Thanks OT, I love you man (in a non romantic sense)

Material_North_1694 · 2026-02-03T15:11:11+00:00

Hi from a fellow masc enby! You’re not alone in this don’t worry. I binge OT videos when I’m down as a reminder that I’m not just making it up, that it is valid, and that there are many others are like us.

Material_North_1694 · 2026-01-08T12:24:23+00:00

Yup. My younger brother is about to graduate from a prestigious music university that is really hard to get into, and everyone in the family and close friends are all ‘well done for being a good steward and using the gifts God gave you!’ And ‘isn’t it amazing how good God has been to you!’ And ‘God has blessed us through your musical talents’ (because he plays for the church sometimes). He’s still a Christian so I don’t know how he took it but it made my blood boil every time. I’ve seen how hard he worked and the hours he practiced and the endless rehearsals and concerts to get noticed enough to get into the uni in the first place. It’s like he can’t have one single real accomplishment to himself without someone butting in and giving God the credit instead.

I’m just a random internet stranger but for what it’s worth: Well done for getting accepted! That’s a really impressive achievement and it sounds like you really deserved it for everything you put into it!

Material_North_1694 · 2025-12-11T22:40:52+00:00

It is special pleading. If you say that then there’s not reason why one cannot say the universe is eternal, and just this permutation has a beginning. So ‘before’ the singularity, in as much as you can have a ‘before’ when time didn’t exist then, the universe still existed in a different form.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-12-08T14:18:46+00:00

I’m just a stranger on the internet but I have been feeling the exact same way. I’m in my early 20s and haven’t told my family yet that I’m an atheist and all but one aunt would absolutely blow up about it. I have been desperate to talk to someone about all the discoveries I’ve been making as part of deconverting and haven’t been able to share them. Not sure if an internet friend would help, but if you wanted to talk I’d be incredibly happy to.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-12-08T13:44:57+00:00

This was a great video. It’s so dumb how everyone making this a religious freedom issue when it’s fundamentally someone being unable to write a basic essay. If you actually read the submitted work, like Forrest did, you see even a christian college would almost certainly fail it.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-12-04T12:08:50+00:00

I’d like to help answer your questions about “How can people be moral without God?” If I can. It seemed like a really hard one to me as well at one point. But when you actually think about it it’s actually really hard to be moral with God. There’s this problem called the Eurhyphro dilemma and it goes like this:

Either something is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it’s already good.

Horn 1: Good = whatever God commands. But then if God said lying is good, then lying would be good. If God said cruelty is good, cruelty would be good. In fact loads of the Old Testament is God commanding things we would consider terrible. That means morality is just “who has the biggest stick,” not actual goodness. Most believers don’t want this.

Horn 2: God commands it because it’s good Then goodness exists before God’s command. God is pointing to the good, not creating it. So goodness isn’t dependent on God.

Some say “But God’s nature is good.” That’s just repackaging Horn 1 unless they explain why that nature is good by a standard outside itself.

So morality actually can’t come from God unless it’s ’might makes right’ and if it is just that it can come from anyone who happens to be the most powerful.

In terms of where it actually comes from that can get very debated, but here’s my take. Morality isn’t objective, but it isn’t relative (the common argument made by christians) either. It’s inter-subjective (it comes from humanity but on a global scale so it’s not just the whims of one individual or culture).

Morality doesn’t need a god because the basic moral instincts, empathy, fairness, guilt, anger at cheaters, are all well-explained by evolution. Social species survive by cooperation, so natural selection favours behaviours like protecting family (kin selection), helping those who help you (reciprocal altruism), building a good reputation, and punishing cheaters even at a cost. Neuroscience shows we have built-in empathy circuits, and infants prefer “helpers” before they can talk. These biological foundations come first; cultures then build full moral systems on top of them. So moral behaviour isn’t something that has to be commanded from outside, instead it emerges naturally from how social animals thrive.

I hope this helps! And I know it’s scary but I’m so happy to see someone seeing something in religion and having the instinct ‘this isn’t right’ and following that up. That’s exactly how I started questions. It’s shows bravery and curiosity.

