u/PurpleElephant28

I’m an atheist, but it’s not something I think about much and doesn’t really affect my views of other people I meet day to day who are religious, although I do confess I am very against a specific type of white American Christian mega-church going kind of religiosity. But I do admire and am friends with a lot of people who are Jewish or Muslim, and a few Christians as well. I do think religion is irrational but all humans are irrational in some way and anyone who believes that everything they do, think, and believe is perfectly rationally is suspect.

My dad, however, while he’s always been an atheist, has fallen really deep into the atheist-media content rabbit hole in retirement. While this is much much preferred to the folks whose parents get into Q anon and right wing nut job conspiracies, he’s become extremely biased against anyone who’s religious at all. He doesn’t want a doctor whose religious, and has said things like religious doctors can’t treat patients as well, he’ll make snide comments about anyone I’m friends with whose religious, he spends a lot of time listening to old Christopher Hitchens debates or reading Dawkins. Once he learns someone is religious, he’ll completely dismiss anything else they have to say as worthless because they believe in something irrational.

Does anyone else have experience with this? What did you do?

I know part of this might be religious trauma on his part from a catholic upbringing, but the fact that anyone, no matter Jewish, Muslim, or Christian is suddenly completely discounted wholesale in his book is disconcerting to me.

Just got out of the theater and it is by far the worst movie I’ve seen in years. Weirdly enough it was so bad that I spent the first couple hours of the movie thinking it was supposed to be satire (albeit a badly executed one) with a twist ending. [Spoilers ahead].

I went into the movie only knowing it was Spielberg, Emily Blunt was in it, and it was about aliens.

Immediately the movie jumps into media res, with technobabble centering around a McGuffin device. The shadowy governmental cabal are cartoonishly 2-dimensional with a laughable headquarters covered in an excessive amount of screens, like a satire of the worst bad action movies you’ve seen. The music is not only generic but almost scored to perfectly highlight the eye-rolling dialogue, almost as if it was purposely spotlighting itself to scream ‘this is a bad movie, wink wink nudge nudge’! Even the excessive lens-flairs I began to think huh this is really annoying but almost like it’s supposed to be annoying, like it’s bringing attention to itself. Then there were the generic monologues, doing their best to bumble their way into hand waving at some deeper themes but almost like AI was asked to shat something out. Even the rampant product placement with the cars I began thinking hmm maybe this is supposed to be a satire about bad movies, and there would be some kind of twist reveal to drive it home!

Personally I thought there would be a reveal where it turns out that it was actually a ‘movie within a movie’ where we were watching an in-universe movie and that the ‘characters’ were all actors that we would later see at a premier or something, and that in reality the government was using the in-universe movie to add in the ‘real’ alien footage since there had been a leak of some kind they were trying to get ahead of, to head off an actual disclosure day.

But I guess I was just thinking way too hard, and I left the movie flabbergasted that it had in fact actually been completely played, written, and directed straight.

Although, in my defense, it just had so many bad movies-isms stacked on top of each other I thought it was supposed to be a joke and I had just figured it out early. I mean, come on really. It had them all: the math scribbles that are supposed to be ‘alien language’, the obligatory car chases that are really just product placements, the speeches that are supposed to be profound about what is our place in the world!?? but never actually grappling with any themes because it would take away from the next goofy action sequence. It’s been done so very much better in a thousand other sci fi films.

Anyways… I’m so mad I spent money to see this movie. I pity anyone else who paid for tickets.

27F dealing with some serious feelings of wasted potential and failure. A lot of my friends from high school are doctors and lawyers now or in successful six-figure careers. I did well in school because I could still get the grade even when I procrastinated until the last minute but holding a 9-5 job just isn’t like that. Everyone thought I’d go far and have a great career. But I’ve struggled to keep a job and ended up jumping all over the place to disparate fields. I got a STEM degree but didn’t end up liking lab work so jumped around to doing something completely unrelated. Now I’m in a dead-end job barely saving anything and thinking about going back to school for something that might be a bit more ADHD friendly but having serious self-doubt. It feels like I’m being outstripped by everyone who is able to focus, deal with boredom, sit chained to a desk, live with repetition. I barely have any responsibility and am bad at my email job.

Just wanted to share and see whose experiences have been similar. It’s a tough spot to know you’re smart enough to do things but don’t have the executive functioning to be consistent about anything. I used to push myself to the breaking point in school but then I’d have summer or winter break to cope with burnout. In real life you just have to keep going no breaks until you retire and I’m exhausted.