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Moral Reasoning: How a Narrow Understanding of Morality Taught Me Fear

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When I think about things I'd like to be different in my life, the most significant changes are relational. I want to get to know a few more people, but to also have deeper relationships with the people I do know. However, I've identified something that gets in the way of both of those things, which is an assumption that others are judgmental. This assumption leads me to try and present myself to others in ways that I think will get their approval; often, this is through censoring my actual thoughts and likes. In other words, I find myself hiding parts of who I am from others to try and manipulate them into not socially rejecting me or otherwise enacting socially-devastating (albeit nebulous in specifics) consequences on me. Needless to say, this underlying, emotionally-driven perspective impedes my ability to develop relationships with others. If I want to find those with whom I can connect, I have to reveal myself. This revealing of my personality feels scary, sure, but what ...
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Pondering Marriage, Sexuality, and My Future

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I've been finding myself thinking about marriage a lot lately. I've had a lot of questions. What is marriage, really, if you boil it down? Why does marriage exist? I write here today to ponder these questions (and more), and I really mean ponder . I'm typing this up as a way to force myself to think through these ideas and get them out of my head. I don't know that I'll find any answers in so doing, but hopefully it'll leave me with something to share with others to get their input. These thoughts have been prompted by a number of things. One of those things has been reading about the history of misogyny as recorded in Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty  by Victoria Bateman . Another has been people I follow online, primarily on Twitter, who have presented ideas and concepts about sex and sexuality that were foreign to me, ideas that raise questions in my mind. One of those big questions is: what is  sexual immorality? As I've pondered the S...
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God As Asceticism vs. God As Love

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It was on a Sunday morning—that of August 25, 2024 to be exact, when church was starting—that God gave me a revelation, not unlike others He has given me in the past. It's the kind of revelation that gave me understanding of something about myself that had been eluding me. In this case, it was the way church and church culture, at least in the ways I've experienced them, have been a stumbling block in my ability to know God, desire Him, and feel desired and loved by Him. We Christians represent God to the people. I think He's chosen to make us His ambassadors because He's a big fan of free will—it's kind of necessary for love, after all (you can't force genuine love). So in a very real sense, Christian culture, and more directly church culture, paints a picture of God. Unfortunately, this picture is often inaccurate in many ways, as it's affected by the world; for me, the most warped part has been the way the church has so often adopted the world's conce...
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Speculation: Why an Infinite Universe?

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Lately I've found myself wondering if the science-fiction dream of colonizing the stars isn't just a human dream, but one God has for us, too. This is pure speculation, of course, but it doesn't come from nowhere. You see, I found myself wondering if people would have children after the Resurrection. The Bible doesn't say one way or another, though some interpret something Jesus said in such a way as to come to the conclusion that people won't have kids, but I'll talk about that later. There is one thing that is clear regardless: after the Resurrection, humans will be immortal, which makes having children problematic due to issues that arise with an ever-increasing population. Over the last couple of centuries, we've seen concerns over population growth, with fears that the number of people would outstrip resources, such as food. You see, population rates exploded when medical advances reduced mortality, especially child mortality, but people were still havi...
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Some Observations About OnlyFans

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I first began poking around OnlyFans (and can't claim to have done much more than that) because I thought it would be a good way to get to know sex workers and nude models. These are two kinds of people that I want to know, but doing so in person has seemed improbable to me. OnlyFans therefore looked like it might be a good way to connect, a thought which makes superficial sense if you understand how the website is structured. OnlyFans (OF for short) is set up a lot like a social media website with solid monetization options. This contrasts with something like an impersonal video site or store front. Like other forms of social media, OF provides you a feed of creators you've subscribed to and a messaging system. Creators can set their subscription fee to zero to create a free account, or they can set a monthly fee for access, much like any subscription service. In many ways, its feature set is similar to Patreon, a website I'm already quite familiar with. This social-media...
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The Space to Heal

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I recently read a Tweet by Hana Wu where she said, "A way to reframe and reflect when you're feeling stuck 💗" as a caption to the following quote, attributed to vlonelylulu on Twitter: "Someone told me 'whenever your life is feeling stagnant or as if nothing is happening, that means you're being given the time & space to heal & release the baggage that you cannot carry to where you're meant to go soon.'" This sentiment has been dwelling in my mind since I read it for the simple reason that I have been feeling stuck lately. There are a lot of ways I want my life to change, but this quote has gotten me thinking...what baggage do I need to release, what healing do I need? As I pondered this, something fascinating happened: I began to synthesize things I'd previously processed individually, seeing how they fit together. Put another way, the process of healing feels like a spiral, where I come back to the same ground over and over, but e...
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