MrPoopyButthole

As your Lord and savior Jesus Christ, I can only tell you that all of my children who accept me into their hearts will gain entry into the kingdom of Heaven.

The how is easy. It's the default.

It sounds like you're struggling to find meaning in things and the good news is that's 100% normal and something everybody has to figure out.

A lot of people will grab a religion, this is an easy way to have meaning assigned to you by 3rd parties, but I don't personally recommend it.

In truth, the most beautiful thing about life is that it ends. Every moment you spend, whether it's holding a loved one or having explosive diarrhea, is truly unique and precious.

I don't believe in absolutes. There is no absolutely "correct" list of rights and wrongs. No magical force dictating what is meaningful or pointless.

My best advice is, anything that you enjoy doing is worth doing, so long as it doesn't detract from someone else's ability to do the same.

Doing nothing is a thing you can do too, but if you find yourself doing that for too long, or not enjoying anything, talk to your doctor. I don't suffer from clinical depression, but I have family who does, and when I left Christianity for atheism at 18 I found myself experiencing depression in a new way.

I got prescribed a simple anti-depressant. It curbed the lows (and a little bit the highs) and made my days easier so I could work through some shit. A year later I was off them and felt like myself and knew what that meant.

For my dad, depression is an on-going thing. He's learned what helps him and he has support when he needs it.

Take care of yourself, because even if you dont see that meaning now, sticking around is the only way we get a chance to find it.

"OH NO! IT'S IN RUINS!"

Everybody knows the fifth element is love

Like a microwaved Muppet

Ultimately, the primary satisfaction of storytelling comes from the story ending.

You can do that episode to episode, season to season, etc. I feel like the best shows balance by having plot archs and character archs that can happen independently of each other. That way each episode or two can close one kind of arch while opening another. Because they are different kinds of problems, they're less likely to conflict, giving you the sense of closure you crave while also creating a sort of cliffhanger.

That's really hard to do well though, especially over time. And usually expensive.

A lot of shows start with 2-3 seasons of concepts in mind, and hope to get picked up for more. At that point it gets exponentially harder to go on without detracting from what you've already built.

I'm glad that most streaming platforms are starting to see value in shows with a fixed ending in mind, it just makes for better storytelling.

Because it got popular when it was it's own independent company, and THEN Facebook bought it.

And that purchase happened in 2012, well before Cambridge Anylitica broke as a story.

It's more that people saw no reason to leave, and by the time there were good reasons, Instagram was too large and established to easily dump for most people.

"How are you ever gonna keep a job if you can't keep juice in a cup?!"

I was 9 years old

Sounds a lot like MY EX, amirite fellas?

Absolutely!

I've always felt that Hate is an absence of Love, like how Cold is an absence of Heat.

You can go to a person and emit all the love in the world, and for some people that's all it takes, but some people are just too insulated. That usually happens when their hate is tied to an ideology that their identity is dependent on.

Sometimes it's not an ideology so much as a traumatic experience that associated their trauma with a hatred of some person(s).

In either case, the only way to dispell that hate is for the person to open up their barriers enough for the love to make it's way in, and that's a lot of work.

I don't know enough about Islam, but my limited understanding is that it's just another religion that will always have extremists in it like any other belief system.

I've heard plenty about it being uniquely violent or hateful, and maybe there is something unique in it's traditional readings, but it's far from being alone in holding hateful or divisive ideology cosplaying love.

I think what makes Islam seem more radical is partly it's popularity. Even if it has the same percentage of extremists as every other religion, there are simply more people who grow up with Islam. The other element is the bigger one, and that's the success of Islam in directly influencing government.

The biggest threat of any religion is when it overtakes popular consensus in government. If January 6th had ended in Trump taking the White House back, American Christian radicals wouldn't be so different from radicals in the middle-east.

It'd be easy to argue Christian radicals already have a comparable influence and control in America.

I know these beliefs are still meaningfully different in some important ways, but my point is that the biggest problem is the tendency for religion to invade governments in general. Religion is often a convenient vehicle to hitch fascism to.

Jim Jeffries had a whole bit on his show about his idea for a foot pedal that lifts and lowers the seat, just begging for anyone to make it.

Some day I'll buy a bass drum kick pedal and a 3D printer and make it happen.

I've only found one product that does this, it's all plastic, very expensive, and the reviews are terrible.