#“religion”

[scotianostra]

25th May 1847 saw the birth of John Alexander Dowie, the Scots-born religious leader.

Dowie, a highly controversial but charismatic faith healer, founded the Christian Catholic Church at Zion, Illinois, where around 5,000 followers created a unique community and followed his teaching.

This included a belief in the power of prayer in the healing of disease: Zion existed without any doctors or pharmacists. Smoking, drinking and the eating of pork were banned. Dowie, the self-proclaimed apostle Elijah the Restorer, was expelled from the Church in 1905 after he had become increasingly eccentric, and the community fell into financial ruin. He died a year later.

More info here https://www.james-joyce-music.com/extras/dowie_bio.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0vFNozQQuxkmz3zU8yokyJCNFGppk0GtKjO8OvepnAQ71vLgysXf2CxDE_aem_AabXHtu40JdfxGGMKAdGWBAYrZpwc4QciW6PwPl3CVUXAtELHBgeuXL2pQBr7OtA74KjaBH4ldWTq9AbWIWWkRM4

[moths-and-crows]

google defines a cult as "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object," or "a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister."

so if I made a religion with strange practices that was devoted to a specific thing (I might be confused, but isn't "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object" just... any religion????) that only a small group of people were a part of I could officially call it a cult?

@sabineandcheeseburrito @starcrossedandstupid @3guineapigsinatrenchcoat @parrotxx you have been invited become a founder of my cult

would you like to accept this offer

[inbabylontheywept]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[prokopetz]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[soup-mother]

still thinking about "decolonising" missionary work.

the way you decolonise missionary work is by not doing missionary work

the way you decolonise missionaries is like this:

[nando161mando]

[fuckyeahreligionpigeon]

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[what-even-is-thiss]

Love answering ”why are you transgender?” with “God told me to” because it’s funny and it confuses everyone except for me. And God. Because he told me to.

[alienbycomics]

Gender Nonconforming Jesus: A look at art history. CW: religion, transphobia, artistic nudity, depictions of open wounds (Long post)

Here’s a link to the original comic: Trans Jesus

[oxytocinatrocities]

A comic I drew about leaving the Mormon church.

I've come to think this metaphor also applies pretty well to constitutional originalism and the absurd idolization by both U.S. political parties of a document written hundreds of years ago by men who didn't know about the carbon cycle and owned human slaves.

[seraphimfall]

there is an insane amount of antisemitism floating around right now.

i just want to say:

this blog loves and supports jewish people.

this blog does NOT conflate the israeli government, or the atrocities it commits, with jewish people.

this blog is disgusted with those who use or express antisemitism.

this blog knows that if someone needs to invoke antisemitism, they do not actually care about helping palestine or the palestinian people.

this blog will do its best to ensure that it remains a safe space for all.

[ruegarding]

that scene in tlo where thalia tells percy he can't start feeling sorry for luke bc luke made his choices. and thalia reveals that the reason they couldn't make it to camp in time for all of them to make it to camp was bc luke kept picking fights. and annabeth never saw this as wrong bc luke was her hero. so thalia had to pick up the pieces. and percy thinking both that luke was put in a cruel position and that luke was putting others in a cruel position. and percy is the only character who understood both sides of luke bc annabeth sees only the best of him and thalia sees only the worst. and that's why percy is the prophecy kid and the one who gives luke the knife. bc annabeth had spent the entire series essentially giving luke the knife when he didn't deserve it. and thalia was never going to give luke the knife. but percy is the only one who can see exactly when luke deserves the knife.

[prokopetz]

It's that time of year when Tumblr celebrates Easter by posting pictures of crucified anime characters, and inevitably somebody in the notes will pop up to helpfully explain that crucifixion imagery has no cultural significance in Japanese media because Japan is only about 1% Christian, which bugs me because it's completely wrong.

It's true that in the majority of cases, crucifixion in Japanese cartoons isn't meant to be conveying any specific theological message, but something Western audiences are likely to miss is that a large portion of those random crucifixion scenes are referencing Ultraman.

Ultraman's creator was a devout Roman Catholic who explicitly intended the titular hero to read as a Christ figure, and consequently, various Ultramen have been crucified on multiple unconnected occasions throughout the franchise's history. Crucifixion scenes in Japanese cartoons are often directly name-checking particular crucifixion incidents from Ultraman, right down to emulating the compositions and camera angles of specific shots. It's like an especially morbid version of the Akira slide.

The upshot is that, while it's true that the inclusion of gratuitous crucifixion scenes in Japanese cartoons typically has no (intentional) theological message, stating that they have no cultural significance is incorrect. A large chunk of the Japanese viewing audience are going to see them and immediately go "hey, that's an Ultraman reference".

Anyway, as an image tax, have a shot of four crucified Ultramen miraculously resurrecting a fifth Ultraman by shooting laser beams out of their hearts: