#and my parents never really talked about god or religion except for if it was a holiday

[primrosebitch]

I wish I could believe in like anything supernatural or like witchcraft or the greek gods because it's so interesting and fascinating and cool but my brain is very like scientific(?) in that without real evidence i can't believe anything like that, evidence as in i personally see or experience it not like hard evidence that like scientifically proves it exists, i just need to see it for myself.

I was also raised catholic and idk if i ever believed in god, like it's hard to remember how i felt about god when i was in elementary school because of how long it's been but from what i can remember i think i kinda just went along with it and didn't really think to hard about if god exists but i also remember that i never really believed that praying would do anything and i never really took being religious or god too seriously so i think that although i never really thought about it back then i didn't really ever truly believe in god

[pearl-the-artist]

(You called for me) Gabriel / Reader Oneshot

Ok please be patient with me on this. I spent over 24 hours in a car on a trip to Russia a few days ago and it made me do something I've never dared to before: write a fanfic. On my humble Samsung notes.

If this isn't a total flop I might make more? I dunno? Maybe hop on ao3?

Criticism and feedback is appreciated ok thank youuu have fun

Another restless night, another hour spent lying in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling above you. The room was shrouded in the comforting night air, more illuminated than usual by the soft glow of the full moon outside.

You look at the clock on your nightstand; precisely midnight. Two hours after your drunken father came home again, letting his pent-up frustrations and anger out on you in a one sided yelling match. Of course, as usual, neither was your mother of any support; only giving you that same disapproving, disdainful glare. You were never really welcome, not even in your own home- your parents biggest mistake lingering around only to weigh them down, and remind them of what they could've had. Or so they've told you, many, many times before. Tonight was no exception.

When the broadcasts first announced the new threat infesting the county, "alternates" they called them, you were, admittedly, both terrified and somewhat relieved. You were never really one to believe in the supernatural, but who knows, your parents were just superstitious enough to maybe fall for their schemes.

The first announcement had been around, what, a year ago now? Not much had really changed admittedly, although the population had begun falling drastically since then.

Your parents had of course used this opportunity to also confiscate your phone, the CRT TV in your room and old little MP3 player gifted to you by a relative, god forbid you let an alternate in to potentially threaten them, your own safety not even really a point for consideration to them.

Living with your parents was already hell, but getting by without your favourite albums and shows? Torture.

So tonight when you lied in bed unable to fall asleep, your mind wandering as usual, it may have wandered a little too far.

You recalled something you overheard your parents talk about. A friend of your dad's, a man of unwavering faith, who had been found dead in his own home a few weeks ago, seemingly in the middle of his usual prayers. Even though his family mentioned having seen an odd, ghostly figure outside their home that night, the doctors seemed to blame the cause of death on a brain hemorrhage.

It made sense, come to think of it. When you first saw the emergency PSA, it explained all kinds of methods to protect yourself from alternate attacks, one of which being avoidance of religion, faith, and philosophy.

So then, the alleged "ghost" that visted that poor man just might've been... Well.

This gave you a bad idea, but you weighed the options available to you.

Either you would die in a similar way as the old man, or... you might just get lucky and bargain with it. Alternatively, nothing happens, and you remain stuck with an unhappy married couple that hates each other as much as they hate you.

It was definitely stupid, but at this point it seemed like you had nothing to lose anyway. You weren't really much of a believer yourself, so you didn't exactly know how to pray, but you gave it your best shot. Sitting up in your bed, hands clasped together with a bowed head and closed eyes, you tried your best to focus.

If there was a god out there, may it hear your pleas. Wordless whispers called for help, begging to be heard, while you did all you could to try to concentrate on any spiritual connections. All the while you knew you may as well be praying to a literal demon.

A few minutes passed as you racked your brain for what to say before you stopped, your hands falling back into your lap.

What the hell were you doing? Yes you hated it here, and you couldn't even run away if you wanted to, but inviting an alternate to your house just like this? It was a death sentence, and not a pretty one, that much was certain.

You shook your head. It probably wouldn't have worked anyway. Right, this was all just some silly superstition, not that different from those "send this to 5 other people or you'll die tonight" chain e-mails. You laughed internally at how silly it was that you even thought this would work to begin with, and, admittedly, felt a brief sense of relief. You decided that you were ready to just go back to sleep, and just as you pulled your blanket up to crawl back underneath it- you almost jumped.

It was a voice, faintly audible outside your window. You didn't even process it until a few seconds after, a barely legible, strained whisper.

"I heard you praying."

You froze. A cold wave shot right to your stomach. Slowly, agonisingly so, you turned around to face your bedroom window.

