Airplane Evangelism

People on an airplane. Image source.

Apparently there have been some recent tiktok videos where Christians preach on airplanes. See these links:

Christian preachers are turning airplanes into unwanted worship services

‘Airplane evangelists’ vs. ‘Sweet Caroline’

Preach the Gospel, but Not on a Plane

My first reaction to this is ugh, I don't like it. 

But, in the first link above, Hemant Mehta says, 

Other Christians have an especially important role here, too. If they believe faith shouldn’t be imposed like this, they should be the loudest people condemning this behavior—in real time if they’re fellow passengers and later if they hear about it.

And I feel like, it's not that easy. I don't know if I would do that- tell these people "hey I'm also a Christian and I don't think you should preach like this."

Oof. I've done this kind of "go up to random strangers and tell them about Jesus" style of evangelism before. Among my Christian friends in college, most of us who did this were really uncomfortable, but we believed we had to. People are going to hell! They need someone to tell them about Jesus! How can you care more about social awkwardness than about people going to hell????

So that's the logic. And I believed the "people are going to hell" part, so there was always that guilt, like, I should do more, I should tell more people about Jesus, but oh goodness it's so awkward and I'm an introvert.

So yeah, I sometimes did what we call "conversational evangelism" (or, one of my friends called it, "evangelism to the randos"). Usually we went in groups of 2, but also there were times I did this by myself. Go up to someone who's just sitting there by themself, ask them if they're okay with talking about religion- we ask first and we leave if they say no- and then ask them what they believe, and try to find a way to "share the gospel" and convince them to believe in Jesus.

It was, oh man, it was a mixed bag of emotions. So terrifying and awkward to go talk to someone who's not expecting it, to say "excuse me" to get their attention, and then draw them into a conversation where they share their personal beliefs- a weird level of emotional intimacy. But it was exciting, to hear about what these random people thought about God, and to have a chance to "share the gospel"- we felt like "God is working" and it was so exciting to be part of that.

It's the kind of thing that you don't want to do, and you psych yourself up by thinking about how God wants you to do it, and all these people are at risk of going to hell, and Jesus did so much for you so can't you do this for him?

The airplane thing, it's more like what my friends called "street preaching," where you just stand up in a public place and talk loudly about God to any passersby, rather than having a one-on-one conversation. (The difference is that on the airplane, people can't walk away.) I never did street preaching. I remember I had a friend who was interested in doing it, and was checking into the rules at our university to see if it was allowed. I don't know if he ever ended up doing it or not.

But anyway, Mehta's suggestion that other Christians should tell this airplane preacher to stop. I have a few things to say about that:

First of all, even though my initial emotional reaction is "I don't like this", can I actually give a logical argument, consistent with my religious beliefs, about why it's a bad idea? I think I could do that now, now that I don't believe in hell, but in the past I couldn't. I always felt guilty... all the people around me are at risk of going to hell, and I'm too scared to say anything about it? What's wrong with me? And now here's someone who's actually taking action and doing something about it. I don't like it, but I'm the one in the wrong. She's doing what I should be doing.

We always *said* we should do more evangelism, but we were too scared to actually do it. Now here's someone who's actually doing it. How can we oppose that?

I guess the best you can do- if you're in that ideology- is argue that this kind of loud public evangelism is not an *effective* way to convert people. You don't believe that respecting people is a good thing *in and of itself* but it's a strategy that will win you more converts in the long run.

And second, oh man, I know how it is, when you finally get up the courage to violate social norms and just go for it. You just focus on your goal, and what God wants you to do, and you block out everything around you that tells you how wrong your behavior is. Imagine if someone interrupts you right then and says "I'm a Christian and I don't think you should do that." You're not in a state where you can reason about it. You've already decided you're doing it, and if anything gets in your way, it's an obstacle that you need to fight back against. (Obviously this naysayer is a fake Christian who cares more about social awkwardness than about people going to hell!) This other Christian who interrupts you to point out that you're violating social norms- you already know all that. You already know all those reasons, you know them very well, and they have held you back, but finally at this moment you've gotten up the courage to push past them, and it's terrifying. And then someone comes and reminds you of all those reasons that you've been working so hard to ignore. You're not in a state where you can be receptive to that feedback at all.

