And as is usually the case, that probably means I'll end up talking about each of them, but none to the level I want to, especially the later I go and the longer this takes.
I'll start with the follow-through on my last blog. It's overall worse, but at the same time, there's a reality of somehow making it through and that reality provides hope. At every stage, I feel like there's more and more setting us up for failure and less and less providing a path for success. But at the same time I still do cling to the hope my wife is right and that everything they dream of is possible.
That we can pull off a cross-country move.
That where we will live will be cheaper.
That where we live will have employment.
That where we live will allow us to finally progress in areas of our life that have remained stagnant for years.
That where we live opens up the avenue for building a future family together and starting the rest of our lives together.
After all, there's a lot going for us. For a start, my line of work is more likely to have openings because there's fewer who would qualify for and have the certificates I have, with my experience providing me an edge over other applicants.
We have tangible places to look at we know the general pricing of, which don't price us out or breed restrict us out.
We have the potential support of who knows how many others, from potential friends, family, loved ones, and maybe even coworkers.
There's the potential to maybe have transitionary housing with a relative.
We might even be able to use credit cards in this transitionary period to pay off big bills and then make gradual payments off on said cards even if it's only a small amount over time and accrues a huge level of interest.
All we need is the help getting through the door, and we would likely be good.
The hope-crushers are all getting more problematic for me to try and ignore though.
This would mean that for the second time in a row, we can't pay for the full lease of a place we're currently renting. We know the old management for our place would definitely have been willing to work with us, but at the end of last year our apartment complex was bought out by a more parasitic toxic management who is immediately violating state law in refusing to offer payment plans. Which is funny because we learned about said state law being a state law from the current lower management who helped us move in in the first place. The lower management is great and would love to offer us the accommodations we would need, but the higher up company policy overrides their sanity.
And we might not be able to meet their insane demands, despite actually desiring to pay them what they are owed. (We like our current place enough where we WANT to pay them the full amount of our lease, plus any moveout costs, plus any fines and interest that are reasonably accrued. For instance we would fight them on a charge of repainting the walls because nothing about any of the walls was damaged by us as tenants, but there's definitely some upkeep cost we would likely be responsible for.)
Moving half-way across the country loses all of the benefits of my current state. I don't think people understand just how many programs we have here that are helpful, and I genuinely believe my state offers some of the best public and semi-public and non-religious private education in the entire country across every level of education from pre-K all the way through college up to master degrees at a minimum. We'd be closing ourselves off from being eligible for state healthcare, from my state's education, from my state's culture and diversity and education and from being in one of the few places to have the ability to opt out of shopping at a big corporation like Walmart.
We would have to begin paying for things we currently receive through my parents. AAA membership and car insurance being the big ones.
We would have to somehow pull off a move of all of our stuff with me as the only driver, and to also get our car to our new place too despite my car and the rental truck likely being half the country apart.
Employment isn't a guarantee, it's just a hope--and there's no guarantee I receive gender-affirming care of any kind in a state which is less blue than Washington State would be. Not only on a social level (would I even be able to use the women's bathroom, locker room, etc.?), but on a medical level as well (here as long as you have medical insurance of just about any kind, you're eligible for all the services needed to transition pretty much for free with the maximum copay being $60 or so at the most expensive, with most cheaper ranging from free to $15 or so).
We have no protections against something going wrong. With our car for instance, or with moving vehicles.
There's less support available from family and the support available more likely to be toxic and come with conditions. I know I can rely on my family for any services they can afford to provide. They can't pay thousands per month, which is why we're in as dire a straight as we are, but they can provide a lot of help for things like food, transportation, storage, etc., all without conditions. My wife holds hopes of receiving that, but I don't think that the family in the area we would be going would be able to provide.
We would lose all of our social connections in the area and need to start over, when getting the few we have was difficult enough already. No friends in the area we would be going, and far less programs we'd be interested going to. I genuinely love going to Sapphic events and to Witches Markets. While I've gained some level of cynicism for both (Sapphic events overbook for their venues getting too crowded and provide too few protections from drunken ladies becoming too drunk to have spacial awareness aside from parking being paid; witches markets have poor parking availability, vendors outside are ridiculously cold, vendors inside don't allow dogs, and a lot of the vendors don't feel properly vetted), I genuinely love both and they have provided me enrichment and fulfillment in my life that I never thought possible going out in public.
Where am I going to get that in a place with far fewer people and far less diversity and far fewer outside of the cult of Christianity? There's probably still LGBTQIA+ events a plenty to be found, but would there be Sapphic events specifically? I doubt there's enough sapphics to generate the demand for monthly events the way we have an overabundance of Sapphics here. (Demographically we have a disproportionately high number of queer femme-presenting people here, our state is probably one of the top five in terms of queer ladies being openly queer.)
And even if there is...what would there be in terms of witchy events? Maybe, maybe, there would be some form of yearly market that is witchy-adjacent. Here we have a nerdy market which is technically focused on nerdy oddities particularly focused on Dungeons and Dragons and D&D-adjacent topics, which runs four or so times a year, and has a good 60 - 80% of the same vendors as the eight yearly witch markets.
And here we also have gothic markets covering darker things, loosely of the edgy hail-satan variety, but not really. The type of market covering metal music, and emo music, and similar genres, black clothing and lipstick and makeup and all types of things with spikes, bones, and similar.
And here we also have krampus markets, similar to the above.
Between the three of those, nerdy D&D-adjacent markets, gothic markets, and krampus markets, there's probably one or two that would run at least once a year...but I would be shocked to find witches markets for all eight witch events anywhere outside of where we live right now because as far as I know...the pacific northwest is the only place in the country with the level of diversity and cultural identity to have the level of demand to fuel these events being run rain or shine year-round.
Basically, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of cultural identity, social acceptance, in basically every way except for the cost of living, we already live in the best place in the entire United States for queer disabled neurodivergent witches. We live in a place where queer folk, disabled people, neurodivergent folk, and witches, are all at a level of unusually high percentage of the population. Anywhere else in the country isn't going to have the same amount of "our people" locally, at least not as openly so.
We have no real plan to get all of our stuff moved. We have only the hopes of it being cheaper and the cost of living actually being reduced lower than the increased amount of things we'll have to pay for and the likely decrease in comparable pay.
All of that is building up to be a weight because I'm on the verge of receiving all of the care I need here. I'm going to physical therapy and making huge strides in not being in constant pain. I qualify for behavioral health being given to me. My depression could get proper medication, as could my ADHD, and I have the access to medication for my disabilities, and I have access to HRT. I lose all of that when not here.
And those took me years to get, here, in the place considered one of the easiest in the country. How long would it take for me to get them in a place less queer-friendly, less neurodivergent-friendly, less disability-friendly?
My depression is getting to the point where with all of my anxieties, with all of the pressures, with all of the weights of the bills we're liable for and responsible for, with all of what we are likely to be dealing with...I'm just feeling hopeless and defeated.
I'm at the point where I feel like I am the obligatory sibling who never amounts to anything and is a total failure in any family of four or more kids. It's to the point where I feel bad enough where I've contemplated ending my life for only the fourth time in my entire life and only the third time since I got with my wife, for the third time since July 2023. (The other two being December 2023 and then around June 2024 if I recall correctly.)
Now, to be clear, I'm not actually suicidal, yet. If I were at risk, you'd know. I'll say that the best way for you to keep an eye on it is that my enemies should really be praying for my success and not my downfall because if I do go down I'm not going quietly into the night. I'm not going to be radio silent and then end my life. If I go down I go down swinging and will mince no words about any of the traumas, any of the abuses, any of the injustices, I've faced, my wife has faced, etc.
I've held back from ever lashing out like that because at the end of the day, as long as I have a hope for living a life, I don't want to live a life with hate. So if I succumb to hate, if I succumb to lashing out, then you'll know that I'm close, because if I am going to air out every secret I have, it's only because I don't want those weights to drag me down in whatever comes after my current life.
