It’s been a while since I was in the job market (I’ve been disabled almost 15 years), but the advice I consistently received was ‘call them’. If you apply online or file a resume or even drop one off in person, you’re just one name in a sea of applicants. File the resume, give it 3 days or so, then call them. Talk to the hiring manager if you can. Tell them who you are and what you’re looking for. Find out if they have a timetable on when they’re hiring. If they don’t give you one keep calling them every few days until they hire you or say ‘no thanks’. At that point you go from being one rando among dozens or more to being that one really persistent person who seemed super interested in the job and whose name is now memorable when they get around to looking at your resume.

Bill Wurtz’s excellent history of the entire world, I guess. Also check out his history of Japan.

Yeah I don’t need anywhere near that much. I’m syncing maybe 50-100mb worth of stuff. More might be nice cause I could back up other things too, but… meh.

Came here to say this, I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Absolutely. I, too, was once a teenager.

I don’t trust a particular source. I sorta trust GroundNews to at least show me the bias and give me less-overtly-biased alternatives. Otherwise I am more trustful in general (but don’t fully trust) investigative journalism orgs like ProPublica, independent journalists like Ken Klippenstein, etc.

Yeah, that worked for copyign stuff over, but I need some kind of cloud backup service that I can drop files like my passwrods.kdbx file or my writing projects on to ensure that they are backed up. I have since discovered pCloud and have been very happy with it so far.

Yeah, I found some tutorials for it and was like ‘Nah fuck this’, so I switched to pCloud. Much rather have a linux-native client for a service that cares about privacy and doesn’t include the fuckery that MS often puts into its products. pCloud works great.

I hate the ‘containerize everything’ methodology of Bazzite. I tried it, and every problem I ran into the solution was like ‘Oh, go add this line to the config file in this folder, easy peasy’, only nothing was where it should’ve been because everything was containerized. I get that it’s useful, but it’s not my jam. I like nobara a lot better (because it’s a regular distro, but also because it’s not-ubuntu which hates my bog-standard RTX3060 GPU for, uh, reasons; Pop wouldn’t let me update the nvidia driver without hard-locking the system no matter the version I tried, 2 installs of Ubuntu simply turned my monitor off with ‘no signal’ on boot and refused to do anything even when I let them sit there for 30 minutes, and Mint did the same thing booting the installer on USB.

However, I’ve since discovered pCloud and begun migrating my onedrive stuff over there. I was only ever using onedrive because it came installed with windows and I needed a place to put little stuff like my keepass passwords database and small projects and such to ensure that they were backed up. I would much rather use something with a linux-native client and without all the fucky-wuckiness that tends to be involved in any Microsoft product.

I’m already in the process of switching. Just installed nobara a few days ago, been slowly getting my games and such working and have been impressed. My only issue so far is I have some stuff in my onedrive folder on windows that I can’t seem to access from linux. Need a way to access that or replace one drive for file sync and backup.

There are often other requirements to consider as well, so be aware of those. For example when I looked into this (in the late 90s, so a long-ass time ago) it was super common to accept native English speakers pretty much with no experience or certification or whatever, but I guess a lot of companies had bad experiences so right when I started looking seriously into doing it many of the companies started requiring a 4-year degree (in anything, just kind of as proof that you could stick something like that out, since one of the common complaints I saw is people bailing before the contract was up.)

The point of all this is just to say: check job boards for companies that are hiring and look at what their requirements are. Some might not require TEFL, some might require other stuff too.

Thanks. Yeah the friend might’ve also been asexual? He had one girlfriend in the entire time I knew him, but that didn’t last very long. shrug The subject honestly never came up between us, it was just how it was and we had more interesting shit to do/talk about/etc with our time.

