• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Thanks for the thought - we did a little of this over the last few years but it wasn’t working for us. One of the more important parts of religious practice for both of us is the communal aspect, and as we live in a mid-size city in the Southern U.S. there aren’t very many opportunities outside of a church setting for strong, long-term community building. Not saying there aren’t any, but it’s difficult to build a strong network when third places have essentially disappeared. The Episcopal Church is working for us, at least right now, as a place to build those networks and practice our faith without having to compromise on moral stances that are critical to us.


  • I’m always a little reluctant to post about religious topics on Beehaw because there’s a pretty strong anti-christian sentiment on Lemmy in general which is, to be fair, entirely understandable.

    I grew up in the “Church of Christ” and my wife and I stayed part of our CoC congregation for a long time mostly because of the support network and personal connections we had built up there, even though we had a lot of problems with evangelical theology and the increasing conservatism. A few years ago we wound up in the crosshairs of a group of deeply unpleasant people because of some comments we made in support of LGBTQ folks, and ended up spiritually homeless for a while. We eventually ended up at a local Episcopal church and while it’s been a big adjustment for us in some ways - we definitely weren’t used to high church liturgy - we’ve really come to love it there. It’s not without problems, but we feel like we’re able to wrestle with our beliefs and still have the support of the community, and we’ve made some close connections there as well.

    Theologically I’m all over the place, so don’t ask me for a firm stance on anything - I’m just making this shit up as I go 😅



  • If I recall correctly, the main reason we defederated from those instances at the time was the sheer volume of spam we were getting from users of those instances. While we do sometimes have a need to moderate users from larger instances like Lemm.ee, it’s not currently at a volume that we can’t handle, from what I’ve seen.

    As always, as a moderator of several Beehaw communities, I would encourage you to report any comment or post you see that isn’t up to the standards of Beehaw.org. Don’t assume someone else is going to do it, and don’t assume that moderators are always watching every interactions closely - we’re all doing this in our free time and have other responsibilities. We may not take action on every report - sometimes things are borderline or the community has already pushed back and we feel like things are in hand - but I guarantee someone is looking at and considering every one.











  • I feel like the conversation is getting pretty far out of my depth, so again if I say something hurtful please let me know. If it helps, I’ve been diagnosed with a mild to moderate anxiety disorder, but I’m pretty functional and CBT has been enough for me to get through most of my rough patches. I also have a loved one who suffers from OCD (actual OCD, not the kind where you like things to be neat). I also know how unbelievably frustrating and hurtful it is to be told that you should just “think better” or somehow fix your own “bad thoughts” or “wrong feelings”, so if I somehow unintentionally communicated that in my earlier comment I apologize, it’s not what I intended.

    My conception of mental illness has usually been that the problem is happening before volition really comes into the picture. So in your example of the videogame, it’s not necessarily that there’s a bug with the controller, but maybe there’s a bug with the display. What you’re seeing in the “game” isn’t accurate in some way, so you wind up in the pit because you didn’t see it, or because it seemed like it was somewhere else on the screen, or because something was indicating that the pit was the correct direction to go. The way I’ve always pictured mental illness is that the inputs on your controller might make perfect sense to another person if they could see what’s on your display, but because the display is bugged they lead to the “wrong” outcome. To exit the metaphor a little, I might be feeling intense anxiety about something (or nothing in particular, thanks brain) and avoid it, because anxiety is our brain’s signal that something is dangerous and should be avoided. But when that thing is an assignment for school, there’s a problem with the input or the perception of that thing. Now, my brain causing me to feel amounts of anxiety that are wildly disproportionate with the thing itself is not really something I can control, but once I understand that my “display” is fucked up in a certain way, I can work around it to a certain degree and remain pretty functional.

    I tend to believe that if we were able to get inside people’s minds and understand all of the “inputs” they’re getting, from their emotions, stray thoughts, traumas, memories, etc that for the vast majority of people, we’d be able to understand why they’ve made the choices that they make and they would make sense, in light of the information their brain is giving them. That’s why the assertion that mass shooters don’t have any mental illness is surprising to me. I can’t understand why someone would make that choice if their display hasn’t gotten fucked up in some major way. Now, maybe it is, but it’s entirely environmental or social, or something along those lines. If that’s true, then I guess I could make some sense of it, although it’s hard for me to understand what experiences would lead to this kind of destructive decision.

    Anyway, at this point I’m basically rambling about a bunch of stuff that I really have no expertise or deep understanding of, so I apologize for that, and I apologize again if I’ve said anything out of line.




  • Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of “mass shooting” is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I’m fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I’m not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term “mass shooting”. Don’t get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It’s not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don’t understand, and it’s what I tend to think of when people talk about “mass shootings”. Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it’s a problem of imprecise terminology.


  • Hi Tomato - a lot of what you’re saying here has already been addressed elsewhere in the thread. The OP isn’t just addressing Lemmy, but other Fediverse services like Mastodon as well. He also notes in the article several people who been addressing ways in which Fediverse culture has been toxic to black users. These aren’t imagined problems, they exist in a lot of places off of and on Lemmy, and providing suggestions to make these sites better for black users is a good thing, not something to get defensive about. This post isn’t accusing you personally of anything, but if you feel challenged by it then it might be a good opportunity for you to interrogate those feelings.

    Also, others have addressed your comments about not seeing other’s race online, etc, but I think it’s worth taking a step back and pausing. If people of color say they experience racism online, even though you don’t notice what race other people are, do you think it’s possible that there may be systemic problems or unconscious biases that might cause those folks to experience racism even when it is unintended? Those are the kinds of problems that aren’t solved by saying “I don’t say racist things to people and I don’t see color”. They’re problems that are built into our society just by the fact that we were all born and raised in an imperfect culture.

    Nobody is accusing anyone of anything here, and nobody is trying to make anyone feel ashamed of who they are. But we can all benefit from stopping, thinking about the ways that we interact with others, and taking the time to try and be sure that we aren’t acting in ways that harm others even if that isn’t our intent or we weren’t aware of the harm in the first place.



  • I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn’t seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase “mental illness” is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?

    Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone’s toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that’s genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don’t know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?