#NOT ME TALKING TO THE PRIEST ABOUT ISLAM

[mchiti]

you guys it's 6 am I just got back home and my phone fell down the courtyard of a church. I'm not joking. I had to talk with the priest who just got up and he said "yeah yeah you know how many people ask me to get in for the same reason???" WELL WHAT THE FUCK LET ME JUST GET MY PHONE. I GOT IT BACK. MY SCREEN IS SCRATCHED BUT I HAVE IT BACK ALHAMDOULILLAH GOODNIGHT

[15-lizards]

what are your thoughts on the dune costumes? ive always found them so beautiful and they have left me going down rabbit holes trying to put together my own versions and collections of things i think fitting for the setting. i personally am OBSESSED with the bene gesserit and their look … and naturally lady jessica is an inspiration to us all

I was really impressed by the costuming in the movies, and I adore the attention to detail and storytelling through different clothing. You can clearly see the North African and classical Islamic inspirations

However, the one gripe I have with the Fremen costumes is the lack of color. Like these pics above are clearly the cultures the designers were inspired by, but if you see the newest movie, there is quite a lot of sandy, beige, and brown coloring and little else. Obviously if you live in the desert, you will rely on undyed or neutral colored cloth, but natural dyes are still available in these areas. Even in the book, the sietches are described as having colorful tapestries and color on the walls. The costumes were still beautiful and practical looking, but I do wish there was some individuality. There are a couple scenes near the end where Jessica and her entourage all have on brilliant dyed clothing and headdresses, so it is possible.

Here's me once again championing for the Islamic Fashion Institute to create all the costumes for future Dune projects, especially the Bene Gesserit show. There's an air of secrecy and mystery to the organization, and I just love the way their costumes shut the sister off from the average person as well as making them stick out as a member of the order. And these pics are giving me very regal secret sisterhood vibes

Also the catholic nun inspirations are sooooo palpable I need more people talking about this. All the strange headdresses and veils that put a barrier between the sister and the rest of the world. And not even just the costumes. Pure Catholic arrogance that this coalition of space priests could breed the savior of the world I live for it

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

before this goes any further, I want it on the record that you all asked for this.

my first and most petty point: Midnight Mass gets basic details about Catholicism wrong, such that even I (not a Catholic) twigged them. The big one is that Catholics DON'T HAVE MIDNIGHT MASS FOR EASTER - it's a Christmas thing - but since the priest holding the mass is also a vampire, I can accept that he's going off-book. I have a harder time with them holding a PICNIC for ASH WEDNESDAY, aka THE DAY LENT STARTS, aka the day everyone starts fasting and are therefore not snacking on a potluck. It's a minor thing, and normally I wouldn't pick at it, but since this show ostensibly revolves around Catholic doctrine, it bears mentioning.

on a writing level, not one single character in this show talks like a human being. or acts like one. I couldn't give you any information about who these characters are as people, because they're not people, they're mouthpieces for Flanagan to impart his ideas to the audience. He is both deeply in love with his own writing and entirely unconvinced that his audience is smart enough to Get It, so he has his actors turn to the audience and lay it all out. Not only is this bad writing on a character level, it brings all plot and tension to a screeching halt whenever it happens. The most unintentionally hilarious instance of this has to be when Annabeth Gish comes to the sheriff to tell him that the church is being run by a vampire and her mother is aging in reverse, and his response is to start rambling about where he was on 9/11. Like. Nothing about this makes sense, and also why should we care when it has fuckall to do with the story?

(as regards the sheriff character: I, a white Quaker, am not the person to critique this show's handling of Islam. But I will say that Flanagan doesn't seem to have a clear idea what he wants to communicate: the overarching plot is antitheistic, in a very r/atheism sort of way ("WHAT IF THE SACRAMENT WAS VAMPIRE BLOOD" ooh wow didja cut yourself on that edge there, buddy) but Flanagan has no idea how to balance that with the precepts of any religion that isn't Christianity while also maintaining his broadly liberal bona fides, so it all sits very uneasily next to the church plot. I'm not advocating for the show to go full Christopher Hitchens, but I am saying that if Flanagan wants to posit that faith is a mass delusion and a net detriment to any community formed around it . . . he needs to either focus only on Christian characters or be willing to engage with how other religions function in society, because as is, the storyline with the sheriff and his son just peters out into nothing.)

but the thing that made me angriest - that took me from "this is so boring and pretentious and badly written" to "oh FUCK this guy and the horse he rode in on -" was the titular midnight mass. It is very overtly inspired by the Jonestown massacre, which a lot of horror media does, but what it fails to account for is that the members of the People's Temple did not voluntarily kill themselves. I know "drink the kool-aid" has entered the popular lexicon as shorthand for "blindly following a leader," but extensive testimony from Jonestown survivors - not to mention the death tape, which is available online if you really want to ruin your day - all confirms that the people who died that day were forced to drink poison at gunpoint, after years of brutal abuse from Jones and his inner circle. And even after all of that, people fought back. And not outsiders - people who had been in the Temple for years and wholeheartedly believed in the mission that had lead them to Guyana in the first place. (Christine Miller was a fucking hero and she deserves to be remembered for it.) Jonestown was not lemmings going off a cliff, and any serious take on the story would involve reckoning with that - that these people believed in a higher power and also believed that they had a right to live despite what Jones told them. But that would contradict Flanagan's point of "religion is dumb, WAKE UP SHEEPLE," so instead he borrows the iconography of a truly horrific tragedy and disrespects the victims by implicitly representing them as dumb, brainwashed cult members who eagerly toss back poison because they think sky daddy wants them to. He has so little respect for the subjects he's portraying, and the real people whose deaths he is copying for shock value, that he doesn't care about the inner lives of anyone whose beliefs might demonstrate that faith is more nuanced than his screed would have you believe.

There are good horror properties out there that are critical of religion and society - The Medium, which we posted about a few days ago, is one. The Witch is another. So is The Sudbury Devil. Hell, you could go back to the sixties with Witchfinder General. Religion - especially socially dominant religions like Christianity in the west - can and should be critiqued. But Midnight Mass is too sloppily written to be a critique of anything besides, accidentally, how far Mike Flanagan's head is shoved up his ass.

Anyway, that's why mod L doesn't like Midnight Mass. I did warn you.

[mask131]

While I'm at it, because I just had a little beef with a fanatical Christian who couldn't believe I was born in a Christian setting because I had a pentagram as an icon (you see the kind of person)... [Edit: For more details they were a clearly antisemitic Orthodox person who, after refusing to believe I was anything else than Jew, atheist or a devil-worshiper, starting lashing out at me when I said I had a Catholic upbringing saying I was the cause of the crusades and the reason Hitler was alive, yada yada, you know the kind of crazy religious person]

So I decided to have a brief Christianity talk. Not much but just this:

If you ask me, yes, there is a Christian mythology, even though people do not like this term - because there is a bunch of Christian legends and Christian myths that form a Christian folklore and a set of Christian tales with distant, weak or inexistant links to ACTUAL Christian teachings, rites and the actual Christian religion.

And I do believe that folk-Christianity is a fascinating thing that deserves to exist alongside official, actual Christianity. Santa Muerte, and the local saint celebrations, and strange Christmas and Epiphany beliefs, and this story about God and Saint Peter getting drunk at a farmer's house, and the fairytale about Jesus and the Virgin Mary throwing the devil and his wife in an oven to save the girls they wanted to eat... Anyway, no matter how much one can try to destroy folk-Christianity it will always survive because it was centuries and centuries of rites and beliefs spread across several continents, and you can't destroy that easily.