Re:puberty - yeah, my mom a couple times decided to ask me The Gay Question, like if you aren’t bringing home girlfriends maybe you have boyfriends and are just shy about it or something? And I didn’t have the words to explain (or really even understand myself) that I was into boys about as much as I was into girls: not at all. Like I went through some of the motions just because it was what everyone else was doing, but I never understood the point so it never worked out for long. Man, if only I had just been into boys instead, that would’ve been a massive relief. I’d have been parading that shit up and down the street in a pathetic attempt to get me some of that ‘Look, I’m not broken; I may be a little weird but I’m just like you!’ validation. :P

Yeah I’m definitely working on trying to get rid of the FOMO at this point in time. I have a lot of great people in my life tbh and I’m trying to branch out and be a bit more social with things that scare me. But even if I do, I’ll never really have the “standard” human experience. Gotta figure out how to eventually be ok with that.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Once I got out of the depression of my younger years I spent a lot of years I still had to distract myself constantly from that hollowness I felt inside at not having what everyone else had, that loneliness that threatened to overwhelm. I was good at it, and thus I was able to mostly be a nominally-functional adult most of the time. But it did fade, and I think a lot of that had to do with age. The older you get the more you just get used to the way things are, you become more comfortable and pragmatic about who you are, and you don’t miss the things that you decided were less important nearly as much. I was rather surprised to discover a few years ago that it wasn’t gone forever, though. I got a surprise dose when the friend I mentioned died; I had also lost both of my parents in the ~8 years before that, so with that third and most shocking death I pretty much went instantly from feeling like a reasonably well-adjusted person to rudderless and totally alone in the world. In the first week or two I couldn’t not have some kind of live TV or radio on, it was like I had to know for sure that there were definitely still other people in the world right now living their lives just like they always had. I couldn’t sit in a quiet room by myself without feeling it creeping up on me for like a year afterward. But it does get better.

I’m not a spiritual or religious person, myself. I briefly looked into Taoism, but it seems that the westernized idealized version of it isn’t what Taoism necessarily is in reality.

Yeah, fair enough. If I had to slap a label on my spirituality it’d be ‘It’s complicated.’ :P I spent a lot of my life looking for meaning and religion seemed like simultaneously the best place to look but also the hardest place to find it in, it was frustrating and confusing as hell, so I spent a lot of time reading everything I could get my hands on about it, was an atheist for a long time because of that frustration, and… let’s just say that nowadays I’m more of a homebrew kinda guy. ;)

Thanks for your offer to chat! Hope you don’t mind if I’m just giving a long winded response here lol.

Not at all, you might’ve noticed I’m a lil long-winded myself. :P

I found out about asexuality in my teens.

That must’ve been an interesting experience. We often don’t realize how hard it is to think about and understand a thing until we have a name for it, it’s like we need that convenient handle to grab onto to be able to figure it out, and I didn’t have that until years and years later.

Even today, whenever I approach asexual communities, I find that most of them are filled with very young coming of age people who are so extremely “terminally online” to the point where it makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t discover these communities until I was in my 40s, but I felt that pretty keenly myself, so I think I know what you mean. Because they’re young and sexuality is normally such a huge part of peoples’ lives at that time it’s hard to escape the constant reminders from all around them of the fact that they’re different, so they seek community online/etc and then turn that community’s group identity (identification with this particular way of being) into their own personal identity, they make themselves so much about this one aspect of their lives. Meanwhile I’m over here like ‘Yeah, I’m asexual, but also I’m a former IT guy, a life-long gamer almost since the birth of video games, an avid student of politics, religion, and philosophy, a big sci-fi nerd’, etc. I have a lot of stuff going on, that’s just one small - and, these days, not even particularly significant - portion of my life, so the idea of people who are all about that is just weird to me.

But it’s refreshing to hear from your perspective, as an asexual in the “real world”, with thoughts, feelings, and experiences based more in reality as opposed to in an online hypersensitive safety zone.

I dunno that I am any more ‘of the real world’ than anyone else, lol. I’m disabled and spend a huge amount of my free time in front of a computer, so I’m as terminally online as anyone else. :P I just had to mostly figure a bunch of this stuff out on my own because it was going on before the internet was a thing.