I'm very hesitant to criticize people for how they do evangelism. It's extremely uncomfortable, and they don't want to be doing it, but they're forcing themselves to, out of obedience to God. I empathize with them, and I wish I could tell them the good news that there is no hell and they don't need to tell random strangers about Jesus, but they're not in a place where they can accept that.

It would be a different thing, if the evangelist is totally fine with what they're doing, if they're not hating it internally and forcing themselves to do it despite how wrong it feels. I feel better about criticizing them, if that's the case. And maybe the people who are posting videos of themselves on tiktok, saying "I just love a captive audience," maybe they're different from me, and they actually *like* doing that. 

It's just very hard for me to imagine *liking* to do this kind of evangelism. You stand up on the plane and make an announcement about Jesus, and then you have to wait around at the baggage claim with all these same people, oh so embarrassing. And what if you need to ask someone for help, like "oh that's my suitcase there", they're all gonna try not to make eye contact with you... You've broken the social norms, and now you're you're trying to just slip back into the world of social norms again.

And then posting it on tiktok... I feel like this is the kind of thing that one would share with one's Christian friends, and they'll admire your faith and say "that's so hard, but you did it." Not something that you would post publicly. I wouldn't think you'd want everyone to know you're the kind of person who preaches on airplanes.

But anyway. What I would say now- now that I don't believe in hell- is that as Christians, we want to be known for our kindness and love for others. People don't like being preached at nonconsensually, so we shouldn't do that. If we really want to show Jesus' love, that means getting to know people, valuing them for who they are, respecting that they have their own beliefs and can make their own choices, and they don't need you to convince them to believe in Jesus or whatever. Don't treat them like your personal mission project, like the only thing that matters is whether they're "saved" or not.

But again, this only works if you don't believe in hell. How can you "value people for who they are" if you believe in a God who isn't going to do that on Judgment Day, but will just sort them into "saved" and "unsaved" and send them to hell? Like the only thing that matters is whether they're "saved" or not.

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Related

The things I've never let myself say about evangelism

When Christians Say "We're Sorry"

"My Evangelism Isn't Working" is a Very Creepy Thing to Say

Yep, I Totally Did This Creepy Evangelism Strategy

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Q&A: Pangram CEO (June 23, via) "There is a social contract between the writer and the reader. If I believe there is an idea worth sharing, I pay a cost by writing a piece of text, and the reader pays a cost by taking the time to read it. In a future where AI content lets you bypass the cost of writing your idea and formulating it, we get into a situation with perverse incentives, where people are posting total slop, and the reader is taking more time to read than the writer put into the text in the first place."

2. The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet (April) "So, for many years, if I needed a painkiller, I’d try to take ibuprofen rather than acetaminophen. My logic was that if eight grams of acetaminophen could kill my liver, then one gram was probably still hard on it. I’m fond of my liver and didn't want to cause it any unnecessary inconvenience. But guess what? My logic was wrong and what I was doing was stupid."

3. This video of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani speaking Mandarin Chinese. (August 16) Wow, this is really good! I can understand all of it- it's not like a lot of other videos of actors/beginners trying to say things in Chinese, where they don't even come close to nailing the pronunciation, and I'm like "... I can't even figure out what they were trying to say." He's got the pronunciation totally right- even difficult ones like "ri" and "yu." The way he talks is slow and careful, like he memorized a script and he's trying to get it perfect, rather than just naturally being able to speak the language. So my guess is he has spent time studying Chinese before, especially the pronunciation, but maybe not good enough to just have a conversation whenever. (See also, the blooper reel.) Anyway I'm very impressed, and as a politician you *should* do stuff like this, to connect with the people you represent.

4.  Total Eclipse of the Heart in the Original Klingon - Strange New Worlds (August 8)

5. She Faced a Life-Threatening Miscarriage. Under Arkansas’ Abortion Ban, Even Calls to the Governor’s Office Didn’t Help. (May 26, via) "'This is basic obstetrics,' said Dr. Alison Goulding, a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist in Texas. 'Everyone should know that you have to provide an abortion in these settings or women can die.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. DHS's abuse of power in Minnesota was even worse than we knew (August 18) "What we didn’t know at the time, though, was that the administration had engaged in utterly unprecedented surveillance in service of its theory that somehow everyone in Minnesota was engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to make ICE thugs feel sad."

