#a real 'cultural christian'

[hadesoftheladies]

western women in privileged countries, when feminists from the global south tell you to watch out for white men and that your superiority complex won't save you, it is not an insult, it is a warning

what happens to women in the global south isn't happening because we have dark skin or non-european cultures. the threat that terrorizes us openly that makes you feel pity for us is not unique to us. that threat is in your bed, too.

[hazel2468]

I got Very Yelled At when I said that Christmas is not and never will be a secular holiday but like.

What are you celebrating on December 25th?

"Oh, well, it's a time for people to come together with their families and-"

What are you celebrating on December 25th?

"You don't need to make it religious, you can just enjoy the holiday energy-"

There is nothing secular about a Santa hat. It is about Christmas. CHRISTmas. Because- what are you celebrating on December 25th?

"It's a holiday about universal joy and love and peace and-"

My people have an entire tradition centered around staying inside on Christmas Eve because we get FUCKING POGROMED so often on that day. This is NOT a day of universal peace and love. Also-

WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING CELEBRATING ON DECEMBER 25th?

The answer is the birth of Jesus. You can make your trees and garlands and hats as blue and white as you want. You can call it a "Channukah hat" all you want. Those things are about Christmas, not Channukah. And with Christmas approaching, I'm surrounded by people insisting that Christmas is secular now and it's "just the winter holiday".

I hate how Christianity is so much the norm in America that it is basically divorced from being "religious" at all. Christianity is seen as being irreligious and "normal" to the extent that if you point out that CHRISTmas is not secular. You get a bunch of people yelling at you that yes it is shut up.

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

guy who so desperately tries to find god. who wants to have faith in a higher authority to guide him out of the hole he's in. from the weight of guilt from simply existing, as the person he is. but every time he thinks he's answered his higher calling it turns out he's made the Morally Incorrect choice and his path to goodness and holiness was the road to the devil all along

[jewishbarbies]

so much antisemitism comes from pop culture insisting being jewish is JUST a religion and you can’t convince me otherwise.

[mehilaiselokuva]

actually am i allowed to be angry about christian missionaries/general influence erasing so much finnish history and folklore. because i kinda am. i love learning about not just the finnish language but finland itself as a person with mainly nordic (finnish included) heritage looking to reconnect with their culture, and i felt like stumbling across a barren, black crater where rich history once stood

sorry if this is too off-topic/heavy for this blog i just saw that one ask you answered and saw red :p

Hi!

I am angry as well. There must have been so much culture and folklore lost during Christianization out here! I did a presentation about ancient Finnish traditions for my English class, and my (British) teacher wasn't even aware of what happened to the Finnish and other Uralic cultures in this area. Many of my Finnish classmates were unaware of ancient Finnish culture as well. (Unfortunately, that was expected, since people here aren't aware of cultural history that wasn't taught in school! Not many people know what Karelian culture is about. Not many know about the traditions of the Sámi or the Romani here. etc etc)

I feel like the study and preservation of culture, in general, is very important as it's so easy for the dominating population to kill the cultures of smaller populations. We could also put more effort into preserving languages and cultures and teaching languages to the young generations regardless of how "useful" the language is! While we cannot reverse time and stop our culture from being erased, we can still put time and resources into preserving languages and cultures of the world to possibly save them from this fate! Maybe with research and raising awareness lets us rediscover culture that was lost!

[deservedgrace]

Xtianity putting so much weight in self sacrifice means you can't complain when putting your all into the church god causes you harm, because "Jesus gave the ultimate sacrifice and we're called to sacrifice things joyfully and graciously and complaining and being ungrateful is a sin"

[jstor]

The first sentence in this book (not the one in the preview above) sure got us interested. We're not going to post it here, though, because chances are high that it would get us in trouble. The book is open access, so go check it out yourself, you!

[isdalinarhot]

everyone else going to the worldhopper ball it seems like: doing intricate cosplays for their cosmeresona and going All Out

me: $20 black dress shirt $20 black pants that i wear on normal days anyway $50 black snow boots (fanciest shoes i own) i am going as a boring ass threnodite

[hoarder-of-rats]

I got curious and so was doing some research on the etimology of the names of states and biomes in Brazil, and apparently most of it is named after words in the languages of the native peoples! Examples:

Caatinga comes from Tupi-Guarani: Ka'a (vegetation) + Tinga (white, clear)

Roraima comes from Ianomâmi: roro or rora (green) + ímã (mountain).

Acre comes from Apurinãs word aquiri, which means River of Alligators.

Pará comes from Tupi-Guarani pa'ra, which means Sea River, because the river was so wide it looked like the sea.

Like, most of the states whose names aren't actually words in Portuguese (for example, Rio De Janeiro (January River (?)) come from Tupi-Guarani, and I think that's neat

[prolibytherium]

No hate I’ve just got like.. The absolute polar opposite opinion. I tend to be less into high fantasy where gods are confirmed Real with little to no room for interpretation because of the way it often sets up dichotomies of like, the Correct/Good belief systems vs the Wrong/Bad belief systems. If gods are observably materially real with exact specific natures and correct interpretations, it just kind of Adds limitations that would not otherwise exist, and a lot of the times results in worlds that feel flat and lacking in diversity. I think this framework can be perfectly fine for fantasy but approaching it with the exact same lack of nuance I'm talking about lends to executions that are reductive at BEST.