Again, why I say my enemies should be praying for my success, because I know enough to take them down with me and the only reason I don't take them down already is because I don't want to. As long as I have a hope for a future, I will never want to. But if they pray for my failure, and then it turns out I do indeed fail and lose my last reason for living...then they're gonna find out the hard way why they should've been wishing me well because the things I know are things I would be willing to go to the grave with if I live a long life but aren't things I'm gonna let be left unsaid and secret if my life were to end early.
Now, granted. I use the term "enemies" here mostly to invoke the stock phrase of enemies wishing success. I forget the exact phrase at the moment, but you probably know it well enough. I personally am of the Vinland Saga of "no person has any enemies". As I said in my last blog post, I'm slowly becoming the worst version of myself, the version of myself I least want to be. And that's the version which would retaliate against people who I know aren't bad, by and large, and deserve to live their own lives of prosperity. The worst version of myself would forget that.
But the me that I am, the me that is the best of myself and my life, believes that most humans are good, and that very few people deserve to be condemned. I believe in us all sharing a lot of the same desires in life and being owed the chance to pursue those things.
I believe in building people up rather than tearing people down. That to find common connection and to find the ability to empathize with each other and help each other is far better a life and future than a life where we're dunking on people for their worst sides and excluding them for their shortcomings. A life filled with joy and with awe and with passion is one far more fulfilling than a life filled with paranoia about the people you know secretly being terrible, more fulfilling than a life tearing down those around you, than a life of hatred and dividing and excluding those who don't meet the standards set.
I have this belief that "childlike awe, childlike wonder, childlike joy, childlike idealism, childlike passion", are not in fact traits of children but rather innately the inherent nature of humanity. That what makes humans be humans is that we have a natural innate awe and wonder of the world around us, we have an innate desire for the joys of both laughter and happiness, that we have an innately positive view of the future and of the world around us and of others, and that creativity is arguably the most human thing which is human above all else.
And that any association with those things being childlike is an artificially enforced view by an artificially built modern society that encourages conformity over individuality, but also selfishness over community, when it should be individuality over conformity and community over selfishness.
Yet despite how strong I am...I'm not so strong as to hold these beliefs so strongly I would rather die for them wordlessly, silently, in a young age. The pressures of society are enough, I know, to break me, and while in my better moments I believe all of the above...in my worst moments the amount of pain and suffering I've lived through on a daily basis is enough where I know I would lash out in hate, in bitterness, in despair, in destruction.
It takes years to build what can be destroyed in seconds. While that makes the efforts to build all the more sacred, all the more precious, all the more things we can and should appreciate for lasting as long as they do...that destruction is something I actively have to suppress, because the worst mistakes in my life and the fuel for the things I need the most therapy for are from not having been strong enough to prevent from lashing out as I did.
All of the lost friendships.
All of the burnt bridges.
All of the things I destroyed from anger, from desperation, from apathy, from asking too much and giving too little.
That's what I don't want to continue to be. And you'll know I've given up on life if I give up on not being those things and actively am throwing them away--and I'm dangerously close. I'm dangerously withdrawn. I'm in far less spaces than I was last year. Ever since January, I've been shrinking myself to be less and less out-there, to the point where I've stopped being involved with many of my closest friends.
I've stopped providing daily check-ins.
I've stopped talking to friends.
I've stopped coming to streams.
I've stopped keeping up to date on discords.
I've stopped visiting websites I've had as a core part of my life since I was 13 years old despite my age now being a flip of those two numbers. (31 going on 33, because I haven't felt like the last year has had anything really noting me as having a birth.)
I've largely lost my passion for games, given up entirely on content creation and streaming, and while my passion for writing was recently reignited...it chose the worst possible time with me unable to really put any time or energy into nurturing it. Most of what I'm passionate about right now is organizing my notes and making them more coherent, connected, and consistent. All of which there's secretly an ulterior motive for, in that it's also one of those suicidal ideations, where I have this idea that if I were to note every aspect of my work then it would be okay for me to not make it if it were released publicly in a way anyone could follow and make.
Now, I know better from experience. ComicFuryians literally lost one of their most beloved members to a suicide where the person gave up on life, released their work, and took their life. To this day, nobody as far as I know has continued their work and nobody likely ever will. I am the only one who actually will make my work and logically I know that. But suicide is never logical and illogically, it feels more okay to have my life end if I have the potential of a legacy after, and releasing my work in a way where anyone could pick it up fuels that.
Butstill. At the end of the day, that wasn't what fueled the reignited passion. In fact, quite the opposite. It was me just...wanting to. To have this pure passion, this unbridled joy to share my work with the world, reignited. I had a fire lit under me to show what the world of farn is really like, and I want to share it with everyone, in full, which is something requiring me to be there to work on it.
So that's one of the few things keeping me alive right now, and it's something hard to keep. I've been creating stories and ideas and games and such since I was 13. To date, nearly 20 years later, none have been realized, because I can never see them through.
And I do have a lot of ideas.
My most recent idea, which is both kinda political but also kinda not, is that I think websites should stop being lazy with their filters for content in terms of age being largely a binary setting tied to maturity, and that for all content filters it shouldn't be a strict binary but rather a sort of slider, which both posters/creators can set appropriately and readers/viewers can filter for also appropriately.
As I see it, this should be a universal thing for websites, because it would also help create further protections for children.
"I never make content with a target audience of children", "I very rarely make content with a target audience of children", "I only sometimes make content with a target audience of children", "I make content with a target audience of children about half of the time", "I often make content with the target audience of children", "my content is near-exclusively targeted towards an audience of children", or "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children".
A filter would then be for what is defined as children. "12 and below", "14 and below", "17 and below", or "20 and below".
Set that as the first setting. "I never make content with a target audience of children" would automatically skip the following filters based on mixed audience targeting in favor of focusing exclusively on more mature ones, whereas "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children" would automatically skip every mature/adult filter. Those filters would note why they are disabled by the above.
From there, the next filter would be:
"None of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is inherently 18+ and for mature audiences", "I very rarely make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is inherently 18+ and mature in nature", "I only sometimes make content suitable for all ages; most of my content is 18+ and mature", "about half of my content is suitable for all ages; I don't try to be mature but don't shy away from 18+ material", "I often make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is not mature, but I have occasional 18+ material", and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages; I never have mature or 18+ material in my content".
There would likely be a similar filter for the maturity range of the content. "My content is 18+", "My content is 21+", "My content is late 20s and above", "my content is young 30s and above", "my content is 36+ and above", "my content is 40+".
Similarly, "none of my content is suitable for all ages" and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages" would disable most of the following filters by and large, with the disabled filters explaining why they're disabled.
"I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times", "I am an adult who frequently covers adult material", "I am an adult who often covers adult material", "I am an adult and about half of material I cover is adult in nature", "I am an adult and some of the times I cover adult material, but it's not my focus", "I am an adult, but I never cover adult material", and "I am not currently an adult", or something approximately close to that.
There would also be a filter for definition of adult. 18+, 21+, late-20s, early-30s, late-30s, and 40+, potentially both for the age of the individual and for their target audience. There might need to be an option for "my material has aged as I have".
Obviously children, as well as those selecting that they never cover adult material, would be locked out of describing the filters for various types of adult material, and this would be a list of trigger warnings and essentially how often they are shown.
Nudity: "I show full-frontal nudity, including sexual acts", "I show full-frontal nudity, but no explicit sex", "I show breasts and butts, but any lower frontal nudity is partially censored", "I show breasts and butts, but lower frontal nudity is heavily covered or censored", "I show butts, and heavily suggestive near-nudity, but full nudity is avoided or partially censored", "I show butts, but heavily suggestive nudity is avoided or heavily censored", "I don't show full nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured and/or near-nudity is displayed and/or nudity is heavily implied", "I don't show full nudity or near-nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured", "I don't show full nudity or prominently focus on lewd body parts, but near-nudity may be present", "I don't show full nudity or focus on lewd body parts, but nudity might be implied", and then at the SFW end, "I don't show or imply nudity, near-nudity, or prominently display lewdness".