2. They grew up with disability rights. Now, they're fighting to keep them (August 20) "'I can't really overstate how significant this change in position is,' said Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who worked on Olmstead enforcement in the Justice Department during the Obama administration. 'It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don't have a right to be part of their communities.'"

3. The system meant to protect ICE detainees has collapsed (August 20) "'I even told them in English: I have a Stage 4 brain tumor. I have to take 1,000 mg of Keppra at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. I'm supposed to start chemotherapy this week,' he said."

4. “The ICE Agent Behind Me Grabbed the Back of My Shirt and Just Threw Me Like a Sack of Trash” (August 1, via) "Bowe was in shock. “I thought of Alex Pretti, because he was also a nurse, and he was also helping someone who’d been knocked down.” Bowe was treated for a concussion, and for a kneecap fracture. She’s now suing ICE for $500,000."

5. Kings are creepy and weird (August 19) "I’ve been thinking about poor Abishag lately due to the recent attention being given to our own very old, doddering would-be king’s constant companion and non-sexual female attendant."

Chinese Shopping Apps: Giraffe Toy Edition

My son had a giraffe toy, and then I let my daughter play with it and she chewed the legs, so now I owe my son a new one. Let's go to Taobao (a Chinese shopping app) and find one.

Okay, so, first of all, I'm not sure how to search for this. I'm trying to buy the exact same toy that my son had, but like, how to describe it? It's a giraffe with legs that you can extend and they have suction cups at the ends.

Giraffe is 长颈鹿 [cháng jǐng lù] and toy is 玩具 [wán jù] so I guess I'll just search 长颈鹿玩具 and see what we get.

Oh, it's the first result. Huh. Apparently this toy is *the* giraffe toy as far as Taobao is concerned. Okay.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. On ‘James Talarico and the [white] religious left’ (August 10) "Where the “religious right” is always presumed to be acting out of genuine religious conviction, the “religious left” is always presumed to be just a bunch of Democrats fumbling to close the “God gap” in electoral campaigning."

2. ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Loki’ Directors Say They Rejected HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’ Due to J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia: ‘Absolutely F—ing Not’ (August 14, via) 

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. More Than 20,000 Unaccompanied Children at Risk of Losing Legal Representation in Immigration Court (August 5) "On Friday, July 31st, the Trump administration ended a critical federal contract with the Acacia Center for Justice providing legal services and representation to children who entered the United States without a parent or guardian. The decision dismantled a network of nearly 100 legal service providers, including Church World Service, and leaves over 20,000 unaccompanied children across the country, many of whom are victims of trafficking or other abuse, without legal representation."

2. El-Sayed blasts Trump over ‘Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s’ post (August 9, via) "'Yeah, he’s right,' El-Sayed said. 'One in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other but joint in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you, or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family, and know that that family is going to have the good things.'"

3. ICE plans to outfit officers with electric shock gloves (August 12) "'My immediate reaction was, why would you give this kind of novel dangerous technology that's hard to train people on to agency personnel who have a track record of abuse and even cruelty?' Shah says."

4. 'What are we going to do?' The mom of a trans teen grapples with Trump's Medicaid move (August 16) "She says the narrative advanced by the Trump administration — that families are being tricked into gender-affirming care by doctors and hospitals driven by greed — is completely off base."

5. They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards (August 15) "'We are trying to work, study, raise our children and build a normal life in the U.S,' said M., who asked NPR to refer to him by his first initial because he's concerned that speaking to the media could affect his green card. 'But now we are also trying to find lawyers, contact congressional offices and understand what may happen to our green cards. It is very stressful because even immigration lawyers give different opinions.'"

6. Families of USS Lincoln crew say Trump should be 'ashamed' of conditions on board (August 15) "His comments come amid reports of food shortages, plumbing problems and declining mental health among crew members."