Hope the best for you!

Thanks, you too!

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Absolutely, I don’t mind at all.

1. That’s complicated. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when there wasn’t a word for it, so I spent a lot of years just thinking I was broken/defective and hating the world as a result (I had some other stuff going on as well, medical problems and such, so I felt like I had just been dumped on and it was somehow the fault of the world and everyone in it.) Puberty was fuckin’ weird because my younger sisters and cousins and such kept bringing home boy/girlfriends and everyone would look at me like ‘Where’s yours?’ They did eventually stop asking questions, but the looks didn’t stop for a long time. I didn’t come across the word ‘asexual’ until maybe ~15 years ago, and even then it kind of took a while to realize that it was an accurate description. So… anywhere from puberty in the late 80s to maybe 10 years ago depending on definition? I kinda went from ‘I’m broken and unlovable’, to ‘This is just how I am and fuck anyone who has a problem with it’, to ‘Oh, there’s a word for that. Hi, I’m Libra and I’m asexual.’
2. I do now. When I was younger I keenly felt like I was missing out on what everyone else took for granted, especially that life-partner thing, and I was depressed for many years as a result. What pulled me out of it and made me see the value of my life was two things. First, and this is kinda dark, but I got literally to the point of putting a gun in my mouth and realized that for whatever reason I just couldn’t do it. That left me no option but to find ways to make my life even marginally less unbearable because I had no escape, it immediately got rid of all the excuses I had used to not work on myself, my situation, etc. The second, and this might sound strange, was philosophy. I’ve long been a student of religion (but not a member of one since I was a teenager) and in my 30s I branched out into philosophy as well. There I came across the works of the absurdists like Camus, and the Myth of Sisyphus especially (though it took some time) was a big help. It made me realize that if there is no meaning inherent to anything then I get to decide what it all means to me. I had been deciding sort of subconsciously that life was a hateful, burdensome thing to be endured rather than enjoyed, but I could decide instead that even if I wasn’t leading the kind of life the people around me expected that I was still enjoying the moments, that I could even enjoy the struggle (‘The struggle itself … is enough to fill a man’s heart’). I slowly stopped being an angry, cynical asshole who hated the world and learned to embrace the things I did enjoy about life until I realized one day that that was most things actually. It also helped that I had a good friend for ~25 years who was basically a life partner without being a romantic partner, though he sadly died a few years ago. I still miss having someone to share my life with now sometimes, but most of the time I can fill that void with friends, community, and hobbies (I’m disabled so I have lots of free time for tabletop RPGs, gaming, reading, etc.)

I’m still a little awkward in social situations too, but I’ve gotten much better about it, I’ll actually talk to total strangers in the store instead of being weirded out that someone I don’t know would talk to me, etc. I feel like I fake being a relatively normal, socially well-adjusted adult pretty well, to the point that most of the time I actually feel that way too. I have to imagine that the modern relatively easy access to therapy could speed that process along for most people, but I was born too early and was too poor/stubborn to try to get help so I had to bull my way through it on my own. It sucked, and it has had some lasting consequences that I hope others don’t ever have to go through, but at the other end if it I’m a pretty content person, which I guess is all that matters.

I haven’t really talked with other asexual people (internet or otherwise) myself, so I welcome the opportunity to do so. In fact if you ever want/need someone to talk to about this stuff you are more than welcome to hit up my DMs (does lemmy have DMs? I’m still new here.)

Well I’m not sure which was the biggest shock, discovering that I have a partner or discovering that we’re having a baby. Both, as you might imagine, came as quite a surprise to an asexual man in his 50s who has never had a girlfriend. ;)

You are welcome to read the thread below, I’ve laid out my issues here, but it looks like we might get a proper conversation going if you want to keep reading.

Two Paths

The revelation of God is one that compounds on the past. Creation, Expulsion, Punishment, Enrichment, Liberation, Exile etc until you reach God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ who uses the history of human failures to illustrate the grace of God and the establishment of a new covenant that saves all people. This is a logical progression.