Maybe breaking the above into two filters, one for nudity and one for lewdness.
Sexual content: "I show sexual content, including explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, including implied explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but don't show explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness and kissing", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness", "I don't show sexual content". This one I had a better version of in my head, I'm running out of momentum on how to explain it.
Adult topics: "I always talk about adult topics and themes", "I almost always talk about adult topics and themes", "I frequently talk about adult topics and themes", "I talk about adult topics and themes about half of the time", "I talk about adult topics and themes occasionally", "I on some rare occasions will talk about adult topics and themes", or "I never talk about adult topics and themes".
This would probably have subcategories for what constitutes adult topics.
Always/almost always/frequently/about half/occasionally/rarely/never for:
Death,
Depression,
War,
Genocide,
Abuse,
Finances and Employment,
Living Conditions and Situations,
Food Struggles,
Life Skills,
General Darker Themes,
Probably more, I can't think of everything which would constitute an adult topic.
Violence would require at least two filters. The first:
"I exclusively focus on violent content", "I heavily feature violent content", "I frequently feature violent content", "I often feature violent content", "I feature violent content about half of the time", "I feature violent content sometimes", "I feature violent content on rare occasions", or "I never feature violent content". This filter would mention that it explicitly ties into any of the sub-filters.
The one I can think of being,
"I show the most gruesome form of violence including extreme gore", "I show heavily bloody content, including some light levels of gore" "I show heavily bloody content, but avoid gore", "I show bloody violence, but avoid extremely realistic and/or over the top levels of blood and violence", "I show bloody violence, but stylized and/or in moderation", "I show violence, but avoid extremely bloody content regardless of how stylized it is", "I show some blood through violence in weapons and fighting", "I show violence in weapons and fighting, but blood is kept minimal or nonexistent", "I show weapons and fighting with minimal extreme violence", "I show weapons and fighting but there's no violence", and at the lowest end, "I occasionally show weapons being displayed and discussed but never used and/or I occasionally show characters hitting other things".
Or something to that effect.
To give an idea of how these filters would apply to, say, my blog?
I never make content with a target audience of children.
Arguably (and what I would do for safety), none of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is mature and inherently 18+.
Similarly, I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times--even my earliest 2014 blogs were made after I was already an adult, albeit a very young one.
As such, my content is aimed at 21+ adults at minimum, with the content aging as I have. This blog is not designed for young-20s anymore, but the earlier 2014 entries were. I don't know what the minimum age for current blog entries would be, but it ain't 18-year-olds, I can confidently say that much at minimum. You could say anything 21+ is okay, my personal definition is usually "if you were born after 9/11 you're probably too young to be here", but you could go up to saying the youngest allowed age would be my wife and anyone younger is too inexperienced to really be dealing with the heavy topics my blog has delved into at times.
I never show nudity, and very rarely do I talk about nudity, but I do talk about kinks and lewdness on occasion (probably need to refine the filters for that).
I am extremely lewd, with lewdness almost always mentioned (deez nuts and hardly know her jokes in particular but also pickup lines a plenty and innuendos of all kinds), so sexual content isn't shied away from whatsoever.
I almost always am talking about adult themes and topics.
Literally all of them have those themes, in heavy levels.
I feature violent content sometimes.
But it's in moderation, with me not going into gruesomely detailed versions of things, I'd say.
Then from the perspective of a viewer/reader, you would have filters.
First being selected age range.
"I am currently considered a child", with filters for "12 and under", "13 - 15", "16 - 17", "18 - 20". This would lock the user out of the majority of content regardless of selection, but based on the filters of the creators of content it would have some more available. (For many websites, arguably 12 and under being selected should auto-ban the account.)
"I am an adult", with filters for "18 - 20", "21 - 25", "26 - 29", "30 - 35", "36 - 39", and "40+". This would lock the user out of content which their age range makes them ineligible to view. Namely it would lock them out of content exclusively made for children and content heavily targeting children, as well as content they are too young for.
I think that mandating filters of this sort to be implemented on all sites offering content would make the internet a safer place for everyone. Does it stop people from lying? No. Does it stop people from misapplying filters? Not entirely, but these would be things that people would try their best at, with small misapplications corrected and punishments only for those who are wholly and entirely in very obviously extremely wrong classifications.
You might not know the difference between some violence and moderate violence, but if you're showing extreme violence with a filter set to showing almost no violence, you know your filter isn't properly applied.
These might be somewhat variable in being applied to specific content or to the account or to both, depending on the medium. Artists for instance might have filters for their content in general, but specific pieces might have filters that are different from their general filter. Streamers might have some filters for things that change, but likely less things change stream to stream than for an artist piece to piece. Posting on social media is something that likely wouldn't be viable to set most filters for most posts, so that would rely heavily on the profile filtering.
The specifics there are less important than their existence in general existing.
And this was my latest idea.
The third thing I wanted to talk about is religion, specifically how I believe that Christianity is arguably the only false religion in the world and arguably the only one to not be intrinsically tied to specific cultures, but also going into why many of the beliefs of Christianity are arguably applicable to nearly any culture and any religion and any belief system despite the religion being invalid.
But I don't think I have the energy to cover that in detail.
What I'll say there is basically that to accept the path of Christianity as valid requires first a belief that Christianity is not put on a pedestal above any other mythology. From the onset, the idea of "God" and Angels should be taken as no more real than Zeus and the Olympian pantheon, Odin and the Aesir and such from Norse mythology, Ra and the Egyptian pantheon, etc. You get the idea.
There should be the understanding that the universe wasn't made in 7 days, that evolution is real and there was never a real Adam or a real Eve, that there was never a Noah's Arc that contained literally the entirety of all life on earth in pairs of two, you get the idea. Science comes first, and that includes things like a virgin birth and the parting of a sea and the presence of mythological divine plagues and divinely striking down enemies and instantly vaporizing those who touch an artifact.
These should be considered as having the same basis in historical fact as any other piece of mythology from any other culture, in that whatever truth there may be behind these accounts has been heavily filtered by the mythology of numerous isolated cultures through countless generations of oral tradition that changed the tales and were eventually attempted to be written down long after they happened and were attempted to be unified even longer after they were written.
That in the same way there's no unified singular Greek Mythology or Egyptian Mythology or Norse Mythology with the mythologies of them being from countless different cities/tribes/etc. told over centuries or even millenia, the stories told throughout Christian lore are from countless different groups over a period over a thousand years, and as such, they have the same level of variance with there being no one singular truth above all others.
And that also, there needs to be a viewing of things as they would have been seen at the time, not as we have reimagined them over the millenia, before we can truly apply a modern lens on those ideologies. Jesus was understood to be a Jewish man (a man of color), and while it can safely be assumed he genuinely thought himself to be a man of reform, a man divinely inspired by God to reform the Jewish people, Jesus did not view himself as being born from a virgin. Jesus did not view himself as having mythical origins as being literally born from a supreme deity.
The phrase "Son Of God" was, in the historical context of the time, seen as a phrase for one enlightened by God, more or less. Someone with divine inspiration and backing. It was applied to all prophets from my understanding, not specifically Jesus and Jesus alone above all others being just Jesus. It was understood to not be an indicator of literally being the child of a divine being, of not literally being fathered by a divine being, of having no mortal father and only a divine one, but rather to be in the metaphorical sense of being divinely chosen to be divinely empowered to have a divine fervor, divine favor, divine spark, to be divinely empowered to deliver divine messages and miracles.
That Christianity culturally appropriated YHWH, the God of the Jews, and artificially elevated YHWH to be a supreme deity that is omnipowerful and omnipresent in ways that YHWH is always displayed in Jewish material as not actually being, because YHWH was The God Of The Jews, with The Jews as YHWH's chosen people, the two intrinsically being linked with a symbiotic relationship.
