I.Mara

There is no way of knowing how often Parliament votes against what the public actually wants. Until now. houseofthepeople.com tracks every bill going through Parliament. You vote. We compare it to how your MP voted. The gap speaks for itself.

The body says "I need security." The mind says "I need appreciation." Society says "I need success." And slowly, the soul becomes silent. But the soul has its own needs. It needs to express peace, love, wisdom, and creativity. It needs to serve something greater than the temporary desires of the body and mind. It needs to feel connected to its purpose. When your work gives your soul space to express these qualities naturally, your energy grows. You feel refreshed and supported because you’re moving in harmony with your essential nature. You flow with it. Think of a river. When water flows in its natural direction, it moves effortlessly, creating beauty and nourishing everything in its path. When you try to force water uphill, it requires enormous effort and creates turbulence. Your career is either flowing with your soul's natural direction or forcing it uphill. The soul speaks to us through energy, through joy, through a sense of rightness that cannot be explained logically. When you're doing work that aligns with your true nature, time passes differently. Challenges feel like opportunities rather than obstacles. You have energy left for your relationships, your health, your growth. But we've been trained to ignore these signals. We've been taught that work should be difficult, that ease means laziness, that following joy is impractical. So we choose careers based on fear. Fear of not having enough money. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of being judged as unrealistic. These fears create a wall between us and our inner wisdom. The mind becomes noisy with calculations like "Will this pay my bills?" "What will people think?" "Is this secure enough?" And eventually, the soul's quiet voice gets drowned out. Money is important, yes. Security matters, yes. But when we make decisions from fear, we create exactly what we're trying to avoid. Work becomes a burden. Success feels empty. We earn money but lose vitality. The soul operates from abundance. When we express our true nature, what we need arrives naturally. This happens through clarity and alignment. And focused work creates stronger results with greater ease. Quality emerges effortlessly when we're working from our center. But this requires trust. Trust that our inner guidance is reliable. Trust that following joy leads to contribution, not selfishness. Trust that the universe supports authentic expression. Most os us have lost this trust. We've had experiences where following the heart led to disappointment. So we conclude that practical thinking is safer than soul wisdom. What we don't realize is that following the heart without understanding how it works leads to confusion. The heart sometimes carries old wounds, conditioning, and desires that aren't from the soul's pure nature. True soul guidance comes from a place of inner silence, where the noise of wants and fears has been stilled. In that silence, clarity emerges naturally. You know without knowing how you know. This knowing doesn't come with guarantees about external outcomes. It doesn't promise immediate financial success or social approval. It promises an alignment between your daily actions and your eternal nature. When this alignment exists, work becomes meditation. Challenges become opportunities for growth. Success becomes a byproduct rather than the goal.

