Started to post this to a friend, then I decided maybe it wasn't really relevant to what she was going through, and I was trying to delete the text I'd typed and then I hit a wrong key and posted the beginning of the post, and since she might have gotten a response notice and see the weird beginning before it got deleted, and then wonder where it went, and, ..., well, anyway, this might not be relevant.
And I don't remember who I've already told this about me or not.
When I was seven going on eight, I found myself facing a decision whether to be baptized or not.
I thought I was already in the enemy camp about church. I was already working out some of the standard concepts of atheism, some of the apparent contradictions, the old problem of evil and such; and I was already seeing lots of hypocrisy at church. I had already decided I didn't like the way God was doing things, and because of that I thought I was going to not believe in Him. Out of spite, by the way, because I still remembered Him.
My dad told me I couldn't fight from the outside, but I wasn't sure i wanted to fight the bad stuff going on at church. I was thinking I would just rather to do other things.
My mom suggested that I work out my ideas, write them down, and we could discuss my alternate ideas for how the world ought to operate. My mom later told me she doesn't remember telling me this. But I took the idea seriously, even though I didn't actually start writing. I just started thinking the arguments through. Including the problem of evil.
Both of my parents told me that baptism was ultimately my decision -- timing, or whether to get baptized at all.
While I was working out my ideas for how the world should be run, I kept finding myself coming to conclusions that matched, not what I (thought I) was being taught in Sunday School or Primary, but what I was finding in the scriptures. I'm not claiming to be a scriptorian at eight. I just learned how to use the concordance and index.
It would be several years later that I made the connection to prayer, but I was essentially talking with God about the hypocrisy, and about who writes the rules and who writes the real rules, and about other such things.
God impressed on me at that time, that other people's hypocrisies were not my problem, and not my responsibilities. God also impressed on me that the hypocrites at church were all converts from somewhere (Even the life-long members have to be converted at some point.), working from what they understood, trying to prepare and teach lessons while they were themselves trying to make time to study what they were supposed to teach, while they were at the same time trying to pay rent, put food on the table, get the kids to school, do the laundry, keep the house clean, etc. And that I really should give them a break.
Yeah, lay clergy has a down side. The only thing worse is professional clergy. I figured that out why that is, as well.
The lying spirit was also working on me at the same time, still telling me that God was a bully for making life so hard for so many people and such. Oh, best not to dwell on what the lying spirit was saying, but I probably should note, -- I don't remember who all I have mentioned this to before -- that I had been groomed before I was five by friends of the family (neighbors, the family of my "best buddy", who were not members of the church) into queer and bisexual points of view, behaviors, and ways of thinking, and groomed to sexual fantasy. I had put the bi behaviors on hold by the time I was seven, but I was actively closet queer.
I hadn't fully formed my political ideas at eight, of course, but I was already reading science fiction that the teachers thought was middle school level, and that included the usual progressive/liberal authors. I was definitely leaning towards communist and democratic/socialist ideologies.
We had friends of the family who had runs-in with INS (back when it was INS). I had very negative opinions of laws limiting immigration. Also, the idea of bringing people into the US to teach them how to be free was a very attractive idea to me. Still is, to a certain extent.
This is not really a change in subject, but I have always struggled with budget issues and with deadlines. So much of the evil in the world has always seemed to me to derive from artificial (pseudo-Malthusian) assumptions of limits.
I'm rambling.
There is much to hate in this world, limits, particularly artificial limits being among the big ones.
But I spent the latter half of my third decade in this world essentially shoving all the limits aside and postponing them so I could do some fundamental research in computer science. My parents were kind enough to give me a place to live in my grandfather's house and enough money to get my own food.
Lack of limits allowed me to explore the need for limits and other such esoteria -- including reading scriptures several hours a day sometimes. It was useful in many ways, even if I was not able to do what Linus Thorvalds or Theo de Raadt did.
But the lack of limits was actually the reason I was unable to do what Linus Thorvalds or Theo de Raadt did. No boundaries to my research meant I had no reason to get my feet on anything solid. I did learn some things that were useful to me, but I have never been able to turn what I learned to the sort of profit that would pay my rent.
Limits are important.
My sister lived there as well, and we had room for some of our newly married cousins to have their own apartments at really good rent while they got their feet under them. One of the couples, the husband was a not-fully-documented alien and the wife was a foster daughter of one of our cousins. Really nice couple, and the cheap rent allowed them to get on their feet and move forward.
For a number of reasons, I am not natively inclined to be happy about the idea of kicking people out of the country just because they failed to successfully complete some paperwork.
Nor am I naturally inclined to try to tell people how they have to deal with their sexuality. (If they ask and I think I can help, I may make some suggestions from my own experience, but I do not care to dictate to people about their sexuality/gender)
But there are limits that have been crossed in both immigration and in the gender wars.
