Life

Sanders Sides Fandom–What the heck?

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Hello, so this is a pretty specific post, kind of a rant post, my sister and I are collaborating on it, so some of these thoughts are from her.

This happens in every fandom, not just the Thomas Sanders one, it just so happens that his exploded after the Intrusive Thoughts vid I mentioned a couple posts ago, into a prime example of this phenomenon, if it is a phenomenon.

So, Remus, the embodiment of Intrusive Thoughts, basically the embodiment of the word smut, has become….popular.

He’s been shipped with people.

People are adopting him as their smutty son.

He’s made a splash…

My feelings: AHHHHHHHHH!     😤😠😯😢😡😧😬😥

Sister: This is not surprising, unfortunately. We’ve seen it happening before with similar characters but it’s more obvious here, because this character is just so focused on beignt he embodiment of all terrible thoughts…like just the worst.

Me: Yeah… so why are people adopting him. As their son!

Sister: For one thing, they feel like they’re like him.

ME: HOW?

Sister: They feel like they are like him because–which is actually really sad–because the whole point was Thomas convincing himself that he wasn’t like Remus, that Remus was intrusive not a reflection of himself. But these people don’t get that. They don’t have that freedom, Sanders has a limited freedom, but compared to theirs, it’s still more.

Me: I don’t think Thomas was trying to give people a complex about loving intrusive thoughts, since Remus is basically a bully, to Thomas. A jerk, not good at all. The Dark Sides are the sides that do nothing good for Thomas, especially Remus, because even deceit can at least help him realize the truth by arguing with him, but Remus doesn’t help him at all. He just stresses him out.

S: So this brings us back to the question, why are people–ugh– attracted to Remus?

Me: You have an answer?

S: Your thought first.

Me: What I think, is that people strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. Like we nitpick the smallest, stupidest things, but then we accept the most outrageous stuff because it is outrageous on purpose. I think that people don’t think of Remus as a character showing a problem, they only see his flamboyant personality. And many people would say there is nothing wrong with liking his personality, as long as you are admitting that is what you like.

But the problem with that is, again, straining out a gnat, this one thing you like, and swallowing a camel by accepting all the things that come with it. Liking Remus means not noticing how bad he really is. Because his personality is to cover up how twisted he is, it’s embracing the twistedness of what he represents, shamelessly, and liking that, means you are not really seeing the reason he exists.

S: My thoughts are similar, I think People like Remus because he is so reveling in who he is, and what he is, in this day and age that’s a virtue values above almost everything else.

Me: But the problem is, vile people can love being evil. Thomas even brought up in the video a guy who went form hating his intrusive thoughts to enjoying them, and that led him to murder people. It’s like the virtue of pride in who you are, outweighs who you actually are. As long as you’re confident, people don’t care if you’re a jerk.

S: That reflects on the state of people’s souls today. All over you see people whether humorlessly or not humorlessly being self deprecating,

Me: Like sheep

S: But my point is it means we’re so hungry for any sort of self-love or being okay with oneself that we are willing to swallow gallons of poison just to get it.

Me: You think we’re exaggerating this?

S: Not in the slightest.

Me: Well there are a lot of characters like this in media, anime, reality shows, and a lot of jerk characters get to be popular because they are confident. Rainbow Dash from MLP, Bakugo form MHA, Gordon Ramsey, (I am not saying Gordon Ramsey is really a jerk, but the persona for his show was like that, and it was popular)

S: Loki, villains form all sorts of franchises, even Thanos.

Me: Can you elaborate more on what the appeal is? Or why people can’t resist it?

S: They can’t resist it because they don’t have any better examples. Almost all the characters who display this kind of self confidence are villains or at least natural in the war of good and evil.

Me: And good characters are often nervous, socially awkward, and lack confidence.

S: And that’s okay because those are obstacles they are meant to overcome not stay in, we love it when that happens. But no one gives a powerful example of a good person who is so confident in who they are. That’s why people over Bakugo.

M: I don’t think that’s why a lot of people love him. It’s why we love him. Also if we do have such a character, they usually die. Or get de-powerd.

S: That’s because the author doesn’t know how to write them properly.

M: *cough Pyrrha Nikos *cough.

S: But I think it’s what our culture desperately needs, what everyone is looking for, but we’ve been forced to look for in the wrong places.

M: You maybe be cutting people too much slack when you say we’ve been forced to look in the wrong places. More like, we lost interesting the wholesome stuff, and even when we are presented with innocence, many people go out of their way to corrupt it with their imaginations. Remus is more like a version of what some people willingly do, they’ve embraced it, maybe it started out as intrusive thoughts, but now they think them on purpose. And then they like it. And they spread it around to the rest of us, and that’s why characters like Remus end up popular. Because it’s popular to embrace the gross, smutty, pervy side of things. Even when they don’t really exist.

S: There’s a reason for that attitude though. It’s lack of power. See, people have abandoned innocence and 1950’s values, because they don’t think they work. They are faced with their won inner demons and the outer problems of the world running rampant, and if those things are supposed to be so great, why aren’t they working? Why don’t more people use them? Why is everything to terrible?

Me: Okay

S: People don’t think they can afford to stick with something that won’t be powerful enough to save them. So why bother? Just abandon all those useless values and platitudes. Embrace the smuttiness because that’s all you’ve got.

