine’s hair and teeth here in preparation for two chapters ahead. Weirdly, this reminds me of the Bishop’s silver. Back in 1.1.6 we learn about Myriel’s silver, and it’s mentioned multiple times afterward. When he gives it up, he’s giving up the last thing that connects him to his past life and is put on the same level as any of the poor parishioners or citizens of Digne. When Fantine gives up her teeth and hair, she sacrifices the last two things that tie her not only to her old life in Paris, but to the possibility of success in society as a woman.

So from what I can tell, the Bernardines are a Catholic order also called “Cistercians.” Originally they tried to observe the Rule of St Benedict and focused mostly on manual labor, but later become more focused on intellectual and academic rigor. There was a semi-successful reform movement to go back to old ways in the 17th century. By the 19th century it seems it was mostly dissolved. The “Bernard” of Bernardine was Bernard of Clairvaux, a powerful French abbot who actually wrote up rules that allowed Templar knights to pass through all borders freely. He also encouraged the Second Crusade, though it failed. The Jacobins were anti-royalist republicans who encouraged dechristianization of the country. The Jacobins spoke on behalf of the people but many were bourgeoisie.

So Mme. Victurnien’s ex-monk husband went from being a monk of a fairly intellectual order who observed pretty strict Benedictine rules to joining the fairly atheistic, republican, radical Jacobins.

Madame Victurnien was strict and harsh because her husband was strict and harsh to her. Something I’ve noticed about the way Hugo writes about toxic/abusive/bad relationships between people is how children are affected versus adults. Victurnien and her dead husband, the Thenardier parents, even Gillenormand (with his spinster daughter) to some extent, are all horrible relationships where the treatment of each other means they both turn out pretty awful. However, the same treatment to children (Thenardier parents to their children and even more so to Cosette, Gillenormand to Marius) actually creates an opposite personality. Eponine and Gavroche are both pretty rough, but they’re also both fairly kind in certain ways, which their parents are definitely not. Marius is socially awkward but happy to help when he can. Cosette defies her childhood completely. It’s just an interesting observation that adults abused as adults become abusive themselves while children who were abused have the chance to end the cycle.

“She was a nettle bruised by a frock.” Does Hugo use “nettle” in this metaphor as a verb or a noun? Because to nettle someone is to annoy them, which works, as Victurnien seems to be an extremely annoying individual. But also we have nettles as prickly, stinging plants and as a metaphor from a few chapters ago for the way people become hurtful when neglected. Here we have Victurnien, this nettle bruised by a frock, hurt and damaged by this ex-monk, who becomes prickly and abusive herself. Perhaps with better treatment she would not have turned out this way; but she continues the cycle, beating down others and turning them into stinging nettles rather than them becoming useful.

Fantine is given her fifty francs upon her termination “on behalf of the mayor.” Madeleine is not even Madeleine at all in this chapter. He’s just “the mayor,” as Fantine had been just “the mother” back in 1.4.1. To her he’s this entity that has power over her, that even hates and persecutes her the way the townspeople are. She doesn’t see him, and neither do we; by this point he seems to have relegated factory admin jobs to others, who are then able to make the choice about who to dismiss and why. Again this presents a problem to his rules. People can make up any old rumor or reason to dismiss a person they don’t like or see as morally unfit, and because Valjean doesn’t seem to play as much a part in the running of the factory as before, there’s no way to dispute, except to go to him. And who’s going to go to him, if they feel the same shame that Fantine does?

Fantine is in limbo; she’s told to leave the city but she cannot because of debt. Hugo’s characters in limbo are usually on the edge of an emotional or ethical breakthrough, as with Valjean leaving Digne, Marius just outside the barricade, or Javert at the bridge. Fantine’s limbo doesn’t seem like the edge of a breakthrough, more like the edge of collapse. She really doesn’t have many avenues open to her anymore.

Also, what about sex workers who are more obvious? Later, we see Fantine walking the street in a ballgown. That’s very unsubtle. And, I don’t know, maybe it goes with her sort of social innocence that she would do something like that, but surely there are other desperate women who blatantly walk the streets like that. They haven’t been kicked out of the city. Surely they don’t--or can’t--hide their trade completely. It must be some sort of open secret. I understand that the reasoning for her being banished from M-sur-M is that Valjean has very strict rules, but it still seems so weird to me to set these rules up for some of the city but not all.

Fantine feels shame more than she feels despair. Which. Is a lot. It’s just awful that she has to feel ashamed for this thing that she would have kept hidden if the townspeople weren’t so awful. She has to feel ashamed for the one thing in her life that she truly actually loves and sacrifices for. Which is another parallel between her and Valjean. Fantine feels ashamed not because of her love of Cosette, but because of the “mistake” and stigma that Cosette’s existence implies. Valjean loves Cosette but he always feels a little bit ashamed, not at loving her, but because he feels she doesn’t deserve his love. Despite both of their shame regarding their love for Cosette, both Fantine and Valjean will sacrifice anything for her. It’s definitely a statement about the power of Love, but I think it’s also a good illustration of how both Valjean and Fantine seem to think of themselves as people meant to Suffer For The Good Of Another.

Fantine was “advised to see the mayor; she did not dare.” She believes this was his decision, and not some foreman’s. This is a failure on her part and on Valjean’s part as well. It’s a failure on Fantine’s part because had she gathered her courage and gone, she could have avoided everything that soon comes. But Fantine is so optimistic and sees through rose-tinted glasses, all the way until the moment everything collapses on her, and then she can’t go on. Her optimism doesn’t get her far enough to stand up again immediately; it has to rest first. But more than Fantine’s failing, this is Valjean’s. I assume he gets notified of who is hired and fired at his factory; does he not reach out when someone is dismissed to make sure they’re okay and to see if he can help? Even more of a failure is this rigid system he’s set up combined with his kind-but-mysterious air. He’s so nice and fair that the townspeople see these rules as kind and fair as well, when they’re very much not. But no one--including Fantine--is going to question it because they assume it’s set up in the spirit of kindness. Which I suppose it is, from Valjean’s point of view, but it’s misguided and twisted and ends up being far more damaging than it could ever be helpful.

[SIZE=1][b]Name:[/b] Jess. [b]Age:[/b] 20. [b]How did you find us?:[/b] I hate this question. [b]How did this happen?:[/b] Chase and Fallon refused to kill him.

[b]Name:[/b] Nathan Eliot Travis. [b]Nicknames & Aliases:[/b][LIST] [*] Nickname: Nat. (Earns some responses at times.) [*] Nickname: Nate. (Earns less responses than Nat.) [*] Nickname: Travis. (Responds to this!) [*] Alias: Nathan Reese. [/LIST][b]Age:[/b] 42. [b]Date of Birth:[/b] July 31st 1969. [b]Gender:[/b] Male, defiantly a male. [b]Sexual Orientation:[/b] Straight.  He’s not exactly looking right though. [b]Occupation:[/b] Works at Resurrect-R-Us.

[b]Nightly Raising Limit:[/b] 2 on his own, 3 with help from another animator. [b]Standing Rising Kit:[/b][LIST] [*] A sacrifice. Which is usually a chicken, sometimes a goat, or even his own blood. [*] A ceremonial knife. His knife is a simple hunting knife. [*] A jar of ointment. Which is basically blended Rosemary, Cloves, Sage, Thyme and graveyard mould. [*] Salt. [/LIST]

[b]Powers:[/b] [LIST]Nathan is an animator. Which means he was born with the power to raise the dead from their graves prior to the deceased soul leaving its body and moving on into the next life. It’s not as easy as it sounds either, there’s no waving a magic wand and saying a few words and hey presto, a zombie appears. An animator’s job is more ritualistic than that. – Nathan: Which is probably why it pays as much as it does. – Unless they mess up that is, but nine times out of ten, nothing bad happens.  

While he was born with the power in him, he still needs some tools for the trade. Those include, and I kid you not, chickens or goats and at times he’s even needed a pig, as the summoning involves a sacrifice. The older the zombie, the bigger the sacrifice, and since he doesn’t like ruining his jeep with farm yard animals, Nathan tries to keep it to chickens and the odd goat. Nathan also needs the zombie’s name in the ritual, the full name is best but if he’s pushed then the given birth name will do.  During the ritual, Nathan circles the grave with the blood of the sacrifice, ‘drawing’ a circle of power. Now, normally he’s the only person in that circle when he raises someone, but at times relatives of the deceased want to do things or ask things so Nathan makes them stand behind the grave marker before feeding the zombie blood and then giving the other person a chance to ask what they want. As a newly raised zombie has no memory and needs blood fed to them to regain their knowledge of their former life, Nathan gets through the basics first and hopes to God that anyone else inside the circle with him would be ballsy enough to disrupt the ritual.

So, he circles the grave with blood and power by picturing a glowing circle in his mind, it’s a double edged sword. Dead things can’t get out and dead things can’t get into it without him breaking the circle. With that done he dabs the blood of the sacrifice on his forehead, cheeks and heart, then repeats the motion with the ointment before smearing the headstone with both blood and ointment. The chant he then has to say is pretty basic [i]“Hear us, (corpse name). We call you from your grave. By blood, magic and steel, we call you. Arise, (corpse name), come to us, come to us. (corpse name X2) come to us. Waken, (corpse name), arise and come to us.”[/i] With that done, the dead literally rise as the earth covering the zombie rolls away allowing it to rise to Nathan’s command.  Since the zombie’s just a zombie, Nathan must then prick his finger and let the zombie taste blood to bring back its memories and give him total control. Insta-zombie! – Nathan: Hey! They have feelings now you know. – Questions can be asked and then he can send the zombie back to its resting place with salt and the chant to release them. Then its just a matter of going back to the car and cleaning up.

He also has the minor ability to sense the dead, and occasionally see human souls and ghosts that haven’t moved on. They’re nothing more than shades really, and so he doesn’t give them much attention. Everyone knows if you give ghosts attention, they’ll come back for more and more of it. [/LIST]

[b]Face Claim:[/b] Simon Baker. [b]Description:[/b] [IMG]http://i54.tinypic.com/33o7790.jpg[/IMG][LIST]Nathan? A remarkably stunning male that needs to be in a fashion magazine? Never! He is however 5 feet and 10 inches tall and of average build, though – Nathan: I work out....Sometimes. – he looks a bit bigger than his 160lbs in weight. He can hold his own in a fight though for a time, and I suppose that’s what counts in the end right? Well, he’s also got blonde hair that can be mistaken for mousy brown when it’s wet or under certain lighting, and stunning green eyes and that’s about it.

Oh! You want more, ok.  His hands are rough with small scars from his work; those scars turn a little bigger and more pronounced against his skin as you move up to the wrists. Suicidal, psh, never, but it’s often mistaken for such. Tattoos, piercings and Nathan don’t belong in the same sentence. Nathan has nothing in the way of ink work or metal work and has never shown interest in getting things like that done and likely won’t anytime in the future. While he may not have any work done himself, he does take an interest in stuff like that at times. – Nathan: its art, of course it’s interesting. –

Nathan tends to wear suits more than casual clothes like jeans and t-shirts but he won’t rule them out. A nice suit can promote maturity and professionalism, and that seems to calm down distraught clients. Of course, there’s that and the fact that suits are cool. He won’t rule out t-shirts and jeans though, he tends to wear them more when he’s spending time at home or on his day off. [/LIST]

[b]Special Skills:[/b] [LIST] [*] Has a degree in preternatural biology. [*] Has helped in multiple RPIT cases stateside and brought in four killers. [*] A good listener when people need a shoulder to cry on. [*] Can summon a zombie up to 130 years old. [*] Giving blood. Yes, this means he’ll feed vampires in a pinch as well. [*] He’s good with a knife but he won’t ever use it against anyone. [*] Screw your weapons; he has logic on his side. [*] Knows a bit of Spanish, just enough to get by really. [/LIST] [b]Personality:[/b] [LIST]Nathan isn’t a generally moody person, he likes to see the positive side of things rather than the negative and often remains open minded about things around him. Some would say that he’s blunt and cocky at times, but that’s more because when he sees things, he doesn’t always think about what he’s saying until he’s actually said it and getting weird looks from people. When he’s thinking about the situation before him, Nathan can be the polite charmer that can pick up on other people’s emotions and body language quiet well, and will often manipulate people into emotional situations that suit them all. He doesn’t do it to be malicious, he does it to give people a piece of mind because really, he doesn’t like people to be all about the doom and gloom in their lives. – Nathan: I refuse to be that one emo guy in the corner; I won’t let others suffer either! –

So he’s the token smiler and the charmer, and a bit of an odd ball for apparently caring. – Nathan: You forgot impudent, annoying and clever, my dear. Opportunistic at times as well.– You’ve got to earn respect to get it, Nathan’s a fond believer of that and while people may cower and cringe around angry supernatural’s he won’t do it without due course to do so, say like, he’s being paid to do it and only then would he cower like a struck dog. Since his boss signs the pay check, he has to be nice to them, and will often swing from being a fake to a cheeky flirt. –Nathan: The last time I did that, I ended up with knee to the groin. Please don’t paint me out to be something I’m not most of the time. – Nathan will often feel bad for victims of supernatural violence, be it a lycanthrope mauling or a vampire killing, or anything else and if he’s called into help on a RPIT case, he’ll do his best to help and once it’s solved, sink into oblivion with a nice bottle of alcohol.

