gods demand too much, children are people, the world is still a beautiful place

Gods. What are they? Do they work? How much blood sacrifice do they demand? Are the gods that demand money/ attention/ blood any different from or better than the others? If you’re like me, these are questions you think about. 

Psalms 115 and 135 and Isaiah 44 describe a sort of you-are-what-you-eat logic to idol-worship. They go like this:

All these gods are made out of silver and gold which is just rocks and wood is which just trees. Some dude made an outline in pencil or sharpie, took his saw or chisel or whatever and made it. You think that’s impressive? It’s not. It’s bullshit derivative amateur hour shit. They’re the fake version of real stuff. They have mouths but can’t speak, ears but can’t hear, noses but can’t smell, nostrils but can’t breathe, hands but can’t grasp, legs but can’t walk, weewees and vajayjays but can’t bump uglies, cute little toes but no giggles when you say weeweeweewee all the way home, their eyes are actually plaster, their minds are wooden blocks so they obviously can’t think, etc. 

That is actually the gist of the anti-idol diatribes cited above even if I was a wee bit flippant and irreverant which I am even though I’m The Religious Weirdo. I love this stuff and I don’t think God gets offended or sad if I say peepee bunghole etc while talking about God for was it not God who made the aforementioned poo chutes and piss hoses. Anyway. Tone shift. The end of Isaiah 44, which is a certified banger, goes like this, in the relatively not-weird NIV:

Half of the wood he burns in the fire;
    over it he prepares his meal,
    he roasts his meat and eats his fill.
He also warms himself and says,
    “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”
From the rest he makes a god, his idol;
    he bows down to it and worships.
He prays to it and says,
    “Save me! You are my god!”
They know nothing, they understand nothing;
    their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see,
    and their minds closed so they cannot understand.
No one stops to think,
    no one has the knowledge or understanding to say,
“Half of it I used for fuel;
    I even baked bread over its coals,
    I roasted meat and I ate.
Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left?
    Shall I bow down to a block of wood?”
Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him;
    he cannot save himself, or say,
    “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”

I think of this passage as I was today, at a union convention, asked to stand for the pledge of allegiance. Shall I bow down to a block of wood? Shall I pledge allegiance to a flag? I stood up but I didn’t put my hand on my heart. I sipped my bad hotel coffee. I looked around and wondered what makes people recite these words with conviction. The idols are worth no more than indifference. 

Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?! That’s good shit. The B I B L E yes that’s the book for me. 

I’ve been rereading these anti-gods diatribes and replacing “the idols” with “generative AI” as a little imaginative exercise just for shits and giggles. There’s this deep unholy desire (I think I have it too) to make something truly alive. Not just a computer that seems alive, but to become a living being’s Creator. Which is to say, a desire to be slave-masters. Is AI sentient? Is my gigapet angry at me? They may be stupid questions but they show a dark longing. If your tomagotchi has feelings, hopes, and dreams, then it’s obviously wrong to make it work for you for free. The tech bros wish their chatbots which in fact cannot see/hear/feel/think were living so that they could own a pseudohuman. The warning of the prophets of old is that the tech bros will lose their ability to see/hear/feel/think as they chase the anti-reality anti-human idols that pretend to do all those things. 

There’s a slide purportedly from an IBM training that reads “A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION” and I saw a meme where someone had replaced a few words so it said “A computer can never be SPITEFUL OR HORNY therefore a computer can never MAKE ART” and that’s really the same thing the prophets were saying. Maybe.

The Fall is the story of the desire to be gods. The incarnation is even god giving up on being a god.  It’s no way to live (being anybody’s god).

Athanasius said God became human that humans might become Gods. “Divinization” they call his theological idea. He also had major issues with butt sex. Said it was worse than murder. Bizarre. Mixed bag, these early Christian leaders. 

God put a G spot in fella’s buttholes. Do as you please. Athanasius is with Jesus now and is blessedly indifferent about your prostate tickles. 

Should this blog have less or more Bible Story Time? Weigh in with a comment and I’ll disregard it and continue to write whatever I like. 