Part of why I’m into the hard realism no canon magic/supernatural fantasy is because of how much freedom it gives to explore the full spectrum of belief systems. There's nothing about this framing that prevents you from treating belief systems in a thoughtful and serious manner, and if anything it's a better framework to explore the full implications and effects on reality of religious belief (because In Real Life religion is a personal/cultural lens to subjective reality and has profound societal effects without people having Empirically Provable interactions with deities or etc). And tbh I feel like thinking that having a religion be Canon Reality in a setting is the only way for beliefs to not be treated as Stupid just kind of loops back around into treating religious belief as Being Stupid (ie: it's only NOT stupid when it's a materially provable aspect of reality)

I think you can have a setting that embraces the idea of a religion people believe in by simply having a setting that embraces the idea of a religion people believe in. You know?

[clementimetodie]

I think we need to start treating sexually impure thoughts as intrusive thoughts just like we do with thoughts that are violent or frightening

[maaruin]

I watched The Acolyte episode 7 and all throughout, I kept seeing parallels to the conflicts between conservative Evangelicals and progressive secular education in the United States, which has been one of the driving forces in the Culture Wars of the last decades. I think many viewers will miss this, because the coven has many symbols that make them seem unlike Evangelicals (they are "witches", all of them are women, two women had a child with each other), but the parallels are there:

The coven is similar to conservative Evangelicals: insular and isolated, very worried about its survival as a group, and sees the children as a means to ensure this survival. They are immediately suspicious of the Jedi and see them as a threat to their way of life.

The Jedi are similar to Progressives: they are centeres in the urban core and see themselves as promoting universal interests (instead of the interests of a particular group). They are worried about the children's safety in their religious group, but at the same time have an ideal of non-interference.

Osha has parallels to people who grew up Evangelical but didn't really fit in. In our world, such kids may be queer, or doubt their religious beliefs, or just be curious about life in "the world". Mae and many of the witches view her as a potential traitor because of that. And more than that they view the Jedi as intending to steal their child - in their view the Jedi have much more agency than Osha. When people who were raised Evangelical leave their faith, their former fellow believers often view this as them having fallen for outside manipulation.

Even Sol, who is in favor of taking Osha as a padawan, both respects her agency and doesn't intend to harm the coven. But Osha potentially leaving because of that would still be bad for the coven. This is actually a very important tension in religious freedom: the freedom of individuals to leave their religion is in conflict with protecting religious groups in their continued existence.

(More symbolically) Mae burning the Jedi book calls to mind attempts to ban books from schools because they are considered corrupting by some parents.

Neither group acts in a unified way. The tension escalates into violence because the more impulsive members of both groups act, well, impulsively.

We still don't know exactly what Mother Aniseya was trying to do when she turned into smoke. Sol didn't either but assumed that she was trying to harm her children. For someone outside a culture, it may be difficult to differentiate love and abuse in the interaction between parents and children in that culture - made even more difficult by the fact that love and abuse can overlap.

(This one is more of a stretch) When Indara forces the witches out of Kelnacca's mind, she ends up killing them. Even is someone only wants to fight the harmful ideas of a religious group, their action may end up destroying/damaging the group itself and not just the ideas.

The tragedy in The Acolyte was not inevitable. If people of both groups had acted more level-headed and tried to understand where the other was coming from, compromise may have been possible. Perhaps the same is true for our world.

[kavehater]

Most funniest thing ever btw is a person who likes alhaitham and kaveh and has alhaitham as his pfp and kaveh in his banner yet is a raging Zionist

[jackawful]

fuck it, dipping my toes into the discourse again...noticing that literally everyone who has blocked me on tumblr for being pro-palestine in the past couple weeks has been american ex-christian jewish converts & meanwhile my irl ethnically jewish friends and chosen family are like. complaining about arguments with zionist relatives and going to pro-palestine protests and organizing donation drives for fauda and the palestinian red crescent. it's been extremely whiplash inducing.

and I can't help but notice that like...the propaganda that equates all support of decolonizing palestine with antisemitic violence is a very very similar amygdala hijack to the christian persecution complex I grew up steeped in. those with power in a religious community say "people like you are being hurt for their religion over there, therefore you are in danger here!" and like, I get its a little more complex because antisemitism is a real opressive force in the US, but it straight-up isn't in israel - and in fact, most of the israeli government propaganda I'm seeing is an attempt to equate palestinian defensive violence with antisemitic attacks in the US and Europe. the difference is that diaspora jews aren't agressors in a position of power, but israeli settlers absolutely are.

and like, I'm looking at this dynamic in light of the main discourse drama in these circles before early october being about how ex-christian atheists are sometimes antisemitic because of ~cultural christianity~ and then watching this shit come nigh-universally from ex-christian jewish converts and going like...hm. maybe the cultural christianity call is coming from inside the house this time.

[james-silenthill]

People that refuse the concept that things might be culturally christian are chuckleheads

[bijoumikhawal]

honestly my hot take is you can end up being culturally Christian if your family is irreligious enough even if all of you belong to a completely different religion, and even if you aren't irreligious being a minority within a majority means the majority culture and customs impacts you, whether you adopt those customs or run from them