M: Remember I said intrusive thoughts are based in the fear of yourself? And that people embrace them because that is less painful than fighting them and not seeming to ever win? It’s the coward’s way out, but when you have no solution, it can seem like the best way out. Because it’s painless. Except when your conscience does bother you, but that’s less often over time. Like 1 Tim 4: 2 “Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;’

S: Yeah, but it’s almost hard to blame the people who stop fighting it and start embracing it.

Me: (Maybe for you o_O ).

S: Because look at what they think their only other option is: People who keep fighting are in a constant state of inner turmoil and self hatred, just look at Thomas’es reaction through out the whole video, Thomas doesn’t know how to stop these thoughts, and neither do the people who embrace them. So it seems to reflect on who they are. If I’m damned either way at least I can be damned and comfortable. But the hard truth is it’s not comfortable it just pretends to be.

Me: Like I said when we talked about it before, in Romans 7 Paul asks “who will deliver me for this body of death?” and the inner turmoil he describes is just like Thomas’s, and all of ours, it’s the human condition.

But what is our solution then?

S: Well we both know, we can’t stop ourselves from having those thoughts, all we can do is deal with them when they come. The truth is we can’t save ourselves from it. That’s kind of the conclusion Thomas came to.

But Thomas, all he’s doing, is putting down faulty weapons, he doesn’t know how to pick up effective weapons.

Me: I think that would tick some fans off to hear, but he admitted it himself.

S: So the only way to be completely and totally free is to not think those thoughts anymore, but that’s impossible isn’t it?

Me: I could argue that you can be completely free while still having the thoughts, because you can be free of bondage to them. You don’t have to feel bad, and you don’t have to like them, they can just cease to have any power over you at all. And then they don’t come very often. I don’t have them nearly as much as I used to.

S: But why?

Me: Because I started asking God to fight the thought for me, instead of doing it myself. I would tel them to leave, but also ask Him to take authority over them, I remind the thoughts that God is higher than them, and that I have the mind of Christ. And then, it’s just doesn’t bother me anymore. And they go away. And I forget about it in a hour or so.

S: What really has been working for me, is remembering who God says I am. If He says that I am not some demented disgusting thing.

Me: Like Remus

S: But instead I am a pure, powerful, beautiful, warrior, who don’t have to take no crap, and royalty which helps, then these thoughts can’t be part of me. They are obviously from somewhere else.

Me: And that there is what I think people don’t have. Any sense of a better identity. So they have no other recourse than to say these are me, and I suck. Poor Thomas.

S: Well, he even decided they weren’t a reflection of his character.

Me: Yeah, but he didn’t go far enough. He still thinks it’s art of his imagination. I’d say it’s not, it’s just using his imagination. And what we feed our imagination is important. Part of the problem is that many people out all sorest of horror imagines, smutty images, inane humor, dirty jokes, into their mind, and then they are surprised when it regurgitates in a form they are less comfortable with. What you laugh at and enjoy effects what kind of intrusive thoughts you’ll get.

S: (Nods)…so to come back to the original question, as to why people like Remus and are reacting this way to him, it’s because we don’t think we can have anything better. And to an extend we don’t want anything better.

Me: If you’re satisfied with mud, you won’t get a trip to the beach, right? But also, he who is loves silver won’t be satisfied with silver, these people are never satisfied.

S: Yeah, cause they are taking their questions to the wrong place.

Me: We need to wrap it up.

Well, thank sis, for helping me discuss this, and figure this out. I feel kind of somber now. I feel bad for all these people. But I hope that some people found this post helpful as an explanation, or as a guide to maybe how you can deal with this problem better. I  like Thomas, and I didn’t want to criticize him, I just think he’s not got the whole picture.

So, until next time, don’t like Remus–Natasha and co.

 

Fandoms–what the heck?

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

One follower away from 100! Whoo! No pressure.😉

Okay, so I want to talk about Fandoms a little bit, because fandoms are the perfect illustration of this verse I was just reading.

(Read the lesser known books of the Bible sometime, it’ll blow your mind what’s in there. My mom likes to say there are hidden gems.)

I was reading Titus, literally, the whole thing (it’s three short chapters).

Chapter 1, verse 15 says: “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled.”

I quote the first of it a lot, but I didn’t know the rest.

My siblings and I are, or have been, part of quite a few fandoms, and I can date my first real experience of realizing that people are fans of things for a wide variety of reasons when I started watching Justice League Unlimited again online.

And whoa, mama, I found some messed up stuff in the comment section.

I’ve mentioned this before. You know, a lot of people say not to read the comment section, even under your own videos. I don’t have this problem yet, but I follow plenty of YouTubers who do.

It’s kind of sad really. I almost can’t blame those who disable the comments on their videos.

I’m just going to be blunt here. The number one thing I find in a lot of comments, but especially superhero ones is: SEX, SEX, SEX, Gay, homo, lesbian, incest…yeah, that last one is especially disturbing.

I’m scared because my 8 year old cousin already knows this stuff, though she’s too young to enjoy it, she know there are sick people like that our there. Goodness knows her parents aren’t going to explain to her.