7. Suing Stephen Miller (July 20, via) "You shouldn’t be able to order the military to carry out extrajudicial executions of fishermen and/or low-level drug runners that violate both domestic and international law, and then simply return to your job as a weekend cable news host once the other party retakes the White House. You should not be able to lie to the courts about sending immigrants to an overseas torture prison with zero due process and then live out your days with the lifelong job security of a federal judge. You should not be able to write a bullshit, meritless, bad faith legal memo while working at the Office of Legal Counsel that authorizes immigration officers to ignore the Fourth Amendment and batter down the doors of private homes without a warrant, then go on to make millions as partner at a white shoe law firm."

Inspiration and Incarnation: Wisdom Literature

Image text: Ecclesiastes 1:2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." Image source.

I've been reading "Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns. Chapter 3 is called "The Old Testament and Theological Diversity." There are diverse viewpoints within the Old Testament- one passage says one thing, and another passage says another thing which is inconsistent with the first passage. 

There's a lot of fascinating stuff in this chapter, so I'm breaking it down into several blog posts. This post will cover the part about the wisdom literature in the bible. Specifically, the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job.

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Proverbs

Proverbs is a book of wise sayings. These are useful guidelines for how to live your life, but it doesn't mean you're *guaranteed* to have good results if you follow them. That's why I never really liked the book of Proverbs when I was evangelical- it's a bunch of generalizations, all of which have exceptions so you can't take them too seriously. Unlike the rest of the bible, which was Absolute Truth [so I thought].

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. They're Made Out of Weights (June 3, via) "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of weights."

2. Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan (July 24) This is about the phenomenon of foreign NGOs coming in and transforming local community-led organizations, giving them money but making them no longer able to connect with and raise support from their community.

3. Antiques Roadshow (August 5) From xkcd. 

4. Furiosa’s Cat Feeder (2016, via) About a cat who keeps finding ways to get extra food out of the cat feeder, and the owner's continued attempts to prevent it. "Her next move was to lie on her back in the bowl, and stick her paw up the chute. She could paw the conveyor belt itself, getting it to move. This was very effective, netting an extra meal or more." 

5. Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internet (July 13) "I wish everyone giving this parenting advice were first required to actually try, for an hour, to configure a computer such that it gives a user the ability to meaningfully interact with the web without bombarding them with content selected to make them hooked and miserable. It can’t be done. I have tried a wide range of parental control tools, and none of them even seem to comprehend it as an aspiration."

6. Sheep and Goats and ‘Hell’ (August 4) "So they need the Sheep and the Goats to support the claim of a 'literal' Heaven and Hell, but cannot acknowledge or accept what that parable has to say about who is going to 'Heaven' and who is going to 'Hell' and why. That parable, like the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, is explicit, emphatic, and categorical. 'Heaven' is for the poor and for those who feed the poor. 'Hell' is for rich people who neglect the poor. Full stop."

Also from the Slacktivist: No sign will be given except the sign of Jonah (August 7) "And then it struck me that I was sitting there earnestly asking myself one of the most pernicious, corrosive, damnable questions one can ever wind up asking oneself: Who does and does not count as 'our' people?"

7. Why Rachel Held Evans Still Reads Like a Prophet (August 10) There's a new book called "Braving the Truth" which is a collection of Rachel Held Evans's writings. Definitely worth reading. See also, this link roundup I posted in 2019: Link Roundup of Posts Honoring Rachel Held Evans

8. Niagara Falls and the Limits of the Design Inference (July 25) "In its cosmology, then, [intelligent design] finds design in the very law-structure of the universe. In its biology, it finds design in the failure of that law-structure to account for some feature. These are opposite arguments."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Justice department moves to dismiss its charges against Olympian over reflecting pool (July 31, via) "The documents 'indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,' the motion said."

2. The Assault On Science Funding Continues (July 23, via) "But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands."

3. Truth Social’s Audacious Plan to Sell Banks Early Access to Trump’s Posts Goes Live (August 3, via) "This story has captured our attention because it compounds the corruption that has become endemic throughout the executive branch with a new, ridiculous feature of our economy — Trump manipulating the markets through his bespoke social media platform, prompting sell-offs and rallies with his statements about the status of such things as tariffs or the Iran war, regardless of those statements’ grounding in fact."