A Harvard professor spent 40 years inside the human brain studying how language works. Wrote 9 books. Taught thousands of students. And he still thinks most people have no idea why their writing fails. Steven Pinker stood in front of a room and asked one question. Why is almost all writing academic, corporate, government, even most things you read online so painfully bad to get through? The room expected him to say laziness. Lack of practice. Poor education. He said none of those things. He called it the Curse of Knowledge. And once he explained it, I couldn't unsee it anywhere. Here's how it works. The moment you understand something deeply, something breaks inside you. You lose access to what it felt like before you knew it. The confusion you once had disappears so completely that you can no longer imagine anyone else feeling it. Your blind spots don't feel like blind spots anymore. They feel like obvious starting points. He told a story about a molecular biologist presenting at a TED event in front of 400 people. Brilliant man. Spent years on his research. Walked on stage and immediately started speaking in technical language without ever once explaining what problem he was trying to solve or why a single person in that room should care about it. People glazed over within two minutes. He finished his talk having no idea what had just happened. He thought he'd done well. That is the curse in its purest form. It doesn't announce itself. It disguises itself as competence. Then Pinker said the thing that stopped me cold. Bad writing is not about intelligence. It is not about effort. It is a failure of empathy. A writer who cannot imagine what it feels like to not know what they know will always lose their reader. Every time. No exceptions. His solution was not a writing technique. It was a person. He gave his drafts to his mother. She was educated, well-read, deeply intelligent. But she was not a cognitive scientist. She had no stake in his field. When she hit a sentence and her eyes slowed down, when she read a paragraph and looked up slightly confused, he didn't think she'd missed something. He went back and fixed the writing. Not her. The writing. That reframe alone is worth more than most writing advice combined. Then he moved to the thing almost every writer gets completely wrong. Words are not the point. Words are just a vehicle. What your reader actually walks away with is not the sentence you wrote. It is the image, the feeling, the physical thing that sentence was supposed to create inside their mind. If no image forms, nothing was communicated. The words passed through and left nothing behind. He asked his audience what a paradigm looks like. What a framework feels like. What color a concept is. Total silence. Because abstractions are invisible. They produce no picture, no texture, no sensation. They are placeholders that feel like meaning but deliver none. The writers who survived two hundred years did it because they had no choice but to be concrete. There was no jargon to retreat into. So instead of writing about aggression they wrote about the spirit of the hawk tearing into flesh. The reader felt it before they understood it. That is the only writing that actually works. The last thing he said was about brevity. And he defined it in a way I had never heard before. Brevity is not a low word count. Brevity is the discipline of cutting every single word that asks something of your reader without giving something back. Every unnecessary word is a small tax. Enough small taxes and the reader stops paying. He has carried three words with him for forty years. Omit needless words. He said that line does something almost no piece of advice manages to do. It demonstrates what it teaches. It is itself an example of the principle it describes. The best writing he ever produced came under an 800-word limit an editor refused to negotiate. The pressure of that constraint cut everything that was hiding inside the extra space. It always worked. Without fail. The Curse of Knowledge will not go away because you are aware of it. Awareness is not enough. The only move that actually works is finding someone outside your world, handing them what you wrote, and watching their face while they read it. Not reading it for them. Watching them. The moment their face shows even a flicker of confusion, you have found exactly where your writing failed. That is the whole masterclass.

Catolicismo, ciencia, interpretación de la Biblia y la caricatura del evangelicalismo. Este comentario es un ejemplo perfecto de un fenómeno que se repite constantemente en redes y que merece desarrollarse. Gente que cree estar haciendo una crítica demoledora al cristianismo cuando en realidad está criticando una versión del cristianismo que la propia Iglesia católica lleva diecisiete siglos rechazando. La idea de que la ausencia de Marte o de los dinosaurios en el Génesis supone una contradicción parte de una premisa concreta, que la Biblia es un manual de ciencias naturales que debería describir la totalidad del universo físico, y esa premisa no es católica. Es protestantismo evangélico norteamericano, el literalismo bíblico que arranca con los movimientos fundamentalistas del siglo XIX en Estados Unidos y que ha contaminado la percepción del cristianismo en todo el mundo hasta el punto de que mucha gente que se cree atea lo que realmente rechaza es esa caricatura, no el catolicismo. La Iglesia católica no ha leído nunca la Biblia así. San Agustín ya advertí en el siglo V en el De Genesi ad litteram que era una vergüenza que un cristiano dijese disparates sobre cuestiones naturales apoyándose en las Escrituras, porque hacía el ridículo ante cualquier pagano con formación y desprestigiaba la fe por ignoranca. Tomás de Aquino enseñó en el siglo XIII que la verdad revelada y la verdad natural no pueden contradecirse porque proceden dl mismo Dios, y que si un dato científico contradice una interpretación bíblica el problema está en la interpretación, no en la ciencia. La Pontificia Comisión Bíblica aclaró en 1909 que los primeros capítulos del Génesis no pretenden enseñar la constitución física del mundo visible, y la Dei Verbum del Concilio Vaticano II (1965) lo formuló al afirmar que la Escritura enseña, cito, "la verdad que Dios quiso consignar en los libros sagrados para nuestra salvación", no geología ni astronomía. El Génesis utiliza el lenguaje y las categorías csmológicas que sus destinatarios podían comprender (un pueblo del primer milenio antes de Cristo) para transmitir verdades teológicas que trascienden ese marco, que Dios es el origen de todo lo que existe, que la creación tiene orden y sentido, que el ser humano ocupa un lugar singular n ella. Esto lo entendía un niño de catequesis hace medio siglo porque se lo explicaban correctamente, y ahora hay adultos que no lo comprenden porque lo que les ha llegado del cristianismo es una parodia literalista importada del Bible Belt que la Iglesia católica rechaza desde Agustín de Hipona.

