Think It's A Deep Consolation To Know That Spiders Dream, That Monkeys Tease Predators, That Dolphins

think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. that there isn't their life and our life. nor your life and my life. that it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled w it as deep as entanglement goes. v neat i think.

Also desperately need a book about the Orthodox influence on Celtic, medieval, and even modern Christianity in Britain. We have never been a fully Roman church.

Having visited a Celtic neo-monastery under the Anglican umbrella, I can confirm that tradition is still alive.

According to the most ancient (and understandably not well-documented) sources, our island was visited by Egyptian missionaries, before the east-west divide had even occurred. Centuries later the Roman Catholic Missionaries found Christianity already here, to their great surprise.

Despite nominally joining the west for a handful of centuries, I think Britain's role in the reformation shows it's discomfort there. I think Christianity is older and more wild in this country than we realise.

Invariably the most exciting features added to Minecraft are the ones that make it even more of a sandbox, they allow greater customisability, easier modification, new possibilities, new abilities. The more basic and technical the better - the copper bulb (and everything it does for technical Minecraft) generated far more excitement than the armadillo! Custom enchants, data packs, custom paintings - these are the exciting updates; freedom. Options.

I wonder if God felt the same way designing us and our world. Giving us opposable thumbs, laws of nature which mostly follow neat mathematical rules, neural plasticity, customisable genetic codes, a system of elements and chemicals we can write on a spreadsheet and manipulate in an equation.

We live in a world far more richly customisable than Minecraft, with even more coherently designed interlocking systems that we can understand and utilize with our current tools.

There's a reason half the technical Minecraft community has 15 PhD's and turned down a Nobel prize - technical Minecraft is a (much simpler) form of the same scientific endeavour: exploring, understanding, and pushing the limits of what the world's mechanics allow.

NEVERTHELESS MENTIONED WOOOOOOOOOOO

Matthew 26:39 (NKJV) - He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”

Elmer Gantry is a really amazing example of a book that does this well - I read it specifically because it was banned across America (for being too accurate). But it knows what it's about! It's a critique of performative religion, nominal cultural Christianity, sensationalist prosperity gospel preaching, etc.

Iron sharpens iron, and awareness of the issues in the church is much more useful, and narratively satisfying, than 'Christianity Bad' media.

I mean if we're really getting into it, most problems with people creating stories to critique Christianity boil down to either a. They do absolutely zero research and think "why do bad things happen" is unanswerable for anyone who believes in a fundamentally good deity, b. They assume that the religious beliefs of two churches in Missouri run by an abusive pastor are the religious beliefs of 3 billion people, or c. They're actually critiquing cultural systems which utilize Christianity to uphold oppression (good! Critique that!) but they conflate that with the religion itself which often leads back to the first two points, meaning they make factually incorrect statements about actual religious teachings and approach faith as inherently evil (wrong! Read the Book!)

I do believe you can write a story critiquing faith or religious systems or religion and do it well but unfortunately 90% of the time this is how people do it. Which is poorly done and useless.