Yeah, he doesn’t instantly trust anyone either. He may appear like it but he’s always on his guard until he decides that he doesn’t need to hide behind the fake smile, and cryptic puzzle loving mind. Nathan can be impulsive at times, often doing things without telling anyone until he needs help or after the fact because he’s a bit of a masochist that way. He doesn’t often accept help, either in day to day life or working life, but when he does, he obviously feels a need to have it. Nathan tends to keep a lot of emotions bottled up at time, it’s nothing intentional on his part, he just does it unconsciously for reasons spanning back years. Doing this has gifted him with the inability to sleep properly on a night, instead of getting the recommended eight hours; Nathan rarely gets more than four at a push.

He does have a bit of a bad side though and you can tell the difference if you know him well enough. He withdraws into himself and often keeps his thoughts to himself, even when asked to share he won’t do it. He’s the type of person that likes pushing buttons and playing mind games with people so this is a startling difference in his person. He doesn’t get violent and smack people about like some thug on an ego trip, but some of his snappy growled comments will often leave marks that he will try and fix later on when he’s calmed down if he’s presented with the opportune moment to do so. He doesn’t like being angry, isn’t naturally angry, so there’s no real need to leave things fester just to be cruel.

Nathan’s an excommunicated catholic – Nathan: If God loves all, then the Pope is an idiot for excommunicating all animators and necromancers because they can summon the dead. – So he doesn’t have faith like most people that he knows does, thus a Holy item won’t protect him. He’s an Atheist and proud of it. He just doesn’t believe in a higher power because it’s illogical and he won’t believe until there’s proof of said power before his very eyes. However, saying that, you could also label him as Agnostic because if vampires and other supernatural creatures exist, then why shouldn’t a “God”? Now, his views on the supernatural community are a little more logical. Well, since he’s a part of it he can’t complain much about it. He won’t put himself in the middle of angry vampires or lycanthropes because he knows that they have a system of their own. He will however, step in and try and diffuse the situation if there are other humans involved between other beings because it’s only natural for him to help the underdog. [/LIST][b]Likes:[/b][LIST] [*] Puzzles and challenges. [*] Relaxing after a long day with a puzzle book. [*] A nice glass of red wine, or a cup of tea. [*] Risings that go to plan. [*] Walks on the beach. [*] Sleep when he can get it. [*] Helping people out to the best of his ability. [*] Going for a walk if he’s restless. [*] Appearing professional in everything he does. [*] A home cooked meal over fast food. [/LIST][b]Dislikes:[/b][LIST] [*] Sunrises. It means he’s worked all night long. [*] Ankle biting dogs. Have you ever been bitten by one of them? He has! [*] Vampires that thing they’re all that. [*] People that take no badly. [*] Noisy criers. Zombie rising is hard work without the distraction as it is. [*] People that think being ‘supernatural’ is a crime against God. [*] Killing goats for work. He likes to make do with chickens. [*] When his computer doesn’t work, because he has no idea how to fix it. [*] Types of people that spoil movies or books before he reads or watches. [*] A promising challenge turning into a dud. [/LIST][b]Strengths:[/b][LIST] [*] Will be polite if he’s with civil people. [*] Can follow orders, in his own way. [*] Is professional when it comes to his work. [*] Doesn’t drink through the week, that’s saved for the weekends. [*] He’s got a good mind; he just over uses it to the point of abuse. [/LIST][b]Weaknesses:[/b][LIST] [*] He’s anyone’s for a nice cup of tea. [*] Victims of supernatural crime, particularly children. [*] Isn’t that technological advanced. [*] Attitude and trust problems. [*] Bull-headed reckless streak. [*] Can be pretty oblivious to things at time. [/LIST][b]Fears:[/b][LIST] [*] Claustrophobia: He’s tried to get help for this, but there’s nothing to be done. It’s an irrational phobia that makes him terrified of confined spaces. [*] Belonephobia: He’s afraid of needles and will faint if they’re used on him. He’s fine if he doesn’t look but this phobia’s what’s pushed him to avoid many medical experiences than he cares to mention. [*] Being the cause of an out of control zombie of any kind. [*] Being tricked into raising a murder victim from the grave. [/LIST][b]Family:[/b][LIST] [*] Janet Reese: mother : alive. [*] Elliot Travis: father : unknown. [*] Ines Reese: grandmother : alive. [*] Jonas Reese: grandfather : dead. [/LIST][b]History:[/b] [LIST]Nathan Elliot Travis was born in downtown San Diego, California way back in July 1969. He was the surprise – Nathan: More like unwanted but mother never was to hurt people’s feelings. - Birth of female police officer, Janet Reese who before she had found out about the pregnancy, had recently changed her name back to her maiden name after a long year of family and relationship drama that she wanted to put behind her. Nathan was simply the product of a very brief fling with her former husband Elliot Travis and she didn’t know about their child until it was too late and she was screaming blue murder and cursing all males within a thirty mile radius of her.  Now, as an unwanted child, you’d think that his childhood would’ve been one full of heartache and misery but it really wasn’t. His mother loved him with every breath in her body and even though she’d given up her badge without thinking about it when he’d been born, she never once let people put her down or her son for that matter. So what if his Grandparents where old fashioned and thought that he should’ve been put into the foster system because his mother couldn’t cope! She would be twice as mean back and just as stubborn as them and prove that she could. Since she was a single mom though, things were hard on her. If Nathan got sick, she would go without sleep and food just to make sure that he was better. If he outgrew any clothes, she would go without stuff for him all the more. The stubborn streak was what cost Janet the semi support of her parents by the time Nathan was three years old, and brought into the young man’s life something that Janet had never wanted. His father.

Elliot Travis was a manipulator, he wooed his mother for months after finding out that he had a son by her and almost a year later, he was back in her bed and in her body as well as her mind. Nathan didn’t like this man from day one and while most children wanted to be like their father and impress them, Nathan did not because at the end of the day there was only enough room in the house for two people. His father had to go. – Nathan: You make it sound so malicious than it actually was at the time. – Nathan started to plot little things at first, typically childish stuff like dumping his father’s wallet into the bin or tossing his car keys out of the window and into the garden hoping and praying that someone would find them or that they’d get buried under garden refuse. He even went as far as switching the setting on the washing machine to shrink Elliot’s clothes. Poor Nathan, he got the shock of his life when his father found him red handed pouring paint on all of Elliot’s clothes just after his eighth birthday, his plan had been to blame the decorators that Elliot had hired to redo the ‘marital room’ – Nathan: Oh lovely, I think I’ve just been sick in my mouth. - If it ever came about. Elliot beat Nathan into submission both physically and also mentally. He swore that if Nathan played anymore tricks, that Nathan would be made to watch Elliot hurt his mother and that alone put Nathan back in his place for many years to come. Of course the occasional beating that was brushed off as accidents helped Elliot control Nathan, as well as the threats towards Janet’s safety and wellbeing. It all stopped by the time he was fourteen thankfully, but it would be one of those memories that Nathan would keep for the rest of his life.

He’d been suffering at school, insomnia during the night and headaches and nausea, the inability to hold down food for more than five minutes before running to the bathroom, had affected his grades and performance on a whole as well as his life. His mother was worried, almost frantic that something was seriously wrong with her son, but Elliot didn’t care. He tried to calm Janet down but she had none of that and called in the grandparents. Nathan had an alright relationship with them, they neither loved him or hated him and defiantly didn’t try to beat him like Elliot did. His grandmother took an interest immediately when she found out that he hadn’t been sleeping or eating. Granny Ines put her foot down so hard when Nathan complained that he wasn’t hungry or lied when he said that he was going to try and sleep. Sure it made her angry but what really infuriated the dear old soul was the time when she’d come to give Nathan some clothes to put in his wardrobe – Nathan: I remember that night. Mom was on a date and they were babysitting. - And saw the bruises on his ribs and back. Nathan broke and told her every single detail, and at fourteen years of age, it was hard to ignore [i]the look[/i].

By the time Elliot and Janet returned, Nathans Grandfather Jonas was waiting. Jonas at the time knew everything – Nathan: Well, not everything. I didn’t tell them about me trying to get rid of Elliot in the first place – and just like Ines, he was furious and simply set the big old German shepherd dogs he kept around the back of the house on Eliot to scare the live out of him. Hex and Hooligan did their job, but what was worse, Ines told Janet the whole sordid tale and Nathan’s mother saw red. In the following days, Nathan enjoyed peace. Elliot was out of his life – Nathan: Go, go gadget restraining order! - And in an amusing turn of events, Nathan had his grandparents around in his life more often and his mother had her parents back. All was well, until a year or so later when Jonas suffered a heart attack which proved too much for the seventy two year old and slowly killed him. Nathan shouldn’t have been listening in on the brief conversation between his grandparents, but the talk of being brought back and his grandmother agreeing had caught and held his attention in its poisonous grasp and still weighed heavily on his thoughts throughout the following day into the next until Ines informed him and his mother that Jonas had passed away. The look that she gave Nathan though, removed any idea that he’d not been caught spying and listening in.

After Jonas’ funeral, his grandmother drew him aside. She explained...things to him. She was a long retired vaudun priestess, having left her religious beliefs behind when she’d found her true love and could bring the dead back for brief periods of time. Monsters from fairytales and movies were real and lurking in the shadows preying on people and the world was in for a very big wakeup call someday. Instead of brushing her off as a distraught widow, Nathan believed her, he could sense something about Ines now that he hadn’t been able to sense before, and he begged her to train him as her apprentice and seeing something in the young one, his grandmother agreed. Thus, at the age of sixteen, Nathan Travis’ mind was opened to a world bigger than the one that he thought he knew. Oh, Ines poked and prodded that spark in Nathan and helped him grow in his power and never gave him a break. She wasn’t the best mentor – Nathan: Her words, not mine. She said them repeatedly. – But she wasn’t exactly the same as Nathan was. He’d been born with this power, but she couldn’t work out how he’d got it since Janet hadn’t been born with it. However, they rarely sat down and brooded about things in the past because there was always something new that she could teach him and by the time he was twenty one, he’d brought back his first zombie on his own and Ines declared that there was nothing else to teach him.  