Which is kind of my point. A logical progression of revelation implies change over time in god’s plan, actions, or relationship with humanity. But a truly perfect, eternal, unchanging truth wouldn’t require progression or revision. If the Divine Truth was perfect and eternal and true, why did it need changing? Evangelicals talk about the ‘new covenant’ all the time, but humanity isn’t any different now than it was then, why did we need a new one? Seems like either god changed or the truth wasn’t eternal.

I haven’t seen a compelling case that divine truth has been fundamentally corrupted.

Corrupted might not be the right word, but we have examples of, say, King James commissioning his own bible to support the divine right of kings. But aside from that, human fallibility plays a part in the transmission of this truth, and anyone who has played a game of telephone in grade school can tell you how that tends to go: you line up the whole class, whisper something into the first kid’s ear, they whisper into the next, and what started out as ‘Billy can’t come to school today because he’s sick’ comes out the other end as ‘little Billy died’ or whatever. Even if you assume each person in the chain intends to transmit it faithfully people make mistakes, there are disputes over word choice and changes to meaning over time in translation, there are newly-discovered ancient texts that cast new light on the ones we had, etc. I don’t know about fundamentally corrupted, but if the perfect eternal truth is all of those things then something else has to account for the paradoxes, and if we’re assuming the literal existence of god then that leaves only human fallibility.

I recognize you may disagree with the points I adequately communicated or have questions about ones I failed to describe well. I am a fallible human after all 😂.

Me too man, I’m just here to have an engaging conversation and learn a little something. All we can do is do our best to own mistakes and not be shy about admitting fault.

You may find that many of the contradictions you’re grappling with don’t exist in Orthodox thought in the same way they might in some Western traditions. I’d encourage looking into Orthodox apologia for a perspective not burdened by the theological inheritances of later Western heresies like penal substitution or strict determinism…

That doesn’t surprise me. What little I know of the early history of Orthodoxy is that there was an early, pretty severe schism over some fundamental stuff that sent the two churches in very different directions. I am curious to know more, though, so I hope you stay and keep the discussion going. I admit that (probably because the way I fell out of Christianity and then into a long but fortunately-ended period of atheism) that Orthodoxy was never really on my radar in my religious studies. But I am a more curious person than I once was with considerably more free time, so I’ll do some poking about and see what I can find. ;)

An aside about “war crimes” … be wary of using a modern lens when assessing the ancient.

That’s entirely fair. I don’t think I was intentionally doing it but there may have been some subconscious stuff going on there. My intent, and perhaps I should’ve chosen a better tool, was to use the terminology of modern ethics to convey the weight of my distaste for the idea of punishing one person for another’s crime in any context.

What is the epistemic justification for Good and Bad in a world where everything is relative? Philosophically it is an arbitrary critique without grounding.

I don’t think everything is relative, nor do I think god is the only source of morality. Even without modern utilitarian concepts like least-harm, it’s pretty clear that ancient human cultures had a concept of justice that depended on the simple and self-evident truth that causing intentional harm to others is bad. It may have been applied unevenly and inconsistently, but. And hell, even a toddler with barely a grasp on language, much less culture or philosophy, can tell the difference between getting bitten by the kid you bit and getting bitten by some kid because she thought you bit her. They’re unhappy at being bitten in either case, but - and I’ve seen this in my nieces and nephews - they get downright angry when they feel that sting of injustice, even if they can’t describe it.

Re:Orthodoxy - fair enough.

Original Sin

The Orthodox perspective is that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin is theirs alone. The consequence of their sin, death, is inherited however.

Ok, that’s an interesting take. If man is not guilty of the sin of Adam then why does he bear the consequences of the act? Why punish someone for something you don’t believe they did?

Since God cannot be in the presence of sin Adam and Eve had to be expelled from the garden.