Anyway, since then I’ve found this problem in every fandom. But what puzzled me is that these people show up in the most innocent, kid friendly of places. Shows you’d think they wouldn’t bother watching, or movies, or even books. Usually you expect perverts to look for stuff marketed to them.

What I had to realize was that there is actually a thrill they get out of spoiling innocent things. They know as well as the rest of us what was intended…they just don’t care.

Likewise, we’ve all been around that rare gem of a person who is exposed to something messed up and is completely unaware of what they are seeing. I’ve been that person. I envy them now, though usually, it’s still me.

And that perfectly illustrates the verse above. To the pure all things are pure. To the defiled, everything that goes into their mind becomes defiled, and they do not even have a conscience about it anymore.

I wish I could say it was unbelievers alone who were like this, I’d expect even a person of a different religion than me to have standards based on that religion, but religious people of any faith are just as likely to do this.

In fact, some of them are more likely. The reason is that, as kids, we were given a high standard. (A good standard usually. I have no problem with plenty of the values of even Islam. They are at least trying to do a good thing.)

When we get older we find out just how few people agree with us, we get into “worldly” stuff…and often its not the material that does it, even in this corrupt age (all ages are corrupt in their own way) I’d say over 50% of popular media is still trying to teach some kind of moral. And even shows that teach morals I don’t usually agree with are at least encouraging moral thinking, not sexual thinking. I can’t stand environmental shows, but I prefer that to nothing but sex and crude humor. What a no brainer right?

No, what does it is finding out that most (or it can feel like most) of the people watching it are just doing it to get their thrills.

So religiously raised kids get cynical, we cease to believe people look for value at all, and our commentary on these things becomes full of bitterness and what we expect people to point out.

I could begin naming names here, but I don’t think it would be fair. I’m sure you’ve seen it yourself and don’t need me to give an example of one of my people I know.

Basically, if you watch any kind of commentary, or participate in discussion with friends, you’ve met this person.

And it’s in humor too.

And these people are also who Paul is talking about in Titus, he’s writing about religious people when he says that verse. Because by overthinking ever little thing, and assuming corruption in other people, they have corrupted themselves.

I’d like to say this very clearly: If you constantly assume the worse motives of other people, you will begin to have those motives yourself.

It’s in another book where we are admonished to rebuke people carefully of sin, lest we also be tempted.

With this, you won’t be tempted by the obvious sin, if it’s there at all, you’ll be tempted by assuming it…and in assuming it, you’ll think of it more than the person you’re assuming about will.

I have to confess I do this too. But I am glad I don’t do it all the time, I can still enjoy some things purely. But the more I listen to people like that , the harder it gets.

It’s easy to write off entire fandoms (and fandoms are just one example of a people group, so it applies to any group of people you know) as corrupt because the ones who are are the loudest.

But the bible warns us of this also, in Proverbs it often tells us that fools will be loud and overt about their folly because they do not have the sense to be ashamed of it, while the wise are quieter about it, often. And wait to be asked. Or the wise offer only part of their opinion until pressed for more.

And in fandoms, I can attest to the fact that the more reserved commentators and analysts tend to have the best stuff. The loud ones can either be empty headed, or… gross.

Of course, if you have a loud personality, it does not make you a fool. It’s more of a rule when the person may be weirdly quiet about the good stuff.

(To me a red flag is if the person says nothing during the lesson or emotional moments, and gets way too excited about stupid or inconsequential gags. Or even worse, sees an emotional moment and immediate goes for the gay joke.)

At that point, their analysis is basically worthless I think. It’s a cheap gag.

I’m lucky to have siblings who enjoy thins for most of the same reasons I do and will encourage me to look at the best, otherwise I think all I would see sometimes is that bad stuff.

I think, if you’re like me, you may be wondering how to avoid getting burned by all this stuff.

I do not have a perfect answer yet. But I know that focusing on what you love, on the good stuff, is the best way to forget about the bad.

And watching your influences. Maybe you can’t get away from all of them, but as far as YouTube goes, I’ve found it helped a lot to search for positive reviewers, and clean ones. Or ones who actually think, for goodness sake.

And outside of fandoms, there are other people who corrupt everything they talk about. It may be better to just not hang around them.

But there are some who do it only because they were never taught anything else. Or, like many kids I’ve known, were not given a standard at all. Often they will change if they simply see something better demonstrated.

And to the pure, even a relationship in real life becomes pure. It all depends on your motives. As long as you also use common sense and set boundaries.

I think this song put it well, I had it playing while writing this:

“This is my brand new day starting now, I let go of the things that weigh me down, and rob me of the beauty that’s to be found, in life all around.

And this is my prayer without ceasing, the negative releasing, and as I rise above, my burden is easing.

I bring the pure flow water around, the rocks of life won’t hold me down.

I bring the pure flow, drink so deep, the river of life, my soul at ease.”–Superchick, Pure.

Until next time–Natasha.

Real Talk: Intrusive Thoughts

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

So, Real Talk.

I watched the latest Sander Sides video. If you read The Snake Cycle (drybonestruth.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/the-snake-cycle/)  post I did, you know who Thomas Sanders is, if not, then suffice it to say he’s a YouTuber who makes Inside Out-like videos about life issues.

His latest, as of this date, is one about something called Intrusive Thoughts.