What could a young animator do in a world that didn’t accept the supernatural? Vampires and were-creatures? He knew that they were there thanks to his grandmothers training and her lessons. He could now make out the souls of recently dead and lingering ghosts if he focused hard enough. He was at a loss, and even though he knew things that not many did, he hid away. Got on with life and moved to New York, then when he got bored with New York, he tried his luck in New Orleans a few years after in 1995, bouncing back to San Diego three times a year to see his mother and Ines when he could. It was great. For awhile he forgot that he could bring back the dead, for awhile he was normal. Then the supernatural world came out of hiding in 1997 and everything changed. Vampires where hunted, lycanthropes where run out of jobs and lynched in the streets, supposed “psychics” and other people that worked with magic where arrested. It was bad times for everyone and people where scared but in 2000 supernatural became legal. It still didn’t stop people from being scared and angry. – Nathan: They had a right to be as well. I’d have been scared if I hadn’t known before hand. -

That was eleven years ago, in that time Nathan’s moved from New Orleans to San Francisco, from there to Atlantic City, and to Toronto plying his trade as a freelance consultant for RPIT teams and anyone needing their formerly alive loved ones returned for a little while, never really running with the ‘’big dogs’’ in reanimation until 2006. By that time he was in trouble, up to his eyeballs in debt and needed the money that a proper position in an animation firm could get him as well as signing himself up as a stable retainer for the Toronto RPIT teams. It took him nearly five years to dig himself out of debt and save up for another move. Outside of San Diego growing up as a kid, five years was the longest time that he’d ever stayed in one place and it was starting to get to him.

Nathan would’ve ended up in another city if he hadn’t heard from an English vampire about this quaint little city England. Jackford. He was told that it was one of England’s supernatural hotspots, and surprised that it wasn’t London, or Cardiff or any of the more commonly known places. Since it was overseas, Nathan had to wait another year to sort through paperwork and stuff to move overseas, while researching Jackford and in February of 2011, early he actually made it to England! Well, London really but close enough to his final destination. –Nat: Now I’ve just got to secure a job and a home and not be stuck in a hotel for the rest of my time here. – It’s now early March, he’s finally made it to Jackford and he has no idea what’s going to happen next. [/LIST][/SIZE]

Appreciate the history lesson Robert M.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/12/john-paul-ii-and-the-crisis-of-humanism

What ever our contribution, we as Moonies still have a voice as witnesses to history and watching John Paul 2 getting gunned down in St. Peter's square was the culmination of a process that we were swept into and out of our innocence.

Whether we choose to educate ourselves about the essential nature of Communism or even modern Liberal Democracy for that matter is almost irrelevant to the core message. Atheistic materialist Communism=bad. Democratic Capitalistic Consummerism=bad. Christian piety charity=good.

We made these choices every day as Moonies from the first day that we were induced to reject "Hippie freedom", (speaking for myself, of course). To consecrating our lives in a form of martyrdom to Jesus Christ. It would be many years before we discovered that Moon himself didn't believe in it but was another of the incessant weeds thrown up to misguide and redirect impressionable souls to largely politically convenient ends. 

Communism was destined to collapse upon it's own preposterous claims and everybody intuitively understood this. Including Pope John Paul, Moon, Solzhenitsyn, C.I.A. Director George H. Walker Bush, Reagan, Andropov and his successors, The Bank of London, Federal Reserve bank, etc, etc. The only ones who didn't know how or when were the actual folks caught in it's meat grinding mechanism on either side of the wall.

When the wall finally started to crumble there were no shortage of lunatics claiming responsibility. Fortunately, it was fairly evident to the rest of the world that it was the indomitable spirit of God deep inside the hearts of men and women trapped behind the wall that collapsed the monstrosity. 

The Pope went down in a hail of gunfire as if to punctuate the orgy of madness. Naturally, it was perceived to be a militant muslim at first. Very convenient. Further public investigation perhaps fueled by the remnants of the K.G.B. revealed that Turkish Grey Wolves were in fact an appendage of the C.I.A. A cacophony of indignation from the west flipped the story to blame the K.G.B. and it cohorts in Bulgaria. The Pope would survive and the world breathed a sigh of relief. Blame didn't seem appropriate any more as the Pope expressed forgiveness and Christians responded. The secret remained with him until his death. Yet another martyr for God.

The Moonies were beside ourselves. What to do now? Hundreds made the pilgrimage to mother Russia to claim victory for God, including yours truly. Most of us were confused by what we saw. Young Russians, Tartars, Georgians, etc. Swarmed to our workshops guided by former, or perhaps, current K.G.B. functionaries. The kids were extraordinarily well educated and well behaved. Most spoke fluently at least 2 languages and were well versed in something known to them as "the classics". I personally was utterly humbled. The experts organizing the events for the church were besides themselves alternating between threats and cajoling us not to fraternize to deeply with the locals. I threw caution to the wind and immediately embraced our new friends. Some were obvious, like little Vladimir who was the spitting image of early Lenin but older than the others who privately indicated to me that he was the designated F.S.B. representative monitoring our activities. He continuously plied me with offers to help him escape with his family, to the U.S. or anywhere that wasn't there. I assured him that I had no ability to do so but he persisted throughout the entire time. The other children of probably mostly former Communist officials were a delight. They loved Americans and were disappointed when I told them I was Canadian. Most of the male moonies had multiple offers of marriage in their first week there which I assumed were politely turned down in favor of our Moonies blessed wives. We were instructed by our handlers to return to Moscow and stay together as a group by train from the Sanitorium on the Black Sea in Yalta where the workshop was held. I rejected this out of hand and chose to follow up little Vladimir's offer to stay with his family in their flat in Moscow. His wife and family were wonderful he had a modest apartment with the usual amenities which I discovered later was an anomaly. I visited in turn all of my guests in Moscow and discovered that most Russians lived in dire poverty usually with three Generations crammed into Tenements blocks without a stick of furniture save a table with a couple chairs. Vladimir has lost control of me by then as well. I hopped from apartment to apartment meeting people that you and I would never have access to in the United States. One girls father was a Scientist working on Artificial Intelligence at the time (1993). I hadn't a clue what that was, sounded important so I feigned astonishment and shook his hand emphatically. He revealed to me in perfect English that a taxi driver made more money than he did because they had access to foreign exchange. I knew that was true because I had taken about thirty people out for Ice cream the previous night and spent the equivalent of two Baskin and Robbins sundays. I commented on this to an American participant next to me and he cautioned me to keep quiet about it so not to offend our hosts. I agreed. Everywhere I went I was plied with shots of Vodka or I "was not a friend". Originating from Canada, I had no problem complying to my new found friends. I was escorted through dazzlingly clean and orderly cavernous subway terminals all over the city from one district to the next. I went horseback riding outside of Moscow at a Orthodox Monastery that had miraculously survived the Communist purges.

A week had passed before I collected my senses and realized that my plane rendezvous was quickly approaching. I found my way to the original Unification church lodgings which was a former Hotel close to the Airport. I was strictly admonished by the church leadership and plied with questions about my adventure. I assured them that their fears were completely and utterly groundless and that they may be suffering from some sort of cultish miasma themselves. They told me that I was never to return to Russia and I assured them that it probably wouldn't be necessary. Russians and everyone else from the former C.I.S. states would descend upon us like a swarm in the days ahead. My newfound Russian friends showed up at the airport to see me off with a flurry of embraces and kisses on the lips, much to the astonishment of the workshop organizers. Some were crying, I was feeling it too but managed to keep my sh*t together. Yes, I was still married to my Moonie bride and maintained my integrity throughout my experience.

I never returned to Russia like others did, but was content to correspond for a few years after, including with little Vladimir. I was busy raising a family in rural Alabama trying to deal with the local Unification church leadership that was starting to resemble the former autocrats of Communism. Moon himself made the unlikely effort to reach out to his perceived counterpart in North Korea. I understood the process but was still taken back by how easily Moon had embraced his former sworn enemy. Amid showers of multi-millions of dollars in gifts, Moon had reached an understanding with his former nemesis to open businesses in North Korea and foster a new age of cross cultural exchange. We later found out that Moon personally profited from this arrangement, seemingly at the expense of his former countrymen. While the overtly Communist Government of North Korea went on to systemically starve their citizens and develop dreadful weapons of mass destruction in order to secure their control.  

Why did I relate all of this you may ask? Since my experience both in the Moonie cult and my travels during. (Russia, C.I.S., El Salvador, during the revolution, Korea, both pre-cold war and post.) My mind has expanded, thankfully, to God. Yeah, I concede that Moon played a role here too. We eventually arrived at something called the Internet with which to educate ourselves in order to digest these experiences. What we have come to fathom, much in line with the admonishments of Pope John Paul 2 and others. Is that God exists and pours his love upon us daily whether deserving or not, in such volume that we are affected in spite of the desperate tangle of 'Isms and ideologies seemingly designed to distort and confuse our spirits from that which we naturally cherish. Someone tried to murder John Paul but they forgot that Catholics, and many others follow someone known as Jesus Christ. We don't even worship the dude but seek his guidance provided in a little handbook called New Testament. Sometime I remember to crack it open in a moment of anguish and my heart was melted in utter complete surrender. Not by force of course, but because my mind could suddenly absorb the kernels of truth from the scant but magnificent parables taught over 2000 years ago by this guy to a bunch of miscreants. Not unlike myself, abandoned by the wealthy and powerful who always seem to be with us but not of us. Trying to control and take what they can from us including our impoverished spirits. But no. Not this time. It is nothing but sand. Of course Jesus said it best. Matt. 4:1; Mk. 1:12; Lk. 4:1

"You will bow down and serve your God and creator" (paraphrasing Jesus speaking to Satan in the wilderness). I concur, God's will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Thanks for reading. Shout out to John Paul and all the saints. I'm unworthy but have committed myself to do what I can, come what may.

Frank F

The Exorcist

William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece, released 45 years ago this holiday season, was largely set in the collegiate Washington D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown. The Georgetown of the early 1970s was a bit less posh than the neighborhood today, but even at the height of the eponymous school’s frattiest years, the area was chockablock with Federal-style and early American architecture. The university itself is heavily featured in both book and film (author William Blatty was an alumnus), as are establishing shots of the Key Bridge (formally, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, built in 1923) that spans the Potomac.

The infamous “Exorcist Steps,” which run from Prospect down to M Street, were even honored as such by the city in a 2015 ceremony.

As previously established, I was raised Catholic-lite: First Confessed but barely Confirmed, aka Catholic enough to be disturbed by the Exorcist but not Catholic enough to have picketed the movie. Although in 1973 I was but one year old, and that would have been a very tiny and cute picket sign in my chubby fists, maybe “Former Fetuses Against Friedkin” or something like that. Anyway! I first watched the Exorcist with my atheist-raised high school bestie, and at the time we both agreed that it was just unsettling enough to raise some doubts about God and the Devil. Also about the wisdom of fucking around with a Ouija board.

No girl! Captain Howdy is not your friend, ma petite.

My second viewing of the film was as a full-grown adult, when the director’s cut was released in 1999. I now realized the true horror of this story was just under foot: the ugly carpeting in that awesome Federal-style townhouse!

The MacNeil residence’s main floor has herringbone parquet in the kitchen, dining nook, and study, but the rest of the house is covered in that ugly-ass, low-pile fuzz bomb. I could barely register Regan’s infamous spider walk down the stairs, I was so distracted by that gross carpeting.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why would you ruin such a historic property? How could you commit such high crimes against the herringbone? But then I did some research, and sigh, I was all wrong. You see, the Exorcist house, aka the MacNeil Residence, wasn’t built until 1950.

Thus, that carpeting makes total sense, as does Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn)’s bedroom style.

The furniture is Federal-style but the wallpaper and (blech) carpet are definitely 20th century.

Regan doesn’t seem to be into carpeting much, either, given her tinkle on the Persian rug. I just love the reaction expression on Father Dyer’s face after Regan pisses the floor. By the way, that character was played by a real live priest, Father William J. O’Malley:

Speaking of priests, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) pretty much wiped out any remaining Catholicism lingering in me. I never met a priest half as handsome, and thus that confirmed that there must be no God.

Mon dieu, he is a tasty sacrament. O la la...

There was so much myth and legend surrounding The Exorcist, it’s sometimes hard to remember there was some bona fide weird shit happening as well. An actual serial killer makes an appearance in the film (okay, alleged serial killler, but convicted murderer). Friedkin shot the hospital imaging scene at New York University Medical Center, and used an actual neurosurgeon and his team as extras. Paul Bateson was an X-ray technician on staff at the hospital and made it into the scene, with a line to boot.