The thing that many people do not get is that a lot of what is Christianity today was completely made up. There's not a lot of Christianity today that was originally in the Bible. There's a lot of Christianity as practiced by the first Christians that was lost. The dates and meanings of celebrations like Easter, All Hallows Day or Christmas kept changing all year long. Lots of saints were completely invented. Don't even get me started on the apocryphal Gospels!

This is why studying and understanding the history and evolution of a religion always allow one to be more understanding of what the religion currently is and what is actually an "option" in it. Religions never stayed the same thanks to times changing, scholarly debates, schisms dividing it into various branches, political and economical forces being at play, translations from one country to the next - and that's not just true for Christianity, but also for all other religions. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism... They all had their own evolution, they all are today very different from what they started as, and to better understand them one needs to learn of their past, what they were, what they still are, what they're not anymore. Heck, today there are talks in India of kicking out and banishing all Buddhists when the religion started there! But now, Buddhism's main nations are China and Japan, and its Indian roots almost entirely forgotten...

Fanatics usually fail to do this study of their own religion's history and evolution, because they imagine that the past was just always a carbon-copy of the present, and that their beliefs stayed unmovable monolith coming straight from God (or whatever principle they follow) instead of something that went through centuries of men and women and governments.

Just look at why and how Protestantism came to be. People realized the Church had added a lot of stuff that wasn't there when Christians first appeared, and decided to return to the "original" Christianity, rejecting all the added, invented stuff. Like the celibacy of priests: Christians priests married and had children in the first centuries following the Christ's death. And the only reason Catholic priests took a vow of celibacy and virginity was because of economic concerns with inheritance matters. Jesus never asked those that followed him to never have children or never marry or never have sex.

Or take the existence of Purgatory! Completely invented by the Church around the Middle-Ages, never spoke about by the Christ or part of the original Christian religion, then quickly removed a few centuries later as a non-existent, borderline heretical superstition, and that yet survived in folk-Christianity, and then in popular culture.

In conclusion, I would have to say that there is one book that made me realize a lot of things about religion as a whole, and that convinced me to go from Catholic-Christian to simply deist. Terry Pratchett's book "Small Gods", which exactly put into words my feelings about the world: there is a difference between religion and organized religion. There is a difference between belief and the organizations built around this belief, between faith and the hierarchy created around this faith. The Church is like a shell that was built around the turtle that is the faith/belief/god - and sometimes, when the shell becomes too big and too heavy or too unfit for the creature it hosts, it smothers, hurts and kills the faith/belief/god, until there is only the shell. And people stop referring to the turtle, and only speak and interact with the shell.

This is the perfect explanation of how Jesus only preached peace and love and friendship and forgiveness, and its priests later invented the Inquisition and caused the witch-hunts.

[thoughtfulfoxllama]

Ok, so it's Fast Sunday in my Ward, and I'm eating Graham Crackers in my In-Laws Ward Lobby, so let's talk about Fasting

Fasting in Mormonism is pretty basic: no food or drink for 24 hours or 2 meals. I never said basic was simple though, so let's deconstruct that

For one, why is it 24 hours or 2 meals? Are we supposed to only eat 2 meals a day? Honestly, I have no idea. Pres Joseph F Smith moved the Church's Fast Day to Sunday (it was Thursday before then) in the early 1900s, and defined a fast as evening to evening. So, maybe the idea of 2 meals or 24 hours is whether you eat Dinner before you start your fast or not (in 1976, Pres Nelson wrote an Ensign Article, where he said that Fasts should be 2 Meals, with no indication of 24 hours, meaning that, to him at least, Evening Meals should not be skipped)

Next, what's considered "food and drink?" Does water count, for example? Everything I've found says "it's personal." In Utah, the custom is to not drink water, but in order to understand what's allowed, we must look at the purpose of fasting. The Purposes of a Fast are increased spiritual connection & to help the poor and needy through increased empathy (encouraging is to help them) and generous fast offerings. If you ask me, not drinking water is counterintuitive to the first purpose. So, I understand the traditional LDS Fast to deal with Calories & Pleasure. If you can, abstain from food, and liquids aside from water. If you can't (for example, I need to eat with my medicine), then eat plain foods as needed

But, we're not the only Faith that requires Fasting. How do they do it (there's definitely more, but these are the ones I'm familiar with):

Judaism: Judaism has several fast days. In addition to optional fasting on Mondays, Thursdays, and the day before the start of the month, they have 6 main fasts. 4 of them are from Dawn to Dusk, but the 9th of Av Fast & Yom Kippur fasts are from Sunset to Sunset, with an abstinence from all Food and Drinks (with additional abstinence from Leather Shoes, Bathing, and Sexual Relations on Yom Kippur). And since Yom Kippur is tomorrow, I wish a Meaningful Yom Kippur to any Jewish People who come across this post before the fast

Islam: In Islam, they have the Month of Ramadan. During this month, Muslims will abstain from all Food, Drink, Tobacco, Sexual Relations, and Sinful Behavior (such as swearing) during daylight hours, instead replacing them with Prayer & Study of the Quran. They also have 2 meals, one before the fast, and one after

Christian: Christianity has so many branches, so obviously has the most distinctions. Many Christians practice a Eucharistic Fast (where they fast before taking the Eucharist, or in Mormon Terms, the Sacrament). Early Christians would also fast on Wednesday & Friday, to commemorate the Betrayal & Death of the Savior. There are also 2 seasons of fasting: Lent & Advent. Lent begins with a fast from all Food and Liquid (known as a Black Fast) on Ash Wednesday, and ends with a Black Fast on Good Friday. During Lent, Christians abstain from a certain bad habit they have (such as smoking), and are expected to increase their Prayer, Study, and Alms (or Fast Offerings as we'd call them). On Fridays during Lent (as well as all Wednesdays & Fridays in Orthodox Christianity), they participate in a Lesser Fast, where one lessens food intake (2 small meals during sunlight hours) and only need abstain from Olive Oil, Dairy Meat, and Fish until sundown. There's also the Daniel Fast, which was a diet where only Kosher food could be eaten, but now refers to only eating Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, Pulses, Nuts, Seeds, and Oils (for the Lesser Fast & the Daniel Fast, that's just being Vegan. So I guess Vegans really are holier than I /j)

Faith of the Seven (A Song of Ice & Fire): I know it's not a real religion, but it came to mind when typing. Whenever Priests in this religion saw the need, they would fast from everything except Bread & Water. (Warning, if done for 40 days straight, this can lead to death and being known as a fanatical king)

Long story short: don't judge how people fast. Not everyone fasts the same way, or even can. I fast from everything except water. I also fast at the New Moon. But if you can only handle a Daniel Fast, then as long as you use it as an opportunity to serve your fellow man (direct service or fast offerings), and come closer to God, that's what matters

[sassymajesty]

may I ask what made you pick judaism, if it's not too personal & you're willing to share? i legit dont know enough about religions so i'm genuinely curious. like why not islam or something else? or why not transfer to protestant or orthodox church? you said you did some wandering, so i'm just curious what made you pick judaism over everything else. like i said i'm not judging or anything, just pure curiosity due to my lack of knowledge! but i'm glad you found something that resonates with you :)

short answer, jewish beliefs resonated the most with me and the more i learn about it, the more at home i feel

long answer, oh boy, i really did do some wandering. i'm putting it under a cut because i wrote a whole essay

i stopped going to the catholic church when i was 15, and the next... ten years? were spent trying to find myself. because i've always known that i believe in something more, but the idea of an old guy in the sky ruling over us with an iron fist felt very odd too me. and that's how i came out of the catholic church

my dad used to say that religion is supposed to bring you comfort and give you the support you need in tough times. that's something that has always stuck with me but then, which religion?