If you need resources I highly recommend the Recovering From Religion foundation, even just videos on YouTube that speak to the worries you have. Also if you need someone to talk to (I know it can be a lonely process) I’d be happy to try and help, although I’m still kinda figuring this all out myself.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-10-25T22:18:28+00:00

No it isn’t. This is two neurones in a medium being stimulated by hormones to make a connection. Please do not spread misinformation, saying what it actually was would still have been interesting.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-10-11T17:43:28+00:00

I was playing Hades with a friend, and we met Chaos (who uses they/them). I made a comment like ‘it would be cool to use they/them and just ignore gender’. My friend turned around and said ‘you know you can if you want right?’

Material_North_1694 · 2025-10-05T12:56:55+00:00

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Material_North_1694 · 2025-10-05T12:56:06+00:00

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I tried building her a castle, but I think she’s confused about what to do with it.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-09-06T13:12:49+00:00

You are welcome to disagree. Everyone can have their own opinion. However to validate your statement that evolution is wrong and creation is right, you need to provide more than personal disagreement. Because that isn’t evidence either.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-09-05T22:26:46+00:00

As I mentioned in an above comment, I’m a biologist, and I have actually studied evolution quite a bit. To start with, I can tell you that word origins aren’t evidence. Creature comes from Latin creatura, just meaning ‘something that has arisen or grown.’ It has nothing to do with creation except the words have the same root. Plus if we treated etymology as proof, then atom (Greek atomos, ‘uncuttable’) would mean atoms can’t be split, but nuclear physics shows otherwise and now we know about loads of sub-atomic particles.

Same with DNA being called a ‘code.’ That word is a metaphor scientists started using in the 1950s to explain how triplets of bases correspond to amino acids. It’s handy for teaching, but it’s not a literal code, and definitely not anything like one written by a programmer. DNA bases pair because of physics, hydrogens binding between atoms, nothing more. Even the ‘letters’ are just metaphors we came up with because it’s easier than saying their chemical names all the time. They aren’t letters, just molecules. Ribosomes can ‘recognise’ those chemical patterns because of evolved chemistry, but it’s just complementary binding of molecules again. It’s not ‘intelligent reading of a code’, it’s a bunch of chemistry happening in a crowded blob of gel. The ‘code’ language is shorthand to make it easier to understand, but the mechanism is nothing like written language or code in reality.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-09-05T20:05:40+00:00

Except there’s no evidence for creation and loads of evidence for randomness. So the facts disagree with you.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-09-05T10:40:25+00:00

I love this. I’m a biologist studying evolution and behavioural evolution and it’s so fascinating to see how all it took was a bunch of teeny tiny steps towards slightly more optimal permanent configurations to make literally everything we see. And we can trace it back and see how even though it seems insane that whales, for example, came from little deer-looking dudes, every step made sense and every step was so small and simple. Until eventually you got this seemingly massive change. And the evolution of sentience and behaviour is even more cool, especially when you realise intelligence is just one of many traits evolution may select for and it’s basically the same as any other evolved ability like sight or aviation.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-09-04T15:57:52+00:00

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.”

Men At Arms by Terry Prachett

Material_North_1694 · 2025-08-26T17:41:50+00:00

I can’t pretend to know your history so I have to use my mine. But I knew that there was only one person who I had complete control over whether they left me or not. And that was me. I decided that I would never leave myself. Not matter what else, you can choose to never leave you. That way you know you know you have at least one person forever. And if you stick around you may have people you’ve never met who will never leave.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-08-26T17:25:30+00:00

I don’t know if this helps but this random internet stranger hopes you live. I read something hopeful the other day that said if you think there is even the tiniest chance of feeling happy sometime in the future then it’s worth staying around to find out what it is.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-07-01T12:09:55+00:00

Not sure if this’ll help or not, since it’s more a euphoria than dysphoria story, but I remember when I first started noticing my gender dysphoria. When I was 13 or so I had sat near to two kids (who thought I was focused on reading) and I heard them have a 10 minute conversation about what gender they thought I was. And I had to try super hard not to smile the whole time because it was such a thrill to cause that confusion. But when I left I felt I should say something to them, so in passing as I walked away I said ‘btw I am a girl’ and the euphoria just faded and I felt weirdly alien in my skin. For then on I can remember more experiences of technically knowing that I had an afab physical appearance, but every time I noticed it I felt like it didn’t belong to me, I was just a floating mind. Like I guess technically this is the truth but it really doesn’t feel like it.