Bateson was arrested in 1979 for the murder of film critic Addison Verrill (an act committed during a date gone terribly wrong). While incarcerated at Riker’s, Bateson boasted to other inmates that he had murdered at least six other gay men. The details he provided were eerily similar to the “Bag Murders” that had terrified the NYC gay community in 1977 and 1978, when the bodies of missing queer men turned up in the Hudson River. The victims were all dismembered and disposed of in plastic bags, just as Bateson described. The police were never able to assemble enough evidence to charge Bateson, so he instead only served his sentence for the death of Verrill. William Friedkin had already been approached earlier to shoot a film based on the 1970 novel Cruising, but he passed on the offer until the Bateson arrest. Friedkin was so disturbed and intrigued by this story and his own connection to the murderer, he ended up making the film.

There are a lot of other fables about the Exorcist curse, which are mostly explained away easily. I personally was a bit haunted when doing my research, thinking about Georgetown Preparatory School and this past year’s shitshow Supreme Court nomination hearing. Even though Georgetown Prep separated from the University and moved to Bethesda, MD in 1919, the name is still triggering. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford still cannot live in her own house, due to death threats, and the accused sits clear and free on the highest court of the United States. Believe women. Why the fuck would we go through this torture a second time, if we weren’t telling the truth?

Here’s to hoping for a better 2019. I made it through a year of blogging about my special obsession, hurray! I’m going to keep this going as long as there are interesting architectural examples in 1970s horror movies. January is going to get weird, so stay tuned. I love you all, you sexy demons. Tabernak!

[26/08, 10:10 PM] 98 41 121780: Awesome Without Allah: Why These Muslims Are Leaving Islam And Are Proud Of It

How a North American group is building public support for those who seek to leave, or have left, the Muslim faith.

For the past few days, the hashtag #AwesomeWithoutAllah is trending on Twitter. Ex-Muslims across the world are celebrating leaving Islam and sharing with ‘twitterati’ their happiness on being free from the shackles of Sharia and acquiring newfound freedoms which they could only imagine before.

Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA), a non-profit organisation, is spearheading this campaign online as well as offline. It has put up billboards at various public places. “Nearly one in four Muslims raised in the United States have left Islam,” reads one. “Godless. Fearless. Ex-Muslim,” it adds.

One of the goals of EXMNA is to reduce discrimination faced by those who leave Islam. It promotes secular values and is working towards making religious dissent acceptable. The initiative was founded in 2012 by Muhammad Syed, a human rights activist.

Islam is a one-way street as far as its affiliation is concerned. It allows, no, insists, on converting people of other faiths. But no one can leave it for the punishment decreed by Sharia (Islamic law), for apostasy is death.

And killing someone for leaving Islam is not a mere disturbing theory. It is regularly enforced across the Muslim world and that includes even the Western nations where Sharia is not the law. Where the state is not Islamic, zealous Muslims take it upon themselves to punish those who ‘stray’ from the path of Allah. Last week, two Muslim men were arrested by the authorities in the UK for plotting to kill a female relative who had renounced Islam.

"This is why @ExmuslimsOrg works to normalize dissent in Muslim communities. This is why we run campaigns like #AwesomeWithoutAllah," tweeted Sarah Haider, executive director at EXMNA.

In such a scary environment where apostates have to live in constant fear of getting killed, what the organisation is doing is quite courageous.On its call to trend #AwesomeWithoutAllah on Twitter, many ex-Muslims have shared their stories on why they are happy to leave Islam. And it should come as no surprise that most of them are women, given their secondary status in the religion.

Nik, a co-founder of Ex-Muslim Support Network of Australia and who goes by the Twitter handle @HereticalGray, explains why she is awesome without Allah. “Because no child should be forced into a hijab/niqab. Because my worth is not determined by a cloth. Because by removing my hijab, it does not mean I am an immoral person that deserves to be raped. Because I believe everyone has a choice,” she tweeted.

“Now we are free to enjoy life as we want. Our minds are free to think what we want. Our hearts are free to love who we want. We are no longer under the commands of some narcissistic demanding being,” tweeted Yasmine Mohammed. Her profile reads: think outside the kaaba (which is depicted in form of an emoji).

‘Unapologetic Madow Lover’ (@gabariskufilan), an honour killing survivor, says she left Islam for feminism. “Because as a radical Black feminist, I can NOT be simultaneously Muslim and feminist. I choose women’s liberation. I love to travel solo, wear whatever I want without victim blaming and support LGBTQIA rights," she tweeted.

"My mother wanted me dead for removing hijab & leaving her house. She endlessly prayed for God to kill me from the moment I left & honestly believes I'm going to die soon bc "allah listens to her prayers"," tweeted Jinan Murtad, a Muslim-turned atheist, sharing her deeply personal story. “Its been 2 yrs now, I'm still alive & well but mostly #AwesomeWithoutAllah," she added.

The best part about leaving Islam, according to Meriem who recorded a video for the EXMNA campaign, is that she doesn't simply pray or fast anymore. “I am breaking free from a toxic, abusive and patriarchal environment,” she said, adding that, “No one can force me to wear something, or do something, or feel something, or be something that I'm not.”

Zara Kay, a Tanzania-Australian, tweeted a picture with her dog. “I am #AwesomeWithoutAllah Because puppies! No more feeling like I shouldn't touch dogs because they're najis," she gave her reason. She is getting a lot of abuse and threats on Twitter for coming out as an Ex-Muslim. But she is not deterred.

“I woke up to 30 messages in my inbox, people wishing death to me, calling me a bitch, talking about hellfire, or wanting to kill me. This is exactly why we need to keep fighting,” she tweeted. She also posted screenshots of some of the abuses coming her way.

In all the backlash that the 'Awesome without Allah' campaign is getting, EXMNA executive director Sarah Haider said she was 'amused by the many "omg it's the end of timess!!!" comments by believers in response to our billboards and the trending of #AwesomeWithoutAllah. I have good news! It's not THE end of times! It's the end of A time — the end of a time of religious privilege, abuse, persecution."

"If #exMuslims speaking up about their persecution, legalized murder in 12+ countries, their jailing & torture, myriad other horrors they face due to Islam makes YOU uncomfortable, it's because you can't bear to look at yourself in the mirror, have some shame!," EXMNA founder and president Muhammad Syed tweeted.

It's not just women who are speaking out and coming out of the closet. Muslim men are also doing so in droves.

Sohail Ahmed, an Ahmadi Muslim by birth, says that 'the best part of leaving Islam was in no longer having to defend verses of the Quran where the inequality of men & women is baked in.

Ali Malik, who is an atheist now, tweeted that is awesome without Allah 'because how independent, human, humble and compassionate it made me.'

"The best part of leaving Islam is to be free from mental shackles." said Abdullah Sameer in a video he shot for the EXMNA initiative.

Alireza Azami posted a photo with the hashtag showing his middle finger.

Supporting these voices of dissent, Ali A. Rizvi, a Pakistani-Canadian and author of The Atheist Muslim, said that Muslims are not immune to reason, secularism, and enlightenment. “We normalised lapsed Catholics, secular Jews, and ex-Mormons. Now it’s time to normalize ex-Muslims,” he tweeted.

Islamic theology has no love lost for the non-believers. It decrees unrelenting hostility towards kafirs. The believers must shun all kinds of relationships with them and if they are to be engaged then that should be done strictly out of necessity. They cannot be accorded any position of respect.

Even saying words of respect to them is not allowed. Not even in their death. To ask dua for them is haram. Their places of worship are places of the devil. Their festivals are haram. They are physically detestable and untrustworthy.

It is no wonder then that when a believer leaves Islam and becomes a non-believer, it is considered a great affront to the religion. That's why the punishment for apostasy is nothing short of death.

If some ex-Muslims are daring to come out in the open and speak against the problematic aspects of their former religion, their dissent not only must be fiercely protected but also promoted.

They are doing a great service to humanity and even Islam itself. Criticism and dissent is the first step toward reform. And Islam needed reformation yesterday

By

Jagadeesh krishnan

Psychologist and International Author

[26/08, 10:11 PM] 98 41 121780: அல்லாஹ் இல்லாமல் அற்புதம்: இந்த முஸ்லிம்கள் ஏன் இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறி பெருமைப்படுகிறார்கள்

ஒரு முஸ்லீம் நம்பிக்கையை விட்டு வெளியேற விரும்புவோருக்கு அல்லது வெளியேறியவர்களுக்கு ஒரு வட அமெரிக்க குழு எவ்வாறு பொது ஆதரவை உருவாக்குகிறது.

கடந்த சில நாட்களாக, #AwesomeWithoutAllah என்ற ஹேஷ்டேக் ட்விட்டரில் ட்ரெண்டாகி வருகிறது. உலகெங்கிலும் உள்ள முன்னாள் முஸ்லீம்கள் இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறி, ஷரியாவின் பிடியில் இருந்து விடுபட்டு, தங்களுக்கு முன்பு கற்பனை செய்து பார்க்க முடிந்த புதிய சுதந்திரங்களைப் பெற்ற மகிழ்ச்சியை 'டுவிட்டர்' உடன் பகிர்ந்து கொண்டாடி வருகின்றனர்.

வட அமெரிக்காவின் முன்னாள் முஸ்லிம்கள் (EXMNA), ஒரு இலாப நோக்கற்ற அமைப்பு, இந்த பிரச்சாரத்தை ஆன்லைனிலும் ஆஃப்லைனிலும் முன்னின்று நடத்துகிறது. இது பல்வேறு பொது இடங்களில் விளம்பர பலகைகளை வைத்துள்ளது. "அமெரிக்காவில் வளர்க்கப்பட்ட நான்கில் ஒரு முஸ்லிம்கள் இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறினர்" என்று ஒருவர் வாசிக்கிறார். "கடவுள் இல்லாதவர். அச்சமற்ற. முன்னாள் முஸ்லீம், ”அது மேலும் கூறுகிறது.

EXMNA இலக்குகளில் ஒன்று ��ஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறுபவர்கள் எதிர்கொள்ளும் பாகுபாட்டைக் குறைப்பதாகும். இது மதச்சார்பற்ற மதிப்புகளை ஊக்குவிக்கிறது மற்றும் மத எதிர்ப்பை ஏற்றுக்கொள்ளும் வகையில் செயல்படுகிறது. இந்த முயற்சி 2012 இல் மனித உரிமை ஆர்வலர் முஹம்மது சையத் என்பவரால் நிறுவப்பட்டது.

இஸ்லாம் அதன் இணைப்பைப் பொறுத்தவரை ஒரு வழிப் பாதை. மற்ற மதத்தினரை மாற்றுவதற்கு இது அனுமதிக்கிறது, இல்லை, வலியுறுத்துகிறது. ஆனால் ஷரியா (இஸ்லாமிய சட்டம்) விதித்த தண்டனைக்காக யாரும் அதை விட்டுவிட முடியாது, ஏனெனில் துறவறம் மரணம்.

இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறியதற்காக ஒருவரைக் கொல்வது வெறும் குழப்பமான கோட்பாடு அல்ல. இது முஸ்லீம் உலகம் முழுவதும் தவறாமல் அமல்படுத்தப்படுகிறது மற்றும் ஷரியா சட்டம் இல்லாத மேற்கத்திய நாடுகளையும் உள்ளடக்கியது. அரசு இஸ்லாமியமாக இல்லாத இடத்தில், வைராக்கியமுள்ள முஸ்லீம்கள் அல்லாஹ்வின் பாதையில் இருந்து ‘வழிதவறி’ வருபவர்களைத் தண்டிக்கிறார்கள். கடந்த வாரம், இஸ்லாத்தை துறந்த பெண் உறவினர் ஒருவரை கொல்ல சதி செய்ததாக இரண்டு முஸ்லீம் ஆண்கள் இங்கிலாந்தில் அதிகாரிகளால் கைது செய்யப்பட்டனர்.