i tried the agnostic route for a while, but that didn't bring me any comfort. then i went to a buddhist temple a couple times, because the logic was sound to me, and i was at a time in my life where acceptance and kindness was what i needed. but still, i felt like there was something lacking

i googled a lot

being gay, i didn't quite vibe with most christian denominations in my town. but my cousin invited me to the presbyterian church and i went there for a few months. it kinda worked for a bit, because i was sure i didn't believe in saints and they talked about jesus with so much love, and tried to spread the love he taught the world. i used to leave the church service feeling very loved, and it was better to read from the bible than it was to just listen to the priest read it and being told that i'd never understand it myself

i just... didn't feel the same love as everyone else. i felt like a fraud even when i was annotating my bible as everyone else. theirs were full of devotion and mine felt flat, i didn't know how to pray without, you know, scripted prayers, i felt like an impostor. then, well. then it got to a point where i couldn't simply ignore being gay for the sake of being accepted there, and i stopped going

at the time, i was working at a health clinic and i worked with pious people from other christian denominations and they were so judgemental of everyone that came in, forgetting their own past and still claiming to be a good christian. which only pushed me away from any other christian denominations, the fanon interpretation of jesus bothered me too. it all felt too restrictive

that's around the time i started wondering whether or not i believed in jesus. it's always been complicated for me to make sense that god, jesus and the holy spirit are separate but still one. i could kinda figure out the holy spirit and god working together, but for me, jesus was a man, a human man who had been kind and drastically radical for his time, but still a man

honestly, at this time i was pretty lost and finding comfort in bits and pieces here and there. christian music actually helped me a lot during this time, go figure

it took me actually meeting a jewish person (that's how small judaism is in here, i had no contact of anyone jewish for 26 years of my life) for me to learn that you could even convert to judaism

i had the catholic thinking of "oh, judaism is an old religion that doesn't really exist anymore" and "the old testament god was barbaric", but getting to learn more about it with fresh eyes was a really breathtaking experience

i like that the rules make sense. there's no "because the church says so" or "because god will be sad if you do it". whatever argument you can think of, someone has gone over it at least a thousand years ago and have had people arguing for or against it ever since. i love it that you get to ask questions!!! you're encouraged to!! oh that's my favorite part, i can have doubts about whatever and no one will talk behind my back that i'm not a good catholic girl. and i get to learn about this practice that goes back thousands of years, and not to be a nerd, but i love how much incentive there is to read and learn and discuss and talk through things and question everything and think critically about every passage, every tradition, every book ever written on judaism

i'm reading "here all along" by sarah hurwitz and there's a chapter called "freeing god from "his" human-shaped cage in the sky" and in it, she talks about different conceptions about god that jewish people believe in. and that is when i realized oh yes, this is home. because god stopped being an old guy in the sky and became this force that no human being could ever describe or understand. god can be all knowing and all powerful, but they can also be all knowing and not all powerful. they can be everything — a shadow the tree casts, the good in humanity, resting on shabbat. god can be the "process of being" or the force that pushes you to be the best you can be. i haven't explored a fraction of those but i love it that i don't have to choose just one, and i don't have to believe in one version that's dictated to me

all my experiences with judaism have been incredible so far. i used to slog through an hour long mass, now two hours every friday feel like not enough. the community i found (both in the synagogue i go to and online) is very welcoming and there's so much strength in them. the more i learn about the practices, the why behind them, the more at home i feel

we had an event for people who want to convert and we talked about being gay and judaism and everyone was pretty much you just gotta find a rabbi that you're comfortable with but even the most conservative ones are mostly chill with it, and the conversation moved on to another question. and that? being accepted fully by who i am, that's incredible for me. i don't have to change, i don't have to force myself to believe in anything

i'm gonna end this here, otherwise i'll be talking about judaism until next week

[slightly-gay-pogohammer]

I want to hear the top ten worst things you heard in religion class please

LMAO HERE WE GOOOO TW FOR ISLAMOPHOBIA BULLYISM AND SEXUAL ASSAULT!!! in no particular order and from three different teachers:

( told to a class of 8 years olds ) "the priest is right if your parents are reading satanic books (the davinci code) tell them to throw it away"

( to me age 12, while developing depression due to being heavily and loudly bullied by 90% of my class ) "you should at least TRY to have more friends :/"

same teacher constantly singled out whoever wasn't in the Hyper Religious Club and didn't even look at them when they lifted their hands in class btw

( to my mom the year after ) "i seriously don't get what's gio's problem"

a classmate in high school after the teacher teacher told us a girl from medjugorje was selling tickets to see her talk to Mary, specifically at 5pm after a TED talk: "prof why is she sure that mary will arrive exactly at that time" "she just does shut up"

( same teacher at a class of 15 years olds ) "gay people aren't real"

( the same teacher 3 years ago after the lesbian prof told him off for that ) "omg i didn't mean that they aren't real i'm just saying that as a christian i would never accept them it's different"

same teacher to a 16 years old basically called her a whore? the exact phrase was "you're a woman of the shady streets", which we turned into a meme. he was married with a child her age btw tho

that time THE SAME TEACHER made us watch a movie of a good christian mother who got married with an islamic man and the second he was asked to get back to his hometown for a short amount of time turned into an abusive mysoginistic asshole and the whole movie was about her trying to run away from the Evil Islam People

and i was kidding the absolutely worse thing that my high school teacher said to a class of ONLY WOMEN while discussing abortion laws, after i specifically asked what a woman should do if she got pregnant after being SA:

"you should give your child to adoption (which was the answer i expected tbh) and then actively look for them once they turn 18 and explain why you didn't want them"

[milflewis]

who is sinead o’connor?

wasn’t going to answer this lol bc i’ve actually found myself feeling more about her passing than i thought i would? so apologies if this comes off a bit weird i am in a v strange place rn. btw. she converted to islam a few years ago and changed her name to shuhada sadaqat. tho she still performed under sinéad o’connor! she was an irish singer from the late eighties and was v talented. would ten out of ten recommend her music! but to me and a lot of ppl she was so much more than that.

the first time i saw a woman angry on tv it was shuhada sadaqat. it was a replaying of this video and the news station was taking the piss out of her. i was eight and i remember my grandad waking up from his nap and rolling his eyes at the screen and saying she should’ve kept her mouth shut. that he used to think she was smth worth looking at. and changing the channel to the sunday match.

she was So Angry and so so unapologetic about it. the ripping up of the pope’s picture in this video and declaring that we should fight the real enemy. was her way of talking about the systemic sex abuse that children have faced at the hands of the church for decades and how no one is properly talking about it. keep in mind this was BEFORE there was any serious investigations being done or it was being discussed openly in the media. it was not smth that was being acknowledged and any priests that were being caught were being treated as a ‘bad apple’ rather than part of a system of institutionalised abuse. she was nearly completely ostracised and blackballed. she was labelled batshit crazy and difficult and a shrew etc. you know the story. it’s always the same.

she never took it back. i remember one time where she was asked did she regret ruining her career bc the career that she could’ve had v much did get fucked by what she did and she said that it fucked up the career that ppl (her agents and etc) wanted for her. not the one that SHE wanted. that has always stuck with me.