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There’s no such thing as non-toxic masculinity. The problem is masculinity. We talk about masculinity the way we talk about capitalism: “unfettered” capitalism is the problem. Well, maybe we have to fetter it because it’s bad. Any example of “wholesome” masculinity or “positive” masculinity is just a man acting in a way that’s coded feminine while displaying the totally neutral and subjective cultural traits that are coded “masculine.” (Facial hair, muscles, flannel shirt, yet he kisses baby on forehead! This must be the “healthy” masculinity we keep hearing about.)

“Man” is a category gatekept by other men but with ever-shifting requirements for entry. To be born cis-typical biologically male is not enough. That just makes you a “boy” to the gender police. There are many categories of not-men, many of them pitted against each other by men. The only workable definition of “man” is someone on the domineering side of the gender hierarchy. 

One of the harshest racist epithets in the American racial hierarchy isn’t a slur per se, but “boy” because even skin color can be an indicator of who is and isn’t in this ambiguously demarcated group called “man.” Race is gendered, gender is racialized, various oppressive structures prop each other up, that’s not news to you. But in this millieu of widespread anti-trans bigotry it’s important to remember who the actual “gender ideologues” and “pronoun police” are. There are so many goddam rules about what it is to be a “man” because “men” are terrified of losing their arbitrarily granted right to dominate non-men. In fact “man” is no more of a real category than “white.” It’s just a name for the oppressor’s club. 

The manliest of men will be policed and questioned in their manliness. If it was a “natural” category nobody would be using social pressure or the power of the state to say who is and isn’t a man and non-man. 

Be a gender traitor. 

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AI chatbots are a conservative technology. By producing the most statistically likely outcome they calcify tradition. They reinforce widely-held but false beliefs. They oppose novelty and innovation because those things are unlikely.

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Here’s a cool propaganda poster. One source claims it’s from 1974 encouraging people in China to join their local militia to defend the nation in case of invasion. Another source said 1950s. I don’t know. I gave up on finding which claim is true. It’s a fun picture. If you have facts please leave a comment.

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Sorta related: Here’s a link to a reddit post by a guy who collects vintage Chinese Bicycles. Whenever I get excited about someone’s collection of something I wonder to what extent I seem to others like what people with collections of dolls or Beanie Babies or rubber duckies seem like to me. The collector’s paradox: I can’t understand why someone would clutter their home with one, much less two, rubber duckies or stuffed animals yet if I were to inherit this guy’s fourteen vintage Chinese bicycles I would feel really bad breaking them up and if I stumbled upon a fifteenth vintage Chinese bicycle I might just buy it because who else would have a good home for it?

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I’m not a hoarder. It runs in my family. I am aware when the quantity of something I own is greater than the socially expected norm. I’d wager I have less of most things than most of my socio-economic national peers. Does this matter? Probably not? This blog is free.

I do think collections are, as a general rule*, cool. There are people who are intrigued and delighted by the endless variety and surprises in this world as expressed by the array of postage stamps they’ve seen and collected. Or the subtleties of the variations in the design language of fountain pens, watch dials, or bongs. It’s hard to name a more sincere celebration of the joy of being alive than delighting in noticing the uniqueness and beauty of one corner of this universe we’re part of. In some way, the more banal the collection the more fascinating to me. If you think every single one of these pocket knives is interesting then I definitely want to hear you tell me what is interesting about every single one. I think that’s the line between a collector and a hoarder. A hoarder has objects of their collection they couldn’t tell you something awesome about. Maybe? Just slinging around confident declarations here.  Two questions to ask if you have a whole lot of something: Would you feel devastated or relieved if it all burnt up in a fire? Would your neighbors or the people you love feel relieved? 

My friend Dale mentioned one time that he collects bicentennial quarters. For you non-US readers, that’s a US 25 cent piece from the year 1976 which was 200 years after the 1976 declaration of independence from Britain. Instead of an eagle on the back there’s some drummer guy and it says “BICENTENNIAL 1776-1976.” These quarters were an exciting thing to find before the US mints started churning out “state quarters” on which the back, rather than having an eagle or that one-off drummer boy, had the name of a state and something symbolizing that state. This started sometime in the Clinton years. I was a kid, still in the US. They rotated through all 50 states at only five per year so it took ten years to get through all the states. There were little collector maps where you could pop in the quarter for each state. Fun! But before that there was only one excitingly unusual quarter. Some people, like Dale, collected them. I doubt many still do. 