"இதனால்தான் @ExmuslimsOrg முஸ்லீம் சமூகங்களில் கருத்து வேறுபாட்டை இயல்பாக்குகிறது. இதனால்தான் நாங்கள் #AwesomeWithoutAllah போன்ற பிரச்சாரங்களை நடத்துகிறோம்" என்று EXMNA இன் நிர்வாக இயக்குனர் சாரா ஹைதர் ட்வீட் செய்தார்.

துரோகிகள் கொலை செய்யப்படுவார்கள் என்ற பயத்தில் தொடர்ந்து வாழ வேண்டிய ஒரு பயங்கரமான சூழலில், அந்த அமைப்பு என்ன செய்கிறது என்பது மிகவும் தைரியமானது. ட்விட்டரில் #AwesomeWithoutAllah ட்ரெண்டில் அதன் அழைப்பில், பல முன்னாள் முஸ்லீம்கள் தங்கள் கதைகளை ஏன் மகிழ்ச்சியாக பகிர்ந்து கொண்டனர் இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு. அவர்களில் பெரும்பாலானவர்கள் பெண்கள், மதத்தில் இரண்டாம் நிலை அந்தஸ்து வழங்கப்பட்டதில் ஆச்சரியமில்லை.

நிக், ஆஸ்திரேலியாவின் முன்னாள் முஸ்லீம் ஆதரவு நெட்வொர்க்கின் இணை நிறுவனர் மற்றும் @HereticalGray என்ற ட்விட்டர் கைப்பிடியின் மூலம், அவர் ஏன் அல்லாஹ் இல்லாமல் அற்புதமாக இருக்கிறார் என்பதை விளக்குகிறார். ஏனென்றால், எந்த குழந்தையும் ஹிஜாப்/நிகாப்பில் கட்டாயப்படுத்தப்படக்கூடாது. ஏனென்றால் என் மதிப்பு ஒரு துணியால் தீர்மானிக்கப்படவில்லை. ஏனென்றால், எனது ஹிஜாபை நீக்குவதன் மூலம், நான் பாலியல் பலாத்காரம் செய்யப்பட வேண்டிய ஒழுக்கமற்ற நபர் என்று அர்த்தமல்ல. ஏனென்றால் அனைவருக்கும் ஒரு தேர்வு இருக்கிறது என்று நான் நம்புகிறேன், ”என்று அவர் ட்வீட் செய்தார்.

"இப்போது நாம் விரும்பியபடி வாழ்க்கையை அனுபவிக்க சுதந்திரமாக இருக்கிறோம். நமக்கு என்ன வேண்டும் என்று சிந்திக்க நம் மனம் சுதந்திரமாக உள்ளது. நாம் விரும்பியவரை நேசிக்க எங்கள் இதயங்கள் சுதந்திரமாக உள்ளன. நாங்கள் இனி சில நாசீசிஸ்டிக் கோட்பாடுகளின் கட்டளைகளின் கீழ் இல்லை, ”என்று யாஸ்மின் முகமது ட்வீட் செய்தார். அவளுடைய சுயவிவரம் பின்வருமாறு கூறுகிறது: காபாவுக்கு வெளியே சிந்தியுங்கள் (இது ஒரு ஈமோஜி வடிவத்தில் சித்தரிக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது).

‘Unapologetic Madow Lover’ (@gabariskufilan), ஒரு க honorரவக் கொலையில் உயிர் பிழைத்தவர், அவர் பெண்ணுரிமைக்காக இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறினார். "ஏனெனில் ஒரு தீவிர கருப்பு பெண்ணியவாதியாக, நான் ஒரே சமயத்தில் முஸ்லீம் மற்றும் பெண்ணியவாதியாக இருக்க முடியாது. நான் பெண் விடுதலையைத் தேர்வு செய்கிறேன். நான் தனியாக பயணம் செய்ய விரும்புகிறேன், பாதிக்கப்பட்டவரை குற்றம் சாட்டாமல் நான் விரும்பும் எதையும் அணிய விரும்புகிறேன் மற்றும் LGBTQIA உரிமைகளை ஆதரிக்கிறேன், ”என்று அவர் ட்வீட் செய்துள்ளார்.

"ஹிஜாபை அகற்றிவிட்டு வீட்டை விட்டு வெளியேறியதற்காக என் அம்மா என்னை இறக்க விரும்பினார். நான் போகும் தருணத்திலிருந்து கடவுளைக் கொல்லும்படி அவள் முடிவில்லாமல் பிரார்த்தனை செய்தாள், நான் விரைவில் இறந்துவிடுவேன் என்று நம்புகிறேன்" அல்லா அவளுடைய பிரார்த்தனைகளைக் கேட்கிறார் "என்று ஜினன் முர்டாட் ட்வீட் செய்துள்ளார். ஒரு முஸ்லீம் நாத்திகர், தனது ஆழ்ந்த தனிப்பட்ட கதையைப் பகிர்ந்து கொண்டார். "இப்போது 2 வருடங்கள் ஆகிறது, நான் இன்னும் உயிருடன் இருக்கிறேன், ஆனால் பெரும்பாலும் #AwesomeWithoutAllah," என்று அவர் மேலும் கூறினார்.

EXMNA பிரச்சாரத்திற்காக ஒரு வீடியோவைப் பதிவுசெய்த மெரீமின் கூற்றுப்படி, இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறுவது பற்றிய சிறந்த பகுதி, அவள் இனி பிரார்த்தனை செய்யவோ அல்லது விரதம் இருக்கவோ இல்லை. "நான் ஒரு நச்சு, துஷ்பிரயோகம் மற்றும் ஆணாதிக்க சூழலில் இருந்து விடுபடுகிறேன்," என்று அவர் கூறினார், "யாராவது என்னை ஏதாவது அணியவோ, ஏதாவது செய்யவோ, அல்லது உணரவோ அல்லது நான் இல்லாத ஒன்றாக இருக்கவோ கட்டாயப்படுத்த முடியாது."

தான்சானியா-ஆஸ்திரேலியரான ஜாரா கே தனது நாயுடன் ஒரு படத்தை ட்வீட் செய்தார். "நான் #அற்புதமானவன் அல்லா ஏனெனில் நாய்க்குட்டிகள்! நாய்கள் நாஜிகளாக இருப்பதால் நான் அவர்களைத் தொடக் கூடாது என உணர்கிறேன், "என்று அவர் தனது காரணத்தைக் கூறினார். அவர் முன்னாள் முஸ்லீமாக வெளிவந்ததற்காக ட்விட்டரில் நிறைய துஷ்பிரயோகங்களையும் அச்சுறுத்தல்களையும் பெறுகிறார். ஆனால் அவள் தடுக்கப்படவில்லை.

"நான் என் இன்பாக்ஸில் 30 செய்திகளை எழுப்பினேன், மக்கள் எனக்கு மரணத்தை விரும்புகிறார்கள், என்னை ஒரு பிச் என்று அழைக்கிறார்கள், நரக நெருப்பைப் பற்றி பேசுகிறார்கள், அல்லது என்னைக் கொல்ல விரும்புகிறார்கள். இதனால்தான் நாங்��ள் தொடர்ந்து போராட வேண்டும், ”என்று அவர் ட்வீட் செய்தார். அவள் வரும் சில முறைகேடுகளின் ஸ்கிரீன் ஷாட்களையும் அவர் வெளியிட்டார்.

'அல்லாஹ் இல்லாமல் அருமை' பிரச்சாரம் பெறுகின்ற அனைத்து பின்னடைவுகளிலும், எக்ஸ்எம்என்ஏ நிர்வாக இயக்குனர் சாரா ஹைதர் கூறுகையில், "ஓம்ஜி இது நேரத்தின் முடிவு !!!" எங்கள் விளம்பர பலகைகளுக்கு பதிலளிக்கும் விதமாக விசுவாசிகளின் கருத்துகள் மற்றும் #AwesomeWithoutAllah இன் போக்கு. என்னிடம் நல்ல செய்தி உள்ளது! இது காலத்தின் முடிவு அல்ல! இது ஒரு காலத்தின் முடிவு - மத சலுகை, துஷ்பிரயோகம், துன்புறுத்தல் ஆகியவற்றின் நேரத்தின் முடிவு. "

இஸ்லாமியர்கள் தங்களின் துன்புறுத்தல்கள், 12+ நாடுகளில் சட்டபூர்வமான கொலை, அவர்களின் சிறை & சித்திரவதைகள், இஸ்லாமியர்களால் அவர்கள் எதிர்கொள்ளும் எண்ணற்ற பிற கொடுமைகள் பற்றி பேசினால் உங்களுக்கு அசableகரியம் ஏற்படுகிறது என்றால், கண்ணாடியில் உங்களைப் பார்க்க நீங்கள் பொறுத்துக் கொள்ள முடியாது. சில அவமானங்கள்!

வெளியே பேசுவது மற்றும் வெளியே வருவது பெண்கள் மட்டுமல்ல. முஸ்லீம் ஆண்களும் கூட்டமாக செய்கிறார்கள்.

சோஹைல் அகமது, பிறப்பால் அஹ்மதி முஸ்லீம், 'இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறுவதன் மிகச் சிறந்த பகுதி குர்ஆனின் வசனங்களை பாதுகாக்க வேண்டிய அவசியமில்லை, அங்கு ஆண்கள் மற்றும் பெண்களின் சமத்துவமின்மை சுட்டப்படுகிறது.

இப்போது நாத்திகராக இருக்கும் அலி மாலிக், அல்லாஹ் இல்லாமல் அற்புதமானவர் 'ஏனெனில் அது என்னை எவ்வளவு சுதந்திரமாகவும், மனிதனாகவும், மனத்தாழ்மையாகவும், கருணையுடனும் ஆக்கியது.'

"இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறுவதில் சிறந்த பகுதி மனக் கட்டுப்பாட்டிலிருந்து விடுபடுவதாகும்." எக்ஸ்எம்என்ஏ முன்முயற்சிக்காக அவர் படம்பிடித்த வீடியோவில் அப்துல்லா சமீர் கூறினார்.

அலிரேசா ஆசாமி தனது நடுத்தர விரலைக் காட்டும் ஹேஷ்டேக்குடன் ஒரு புகைப்படத்தை வெளியிட்டார்.

இந்த எதிர்ப்புக் குரல்களை ஆதரித்து, பாகிஸ்தானிய-கனடியரும், நாத்திக முஸ்லீம் ஆசிரியருமான அலி ஏ.ரிஸ்வி, முஸ்லிம்கள் பகுத்தறிவு, மதச்சார்பின்மை மற்றும் அறிவொளி ஆகியவற்றிலிருந்து விடுபடவில்லை என்று கூறினார். "நாங்கள் கத்தோலிக்கர்கள், மதச்சார்பற்ற யூதர்கள் மற்றும் முன்னாள் மோர்மான்ஸை இயல்பாக்கினோம். முன்னாள் முஸ்லீம்களை இயல்பாக்க வேண்டிய நேரம் வந்துவிட்டது, ”என்று அவர் ட்வீட் செய்துள்ளார்.

இஸ்லாமிய இறையியல் நம்பிக்கை இல்லாதவர்கள் மீது அன்பை இழக்கவில்லை. இது காபிர்கள் மீது தீராத பகைமையை வெளிப்படுத்துகிறது. விசுவாசிகள் அவர்களுடனான அனைத்து வகையான உறவுகளையும் தவிர்க்க வேண்டும், அவர்கள் நிச்சயதார்த்தத்தில் ஈடுபட வேண்டும் என்றால் அது கண்டிப்பாக தேவையின்றி செய்யப்பட வேண்டும். அவர்களுக்கு எந்த மரியாதையும் அளிக்க முடியாது.

அவர்களுக்கு மரியாதை வார்த்தைகள் சொல்வது கூட அனுமதிக்கப்படவில்லை. அவர்களின் மரணத்தில் கூட இல்லை. அவர்களுக்காக துஆ கேட்பது ஹராம். அவர்களின் வழிபாட்டுத் தலங்கள் பிசாசின் இடங்கள். அவர்களின் பண்டிகைகள் ஹராம். அவர்கள் உடல் ரீதியாக வெறுக்கத்தக்கவர்கள் மற்றும் நம்பமுடியாதவர்கள்.