A tall figure stood outside, its hands clasped together similarly to how you just had a few minutes ago. With long, flowing white robes and silver, wavy locks that reached down to his shoulders, he looked... Ethereal. Not to mention the massive, pure white wings folded neatly behind his back. His head blocked out the full moon, the light creating something almost like a halo around him, making him appear even more angelic.

"Woah."

You couldn't help the little gasp of awe. He seemed to find it amusing, his grin spreading a little too wide for comfort. Admittedly, you almost doubted if he even was an alternate at all. Maybe you'd come out a person of faith yourself, after this.

"Are you... An alternate?"

You whispered hesitantly, quiet enough to try to conceal the trembling in your voice and also not alert your parents sleeping upstairs, though you weren't sure if he actually heard you at all.

He didn't respond for a moment, tempting you to ask again, before that inhuman whisper was heard again.

"You called for me, and now I am here."

Avoiding your question, huh. Suppose he was an elusive sort. You quickly glanced around your room, eyeing the door in particular just in case; you really hoped your parents were asleep.

"May I... Come closer?"

You couldn't even recall the last time you were this polite to someone, though it was your best bet not to piss him off while he was still friendly, if you could even call it that. You had no point of reference, though he wasn't actively trying to harm you, so it was a start.

The angel, his smile unwavering, simply nodded, waving his arm in an invitation to approach.

It took a moment for you to will your body to move from the initial shock, but with slow, careful steps you moved to open the window to properly speak to him, a pleasant cool breeze inviting itself into your room.

"So... What's your name?"

Did alternates have names? Suppose they just took on the name of whoever they were trying to mimic. You leaned onto the window frame, trying to catch a good look at his face; and for the first time in god knows how long you were met with eyes that, albeit a bit creepy and lifeless, looked back into your own with an unfamiliar lack of hostility.

"You may call me Gabriel, child."

Gabriel? That name sounded familiar- Oh! The Saint Gabriel's church at the edge of town. Suppose that made sense, given his angelic appearance, if it wasn't just one morbid coincidence. Your thoughts and scrutinizing stare dragged on for a bit longer than you were aware of, though, as his voice pulled your attention back to him.

"Are you lost, my lamb? I can save you. Let me in. Let me into your mind."

The last bit seemed a bit more... Pushy than the rest, making your stomach feel just a little heavier. You gathered your thoughts anyway, trying to push that feeling aside for now. You did do this for a reason, after all, though now that he was actually here you were starting to second guess things.

Gabriel seemed to take note of your hesitation after a while of you not responding.

"Open your eyes, my lost little one. Look at me. I can grant you anything you wish for. You just need to let me in."

An odd mix of dread and comfort you'd never felt before settled in, and the feeling was almost... Refreshing, in a way. You quickly glanced back up at him, and he was still staring at you, ever so patiently, eerily.

"Uhm... I was just- well, it's probably kind of silly."

No backing out now, not when he was already here. Even if you wanted to, you don't think he'd let you go so easily. As you verbally stumbled over your own thoughts, he simply waited, his unblinking eyes staring into you, gouging out your soul. Or so it felt.

"I just thought... Is it possible for, well... Is there a chance for humans to be able to ally with alternates? Can I join you?"

Surprisingly, that got his smile to falter, if only a little bit. A flicker of emotion you couldn't quite explain showed in his eyes- surprise, perhaps, or consideration.

"What for, my child?"

That uncanny whisper of his never gave away any emotion, monotone and unfeeling, yet not unfriendly. Admittedly, his question made you pause; you hadn't exactly thought of how to explain this to him. You hadn't even expected him to show up at all.

Fidgeting nervously, unsure of whether to tell him the truth or not, you tried to think of what to say. Despite your rationality screaming at you for being an utter moron, you knew you were in too deep at this point.

"I don't think I'm any good to these people at all anymore, I just... don't know what to do anymore. With myself. I have nowhere else to go. And, maybe..."

You weren't sure if you should say it or not, you already let more vulnerability slip than you wanted to. But your spite driven words were quicker than your brain, and man did it feel good to open up for once.

"...maybe for revenge, also."

Gabriel listened to you surprisingly attentively, very interested in your words. At your last statement, he perked up with an almost malicious twist to his grin. Before he could respond, though, you suddenly heard the sound of your parents creaky old bedroom door and footsteps from upstairs. And you could tell by the sound of them that it was your mother. And she was pissed.

For a very panic filled moment you weren't sure what to do, your thoughts racing- instincts called for you to jump into bed and pretend you were asleep like you usually would... but with Gabriel here, you couldn't- and that's when you realized you really only had two real options.