Your words should cost something. They need to cost something every single time. It should be expensive to write because you write to gain something, and everyone knows to get something true and rare requires giving up something precious. Write to risk your reputation, your integrity, your friendships, your emotional defenses. Everytime you write it should be a sacrifice. Words that cost nothing mean nothing, and if the writing doesn't give then it takes, and it takes in such a way that everybody who listens to your words loses, including yourself. The words mutate on the page into a tawdry little spell and the world becomes just a little more tainted with the lies pursued by false self interest. Only blood fuels the engine of truth.

@AttorneyF_ That’s a beautiful take. It’s funny, as I was just trying to explain to someone that action - that “burning”, as you’ve put it - is the most logical and “appropriate” reaction to understanding and fully appreciating the magnitude of love that God has for you.

Paul tells a justified man to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. For a while I read that as a contradiction. Why strive if the verdict is settled? Why run if grace is finished? The answer came through a picture of parenting. The father or mother who builds wealth, secures their child’s future, removes the existential terror of ruin, and then raises that child to still work hard, take real risks, and build something of their own, is not being contradictory. The safety net shouldn’t kill the hunger, but it should remove the ceiling on it. The sensible wealthy parent expects their child not to hustle less but hustle better. To swing bigger, fall harder, and rise faster. Not because failure doesn’t cost them anything, but cos failure can no longer destroy them. In that sense, the inheritance doesn’t dilute the ambition. It purifies it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The gospel works exactly the same way. The fear and trembling Paul describes is not anxiety about losing salvation. It is the seriousness of a man who grasps what his freedom cost, and finds he cannot be casual about it. The freed man runs. Not out of fear, but out of clarity. Because liberation doesn’t remove the will, it finally gives it room. The sweet spot, the one most believers never find, is deep settled peace in the finished work of Christ, and still pursuing holiness with everything you have. The security doesn’t produce softness. It produces freedom. And freedom, rightly understood, makes the striving more urgent. Entitlement and freedom look identical from the outside. The entitled believer rests in grace and drifts. The free believer rests in grace and burns. I find that most people only ever find one side. Rest without striving very easily becomes passivity. Striving without rest becomes exhaustion or quiet pride. Both have missed it, in opposite directions. The rarest person in any room is the child who knows the inheritance is secure and still builds like everything depends on it. The believer who knows the price is paid and still burns. That’s not a paradox. That’s the point.

when I graduated with my stats degree I walked across the stage and shook the crusty old department chair’s hand. he pulled me in close and whispered in my ear “correlation is causation a lot of the time”

Im going to leave you with this tonight. Underrated life skill: asking for exactly what you want. Most people hint, hope, and wait for others to read their mind. Instead, state your request directly, explain why it matters to you, propose how it benefits them too, and give them an easy out. You'll be shocked how often the answer is yes. The worst they can say is no, which is exactly where you started. People actually respect clarity. Fortune favors the bold, but it adores the specific.

Martha Nussbaum on why Aristotle believed you are not made of matter. In a 1987 interview on the Great Philosophers, philosopher Martha Nussbaum lays out Aristotle's three-part case against material reductionism, the idea that what you fundamentally are is just the stuff you're made of. His argument is more intuitive than it might sound. First: your matter is always changing. "Matter is always going in and out; it's always changing and of course you do change your material constituents very, very often without ceasing to be yourself." Your cells replace themselves. Your body is not the same collection of atoms it was years ago. And yet you are still you. If your identity were your matter, it would vanish and return constantly. But it doesn't. Something persists that isn't the material. Second: what makes a thing that thing is its function, not its parts. Aristotle uses the example of a ship. Replace some of its planks so long as "its functional structure remains the same, we could always replace bits of the matter without having a different thing in our hands." It's still the same ship. The same logic applies to you. Swap out the components, preserve the structure and function and the identity remains intact. This suggests identity lives in the organisation, not the raw material. Third: matter alone is too vague to define anything. This is perhaps his sharpest point. "Matter is just a lump or heap of stuff and so we couldn't say you are some stuff or other; it's only when we've identified the structure that the stuff constitutes that we can even go on to say something intelligent about the stuff itself." In other words: matter, by itself, tells you nothing. It's formless. You need structure form, function, organisation before you can even begin to describe what a thing is. The deeper implication Aristotle is reaching toward: what makes you you isn't a quantity of carbon and water. It's a pattern. A functional whole. A form that persists through constant material flux. Which raises the question if identity isn't located in matter, where exactly does it live?

