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The comparison trap is the quintessential Debbie Downer of any woman’s life. It just is. This is especially true when it comes to the “oops, I compared myself to my skinny friend” moment.

An unforgettable story from my life: Last year, I went to lunch with my dear and pint-size friend Kari. Afterward, she wanted to do what many of us love to do … shop. Problem was, she dragged me to one of those tiny-people boutiques where the biggest waist size probably wouldn’t even fit my arm. Yes, arm. Just one of them.

I didn’t quite know what to do, so I pretended to be interested in the clothes, of which the largest size I could find was eight. Yes, I was the elephant in the room. And I don’t mean in the size kind of way. I mean in the “what do we do with her” kind of way. (Girl, I know you’ve been there.)

“Can I help you find something?” the kind clerk asked. I had no clue what to say. It’s not like I’m going to open up and blurt out “you know you can’t.” In the meantime, my mind took off on a sprint. If only … if only … if only. I started comparing myself to my petite friend, feeling anything but happy and sexy. Every ounce of self-esteem I had worked so hard to build went out the window in two seconds or less. Why? I wasn’t prepared for how I would keep myself out of this mindframe … a toxic thinking catastrophe we’ve all experienced.

OK, you can’t specifically prepare yourself for every spontaneous experience. But you can prepare in a general way with a little pep talk. For example, I might say: “Put the focus back on yourself, Mary Beth. You are beautiful and amazing exactly as you are.” Then, I start listing all of the positives about myself so that I’m not caught up in someone else’s reality.

Your pep talk will be unique to you. And if you’re really struggling, remember to start small. You might not immediately believe it if you say “I am beautiful.” So start with the small aspects that you see beauty in. This is a little trick I learned from my buddy Jodi, who is a therapist. You can say: “I have beautiful eyes and a beautiful smile. I am a hard worker and a very giving person.” This may sound vanilla, but you’ve got to start somewhere."

Noiseless sex doesn’t have to mean passionless sex. The next time you need to keep it down, try incorporating some of the following tips:

Your lovemaking is less likely to attract attention if everyone is asleep. While you may still want to keep the noise to a minimum, you might have a bit more leeway in the middle of the night or the wee hours of the morning.

Shower sex is less likely to be noisy in the first place, provided the shower you’re using is big enough for two. Plus, there’s added coverage in the sound of the water, which might also help you take your mind off the sound. Take care to avoid slips and falls, which could not only blow your cover, but also cause an injury.

Beds, while great for sleeping, can make all kinds of noises when you’re getting frisky. To avoid those telltale squeaky mattress springs, the floor is your best option. While it may not be the most comfortable, you can soften things up with a few blankets or pillows.

If proximity to other bedrooms is your issue, why not skip the bedroom altogether? You can avoid the possibility of your kids, relatives, or other guests in your own house hearing you by scouting out a new location. An office, basement, or playroom — pretty much any out-of-earshot room with a door you can close — will do just fine.

However, this is not advised if you’re in someone else’s house.

Added noise can give you a bit more flexibility as to how loud you can be. Music is a great daytime option to avoid arousing suspicion. At night, a white noise machine, television, or ambient music are a little bit more discreet when it comes to sound-canceling options. Of course, you’ll still want to be mindful of your volume.

Pillows are handy when you want to scream, but can’t. Feeling kinky? Co-opt a tie or a scarf and tie it around your mouth as a gag. Not only will it help you avoid any involuntary cries when it’s time to orgasm, it’ll also up the excitement factor.

Quiet sex is a great opportunity to break your routine. Avoid the bumps, thumps, and squeaks associated with penetrative sex by focusing on outercourse. Please yourself while your partner watches, or take turns pleasing each other."

"What if I make a mistake?

It’s okay! Everyone slips up from time to time. The best thing to do if you use the wrong pronoun for someone is to say something right away, like “Sorry, I meant (insert pronoun)”

If you realize your mistake after the fact, apologize in private and move on.

A lot of the time it can be tempting to go on and on about how bad you feel that you messed up or how hard it is for you to get it right. Please don’t! It is inappropriate and makes the person who was misgendered feel awkward and responsible for comforting you, which is absolutely not their job.

Taking an active role in your classes, you may hear one of your students using the wrong pronoun for someone. In most cases, it is appropriate to gently correct them without further embarrassing the individual who has been misgendered. This means saying something like “Alex uses the pronoun she,” and then moving on. If other students or faculty are consistently using the wrong pronouns for someone, do not ignore it! It is important to let your student know that you are their ally.

It may be appropriate to approach them and say something like “I noticed that you were getting referred to with the wrong pronoun earlier, and I know that that can be really hurtful. Would you be okay with me taking them aside and reminding them about your pronouns?” Follow up if necessary, but take your cues from the comfort level of your student. Your actions will be greatly appreciated."