That even in the time of Moses, it was understood that other gods were as real as YHWH, but that YHWH had power over The Jewish People, and that YHWH's power over The Jewish People allowed YHWH to be more powerful than those other gods in service of The Jewish People, but that YHWH's domain was not so absolute as to totally trump those other gods. That those other gods were not in fact demons in disguise, but were in fact genuinely gods and recognized as such.
Including how witches were at one point consulted as mediums, in ways which no servant of YHWH was willing or capable of providing, meaning that explicitly there were limits both on YHWH's power and scope of knowledge and reach and ability.
That there is in fact no unified message or truth in The Bible because it is filled with contradictions.
Lucifer/Satan/The Devil (not even really named as such as we tend to think of) could never have successfully led a rebellion against an all-powerful all-knowing supreme true ruler, because by virtue of being all-knowing and all-powerful, God would be able to know of this plan in advance and instantly quash the rebellion before it began.
This would also require God to have known Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create this evil, and willingly let it happen. God would have created Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create evil in rebelling against God, and God still made Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing this and let it happen without either stopping it or discouraging it or preventing it.
There's contradictory narratives about how humanity was given free will by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit of knowledge and by virtue of being the only creatures with souls being the only ones with free will, and how Lucifer/Satan/The Devil and a third of all angels rebelled against God. If they had no free will, then that would mean God literally designed them to become evil in a deliberately designed failed rebellion.
God would know Adam and Eve would have chosen to take the forbidden fruit, yet still commanded them not to, despite knowing they would violate the command.
God would have known everything was going to happen, and yet still have created those circumstances and let them happen, despite being supremely powerful and able to stop these things by virtue of being supremely knowledgeable about all that would happen.
These actions make zero sense under a God that is actually all-powerful and all-known as is Christian doctrine, but are perfectly in-line with depictions of deities that are extremely powerful and knowing but not quite all-powerful and all-knowing, akin to Odin from Norse mythology.
It is commonplace in many cultures for a deity to rebel, to resist, to kill, to fight, another deity in their lore, to varying degrees of success. In Greek lore Zeus was the THIRD-generation ruler. Not second, that'd be his father Kronus (might have spelling there wrong, but not to be confused with Chronos, they were two different titans I'm pretty sure but are often combined to be one), and not first, that'd be a deity I don't remember the Greek version of but I think the Roman name for that first-generation ruler is Uranus.
If memory serves, Uranus + Gaia produced the titans including Kronus and Rhea (by the way a big part of many mythologies people tend to forget is that literally almost every religion is heavily laced in inherent incest), and Kronus and Rhea then produced the next generation of Gods (both Olympian and those of the Underworld which I forget the exact term for), including Zeus. Just as Kronus and Rhea and the titans overthrew his father, Zeus and the Gods overthrew Kronus and the titans.
In Egyptian mythology you've got the struggle of Sett after murdering Osiris with Osiris's son (whose name I can't remember at this exact moment).
In eastern culture you've got some arrogant rebellion in the form of things like Sun Wukong.
And so on and so forth. Across countless cultures and religions, you've got tales of rebelling against the divine, to various levels of success. In terms of Jewish folklore, it would make total sense for a failed rebellion of a servant of their Jewish God to take place, because with said Jewish God not being all-powerful or all-knowing, the rebellion stood at least a chance of succeeding. With a third of all angels being involved, it was a genuine threat and one that almost was victorious, because of how close the two sides were in power.
But that doesn't work if God is all-knowing and all-powerful because that would mean that Lucifer/Satan/The Devil, knowing that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, deliberately entered a rebellion against God, knowing God knew about it and knowing God could end it at any time by virtue of being all-powerful. And that also only works if Lucifer/Satan/The Devil shares the gift of free will with humanity, because without the free will to rebel in the first place, then it wouldn't be rebellion; it would be a divine command from God.
In short, in order for Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have rebelled, it either requires Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have free will and a third of all angels also had free will to join (in which case, free will is not in fact unique to humanity), or if they lack free will then God literally designed Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to rebel and a third of angels to join, because that was God's plan, meaning God by virtue of programming them to do what they did would be the one who created those evils in the first place.
The entire mythology doesn't hold up to scrutiny, either scientifically or as a continuous narrative. It is filled with hole after hole, and even someone as casual as me can point these out. Christianity for two thousand years has spun narrative after narrative to justify these contradictions, rather than just admitting that they are contradictions. Or when they do admit there's contradictions, they pick and choose which parts to follow.
Any religion which you have to pick and choose which parts to follow could not be that of an all-knowing all-powerful God, and that requirement to pick and choose which parts to follow demonstrates why the religion is built on a temple of lies, inconsistency, and fabrications that people blindly believe to be truth despite their logical and rational brains being capable of noting how this shouldn't make sense.
But I'm not covering this in the detail I wanted to. In short I wanted to both deconstruct the flaws behind Christianity, while also rebuilding the strengths of it.
Jesus was against organized institutionalized religion because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus believed religion should largely be a personal practice kept to an individual, private. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against deification of humans, because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against hoarding of material wealth, because he knew how pointless it was. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus preached about how what we do to everyone is what we do to God (you all know the full verse for this). How we treat others is reflective of how God will judge, essentially. That means treating to the poor and needy, showing empathy, etc., are all good things to do, and that's a good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was a pacifist, teaching nonviolent resistance, but 'nonviolence' was defined as not hurting others, with him perfectly willing to flip tables and cause property destruction and damage so long as no humans were harmed. A good philosophy to ascribe to.
Jesus preached love, empathy, and forgiveness, pointing out humanity is inherently imperfect. Nobody is without sin, nobody is without their faults and flaws. A good philosophy to live by.
And so on and so forth.
Christianity also has an excellent grasp on many spiritual practices, which have been adapted by the religion over the centuries, including an understanding of what many in the witchcraft community believe to be an understanding of the nature of "the universe", our role in it, and what follows after we die.
There's certain interpretations of Christian scripture which portray 'Heaven' and 'God' as one and the same, a state of everything everywhere all at once. Everything that ever was, ever could have been, ever will be, ever could, all existing simultaneously in one space happening all at once, and that we reach our highest self by joining with that whereas we experience 'Hell' by rejection of it, and punish ourselves.
And there's many other examples on how Christianity touches on many good spiritual practices.
But the religion itself is arguably built on cultural appropriation and the only religion to have been built without an existing culture it is inherently innately integrated with. (I would argue that even Islam, a religion which took from Christianity, is inherently tied to the Arab people at the time of Mohamed. Although by that logic it might also be possible to argue that certain branches of Christianity, such as the Eastern Orthodox version, do have the culture of their people integrated within. I'm not too concerned with defending my argument since my argument is mostly a combination of clickbait and a thought experiment more than it is a viewpoint I really want to defend. It's mostly a way to engage in the subject rather than a core belief if that makes sense.)
That makes it one of the religions easiest to apply to everyday life and widely broadly giving it appeal to billions across the globe even in this age of skepticism and science.
But it also makes it a religion fraught with issues from the get-go. The Bible was made 400 years after Jesus by a council arbitrarily deciding what to include. The books included were all written 60 - 120+ years after Jesus lived, and translated numerous times. That's a lot of men involved and no proof of divine, yet there are far too many who to this day still believe The Bible to be the Word Of God, despite their bibles being translated and transcribed numerous times and compiled and recompiled by men who had an agenda fueling their decisions.
So I do wanna delve into how to deconstruct the religion and why I do believe it's possible to reconstruct it. I personally don't follow Christianity, since I am very much a witch believing in no specific religion but with my brand of spirituality pooling from my own experiences, beliefs, and what resonates with me from numerous cultures and research, but a lot of my beliefs are Christianity-adjacent so I have an interest in showing how while the text of Christianity doesn't hold, part of the spirit in the most important messages does.
Jesus might have just been a man, but he left a legacy that could arguably be called divine, and I would love to delve into it more.
But alas.
For now, that's it. I've been writing this blog for five hours. The first subject about me, I covered pretty well. The second about my idea of reform for a better internet, kinda got across. The third about religion...didn't really get done, but I've done my best to at least touch on the subject, with the hope of doing more some other time.