It really has been a joy to post through my most secret, forbidden, dark, and complicated thoughts. I'm no longer so afraid of being ridiculed and insulted, but even better, I've found that kind and thoughtful and intelligent people are always waiting in earnest to engage with you. It's like doing a trust fall with your eyes closed and finding a thousand hands reaching out to hold you in the dark.

You’re right. Christianity brainwashed me. Now I want to spend the rest of my life loving one woman, building a faithful marriage, raising a strong and beautiful family, praying for people who hate me, forgiving when it’s hard, staying far away from gossip and bitterness, and finding my peace in Jesus. If that’s brainwashing, I’m grateful for it.

Sometimes the best theology is silence. One of Job’s friends said something so true that Paul quotes it in the New Testament: “He catches the wise in their craftiness.” (1 Cor 3:19) I was astonished to see that this line originally came from Eliphaz, one of the friends God later rebukes at the end of the book of Job. That really struck me. Cos I could see that the problem of Job’s friends wasn’t their theology. Their theology was largely correct so correct that Paul quoted one of them. The problem was their certainty. They took general truths about God and turned them into specific verdicts about Job’s situation, a situation they had no access to. The heavenly conversation in chapter 1 was hidden from them. They didn’t know why Job was suffering. They just knew their framework, and they applied it. That is what God rebuked. Not cos of the doctrine, but the absolute confidence. What makes it more haunting is that when God finally speaks in chapters 38–41, after all the debate, after Job’s protests and the friends’ explanations, He never explains. Not once. He instead asks Job about the foundations of the earth. The movement of stars. Where the morning comes from. The God who could have resolved everything with one sentence chose cosmology instead. And notice that Job compared to his friends wasn’t composed. He wasn’t offering balanced theological reflection. He was accusing God of injustice. Demanding a hearing. Saying things that, on paper, sound far more dangerous than anything his friends said. Yet God says Job spoke what was right. Cos Job was wrestling with God, not performing for an audience. His theology was a relationship, not a system. The friends’ theology was airtight, and completely disconnected from the person sitting in the ash heap in front of them. That’s the rebuke underneath the rebuke. They weren’t just theologically overconfident. They were so committed to defending God’s reputation that they stopped seeing their friend. Doctrine became a wall between them and Job’s actual suffering. And God, apparently, found that inexcusable. Which means silence wasn’t a failure of theology in this story. It was the most honest thing anyone could have offered. The friends had their best theological moment in Job 2:12-13, before they ever opened their mouths. They stayed seven days with him and as the Bible records “no one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was”. It was when they started talking, that they went wrong, so wrong God scolded them. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can say about suffering is nothing. Not because you don’t know God. But because you do, and you know He hasn’t told you everything. And that kind of silence isn’t passive. It isn’t weakness or confusion or a failure of faith. It is the hardest thing a theologically serious person can do; stand next to suffering they cannot explain, with a God they trust but cannot fully read, and choose presence over answers. Job’s friends had the words and even the framework. What they couldn’t do was stop. That’s the discipline the book is asking for. Not less faith, but more restraint.

The Madonna-Whore complex exists because men who lack paradox tolerance are not able to see a woman for both her darkness and light, and so have to pretend pure hearted women don't have dark desires, whilst treating women who don't meet their purity standards as less than human.