Stay here, and continue living this miserable life, and also deal with the imminent outburst of your mother.

Or go with him, and then... Well, nothing and no one could possibly guarantee what would happen to you then.

"Choose wisely, my dear lamb."

Your dilemma seemed to be rather palpable to the "saviour" as he pulled you out of that mental spiral, and you were rather grateful for it. As much as it made you nauseous with uncertainty and anxiety, you finally snapped out of that paralysis and turned towards the window.

"Please, help me. This is the only favor I'll ever ask of you. I will do anything you want in return, I promise."

You began to plead in an urgent, hissed whisper, practically leaning out of the window, causing him to take a step back.

Desperation and panic shook your words as you glanced back at your bedroom door.

"Get me out of here."

He chuckled, an amused sound mixed with something you couldn't quite explain that made you feel more fuzzy than you'd care to admit.

"Come. Come to me, my child. Step outside."

For the first time tonight hesitation became a foreign concept as you practically leapt out that window. Your bare feet felt the cold gravel beneath, just in time as the door to your room swung open.

The angered yelling of your mother were drowned out by the feeling of suddenly being lifted off the ground, Gabriel taking you up into his arms like your weight was akin to a feather.

He was cold, lifelessly so. And yet the soft silken robes, the way he held you in his arms, and his deceitfully promising whispers were lulling you into a sense of security you hadn't felt in a long, long time.

"A lost little lamb, asking their shepherd for guidance..."

His eerie, yet strangely comforting laugh filled your ears once more over the noise of your mother not yet realizing you weren't in your bed. You're surprised she wasn't hearing him at all. Maybe it was another mind game of his.

"You made the right decision. I knew you would. Such a smart, yet scared little thing you are, are you not?"

You leaned your head against his chest, sighing deeply, beginning to forget what you were ever doubtful about during the start of this whole fiasco. Your weight began to sink into his arms as you relaxed. He held you a little tighter in turn.

"Of course I shall guide you, my child. Come with me; you will be mine. You will be safe."

Just as the furious woman realized to check the opened window, Gabriel vanished as swiftly as he appeared, leaving behind the sight of nothing but an empty garden, peacefully quiet, as if you were never there.

[friesian]

my father is dead and i couldn't be happier.

the following is a sort of. reconciliation/vent post since i just got the news a few hours ago that my father died, and i finally feel like i can sort of talk about everything that happened to me as a child. for the first time. without the threat of potential violence. so. tw for neglect, abuse, parental death and honestly just. a lot. if you don't like the most stereotypical 'bad dad' shit, don't read this post.

my father was a cruel man. it was only until recently i was informed that my father used to actually shake me as a baby, no more than a few days old. when i was a few months old, he used to do the same to watch my 'funny reactions' and had to be actively reprimanded by aunt and mother in order to get him to stop lest i die a very sudden death.

when i was a little kid, my father i guess got this idea in his head that i was a little innocent flower and that if anything touched me, that'd be it. i'd be sullied. i'd be dirtied. somehow 'impure'. mind you, my father wasn't a religious man. really, honestly, the opposite. i wasn't allowed to talk about religion or god, explore spirituality, really have 'faith'. this would earn me hostile looks, a loud scolding, or called stupid. this also might displace onto my mom, who received it much worse than me.

when i was 7, my father made the move to go somewhere out into the deep west virginia mountains where i would never be in danger. except by him. we moved to a place where the closest store was 45 minutes by car, getting home from school was 35 minutes-- not counting school bus routes, that was up to 2-3 hours-- and there was not a single neighbor that could see the house nor talk to us. we were alone. for good. for over 11 years of my life i was alone in a house with a man who grew actively more and more hostile to being in that house. as i aged, tried to be a teenager, explore my gender, sexuality, ect. it was all shut down. my computer-- my only lifeline-- was bugged with spyware that allowed him to look at my screen and take control of anything i was doing. a vivid memory of mine is when i used to write fanfiction of innocent teenager things. kissing, holding hands, professions of love, the usual-- nothing explicit. at some point i was caught and had my computer thrown and i was screamed it. i could only run to my room and cry, and hope i wasn't chased. this left me with no sense of privacy, as any computer or technology i ever got passed through him, and as he was a engineer for networking, most things were bugged by him first as much as i tried to remove them. my mom suffered similarly to i, both of us being called slurs and having things thrown at us for existing in his radius. we walked on eggshells. we had no room to breathe. if we weren't in his general space, we were yelled at for avoiding him. if we were actually there, we were yelled at for laughing or even breathing too loud. there was no right answer. my friends never wanted to visit because of him, or he would often get mad at their parents for being 'flakes' or 'untimely', leading for me to be berated about my choice of friend. i wasn't allowed to go out unless it was with 'other girls', and i didn't have many friends to begin with due to the many social problems i faced due to his neglect. i grew up in that house, with many other issues i can't even begin to list, but i grew up and left as soon as i could, and didn't really do much. mostly just coasted by after dropping out of college that he pressured me to be in, lest i end up homeless. my mom divorced him shortly after i left due to being threatened with a gun, and at that point i was pretty sure he was officially off the deep end. this is sort of my 'getting it off my chest' moment as i was never able to speak out about what i faced in any regard due to him consistently monitoring my online presence. for all i know, he could've known about this blog-- choosing to hold onto it for some sort of legal proceeding as he had done to my mother. he tracked her car, recorded her calls, did everything he could to fuck her over. his father did something similar to him back in the 90s, and i needed to avoid it at all costs.