sadaqat was also a survivor of the magdalene laundries. having been sent there for shoplifting i believe? at 18. which are a whole other story but were basically these places set up in ireland by the church and sanctioned by the government where unwed and pregnant/misbehaving and or had mental health issues girls and young women were sent to work (launder clothes and sheets etc) until they gave birth and then the child was taken from them and given up for adoption or were declared fit to return to society. there were v few records kept of who went where. a lot of children and women didn’t make it due to the conditions they were living in (corporal punishment was also not an uncommon practise used). a mass grave of nearly 800 bodies was found here in Tuam in 2017 (i think?) which caused a national scandal that has been handled and is still being handled so v fucking poorly it’s depressing. the church has yet to apologise or take proper ownership for this. neither has our government. who had at best allowed it to happen and at worst encouraged it. for context. shuhada tore up this picture in 1992. the last laundry was closed in 1996.

she spoke out about how abortion was dealt and not dealt with in this country. how we were sending people away to england to have them instead of legalising it here. an irish solution to an irish problem. she told her story about how she had them to try to normalise and create a discussion decades before it was allowed and brought into practise here.

she talked about things. this. to me. was one of the biggest things she ever did. she spoke! she refused to ignore and let it go! which in this country is pretty fucking rare rn. let alone back then. this is who she is and so much more. if you’re interested to learn more about her i would highly recommend looking her up! (she did a podcast episode with blindboy that i haven’t listened to yet but i’ve heard v good things about!) she was a pretty fucking cool person

[mint-moon25]

BRICKELL - HOMO - MALES - MARRIED

HOMO - SPANISH - MALE - JUST - LEFT

I - WAS - ENJOYING - THE - SOFTNESS

BUT - FIRMNESS - OF - NAVY - IKEA YES

SOFA - AND - HE - LOOKED - AT - ME

DRINKING - CAFFEINE - COFFEE

HOMO - SCUM - TALKING - LOUD - AS

HE - BRAGGED - ABOUT - HIS

$2,999 - AND - MORE - AMERICAN

APPLE - SMARTPHONE - HE - HOLES

THE - BUTTHOLE - OF - HIS - SPOUSE

'SCUM' - ASIAN - SMALL - BREASTED

UGLY - WRINKLED - CREEP - SKIN

TURKEY - CHIN - UGLY - ASIAN - GIRL

WRINKLED - PRUNE - BAG

ASIANS - OVER - 1.4 BILLION

MIAMI - MARRIED - HOMOS - OVER

400,000 - PEOPLE

DEAR - CHINA,

WHEN - ARE - WE - GOING - 2 - YES

SLAUGHTER - HOMO - MIAMI MEN

MARRIED - KISSING - EACH OTHER

IN - PUBLIC - ILLEGALLY

MIAMI - POLICE - HAITI - BLK - MEN

LAUGH - SAYING - 'HOW - IT WORKS'

HAITI - BLK - MEN - AND - WOMEN

CHRISTIAN - VUDU - AND - VUDU

CATHOLIC - BIBLE - OFFICIAL

MASSACRE - 1,783 - KIDS

CHRISTMAS - DAY - CHRISTIANS

THEY - ARE - SATANIC CATHOLICS

HAITI - THEY'RE - BIBLE - STUDIES

CATHOLIC - BIBLE

THEN - SATAN - DEMONS

FILL - THEM - UP

ALWAYS - DISAPPOINTED - HAITI

MEN - MIAMI - POLICE - BLK HAITI

MEN - 'GO - AHEAD - MEN - KISS

MEN' - THEY'RE - LEGALLY - WED

HE - LOOKED - AT - ME

WRINKLED - ASIAN - PRUNE - BAG

WRINKLED - UGLY

HOMO - LOOKED - AT - ME - WITH

HATRED - LOUD - APPLE - TALKING

WITH - HIS - HOMO - HUSBAND

1 CORINTHIANS 6

HOMOS - GO - 2 - LAKE - OF - FIRE

AND - SULPHUR - WILL - BURN - YES

CONTINUALLY - 4 - ALL - ETERNITY

MEN - STRONGER - THAN WOMEN

MEN - MARRYIN - MEN

MEN - ADOPTING - BOYS

INCEST - IN - MIAMI - AS - THEY

KISS - THOSE - BOYS - AND - HOLE

THEIR - BUTTHOLES

MIAMI - HOMOS - ARE - EVIL

COMMITTING - CRIMES

ADOPTED - 2 - HOLE - THEIR - BUTTS

MIAMI - FLORIDA

HOMO - WITH - LOUD - CONVERSATION

APPLE - ANDROID 13 - $2,999.99

YOU - UGLY - ASIAN - DON'T - U - HAVE

SOFA - BUMPING - IT

DEAR - CHINA,

OVER - 1.4 BILLION

USA - OVER - 339 MILLION - MORE GIRLS

3RD - WORLD's - LARGEST

ISLAM - 4 WIVES

INDONESIA - NO 4

JANUARY - 18 AND OLDER

DAY - OF - SILENCE

1 MONTH - NO - EATING

WHEN - 2 - INVADE - MUSLIMS

THEIR - 1 MONTH - FASTING

SPANISH - COUNTRIES - DURING

SIESTA - TIME - WHILE - THEY'RE

SLEEPING - CATHOLICS

PRIESTS - PRAYS - 2 - GOD

NO - ONE - ALLOWED - 2 - PRAY

2 - GOD - 2 - ASK-FORGIVENESS

PURGATORY - WHERE - MANY GOES

CATHOLIC - NINNIES

DEAR - CHINA,

WHEN - WILL - WE - INVADE

PHILIPPINE - KOREAN - US GOV'TS

WHEN - WILL - WE - INVADE

HOMOS - LESBIAN - LEGALLY WED

MIAMI - FLORIDA

THEY - KISS - MOUTH - 2 - MOUTH

ILLEGALLY - IN - PUBLIC

THEY'RE - CATHOLICS

LOW - POPULATIONS

SPANISH - COUNTRIES

ILLEGAL - PROSTITUTION

CHILDREN - PROSTITUTES

CATHOLIC - BIBLES

DEAR - CHINA,

WHEN - WILL - WE - INVADE

NON-VIRGIN - HOMOS - LESBIANS

ILLEGAL - PROSTITUTES

SAGGING - BREASTS

LARGE - BUTTOCKS - NON-VIRGINS

NEVER - MARRIED - NOT - WED YES

[khodorkovskaya]

You're right I'm gonna look for some groups to join or somthing because I'm deffo lonely

yesss!

here's how ive been socialising lately/in the past:

group workout sessions

so my city organises free exercise sessions by the lake every summer. and i go twice a week. and it's great! it's usually about 20-30 people and we don't really talk, but just the feeling of being surrounded by people who are all doing the same thing as you feels very nice.

church

okay so this one's a little weird and not for everyone. but i really enjoy singing and church is the only place i know where i can sing in a good quality choir for free. bc other free choirs id been a part of were very amateur and it was basically singing lessons for people who can't sing, no offence. whereas at church, we just come in, sing, and that's it. and the people there are so good at singing!

the vibes are a bit weird tho. there's always people falling to their knees, crying, etc. it's insane. the priest always talks about some weird stuff too. like there's always some kind of drama going on. it's very weird. but i lowkey love it. like the other week the church got fined for "praising the lord too loudly" and the people in the neighbourhood complained to the police. and another week someone sent scam messages to people pretending to be father paul asking for money so father paul had to be like guys that wasn't me. anyway, every week there's some new drama. and people be crazy.

