Feeble False

Fool me once, I've been crowned jester

You make my knees go duckstack

Art: The Marriage, by Erik Johansson

It was a dark and stormy night. He was working overtime, and brooding. The day had come and gone and he was a dollar short and a minute late for his latest Duckstack article. Suddenly, you, the reader, burst into the room. “writer,” you said, knowing full well that I was masquerading as a detective at the time. “You’ve got to help me. I just got your Duckstack in the inbox, and a section was missing!” I looked the reader up and down. They had always been a sharp kid. On any other night, I would have said they were going places. But this wasn’t any other night, it was tonight, here, and I was brooding about them bursting in to ask me about a missing Duckstack section.

“Alright, I’ll take your case.” I said, setting down my steaming mug of coffee, which I hadn’t drunken any of, since I was a Mormon. The mug said “I wrote an entire duckstack and all I got were words about this crappy mug” on it. It was my favorite mug. I started thinking of all the places the Duckstack section could have gone, and I let the reader know it.

“What kind of section is it. Is it a regular? History? Is it that new telephone game? Maybe something that semi makes an appearance but nobody’s seen for a while?” I thought back to the Duckstack article lying unwritten on my desk. I hadn’t checked my horoscopes lately. Did my horoscope say the reader would come and badger me tonight? Would it say that, if it weren’t the missing section? I didn’t know. I put down my coffee, again, which I had picked up to wave around for dramatic effect, spilling piping hot coffee all over the carpet, which was covered in stains. Just how I liked it. It reminded me of home.

The kid threw me a curve ball. “No, its not a regular section at all. In fact, nobody’s ever seen it before.” This reader was sharp. Too sharp for his own good. Brains like that could get you in a lot of trouble around here, if you got in with the wrong crowd.

“Alright I’ll take your case,” I told the reader. “I can tell you aren’t going to leave me alone.” I put on my trench coat, which curved around me like a warm glove, a thin layer of cloth all that separated me from the chill outside. It was like walking the knife’s edge between life and death, which was just how I liked it. Like walking a tightrope, and all the tension I had to rely on was my narrative and a prayer. And also the reader, who was very tense over the situation. “Here, read this.” I told you, handing them a copy of the latest Duckstack, hot off the typewriter in my room. I thought I could still see smoke coming off of the keys. “Lets go look for clues.”

Dead Air

They call it white noise because its not really any of the other noises

I love the feeling of dead air. I know its bad for the environment but I just can't help it. The feeling of being in an enclosed room, and the air goes stagnant as it is entrapped and begins suffocating, and sound comes in from the outside of cars or rain on the glass but its all muffled. And I do feel sad for the air but that's what it means to be on top of the food chain. I guess I’ve come to think of it like “thinning the herd”. Survival of the fittest. Making some breathing room for the other air. Nothing lives forever, right? Its the circle of life.

There’s something comforting in that, as the air settles like a blanket, packing you in nice and tight, reflecting on life and death. The air dies to make my life that much nicer. There’s nobility in that. There’s dignity. It seems to happen immediately but from experiments the air in balloons actually takes a few days to finish dying, on average. There’s a perception gap there then, when you feel like you’re all enclosed, and then a needle or a toddler comes along and sits on you or stabs you or both if the toddler has something sharp, and everything around you explodes, which seems to happen frequently. That’s also the circle of life.

Glorying in Sin

“I used to party and sleep with tons of women and drive cool cars and be rich. Don’t be like me.”

In Christianity, everyone is a sinner. This is very convenient for people who want to believe that their sins are no big deal.

All the scriptural classics are rallied to their cause. The woman taken in adultery. All have fallen short of the glory of God. He who has offended in the smallest has broken the whole of the law. Even looking after a woman to lust is adultery. As one person unironically put it to me this week, “if you kill one person, or you kill a million people, you’re a murderer either way.”

The idea here is to “level the playing field” so that people who are totally outgunned in the sinning department have a better chance of winning the war¹. In Latter-Day Saint scripture, this is called “mercy robbing justice”. Joseph Smith said this is bad, because if God is not just, it means you can’t put faith in him. Most people, in their rush for mercy, forget this. The scriptures do not, when looked at plainly, say all sin is equal- they say all sin is important. This makes more sense when you understand the point of sin. What sin “is” is not necessarily what people want it to be. What is sin, why doesn’t God like sin?