Apparently roughly 2% of the population deals with them, I personally think the number has to be much higher, and that the 2% just are the reported, extreme cases.

Intrusive Thoughts are weird, nonsensical, disturbing, and often violent gruesome or sexual thoughts that seem to come form nowhere, and persistently annoy or bother us, especially when we are stressed or going through a hard time, or feel low on self esteem.

The more you fight them, the worse they seem to get, yet you are horrified that you could even think of these things or think about doing them.

One example form the Sanders Sides was thinking of murdering someone, molesting someone, or eating them. (Ew.)

Now, I have a confession, watching the video my reaction was “So this is more commonly recognized as a problem than I thought.”

I assumed everyone had these thoughts, but that few people saw them as that unusual or problematic, beyond an annoyance.

I still think everyone does have thoughts like this. Is there really a person who’s never thought about killing someone?

Not seriously, but like, pictured it.

IF there is, they have less of a temper than me. I’m betting than you too. We make jokes on shows so often about killing people.

We often say “I’m gonna kill him/her.”

Do we mean it? Not usually. But just that that has become a figurative thing shows how often we have thoughts like that, and we minimize them.

But honestly, that’s not even the worst of these thoughts.

Apparently, some people have them in dreams too. I don’t typically dream them, if I do, I wake up.

I also don’t see my dreams as evidence of my deep desires or serious considerations. To me, a dream is more like the realm where all reason can be off the table for why anything happens. It’s where the  things you worry about can’t be kept at bay with distraction and common sense.

But, I also don’t fine them impossible to resist.

That’s what I want to talk bout.

The conclusion in the video is that you cannot reason your way out of Intrusive Thoughts, you also can’t fight them, you should never check to see if their gone.

It’s true, checking for a thought to be gone is to think it again, that’s only common sense.

They are like moths around a lamp, actually, if you turn the beacon off, they’ll go away, but turn it back on to look for them, and they’ll be back.

Unless it’s to remember where you put something, am I right?

I agree that these methods do not work to fight Intrusive Thoughts, but I do not agree that there is no way  to fight them.

I find Sander’s conclusion to be based on something that I do not agree with. That we can’t control what we think, that there is nothing to turn to besides ourselves when wre are thinking those things, and that thinking those things is okay.

I don’t mean that we should beat ourselves up when those thoughts pop up.

It is also hard to say where the line is. People who have these thoughts continuously can go crazy from it. They can cease to be bothered by the thoughts.

I believe I know why this is, I study character.

When someone has terrible thoughts or desires that beat on them relentlessly, more and more over time, they start to feel like a monster.

When a human being feels like that, they do one of two things. They try to fix it, to change themselves back from it, they may hide it or they may go to someone else (that is better), but they try to do something about it.

Or, they embrace it as a way to not fear themselves. C. S. Lewis mentions this in The Great Divorce, adding that to fear oneself is the last horror.

Imagine Dragons also has done some songs about just this feeling, one is called Monster, I’d say Polaroid is the same thing, toned down to a more relationship oriented version.

I think Intrusive Thoughts break some people, and they embrace them in order to stop fearing them. I doubt most perverts and psychos started off liking those feelings, but they may have given up fighting them so long ago that they only have distant memories as of hating them as a child.

I don’t think we are born enjoying the worst kinds of things, at least not most of us, but if we are not guarded as kids, things can creep in.

As a kid I did things I now know are serious perversions in adults, as a kid, I stopped as I realized it was wrong, I think the fact that I did it unknowingly helped. But I also had better influences.

If someone doesn’t they are likely to give in and end up with weird addictions, fetishes, or worse.

What years of being in Church and reading books about it has taught me is that just about everyone has these dark places in their life, either now, or in the past. I think the devil sneaks in to put us in chains at a young age.

What’s amazing is that none of us seem to realize it’s not just us.

It’s actually sad that humanity is so messed up as a whole, but it’s not, really, so very surprising.

It’s even less surprising that the influence of the Information age has made it easier and more common than ever. We’re exposed tho things by accident, some of us were exposed to them on purpose.

I say this because it does help to find the root of the problem. I’ve retraced a lot of my past problems.

Fear was major factor. To comfort ourselves we develop weird habits.

I really dislike how some shows are portraying this as funny, when it’s a very serious problem, an unhealthy coin mechanism.

Using masturbation as a comfort thing is one common example, even the BIG Bang Theory did it.

How many kids watch that? I know my cousins have.

That’s not even an Intrusive thought, it’s afar too common to be. I doubt the people who do it think about it overmuch. If they do, it’s because of guilt.

Things got a lot better for me once God started removing my fears.

The thing is, Thomas Sanders has been so open about things that bug him, that I can easily draw parallels between my experience and his.

He mentions being afraid of demons and other monsters. That was me once.

I do not think he has seen the connection between this and intrusive thoughts.

Though he did link anxiety with the problem, so he was close.

For some people, it’s an easy leap from “I fear this” to “I fear being like this thing that horrifies me.” And it can be easy to dull the pain of that by embracing it, easier to give up than to keep fighting.

And direct resistance to those thought doe snot work.

But I break with Thomas over saying these thoughts are our own.

I maintain that only thoughts I encourage and welcome are my own. Once I take ownership of them, I say they are okay, because they are part of me.