so yeah i just go there for singing and, again, to get that feeling of being part of a crowd that i really love. but i don't talk to anyone there bc everyone's always praying or talking about god and that's not really my vibe idk. if you're lonely and lost in life i definitely don't recommend getting into religion. figure yourself out first and then join a group if you really feel like you'll fit in, but not the other way around. the people i know who've converted to islam or became catholic or whatever don't seem very happy tbh.

sports club

so i took ice skating lessons this year and i went to skating camp during the easter holidays. and it's the kind of place that's great for small talk. because we'd only ever talk about skating and it was great. no deep conversations, no political talk, no questioning. just like "who's your favourite skater", "how did you get into skating", "look at xyz skating accessory i got", "what trick would you like to learn", etc.etc.

different kinds of sports attract different kids of people too. so my manchester bestie for example has always been a part of some kind of martial arts club like taekwondo or kickboxing. she says that she's always felt very comfortable around the people there bc people who do martial arts are usually very reliable and understand consent/boundaries. it's just a certain personality type, yknow. and with skating too, it's a very specific kind of crowd, usually quite well off, artistic, studious, sensitive. i feel quite comfortable in skating circles. so yeah, finding a sport that attracts your kind of people is great. again, are you gonna be friends with these people outside of the sport you do together? probably not. but that's okay.

associations/societies/clubs

so i know in my country associations are super common, idk about other countries tho. but where i live there's an association for everything. every single public parc has their own association, every interest/hobby has their own little club. like there's the tea lovers society in my neighbourhood! you can literally find a club for everything.

i used to be a member of the astronomical society. but the average age there was like 70 so it wasn't much of a vibe. but i really enjoyed the events we organised. like id always dress up. i dressed up as the moon, as a space princess, as the sun. i was always extra. and it's really fulfilling to like organise events and be a part of something. and all clubs/associations always organise movie nights and game nights and that kind of stuff. so just find one that really vibes with you and it'll be great!

im also a member of this social economy association for work. and they also organise a lot of events. i go there for networking for my work and to be very honest i really don't dig the vibe. it's very leftwing liberal, very much granola millenials but not the fun kind. but sometimes influential political figures hang out there and it's quite entertaining to see them roaming free lol, yknow. and we have made useful connections there for work, so i can't complain.

volunteering

my favourite thing to do when i was a teenager was to volunteer at music and film festivals. because you get free drinks and free tickets for everything. so id go to clubs underage because i was a staff member lol. i have to say, it did lead to some weird things bc the other volunteers were mostly in their late twenties-early thirties and those types of events usually attracted people who were generally lost in life, like lots of weird artistic types and clubbing addicts. and i was this 16 yr old in the middle of it all, flirting with guys and telling everyone i was 21. but despite some weird moments, it was a great and useful experience. idk how old you are, but if you're between the ages of like 18 and 23, i definitely recommend volunteering for a festival! you'll have the wildest parties with all the free drinks and backstage access lol. just be responsible.

conferences/presentations

so if you're older than 23, networking events/conferences/presentations are great. i often go to conferences just like to broaden my horizons and make useful connections for work as a process. again, there's always something going on on meetup or impacthub or something. ive never been able to make friends there because the average age at these types of events is like 35-50, but it's always great to see people who are further in life than you and who have an interesting story to tell or advice to give.

[back-and-totheleft]

The Son Also Kneels

Oliver Stone was deplaning at LAX following a 16-hour trip from Indonesia when he turned on his phone and found it blowing up with texts from his office. Apparently the media—what he called the “paparazzi”—had been in touch. They wanted to ask him about his son, Sean.

In particular, they wanted to know what he thought of Sean’s decision to become a Muslim. Oliver instructed his office to decline comment.

“He never consulted me,” the elder Mr. Stone recalled in a phone call to The Observer from his production office in Los Angeles. “That is something you normally talk to your parents about.”

The director is a practicing Buddhist. “Obviously the Muslim religion believes in a singular god,” he added. “I don’t.”

Sean Stone, a 27-year-old filmmaker who was raised a Buddhist and spent his youth exploring his Christian and Jewish roots (not to mention any number of film sets), is like his old man, a determined—some would say obstinate—truth-seeker. He is also a man of firm opinions who is unafraid to express them in a highly public fashion.

But to peg him, as one Yahoo! News commenter did recently, as “another nut from a spoiled confused family,” is to miss the point entirely.

To hear him tell it, accepting Islam as his faith (and adopting a new Muslim middle name, Ali) is a demonstration that one man can embrace three Abrahamic religions as a gesture of peace.

“I don’t take a priest’s interpretation as sanctity,” he said. “I would not take an imam’s ruling on the Koran as being definitive. I would not take anyone’s word except my own interpretation of the books.”

Mr. Stone’s conversion was only part of his recent media coming-out party. In announcing his newfound faith, he eagerly stepped into perhaps the thorniest foreign policy question of the moment: whether Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons, and whether its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a total nutjob.

“My main thing is I don’t want to see a war, an imperialistic war, because I know what it could do to the region,” he said. Mr. Stone also defended Mr. Ahmadinejad—the man who infamously referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” and declared that Israel should be “wiped off a map”—as a “rational actor.”

“The media is so biased in trying to paint him as a madman, because if he is a madman, you can’t talk to him,” he explained to The Observer.

Mr. Stone first met with Mr. Ahmadinejad in February, when he was a featured guest at the “Hollywoodism and Cinema” conference in Tehran. The president gave him a copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.

When asked what they talked about, Mr. Stone didn’t really remember. The meeting might have seemed an opportunity to do some diplomatic work for his father, who had been eager to follow up his documentary portraits of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with one on Mr. Ahmadinejad, but had been rebuffed (many Iranians took issue with perceived historical inaccuracies in his Alexander the Great biopic). Still, the younger Stone didn’t push the issue.

It soon became clear that Mr. Stone’s views on Iran are not all that radical. For instance, shortly after he defended his opinions to network news blowhards Bill O’Reilly and Piers Morgan, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, appeared on 60 Minutes to declare that bombing Iran right now was “the stupidest idea [he] ever heard.”

Still, his comments were controversial, even within his own family. “When you’re younger, you can make mistakes by saying what people don’t want to hear,” the elder Mr. Stone noted. “Sometimes he says stuff that I think is downright fucking stupid.”

The Observer met the Son of Oliver at a rear table at Think Coffee by Union Square one March morning.

Tall, strapping and square-jawed, Sean Christopher Ali Stone appeared more Winklevii than Wahabi. He did not have his father’s self-described “Mongol eyes” or the gap between his teeth.

What he did have, however, was the family curiosity, and that knack for taking controversial positions.

“I think it’s important to have that spirit of inquiry, that spirit of investigation,” Mr. Stone said as he periodically sipped from a cup of chai tea. “If you keep slandering people, calling them ‘conspiracy theorists,’ you’re killing the desire to investigate, the desire to actually know.”

Mr. Stone, who is single and divides his time between Los Angeles and New York’s Alphabet City, wanted to make it clear that his highly publicized spiritual transformation was not intended as a publicity gambit.

It all began on Valentine’s Day 2010, when he and his filmmaking partner, Alexander Wraith, were at Letchworth Village, an abandoned institution for the mentally and physically disabled in Rockland County. They were there to film Graystone, Mr. Stone’s feature debut, about two men (named Sean and Alexander) who visit supposedly haunted sites to explore their belief in the supernatural.

He and Mr. Wraith had brought along candles from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which they lit and placed on the ground as they prayed aloud. They heard screams and howls and a child’s laughter, which scared them both shitless.

“That’s why there’s an expression ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’” he said. “Either you find your faith and you believe that there is a higher power guiding you and protecting you, or else you basically surrender it and say there is no God.”