You could say God is playing the long game². This informs his perspective. You have to understand where you’re going, and unfortunately lots of people think life is a lot more like a multiple choice test than anything else, so they think the point of keeping commandments is that God is going to tally them up when you die and go “welp, you passed” or “welp, you failed”, and then chuck you bodily into heaven or hell or whatever³. Therefore, they say, sin is so you don’t get the wrong answer on the “test”, therefore, they say, all sins are equal. All that matters is the binary “you got the wrong answer”

This perspective is exclusively used for two things: Either self justification, or status climbing via dragging others down. “I’m just as good as you are, since you’re bad, or can be made to look bad.” These perspectives are totally wrong, and it is precisely for this reason that scriptures about “judging not” exist in the first place. Its not because saying you’re better than someone is bad. Its because decrying people who are actually good is bad. Motes and beams wasn’t about “everyone who criticizes is doing a worse thing than what they’re criticizing!” But we see this social stance often. Racism is a worse offense than murder! We live in a post-Christian world.

To make this work you have to invent an entirely new plane of reality where things have “spiritual” consequences, but not physical consequences. In this “spiritual world”, both lust and adultery earn you “sin points”, so “spiritually speaking” they are the same.

But you don’t live in a spiritual world. You don’t live in a world of pseudoabstractions and dreams and scorecards. You live in a physical world where idle thoughts and murder have vastly different consequence sets. And those earthly, physical consequence sets matter a lot. To level sin, you first have to deny physical life means anything. An attractive proposition, for those who hate life. No earthly judge can tell the soul by any metric other than what you do, and God promises to judge on the same basis: “The books were opened, and the dead were judged according to their works.” (Rev 20:12) And he said people would claim they did great Christianities, in his name, but they never knew him. They corrupted the message. The direction is wrong.

God is not a referee, God is our dad. “What God Wants” is our growth. On his timeline, you, personally, becoming noble and trustworthy, disciplined and competent, just and merciful, is his highest priority for your life. That’s why all sin matters- because your development is personal. What’s easy for one person might be hard for another, and letting pharisees beat their chests in the town square and say “thank God I’m not a tax collector” is bad for them, stalling out their progress. But you will notice that Christ’s criticisms of the pharisees were nearly always about hypocrisy, not compliance! “These things ye aught to have done, while not leaving the things you are currently doing undone.” (Luke 11:42)

The parable of the prodigal son is that God is glad the son came back, not that the son “Didn’t really miss out on anything and in fact he’s more righteous than his elder brother, he went on a journey and learned some things about himself and the world and now he has super deep perspective and wisdom⁴.” As the Father tells the resentful eldest, “you’re literally inheriting everything I have”. He doesn’t set up the prodigal as some sort of a role model. That’s because the dad knows the eldest has a ton more wisdom than the prodigal, gained from keeping the commandments, not breaking them. That’s why he’s eligible to inherit the family business. This is explicitly a metaphor for God.

Quotes Paul on the issue, “Shall we sin, that grace may abound? God forbid!” If you start setting up prostitutes and druggies and gang members and homosexuals and so on as a special class of righteous, then you have set up a system wherein the good people are actively discouraged from being good. If showing off great mercy is the name of the game, good people can never compete. Yes, you should praise their repentance. No, they did not uncover the hidden secrets of virtuous living while doing hallucinogenics⁵. No, they aren’t “just like you” now.

But what you will see is, for example, men being encouraged to marry women with promiscuous pasts. Or even just women who are ugly or undesirable in other ways. “God is merciful. Don’t you want to be like God?” This is, in truth, an extremely insulting thing to say. “If you were less religious, you would deserve better. You are called to self harm. The bad have a right to your wealth by virtue of their lack of virtue- and this is the virtuous perspective.” This is a losing pitch, and men, especially, are right to push back against this as the communist parasitism it is. A religion that is a simple exercise in self flagellation should be rejected, as a matter of mere course. All the other problems with it aside, you aren’t doing anything. Or learning anything. Thankfully, Jesus was not actually a Marxist⁶. The apostles were not promised “you’ll be really virtuous” as their reward. To oversimplify, they were promised power and judgement.

Selflessness is a virtue, but not so much of a virtue that it encompasses the definition of virtue. In the gospels, the correct targets of altruism were: Widows, and the sick. What did Christ do for the poor? He preached to them.

⁴ Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:

⁵ The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

-Mathew 11:4-5 (emphasis added⁷)

Christ did not give them money.

