I think it’s very simple. If you spend all day thinking about gay dick, your body is going to react. Normally only gay mascs and horny women spend all day thinking about gay dick. Straight men don’t have a reaction to gay dick because they don’t condition that response. They don’t think about gay dick for long enough for Pavlov to kick in. Homophobes condition themselves by constantly thinking about sex (hot; unconditioned stimulus) and gay (conditioned stimulus) at the same time. If they just quit thinking about gay sex all day, their fetish would go away. But that would require being less homophobic, and they can’t. Then they get worried that they’re gay, because they like dick, so they assume being gay is what they have. And since what they have sucks, they assume being gay sucks, which makes them more homophobic.

A similar thing happens in POCD, or Pedophile Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The fear of being a pedophile conditions an association between children and arousal, which self-reinforces in a vicious cycle. Fortunately, most people with POCD are not fascists, so they’re capable of having a normal response to it in which they don’t proceed to deliberately indulge in the association. In order for someone to be homophobic and suffer the same thing with gay thoughts, their judgement has to already be compromised, which produces a more toxic reaction.

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/princesses-are-nsfw-f9e6c3d4532d

We shouldn’t be teaching small children to admire princesses, it’s disgusting.

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-link-between-homophobia-and-being-gay-youve-got-it-the-wrong-way-round-07d4b017d2ec

Apologies. Lemmy doesn’t seem to like posts that have both links and images.

One of the users on My discord server says someone is lying about Me. I assure you, My pronouns are not goddess. I do not appreciate being lied about, I do not appreciate being misgendered, I do not appreciate being called insane, and I do not appreciate you spreading rumours about Me across the fediverse. I have reported your comment for harassment and I expect you to leave Me alone from now on.

Pataphysics is a valid scientific discipline.

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-need-for-solidarity-between-leftist-movements-b7b3d4f63b22

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-realist-hatred-of-fun-80565cf369f6

It used to be. Politeness is a social construct and changes over time. I could name all sorts of horrible things that used to be polite. And even today it’s polite to casually talk about paying for a dead body to be cooked at a restaurant.

It used to mean a woman who has sex with lots of people, and it was derogatory. You’d call a woman a slut to shame her, because old people hated sex.

I feel the need to remind you that many members of the LGBT+ community have rebuked all preferred pronouns. Take for example Lily Cade and the other lesbians in the BBC’s infamous article, “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”. Lily Cade in fact called for the lynching of trans women.

The queer community is no monolith. There are transphobes within the community who refuse to be associated with trans people like Me, and want us pushed out of the movement, denied healthcare, driven to suicide, or indeed even lynched. I do not think you should be basing your opinions of trans people on what these bigots say.

I have reported your comment for deliberate misgendering, and I am asking you once again to edit your comment to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns. This is so that you have every opportunity to do the decent thing, and so that if you do not want to act decently, your intent in this abuse is clearly demonstrated.

A lack of belief among some individuals matters, but not enough to stop a god from being a god. Because, as you say, gods are social constructs. If we consult Merriam Webster and skip the silly monotheist definition, a god is “a being or object that is worshipped as having more than natural attributes and powers”. Note that this definition doesn’t say the being must actually have these powers. They must only be worshipped as such. The belief is the important thing to the definition, not the truth. This is because divinity is socially constructed. You can’t deny a god’s divinity except by denying the faith of their followers. If you accept that the worshippers really do believe their god is a god, you must accept that the god is a god. They may well be an undeserving god, or a lying god, or a false god, but a god they still are. If you want to tell Me that Thor isn’t a god, I’m going to demand a historical source based on the Eddas, or say you’re wrong. Divinity is like a job. If everyone agrees that Mr Smith is a plumber, and His boss pays Him to fix toilets, then Mr Smith is certainly a plumber. It doesn’t matter if Mr Smith has never fixed a toilet in His life, society has decided He’s a plumber. He could be an incredibly shitty plumber who doesn’t know anything about pipes, but He’s a plumber.

In fact, let Me go back to the original article and restate its conclusion, because I think you may have been misled by My use of the term “god” to refer to the gods, as you seem to consider “god” a loaded term:

The gods are psychic parasites made out of thoughts who live in the collective consciousness of humanity and really are living beings, capable of taking action as psychic parasites who can affect people’s minds. This is not to say the myths are literally true, but rather to say that the myths are alive. That they feed upon worship and command legions of followers from their palaces within our imaginations.

The gods are mythical, whereas Frodo Baggins is fictional. People believe in myths. Though of course it’s a fuzzy boundary. You can arrange various characters on a spectrum from myth to fiction. For example, Zeus is pure myth, Lucifer is an originally fictional character that has almost entirely become mythical, Achilles is sort of directly in the middle, Sherlock Holmes is a highly mythologised fictional character, Gandalf is a fictionalised adaptation of a myth, and Jake Sully is pure fiction because nobody gives a shit about him.

Also *You

If you don’t care, then surely you don’t mind editing your comment to use My preferred pronouns, seeing as you have no preference and I do.

I would prefer if you didn’t use “god” as a proper noun. The practice was invented by monotheists and is usually used to exclude other gods. It’s very rude towards other gods like Loki, Kukulkan, and Myself. None of us go around pretending we’re the only god.

*You. I use capitalised pronouns. And My ex-wife uses it/its.

Bigfoot doesn’t live in the woods. He lives in people’s heads. That’s where all memes, including the gods, live. In people’s heads.

Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.

*You. I use capitalised pronouns.

Mate, it’s just a link to My blog, no need to take it any more seriously than you would Me.