he never got the chance now. i never felt like i had a father, more like an angry dragon that guarded a tower with someone who didn't wanna be there. some sort of 'king' that transformed into a dragon, i suppose. but, i remember relating a lot to the imagery of people trapped in towers by beasts. i wanted to make a comic about it at one point. 11 years of solidarity does a lot to a motherfucker.

to this hour, i haven't shed a tear. i cheered and celebrated, put on my mask as i'm talking to the funeral home people, family, his friends, whatever it is. i've just been blaise and calm. i have to go back to my 'tower' this weekend and see it for the first time in years, now with the memory of my father dead seeped in those walls.

it's been a relief i didn't know i needed, but that house haunts me with the horrors that went on in it. i guess this is sort of my testimony to his life. i refuse to have a funeral. i refuse to have a memorial. he's being cremated and disposed of as soon as i can. i can already tell what little remains of his side of the family has an issue with it, but i don't care. they didn't live the life me and my mom had, and they never will now. for what it's worth, somehow, even though i was forged in fires that i don't think any man should go through-- it made me a more hardened and aware person. you get time to think when you're alone for 11 years. a lot of time to see emotions, patterns, understand, and just pick things apart. he never knew me, elf, he knew my dead name. and i'm thankful for that. i came out a good man all things considered, i have my flaws and issues, but who doesn't. but at least i never was like him. here's to getting out of the tower.

[urgayoldercousinmags]

hiii i am also gay (bi, more precisely) and christian! i was wondering if you would be open to talking more about how you reconcile those two things/the role faith plays in your life because i find it very interesting and beautiful. totally cool if you're not chill with it though :) have a great day!

oh my god yeah i'd love to, thank you for asking!

so, personally, i know ive had it much easier than others growing up in the churches that i did. from when i was a baby to when i was ten, i think, we went to a very small church where the pastor was my parents best friend and he and his family were very chill, so really all of what i learned and how i learned to approach my faith was centered around the love that god shows, rather than what we shouldnt do or whatever.

i didn't really start to question my sexuality or gender until i was like...13? and at that point, my family was at a church that was 100% focused on just simply building relationships with god and knowing god's love. at this church, i formed a really great relationship with who is formerly our youth pastor, but now works in the worship team. she became like a mother to me, since i dont have a great relationship with my own mother. she's been so supportive of me and regularly shown support of the lgbtqia+ community, so i really never felt wrong about being gay, except when it came to my own mother. not because she was religious about it, she's just "im not homophobic, but" homophobic.

but yeah, i think the main way ive tackled thoughts of like "well maybe this is wrong" is just reminding myself what ive been taught, what the bible says, and that, at the end of the day, god made me in his image, and if he didnt want me this way, he wouldnt have made me gay.

honestly, i see christians getting such a bad rep and i KNOW it's because of people who use religion as a reason to be hateful and that is NOT okay. i fully believe that god put everyone on this earth to be loved, and that he gave us free will for a reason, and everyone's choice is their own.

my faith is very important to me, but im also not stupid enough to realize that there are so many other religions and cultures and that's not my place to judge or try and steer them away from their religion/culture. all my job is is to show people god's love. i really dont tend to get offended when i hear people say things that many would consider "sacrilegious" or anything, i think everyone can make their own choices.

christianity plays a big role in my life, i have ny bible by my bed, theres verses on my wall, and i go to church every week. however, my bible is next to my trans pin, the verses are hung next to my lesbian flag, and i wear my flannels and converse to church. its a part of my life, and its what i believe, but its not my only personality trait.

anyways! yeah. thank you so much for asking, i think its super cool to meet someone else in a similar situation, and its really important to share my experience because i want everyone to know that they are loved ny both me and god.