Thanks for reading.
I'll start with the follow-through on my last blog. It's overall worse, but at the same time, there's a reality of somehow making it through and that reality provides hope. At every stage, I feel like there's more and more setting us up for failure and less and less providing a path for success. But at the same time I still do cling to the hope my wife is right and that everything they dream of is possible.
That we can pull off a cross-country move.
That where we will live will be cheaper.
That where we live will have employment.
That where we live will allow us to finally progress in areas of our life that have remained stagnant for years.
That where we live opens up the avenue for building a future family together and starting the rest of our lives together.
After all, there's a lot going for us. For a start, my line of work is more likely to have openings because there's fewer who would qualify for and have the certificates I have, with my experience providing me an edge over other applicants.
We have tangible places to look at we know the general pricing of, which don't price us out or breed restrict us out.
We have the potential support of who knows how many others, from potential friends, family, loved ones, and maybe even coworkers.
There's the potential to maybe have transitionary housing with a relative.
We might even be able to use credit cards in this transitionary period to pay off big bills and then make gradual payments off on said cards even if it's only a small amount over time and accrues a huge level of interest.
All we need is the help getting through the door, and we would likely be good.
The hope-crushers are all getting more problematic for me to try and ignore though.
This would mean that for the second time in a row, we can't pay for the full lease of a place we're currently renting. We know the old management for our place would definitely have been willing to work with us, but at the end of last year our apartment complex was bought out by a more parasitic toxic management who is immediately violating state law in refusing to offer payment plans. Which is funny because we learned about said state law being a state law from the current lower management who helped us move in in the first place. The lower management is great and would love to offer us the accommodations we would need, but the higher up company policy overrides their sanity.
And we might not be able to meet their insane demands, despite actually desiring to pay them what they are owed. (We like our current place enough where we WANT to pay them the full amount of our lease, plus any moveout costs, plus any fines and interest that are reasonably accrued. For instance we would fight them on a charge of repainting the walls because nothing about any of the walls was damaged by us as tenants, but there's definitely some upkeep cost we would likely be responsible for.)
Moving half-way across the country loses all of the benefits of my current state. I don't think people understand just how many programs we have here that are helpful, and I genuinely believe my state offers some of the best public and semi-public and non-religious private education in the entire country across every level of education from pre-K all the way through college up to master degrees at a minimum. We'd be closing ourselves off from being eligible for state healthcare, from my state's education, from my state's culture and diversity and education and from being in one of the few places to have the ability to opt out of shopping at a big corporation like Walmart.
We would have to begin paying for things we currently receive through my parents. AAA membership and car insurance being the big ones.
We would have to somehow pull off a move of all of our stuff with me as the only driver, and to also get our car to our new place too despite my car and the rental truck likely being half the country apart.
Employment isn't a guarantee, it's just a hope--and there's no guarantee I receive gender-affirming care of any kind in a state which is less blue than Washington State would be. Not only on a social level (would I even be able to use the women's bathroom, locker room, etc.?), but on a medical level as well (here as long as you have medical insurance of just about any kind, you're eligible for all the services needed to transition pretty much for free with the maximum copay being $60 or so at the most expensive, with most cheaper ranging from free to $15 or so).
We have no protections against something going wrong. With our car for instance, or with moving vehicles.
There's less support available from family and the support available more likely to be toxic and come with conditions. I know I can rely on my family for any services they can afford to provide. They can't pay thousands per month, which is why we're in as dire a straight as we are, but they can provide a lot of help for things like food, transportation, storage, etc., all without conditions. My wife holds hopes of receiving that, but I don't think that the family in the area we would be going would be able to provide.
We would lose all of our social connections in the area and need to start over, when getting the few we have was difficult enough already. No friends in the area we would be going, and far less programs we'd be interested going to. I genuinely love going to Sapphic events and to Witches Markets. While I've gained some level of cynicism for both (Sapphic events overbook for their venues getting too crowded and provide too few protections from drunken ladies becoming too drunk to have spacial awareness aside from parking being paid; witches markets have poor parking availability, vendors outside are ridiculously cold, vendors inside don't allow dogs, and a lot of the vendors don't feel properly vetted), I genuinely love both and they have provided me enrichment and fulfillment in my life that I never thought possible going out in public.
Where am I going to get that in a place with far fewer people and far less diversity and far fewer outside of the cult of Christianity? There's probably still LGBTQIA+ events a plenty to be found, but would there be Sapphic events specifically? I doubt there's enough sapphics to generate the demand for monthly events the way we have an overabundance of Sapphics here. (Demographically we have a disproportionately high number of queer femme-presenting people here, our state is probably one of the top five in terms of queer ladies being openly queer.)
And even if there is...what would there be in terms of witchy events? Maybe, maybe, there would be some form of yearly market that is witchy-adjacent. Here we have a nerdy market which is technically focused on nerdy oddities particularly focused on Dungeons and Dragons and D&D-adjacent topics, which runs four or so times a year, and has a good 60 - 80% of the same vendors as the eight yearly witch markets.
And here we also have gothic markets covering darker things, loosely of the edgy hail-satan variety, but not really. The type of market covering metal music, and emo music, and similar genres, black clothing and lipstick and makeup and all types of things with spikes, bones, and similar.
And here we also have krampus markets, similar to the above.
Between the three of those, nerdy D&D-adjacent markets, gothic markets, and krampus markets, there's probably one or two that would run at least once a year...but I would be shocked to find witches markets for all eight witch events anywhere outside of where we live right now because as far as I know...the pacific northwest is the only place in the country with the level of diversity and cultural identity to have the level of demand to fuel these events being run rain or shine year-round.
Basically, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of cultural identity, social acceptance, in basically every way except for the cost of living, we already live in the best place in the entire United States for queer disabled neurodivergent witches. We live in a place where queer folk, disabled people, neurodivergent folk, and witches, are all at a level of unusually high percentage of the population. Anywhere else in the country isn't going to have the same amount of "our people" locally, at least not as openly so.
We have no real plan to get all of our stuff moved. We have only the hopes of it being cheaper and the cost of living actually being reduced lower than the increased amount of things we'll have to pay for and the likely decrease in comparable pay.
All of that is building up to be a weight because I'm on the verge of receiving all of the care I need here. I'm going to physical therapy and making huge strides in not being in constant pain. I qualify for behavioral health being given to me. My depression could get proper medication, as could my ADHD, and I have the access to medication for my disabilities, and I have access to HRT. I lose all of that when not here.
And those took me years to get, here, in the place considered one of the easiest in the country. How long would it take for me to get them in a place less queer-friendly, less neurodivergent-friendly, less disability-friendly?
My depression is getting to the point where with all of my anxieties, with all of the pressures, with all of the weights of the bills we're liable for and responsible for, with all of what we are likely to be dealing with...I'm just feeling hopeless and defeated.
I'm at the point where I feel like I am the obligatory sibling who never amounts to anything and is a total failure in any family of four or more kids. It's to the point where I feel bad enough where I've contemplated ending my life for only the fourth time in my entire life and only the third time since I got with my wife, for the third time since July 2023. (The other two being December 2023 and then around June 2024 if I recall correctly.)
Now, to be clear, I'm not actually suicidal, yet. If I were at risk, you'd know. I'll say that the best way for you to keep an eye on it is that my enemies should really be praying for my success and not my downfall because if I do go down I'm not going quietly into the night. I'm not going to be radio silent and then end my life. If I go down I go down swinging and will mince no words about any of the traumas, any of the abuses, any of the injustices, I've faced, my wife has faced, etc.
I've held back from ever lashing out like that because at the end of the day, as long as I have a hope for living a life, I don't want to live a life with hate. So if I succumb to hate, if I succumb to lashing out, then you'll know that I'm close, because if I am going to air out every secret I have, it's only because I don't want those weights to drag me down in whatever comes after my current life.