Even if, like Thomas, I say they are bad thoughts and that I am not completely good because I think them, I am still softening the blow by saying they are mine.

Plus, these thoughts to me are less about how bad I am, and more about how weak I am.

I think Intrusive Thoughts have two, maybe three sources.

1 . A huge contributor is the World. We are exposed to so much messes up stuff by wack jobs who like it because they gave in, that it’s almost an audible voice (sometimes it is audible_ telling us to give in and accept this way of thinking. A siren song of disturbing elements.

You think I’m exaggerating?

Oh no, think about it. 50 Shades of Gray has done a lot to make having kinky tenancies, as they are called, okay. Even sort of cool, in a you-do-you sort of way.

At the very least, they are talked of more even if mostly to say it’s messed up. PEple read it into innocent remarks on shows that are far from endorsing it.

I doubt that one book or movie is solely responsible, but it’s an example of how something can be popularized through such methods. And those thoughts people used to keep to themselves the now feel free to share, not to get help, but to revel in their own disturbing nature.

I see this on reviews of My Little Pony for crying out loud.

Ugh.

2. This will not sound reasonable to a skeptic, but I think the devil is behind plenty of it.

The very nature of intrusive thoughts reminds me of how Lewis portrayed the demonic in his book Perelandra. Pure evil is not rational, because Reason still comes from God, once God has been fully rejected, reason goes with it. Evil just revels in being evil, mindless, directionless, destructive.

Very much like Intrusive Thoughts. We human are rational, so they make us feel sick. But if someone gives up rationality, they cease to be bothered by it. We have plenty of ugly historical examples of this happening.

3. It’s possible that everyone is born with some capacity to fall prey to these thoughts because of our sinful nature. The fact that the thoughts so rarely are appealing at first makes it hard for me to believe it’s a temptation.

Its our fear of them that is the temptation. It’s easy to panic over it. We are weak, we can’t fight it off, so we panic.

But it’s that temptation that then opens to door to temptation to accept it in order to escape the fear. And then what we once found horrifying can become pleasurable.

I hate it as much as you do, but I can’t deny it’s a fact.

I never could resist temptation effectively until I ceased to fear it. My fear made me more likely to give in, if I was already paralyzed, what else could I do.

Fear is like a bully. You do as it says to make it go away and stop punching you, but it only comes back crueler next time.

Which brings me to my solution:

What actually destroys Intrusive Thoughts is…Joy.

I’m not kidding.

Once I began to get more grounded in who I was in Christ, and began to believe my identity was not based in these thoughts and fears, a strange thing happened.

I began to find them pathetic, and funny in a pathetic way.

Like “That’s the best you can do?”

And once I could laugh at them, the power of them disappeared. Even if I had them again, I knew they were ridiculous.

It is not the same as enjoying them. You laugh at these thoughts like you laugh at an angry dog behind a fence. The danger i rendered innocuous by how stupid it is to be threatening you when it can’t even reach you.

But always keeping in mind that if we go in the fence, the danger is real. To laugh at these thoughts is not to accept them. It’s to block them the way a clique blocks outsiders by mocking them. They are not taken seriously enough to be talked to.

Joy takes a while to build up to. But what started it for me was deciding I had to trust God with y thoughts.

And I think Sanders and I differ on this. I hope his method helps him, but I think one day I will be rid of this problem, and I do not think he will unless he looks outside himself.

Well, this was long, but good to talk about, until next time–Natasha.

 

Friends or Family?

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Well my family has left for vacation, and I am staying at home.

I’m not completely alone, my grandma is still here.

This is going to be the longest I’ve gone without seeing my family. Three weeks. It will be hard, my siblings and I are each others’ closest friends.

We spent our last full day together with another friend, and then watching our favorite anime together, (it’s My Hero Academia if you’re wondering.)

One thing we talked about in passing was how we’ve had difficulty befriending someone we know, and it seems like they don’t really want us to.

I pointed out that church (where all but one or two of my friends are) is supposed to be family, as the bible says, but if you look at how we’re instructed to behave to each other, it sounds more like friendship.

Proverbs even says better is a friend close then a brother far away, and there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Then I pointed out that we three have always been family, and we have always related to each other as sisters, but that it was only the past 5 years or so that we chose to also become friends.

Up until 13-14 I’d say, I treated my sisters like sisters. People who annoyed me, and who I could annoy, with no fear that it would end our relationship. There is a security in a healthy family, room to grow up and develop, while making plenty of mistakes along the way that family blows off, while it would end most friendships.

Of course, the biblical way to treat siblings is nothing like that, but as most adolescents, I didn’t care.

But after returning to Christ, I began rethinking how I acted. It didn’t change a whole lot until my sisters did the same thing, but overtime we began to build our relationship into something very strong. We enjoy it now. We enjoy each other’s personalities, and we are our closest confidantes. We have the kind of sibling-hood you read about.

And sometimes that amazes me, because I know it didn’t have to be that way. I’m so glad we all chose to become friends. (There’s actually a show on Disney Channel that addressed this idea, Liv and Maddie, “Sisters by birth, friends by choice.”)

I was comparing it to the Church family. Once you become a christian (as our doctrine goes) you are part of the family. And the basic instructions off the bat are that we accept you as such. overlook you faults the way a family would, and be your support. If we fight, we also forgive quickly.