Two years later to the day, Mr. Stone found himself in Isfahan, Iran, sitting inside a mosque across from a Shiite cleric, explaining his reasons for wanting to be a Muslim. He was accompanied by a man named Bahram Heidari, an Iranian living in Canada who was helping him develop a feature film about the Sufi poet Rumi (Mr. Stone is also prepping a documentary on djinn, or genies). With an Iranian TV news crew on hand to document the occasion, Mr. Stone said the shahada, the Muslim declaration of belief.

“I didn’t ‘convert,’” he pointed out, “because I don’t believe you can convert from the same God. It’s an acceptance of Islam as an extension of what I call the Judeo-Christian tradition going back to Abraham.”

He said he was surprised the event generated so much attention. “We had not arranged for any press,” he said. “We don’t know how they found out about it.”

But when everyone from CNN to Agence France-Presse jumped on the story, he went with it. He later defended Iran on cable news. “It seems that every time we sanction this country and turn the bolts tighter around it … it’s just going to make them potentially more radical and dangerous,” he said. “You can’t just bomb your way to an accord.” While defending Mr. Ahmadinejad, he also was emphatic that “there is no room for Holocaust denial.” (Not long ago, his father also was quoted minimizing the Holocaust.)

It’s not hard to understand how Mr. Stone developed a certain sympathy for men of strong convictions who are unafraid to offend.

“He says things that rile people, I’m not going to deny that,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Ahmadinejad. He says the same about his dad. “I think he likes controversy,” Mr. Stone said. “I think as much as anything, he likes that people get riled.”

Sean Stone was born in Santa Monica in 1984, the eldest child of Oliver and Elizabeth Burkit Fox, a production assistant and Oliver’s second wife.

He made his screen debut at 6 months, with a cameo in Salvador. At age 2, he was playing Gordon Gekko’s kid, “a fat little capitalist son,” as he put it.

His earliest and clearest film memory was being on the set of Born on the Fourth of July, in which he was among a group of kids shooting at each other with fake guns in the woods.

“That’s pretty intense when you’re, like, 4,” he said.

Mr. Stone’s early film career was more a matter of convenience than raw talent. “He was available and I thought he was photogenic,” his dad admitted.

Sean’s parents separated in 1993 (“It was not an easy divorce,” Oliver said), and Sean and his brother Michael lived with Elizabeth. When he could, Oliver took Sean on weekend trips “where he could be outside the normal Los Angeles ‘shop, drive, and die’ routine,” said Oliver.

They also traveled the world, from East Africa to Tibet, where Oliver, an Episcopalian who had converted to Buddhism, introduced the then 9-year-old Sean to the Dalai Lama.

“It’s a different kind of Buddhism, it’s an atomistic form,” Oliver said. “It must have been amazing for him.” The experience was eye-opening, Sean said. It inspired him to take up the practice of meditation and fostered a curiosity about all forms of spirituality. It was also around that time that Sean began to discover his father’s films, each one violent and provocative and dubious about the powers that be.

Mr. Stone was 7 when his father released JFK, a film that brought a mix of reviews both approving and vitriolic. The knocks on his father bothered him at the time, and still do. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “To me it’s a disgrace that so many people get away with calling him a conspiracy theorist, when the truth is he’s always based his work on evidence. He does his homework.”

After graduating from Brentwood School, just around the same time the second Iraq war was getting underway, Mr. Stone considered joining the Army, “more out of a desire to have a life experience,” he said. (Oliver, who dropped out of Yale and eventually enlisted in the Army in 1967, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, recognized the impulse.) Rather than enlist, Mr. Stone wound up at Princeton, where he enrolled in the ROTC, bailing after a semester to focus on academics.

In 2009, after apprenticing with his father, Sean began to focus on his own filmmaking, starting with Graystone, which will be released on video-on-demand in the fall.

Mr. Stone’s long-term goal is to be a filmmaker, though his father is quick to tamp down expectations. “It’s very hard to assume the mantle, so to speak,” Oliver said. “It’s true about anybody in any profession, whether you’re the stockbroker’s son or a garbage man’s son.”

Mr. Stone agrees that it will be hard to step out from his father’s shadow and make a name for himself, though that new middle name of his is certainly a start.

Even so, his embrace of Islam goes only so far. For instance, Mr. Stone isn’t quite ready to forswear alcohol altogether.

“I know plenty of Christians and Jews who violate the Testaments all the time,” he pointed out. “It all depends on how you practice.”

-Daniel Edward Rosen, "The Son Also Kneels," The Observer, Mar 28 2012

[gun-witch]

Venting about “Acceptable Targets” and Bigotry.

Fair warning, this is me just speaking my mind with no real concern for formatting or making any kind of coherent point. I’m just venting.

And a TLDR if you don’t wanna read it all: There’s a problem in Leftist spaces with deciding certain bigotries are okay, I used antitheists going from attacking genuinely harmful kinds of Christian faith to attacking all Christians to attacking marginalized religions as a way to explain the issue, but this happens in many other ways.

I’ve been trying to reduce my time on twitter lately for mental health reasons. It’s the kind of site that just highlights the worst kind of people imaginable. When I made the account I currently use, I did my best to block liberally and curate things as much as I could, because I know twitter is just an awful website full of awful people.

For a while, it really seemed to work. The times politics came up on my feed, it was like it is here, curated, people having reasonable reactions to the horrible things that happen in the world. Yeah I also got into the occasional argument with right wingers, but honestly, it’s easy to disengage when you know they’re just not operating in a worldview that remotely resembles reality.

A conservative promoting racism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. is really easy to disregard because they’re so ridiculous, that any sensible person isn’t going to take them seriously. You can just post information on why they’re wrong and move on, it’s very easy to disregard what they think about you.

But, more recently, I’ve noticed bigotry creeping its way into leftist spaces (online, I’ve yet to see anything of this outside of the internet). Sometimes it’s the familiar, TERF talking points dressed up as progressive. I’m sure you all know the type, people who wanted to exclude nonbinary people when that was “new”, people who want to exclude neopronouns or xenogenders, or otherkin or whatever else. They’re usually really obvious, and having been one of these people in the past I know exactly what to say, I just tell them what made me realize the harm in gatekeeping and exclusionist thought. Usually, people ignore them, because Leftists usually know better.

Usually.

If you know me outside of tumblr (which most of you do, I’m not exactly big on this site, and I don’t want to be either), you know that antitheism is THE bigotry that pisses me off. Not because it affects me, I can write off transphobia, acephobia, etc. pretty easily even when they’re actively making my life harder, I’m just good at not letting things get to me emotionally. The real reason antitheism gets under my skin is that it’s just different enough from the big “isms” that a lot of genuinely good and well meaning people fall for it.

See, when I inevitably check the profile of someone being nasty over religion on twitter, saying that because I’m a priestess I’m the same as a Christian priest and therefore naturally evil, I often have a lot of mutuals with them, and they’re otherwise an outspoken leftist.

Antitheism is something that a well meaning atheist who sees the very real harm done by the biggest religions in the world can fall for. On the surface of it, it makes sense. A surface level reading of the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the “big 3″ religious texts in the eyes of many activists, would have you believe they promote some really nasty stuff. If you don’t know that the Bible was written as a compilation of conflicting beliefs, and that cherry picking is a feature and not a bug, you could be forgiven for thinking Christianity is evil by default.

And on top of that, you experience hate and violence from Catholicism, American Protestantism, and so many other sects. Eventually that violence just becomes “Christianity” to you.