Again, why I say my enemies should be praying for my success, because I know enough to take them down with me and the only reason I don't take them down already is because I don't want to. As long as I have a hope for a future, I will never want to. But if they pray for my failure, and then it turns out I do indeed fail and lose my last reason for living...then they're gonna find out the hard way why they should've been wishing me well because the things I know are things I would be willing to go to the grave with if I live a long life but aren't things I'm gonna let be left unsaid and secret if my life were to end early.
Now, granted. I use the term "enemies" here mostly to invoke the stock phrase of enemies wishing success. I forget the exact phrase at the moment, but you probably know it well enough. I personally am of the Vinland Saga of "no person has any enemies". As I said in my last blog post, I'm slowly becoming the worst version of myself, the version of myself I least want to be. And that's the version which would retaliate against people who I know aren't bad, by and large, and deserve to live their own lives of prosperity. The worst version of myself would forget that.
But the me that I am, the me that is the best of myself and my life, believes that most humans are good, and that very few people deserve to be condemned. I believe in us all sharing a lot of the same desires in life and being owed the chance to pursue those things.
I believe in building people up rather than tearing people down. That to find common connection and to find the ability to empathize with each other and help each other is far better a life and future than a life where we're dunking on people for their worst sides and excluding them for their shortcomings. A life filled with joy and with awe and with passion is one far more fulfilling than a life filled with paranoia about the people you know secretly being terrible, more fulfilling than a life tearing down those around you, than a life of hatred and dividing and excluding those who don't meet the standards set.
I have this belief that "childlike awe, childlike wonder, childlike joy, childlike idealism, childlike passion", are not in fact traits of children but rather innately the inherent nature of humanity. That what makes humans be humans is that we have a natural innate awe and wonder of the world around us, we have an innate desire for the joys of both laughter and happiness, that we have an innately positive view of the future and of the world around us and of others, and that creativity is arguably the most human thing which is human above all else.
And that any association with those things being childlike is an artificially enforced view by an artificially built modern society that encourages conformity over individuality, but also selfishness over community, when it should be individuality over conformity and community over selfishness.
Yet despite how strong I am...I'm not so strong as to hold these beliefs so strongly I would rather die for them wordlessly, silently, in a young age. The pressures of society are enough, I know, to break me, and while in my better moments I believe all of the above...in my worst moments the amount of pain and suffering I've lived through on a daily basis is enough where I know I would lash out in hate, in bitterness, in despair, in destruction.
It takes years to build what can be destroyed in seconds. While that makes the efforts to build all the more sacred, all the more precious, all the more things we can and should appreciate for lasting as long as they do...that destruction is something I actively have to suppress, because the worst mistakes in my life and the fuel for the things I need the most therapy for are from not having been strong enough to prevent from lashing out as I did.
All of the lost friendships.
All of the burnt bridges.
All of the things I destroyed from anger, from desperation, from apathy, from asking too much and giving too little.
That's what I don't want to continue to be. And you'll know I've given up on life if I give up on not being those things and actively am throwing them away--and I'm dangerously close. I'm dangerously withdrawn. I'm in far less spaces than I was last year. Ever since January, I've been shrinking myself to be less and less out-there, to the point where I've stopped being involved with many of my closest friends.
I've stopped providing daily check-ins.
I've stopped talking to friends.
I've stopped coming to streams.
I've stopped keeping up to date on discords.
I've stopped visiting websites I've had as a core part of my life since I was 13 years old despite my age now being a flip of those two numbers. (31 going on 33, because I haven't felt like the last year has had anything really noting me as having a birth.)
I've largely lost my passion for games, given up entirely on content creation and streaming, and while my passion for writing was recently reignited...it chose the worst possible time with me unable to really put any time or energy into nurturing it. Most of what I'm passionate about right now is organizing my notes and making them more coherent, connected, and consistent. All of which there's secretly an ulterior motive for, in that it's also one of those suicidal ideations, where I have this idea that if I were to note every aspect of my work then it would be okay for me to not make it if it were released publicly in a way anyone could follow and make.
Now, I know better from experience. ComicFuryians literally lost one of their most beloved members to a suicide where the person gave up on life, released their work, and took their life. To this day, nobody as far as I know has continued their work and nobody likely ever will. I am the only one who actually will make my work and logically I know that. But suicide is never logical and illogically, it feels more okay to have my life end if I have the potential of a legacy after, and releasing my work in a way where anyone could pick it up fuels that.
Butstill. At the end of the day, that wasn't what fueled the reignited passion. In fact, quite the opposite. It was me just...wanting to. To have this pure passion, this unbridled joy to share my work with the world, reignited. I had a fire lit under me to show what the world of farn is really like, and I want to share it with everyone, in full, which is something requiring me to be there to work on it.
So that's one of the few things keeping me alive right now, and it's something hard to keep. I've been creating stories and ideas and games and such since I was 13. To date, nearly 20 years later, none have been realized, because I can never see them through.
And I do have a lot of ideas.
My most recent idea, which is both kinda political but also kinda not, is that I think websites should stop being lazy with their filters for content in terms of age being largely a binary setting tied to maturity, and that for all content filters it shouldn't be a strict binary but rather a sort of slider, which both posters/creators can set appropriately and readers/viewers can filter for also appropriately.
As I see it, this should be a universal thing for websites, because it would also help create further protections for children.
"I never make content with a target audience of children", "I very rarely make content with a target audience of children", "I only sometimes make content with a target audience of children", "I make content with a target audience of children about half of the time", "I often make content with the target audience of children", "my content is near-exclusively targeted towards an audience of children", or "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children".
A filter would then be for what is defined as children. "12 and below", "14 and below", "17 and below", or "20 and below".
Set that as the first setting. "I never make content with a target audience of children" would automatically skip the following filters based on mixed audience targeting in favor of focusing exclusively on more mature ones, whereas "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children" would automatically skip every mature/adult filter. Those filters would note why they are disabled by the above.
From there, the next filter would be:
"None of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is inherently 18+ and for mature audiences", "I very rarely make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is inherently 18+ and mature in nature", "I only sometimes make content suitable for all ages; most of my content is 18+ and mature", "about half of my content is suitable for all ages; I don't try to be mature but don't shy away from 18+ material", "I often make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is not mature, but I have occasional 18+ material", and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages; I never have mature or 18+ material in my content".
There would likely be a similar filter for the maturity range of the content. "My content is 18+", "My content is 21+", "My content is late 20s and above", "my content is young 30s and above", "my content is 36+ and above", "my content is 40+".
Similarly, "none of my content is suitable for all ages" and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages" would disable most of the following filters by and large, with the disabled filters explaining why they're disabled.
"I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times", "I am an adult who frequently covers adult material", "I am an adult who often covers adult material", "I am an adult and about half of material I cover is adult in nature", "I am an adult and some of the times I cover adult material, but it's not my focus", "I am an adult, but I never cover adult material", and "I am not currently an adult", or something approximately close to that.
There would also be a filter for definition of adult. 18+, 21+, late-20s, early-30s, late-30s, and 40+, potentially both for the age of the individual and for their target audience. There might need to be an option for "my material has aged as I have".
Obviously children, as well as those selecting that they never cover adult material, would be locked out of describing the filters for various types of adult material, and this would be a list of trigger warnings and essentially how often they are shown.
Nudity: "I show full-frontal nudity, including sexual acts", "I show full-frontal nudity, but no explicit sex", "I show breasts and butts, but any lower frontal nudity is partially censored", "I show breasts and butts, but lower frontal nudity is heavily covered or censored", "I show butts, and heavily suggestive near-nudity, but full nudity is avoided or partially censored", "I show butts, but heavily suggestive nudity is avoided or heavily censored", "I don't show full nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured and/or near-nudity is displayed and/or nudity is heavily implied", "I don't show full nudity or near-nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured", "I don't show full nudity or prominently focus on lewd body parts, but near-nudity may be present", "I don't show full nudity or focus on lewd body parts, but nudity might be implied", and then at the SFW end, "I don't show or imply nudity, near-nudity, or prominently display lewdness".