That’s a family dynamic, a baby Christian needs that because they will get a lot wrong in the first year or so. That’s okay. I did too. And I was raised in Church. You cannot teach spiritual maturity, only exhibit it and hope it will benefit other people. I had my  mom as an example of it for years before I learned to emulate any of it.

A new Christian is only beginning to be a new person. And that makes them immature. We are meant to show grace.

The sad thing, a lot of churches do not even reach the family dynamic. They don’t accept people, they don’t forgive, they don’t support.

This does not mean that it doesn’t work however. The problem with corporate church is that the same flaws tend to creep in as with businesses and charities, many just don’t do what they should because management skills are not adequate.

Which is why I think the church was never meant to be a corporate experience, but there are people who find a way to work the system.

Many churches do find the family dynamic. But what the New Testament instructs us in is far closer to friendship in many ways.

We are not just to support each other, but to find each others strengths and talents, and develop them. We no longer just accept, we are also to correct, to sharpen each other. To hold each other accountable.

Family can do this, but it is something that comes more naturally into a really good friendship. Family can be too close to see the problem. Friends build distance on purpose by having diverse interests, getting space from each other, and so they learn more about the other person because they see them from more angles than if they lived with them constantly.

The church is designed to meld these two dynamics into a hybrid I think only is possible in spiritual ways. It is really difficult to explain until you experience it. My family became my friends. I hope someday to have friends who will be family.

The trouble is, churches can not really support friendship. I have a church that supports family a lot. Better than most places do. But it is still trying to figure out friendship.

A lot of discipleship we do is focused on family, one girl who’d been through their school of ministry even admitted to this. Not a lot of it is focused on friendship.

Yet, I think a lot of what the epistles show us is how to be a friend as well as a brother or sister.

I think in Acts, the apostles already had a family dynamic, but after they started to travel and organised, they had to have friends.

My dad has learned the hard way that family can be heard to organize to do anything if everyone acts as and individual. It takes the build up of friendship, the learning to work with a very different person, to speak their language, that allows for teamwork.

Some families achieve this with seeming ease. My family never had been particularly good at this except in crisis situations. I think it depends on how well the family knows itself.

A lot of friends now are not on this level, thanks to the lack of interaction we have except through technology, but you’ve probably met or known people who still have this teamwork ability. Hopefully you are one of them.

And my whole point to my sisters was that this ability is a choice to develop. That is what makes it different.

We have no choice about our family. We need to accept hem no matter what.

But within the family we tend to have friends. It won’t be every remember, an not the same for every member you do have it with, but there will be the odd person here and there.

I have a bond with family I only see once or twice a year because we are family, but I have a different bond with people I choose to be around and are not related to me except by faith or being in the human race.

I realize a lot of this post may only be interesting if you are a christian, but it was something I had not realized before, and I’ve been in church my hole life. Plus, it’s always interesting to think about social circles like this and how they work.

Plus my real point that friendship is choice, it doesn’t just happen, is one I think many of us need to understand. Myself included. Movies show friendship as something that can happen in an instant…sometimes it can, but I have never found those friends to be the ones I am likely to see the most often or talk to the most… Maybe God in his wisdom reserves the instant friendship bond for a more eternal significance. The people you surround yourself with are going to round our your rough edges, and that’s better for you.

Until next time–Natasha

Speaking of friendship, it is a factor in the book series I am publishing on Kindle, here’s a link if you want to check out the first two installments, more coming once I replace my laptop-

You can also visit my author page and ask me questions about the series if you’re curious about how me and my coauthor came up with the idea.

Thanks for your support!

Aftermath–plus special announcement at the end.

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“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”–C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man.)

I’ve written about this brilliant little book before, but one thing that interests me that I have not really touched on is what happened in the aftermath of it.

The system in England when Lewis wrote that books was followed pretty quickly by America, it was probably already in place in the rest of Europe at the time, at least the countries at the forefront of our minds.

Nazism, the great evil of the War, was leading to the abolition of most men, but Lewis was concerned that what they were teaching schoolboys (and girls no doubt) was going to lead to the abolition of all men, in feeling if not in biological form.

Wise men saw where it was going, but where has it taken us now?

We live in the Post-Modern era. It is rightly called that, if we mean by modern Modernism, which Lewis and his predecessor G. K. Chesterton were both very much concerned with. Modernism was not about being modern in a fashionable sense, like it’s usually used now, or referring to technology or medicine. Modernism was the principles, or lack thereof, of thorough rationality. Which Chesterton showed in his book Orthodoxy to really be irrational.

It is basically materialism, but with odd ideals on top of it, that really make no sense whatsoever if you take the idea literally that nothing has any value except in our own emotions.

But as Lewis pointed out, the men who taught this didn’t believe it themselves. They were teaching values in spite of themselves. The problem is, even if they were better than what they taught, it had the same effect on their students as if they hadn’t been.

My parents, and perhaps your parents generation were the prime victims of this teaching’s first effects.

You’re probably familiar with how psychology got very popular in the 60s-90s, and it still is now. It was beginning before then, but at least in America, it really took off once we began pushing religion aside and needed explanations for all the phenomenon’s sin and human nature used to explain.