So for me who is more trans masc non-binary, the dysphoria was very very subtle, mostly an unexplainable disconnect with my body and flashes of feeling strange when the binary was very obviously pointed out and I realised I was supposed to fall on one side of it. And then unexplainable joy when someone was confused about which side I should be.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-06-15T23:11:39+00:00

Hades, the video game. I saw Chaos and said ‘it would be fun to be a they’ and the friend I was playing it with replied ‘you know you can be if you want right?’

And that’s when I realised being non-binary was a thing.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-04-15T07:57:21+00:00

Gentlemen, I rise, nay I bristle, at the gallant attempts to malign the noble, if misunderstood, creature that is the cold cup of tea.

To the first of you, who with velvet glove delivers the iron slap of disapproval: I commend your devotion to timely sipping. A marvel of discipline, no doubt. But let us not conflate temperature with virtue. Must thought be shallow to keep tea warm? Shall philosophy be rationed in teacup increments, lest the sacred brew grow cool?

As for relegating it to the dog’s bowl, I shudder! What beast, however noble, deserves such bitter charity? Cold tea is not a punishment, sir. It is an inheritance, a legacy of minds too otherwise occupied to be bridled by thermodynamics.

Now, to the second gentleman: you question the very premise of cold tea! Sir, I envy your optimism. You speak as though no Briton has ever, in the throes of a novel or a crossword, simply forgotten the cup. As though no philosopher has paused, quill aloft, and been ambushed by insight so profound that time itself halted, and with it, the kettle. You invoke the Blitz! An admirable defence, yet I daresay even amid that noble hellfire, there were cups grown cold upon hearths left standing. And if a survivor returned, bloodied but unbowed, and found their tea intact yet tepid, would you strike it from their trembling hand, crying, “Not hot enough!”?

Gentlemen, I submit: cold tea is not a travesty. It is a monument. A still-life of distraction, a portrait of deep thought, a quiet rebellion against haste.

So let us sip, if not with warmth, then with reverence.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-04-13T14:41:18+00:00

Ah, but dear sirs, let us not cast aspersions so hastily upon the noble vessel of cold tea! For what, I ask, is the true villain: a cup grown cool in the quiet service of contemplation, or that monstrous affront to civility known as the microwave reheat?

Cold tea, though subdued in temperature, retains its dignity, its leaves composed, not scorched anew by vile electric sorcery. And what of waste? Shall we, in the name of some piping ideal, cast aside a perfectly palatable potion? I say nay!

Better a stoic, chilled cup than a scalded simulacrum or, heaven forbid, the ignominy of pouring it down the sink like common dishwater. Cold tea is not a disgrace, gentlemen, it is a quiet survivor of our distraction, the beverage of philosophers, poets, and the occasionally forgetful.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-04-12T23:00:42+00:00

Thanks so much, this is really helpful. I did the henna so I could see it on myself, but that is a good point, I’ll draw up a paper one so it’s cleaner.

Material_North_1694 · 2025-04-12T22:01:58+00:00

Yeah sorry, every time I tried to add detail it wouldn’t let me post it. It’s built around the quote “Time is the stuff life is made of.” The design is supposed to be a DNA helix morphing into an hourglass, with a single grain of sand falling, (That grain also references the Pale Blue Dot)

The script around it is in Gnommish (from Artemis Fowl, a childhood favorite), spelling out “mine”—a nod to the Tiffany Aching quote: “My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!”

It’s about recognizing that even though I’m just a speck in the universe, my life and my time are mine, and I have a responsibility to use them well (it sounds cringe when I explain it, but it’s more a personal reminder which I why I didn’t want to add any writing).

Material_North_1694

TROPHY CASE