ஒரு விசுவாசி இஸ்லாத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறி, நம்பிக்கையற்றவராக மாறும்போது, ​​அது மார்க்கத்திற்கு பெரும் அவமானமாக கருதப்படுவதில் ஆச்சரியமில்லை. அதனால்தான் துறவுக்கான தண்டனை மரணத்திற்கு குறைவாக இல்லை.

சில முன்னாள் முஸ்லீம்கள் வெளிப்படையாக வெளியே வந்து தங்கள் முன்னாள் மதத்தின் பிரச்சனையான அம்சங்களுக்கு எதிராக பேசத் துணிந்தால், அவர்களின் கருத்து வேறுபாடு கடுமையாகப் பாதுகாக்கப்படுவது மட்டுமல்லாமல் ஊக்குவிக்கப்பட வேண்டும்.

அவர்கள் மனிதகுலத்திற்கும் இஸ்லாத்திற்கும் கூட ஒரு சிறந்த சேவையைச் செய்கிறார்கள். விமர்சனமும் கருத்து வேறுபாடும் சீர்திருத்தத்திற்கான முதல் படியாகும். இஸ்லாத்திற்கு நேற்று சீர்திருத்தம் தேவைப்பட்டது

மூலம்

ஜெகதீஷ் கிருஷ்ணன்

உளவியலாளர் மற்றும் சர்வதேச எழுத்தாளர்

Another Story

“I'll tell you one thing We ain't gonna change love The sun still rises Even through the rain”

- The Head and the Heart

I have always found a notion of someone receiving a “calling” to be strange.  What exactly does that mean?  Growing up Catholic, the priests and nuns used to talk about getting their callings.  The way they made it sound, God spoke directly to them and said “be a priest” or “be a nun”.  They said, “OK”, and their calling was complete.  As a kid in a Catholic school back then, follow-up questions to this type of lecture were frowned upon, but I had plenty.  I could not understand how God could talk to you directly and why wasn’t he talking to me.  Plus, did he only call people into a religious order, or could he call you to do things like play professional baseball.  Because I was much more interested in the latter than the former.  Alas, a deep philosophical debate about one’s calling in life was not to be had at that point, so I figured that someday I would find out.  

I can tell you that it took a long time for that someday to come.  46 years and 95 days to be exact.  But, it turns out today is the day.  This is no joke.  I finally understand what a calling is all about.  Before I go any further, I must disclose that I am not very religious.  I gave up that Catholic habit a while back and haven’t found anything yet to take its place.  I am not an atheist, but I have an awful lot of doubts that any true guiding spirit in our universe is all that interested in the day-to-day workings of our human lives.  If I skew towards any faith, it is the Buddhist notion that our life here and now should be our focus and worry about tomorrow and the afterlife as it comes.  Based on all of that, I do not believe my calling today is coming straight from God’s mouth to my ears.  If there is a God, I would hope with all going on in the world he wouldn’t waste a lot of time on me.  Instead, I’m just trying to use what I already have been given to put it all together about what I should be doing with this life.  This morning, I finally decided I had enough pieces of the puzzle to move forward.

The final piece of the puzzle was my wife telling me about another famous person committing suicide, the second in just a few days.  If you have read my blog before, or seen my Facebook posts, you know that this is a personal subject that affects me deeply.  While I obviously didn’t know either of the individuals that took their own lives this week, nor did I think much about either before their deaths, their stories have moved me in a profound way.  As my wife told me the news, she asked how could that happen?  The standard answer to that question is I don’t know and why would anyone do it.  I knew, though, that her question was not rhetorical.  She was looking for a real answer and knows that I know.  I’ll share my response with you, or at least the abridged version.

The answer is that suicide is the psychological version of the heart attack.  It sometimes comes out of the blue with no warning.  Often, people who commit suicide have had no history of mental illness before taking their own life.  But, as things are pieced together afterwards, it turns out there was a disease that drove them to this result.  Just like the heart attack is the last, dreadful symptom of a lifetime of heart disease, a suicide is the final event of a long struggle with mental illness.  Contrary to popular belief, it is almost never an impulsive act.  Those who commit suicide have likely fought it back many, many times until they just couldn’t do it again.  What is construed as a cowardly act is unfortunate as most people have fought in a brave and noble fashion through years of suffering often alone.  It doesn’t make it any easier for those who are left behind, nor does it change the fact that a suicide is often preventable, but it does provide some context as to how people are driven to such extremes.

How do I know all of this?  While I have never attempted suicide, I have definitely dealt with the suicidal thoughts that come with mental illness.  I have been fortunate in that I have always had support around me to help me deal with my issues, and while it took me a long time to recognize that I was lucky, I feel now that I am at least on the right path.  Having had such thoughts, I can tell you that it is one of the the most uncomfortable things that can happen to you.  The human instinct is always one of fight or flight and your brain turning on you like that is one of the most confusing things I can think of.  Often, after turning back such thoughts, you will get angry and then depressed.  How could I think that way?  Why would I think that way?  While relieved once such a feeling passes, it never fails to cause a deep sense of pain, which is how I can at least understand why some folks take it a step further.  My guess in the case of the two deaths this week, these individuals fought back bravely for many, many years and did what they could until they could fight no longer.  I would assume their celebrity status made it much harder to deal with given how much they had at stake.  Again, it makes me feel fortunate that I have no such restrictions and can deal freely with things that come up versus worrying about my status or the hundreds of people depending on me for a living.  That’s a lot of pressure on top of an already terrible situation, and it makes some sense then why there seems to be no other way out for so many famous people.

So how does this all tie into my calling?  This is it.  Me telling you that I have been there, and while I am nervous about disclosing such a personal fact to my friends, family, and anyone else out there on the ethernet that might see this, I know that I need to do it.  I need to take that risk and let people know that these feelings are coming to lots of people all of the time.  I need to share my experiences and if it helps just one person it is worth it.  Even if no one reads this or acts on it to get help, it is still worth it.  It is worth it to me and more importantly my wife, children, Mom, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, father-in-law, friends, and whoever else is out there that has been an incredible support to me.  Just writing this has given me the courage to move on and confirmed that my calling in life is to keep telling my story and letting people know that it is OK to not feel the stigma if you feel the same way.

I could literally go on forever with this, but I need to save something for my therapist.  Seriously, I promise this will not be the last you hear from me on the topic.  I will spend the rest of my life working towards making myself better and doing my very small part to let people know that the pain you feel is real and there is nothing wrong with admitting that.  I will also continue to share the amazing resources I have discovered, beyond the incredible friends and family support network that I have, that have kept me on track.  I recently posted on Facebook a link to the website of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and I am going to break my rule of just words on this blog to share the link with you here: https://www.nami.org/.  There are local chapters of NAMI everywhere and they provide support at no cost with no questions asked.  If you are reading this and have an inkling that NAMI could help you, just do it.  Go to a support group, or even just go to the website and look around, and you will quickly see that help is within reach.  

My last word on this (for now) is do not be afraid to talk.  I know some of you reading this know me personally and I will state for the record that any of you can call me anytime, anywhere if you need someone to talk to about this.  I guarantee I won’t have any easy answers or quick solutions, but I know enough to help you get started on your journey.  Even better, find someone close to you and just talk about your feelings to them.  You will be amazed at how liberating it is to just say your feelings and hear them yourself out loud.  You will be even more amazed at how much people around you care for you.  It seems like a small first step, but that first step is always the hardest.  From there, it is just putting one foot in front of another, one by one.  I know that sounds arduous, but you will learn to appreciate each and every one of those steps for what they are.  That is going to be my calling.  To get everyone to love every step they are taking.

I really wish you all some peace on what I am guessing has been a tough week for a lot of people.  It can get better, I promise.  In the meantime, I thank you for indulging me with your time and patience, and if you are starting your journey today, I wish you the best.  You are not alone.

- Jim

How different would slaos would be if Holt siblings grew along with Lance, Hunk and Loraine??

Matt is seventeen when they move to Veradera.

He’s hardly keen on the idea—Houston born and raised; the concept of some quiet, sleepy seaside town on the East Coast is an anathema to him, and he shares none of his parents’ enthusiasm for the peace and serenity of it all.

The place is a cobbled together mess of grand, newly built homes facing the water, protected as private by the rising seaside cliffs, and leftover neighborhoods of older homes a ten-minute walk down crumbling sidewalks and sandy pathways to the beach. It’s a mismatch of weatherworn family homes and bungalows, mom-and-pop ice cream and fish & chip shops, and the upscale construction projects looking to capitalize on a relatively unspoiled place.

“It’s rustic,” his dad says when they first drive through town.

Matt thinks of the Houston bustle and the constant loud chatter of his former school. “It’s boring,” he sighs, and next to him Pidge cheers her agreement.

He spends three days moping indoors—in their house that is neither quite one of those seaside cottages nor of the new designs, but somewhere in between—before his mother kicks him out, with instructions to take Pidge to the park.

“Under duress,” Pidge declares as he walks her there, tiny pigtails bobbing in the seemingly never ending coastal breeze Matt already loathes. “Taking me to the park under duress. I never asked for this!”

Matt wonders where the hell his seven-year-old sister picked up the phrase under duress, and then promptly forgets about said concern when, upon entering the park, a child falls out of a tree and on top of his head.

He screeches, the kid screeches, and somewhere along the way he hears a shout of “Lance!” and looks up to see another kid and a girl about his age, with long hair that snags on the branches and falls in front of her eyes, sitting in the tree.

“I’m ok!” The human projectile he can determine is likely Lance calls back. Matt groans into the dirt where he has landed, and Pidge yells a war cry, picking up a pinecone and chucking it at the girl in the tree in an effort to avenge her brother.

And that’s how they wind up with the McClains, plus one Hunk Garrett, as something like friends.

Really, Matt isn’t very good with people. He’s better than Pidge, not like it’s hard, but for the most part he’s hardly a social butterfly, though that doesn’t stop Loraine and her two shadows invading his life, regardless. Pidge is dragged into friendship by the kids—Loraine’s brother Lance and his constant companion Hunk—and after a few weeks of kicking up a fuss for the sake of it, Pidge decides the boys are all right after all and attaches herself to them as her possessions with that kind of blunt stubbornness she exudes in most everything.

Matt, as her built-in (and severely reluctant) babysitter, is in turn left with Loraine, the boys’ enthusiastic (and more than willing) caretaker. She’s all summer-kissed skin and bright, twinkling laughter, and while he would never have expected a friendship to work between them, it somehow just…does. They sit on top of picnic benches together as the kids play on weekend afternoons, Matt with his book as he glares down at it against the sun and Loraine with her bright smiles and nimble fingers that braid his slightly-too-long hair as she reads over his shoulder when she’s not watching Lance and Hunk, and it’s…good.

It’s weird, and as mismatched as Veradera itself, but that doesn’t stop it any more than it does the town from being as it is. Matt is the slightly quirky teacher’s pet attending college several years early that he drives twenty minutes to every morning, and Loraine is the small town golden girl of the public school that she bikes to come rain or shine. His family is small and spread out across the country. His father is on Garrison payroll and on call for NASA, and his mother works in some shiny building in D.C. doing things he’s not allowed to ask about, for purposes of national security. Loraine’s family is large and tight knit, her father is dead, and her mother makes a mean chocolate cake and is the kindest woman he has ever met.

Matt is an avowed atheist, from a family of avowed atheists. Loraine wears a cross around her neck, but her sister wears a Star of David, and the lot of them can’t quite seem to decide is they’re Catholic like their mother or Jewish like their father to begin with. It gives Matt a headache, and when he tells her as much she laughs, high and true.

Most people won’t talk about those things. Religion. Faith. But Matt is the kind of person where curiosity will outweigh social propriety each time, and Loraine is the kind that believes every question is a good one, so they have many debates over the subject against the setting of the summer sun.

