#am I an atheist?

[palmtree-art]

Im fully convinced that I am the chosen one.

God is I

I am the only person that can save and rule this god-awful kingdom.

[chanaleah]

It's interesting to me that growing up Jewish seems to have given me a fundamentally different understanding of religion from my Christian friends. For me, I think that your religion (or ethnicity, since Judaism is an ethnicity) is not something you can get rid of. You can convert to another religion, but I never understood friends of mine who said that they weren't Christian, but Atheist.

"But you celebrate Christmas, right?" I asked them.

"Well, yeah," they said, "but we don't celebrate Christian Christmas. I'm atheist."

That didn't make any sense to me. Sure, maybe the version of Christmas they celebrated in their house looked more like treats and presents and less like nativity scenes and prayers, but it was still the same holiday.

So, I came up with the concept of the difference between "Not Christian" and "non-Christian". Which of course my "not christian" friends didn't understand. But my idea was that there are people who are "not christian" - mainly culturally christian atheists - and people who are "non-christian", like Jews, Hindus, Muslims, or others.

Because while both groups generally don't identify as Christian, we have different experiences. As a Jew, my experience as a religious minority is not the same as that of a culturally Christian atheist. They're not Christian, and I'm not Christian, but in different ways.

note (11/27/23)— I don’t entirely stand by the contents of this post anymore, specifically the part where I said that religion isn’t something you can get rid of. I have changed my mind and as of now do believe that atheism fully separate from Christianity is something that can be achieved, and while I’m not apologizing to many of those in my notes who despite their avowed atheism have continued to uphold Christian hegemony— I do apologize to atheists who have taken steps to distance themselves from Christianity and be careful not to uphold Christian hegemony.

[possession1981-moving]

THE FIRST OMEN dir. Arkasha Stevenson, 2024

[savoredsins]

sorry let me just be delusional and pretend i know how elgarnan looks by zooming extra hard on those two screenshots

[inamindfarfaraway]

The Exorcists’ Masks of Virtue

The vast majority of Exorcists in Hazbin Hotel have a notable design element that other angels don’t: their masks are missing an eye. Specifically, the right eye.

I believe this is a reference to the Bible, Matthew 5:29. Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

He’s being hyperbolic. Mr Free Healthcare was not pro-mutilation. What he means is that you have to be willing to make sacrifices to prevent sin. The context of the eye metaphor is him condemning adultery and warning that even something as easy, casual and small as a look full of lustful intent can lead to further, worse sin if you don’t notice your sin, hold yourself accountable for it and do the work to not let it influence your decisions. This will probably be hard. It could be very, very painful. Changing your perspective can feel as horrible as plucking out your eye, so many people can’t bring themselves to do it. But although it won’t feel that way in the moment, it’s healthier for our general wellbeing in the long run to abandon traits and behaviours that damage ourselves and/or others.

(You may notice that Jesus’s teaching that you can have sinned, redeem yourself by giving up sin and thus escape damnation is the founding principle of the Hazbin Hotel. You may also notice that it contradicts everything the Exorcists believe.)

The Exorcists seem to follow this idea of painfully excising badness for the sake of the greater good devoutly to the point of placing it above teachings like ‘Thou shalt not kill’, with their job being to remove sin, in the form of sinners, to protect Heaven. Hence the missing right eyes. They’re a declaration of moral righteousness and inability to stumble.

But the truth is that the Exorcists all have their right eyes. Their flawlessness is a facade. Underneath, they are untouched, think themselves morally untouchable and, as shown by their horror and outrage when even one of them is killed, would much rather be physically untouchable too. This perfectly represents their complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own faults, let alone improve. They are never the ones who sacrifice. They force the sinners to sacrifice and don’t compensate it with any salvation. They metaphorically rip out the sinners’ eyes, but still condemn their entire bodies as inherently, permanently sinful. So they’ll just have to do another Extermination to get the other eyes! And another one to cut off their right hands! And so on until there’s nothing left.

The only exception to the rule is Vaggie, both in appearance and character. Her mask has the left eye crossed out instead. Even before her expulsion, she’s set apart to the audience as an Exorcist who has the capacity to, shall we say, see a different side of things. Her mask having its ‘sinful’ right eye reflects her understanding that the Exorcist worldview is wrong.

When she almost kills a demon child, her hateful vision clears. She discards the part of herself that’s an unquestioning, merciless agent of death, terror and grief… and as punishment for what Lute perceives as treacherous weakness, gets her eye plucked out.

Of course Lute leaves her with only the ‘sinful’ eye. It brands Vaggie forever as the inversion, a perversion, of what the Exorcists are meant to be.

You know, all this talk of eye removal in the Bible reminds me of another line - ‘an eye for an eye’. Adam directly quotes it in “Hell is Forever”. He uses it to frame the Exterminations as Old Testament-style punitive justice; the sinners did harm and so they receive it. But putting aside the debate about how ethical the concept of revenge is, the entire point of taking an eye for an eye is that it’s proportional. The punishment fits the crime. If someone cuts your eye out, you shouldn’t murder their whole family in front of them and then slowly disembowel them to death. That would be the sin of wrath. You should just make them pay without excessive pain or collateral damage. This is the fairest form of revenge.