We’ve come full circle almost in the pat few decades, we’ve come back to realizing that psychology explains nothing. Now we are looking to physics and other such things, we’re looking to sexuality, we’re looking to race, we’re looking to everything except what originally worked for people: Religion.

My dad had behavioral issues as a kid, and born when he was, he was medicated, put in Special Ed and diagnosed with mental illness, he tried rehabilitation. Like many people of his generation, and ours, he also tried drugs.

It’s strange that drugs and psychology both took off at around the same time. (People can bicker about dates, but a few years or even a decade on the grand scale of time is pretty much the same time.) Both were around before then, but they got popularized, jsutfied, studied, and theorized about. They came to be seen as normal.

Clearly they aren’t the same thing, but strange that the very thing that told us that our dependence on substance was a problem coming from deeper issues did nothing to stop us from abusing substances.

Have you noticed that to highlight a problem in society is no to weaken it, but exposing it makes it become uglier, more used, more prolific, draws more people in.

Exposing it just to comment on it, that is, real solutions are different.

But Psychology did not fix anything, it diagnosed things. Medication could not fix those problems, in face many meds make the problems they treat worse. My dad went off his, and does better now that he did while on them. (Of course, you should be careful about getting off medication, the process is difficult and should be walked through with a doctor’s help. He didn’t quit all at once.)

Now, we live in the information, option generation. In the aftermath of all that identifying, we’ve become clueless about what to do.

Relationships have been diagnosed, studied, and tested; the result? We have a really hard time maintaining even eye contact.

Are they directly related things?

I think so.

Exposing how bad we are at relationships did not help us fix them. It made the revelation overwhelming.

Before, people knew some folks were bad at relationships, but those who were were seen as responsible for their own actions. Since no one thought it was genetically inevitable, people could try to improve, or could be ignored by the general public if they chose to remain unpleasant. Not knowing how deep our mental problems supposedly went, we thought we could move on.

Having it blown so completely out of proportion crippled us. Because it made us think we were powerless to do anything about it.

Doubting our ability to control ourselves is now common phrasing for young people. “That’s just the way I am.”

But we took it further.

It was too depressing to live in that, so we began to take these things that were exposed so that we could not hide them anymore, and we began to say they were not bad, not shameful, after all. Instead they were cool, enlightened, they were our identity.

It’s okay to be gay, it’s okay to have mental health issues, it’s okay to have a disability, it’s okay to do what makes you happy.

Not all the above examples are on the same level of crazy of course, but they all stem from the same thing, a desire to take a shame and turn it into a pride.

In some cases that may be okay. But we’ve gone way, way too far past that line.

I do not blame young people all that much for being so stupid, not really.

When I read books written in the 60s-80s, I often find them depressing.

The infamous Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus was one of the most insulting things I ever read on the difference between men and women. A lot of authors who commented on it were condescending to both genders.

Like our differences can be summed up in quirks. Try it and it fails you, you’ll never find any one thing that makes men and women different other than our sexual organs, if you look only at what we do and what we enjoy and what we hate and how we think. The difference is harder to pin down then that, anyone who tires just makes fool of themselves.

When the explanation for differences was so stupid and limiting, it’s in line with human nature to throw it out and go to the opposite extreme, that there are no differences. That’s insane, but it’s less boring. Youth do like exciting things.

Plus, the new and different aspect is attractive to many people.

If you look at any popular attitude held now, you can trace it back to evolving from an attitude the previous couple of generations have. We have mutated it into something different.

We now speak less of the values they valued, and more of vague ideas about self-fulfillment. But it all make sense, that age of reason led to discrediting pleasure and fulfillment as in our own minds, leaving the young people weaponless to defend pleasure on the grounds o fr eason, the natural result we that young people ignored reason, ignored common sense, and ignored restraint.

Now we have this mess.

IF you listen to how we talked now, it’s becomes obvious. People acknowledge that there are reasons to ear healthy, exercise, and focus on happy things; but then make a joke out of doing none of those things. They laughed it off, but behind the humor, there’s a secret guilt, and a secret bewilderment.

Why, if it is so obvious, do we find nothing compelling about reason? And why, if it is so unimportant, do we make a joke out of not following it that hides a note of serious concern.

We are unsettled. We are drifters. The previous generations removed the foundation of our lives, tried to put a weak one in it;s place, but like sand, it crumbled when the floods of real problems struck again. It was never going to hold up.

But, lacking both  a solid foundation, and now even a sandy one, we have none. Hence our myriad of problems that center around confusion, uncertainty, and depression. Our general feeling of purposelessness.

We now do not have the logical skills to explain why we feel this way, only words of mental illness, social anxiety, and being addicted to screens.

We laugh at it because we have no idea what to do about it.

This, I present to you, is the aftermath of the abolition of Man, our humanity is not gone completely, thanks to God and the preservation of some values even so, but it is hanging by a thread because our defenses are so weak.

We are glorifying our weaknesses because we have been robbed of our strength and glory.

That is what happened. And it turns out, abolishing man’s strength and glory is very close to abolishing man himself, it is good for us that God redeems our weaknesses, or we would have no hope.

But we do have hope. That’s what this blog is about after all. That even dry bones can live again.

It is now almost the third or fourth anniversary of when I started it with just that premise. And I still think that  a return to truth is the only way to preserve hope.