"Why is it important to respect people’s pronouns?

You can’t always know what someone’s pronouns are by looking at them. Asking and correctly using someone’s pronouns is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their gender identity.

When someone is referred to with the wrong pronoun, it can make them feel disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, or dysphoric ( often all of the above.)

It is a privilege to not have to worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender. If you have this privilege, yet fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful, but also oppressive."

"What are some commonly used pronouns?

She/her/hers and he/him/his are a few commonly used pronouns. Some people call these “female/feminine” and “male/masculine” pronouns, but many avoid these labels because not everyone who uses he feels like a “male” or “masculine.”

There are also lots of gender-neutral pronouns in use. Here are a few you might hear:

Never refer to a person as “it” or “he-she”. These are offensive slurs used against trans and gender non-conforming individuals."

Soul Sex is a ritual where you exchange energies, emotions, thoughts, and consciousness. During sex, you’re one and it’s important that your vibes resonate. Each pump and thrust is an affirmation.

Is your partner refueling, healing and recharging your spirit or is draining the life out of you? Are they dragging you down to low-frequency energy, un-fulfillment, depression? Or  elevating you into the higher frequency of love life and bliss?

Sex is powerful and you need to be mindful! Master how your energy is exchanged, received and returned back to you. The pleasures are temporary but the ripples it casts last long.

Sex should be healing, powerful, and rejuvenating to every part of your being, from celluloid to your organs, to your mind and your soul. The very thing that can give you a sense of satisfaction for a few minutes or for a long time if you do it right.

Soul sex is powerful, it is a therapeutic medicine when done right.

Wondering how soul sex leads to spiritual connection? During soul sex one focuses upon the illumination of the soul rather than solely on physical sexual pleasure.

Such a soulful union is divine! This type of sex also called spiritual sex, where one feels boundless pure bliss, warmth, and ego loss, especially during orgasm.

Sexual energy is the bridge – a connection back to the Life force. There are volumes of research on – physical, emotional and mental benefits of a healthy sex and how it promotes your spiritual growth.

When two musical instruments don’t resonate with each other’s beat the music is awful and so is the sex. Make its power flow in the right direction and it takes you up-hill if otherwise, you fall for your own bad. Let the souls meet not just the body."

"As a human rights person, I may attend houses of worship virtually and in-person on occasions to lovingly engage the faith communities in the fight for global justice."

- Antonio Myers

"1.  Religion promotes tribalism. Infidel, heathen, heretic. Religion divides insiders from outsiders. Rather than assuming good intentions, adherents often are taught to treat outsiders with suspicion. “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers,” says the Christian Bible. “They wish that you disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them,” says the Koran (Sura 4:91).

At best, teachings like these discourage or even forbid the kinds of friendship and intermarriage that help clans and tribes become part of a larger whole. At worst, outsiders are seen as enemies of God and goodness, potential agents of Satan, lacking in morality and not to be trusted. Believers might huddle together, anticipating martyrdom. When simmering tensions erupt, societies fracture along sectarian fault lines.

2. Religion anchors believers to the Iron Age. Concubines, magical incantations, chosen people, stonings . . . The Iron Age was a time of rampant superstition, ignorance, inequality, racism, misogyny, and violence. Slavery had God’s sanction. Women and children were literally possessions of men. Warlords practiced scorched earth warfare. Desperate people sacrificed animals, agricultural products, and enemy soldiers as burnt offerings intended to appease dangerous gods.

Sacred texts including the Bible, Torah and Koran all preserve and protect fragments of Iron Age culture, putting a god’s name and endorsement on some of the very worst human impulses. Any believer looking to excuse his own temper, sense of superiority, warmongering, bigotry, or planetary destruction can find validation in writings that claim to be authored by God.

Today, humanity’s moral consciousness is evolving, grounded in an ever deeper and broader understanding of the Golden Rule. But many conservative believers can’t move forward. They are anchored to the Iron Age. This pits them against change in a never-ending battle that consumes public energy and slows creative problem solving.

4. Religion diverts generous impulses and good intentions. Feeling sad about Haiti? Give to our mega-church. Crass financial appeals during times of crisis thankfully are not the norm, but religion does routinely redirect generosity in order to perpetuate religion itself. Generous people are encouraged to give till it hurts to promote the church itself rather than the general welfare. Each year, thousands of missionaries throw themselves into the hard work of saving souls rather than saving lives or saving our planetary life support system. Their work, tax free, gobbles up financial and human capital.