“Don’t you want something to believe in?” Loraine asks him once, grin crooked and face alight in the sun’s glow, and Matt decides if he believes in anything, it’s her—because when he looks at Loraine, he cannot imagine any laws of the universe compelling her to do anything but what she wishes.

When Matt is eighteen, the Garrison offers him a full ride for their upper division research program, like his father before him, and he leaves as Loraine stays. He almost asks her to apply, to come with him, because Matt is a genius as expected for the Holt name, but Loraine is her own kind of quietly brilliant, easily up to the task.

But more than he knows her brilliance, he knows her stubbornness. Veradera—and Lance, always Lance—is her world, and she would never leave so long as people need her here. The unfinished Garrison application she’d told him about once is proof enough of that. She’d made her decision long before he could have impacted it.

When he gets to the Garrison, his roommate notices his picture of the two of them and shoves him, asking about his girlfriend with the pretty eyes.

“She’s my best friend,” he says stubbornly, and then puts the photo away in his desk drawer for good measure, the idea of unknowing eyes seeing Loraine and reducing her to pretty grating in a way he can’t quite understand.

When Matt is nineteen, he gets a call from his mother—hesitant and heartbroken in a way he hasn’t heard her since his grandfather died when he was a child—and his world is yanked out from under his feet.

He comes back for the funeral, and only feels numb as he stares blankly at the casket being lowered, Pidge sniffling and clinging to his arm in a way she hasn’t since she was a toddler. A priest says a quiet sermon, because Loraine was the sister that wore a cross, after all, and Matt feels like standing up and demanding what kind of fucked up God would let someone like Loraine die.

It’s not until it’s all over, and the mourners begin to depart, that it finally begins to sink in that this is really happening. She’s gone and the world will never have her sun again and he wasn’t even here.

Loraine is gone.

At least, he thinks as much until they go to pay their respects to her family, and Matt sees Lance, tiny in his chair, yet so large in his quiet gaze that sees far too much for a child his age. He’s wearing her cross around his neck, hands curled into fists in his lap, and when Matt looks at his face, narrowed eyes and sallow, still sickly skin, he sees that same stubborn determination he knew of summer nights and brash faith.

If the universe couldn’t bend Loraine to its will, Matt decides, it can’t do the same for Lance either, because he sees her in her brother’s eyes, still as powerful and compelling as the tide.

And he doesn’t know whether that reassure or terrifies him more.

Perhaps both. Everything about Veradera, about Loraine, had always been a mesh of impossible combinations, after all.  

Why the hell wouldn’t Lance--her shadow, her moon, her love--be the same?

Look at the newspaper headlines I copied for years.

The list got to be so long that I had to resort to a chart.

Now, most - if not all - people who see this information about young lives tragically cut short, are INDIFFERENT.

Yes, utterly, incomprehensibly, none-of-my-business, who-gives-a-damn, why-should-I-give-a-shit indifferent.

To my immense sorrow, most of my former students display this baffling insensitivity.

Ego-centricity extends wide, and is just narrow enough to cover the family. We cannot go beyond the family in our affections and concerns.

The more intelligent 🤓 and ambitious the student, the greater this callous disregard.

Is this what education does to people?

In Bangladesh, the purpose of education, of course, is not to enlarge your intellectual, or moral, domain, but to “ride a horse 🐎 or car 🚗.”

This is drilled into us since childhood.

When I read this line by Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge is desirable for its own sake”, it came as a revelation, a Messianic message, contrary to my entire upbringing.

It is rational, of course, for an aspiring student to shut off all inputs, and focus, laser-like, on maximizing marks in the present and maximizing income in the future. This is a criticism of the education system made both by atheistical Marxists as well as the Catholic Ivan Illyich (“Deschooling Society”).

Thomas Hardy - whom none of my students read - observed long ago that one “must be as cold-blooded as a fish 🐠 and as selfish as a pig 🐷 to become one of his country’s worthies” (Jude the Obscure).

I don’t expect people to be like Brian Haw (I’ll send you his info), but surely a drop of compassion and concern would not reduce our haemoglobin count!

Now I know and understand why Jonathan Swift wrote his infamous “A Modest Proposal” and why he made Gulliver serve horses 🐎- the only calling fit for a human. He was a misanthrope; I haven’t got there yet, but at this rate....

Bangladesh is not in a state of war; yet fathers routinely bury sons. In political philosophy, this is called a “state of nature”.

They say: “Bad things happen when good people do nothing.”

I don’t know if people who do nothing can be called good people: what’s so good about them? They’re just self-centered egomaniacs.

Rollo May famously observed: “The opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.”

The hallmark of Satan is not hatred, but apathy - he turns us away from our fellow-sufferers, with the aid of our education system and perverted values (in Christian eschatology, the goat 🐐 and the sheep 🐑 will finally be divided on Judgement Day as to whether they turned away the suffering and helpless or responded to their suffering and helplessness. The ethical dimensions of religion can be highly salutary.)

I may not a believer, but I’m terribly fond of a Hadith that says: “If you see evil, fight it; if you can’t fight it, speak against it; if you can’t speak against it, hate it.”

We thus have a MINIMAL moral obligation here: to hate evil.

Is that too much to ask of human beings made in the image of a god?

You tell me! Please!

Hi moo-moo the super model! I've been your fan for a long time now. I love you! How are you?

gee everyone is calling me moo-moo this is fun

I’m lovely! I love you too! You’re the sweetest~

here’s your (rather long and ramble-y) present~

so this is a really old scene, like back from 2014 when i still wrote Tim. anywho, it’s a silly scene that evolves into something serious.

“But seriously, hiding booze behind the Jackson Pollack painting? That’s either funny or really insensitive. I can’t decide right now, my judgment left me and took the dog.”Bruce tilted the whiskey jar. The brown liquid trickled sideways.  “And what next, LSD behind Francis Crick’s books?”Bruce set the bottle down. He sighed, “Tim–”“I mean, wow. No offense, Bruce, but you’re kind of a dick.” He then burst into uncontrollable laughter, falling from the sofa to the floor. “But not Dick! Get it? Dick dick? Ahahahaha.”The corner of the man’s lips turned downwards in a frown. The boy snickered, face planted on the cold wood floor. Tim was not like this. Sure, Tim used to chatter excitedly from time to time, but nowadays he was much more reserved. Why, it was just the other day that they bumped into each other at the office. His emancipated son had apologized swiftly and gone on his way, not even staying for small-talk. Tim was succinct, cold, professional.And lonely.Bruce’s eyebrows rose slightly, surveying the errant teenager on his floor. Tim was just a teenager. He had lived seventeen years. Seventeen years of life in the kid that was snorting rather obnoxiously. He hoped he did not drool on the floor. Alfred had just waxed them.-The former guardian leaned over the boy’s form. Tim flinched.Ouch.Did he really think he was going to hit him?That–that was–Ouch.Ignoring the guilty thoughts, Bruce reached down and pulled the whiskey out of Tim’s grasp.The intoxicated lad grinned up at him, asking, “You wanna drink too?”Well, yes. But no.“No, Tim,” Bruce sighed, closing the bottle. At last it dawned on the boy that his alcohol was confiscated, and when this was realized he glowered most viciously.“Never mind, you’re a douchebag.”“Tim, what is the meaning–”“I don’t drink with douchebags. Bad science or vibes or whatever.”“–of this. Where is–”“I only drink with good science. Like Bill Nye.”“–your judgment?”Tim gave a bark of laughter, pulling himself up off the ground. “I told you, we got a divorce and I lost everything.”-“You’re grounded.”“Noooo, I’m not. I’m emancipated. That means I don’t answer to a higher authority. Besides the government. Oh, and God.”“You want to answer to the government? Because we could make that happen.”“No, but I’ll answer to God. Take me to the nearest church. I’ll go to confession.”“You’re not Catholic.”“Since when did Catholics turn away sinners? I’m a sinner, Bruce. I must go to confession.”“No, Tim. You’re atheist. And drunk.”“And a sinner.”“What induced you to do this?”“Tell me I’m a sinner, Bruce.”“Timothy, I will not–”“Tell me I’m a sinner!”“All right, you’re a sinner.”“Fucking hypocrite.”Bruce considered dunking his third son’s head in a bucket of ice water. But no. He was a good man. A good father. Fathers did not leave their inebriated children to drown. “Timothy, it seems I am not going to get an answer out of you. Go sleep this off.”“You’re a sinner too, Bruce.”“I am aware. Go upstairs.”“No,” Tim stated petulantly but moved anyway. “You can’t tell me what to do, Bruce. I’m an adult. I’m a vigilante. I’m a hipster. I’m emancipated, which means I can eat only peanut butter cups if I want to.”Bruce, who had been guiding the boy, stopped. “Tim, have you been eating regularly?” he questioned through a hard look.“I dunno. I eat peanut butter cups like every two days, so that’s pretty consistent. I mean, if I ate them all the time I wouldn’t like them anymore. That would be a shame because I like peanut butter cups. I also like peanuts. Any nuts, really. Walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, cashews. But a peanut is not a nut; it’s a legume. That is one of the first lies children are told. That and Santa Claus. Because life is but an illusion. Are we human or are we dancers? We’ll never know because we are only linked to individual consciousness. Maybe we all inhabit the same brain but different consciousness. But sometimes the chains of consciousness link up, so we say the same thing at the same time. Like, maybe we’re all just DNA strands in one large body. We all are made for one function. Mine is for peanut butter cups. And Peanuts. ‘And I’d like to say a few words about the Great Pumpkin!’”Here Tim stumbled, nearly smashing his head on an ill-placed table. Bruce snatched him with the air of a mother yanking her toddler away from the swings. But he received no gratitude; instead, Tim shoved his role model away, shouting, “I don’t want to dance with you!”-A whisper.“I’m sorry.”Bruce hesitated, then rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder.“I’m sorry,” Tim repeated, glassy eyes staring at the ground. “I always mess up. I’m a mess-up. I’m sorry, Bruce. So, so sorry.” He closed those sad blue eyes, swallowing his tears. “I wanted to say goodbye, but you weren’t there. I waited. But then things got too big and I was afraid life was going to swallow me, so I thought I could swallow it instead. But I can’t. I’m just drunk and you despise me. I didn’t want it to end like this. I wanted it to be professional. I wanted to leave a legacy. I wanted you to look back on this and say 'Well, Red Robin was a clever chap. Nothing special, but that’s how it goes. Not much of a waste, that one.’ But it’s all a lie. I’m a waste.” He laughed, choking on the sound. “S-sorry.

and on that depressing note, I hope you liked it! ^.^

163

Have you ever skipped class before? Yeah. Seldom in high school, but I’ve been doing it more in college. Are you a regular school skipper? Not regular, just at a higher frequency than how I was in high school. Like nowadays I’d skip just because I was lazy or I want to get work done for another class. I never did that back then. Do you want a different cell phone, besides your own? Ugh yes. I want a 6S so bad. Do you have any Pay-per-View channels? Technically we do but they don’t show any programming unless we pay for it.

Do you tend to apologize first? I don’t apologize first, but I apologize a lot.

