Here’s a data point for you regarding Christianity (coming from someone who is not particularly spiritual at all full disclosure)

For a while before the first crusade, the church gained a huge amount of popular support and devotion when it managed to enact the Truce of God which basically forbade the constantly feuding warrior elite class, the knights, from pillaging on a few days of the week. It was mostly done as a way to give the peasantry a chance to actually do some agriculture amidst all the pummeling, but the peasantry understandably saw the church as an institution that acted in their interest. Fast forward to the first crusade, and there was almost a mass hysteria event as people, whose only chances at comfort for their whole lives had pretty much been downstream of the church, believed Pope Urban’s propaganda about the Turks wholeheartedly.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I don’t subscribe to the idea that religions are some kind of evil anti-intellectual force to be eradicated, their becoming the providers of people’s material needs represents a failure of some kind. The hierarchical structure of the average major religion just lends itself too easily to exploitation imo.

THE POINT OF LIFE BECOMES OBVIOUS WHEN YOU ARE BITING INTO THAT-A DELICIOSO AUTHENTIC PIZZA PIE

also talking

Starting to understand how self-loathing makes you ill if it goes unaddressed

I’ve had a series of nice things said to me recently and I discovered this knee-jerk response where I assume it CANNOT BE TRUE that people mean half of the things they said

Someone compliments my writing? Well I haven’t met them in person, they could just be working on a long term scam. Someone said I’m thoughtful? They must be intellectually lazy. Someone compliments my appearance? Gotta be some kind of hypersexual fiend who will say anything.

Like my god, I come up with downright mean assumptions about others just for some kind of weird avoidance of believing I have good qualities, probably some kind of paradoxically narcissistic impulse I don’t fucking know. I wouldn’t want to associate with someone who assumes these terrible things about me either.

I have had a few nights where I just climbed out of bed with no sleep before sunrise and just stood outside feeling numb and lost

But you know what? I told people about it, most of them couldn’t say more than “same dude,” but a couple of people chose those moments of admission to invite me to their discord, have a chat, etc and it kept my head above water for a while longer

Nights like those will come again for sure but today I’m flush with the love again

Hey friendo how you doin these days?

Feel lonely -> say to others “I feel lonely” -> others try to make me feel less lonely -> feel less lonely

It’s amazing how simple this process looks when you remove “cringe hard enough that you pull your own face off” from between each step

The setting has made me keep an eye on it, I have a soft spot for Pillars of Eternity 2, hopefully it keeps the same tone of “I like fantasy but I promise I have read some history books too”

The sea shanties they recorded really stuck with me, “roll the berath’s wheel” sometimes pops into my head.

Oops I consolidated a billion dollars oopsie

this could be you

Had a conversation with a cashier and said in passing “after all, every adult mind was built by a child” and she stopped me and said “that’s beautiful dude”

GOOD GOD

you are onto something here

cognitohazard pay

Hmm, that doesn’t sound impossible tbh, like just filling the empty space with psychedelia. That’s so in

(thank you for the compliment)

Haha, I will probably make more of these, they are fun little ways to revisit my book while I am putting a teaser of it on some public places

If you like it perhaps considering giving the author of the book one million dollars?

Good, it’s supposed to be like a scholar’s hastily drawn impression of a mural, the whole book it’s for is concerned with a “translation of a translation”

You’re welcome comrade, good luck to you in becoming a more fully integrated person.

Pro tip: If you just contextualize hard enough, you can draw with the skills of a child and claim it’s on purpose. “Ohoh, see the intentionality in every crude brush stroke to create a primitive style!”

This was me for a long time and tbh chafing at the barrier’s existence is the only part that in retrospect was really causing me harm. Looking back, I think making art to explore it was a necessary part of growing past it, instead of it being something I needed to shatter with a hammer.

No mistaking agamids, love em all