Your brain genuinely cannot tell the difference between learning and achieving. I recently learned that the brain processes the act of acquiring information through the same reward circuitry as actually using it. Neurologically, reading about building a business and building one produce overlapping sensations. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between consuming knowledge and applying it. So it rewards both equally, and you unconsciously choose the one with less friction and zero risk of failure. Reading cannot reject you. Action can. This is why intelligent people are disproportionately vulnerable to this trap. The smarter you are, the more convincingly you can argue that you need more information before you begin. You can always find a gap in your knowledge. There will always be one more framework, one more perspective, one more edge case you haven't studied. Intelligence becomes the mechanism of its own paralysis. At some point, more information stops compounding and starts substituting. You are no longer preparing to act. You are using preparation to replace action while maintaining the psychological identity of someone who is working toward something. The shift that actually changes behavior is ruthlessly simple. You stop measuring your days by what you consumed and start measuring them by what you produced. One email sent outweighs ten articles about email marketing. One page written outweighs one hour of reading about writing. The doing is the learning that the consuming only pretends to be. Your dopamine system will follow wherever you train it to go. Right now it is trained to chase input. But we can retrain it on output and the entire experience of a working day changes at a neurochemical level.

Keith the Apocalypse Bringer is a three-year-old Anglo-Nubian goat in a field in Devon. Keith should not be underestimated. Keith has been systematically dismantling the ecosystem since approximately 7am, when he ate a bramble. This is significant because bramble is an invasive scrub species that outcompetes wildflowers, reduces biodiversity, and creates dense monoculture thicket that nothing else can use. Keith ate it. Keith does this every day. Keith does not charge for this service. 8:15am - Keith ate a thistle. Thistles are also considered invasive scrub in managed pasture. Goldfinches eat thistle seeds, but Keith's grazing will ensure the pasture remains open enough for the ground-nesting birds that can't use dense scrub. Keith has not attended a conservation workshop. Keith arrived at this conclusion by being a goat. 9:00am - Keith dismantled a section of hedge. This was less helpful. Keith does not have a perfect record. 10:30am - Keith escaped the field. He was in the road for eleven minutes. He ate a neighbour's rose. This is not being counted in Keith's environmental impact assessment. 11:00am - Keith was returned to the field. Keith regarded the farmer with the specific expression of an animal that does not recognise the concept of property. 12:00pm - Keith ate more bramble. His digestive system: four stomachs, a rumen full of specialised microorganisms, the ability to extract nutrition from lignified plant matter that would defeat any other animal on this field, is converting scrub vegetation into milk with a fat content of approximately 4.5%. The milk will become cheese. The cheese will be sold at the farm shop. The farm shop is four miles away. The cheese food miles are: four. 3:00pm - Keith produced manure. The manure will grow the grass. The grass will grow the bramble. The bramble will be eaten by Keith. This system has no inputs. It has been running since goats were domesticated approximately ten thousand years ago. Keith is not aware he is saving the planet. Keith is thinking about whether the fence on the north side has a weak point. It does. Keith found it at 4:45pm. Keith got out again.

I was raised around the church, and I wasn’t into it. I was never going to be the guy that believed in all this just because that was what was socially acceptable in my environment. Over the years, I had gone back and forth, but it was never much of a priority. Fast forward to 2022, I considered myself agnostic and decided to get serious about figuring out a direction. I read every book I could find on the subject, the Bible included, doing my best to view all the information objectively. Around this time, I was down bad one day and decided to say a prayer and asked Him to show me a sign. The very next day, a man came up to me in the gym, hadn’t seen him before and haven’t seen him since, he held out a shirt with the verse from Jeremiah "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” on it and said “I’m not sure why, but I felt called to give this to you today, he sees you”. I get random text from my mom that afternoon, same verse. On that same day, my Grandpa was in the hospital—the only artwork in his room? Same verse. (Found this out weeks later) I realized that over the years I had a bad taste in my mouth about organized religion. It can be used to control and to profit, but I also realized that isn’t what Jesus wanted or taught. That is humans being human, and I came to the conclusion that it’s not right for me to let their mistakes affect the way I view Christianity. I’m a logical dude, I get the skepticism over the subject, and sitting here today I can tell you that I never thought I would write something like this. Everyone is on their own journey, and I’m the last one to push my beliefs on someone else. I’m not trying to appear virtuous, or trying to assert myself as “above” anyone. I’m writing this because arriving here has changed my life in a way that makes it feel wrong to keep it to myself. I don’t have all the answers, but through my own research and experience, all I can say is that I believe with all my heart and soul. God bless, and have a great weekend.