Besides exploiting positive moral energy like kindness or generosity, religion often redirects moral disgust and indignation, attaching these emotions to arbitrary religious rules rather than questions of real harm. Orthodox Jews spend money on wigs for women and double dishwashers. Evangelical parents, forced to choose between righteousness and love, kick queer teens out onto the street. Catholic bishops impose righteous rules on operating rooms."

"Jesus was hostile towards religious practices that divided people into clean and unclean groups instead of grace-based community. The setting for three of Jesus’ most famous parables reads: “Tax collectors and other notorious sinners often came to listen to Jesus teach. This made the Pharisees and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful people—even eating with them!” (Luke 15:1-2; NLT). So Jesus tells three of his most beloved parables to further infuriate the religious leaders—The Parable of the Lost Sheep, The Parable of the Lost Coin, and The Parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus believed grace-base community cleanses and heals.

Jesus was hostile towards religious practices that valued rigid rules instead of loving relationship. In The Parable of the Two Lost Sons (aka The Prodigal Son in Luke 15), the younger son breaks all the rules and the older son keeps all the rules. However, both sons are alienated from the father and both sons dishonor the father, only for different reasons. The “rule breaker” leaves home, hits rock bottom, and returns to the father with a humble heart; the “rule keeper” stays home, swells with anger, and injures the father with a resentful heart. Jesus believed costly love and grace could mend broken relationships.

Jesus was hostile towards religious practices that focus on dead ritual instead of compassion. In The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), Jesus told a story about a Jewish priest and a Levite (religious leaders) who came upon a man who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. The religious leaders passed by and didn’t help because they feared they would become ceremonially unclean if they touched a dead man, plus they didn’t know if the man was Jewish or not. A Samaritan man (people whom Jews discriminated against) finds the man and displays costly love to help the man. The Samaritan becomes the hero of the story. Jesus believed it was more important to show compassion and costly love to a fellow human being than rigidly adhere to religious purity rituals.

Jesus was hostile towards religious practices that excluded people based on social status, lifestyle, or nationality instead of radical inclusion. In The Parable of the Great Banquet Feast (Luke 14:15-24), Jesus tells of a wealthy nobleman who invites an elite list of guests to his dinner party. The elite guests make lame excuses for not attending. The nobleman tells his servant to go out and invite the outcasts and misfits of Israel who could never return the favor. Then the nobleman goes a step further and tells the servant to go out beyond the borders of Israel and, in essence, invite people of other nationalities and religious beliefs (the Gentiles) to the dinner party. Jesus believed that God’s grace-based kingdom would include the outcasts, the misfits, the marginalized, and the strangers from around the world—a kingdom of radical inclusion.

So yes. Jesus was radically irreligious in his teachings and in his actions."

“God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.”

“The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

“What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.”

“Whatever it was that people experience in Jesus has today come to be identified with medieval doctrines based on premodern assumptions that are no longer believable. That identification means that serious theological discussion seems to accomplish little more than to erect a division between the shouters and the disinterested. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me neither option is worth pursuing. Yet even understanding these things, I am still attracted to this Jesus and I will pursue him both relentlessly and passionately. I will not surrender the truth I believe I find in him either to those who seek to defend the indefensible or to those who want to be freed finally from premodern ideas that no longer make any sense.”

"Chapter 2: Jesus Makes Sparrows

(1) The child Jesus was five years old. After it rained, he was playing at the ford of a flowing stream. And stirring up the dirty waters, he gathered them into pools, and he made them clean and excellent, ordering them by word alone – and not ordering them by a deed.

(2) Then, having taken soft clay from the mud, he formed twelve sparrows from it. But it was the Sabbath when he did these things, and many children were with him.

(3) But a certain Jew saw the child Jesus with the other children doing these things. He went to Joseph his father and slandered the child Jesus, saying that “he made clay on the Sabbath, which isn’t permissible, and formed twelve sparrows.”

(4) And Joseph went and rebuked him (Jesus), saying, “Why are you doing these things on the Sabbath?”

But Jesus clapped his hands, ordering the birds with a shout in front of all, and said, “Go, take flight like living beings!” And the sparrows, taking flight, went away squawking.

(5) And having seen this, the Pharisee was amazed, and he reported it to all his friends.

Chapter 3: Jesus Curses Annas’ Son

(1) And the son of Annas the high priest said to him (Jesus), “Why are you doing such a thing on the Sabbath?” And having taken a willow twig, he destroyed the pools and drained the water which Jesus had gathered, and he dried up their gatherings.

(2) But having seen what had happened, Jesus said to him, “Your fruit (will have) no root, and your shoot will be withered like a scorched branch in a violent wind!”

(3) And immediately that child withered away.

Chapter 4: Jesus Curses a Careless Child

(1) From there he was going with his father Joseph, and someone running struck his shoulder. And Jesus said to him, “Cursed be you because of your leader!”