Yeah but then he followed them around? Adam praises god on the birth of his sons, they give offerings to god and even talk to him, etc. And if Adam’s sin is transmitted to all mankind then Cain and Abel were sinful too, so it kinda seems like god didn’t have a problem being in the presence of sin?

This is, however, a mercy because despite entering a fallen state humanity has an opportunity to sanctify itself in this life

This doesn’t fly with me, because god created Adam and Eve as they were and they (assuming omniscience) couldn’t choose to do otherwise. So not only is god punishing them for a sin of his own making, he’s punishing everyone else despite, in the Orthodox version, them not being guilty of that sin. And then to call pain and suffering a mercy because it gives us the ‘opportunity’ to ‘earn’ back what you took? Nah, I’ll take a hard pass on that one. Sin but not guilt is kind of worse actually. It’s like telling your kid, ‘I know your brother was the one who took the cookie, but I’m going to spank you for it too.’ See also: pettiness and tyranny.

Heavenly beings are in a static state … the state of [Satan’s] soul cannot be changed

If it was static, how did it change from ‘angelic’ to ‘damned’ or whatever after his act of rebellion? Was it the act itself that somehow changed the unchangeable, or did god decide to rewrite reality just this once? If that’s the case, rewriting someone’s soul just so you can eternally punish them for one mistake is kind of a dick move.

Free Will

This is a false dichotomy and is highly dependent on what you mean by free will.

I don’t think so, though I concede that there might be definitions of free will that render it thus, I’m using the pretty common definition of having the ability to make choices.

Just because God knows all things doesn’t mean he orchestrates all things … foreknowledge ≠ predestination

I whole-heartedly disagree, foreknowledge precisely equals predestination. He doesn’t have to orchestrate things; merely knowing ahead of time that I will turn left instead of right at the next intersection means that it is definitionally impossible for me to turn right. If I was able to turn right anyway that would definitionally preclude foreknowledge: you can’t know that I turned left if I turned right.

God is incomprehensible and operates outside of time.

Even if I grant this for the sake of argument, humans do not operate outside of time so foreknowledge of human futures, again definitionally, must necessarily be knowledge about the future of the time that humans operate in. But even if that wasn’t true, if god exists outside of time then he also definitionally exists outside of causality and cannot influence or be influenced by human choices within time, which precludes foreknowledge of human futures.

Furthermore because the Orthodox don’t believe in Original Sin the theological allowance for how man moves and works in the world is different. Man can live in the world and freely choose between Good and Evil. Salvation is achieved through a process of working together with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of life. This process is called Theosis.

Ok, I’ll take your word for it, but according to the most widely-accepted definitions if man is free to choose then god cannot have forenkowledge of those choices.

Because God is not bound by time, His knowledge isn’t predictive—it’s participatory. … We remain free precisely because God allows our freedom to unfold within His omniscient love.

If he’s not outside of causality (as implied by the participatory element here) then he’s not outside of time, because those two things mean effectively the same thing. You say he allows it out of love, I say he allows it out of lack of foreknowledge, because that’s the only thing that is logically consistent.

What we perceive as logical already presupposes the existence of God, because logic itself depends on the existence of objective truth.

Logic doesn’t presuppose god, it merely presupposes consistency. Objective truth can arise from the structure of reality itself without requiring a divine source. We have mountains of evidence that logic is internally self-consistent; that’s not the case for pretty much any holy book I’ve read.

Vengeful/loving God

This is primarily a postmodern critique of scripture by people like Richard Dawkins

That doesn’t render it invalid. Also: primarily, but not uniquely as you point out; I was personally puzzling over this stuff back in the 80s before anyone but the editors of a few science journals had ever heard of Richard Dawkins.

The Orthodox wholly reject this critique as a shallow reading of scripture that does not take into account the context of passages in and of themselves or scripture in its entirety.