I should have consulted Wikipedia’s 50 State Quarters article before trying to explain that. I opened it just now to fact-check the above paragraph but have now decided not to. Too much work. Maybe I’ll read it later. 

I was working two cash-register jobs at the time. I kept hooking him up with bicentennial quarters. I’d just swap out any in the till every day when counting out the drawer. It made the tedium of counting coins less tedious. I mentioned Dale’s collection to coworkers and mutual friends. They started passing me bicentennial quarters. I’d known Dale about five years and never known about the bicentennial quarter collection. How dare he? This was like 15 years ago now. Soon with our help he had outgrown the m&m’s minis tube housing his collection. I discovered a bicentennial half-dollar. You know I swapped that out for less exotic currency and presented my prize to Dale like I was a magi with myrrh or a kitty cat with a dead bird. 

Send all bicentennial quarters to:

Dale McCarthy
c/o Ben Wildflower Art
PO Box 4798
Philadelphia PA 19134

Here’s another thing I just realized as I’m thinking about collections: I hate seashell collections. So much surface area for dust. My mother loved to have bowls of seashells in the bathroo;. But if you collect little bits of sea glass in a bowl on your shelf that’s somehow interesting to me. My preferences don’t have to make sense. 

Collections, rated into three categories:

COOL: bicentennial quarters; any specific bicycle component; bicycles; relics; holy water from various sources; swords; knives; coins; rocks; taxidermy, pelts, or skulls; inexpensive watches; almost any hand tool; ephemera and equipment from a hobby or interest; fossilized anything, petrified wood; feathers; cool rocks; plants; books; crucifixes; 

OK: sea glass; vintage firearms; key chains; refrigerator magnets; those squashed pennies from tourist traps; expensive watches; sand from various locations; beer cans and bottles; band shirts; 

DISLIKE: sea shells; Funko Pops or any kind of consumer product new in its box; children’s toys of any kind including action figures, dolls, or Tonka trucks; Precious Moments figurines or whatnot; modern firearms; a bunch of things that are all one theme or animal but all kinds of different categories of objects (like if you become the turtle guy because you had a pet turtle and used to wear a hat with a turtle or something like that so now everybody gives you turtle things and if they see something with a turtle they’re like, “Oh I should get that for so-and-so whose thing is turtles.” Every new turtle gift you get solidifies your identity as the turtle guy.); neck ties;  cats or any animal really; sneakers; 

Real benwildflowerdotcomslashblogslashbloggityblog fans will leave a comments with at least one Cool, one OK, one Dislike collection category. 

*I mis-typed “rule” as “rool” and couldn’t figure out why it had the red spellcheck underline for maybe five seconds. In my head it was spelled ROOL. Funny. My friend David could never remember how to spell “tongue” so he’d google “big lick muscle.” He died in March 2020. I miss him pretty often. 

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Francis turned five recently. I am in awe of him. He loves me with a purity of heart I can’t describe. There are more surprising joys in parenthood than I expected. Francis is curious. He has intellectual humility. Recently he came to me and said, “Dad. The sun is bigger than the earth. Way bigger.” I told him he was correct and I did already know that. I wasn’t being a dick about it, but I wasn’t leaning into the sense of awe he was sharing with me. He kept talking about it wide-eyed, saying “For a long time I thought our world was way bigger than the sun. I thought that for a long time because it looks like a little ball. But now I know it is way bigger and far away so it looks small. It just looks small. It’s huge.” He really wanted me to grasp how big of a deal this was and so I sat down and I just asked questions. How did you learn that? What else did she say about planets? You were surprised? Did you think maybe she was wrong when she said the sun is that much bigger than the earth? He was satisfied with the exchange, we ended up talking about whether he could have a snack or something. The kid had a whole Copernican revolution in his head. That shit could break the Catholic church. And he processed it just fine. I admire him. I learn a lot from him. He’s a good learner which makes him a good teacher. 