4. They lost their work permits and their legal status. Returning to Haiti is still 'unimaginable' (August 5) "Approximately 350,000 Haitians and Syrians who have remade their lives in the United States are now at a crossroads. Their work permits and legal status have expired, yet their home countries haven't recovered from the crises that drove them to seek Temporary Protected Status protections."

5. Trump signs new orders targeting birthright citizenship, weeks after Supreme Court ruling (August 7) The wording of this one is different than the previous one- I would be interested in reading an article explaining those differences and to what extent they matter.

6. Federal funds can't be used to give test strips to drug users, raising overdose fears (August 8)

"The Strangest Thing in the Sea" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "The Strangest Thing in the Sea."

Here's a book that my son loves, because it's about weird sea creatures: The Strangest Thing in the Sea by Rachel Poliquin, illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler.

On every page, it has a little hint on the left side, about what kind of creature it is, plus part of a picture of it. And then the right side page has an artistic representation of what kind of thing it might be. Like what you might imagine it is, just hearing a partial description. And then you flip open the right page and it shows the rest of the picture of what it really looks like, and it has all the information about what it is, what it eats, what kind of ocean environment it lives in, special abilities, etc.

Here's an example. On this page we see part of the creature, and we're told it's like a moon, so the right side page shows an artistic representation of a moon face:

And then you flip it open and you see it's actually an ocean sunfish!

This is really cool- every page is like this. It has an artistic image of what you might imagine it looks like, and then you flip open the page and see what it really is. (Apparently this is called a gatefold.) And there's a good variety of weird sea creatures. My son loves this because he loves weird animals.

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Related

Reviews of Kids' Books

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Famous Science YouTuber Admits He Has Unhealthy Relationship With AI After Facing Backlash Over Recent Video (July 31, via) "Longtime YouTuber and science content creator Hank Green has announced that his main channel will likely be “paused” as he deals with his admitted overreliance on ChatGPT and other AI tools after some fans claimed a recent video included him reading AI-generated language."

2. The Underlying Misogyny of Grand Romantic Gestures (July 27, 47-minute video) "If you meet your best friend's fiance and all you can think is, 'oh man, she's so hot, let me film intense close-ups of her, then go home and edit them into a weird montage that I will keep in a VHS tape to fantasize about in my house', you're just weird."

Another good line from the video: "It is only by doing the little things, the daily, mundane work, that you can build to a place where your relationship is healthy enough to also accommodate fun gestures and surprises."

And: "No matter how much women say, stop, leave me alone, I don't want to be with you, we'll never be together, the grand romantic gesture argues that it's all just all just pretense. It's this fake defense that women use, almost as a filter to weed out the guys who aren't romantic enough to keep pursuing them."

3. How China Delivers a 14-Yuan Bouquet Over 2,000 Kilometers (August 3) "On China’s major e-commerce platforms, a bouquet of fresh-cut roses from the southwestern Yunnan province sells for just 14 yuan ($2), with free delivery to most parts of the country."

Also from Sixth Tone: Check in, Log on, Stay for Months: Life at China’s 9-Cent Internet Café (August 5)

4.  Is Captain Pike's Tragic Fate Actually a Happy Ending? (July 22, 31-minute video) An analysis of Captain Pike's disability in "Star Trek": how it is viewed in different ways in different "Star Trek" series (the 1960's vs now), and the parallels between Captain Pike and the lives of disabled people in the real world.

5. Works of culture from age to age (July 28) "But the other thing Card does here also seems utterly alien to contemporary MAGA worship and MAGA religion: He identifies God through the eyes of Hagar, the abused and discarded concubine, the refugee."

6. The Pastor No One Can Correct (July 11) Posting this because it's related to the question of whether or not children can/should take communion in church, which we were talking about when we read "The Kingdom of Children." Apparently Doug Wilson said "we commune children", and first of all, I have never heard "commune" used as a verb meaning "give communion to", and second, this is definitely a different thing than what "The Kingdom of Children" was talking about. (If you don't know who Doug Wilson is- he's a pastor who is so extremely racist and sexist, like, I didn't even know there were people who were that racist and sexist.)

I guess you can imagine a spectrum going from "we make infants/children/everyone eat communion, whether they want to or not" (is this Wilson's position?) to "we let everyone (children and adults) take communion if they choose to" to "we have an official vetting process to make sure you're a real Christian before you can take communion, and children cannot pass this vetting process." [Okay maybe this isn't a one-dimensional spectrum, maybe it's several dimensions.] What is the role of choice, and what is the role of "understanding" (understanding what communion means, understanding what it means to be a Christian, understanding the meaning of Jesus' death)? 

"The Kingdom of Children" talks about communion as "the family meal"- like it's about being included as part of the community, rather than about your own individual feelings/understanding about Jesus- to me, this sounds like if you're at church, you take communion, because that's what everyone's doing. It would be weird if you're having a meal, and some people are eating and some people are just sitting there not eating while it happens around them- but that always happens at church during communion. It's totally fine if some people choose not to do it while everyone else does, maybe because they're not Christians, or for any other reason. It's not weird. I *don't* think children should have communion just because "oh, it's time for us all to have communion now"; I think there should be some "understanding" of what it is. I don't think "The Kingdom of Children" addressed that- it was mainly talking about churches which exclude children who *want* to take communion. The main point of "The Kingdom of Children" was that children should be able to make their own choices about religion.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Oh turns out I haven't been following the news this week so I don't have any links

"Aces Wild" and my thoughts on queer fiction

Book cover for "Aces Wild"

I read Aces Wild: A Heist by Amanda DeWitt, and here's my post about it~

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Overview

This is a novel about Jack Shannon, whose mom owns a casino in Las Vegas. His mom gets arrested for shady business things, but Jack's take on it is that all the casino owners are doing those kinds of illegal things, and the reason his mom got arrested is that a rival casino owner targeted her. So Jack invites his friends- that he met on an asexual web forum- to come to Las Vegas and help him figure out what's going on/ play illegal blackjack/ etc.

So we have 5 ace characters working together, in this casino-heist-style plot. When we talk about queer fiction, we can say there are 2 kinds: One kind is where the queerness *is* the plot- like, it's about a character figuring out they are queer, or about overcoming obstacles/discrimination related to being queer. The other kind is a plot about something else, where the characters are queer but the story isn't *about* being queer; the queerness is just a background element. "Aces Wild" is the second kind. We need both kinds, so it's good that this exists.

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My opinion

I found this to be a good story, fun to read. And I liked the asexual elements in the background- for example, having online friends that you feel totally understand you, because they are also ace. Meeting ace people "in real life" and feeling so comfortable with them because they *get* that. I've had that kind of feeling in some queer spaces and ace meetups.

Also the line "sometimes you need five aces to win," in the context of asexuals playing illegal blackjack, is just extremely clever. Love that.

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But basically I don't know if I'm interested in queer fiction

Or rather, I guess I'm not really the kind of person who likes to read a lot of fiction. 

I read a lot, and my motivation for reading is I want to learn things. When I see a book about some topic and I think "oh I want to learn about that" then I add it to my wishlist. 

Fiction doesn't necessarily fit into that. Fiction *can* be a way to learn things- some authors use fiction as a way of exploring a topic and getting the readers to think deeply about it, and if the author is skilled then this can be more effective than just directly telling you what their point is. But fiction can also be really formulaic, where readers want to have an enjoyable experience by reading a story that follows a known structure. Where it's fun but you don't really learn anything new from it. And that's fine- I'm not saying it's "better" to read to learn things vs reading to experience a plot structure you already know you're going to like. (I mean, I read dozens of "Nancy Drew" books when I was a kid.)

(And also I'm oversimplifying it; there's a wide spectrum between "learning things" and "formulaic", and also, one reader might read a book and not get anything out of it, while another reader reads the same book and finds it really insightful and illuminating. For one reader, it's near the "formulaic" end of the spectrum, and for another reader it's at the "learning things" end.)