I don’t dispute that he is also loving, I dispute that he is exclusively loving as of the New Testament. He just goes on and on about how vengeful and angry he is in the OT, and there’s some of that in the NT too, though I think it’s all said by others since (IIRC, it’s been a while) god doesn’t really have a speaking part in much of the NT. Also I don’t think you get to send your PR team out to call you a ‘loving god’ after slaughtering innocents and children (and advocating the same) over and over again.

NT - Jesus over-turning tables of Money Changers

I wouldn’t count that as wrath, and I also wouldn’t attribute it to god. We know he’s capable of turning those tables over himself if he wanted to, but he didn’t. :P

This is more of a squishy critique than the other two

That’s fair, it’s definitely more of a vibe-check thing, I’m not sure there’s much space to discuss there.

(cont, TIL lemmy doesn’t have that high of a maximum post length.)

Fair point. I am not very familiar with Orthodox Christianity at all, save a little of the very early history. You also sound fairly well-educated on the subject, which makes you twice over not the usual kind of person who responds to my comments about religion.

So, first, let me apologize for making assumptions; the usual kind of person I get is an American evangelical protestant who hasn’t read most of his or her own bible and is of the opinion that anything important for them to know would be whispered on the wind directly into their ear by god himself, so they have a pretty dim view of learning in general, but also of learning about their religion in specific. That’s clearly not you. My bad.

Second, it’s my understanding that Orthodoxy (probably not the right word, my bad) uses fundamentally the same scriptures as Catholicism and Protestantism, with some additions to the Old Testament. My issues come from the bible’s descriptions of god, events, and people, so I’m going to assume there’s enough common ground that my these translate to Orthodoxy as well as the others. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I have 3 core issues with Christianity:

1. Original sin: imposing the consequences of one person’s actions on others is called collective punishment and it’s a war crime, and needless to say baking a metaphysical war crime into the very heart of a religion - its origin story - is just not ever going to fly with me. It certainly doesn’t help that this is further complicated by #2.
2. Omniscience/free will: either god is omniscient (lit: all knowledge, which includes perfect knowledge about the future) and free will is impossible so we can’t choose to love god, or he isn’t omniscient. His claims about moral authority are held together by this linchpin, and honestly either way it falls doesn’t look great. If we can’t choose to love god then punishing us for ‘choosing’ otherwise is effectively god punishing others for his own crimes since he made us unable to choose otherwise, so we’re right back on the war crimes train. If he’s not omniscient then he doesn’t have a plan, can’t judge sin in the hearts of men, etc. Is he even still a god at that point? Also that would make him a liar, which again is not a great foundation upon which to build a claim to moral authority.
3. Vengeful/loving god: the Old Testament is full of examples of god as an angry, petty, vengeful tyrant, only for him to change his ways or something in the New Testament and be all about love. There are exceptions in both, obviously, so I’m referring to general trends. I think Jesus had some great ideas (best summed up by Bill & Ted as, ‘Be excellent to each other’), but the rest reads like infantile revenge-porn. And I’m not buying that ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ thing either (that’s probably an evangelical thing), because god sure wasn’t raining fire and brimstone and calling for the wholesale slaughter of the sins, that was inflicted upon the sinners. And their sin mostly seems to boil down to not believing in god.

These, to me, seem like unsolvable, unavoidable paradoxes. I see two paths when faced with them:

1. I’m forced to admit that the ‘perfect eternal Divine Truth’ is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god’s nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.
2. What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn’t necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.

I don’t begrudge people who believe or find comfort in it, mind you, but it’s not for me. I’m searching for Truth, not a search for ‘it’s probably not true but I guess it’s a nice idea?’

Yup, or any hex editor that could target memory addresses (some of them were limited to run on a certain file or whatever.) But yeah I used to do similar when I was a kid, I would go into my game files (all DOS games back then of course) and change text strings you could find in there with a hex editor. I’d just change goofy stuff like ‘Copyright’ to ‘Copyleft’, ‘The bandit strikes the princess!’ to ‘The dude slaps a ho’, etc. It was endlessly amusing when I was that age. :)