As I’ve been thinking a lot about what a blessing it is to be a parent I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the notion of children’s liberation and what I can confidently say about the ways we need to dismantle the hierarchy of adults over children. Like any political or philosophical concept I try to wrap my head around I find myself unable to describe it except as primarily a religious issue. The various domination structures I live in and participate in (member of legal cis-hetero marriage, employed taxpayer, US citizen, etc.) demand we conceive of children as the property of their parents. Like any domination structure, this destroys the oppressor and the oppressed because we are not here on earth to lord over others, we are here to love and be loved. Under the anti-child patriarchy parents are cut off from the authority and opinions of their children. Children are not taken seriously except insofar as they act like adults.

There’s a lot to learn from children. There’s a lot I’ve learned from Francis. I don’t mean just like, “Gee, I’ve learned patience because kids are little shits.” I mean he has insights I’m cut off from if I don’t acknowledge the authority that comes from a perspective he has that I don’t have. 

Parenthood is the greatest joy of my life. You can experience this joy too. Go learn something from a child today. They’re people not property! If we love someone we are delighted in their autonomy. You can't love someone and believe them to be your inferior.

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Americans are leaving the US. I get it. It gets uglier here by the day. 

A Gallup poll last year found 40% of American women, ages 15-44, would like to permanently move overseas, if possible.

Hot diggity damn. That’s a lot of American women.

When Gallup asked Americans during the 2008 recession how many wanted to leave the U.S., the answer was one in 10. Last year: One in five.

It is wild how nearly every American expat quoted in this article is participating in some kind of emigration consulting scheme. 

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Brothel unionization feel-good-story by local metal and labor reporter Kim Kelly. 

Unionize your workplace. Bosses are tyrants and tyranny is bad for your soul. Do some freedom and democracy at work. It feels nice. 

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I’ve got paperwork sitting on my desk here to sign up to be a Cub Scouts leader. They’ve rebranded from the Boy Scouts to Scouting America and made some changes to be less infested with pedophiles and Pete Hegseth was like, “That’s no good! If you don’t support the troops then me and my “Department of War” won’t support your wholesome camping activities club,” and Scouting America decided to cave and appease the party of pedophiles. Not good. Too bad. 

The organization began allowing gay youth in 2013, ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders in 2015 and announced in 2017 that it would accept transgender students. It began accepting girls as Cub Scouts as of 2018 and into the flagship Boy Scout program — renamed Scouts BSA — in 2019. As of May 2024, more than 6,000 girls had earned the coveted Eagle Scout rank.
The Pentagon said in a statement earlier this month that it was reviewing its relationship with Scouting America, claiming it had “lost its way” in many ways and calling the organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts “unacceptable.”

The next day Hegseth and his fuckwits bombed a school full of girls. They hate children and they hate girls even more than they hate boys.

In America the people in charge of bombing kids in countries its citizens can’t find on a map get to decide if the outdoors activities clubs have been too kind to girls and gay and trans people. Seems not like a good way to arrange society.

I have more in common with the slaughtered schoolchildren in a school in Iran than I do with Hegseth and his ilk. Which side are you on?

When I was a kid I was not a Boy scout. I was a Royal Ranger, which is the evangelical pentecostal denomination Assemblies of God knockoff. There was an analogous club for girls called “Missionettes” where they learned how to dress modestly and bake treats or something. I don’t know. We got to go shoot shotguns and rifles while the girls made lists of what their godly husband’s attributes would be. Unsurprisingly, recent reports indicate Royal Rangers is infested with pedophiles too. 

My first time realizing it was bad to be a girl and good to be a boy was while loading a vehicle with another kid's dad for some cool Royal Rangers outing and this kid kept bending the aluminum leg of a camp stool even though his dad said to stop and eventually his dad snapped, "Do you want to stay here with the girls?! Or do you want to go campling?! Do that one more time and you're staying here with your mom and sister!" And that's how I learned it sucks to be a girl.

I have since learned girls don't go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

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Stupid video break

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I deactivated Facebook. I was tired of seeing slop and bad political opinions from people who aren’t a part of my real life. It sucks. Marketplace was the best part of Facebook. It’s encouraging to see people making alternatives to the value it actually provided. 

I hope more little localized experiments like this pop up. Here’s hoping a few can be replicable and not controlled by wealthy perverts. 

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We shouldn't give our attention to contraptions that can't love us back.

Let's love real people and love the real world.

I think that's what the prophet Isaiah was saying.

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Some photos without context:

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See you soon. Go love something and someone real.