Tim got tired of dealing with the annoyances people were causing from what i heard.

Who is JDM?

Admin

is anyone a member of the "backup"?

Not sure how many people are there, but I wouldn't mind an invite

About 100. >50 active.

That's very little

Probably better that way though. Only a fraction of the member list participates anyway

Started reading some William Blake. This motherfucker is spicy

"As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. "

Is Blake the one that wrote Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience?

If so, yeah, that dude got cynical af.

Yes

Reading through The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion. "
Oof

And one for the culture war "As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible"

Really? Brothels with bricks of religion? Is he suggesting that brothels wouldn’t exist without religion? Sounds like a fool to me.

After that read “The Great Divorce” by CS Lewis

I feel like the full meaning is hovering out of reach, but I think it's meaning is derived from the comparison. Laws are what send people to prison, maybe he's saying religion sends people to brothels?

CS Lewis annuls the marriage of heaven and hell in that book

Tbh Blake reads almost like a proto-Nietzsche

I think you have to consider in perspective that at this time the state and the church of england were the same entity.

so like a religious American would say to Blake "if your religion represses your sexuality, don't be religious"

but for him the state forced him to be both religious and moral, and behavior outside the teachings of his church would separate him from civil society

There does seem to be a considerable portion of the work dedicated to mocking/criticizing the king and corruption within religious institutions

But the way in which he writes reminds me heavily of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Which is nice
I quite like that book

yeah, don't forget that one of the key titles for the King of England is "defender of the faith"

he IS the pope

That makes it more ballsy though really

It's one thing to make a Trump baby balloon

oh for sure, but someone mentioned that it seems foolish to think that religion makes people sexually repressed.

It's another to take the Divinely Appointed Leader and call him a cowardly shit

Oh that, yeah

the context of what he says isn't run-of-the-mill religion as we experience it in the US

Yup

or even as the UK experiences it modernly

Been collecting links to local meetups in our off-shoot of this discord: https://discord.gg/4ustGmV

^they're pinned in the #local-groups channel. feel free to add more, and I will pin them.

Also, free to join the discord server and just chat

Any in Europe or Africa? @grant

I only collected discord links, and they're all in the US.