Tell me more about how this works. You're obviously a more mature balanced person than I am, but how does once deal with being, would you call yourself agnostic?, and married to someone with such a different beliefs system. I guess I'm curious about his view point on it as well. Like does he run a church? And is it…

“The tragedy of abortion is experienced by some with a superficial awareness, as if not realizing the extreme harm that such an act entails,”

Leckie’s book last year won the Hugo, and it was one of the finalists this year. It’s interesting on gender topics, and on AI, and I’m basically a fangirl =)

Oh, I know. I’m just saying that if a pope did say that ex cathedra (which I’m assuming is physically possible because I don’t think there’s a god that actually prevents such utterances), I think the church would find some contrivance to say he was never a true pope in the first place.

I vaguely remember being terrified of turning 13 because I thought that was the age where would go to hell but I refused to be baptized for some reason. Maybe 13 year old me subconsciously knew of my agnostic ways to come and just couldn't be bothered.

I’ll have to check that out! I’m really interested in reading more stories that explore AI characters (especially AI characters integrated into a society).

That wouldn’t just be unprecedented. It would be un-Christian. He couldn’t stay Pope if he didn’t believe in Jesus. That’s like, basic.

I read Player of Games and I’d like to get around to reading more. I noticed that too, oh, everyone’s cool and gender and sexual fluid exceptttt the main character that the author has to empathize with. The first 50 pages of Player of Games were damned near insufferably full of the character’s zero-th world (like…

Wait—- Candida Moss? Candida Moss? Her parents need absolution.

Have you read the Culture novels? I really like that setting, though of course some of the stuff is still obnoxious (like how in a society that’s mostly pansexual almost every male main character is heterosexual).

he calls it a decision. you are correct that he doesn’t call it a “right” but he does acknowledge agency and decision making, which seems like progress, however glacial, and I think it’s like any other training process, you have to take heart at and encourage positive motion. More would be better, but this is at least…

Abortion isn’t a sin. But if Chill Pope making a statement will help convince the governments of overly-christian places like Paraguay and Ireland to pull their heads out of their @sses about allowing child rape victims and dying women to get abortions, then I guess that might do some good.

I literally forced myself to read the book so I could better criticize it. Best scifi book ever my goddamned ass. So I can’t say much to defend it. I used to antagonize the 60-something men in my scifi group quite a bit on this topic.

I am an atheist with only the most basic knowledge of the Bible, but I thought that I heard before that the only sin the Bible mentions as being “unforgivable” is blasphemy.

he was conscripted into the hitler youth as a teenager, which was required by law at the time. His whole family was very much anti-Nazi but in WWII Germany there weren’t many options... you’d be hard pressed to find any German citizen who wasn’t “like, an actual Nazi” during the war because it was either that or the…

This is good. Because buying Plenary Indulgences gets expensive.

The thing I never understood about Dune was what the upside of space Hitler was supposed to be.

Not to say that there isn’t sexism in sci-fi! I just prefer mine in the old fashioned we-just-happened-to-make-this-engineer-male flavor and not the women-have-magic-powers-because-fertility flavor.

I feel surrounded by idiots. Me, à la gif:

You’re like, a word artist.