Maybe breaking the above into two filters, one for nudity and one for lewdness.
Sexual content: "I show sexual content, including explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, including implied explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but don't show explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness and kissing", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness", "I don't show sexual content". This one I had a better version of in my head, I'm running out of momentum on how to explain it.
Adult topics: "I always talk about adult topics and themes", "I almost always talk about adult topics and themes", "I frequently talk about adult topics and themes", "I talk about adult topics and themes about half of the time", "I talk about adult topics and themes occasionally", "I on some rare occasions will talk about adult topics and themes", or "I never talk about adult topics and themes".
This would probably have subcategories for what constitutes adult topics.
Always/almost always/frequently/about half/occasionally/rarely/never for:
Death,
Depression,
War,
Genocide,
Abuse,
Finances and Employment,
Living Conditions and Situations,
Food Struggles,
Life Skills,
General Darker Themes,
Probably more, I can't think of everything which would constitute an adult topic.
Violence would require at least two filters. The first:
"I exclusively focus on violent content", "I heavily feature violent content", "I frequently feature violent content", "I often feature violent content", "I feature violent content about half of the time", "I feature violent content sometimes", "I feature violent content on rare occasions", or "I never feature violent content". This filter would mention that it explicitly ties into any of the sub-filters.
The one I can think of being,
"I show the most gruesome form of violence including extreme gore", "I show heavily bloody content, including some light levels of gore" "I show heavily bloody content, but avoid gore", "I show bloody violence, but avoid extremely realistic and/or over the top levels of blood and violence", "I show bloody violence, but stylized and/or in moderation", "I show violence, but avoid extremely bloody content regardless of how stylized it is", "I show some blood through violence in weapons and fighting", "I show violence in weapons and fighting, but blood is kept minimal or nonexistent", "I show weapons and fighting with minimal extreme violence", "I show weapons and fighting but there's no violence", and at the lowest end, "I occasionally show weapons being displayed and discussed but never used and/or I occasionally show characters hitting other things".
Or something to that effect.
To give an idea of how these filters would apply to, say, my blog?
I never make content with a target audience of children.
Arguably (and what I would do for safety), none of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is mature and inherently 18+.
Similarly, I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times--even my earliest 2014 blogs were made after I was already an adult, albeit a very young one.
As such, my content is aimed at 21+ adults at minimum, with the content aging as I have. This blog is not designed for young-20s anymore, but the earlier 2014 entries were. I don't know what the minimum age for current blog entries would be, but it ain't 18-year-olds, I can confidently say that much at minimum. You could say anything 21+ is okay, my personal definition is usually "if you were born after 9/11 you're probably too young to be here", but you could go up to saying the youngest allowed age would be my wife and anyone younger is too inexperienced to really be dealing with the heavy topics my blog has delved into at times.
I never show nudity, and very rarely do I talk about nudity, but I do talk about kinks and lewdness on occasion (probably need to refine the filters for that).
I am extremely lewd, with lewdness almost always mentioned (deez nuts and hardly know her jokes in particular but also pickup lines a plenty and innuendos of all kinds), so sexual content isn't shied away from whatsoever.
I almost always am talking about adult themes and topics.
Literally all of them have those themes, in heavy levels.
I feature violent content sometimes.
But it's in moderation, with me not going into gruesomely detailed versions of things, I'd say.
Then from the perspective of a viewer/reader, you would have filters.
First being selected age range.
"I am currently considered a child", with filters for "12 and under", "13 - 15", "16 - 17", "18 - 20". This would lock the user out of the majority of content regardless of selection, but based on the filters of the creators of content it would have some more available. (For many websites, arguably 12 and under being selected should auto-ban the account.)
"I am an adult", with filters for "18 - 20", "21 - 25", "26 - 29", "30 - 35", "36 - 39", and "40+". This would lock the user out of content which their age range makes them ineligible to view. Namely it would lock them out of content exclusively made for children and content heavily targeting children, as well as content they are too young for.
I think that mandating filters of this sort to be implemented on all sites offering content would make the internet a safer place for everyone. Does it stop people from lying? No. Does it stop people from misapplying filters? Not entirely, but these would be things that people would try their best at, with small misapplications corrected and punishments only for those who are wholly and entirely in very obviously extremely wrong classifications.
You might not know the difference between some violence and moderate violence, but if you're showing extreme violence with a filter set to showing almost no violence, you know your filter isn't properly applied.
These might be somewhat variable in being applied to specific content or to the account or to both, depending on the medium. Artists for instance might have filters for their content in general, but specific pieces might have filters that are different from their general filter. Streamers might have some filters for things that change, but likely less things change stream to stream than for an artist piece to piece. Posting on social media is something that likely wouldn't be viable to set most filters for most posts, so that would rely heavily on the profile filtering.
The specifics there are less important than their existence in general existing.
And this was my latest idea.
The third thing I wanted to talk about is religion, specifically how I believe that Christianity is arguably the only false religion in the world and arguably the only one to not be intrinsically tied to specific cultures, but also going into why many of the beliefs of Christianity are arguably applicable to nearly any culture and any religion and any belief system despite the religion being invalid.
But I don't think I have the energy to cover that in detail.
What I'll say there is basically that to accept the path of Christianity as valid requires first a belief that Christianity is not put on a pedestal above any other mythology. From the onset, the idea of "God" and Angels should be taken as no more real than Zeus and the Olympian pantheon, Odin and the Aesir and such from Norse mythology, Ra and the Egyptian pantheon, etc. You get the idea.
There should be the understanding that the universe wasn't made in 7 days, that evolution is real and there was never a real Adam or a real Eve, that there was never a Noah's Arc that contained literally the entirety of all life on earth in pairs of two, you get the idea. Science comes first, and that includes things like a virgin birth and the parting of a sea and the presence of mythological divine plagues and divinely striking down enemies and instantly vaporizing those who touch an artifact.
These should be considered as having the same basis in historical fact as any other piece of mythology from any other culture, in that whatever truth there may be behind these accounts has been heavily filtered by the mythology of numerous isolated cultures through countless generations of oral tradition that changed the tales and were eventually attempted to be written down long after they happened and were attempted to be unified even longer after they were written.
That in the same way there's no unified singular Greek Mythology or Egyptian Mythology or Norse Mythology with the mythologies of them being from countless different cities/tribes/etc. told over centuries or even millenia, the stories told throughout Christian lore are from countless different groups over a period over a thousand years, and as such, they have the same level of variance with there being no one singular truth above all others.
And that also, there needs to be a viewing of things as they would have been seen at the time, not as we have reimagined them over the millenia, before we can truly apply a modern lens on those ideologies. Jesus was understood to be a Jewish man (a man of color), and while it can safely be assumed he genuinely thought himself to be a man of reform, a man divinely inspired by God to reform the Jewish people, Jesus did not view himself as being born from a virgin. Jesus did not view himself as having mythical origins as being literally born from a supreme deity.
The phrase "Son Of God" was, in the historical context of the time, seen as a phrase for one enlightened by God, more or less. Someone with divine inspiration and backing. It was applied to all prophets from my understanding, not specifically Jesus and Jesus alone above all others being just Jesus. It was understood to not be an indicator of literally being the child of a divine being, of not literally being fathered by a divine being, of having no mortal father and only a divine one, but rather to be in the metaphorical sense of being divinely chosen to be divinely empowered to have a divine fervor, divine favor, divine spark, to be divinely empowered to deliver divine messages and miracles.
That Christianity culturally appropriated YHWH, the God of the Jews, and artificially elevated YHWH to be a supreme deity that is omnipowerful and omnipresent in ways that YHWH is always displayed in Jewish material as not actually being, because YHWH was The God Of The Jews, with The Jews as YHWH's chosen people, the two intrinsically being linked with a symbiotic relationship.
That even in the time of Moses, it was understood that other gods were as real as YHWH, but that YHWH had power over The Jewish People, and that YHWH's power over The Jewish People allowed YHWH to be more powerful than those other gods in service of The Jewish People, but that YHWH's domain was not so absolute as to totally trump those other gods. That those other gods were not in fact demons in disguise, but were in fact genuinely gods and recognized as such.
