Sientir's Blog

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 ...

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...

I once had a dream, and in this dream I was walking around a city. The initial details are vague, of course; remembering dreams is a tricky business. But there was an element of video-gameness to this situation, as I, like a game creator, was some sort of godlike being. Now, I don’t mean the pathetic gods we see in movies. No, I mean like the powerful gods the player inhabits in games like The Sims or the even more powerful godlike position of creating a video game, where you’re responsible for designing the rules of the universe. In this case, I was positioning NPCs—that’s “non-player characters,” an entity that the player doesn’t directly control. I was figuring out how the game engine worked: specifically, what would happen to NPCs on the street if I went into a building? Would their position reset (that is, was the outside reloaded into its default state when entering and then exiting a building?), or would they continue doing what they’d been doing? After all, computers (including...

In this episode, I talk about a few of the ways that Christians can end up waging an unholy war against non-Christians, which is something that shouldn't happen, yet sadly does. Support me at https://www.patreon.com/Sientir

This was a hard episode for me to write, as my natural inclination is to delve deeply into any given subject, whereas this episode required me to be be shallow and broad. That said, it's an important topic! Support me at https://www.patreon.com/Sientir