#⁂ religion

[charlesoberonn]

[help-me-find-a-name-please-lol]

Hero of the Year 2025

I'm calling it early - I doubt anyone will beat The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde

(I sure hope I've addressed her correctly)

For the most stunning act of bravery, class, integrity, and speaking truth to power that has graced the USA in far too long.

Not a single shake in her voice as she spoke directly to one of the most vengeful, spiteful, and (unfortunately) powerful people on the planet, while also receiving glares of hate and outrage from the despicable VP and his wife.

It's not the first time she's stood up for what is right in defiance of trump's actions, but while many may speak out on it, there have been scarcely any with the backbone to follow through on the opportunity to do it to his face, and especially on live television. She had her moment, and she didn't waste it.

May she be the inspiration we all take forward with us into the turbulent times ahead.

[lizardsfromspace]

It's tempting to call out evangelicals on grounds of hypocrisy - on ignoring the teachings of their own religion - but to them, it all makes sense, because they've developed a framework that basically amounts to Jesus having no real philosophy

They acknowledge the many verses about caring for the poor etc, but take it either as a code or of lesser importance. It's not about changing society, it's about individual charity, but not about compelling people to be charitable, just that it's nice. When Jesus spoke of the "least" of society, that wasn't about helping marginalized people, that was either about Christians, or about what side to take in the war that happens after the rapture. Simple. You may think "wait, but right before that it mentions caring for the poor, sick, and imprisoned" and their answer is, as I understand it, that you can just read every verse of the Bible in isolation from every other verse and it still makes sense on its own, so it doesn't matter (for reference, the New Testament wasn't split into numbered verses until 1551, when they were decided on by a random Frenchman)

This doesn't make sense on many levels. Anyone outside the sphere would point out that, religion aside, it would be really weird to have a story about someone telling a bunch of people to help the poor and then reveal "actually, it was all about events that will happen thousands of years after everyone present was dead! Nothing that was said matters to you or most people reading this!" Like what's the point. But within the sphere they have so many rationalizations, like how it's taken as writ in evangelical circles that it's okay to be rich because the "Eye of the Needle" was a specific gate in Jerusalem that was merely difficult to get through. Meanwhile, outside their culture, no references to that gate exist, because it didn't exist

One fun strain of this thinking is this

The Good Samaritan is a parable that ends with the directive to "go and do likewise". So clearly, the real point of the story is that you can't do anything. Jesus told everyone to go and do likewise to prove that nobody can ever show the impossible love to...help a guy who got robbed? Because Jesus was perfect, all advice from Jesus can be disregarded, because nobody can follow it because they're not Jesus

This idea, that every story Jesus told was just about how nobody can ever be like Jesus, is a thing in those circles and it's such a baffling foundation for a religion. Follow our messiah, who told us to be nice to people, but we know all the secret messages about how all those stories meant we SHOULDN'T be nice to people. Their sacred text is not a guide to living, it's a textbook for the apocalypse and how to go to heaven disguised as a guide to how you should be nice to people and help poor people. But a bunch of well-off white people discovered the secret parts of the Bible absolving them of the responsibility to care about people, so

[wojakgallery]

can you post the chuddha

Title/Name: Chuddha Wojak Series:  Chudjak / Poljak (Variant). Image by: Unknown Main Tag: Chudjak Wojak

[typhlonectes]

[heresylog]

I don’t care if you make fun of Catholicism as long as it’s accurate! The best humour has its roots in the truth.

[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.

[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.

[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

[autisticexpression2]

We need the obnoxious atheists back. I know they engineered their own destruction by being annoying and pretentious, but it has become apparent how essential to the ecosystem they were. The religious fanatics have become too bold without their natural predators. Jesus wojaks would have been torn to shreds in 2011.

[oxytocinatrocities]

A comic I drew about leaving the Mormon church.

Can also apply to other things. Ex. constitutional originalism in the US