my most antitheist opinion is that hell is like. a cartoonishly evil thing to believe in and insanely abusive to teach children about
“No, I didn’t threaten my children with torture if they disobeyed me, I just told them that an omniscient force forever watching their every move would torture them eternally if they ever disobeyed me!”
Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
I was at the coffeeshop in the village and someone asked me how my llamas are doing, and a woman overheard and told me that when she was a kid, her parents used to have a couple of llamas in their sheep farm, and every single sheep in their flock imprinted on one of the two llamas. Each sheep chose the best most charismatic llama according to mysterious sheep criteria, and never wavered in their ovine loyalty. Each of the two llamas was worshiped by a small sub-flock of devoted sheep who followed him everywhere like Jesus’s apostles and only left their field for transhumance when led by “their” llama. The funniest thing is the way this woman overheard the word “llama” and immediately came to sit next to me to tell me this, like she had waited since childhood to share her bewilderment about the two religious congregations of sheep led by rival llama prophets in her family farm.
I’d have trouble keeping that in myself.
i love how 100k of us feel the same need to tell everyone that she felt