And immediately he died.

And the people who saw that he had died immediately cried out and said, “From where was this child born, that his word becomes deed?”

(2) And when the parents of the dead child saw what had happened, they blamed Joseph his father, saying, “From wherever you have this child, you can’t live with us in this village. If you want to be here, teach him to bless and not to curse, because our child has been taken away from us.”

Chapter 5: Joseph Confronts Jesus

(1) And Joseph said to Jesus, “Why do you say such things, and they suffer and hate us?”

And the child said to Joseph, “Since you know wise words, you’re not ignorant of where they came from; /they were spoken about a five-year-old.\ And they won’t be raised, and these will receive their punishment.”

And immediately those accusing him became blind.

(2) And Joseph took his (Jesus’) ear and pulled hard.

(3) And Jesus said to him, “It’s enough for you seek and find me, and not, beyond that, to scourge me by having taken on a natural ignorance. You haven’t clearly seen me, why I’m yours. Look! I’ve been subdued before you.”

"Langberg thinks the 83 percent from this latest survey may be surprisingly high for the public—but most significantly, she points out that the ‘numbers on the ground’ are probably lower than the survey reveals.

Survey respondents often answer surveys—especially those on sensitive topics—in a way that they think will be most presentable to the interviewer. The field of psychology even has a name for this phenomenon: the social desirability bias.

“The church is far more protective of abusers than those numbers would indicate,” Langberg said. Put another way, answering a survey question is not the same thing as triggering a figurative earthquake in one’s church community by reporting abuse.

“Not many people would say they should stay [after abuse],” Langberg points out, but translating it on the ground, in real life, I think there will be a gap. As we know, when these things are exposed, there’s almost always more than one victim and it has gone on for some time. There has been hesitancy to deal with it at all because of all the ‘damage’ to the church that will have.”

There’s another curiosity in this survey: the other 17 percent, who didn’t respond that child sexual abuse should permanently disqualify a pastor from ministry.

CT found U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics stating that for Fiscal Years 2014-2018, 98.8 percent of sexual abuse offenders were sentenced to prison, and their average sentence was almost 16 years.

Yet in the Lifeway study, ten percent of pastors told researchers that if a pastor has engaged in child sexual assault, that person should spend between 2-10 years away from ministry—or even less. (Seven percent did not know how long the pastor should spend away.)

What is going through their heads?

“I would assume... part of what’s going through their head is: ‘we’re sorry it happened, but he’s repented and maybe even cried and we’re called to forgive him,” Langberg said.

That kind of thinking—not just in terms of the abuse, but in terms of scripture—is not being done well in Christendom."

"EHRMAN: I think one of the hardest things for people to get their minds around is that ancient Israelites and then Jews and then Jesus himself and his followers have a very different understanding of what the relationship between what we call body and soul. Our view is that we - you've got two things going on in the human parts. So you have your body, your physical being, and you have your soul, this invisible part of you that lives on after death, that you can separate the two and they can exist - the soul can exist outside of the body. That is not a view that was held by ancient Israelites and then Jews, and it's not even taught in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, what we would call the soul is really more like what we would call the breath. When God creates Adam, he creates him out of earth, and then he breathes life into him. The life is in the breath. When the breath leaves the body, the body no longer lives, but the breath doesn't exist. We agree with this. I mean, when you die, you stop breathing. Your breath doesn't go anywhere. And that was the ancient understanding, the ancient Hebrew understanding of the soul, is that it didn't go anywhere because it was simply the thing that made the body alive.

And so in the Old Testament, there's no idea that your soul goes one place or another because the soul doesn't exist apart from the body. Existence is entirely bodily. And that was the view that Jesus then picked up."

"This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When we originally scheduled the interview we're about to hear, we didn't realize how weirdly timely it would be. Let's face it - the pandemic has made death a presence on a scale most of us aren't used to. Your beliefs about what happens after death or if anything happens might shape how you're dealing with your fears and anxieties. In the new book, "Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife," my guest Bart Ehrman writes about where the ideas of heaven and hell came from. He examines the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, as well as writings from the Greek and Roman era.

Ehrman is a distinguished professor of religious studies at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is one of America's most widely read scholars of early Christianity and the New Testament. His books such as "Misquoting Jesus" and "How Jesus Became God" challenge a lot of beliefs and common wisdom. As for Ehrman's beliefs, as a child, he was an altar boy in the Episcopal Church. At age 15, he became a born-again fundamentalist evangelical Christian. After attending the Moody Bible Institute, he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary, which introduced him to texts and interpretations that led him to a more liberal form of Christianity. Eventually, he left the faith altogether."