One of Christ’s most famous miracles was to multiply bread and fishes to feed everyone who had been listening to him all day. The next day, the “multitude” exploded in size from people straight up looking for a handout. At this point, Jesus refused to feed them. I’m serious, read the full chapter. Its very enlightening.

John 6:26 Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.

[…]

66 From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.

This serves to illustrate that “being good to each other” does not mean “indulge people”, and it especially doesn’t mean “enable people in their vices.” I doubt Jesus was thinking about the sociological implications of building a church on handouts- I think he was thinking about what each soul in that crowd needed to repent of. That message is far less eagerly received than the message of grace. People love to talk about grace.

This is where we get to backhanded testimonies. People getting up and talking about what a wild sinner they used to be. People getting up and talking about their past sins in extraordinary detail. Bragging about what they have gotten away with, thanks to Jesus. Making Jesus complicit in their sins. That’s what grace means to a lot of people. They see themselves as bragging “on behalf of God”, and when your God is basically a standin for yourself, you can see how eager people are to get to the braggin’. Who wants to hear a story about a person lifting a single weight? To make God truly heroic, he’s gotta lift crazy weights. The crazier the sin, the more glorifying it must be for God to have overcome it. So the logic goes. My God can beat up your God. And so the people revel in filth, and call this “Christianity”.

I think the scriptures are fairly clear that God cares about the single feather of a sparrow, he has no need for grand gestures and “glorying”. He wants you to 1) have faith (motive power, especially re: to keep his commandments) and 2) repent (turn your heart and mind from bad courses). You can solidify those two with covenants. But the work is pretty clearly to change hearts, and that means hearts of pride, hearts of sin, hearts of bad habits, and hearts of laziness, all sorts of hearts, major and minor. Which is why the gospel practiced correctly improves every aspect of a person’s life. It does not do this by creating a pretend world where practical consequences don’t matter.

Water Bottles: A History

They used to be gourds, then they were plastic, and now they’re metal. They are evolving into cyborgs

Where did water bottles come from? They have rapidly become an invasive species. Like cockroaches, they are pretty much indestructible, live in the brush on the side of the road, and are filled with liquid⁸. In their natural habitat on store shelves and in the fridge, they are inert, orderly, and innocuous, but when they get out into the wild they become an invasive species, and pretty soon they’re everywhere.

They’re going to eat us

Invisible Section

A Game Of Telephone

Do people still know what “telephones” are? or is it all just cellphones these days

Its high time we see if I can retype the same section every week. The people have been waiting for too long.

History

What have the babies been up to this week? Aggressive, malicious, insatiable clothing

Our toddler loves clothes, and loves putting on different outfits and combinations, and this week she figured out how to get out of them, which means she’ll just run in naked with a new set of clothes from her drawer constantly and beg us to put her in the new outfit. Which means she’s piling up laundry at a rate normal households would need dozens of kids to match. Its like the financial swapover to feeding a teenager, except she’s 2.

Our son picked up a swear word so I talked with him about it. I told him he’d hear swearing in videos and stuff, but that those are bad people and we want to raise him to be a great person, and to try to cut down on it I told him he can say gosh heck or dang. And then an hour later he started constantly saying things like “They’re bad? How dang bad are they?” There’s a lesson here about giving kids abusing every goshing tool you give them.

Our son was dissatisfied with the amount of grape soda we gave him. He told us: “I’m still thirsty and… My tummy wants grape sugar.”

Son asked us: “Have you ever seen a movie with my dream?” I still have no idea what he meant by that.

Our toddler has learned her fourth or fifth word. “Seaweed.”

Horoscopes

The stars just left us a dialtone so we’re just making these ones up

Brooding detective: Some reader is going to barge in to badger you tonight. Keep brooding.

Boisterous reader: You’re the best side character a man could ask for. Go find a detective to glom onto.

Ducksnax

Seaweed

Ducksnax #104

▼ Previous Duckstack ▼

1. by going to hell. If im following my analogy correctly

2. Shocking for a being made of eternity I know

3. Siberia?

4. This is not a caricature, this is very widespread. The pope himself said this almost verbatim a few months ago, about how these people are “the best of us” and “have so much to teach us”

5. ironically, one of the huge problems with recreational drugs is precisely that they make you think you’ve unlocked something when you have in fact been sitting still.

6. I don’t think he had even read Karl Marx

7. “This verse was italicized in the original Greek”

8. Cockroaches have liquid in them. I… Think?