Including how witches were at one point consulted as mediums, in ways which no servant of YHWH was willing or capable of providing, meaning that explicitly there were limits both on YHWH's power and scope of knowledge and reach and ability.
That there is in fact no unified message or truth in The Bible because it is filled with contradictions.
Lucifer/Satan/The Devil (not even really named as such as we tend to think of) could never have successfully led a rebellion against an all-powerful all-knowing supreme true ruler, because by virtue of being all-knowing and all-powerful, God would be able to know of this plan in advance and instantly quash the rebellion before it began.
This would also require God to have known Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create this evil, and willingly let it happen. God would have created Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create evil in rebelling against God, and God still made Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing this and let it happen without either stopping it or discouraging it or preventing it.
There's contradictory narratives about how humanity was given free will by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit of knowledge and by virtue of being the only creatures with souls being the only ones with free will, and how Lucifer/Satan/The Devil and a third of all angels rebelled against God. If they had no free will, then that would mean God literally designed them to become evil in a deliberately designed failed rebellion.
God would know Adam and Eve would have chosen to take the forbidden fruit, yet still commanded them not to, despite knowing they would violate the command.
God would have known everything was going to happen, and yet still have created those circumstances and let them happen, despite being supremely powerful and able to stop these things by virtue of being supremely knowledgeable about all that would happen.
These actions make zero sense under a God that is actually all-powerful and all-known as is Christian doctrine, but are perfectly in-line with depictions of deities that are extremely powerful and knowing but not quite all-powerful and all-knowing, akin to Odin from Norse mythology.
It is commonplace in many cultures for a deity to rebel, to resist, to kill, to fight, another deity in their lore, to varying degrees of success. In Greek lore Zeus was the THIRD-generation ruler. Not second, that'd be his father Kronus (might have spelling there wrong, but not to be confused with Chronos, they were two different titans I'm pretty sure but are often combined to be one), and not first, that'd be a deity I don't remember the Greek version of but I think the Roman name for that first-generation ruler is Uranus.
If memory serves, Uranus + Gaia produced the titans including Kronus and Rhea (by the way a big part of many mythologies people tend to forget is that literally almost every religion is heavily laced in inherent incest), and Kronus and Rhea then produced the next generation of Gods (both Olympian and those of the Underworld which I forget the exact term for), including Zeus. Just as Kronus and Rhea and the titans overthrew his father, Zeus and the Gods overthrew Kronus and the titans.
In Egyptian mythology you've got the struggle of Sett after murdering Osiris with Osiris's son (whose name I can't remember at this exact moment).
In eastern culture you've got some arrogant rebellion in the form of things like Sun Wukong.
And so on and so forth. Across countless cultures and religions, you've got tales of rebelling against the divine, to various levels of success. In terms of Jewish folklore, it would make total sense for a failed rebellion of a servant of their Jewish God to take place, because with said Jewish God not being all-powerful or all-knowing, the rebellion stood at least a chance of succeeding. With a third of all angels being involved, it was a genuine threat and one that almost was victorious, because of how close the two sides were in power.
But that doesn't work if God is all-knowing and all-powerful because that would mean that Lucifer/Satan/The Devil, knowing that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, deliberately entered a rebellion against God, knowing God knew about it and knowing God could end it at any time by virtue of being all-powerful. And that also only works if Lucifer/Satan/The Devil shares the gift of free will with humanity, because without the free will to rebel in the first place, then it wouldn't be rebellion; it would be a divine command from God.
In short, in order for Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have rebelled, it either requires Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have free will and a third of all angels also had free will to join (in which case, free will is not in fact unique to humanity), or if they lack free will then God literally designed Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to rebel and a third of angels to join, because that was God's plan, meaning God by virtue of programming them to do what they did would be the one who created those evils in the first place.
The entire mythology doesn't hold up to scrutiny, either scientifically or as a continuous narrative. It is filled with hole after hole, and even someone as casual as me can point these out. Christianity for two thousand years has spun narrative after narrative to justify these contradictions, rather than just admitting that they are contradictions. Or when they do admit there's contradictions, they pick and choose which parts to follow.
Any religion which you have to pick and choose which parts to follow could not be that of an all-knowing all-powerful God, and that requirement to pick and choose which parts to follow demonstrates why the religion is built on a temple of lies, inconsistency, and fabrications that people blindly believe to be truth despite their logical and rational brains being capable of noting how this shouldn't make sense.
But I'm not covering this in the detail I wanted to. In short I wanted to both deconstruct the flaws behind Christianity, while also rebuilding the strengths of it.
Jesus was against organized institutionalized religion because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus believed religion should largely be a personal practice kept to an individual, private. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against deification of humans, because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against hoarding of material wealth, because he knew how pointless it was. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus preached about how what we do to everyone is what we do to God (you all know the full verse for this). How we treat others is reflective of how God will judge, essentially. That means treating to the poor and needy, showing empathy, etc., are all good things to do, and that's a good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was a pacifist, teaching nonviolent resistance, but 'nonviolence' was defined as not hurting others, with him perfectly willing to flip tables and cause property destruction and damage so long as no humans were harmed. A good philosophy to ascribe to.
Jesus preached love, empathy, and forgiveness, pointing out humanity is inherently imperfect. Nobody is without sin, nobody is without their faults and flaws. A good philosophy to live by.
And so on and so forth.
Christianity also has an excellent grasp on many spiritual practices, which have been adapted by the religion over the centuries, including an understanding of what many in the witchcraft community believe to be an understanding of the nature of "the universe", our role in it, and what follows after we die.
There's certain interpretations of Christian scripture which portray 'Heaven' and 'God' as one and the same, a state of everything everywhere all at once. Everything that ever was, ever could have been, ever will be, ever could, all existing simultaneously in one space happening all at once, and that we reach our highest self by joining with that whereas we experience 'Hell' by rejection of it, and punish ourselves.
And there's many other examples on how Christianity touches on many good spiritual practices.
But the religion itself is arguably built on cultural appropriation and the only religion to have been built without an existing culture it is inherently innately integrated with. (I would argue that even Islam, a religion which took from Christianity, is inherently tied to the Arab people at the time of Mohamed. Although by that logic it might also be possible to argue that certain branches of Christianity, such as the Eastern Orthodox version, do have the culture of their people integrated within. I'm not too concerned with defending my argument since my argument is mostly a combination of clickbait and a thought experiment more than it is a viewpoint I really want to defend. It's mostly a way to engage in the subject rather than a core belief if that makes sense.)
That makes it one of the religions easiest to apply to everyday life and widely broadly giving it appeal to billions across the globe even in this age of skepticism and science.
But it also makes it a religion fraught with issues from the get-go. The Bible was made 400 years after Jesus by a council arbitrarily deciding what to include. The books included were all written 60 - 120+ years after Jesus lived, and translated numerous times. That's a lot of men involved and no proof of divine, yet there are far too many who to this day still believe The Bible to be the Word Of God, despite their bibles being translated and transcribed numerous times and compiled and recompiled by men who had an agenda fueling their decisions.
So I do wanna delve into how to deconstruct the religion and why I do believe it's possible to reconstruct it. I personally don't follow Christianity, since I am very much a witch believing in no specific religion but with my brand of spirituality pooling from my own experiences, beliefs, and what resonates with me from numerous cultures and research, but a lot of my beliefs are Christianity-adjacent so I have an interest in showing how while the text of Christianity doesn't hold, part of the spirit in the most important messages does.
Jesus might have just been a man, but he left a legacy that could arguably be called divine, and I would love to delve into it more.
But alas.
For now, that's it. I've been writing this blog for five hours. The first subject about me, I covered pretty well. The second about my idea of reform for a better internet, kinda got across. The third about religion...didn't really get done, but I've done my best to at least touch on the subject, with the hope of doing more some other time.
Thanks for reading.
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