The Exorcists don’t do that! The Exterminations aren’t proportional to the wrongs of all they hurt, nor was Vaggie’s brutal punishment equivalent to her extremely mild insubordination. Lute literally takes Vaggie’s eye, and more, after Vaggie does nothing to her! That’s the opposite of the phrase! Adam and his soldiers are wrathful and cruel, deriving satisfaction from others’ suffering. But they just can’t stop going on and on about how disgustingly evil the sinners are, in total hypocrisy… despite some of the sinners being far better people than the genocidal Exorcists are… it’s like they’re obsessed with specks of dust in the sinners’ eyes when they have massive logs stuck in their own. Oh hey, that’s in the Bible too!

[light-koe-pinsky]

Ok but God having a lightbulb for head making it easy to break whenever someone's had enough of "his" bullshit but the back of his throne being full of new fresh lightbulbs, leaving it to the people/creatures, even the ones that broke him in the first place, to replace it if they find the mercy and humility in their hearts to do so has to be one of the hardest and most creative metaphors for hope Ive seen in a Groening show

[roses-ink-dipped-pen]

Mad scientist Villain who doesn’t believe in supernatural beings meets their new archnemesis: an archangel

[ricksanchezbignaturals]

rick baby if you're not going to hell nobody is

[frobby]

I think it would be really funny if rin was the more helpful one around his house. Like u would think rin would be the disrespectful one who always bails on housework or mass but its actually yukio who would always have an excuse not to go or forget about chores to the point that rin just does them instinctively now

[duckprintspress]

Duck Prints Press has contributors from many different religions and traditions, but given our love of books, we thought that the Yule Book Flood was a holiday we all could get behind. Jólabókaflóðið is an Icelandic tradition, wherein people unwrap books on December 24th and then stay up late into the night reading them.

Happy Jólabókaflóðið!

What books are you gifting to your friends and family this year?

please reblog and tell us what you're gifting, we're super curious!!

[attackfish]

So I reported this asshole and IP blocked them, for their intense and blatant antisemitism, but I'm screenshotting and posting this ask because it's a perfect example of what I talked about here: [Link] on my other blog.

I am really open about being an atheist. I am of course really open about being Jewish. I frequently talk about the two in conjuction, and when I talk about Christian cultural hegemony in atheist spaces and antisemitism in atheist spaces, I am talking as a Jewish atheist. But the first thing any gentile atheist who doesn't want to think about antisemitism and Christian cultural hegemony does, is erase my atheism and paint me as the outsider religious person attacking atheists.

And the same thing happens when queer Jews bring up antisemitism in the queer community. Our queerness is erased, and it's "Oh the Jews are such bigots, attacking queer people!" Every time. Intracommunity discussions of antisemitism in communities we belong to, over and over are shut down by gentile members of those communities, painting us as outsiders and interlopers trying to atrack the community. Thank you, Nonny, for providing a perfect example.

[essektheylyss]

Here's the thing with Cassida: skill issue. Sorry babygirl but you've got the vibe of a bright but otherwise simplistic scientist who's an atheist purely because you cannot possibly conceive of portions of the universe beyond your ken. Just because a god knows no mercy that a mortal can comprehend doesn't mean that mercy means nothing. I am not the center of the universe and I do not presume that my existence is the end-all be-all of divine intent, nor that it should be. So yet again: skill issue.

[impishtubist]

In 25 years of reading SBRL fic (yes I took a 17-year break but best believe I caught up real quick on all I had missed when I came back in 2020), I've only read one fic that actually addresses the fact that godfather has religious connotations to it. Like, it really is intended to be someone who guides your child in the faith. It is not automatically someone who has guardianship of your child after you die.

Idk, I'm not a religious person, but I think that should actually be explored more in fics.

[awweshuuks]

Stan twins but Ford understands and speaks Hebrew completely and Stan can understand most of it but speak it at a 1st grade level when.

[wrexkinghxvoc]

Benjamin Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe // Grimes, from Oblivion // Marya Hornbacher, from Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia // Sylvia Plath, from a journal entry featured in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath // Kaveh Akbar, from Calling a Wolf a Wolf // Euripides, from “Orestes”, An Oresteia (trans. Anne Carson)

[hugintheraven]

Why does everyone think burning the Gävlebocken will make good things happen?

To be clear, it's a fun meme, and I support it. But I see a lot of people talking like burning the Goat will be a sacrifice to make the world better. And if we're going to make a religion of this, let's be serious.

The Goat burned in 2015, and 2016 was a notably awful year. It was burned though not destroyed in 2019, and 2020 hit us with Covid. 2023, Goat destroyed by birds, and then 2024 gave us worldwide inflation and right-wing political victories.

If we're going to take religious implications from that, I'd say that we are being charged as a people to protect the Goat, and our failures to do so are being punished.