What is your most favorite school subject? This semester, it would be Asian history. Who, in your life, makes you feel discouraged? My mom hah. Do you attend church regularly or follow a certain religion? I [have to] do the former because my family is Catholic, so I get dragged into the whole mess every Sunday. I’m atheist. Which store do you buy most of your clothes from? There isn’t a certain place. Wherever I find something cute, I get them if I can. But preferably, I’d want to get all my clothes from H&M. Are you the kind of person who always looks for sales? Not really. I don’t actively look for them, but if I end up somewhere that has a sale, I try to take advantage of it. When was the last time you went bowling? May 2016. Do you ever suspect your significant other of lying to you? ‘Suspect’ isn’t the word for it because I can easily tell if she’s lying. She knows that too, so she doesn’t try to lie around me anymore. Are you expected to help fix Thanksgiving dinner? I don’t care for Thanksgiving. Is there anything bothering you right now? My trichotillomania is coming back and I just waaaant my hands away from my eyebrows. Would you like to talk to someone about it? No, it’s not something I tell people about. Do you live by any major bodies of water? Nope. The Pacific Ocean is close to us, but I don’t live directly near it. Do you know the difference between latitude and longitude? Er I guess I could provide a very vague description of it, but I can be confused if it gets more technical. Do you tend to make the first move in a relationship? Yes. 100% yes. What color are your bedroom walls painted? White, and I wish I could change it. What is your favorite item in your bedroom? My mason jar filled with receipts and ticket stubs from way back in 2014. If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be? A buffet at my fingertips :---( Do you ever watch children's movies and shows? Quite often. If so, which movie or show is your favorite? Toy Story. Do you spend a lot of time with family? HAH FUCK NO. Unless my friends can be considered family, in which case, yes, I do. What is one of your biggest pet peeves? People who are habitually late. Have you ever contemplated suicide? ...You’re asking me? When was the last time you had your favorite food? I haven’t had pizza and macarons in a loooong time. How many times have you been to Disney World, if any? Zilch. Do you still have feelings for any of your exes? I did, so much so that I asked her out again. The original breakup wasn’t up to me in the first place, so I was very hesitant to do it. Many months later I was desperate to give things another shot, so I talked to her again and yeah that’s basically why I’m here now, with her. Does your birth name mean anything in another language or sense? I mean don’t all names have meanings? I looked mine up and apparently it’s of German origin meaning famed or bright. I’m neither of those. What is your favorite pair of shoes? I have a pair of black Keds that I really like, except that I get horrible blisters every time I wear them, so I keep their usage to a minimum. What holiday is coming up next? Halloween even though it doesn’t really count as one.

How many times a day would you say you go to the bathroom? Once or twice. Do you spend more time watching television or on the internet? Internet. I don’t go anywhere near a television these days... Do you have a Tumblr? :) If so, how often are you on it? My schedule is really booked and heavy these days so I literally only have time for my blog 1-2 times a week, as opposed to being able to post everyday when I was in high school. Do you get offended if people use your quotes? That hasn’t happened to me, I’m not relevant enough to be quote-worthy LOL. Would you say you're a completely original person? We all emulate other people in some form or another. No one is completely original. Have you ever been really obsessed with a fictional character? I guess. Maggie Rhee from The Walking Dead, yo. What was the best birthday you've ever had? Turning 18 was pretty neat, because I had three separate occasions for it. Still, I know it’s far from being my favorite because the best simply hasn’t happened yet. I’ll try to make my 20th worthy of that title. When did you last go to the dentist? February or March, I’m not exactly sure. Do you trust your best friend? I wouldn’t befriend anyone I don’t trust.

Do you tan easily or not so much? I’m already tan. Would you say you have a great sense of style, or not so much? I would if I actually had the wardrobe for it -____- Right now I try to make do with what I have, and I do get complimented quite a bit, but I wish I got to update my closet more often because I hate repeating outfits. What is your favorite desert? The Sahara is pretty big and carries lots of wildlife in it, so. When, if at all, do you plan on having children? In 10-15 years. Does it bother you when people type in all caps? No, you see that all the time on Twitter. Survey questions in all caps, though, that’s a different story haha. Have you ever been on a train? I never have been actually. Why did you last cry? No reason, just depression. Did the person who hurt you last, apologize to you for what they did? Yes. What is your original hair color? Black. Do you think you have a good singing voice, personally? Nope, I keep it to myself at all times. What are your opinions on hunting animals when they come into season? I think hunting animals is terrible, in season or not. What have you been stereotyped as before? I get “I thought you were conyo” a lot – which is basically a Philippine subculture of upper-middle class private school students who speak English and are just privileged pieces of shit. I get that with some frequency since I came from a private school, but in truth I really really really HATE them HOLY SHIT conyos literally can’t do anything on their own other than act dumb and say ‘like’ 36 times in one sentence. Thankfully in uni I get to stray away from that image since I hang out with people who don’t like conyos just as much as I do. Have you ever been called a good kisser? Yep. Have you ever tried sleeping on a futon? I haven’t. What is your favorite fruit? Favorite vegetable? I don’t eat fruits. Favorite vegetable is broccoli. Would you say you're more outgoing than kept to yourself? Quite the opposite. I would never approach people first.

At USC, a Hindu lawyer leads the spiritual way Varun Soni is one of a few to break the Protestant chaplain mold VARUN SONI, dean of religious life at USC, speaks during a service honoring professor Bosco Tjan, who was killed in December. (Photographs by Allen J. Schaben Los Angeles Times) SONI, middle, Father Richard Sunwoo, left, of USC’s Caruso Catholic Center and the Rev. James Burklo, associate dean of religious life, embrace at the ceremony for Tjan. () By Rosanna Xia Varun Soni straightened his shoulders and grasped the lectern, his dark suit flanked by the stately white robes of priests and ministers. A beloved professor had been stabbed to death. As USC’s head chaplain, it fell to Soni to help the hundreds gathered outside that day to process their loss. And so he spoke to them of the stories he’d collected, the pain he’d shared, the grief he had witnessed. And he offered words to help them, though not from the Bible or any other religious text. “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” he said, quoting Maya Angelou, before he bowed his head in a universal “Amen.” Soni is an unusual college chaplain. He is a Hindu. He has a law degree. In 2008, when USC hired him as its dean of religious life, he was the sole head chaplain at a major American university who was not only not a Christian but not an ordained Christian at that. Today, at a time when differences — religious and otherwise — grow ever more fraught and complex, he remains all but alone in breaking the Protestant chaplain mold, except for a rabbi at Dartmouth, another at Wesleyan, a Buddhist at Emerson. “It’s very, very hard to divorce the pomp and circumstances of academia from particularly Protestant traditions,” said Dena Bodian, president of the National Assn. of College and University Chaplains. “Chaplains like Varun enable us all to rethink what chaplaincy in higher ed could look like.” The job, after all, is about much more than Christianity. As USC’s spiritual leader and moral voice, Soni oversees about 90 campus religious groups including atheists and agnostics, Baha’is and Zoroastrians. Inside and outside the lecture halls and dormitories, he bridges what he sees as the gap between the slow-moving wheels of academic change and a new generation’s impatience with tradition. He counters the tendency to split apart and subdivide with a message of tolerance, coexistence and respect. “If we want to know what religion is going to look like in the United States in 20 years, just look at what’s happening on college campuses now,” he said. “Particularly at a time when our country is so polarized, and people aren’t speaking to each other.” Soni himself exemplifies the many in the one. He holds five degrees — from Harvard Divinity School, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA’s law school and the University of Cape Town, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation in religious studies on Bob Marley as a spiritual figure who used his work to spread a divine message. As an undergraduate at Tufts University, Soni studied in India at Bodh Gaya, where Buddha attained enlightenment. He’s consulted for the Obama administration, produced a graphic novel and advises celebrity religious scholar Reza Aslan. The son of immigrant doctors, he was raised in Newport Beach, where he went to a Catholic elementary school and learned from his best friends, who were Jewish, and his grandfather, a Buddhist who grew up around Mahatma Gandhi. “Gandhi, that’s why I went to law school and studied religion,” Soni said, nodding to a framed portrait hung alongside the Dalai Lama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his office. “Those are my guys — people who brought together the spiritual and the scholarly world for the purposes of social change.” What better place to bridge these two worlds than a college campus? It’s not easy, Soni acknowledged, to guide a generation that grew up seeing religion as a source of terrorism and patriarchy, whose institutions covered up child abuse and preached discrimination. More and more millennials are rejecting formal religion but seeking a spiritual sense of purpose. It helps that Soni’s approach centers more on commonality than God. “We’re oriented around meaning and purpose and authenticity and identity and significance,” he said. “My concern is that as students leave traditional religious congregations, they haven’t been taught how to build an intentional community of like-minded people in a way that creates empathy and compassion and a sense of belonging. That’s compounded by the fact that this is a generation that was born into technology.… You may have 500 friends on Facebook, but what does that mean in real life?” Around campus, he’s facilitated interfaith retreats, promoted LGBTQ Bible studies and taught courses on misunderstood religions such as Islam and Sikhism. “My programming is my pulpit,” he likes to say. After the Trump administration announced a travel ban that alienated Muslims, his phone rang nonstop. Empowered by Soni’s inclusive approach, dozens of students, professors and religious leaders rallied alongside their Muslim peers and attended a local mosque, where they joined in the midday Juma’h prayer. “Varun does a good job of keeping us moving in the same direction,” said Dov Wagner, a rabbi at USC. Soni, who is 42, could be mistaken for a graduate student. His hair is cut in a fade. He often teaches in jeans. He knows how to speak to a generation used to abbreviations and hashtags. One afternoon, he walked his students through the religious history of northern India’s Punjab, where his family is from. He rolled up his sleeve to show them his Sikh kara , a delicate steel bracelet he has worn since his mother gave it to him when he was small. “Traditionally, these are much thicker and protected one’s wrist when you went to war,” he said, attempting to mimic a sword fight with his hands. “Luckily, my days of swordplay are over.” After class, one student came up and said he was Punjabi as well, then shyly reached out for a handshake. “Right on, Pun-ja-bis!” Soni cheered. Soni tries hard to reach everyone. As a way to include students who don’t believe in God, for instance, he hired a “humanist chaplain” to collaborate with other religious leaders on campus. “Because of Varun, these other chaplains aren’t threatened by me,” said Bart Campolo, who uses his skills as a former pastor to guide students in a secular way. “I’m not here to attack anybody’s belief system. They realize I’m just another guy trying to help students answer life’s ultimate questions.” Eugenia Huang, whose father died a week before she went off to college, said she was grateful to encounter Soni at a freshman dinner, at which he urged students to feel free to come talk to him. “I really liked the idea that he was about spirituality, instead of forcing any religion down my throat,” Huang said. “You often see people turn to religion when they’re sick or experiencing pain, and so I had always viewed it as something for the weak.” Now a sophomore, she is taking Soni’s global religions course, which has changed her thinking: “I’m learning that a lot of the times, people turn to religion for the community and they just want to know: What’s our purpose?” Soni also has inspired a number of non-Christian students to pursue careers in religious leadership. Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago has led the way in bringing college students of different faiths together. Founder Eboo Patel speaks of students who’ve learned from Soni as if they’re top players in a fantasy draft. The Buddhist who went to multiple divinity schools in order to one day be a campus chaplain like Soni. The Muslim doctor who is studying religious diversity as it applies to healthcare. “You don’t get interested in that unless you’re influenced by somebody like Varun,” Patel said. “Now multiply that by 25 or 50 young people a year, and multiply that by 10 or 15 years, and think about the number of people who are going into everything from diplomacy to chaplaincy to medicine to business who have a really refined sense of religious diversity.” As an ever more diverse group of religious leaders seeks positions on ever more diverse campuses, universities will need to let go of outdated assumptions about what a head chaplain should look like, said Adeel Zeb, the imam at the Claremont Colleges. “We’re at a crossroads,” said Zeb, who was elected recently as the first Muslim to lead the national group of college chaplains. “If you start defining a chaplain as a spiritual healer, an ethical leader and emotional healer on campus, regardless of anyone’s faith traditions, if you start focusing on the human emotions and the human spirit, it enables more diverse possibilities.” One day in February, dozens of USC religious leaders of many faiths gathered in a conference room next to Soni’s office. It was their first all-chaplain meeting since President Trump’s inauguration, and each came troubled by anxieties many of their students were feeling. Soni sat back and listened to his colleagues — Episcopalian, Catholic, Mormon, Buddhist, Jewish — weigh in on the hatred unleashed by the recent political rhetoric. “So what should our role be, running our different groups on campus?” Soni asked. “Is an attack on one religion an attack on all religions?” Campolo, the humanist chaplain, brought up the words of German Pastor Martin Niemoller, familiar to everyone in the room: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me. A fellow pastor led the group in a prayer. They stood in a circle, raised their right hands toward Soni and vowed as one to lead their communities on the path they all shared. [email protected]