You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
All Minnesota license plates recalled after it's discovered that the state only has 9,998 lakes
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
"Hell, I absolutely cannot stand the weird Loki-obsession that some people develop, especially when it comes from a background of absolute ignorance. As a bit of background - I teach Scandinavian literature at a large-ish university. This means that, in every class I teach, there's at least one Neo-pagan with patently absurd ideas about how older Germanic religion worked, usually backed up by other texts that don't reference actual research at all. Last semester, though . . . I actually had to deal with one of these "I am a spiritual bride of Loki" types.
It's one thing to have that belief - I'm totally fine with that, because people can believe what they like, and religious beliefs, no matter how odd or out-of-touch with the original practice, are personal and subjective enough that it's your decision - and I don't really want to argue about personal decisions. It's another thing to derail a class for fifteen minutes claiming that Loki hates the story of making Skaði laugh because it was invented by the nasty Christians to discredit how much the Norse people liked him and prevent his awesomeness from shining through. Nor is it appropriate to come to my office hours and request that I change my teaching methods to accommodate your beliefs and teach "the real stories", which in this case meant a gigantic pile of disturbing fan-fiction that I promptly deleted for being creepy and sent a curt reply of, "Please don't send this to me again. Further attachments of explicit text will be treated as sexual harassment and will be forwarded to the appropriate departments."
I've had some good come out of people who take these classes thanks to prior beliefs. Heritage students are generally good, I've seen metalheads end up liking some of the cooler 1800s literature, and I've had Neo-Pagan/Ásatru students really get into the modern stuff - especially when they learn the word they're using was invented by Edvard Grieg and does not, in fact, go back thousands of years. But damn, I cannot believe the crazy that comes from someone thinking they're married to a figure they only know about through the Marvel alien-god version. It mostly comes down to cultural misunderstanding, I think - people can't seem to grasp that they're looking at legends through the lens of Christianity preserving a cultural heritage, that a lot of the mythological details are commonly accepted to be allegorical stories, or that older cultures had this amazing concept we call "metaphor". It's maddening, and now that I know Tumblr is partially to blame, I'll try to ignore it even harder."
People will tell you that you can believe whatever you wish, that all opinions are equally acceptable, that you can say whatever you want to and no opinion is right, wrong, or better than another opinion; as they are all just different ways of seeing the world.
In the end, it's not that you can do/say/think/believe whatever you want. It's that you can do/say/think/believe whatever you want within reason.
Where "within reason" is determined by the majority of the reasonable people around you; where said reasonable people determine who is or who is not reasonable.
This is the tyranny of the nice people over the jerkfaces.
"Hell, I absolutely cannot stand the weird Loki-obsession that some people develop, especially when it comes from a background of absolute ignorance. As a bit of background - I teach Scandinavian literature at a large-ish university. This means that, in every class I teach, there's at least one Neo-pagan with patently absurd ideas about how older Germanic religion worked, usually backed up by other texts that don't reference actual research at all. Last semester, though . . . I actually had to deal with one of these "I am a spiritual bride of Loki" types.
It's one thing to have that belief - I'm totally fine with that, because people can believe what they like, and religious beliefs, no matter how odd or out-of-touch with the original practice, are personal and subjective enough that it's your decision - and I don't really want to argue about personal decisions. It's another thing to derail a class for fifteen minutes claiming that Loki hates the story of making Skaði laugh because it was invented by the nasty Christians to discredit how much the Norse people liked him and prevent his awesomeness from shining through. Nor is it appropriate to come to my office hours and request that I change my teaching methods to accommodate your beliefs and teach "the real stories", which in this case meant a gigantic pile of disturbing fan-fiction that I promptly deleted for being creepy and sent a curt reply of, "Please don't send this to me again. Further attachments of explicit text will be treated as sexual harassment and will be forwarded to the appropriate departments."
I've had some good come out of people who take these classes thanks to prior beliefs. Heritage students are generally good, I've seen metalheads end up liking some of the cooler 1800s literature, and I've had Neo-Pagan/Ásatru students really get into the modern stuff - especially when they learn the word they're using was invented by Edvard Grieg and does not, in fact, go back thousands of years. But damn, I cannot believe the crazy that comes from someone thinking they're married to a figure they only know about through the Marvel alien-god version. It mostly comes down to cultural misunderstanding, I think - people can't seem to grasp that they're looking at legends through the lens of Christianity preserving a cultural heritage, that a lot of the mythological details are commonly accepted to be allegorical stories, or that older cultures had this amazing concept we call "metaphor". It's maddening, and now that I know Tumblr is partially to blame, I'll try to ignore it even harder."
Who is this person? Unlike most of the people you quote, they sound pretty OK.
Comments
i'll delete a few of those
BE UPSET AT MY HORRIBLENESS
oh my, how naughty of me!
*blushes*
'only on tumblr' *laughtertrack*
and its sequel, Dan Vs. Dan Vs. Dan Vs.
It's one thing to have that belief - I'm totally fine with that, because people can believe what they like, and religious beliefs, no matter how odd or out-of-touch with the original practice, are personal and subjective enough that it's your decision - and I don't really want to argue about personal decisions. It's another thing to derail a class for fifteen minutes claiming that Loki hates the story of making Skaði laugh because it was invented by the nasty Christians to discredit how much the Norse people liked him and prevent his awesomeness from shining through. Nor is it appropriate to come to my office hours and request that I change my teaching methods to accommodate your beliefs and teach "the real stories", which in this case meant a gigantic pile of disturbing fan-fiction that I promptly deleted for being creepy and sent a curt reply of, "Please don't send this to me again. Further attachments of explicit text will be treated as sexual harassment and will be forwarded to the appropriate departments."
I've had some good come out of people who take these classes thanks to prior beliefs. Heritage students are generally good, I've seen metalheads end up liking some of the cooler 1800s literature, and I've had Neo-Pagan/Ásatru students really get into the modern stuff - especially when they learn the word they're using was invented by Edvard Grieg and does not, in fact, go back thousands of years. But damn, I cannot believe the crazy that comes from someone thinking they're married to a figure they only know about through the Marvel alien-god version. It mostly comes down to cultural misunderstanding, I think - people can't seem to grasp that they're looking at legends through the lens of Christianity preserving a cultural heritage, that a lot of the mythological details are commonly accepted to be allegorical stories, or that older cultures had this amazing concept we call "metaphor". It's maddening, and now that I know Tumblr is partially to blame, I'll try to ignore it even harder."
In the end, it's not that you can do/say/think/believe whatever you want. It's that you can do/say/think/believe whatever you want within reason.
Where "within reason" is determined by the majority of the reasonable people around you; where said reasonable people determine who is or who is not reasonable.
This is the tyranny of the nice people over the jerkfaces.
the only solution is to (literally!) reduce the universe to a single concept and rebuild it from scratch so that it is comprehensible to non-geniuses