Too many of the immigrants have been too willing to fail to respect basic boundaries -- too willing to appropriate anything that is not tied down. Too many are here to move and deal drugs. Too many are destabilizing factors like the guy who stabbed Iryna Zarutska. Trying to deal with them requires ICE to present a show of force, and it does require them to forcibly detain some people.
I'm not going to argue motivations, but the liberal/Democrat insistence on de-funding ICE is making it triply difficult to take care of people in custody. It leaves ICE with the dilemma of deciding whether to fight judges who release guys like Iryna's attacker back to the streets, because if they waste time and legal fees trying to keep criminals from being released back on the streets, that's fewer resources with which to take proper care of the people they have in custody.
I'm not going to argue here that the stories about wormy food are false, even though I think i have plenty of evidence that they are mostly less than true. There will be cases when the resources are not enough to take proper care of everyone.
But fighting over funding will increase the number of such cases.
Yeah, if we could figure out who is safe to release back into society immediately, we could release them immediately and go after more real criminals, but the courts that should be helping figure that out are being hamstrung by people who don't have even less information than the courts and ICE. And some of the courts that should be helping are deliberately hindering.
Most of the people, even the MAGA people, who want the illegal immigrants out of the country, will be plenty happy to just get the criminals out as much as possible.
Concerning the anti-trans movement, please understand that allowing self-id gives the worst sort of men license to use self-id in ways that I sure didn't intend when I used to say, let people self-identify.
And I hope that you don't intend to give such men such license.
I did used to say that. I did used to assume that biological men who thought they were women would not be inclined to harm women. Assuming that they are sincere in believing themselves to be women, they should be motivated to refrain from harming women or causing women to fear.
Some trans women are, indeed careful to avoid using their trans-ness to intimidate people around them.
But it turns out that many are so focused on their right to find happiness in their own way that they don't seem to care whether people around them are intimidated or harmed.
You may have heard that it's all fake news, but I have seen long lists of names of men in prison for violent crimes, including sexual violence, who have self-identified themselves into women's prisons, and done serious violence to their cell mates there. This includes resulting in roommate pregnancy -- rape, and often violent rape. I've seen the lists, I've looked up some of the news reports that the names are taken from.
I can't conclude that the lists are fiction.
I have also participated in discussions among ostensibly alpha male men -- military officers, police officers, top-level business management -- who have decided to transition, and in somewhat overlapping groups where wives of such men try to help each other figure out what to do next.
A common thread in these discussions is that the men are addicted to pornography. Somehow, that addiction doesn't magically go away when they transition. Maybe in a few cases it gets better, but It often gets worse.
I don't have the right, I suppose, to judge, but it is apparent to me, in watching these discussions, that the alpha male men who are transitioning have never been quite able to learn how to earn a woman's real trust, and therefore have never known real intimacy. Surface intimacy, yeah, but not the deep kind humans need.
That's why they have turned to pornography, which just exacerbates the problems. And now we have this idea of self-identifying, and the men are thinking, this looks like a good short-cut to the intimacy that they haven't been able to find.
But it does not lead to intimacy. Of course it doesn't.
You can't force intimacy. When people are forced, they quickly build up walls to protect themselves, and those very walls prevent the intimacy they are reaching for.
It tears marriages apart. Because self-identifying doesn't really magically make the men understand that women think differently from men, and that even alpha males have to let what happens happen.
Among other such preconceptions that have been the actual source of the problems. We have this thing, this assumption, that if God is good, power must be right.
No, it's not right to make things harder for people than they have to be.
But trying too hard to make things easier sometimes backfires spectacularly. Often backfires. Sometimes spectacularly. And that is basically where we are as a society right now.
Hate.
Hate takes energy.
Sometimes, you need hate to motivate you to do things that are hard.
But hate usually takes resources away from better things that we could be doing.
I could, when I was a kid, have gotten stuck on hating the hypocrisy at church. I might have done better to have done more hating the hypocrisy, enough to get me to find ways and times to talk somewhat privately with the hypocrites and try to help them overcome their hypocrisies.
But God told me to focus first on getting past my own hypocrisies.
It was easy enough to think I would behave generously in a situation that I didn't know how to get myself into, but I needed to get myself into those situations before I could say for sure what I would really do. Otherwise, my liberal theories were hypocritical.
Sometimes I've hated God because the puzzles They gave me were just too difficult. I think you know how that ends?
Well, okay, it never ends the same, because each time is different. Except that God keeps trying to give you the best that God can give you.
In my patriarchal blessing, God told me not to focus on the things I have done wrong. Lately I've been doing what looks, from the outside, like exactly that. I've been working on alternative reality fiction where a fictional version of myself makes all the "right" decisions and finds himself in real trouble because of it. World-destroying trouble. (The parts that I've published in my blognovel blog hasn't gotten anywhere close to there yet, just for the record.)
In the process of writing these stories, I find that many of the things I want to think I did wrong were not as wrong as I want to think they were.
Hate. Constructive hate can be love.
Anyway, I find that if I focus more on loving the people around me who need loved, God will help me find ways to hate constructively those who need to be hated constructively.
