Aaron

Mine was from Christianity, US evangelical flavour. It happened in stages, but really in the end I just stopped going to religious activities.

What made it happen? A lot of things at each of those aforementioned stages, but the most common theme was other Christians. They just were overwhelmingly awful.

I grew up in the Church, so it was all I knew. Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, youth groups (extra brainwashing sessions from a special church leader for kids) once a week, etc. The only thing outside of religious activities was school, and thankfully I was in public school.

I grew up curious and questioning, which the religious leaders did not always appreciate, but because I was serious about understanding things, I was given a lot of early “apologetics”, which I understood to be attempts to prove the unprovable, and quickly came to realise that the point was to take things on faith… don’t prove, believe. And for that, I needed a “religious experience”.

Evangelical churches are good at manufacturing believable religious experiences, so eventually I had what I believed was one. This was the first thing to go when I “deconstructed”, realising that this experience wasn’t supernatural, it was manufactured. Once that was gone, the rest was easy to mentally deconstruct and all that was left was the social.

The social took longer, but I was in the US south, so everything revolved around church activities for me and there wasn’t a clear alternative. What encouraged me to cut ties though was my sense of justice. I accepted a lot of the “christ” teachings like loving your neighbour and providing for those less fortunate, caring for those who can’t care for themselves like the sick, children and those struggling in other ways, and Christians just seemed to only care for those who were close to them, not everyone, and especially didn’t care for very specific groups.

This got very clear with the rise of the alt-right political movement in the US and especially when Covid-19 hit… all these people who claimed to care about their neighbours wouldn’t do the bare minimum to help. For the few years before this I was already in a “missionary” mindset: I was attending these religious activities in order to help these Christians be more christ-like. At that point though, I realised it was a lost cause. These people didn’t want to be christ-like, they wanted to “win”. So when covid came and nothing around me locked down, I locked down myself, stopped attending everything, and moved out of the US entirely as soon as I could. My own parents wouldn’t wear a mask, or even spend time outside to spend Christmas with our kids, and were so deep in the far-right rabbit hole that it made it easy to move. So many people revealed they were just hateful shells, their insides rotted away and either I didn’t notice or they never were filled to begin with.

It was sad, but I have a much more fulfilling life now. If you are looking for resources or community to kind of get some confirmation that you’re not alone, the freedom from religion organisation is pretty good for some things… but can be a bit too much so I recommend just dipping in for specific things you’re thinking about. I found things in that community well after deconstructing and used it to put terms to what I experienced. Like the word deconstructing wasn’t a word in my lexicon until well after the fact.

Good luck!

I can’t vouch for the AI result above but I’m from NZ and we had a citizen mom detained with her kid for weeks, Sarah Shaw, who thankfully got out. However another of our citizens, Everlee Wihongi, has been detained for over a month now. ICEs strategy is to move people so they’re harder to find and they move them when they have a court appearance coming up so they have to “reschedule”.

That used to be their whole shtick, the third place experience. They wanted people to treat Starbucks as where they go when they want to relax or meet with friends, a place outside of their home and work, where the baristas knew their names and would chat and make them feel welcome. Especially a lot of older folks liked that, and would make it part of their routine. Starbucks threw that all away when they went to prioritising drive thru and mobile order/pay systems. It’s a shareholder business and this is capitalism. It’s either neverending growth or death.

In my experience, there can be very strong views on this question from people who identify as enby and/or trans. I always defer to what the enby person I am interacting with prefers identifies as, but know that what is good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander. I’d always suggest asking the person you’re referring to about how they personally identify, but I have had almost zero reason to ever ask. Pronouns are usually enough for day to day interactions and friends/family have always just volunteered without me asking (they’d give different responses to your question, by the way).

Edit: suggested to me that “prefer” sounds suggestive. How someone identifies isn’t a preference but a fact. Crossed out in original to show what changed, and I was assured it’s nitpicky but nice to not use prefer 😊

Absolutely right. It’s not a law for them, it’s a fine.

I think I have four that are top of my current most played songs that aren’t English:

Kaval Sviri, a Bulgarian folk song. Specifically the version performed by KSS, a women’s choir in Oslo. It’s a cappella, and has some great resolving dissonance. Really a fantastic performance.

Next would be Ka Bohaleng performed by Abel Selaocoe. It has some cool string effects and I like the throat singing technique he uses in this song in particular.

Presidente by Goran Bregović (featuring Gipsy Kings) is a fun upbeat celebratory song.

Altay by Ummet Ozcan, featuring vocals from Otyken is a great song that feels like… Mongolian cyberpunk? If that’s a thing. If you can’t tell I’m really feeling throat singing multiphonics right now 😆

I’m no expert, but I was under the impression that their tools use not only facial recognition that can (with a non-perfect record) identify people wearing nose and below masks, but also identifies based on cell phone and geographic data. So if someone plans on relying on beating facial recognition, they’ll need to also beat the other tools in use by wearing a full mask, not carry a cell phone, etc.