Saviour Syndrome: thoughts-in-process

I’ve noticed a trend, lately, in a lot of the circles I move in or at least brush against, and it’s something I’m starting to label, since I’m coming across it so often. Help me think through this?

I’m calling it “saviour syndrome” because I’m coming across a lot of religious language and mythos from sources I would expect to be fully secular, or atheist, or at least agnostic or pagan or heavily critical of the Christian narrative. It’s frankly pretty puzzling at first, but given more thought and what I know about the origins of settler society on Turtle Island, it comes clear after a bit of thought. At least, to me. I want to know if I’m off-base or what I haven’t thought about, since this is grounded in my own experience as a cis, white, 3rd-gen Dutch settler woman who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church ethnoreligious community. So there’s a lot I might not be seeing. But this is what I have seen.

On Facebook and Privacy (from the archives!)

Note: whoa, I found this post from November 2014 sitting in my drafts pile! Am publishing it now because it’s an interesting retrospective on my thought process at the time. I’m not this cynical about the voting process – or at least, on most days I’m not.

Just an FYI for those friendly folks I see on my FB wall who may have been taken in by this hoax about how putting up a legal notice on your Facebook wall will guarantee your future privacy.

There is no simple fix for this. Increasingly, in our society, there is no simple way to exercise your rights; perhaps voting used to be, but in the system we have right now in Canada, even that is about as effective at shaking up the government as posting an official-sounding screed about your rights and freedoms in a venue that is set up to exploit your content, your photos, your very self down to the last penny. I digress. In my opinion, if your information’s going to be out there anyway, might as well make your peace with it and move on with your life.