So, with that in mind, until next time–Natasha.

Announcement:

I have now published the first two parts of a series I wrote on Kindle!

It is about superheroes, mystical creatures, and mysteries.

There may be over 20 parts in all, at 0.99 an installment (lowest price possible), if you would like to check it out, here’s a link to find it, the series is called “When It Started.”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=When+it+started+Natasha+Queen&rh=n%3A154606011&ref=nb_sb_noss

The Snake Cycle.

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Okay, Thomas Sanders, I admit it, you are a freaking genius.

You may not know it, but it’s buried in there.

I was reading  a book by G. K. Chesterton and I came cross an analogy for eastern philosophy’s view of eternity that arrested my attention, because I hear it used elsewhere.

Ironically, I do not think Thomas Sanders, winner of best YouTube Comedian Shorty award (hope I spelled that right), knew exactly what he stumbled on…or Joan, his friend who helps research and write this stuff.

It’s the snake devouring its own tail picture. I did not know it was a real symbol, but apparently it is. (In occult stuff, as well as Viking culture. Weird.)

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I believe, given what I know of odd eastern mysticism, it would mean in that context that eternity flows in and out of itself, it feeds into itself, starting over and over again, regenerating, reincarnating.

Some cultures view time as cyclical, or traveling in a circle, which is why we have repeating patterns.

The biblical view of time is better represented by a wheel that rolls on a line, like the seraphs from Ezekiel’s vision, cycles repeat, but changes and alternations and progress still happen. Time is a vehicle getting us from one place to another. The only way a mortal being could travel without being burned up.

You’ll find the idea in “A Wrinkle in Time,” the 4th dimension is time, which is another way of saying the 3rd dimension is solid objects and the 4th is them moving. The 5th dimension is moving through time, or more accurately, moving time itself. Bending it.

That’s not really relevant to this, except as a concept slightly different from the repetition of the eastern view.  Even they think you reincarnate into better or worse states, as I said in my last post, all religion seems to share the idea of a better or worse end after death. In this case Karma is what decides that.

To be fair, I’m sure there’s nuance depending on whether you’re Hindu, Buddhist, or some other variation of a reincarnation-believing religion that I don’t know about because I live in the West. (Hey, it’s hard to keep track when you don’t live in it.)

But the point is, Thomas Sanders links this odd idea to the idea of losing motivation. He only applies it to creating his videos, but it easily applies to more than that. He actually sort of acknowledges this in other videos about “Why do we get up in the morning?” and “Learning New Things about Ourselves.” Even coming into the more lighthearted “Becoming a Cartoon.” He has a habit of getting existential.

Being the unashamed nerd that I am, I find his philosophy to be the most interesting part of his videos.

If you want to see for yourself, 6:00 minutes in is where the part that really interests me happens. I want to give credit where it’s due.

 

Patton (Morality) describes the creative process as a whole, mushy vision, and the solution to this is Logic. Yet Chesterton points out that a purely logical way of viewing things only narrows your perspective. The creative process may be unclear, but that mirrors how we see life, not always clear on what is happening, but able to see more because we cannot see all, than by trying to fit all into our logical minds.

That leads to a very dark, bleak, panic as Logic in this video discovers, being the solution to a problem he has caused. And those who try to see the world with reason alone find themselves in that  position, as Chesterton elaborates:

“Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether skeptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys himself.” (Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton. Pg 47.)

This got me to thinking about the anime I watch. I’ve noted this particular philosophy to be present in it. It’s a common one in anime, and other eastern influenced stuff, it’s also frequently found in the Church. It’s a common idea to men.

That you can, like with a piece of wood, whittle your character down into something beautiful and smooth.

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My Hero Academia‘s eastern philosophy of lopping off all the bad habits and tenancies and honing your skills down to the basics. That you have a basically good nature, with potential, but you need to be trimmed, (it is literally expressed almost that exact way in Best Jeanist’s words to Katsuki Bakugo in Season 2.) It’s basically the same thing. And the same as the materialism which Chesterton is referring to, which by the way, he compares to madness.

The idea that materialism shuts out everything but just the material. It’s literally the definition, but the definition is awful, he thinks, because it is so narrow.

It may encompass the whole world in that it is a world view, but it also shuts out much of the world, anything that can’t be measured by matter. Including our emotions.

My Hero Academia is not that extreme. It certainly has a better worldview than materialism. It’s not completely wrong to think we should cut out the bad things of our lives.

The bible teaches that.

But here’s where it deviates, and I may add, where Thomas’s Logic has to cooperate with his Morality, since he is smart enough to know nullity is not the way:

The Bible says not just to remove evil, but to replace it with good. The idea is not to be some enlightened martial arts master, cut off from all negative emotions, inner peace is not the annihilation of troubling feelings, but the overcoming of them with better ones.

Few people can succeed at shutting off their feelings completely, even depression is a feeling, and those who can are only less able to understand them. But it’s far most possible to overcome our emotions by focusing on better things. OF course, we still deal with the bad stuff, but we do not dwell on it.

I could go for a long time about all the fictional examples of this, and even real life ones, but I think I can leave it here.

Good for you Sanders.

And Chesterton is a genius also.

Until Next Time–Natasha.