For context, I'm a USian who became interested in Islamic cultures as a young adult, and from there found something magnetic about the faith of Islam.
I have many LGBT friends, and whenever I've reached out to mosques, the answers I get are rather disappointing. The best one I've gotten still invalidates homosexual relationships. I'm cishet, but as I said I have many LGBT friends, and I'm also poly. I have a comrade who is trans and converted to Islam, and I see that many LGBT Muslims exist, but this confounds me, too. Even the most open-minded of them will say something is "what Muslims believe" and then clarifies that it is from a Hadith, not strictly from the Quran. The comrade I know is a "Quranic" Muslim - one who follows the Five Pillars and the teachings of the Quran itself, and I know the Hadith are controversial outside of the majority of Sunni Islam.
I want to be a more spiritual person, but the type of Islam I encounter promotes teachings I know in my heart to be wrong. I know, too, that many Christians, Muslims, and Jews have this odd personal combat with God, for lack of a better term - a struggle with the divine, wherein they work out various personal sins/failings or disagreements with the scripture. I know Jews that eat pork, Muslims who drink, Christians who don't pray. I sense there's a spirit to the faiths that is more important than adherence to prescriptions of the text.
I am white (part Native American, but this isn't visible in my appearance or culture). No part of my lineage comes from any land associated with Islam. It feels like appropriation for me to want to convert to a faith, but then pick and choose which parts of it I want to believe and follow. I dabble in tarot and the occult. I'm poly. I believe all consensual love is valid and sacred. So, I guess my question is aimed more towards the Muslim comrades here who are LGBT or allies, who balance the secular with the spiritual, who might be able to show me the way:
How can I call myself a Muslim without compromising my beliefs? Is there a sect or denomination I can seek guidance from? Am I just wasting my - and your - time?
I'm currently an emergency certified teacher, but I'm really interested in maritime work and know a little bit about the career path and some options of how to navigate it.
I tried finding a maritime community on Lemmygrad, but I didn't have much luck, so if it exists I'd appreciate a redirect. Any comrades here familiar with maritime work and law?
I've got some friends who want to move to Shenzhen. I used to live in Beijing for a time as a ESL teacher. I don't really enjoy teaching, and I want to do maritime work, but I also rather miss China. So, I was curious: can I live in China, doing maritime work? As an ESL teacher I know companies will hire and help me with visas and the like in order to live there, but shipping is an altogether different matter. I know in most countries, maritime work hires foreign nationals all the time, but it's also a security thing. As an American citizen, would it be possible for me to get a Chinese visa and work in the maritime industry while living there?
This is really just a pipe dream at the moment. I don't have much maritime experience, and I don't have a maritime job at the moment. This is more of a five-year plan type of situation - something to start working towards, if possible.
Any help would be appreciated!
I'm an emergency certified teacher for geography in middle school in the US. Our textbooks are most odious propaganda I've ever had to witness, and I just can't deal with it. I managed to swing some alternative sources when we covered Eastern Europe and Western Russia, and when we covered China, but now we're going over Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Russia.
The textbook is just vile. Takes any opportunity to overrepresent every negative aspect of socialist countries in ways obvious to people like us, but innocuous to children. I've been struggling to balance my lessons in a way that teaches the regions, but isn't brainrot. Some of the stuff I can let slide and use the textbook for, but anything Soviet related is written in an insanely biased way.
We have to rush through the region to catch up to where other classes are, so I only need a few days' worth of material, but it's difficult to find things on YT that cover history of the region that's 1) easy for kids to understand, and 2) doesn't try and make the region out to be some kind of nightmare.
@CicadaSpectre
@lemmygrad.ml