Most of the books I read, I choose them because I want to learn things. But sometimes I just want something easy and fun; I don't feel like learning things. There's a place for both kinds of books! But anyway, my point is, I see people on the internet talking about how important it is to have queer fiction and representation, and sure that's great, but it seems it's not really something I'm interested in myself. Maybe sometimes? But also sometimes I'm like, what's the point of this?

Obviously, since fiction exists, there *should* be fiction books with queer characters. And we need more of that! For people who like fiction, there should be a whole range available to them. There should be books where the plot is about being queer and overcoming problems associated with that, and there should be books where the plot is about something else entirely and the characters are queer just because.

Or, maybe nobody likes to read *all* queer fiction; they only like a small subset of the books, and when we make such a big deal about how "queer fiction is so important" and "representation is so important" it means "a wide range of books should exist, because someone will like to read them, but that doesn't mean *I* am going to read them."

So anyway, that's my opinion on that. I enjoyed reading this book, but I don't really feel like it's something I "need" or something that made a big difference and improved my life or whatever. BUT there have been other fictional stories I've read, with queer characters- fanfics- which did make an impact on me and improved my life. So I'm sure for some readers, "Aces Wild" could be meaningful and helpful to them. Different readers, who are at different places in their lives, will feel differently about reading the same book.

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See also: 

Siggy's review of "Aces Wild"

And this review from Bring On The Pigeons

Related:

Totally Baffled, in an Asexual Way (or, my review of "Let's Talk About Love")

All of My Book Review Posts

Blogaround

Image source.

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious. (July 6) "We’re not in a Manichean struggle between two monolithic systems. We’re just deciding where to draw the line between the private and public sectors of our economy."

2. JK Rowling deadnamed and posted 'upskirt' photo of trans woman on X (July 17, via) "It was true that Rowling posted a photo that could reasonably be considered an "upskirt" photo, meaning a voyeuristic image intended to show the crotch area of a person wearing a dress or skirt."

3.  "The Millipede March!" Bug Dance 🐛🐞 Insect Brain Break | Danny Go! Songs for Kids (2024) I have small children that like to watch these videos from Danny Go. They're high-energy music videos to get kids to dance and exercise. After watching a million Danny Go videos, I've been brainwashed into kinda liking them.

4. In Turn Each Woman Thrust Her Head (2018, via) [content note: misogynistic violence] "At the university, in my literary-nonfiction class, female students bring me their stories. They are eighteen, nineteen, twenty and should be writing about gathering friends, stocking a ship with provisions, going out to seek adventure. But too often, one will hand me an essay about being raped. I realize the ability for women to articulate these stories is new and should be celebrated, but they carry Odysseus’s judgments, Homer’s lens. The students wonder: Did they somehow give permission? Did they obediently mop up the blood? Did they put their own heads through the noose? And the male students described are clearly rehearsing instructions for what they think makes a man. I am overwhelmed by the tales of the maids."

5. It’s not ‘pick and choose.’ It’s pick a side. (July 24) So, the point that Fred Clark is making here, that the bible is a collection of arguments and as readers we choose which side we agree with- yes, I basically believe that, BUT I think this doesn't quite answer the "picking and choosing" accusation. 

When conservative Christians say progressive Christians are not legit because we are "picking and choosing" which biblical texts we agree with, that comes from a perspective where the whole bible is correct, the whole bible is in charge of us, the whole bible teaches 1 consistent thing, and where there appear to be differences of opinion in the bible, that's just because we need to work harder to understand it- it *does* teach 1 consistent thing, if understood correctly. You can't just believe that parts you like and ignore the parts you don't like. You have to believe and obey the whole thing.

But the "progressive" view that Clark is talking about here is different from that. He's saying, the bible presents different voices talking about these topics (inclusion vs exclusion is one of the big topics), responding to each other, and some of them are wrong. The bible is not in charge of us; instead, we read the bible and judge which arguments make sense. 

So in order for this "it's about picking a side" idea to make sense, we have to take a step back and talk about what the bible is. Is it just simply true? Is it teaching 1 thing? Is it in charge of us? No, no, and no.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. These Are the Headlines That Elon Musk Says Don’t Exist (June 23) "Children are starving and people around the world are going without medical care that was being provided by USAID. People are dying as result of Musk’s action. And to deny this fact is to deny reality."