Then it becomes “Abrahamic” religions, because to the uneducated, Abrahamic means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and as far as you know, these religions are identical. You haven’t done the research to know how ridiculous this idea is, and you won’t because nobody has prompted you to.

Then, because the only preachers you hear are from Christianity (which you’ve already decided represents two other completely different faiths), and you never talk religion with someone who isn’t trying to convert you (really, why would you?), that violence you experienced becomes “religion”.

Religion becomes synonymous with conservativism, fascism, and every other political ideology that we rightfully write off as harmful. So then when you meet a Gnostic, a Jew, a Pagan, a Satanist, a Native American who believes in the religion that’s intrinsically tied to their culture? You look at them and you see a Nazi.

The very important aversion to hateful ideologies is hijacked, you begin to hate marginalized groups in the name of opposing bigotry.

It gets worse though, because from there, antitheism becomes a gateway bigotry of sorts. I’m sure everyone’s heard the statement “religion is a mental illness” at this point. The antitheist becomes so attached to their bigotry, that when they realize a religion isn’t harmful directly, ableism comes in to save them from introspection.

This happened on a large scale a few years ago, in the mid 2010s we saw a lot of youtube channels and social media pages dedicated to opposing religion turn their sights on “social justice warriors”. I remember these channels promoting this hip and new thing called “the alternative right”, what they described as a secular form of fascism, a “good” fascism, because they were so deep into hating religion that they forgot why religion was bad to begin with.

This isn’t unique to antitheism by any means, like I said before it happens with exclusionary movements like transmedicalism, anti-mspec crap, and one could even argue it’s got something to do with how transphobic “feminism” rose to prominence.

I think more people should be aware of how radicalization happens, more critical of what we consider “acceptable targets”. Racism isn’t bad because of the race aspect, race is bad because prejudice itself is wrong, attacking groups of people who lack social power is wrong.

Because it isn’t the big corrupt churches you hurt when you label all religion evil. It’s the marginalized faiths. The Pagans, the Jews, the Muslims, the sects of Christianity which do genuinely preach love and compassion. Focus your criticisms on groups in power, not people who seem similar at a glance.

And this applies everywhere, transphobia and exclusionism toward transmasc people also come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what male privilege is. I’m really only using religion and antitheism as a vehicle to talk about a more general issue because it’s the one that’s on my mind.

[cymorilcinnamonroll]

Melqart Appreciation Post

Malik, or Melqart as his most commonly recognized form is known as, is a wonderful God that's been in my life since I met him when I was 14 on the bus in a beautiful vision where he appeared surrounded by butterflies. He tends to go by his old Syrian name, Malik, God of the Underworld and the Divine Lyre, and he later evolved into the god of Tyre, Carthage, and greater Phoenecia, all the way to Spain.

The God of Hannibal, most Hercules originate from Melqart, a god of fertility, money, the ocean, Tyrian Purple dye, nature, and kingship. It was recorded the door to Melqart's temple in Tyre was half coated in gold, half coated in sparagmos, or emerald! Elissa, immortalized as Dido, was related to a priest of Melqart (I can't remember if it was her brother or husband, whoops!) but he was not only the god of Queen Elissa of Carthage, but also Hannibal, in which he appeared to Hannibal in quite the scary vision about Rome! All this information is available at the click of a button on Google, so I guess I'll talk a bit about my UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis).

I mainly work with Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Middle Eastern gods in both their divine original forms and Abrahamic masks. Some Hyksos, Greco-Roman, and Egyptian crosses over into gods like Resheph or Nergal or Qadesh. And then, the Daevas and Norse and Slavic pantheons are pretty separate at least as far as my scholarship can tell me. Melqart has a lot of guises, and to me appears in triple form as Eshmun/Baal Hammon/Melqart. No idea if this is historical, but I'm not gonna boss around Malik. He's always been associated with rain in my practice - in ninth grade, I wrote a novel where Malik goes to Maine with his motorcycle and works with the fey and Odin to try to find Ostara and restore the fertility of the land. This particular passage, about Melqart offering himself to the Earth in a sacred dismemberment ritual, is pretty much verbatim like his dying-rising form - only this is like, sixteen years before I had any idea he was Melqart. I knew his name started with an M and that he was fertility and rain, so I assumed Malik Taws... cause he goes by Malik. I guess my god checker research wasn't good at fucking fourteen and he was an ancient Syrian name. Malik is pretty common, including a pretty gnarly angel of the underworld in Islam. But mine is Melqart. Here is the passage I wrote at the Curry School of Education's University of Virginia Summer Camp when I was trying to write with Malik:

There is something particularly appealing about madness.  Its frenzy and passion makes one gentle yet terrible.  Once you are released from the chains of the sun, you can illuminate the void.  Truth follows madness, as resurrection follows destruction.  Madness is the key to ecstasy.   Few are truly sane. Madmen do not know they are mad. A damp blanket of pine needles rustles under my bare feet as I weave in and out of birch and pine, running like a madman.  The jewel green moss is dyed red from my blood as branches tear at my skin, rough bark reaching out to me in yearning, and I laugh like a madman.  I shed the blood with joy, coaxing the flowing rivulets from my flesh.  The mosses sigh in ecstasy, the ferns bud at the touch of my torn feet.  More! the sweet plants cry, and I give, raining down onto the hungry earth.  I am their sustenance, a crimson downpour.  I fall to the ground and the sweet creatures envelop me, thrusting root and proboscis and fang into my flesh to consume.   Shedding my corporeal robe, my body is no more. Dear tithe, we welcome you. The dreamearth opens like a great maw, swallowing me into her.  Damp warm darkness, like a woman’s secret place.  The earth is secret.  She swallows me, and I am reborn. She swallows me, and I am sucked upwards by her roots, birthed into brilliant light on the leaves of her bluebell.  The earth is secret, and she has driven me mad with love. The sun licks the bluebell in rays of warmth, and I am swept up into my kingdom of air.  I weave myself into a rainbow, rooting one end into my torn corpse and the other into that realm beyond dreams, my long journey complete.   Dear tithe, sweet tithe.  We have waited so long. 

What a Phoenician god is doing in my story fucking around with New England fey and Odin is uh, well, I was not very good at writing back then. ;)

Malik's wife as Baal Hammon is this WONDERFUL goddess of mine named Tanit - I adore her. Sadly there may have been some child sacrifice in their cult at Carthage, tophets, which gave rise to Malik/Melqart/Baal Hammon's and Tanit's influence on works like Salammbo and maybe the idea of the concept of a god like Moloch, which never actually seems to have existed and seems to actually be referencing some type of fire baptism to Yahweh by the Canaanites - Baal Kadmon has a great book on that. I tend to think more these were children that had already passed or stillborns that were respectfully, lovingly buried in the tophets in Carthage and Tunisia, but I guess we will never know.

[conspiritusnosterchorus]

 The uncircumcised heathen are "the sons of Belial" (ib. xv. 32). Jewish Encyclopedia I was accused of antisemitism when I quoted this article against some of the claims they made about "sons of Belial" and Belial himself. Not to mention I was accused of anti-islam when I said my ex is a muslim who harbors a hatred toward Christians (fact) so im not sure what was anti-islam about my personal relationship with my ex, it's the only thing i said "my ex is a muslim". The power of western-educated people that purport supremacy over other sources of information. i guess.

They also ignored my experience with other wives and consorts of Belial and claimed I'm level 2-3 possessed (as far as I know, this person wasn't a Catholic priest or anyone really, just a random person in a server) by Belial and told me i need to cut all contact with him. (Which is the leading theme of the spiritual harassment I've experienced, to cut connections and ties with Belial. but by this person to "help against alleged, baseless claim of being demonically possessed" - way to take the side of the harassers - to cut off the threat that can help against these problematic beings! or at worst, fear-mongering a severely ill person who has been unable to get psychiatric help and is so oversensitive to medication that can't be medicated - this is actually a fact, my psychiatric doctor told me there's no available medications for me to try anymore-- but go off i guess). Not to mention the idea they seemed to have, that all Christians and Jews worship the same God, instead of Christians worshipping a dead guy as a god, or like some theorize a Christian Egregore (which in my opinion each sect has their own version (egregore) of this Christian god - it's a stolen book and their own lore is all over the place and cherry picked - dead sea scrolls and all that isn't accepted from these writings into the official book and teachings). It's been told to me by several people how the Abrahamic God is an entirely different entity from the god(s) Christians worship and follow.

and then, I was supposed to comply to these strangers claims after trusting them with my experience. and because I according to them "didn't" they wanted to kick me out based on, quoting Jewish Encyclopedia, telling them my divergent experience of others who work (in very positive ways) with Belial - having dated a muslim and yeah, not taking at face value their 'advice from the expert' who is a total random stranger online refuting other sources and experiences. and ignored my very real situation of having tried to get all sorts of psychiatric help (depression, trauma, religious trauma, severe abandonment and excommunication by my birth cult and family, other trauma symptoms) for 20 years and then lastly being told "We can't do anything for you". sorry mates, if my doc says they can't do anything for me anymore, no amount of your "Have you tried to get medical help?" is gonna make me beat a dead horse more just to appease your egos.

but these people always do others a favor. i wouldn't want to stay in such a place that's so quick to cut people off and blame and accuse them irrationally. they're worst for mental health. I'm rather gone from such a place that feigns friendliness but is very quick to come up with excuses to get rid of people that don't dance to their "happiness woo woo" or whatever the heck it is. plus there was someone else who had a bad experience with them as well. i also feel bad now for having recommended them to someone.

not that the public craft spaces aren't also sanitized currently, sadly. compared to the diverse witchblr of ten years ago where people talked about all sorts of things from astral worlds to energy work experiences to realms and entities and other deep esoteric experiences that had less to do with what some people call "larping" these days and more to do with gnosis. way to shut down people's experiences truly. /rant end thanks for reading <3 best wishes from a girl being possessed by Belial for the past 26 years I guess :D what a lucky girl :3

[persianatpenn]

Attending Kusha Sefat's Book Talk

I attended the Middle East Center’s event hosting Kusha Sefat who talked about the Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran. This talk happened October 10th in Fisher Bennett Hall and pertained to Sefat’s book: The Revolution of Things. Through this talk, while filled with complex sociological terms, I learned more about what truly happened to Iran post-revolution. He discussed how all objects related to physical pleasures were removed from society. For instance, in addition to the widely known hijab mandate for women, men were required to have short hair and long sleeves, alcohol and many types of music were banned, and the diversity of simple things like food products and the presence of bright colors were minimized. In addition to these objects, many words also disappeared from public discourse. For instance, the words “rights” and “freedom” were wiped from common vocabulary, with journalists even being “strongly discouraged” from using these words. Removing these materials and words from society did not mean that they were not still discussed within private domains such as the home; however, making these materials and words was one strategy that Khomeini used to maintain power. I particularly enjoyed this experience as I was able to compare Sefat’s description of post-Islamism Iran to my own experiences traveling there when I was younger. While the lack of women’s rights was very evident to me through my own mandated dress and the mere fact that women cannot even rid bicycles in Iran, I had not noticed this censorship before. I remember watching a movie in a theater in Iran about a man who desperately wanted to leave the country but was not granted a visa, leading him to become a catholic priest in the attempt to become undesirable enough to be granted exit from Iran. My cousin explained that this movie was almost banned by the country, and I was surprised they did not follow through with it, especially considering Sefat’s talk about the strict censorship in the public sphere. Additionally, I attended many hijab-less, co-ed parties and weddings, which upon asking my grandmother later, were only made possible by paying off the police. Combining this experience with the information from the talk, it seems that perhaps despite the government’s best efforts, life and freedom will always find a way to exist.

-هاله

[brightlotusmoon]

The old men were by far the most diverse bunch. Old billionaires wear whatever the fuck they want. One man wore a maroon, velvet, three-piece suit and a paisley cravat, and he must have been sweating in it, but I couldn’t tell because he had doused himself in a cologne that I’m going to call “A Million, Billion Different Kinds Of Fruit, by Calvin Klein.” There were two shaven-headed men of Caucasian descent, wearing black hakama robes and some kind of pendants. They had white socks and sandals, and from the way people were bowing to them, I’m guessing they were some kind of religious officials, but I can’t be quite sure. Whatever faith they practiced, it wasn’t Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Baha’i, Taoism, Shinto, Confucianism, Voodoo, Wicca or the Dreamtime Faith of the Aboriginal Shamans. If I had to guess, I would say they were either members of the Illuminati, or we are living in the Matrix and they are priests from the remaining human city in the real, outer world.

I don’t know what religion they were from. Do we get why that’s scary? Aside from the fact that a vast chunk of my education centered on world religions and mythology, religions really want you to know about them. That’s their whole business model. They tell you why things are the way they are and then you give them money. So the fact that there’s a religion that I’m too poor to know about is deeply troubling.

These rich old billionaires were the kindest, sweetest old gents. In conversations I overheard more than once, a man worth more than my entire extended family (which is Irish and therefore vast and mighty) talked about another man at the party as “just being the sweetest soul,” or referred to a cupcake at a certain café as “sinfully seductive.” And I realized, these men may have been cutthroat sharks before, or they may have inherited their fortunes, but none of that matters now. They won. They won life. They are lions that, having killed enough gladiators, are now left gloriously alive to become old and toothless. The host of the party had an entire wall covered in plaques and trophies. I read most of them, and still couldn’t tell you what he did for a living. Because whatever he had done, he certainly didn’t need to do it anymore. His accomplishments referenced his humanitarianism, his civic heroism and his contributions to culture and civilization. So whether or not this man had worked at Bain Capital gutting companies in the American Heartland didn’t matter, because he had rescued a bunch of Tibetan art and now he was kissing other billionaires on both cheeks and saying, “Tom, I’m in love with you!” because who gives a fuck, I’m rich!

I watched these crazy old holiday wizards and their jeweled scarab wives, their Oxford sons and Cambridge daughters, and thought to myself, “This is the most fun I’ve ever seen anyone have. Louis the XVI would've shit a brick if he'd ever thrown a party this good. This is… so great. This is… completely fucked.”

I began to notice that people were looking at me funny. For a moment I became scared that they realized I was poor. Perhaps I had used the wrong fork, or a moth had flown in lazy spirals out of my wallet, or my toes had popped out of the holes in my shoes. But then I realized it was my expression that was drawing looks. I looked flabbergasted and astounded. And they didn’t.

That’s when I realized it. These motherfuckers weren’t going to the best party of their lives. They weren’t even necessarily going to the best party of their week. Who knows? Maybe one of these plutocrats was sneering at the lack of a third fortuneteller. “No augur divining mysteries from the movement of birds? No oracle breathing poison and screaming prophesies? You call this a Christmas Party!”

Well fuck that!

_

Suddenly I am thinking about that article written by Brennan Lee Mulligan about being witness to extremely hyper-wealthy people believing they were going to live forever.

Not if the rest of us have anything to say about it, said the guy with words on his bullets to the heart of a health insurance CEO.