[secretagentfan]

Some attempted, painful, words of hope:

I've been thinking a lot about how I felt when reading Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler wrote this book in 1993, and it takes place in 2024.

Before Parable of the Sower, I prided myself on finishing "good books" and putting down "bad books". Sower was the exception. It is one of the best books I've ever read, and I never finished it. I'm going to talk about it anyway. I think I need to.

I read a good chunk of it on a plane ride, where there was no escape. I was looking for books that look at religion in a nuanced way and I knew empathy was a main theme, which, fuck yeah.

I was not prepared.

Parable has your standard pre-apocalypse set-up. It's a small town in a horrible world (ours) surrounded by a wall. There are signs that the wall is going to come down, and the young protagonist picks up on these signs.

Early on she tells her friend about it, tells her that they need to prepare to learn to survive. Her friend cries to her parents, and her friend's parents then proceed to get mad at the protagonist's parents for teaching their daughter to fearmonger.

The scene that occurs after this, between main character and her pastor father, punched me in the chest. He basically tells her she's right about the wall falling-- he tells her that the adults in the town all know, and are doing their best to prepare for it. Most young people, he argues, can't handle carrying the knowledge the wall is going to fall. He says that when they discover it for the first time, all they want to do is point at the void-- just point at the big scary thing that needs correcting. But, he insists, that just breeds extremism.

Instead, he advises her to point NEXT to the void. Start learning survival stuff on her own, work it into her life and the lives of others in sneaky subtle ways. Ways that won't scare people-- but ways that they'll have when they need it.

It doesn't sit well with her, but she loves her father, and she tries.

The wall falls anyway.

When it does, it's awful. Like, whatever horrible thing you can imagine happening to people (especially women) happens and happens so much.

When my plane ride was over. I set the book down and googled. Childishly, I wanted to make sure there was a 'happy ending' before continuing. I learned there was, more or less, and that there was a sequel book too. Parable of the Talents, in which a political leader embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths. His slogan? "Make America Great Again".

Nope. No way. I thought. Too close. Oh God, how did Octavia Butler manage to get his slogan back in 1993!?

On top of that, I also learned that Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents were intended to be part of trilogy, but Octavia Butler passed away before writing the third book.

So, knowing this I picked the book up again, read until I reached a spot I determined was hopeful enough and I set it down.

I wasn't ready to start a book that ended up in Trump times, and didn't have a known ending.

I told myself I wasn't quitting, just taking a mental break. I promised to come back to Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents when I was in a better mental place and more ready to handle the themes.

(Lol. Lmao even. )

Well guys, here we are. Trump 2024. Guess who's not in a better mental place, and guess who can't stop thinking about Parable of the Sower.

Crazy thing is, I've been thinking of it in a completely different way than I did back then. I'm honestly really grateful I read what I did, when I did. Octavia Butler was a brave and incredible woman and writer. Braver than me, for being able to sit on those complex horrific feelings and parse them down into something swallowable.

I love that scene between the protagonist and her father. I've tossed it around in my head a lot, I think about "pointing at the void" and the debate of whether that's something we should do, or not do.

I think that's something a lot of people can relate to now. It's tempting to talk about how bad things are-- but does that unite us? However, does pointing NEXT to the void really actually solve the problem?

The wall still falls, regardless. Change is coming.

I'm not looking to point at the void or point next to the void right now. Right now, I just want to be exactly where I'm at, and I'm amazed to find that what I read of Parable of the Sower gives me hope now too.

Another core theme of the book is the agony and strength that comes with being an empathetic person in destructive times.

The protagonist ends up making her own religion, Earthseed. She argues that God is Change, and we shape God. God is not kind. Change is not kind. It's partially out of our reach, but we do shape it and it is our responsibility to shape it for the better.

We decide how we act on a microlevel with each other and that means everything.

We are not living the worst of Parable of the Sower right now. The world hasn't entirely turned toward violence, yet. This is a terrifying, terrifying time, and I don't know what's going to happen.

We are not powerless though. We shape God, we shape Change, even as it shapes us.

Parable of the Sower is a book about surviving. It's a book about sitting in the discomfort and agony of being an empathetic person and continuing to fight to be kind, even when things are at their absolute worst.

We can't give into nihilism, but we can't just look away from the void either. The wall is falling. The wall has fallen. Things are bad right now, and we all just need to sit in it, and offer a hand to each other at every chance we get.

If there's one thing survival stories have taught me it's no matter how bad things get-- people can never truly get ground to dust.

The human will is an incredible thing, and when everything goes horribly, I think that's when the most basic interaction of "you are a human being and I see you, and I believe your worth" becomes the most important hope in the world to maintain. Even in the darkest most horrible corners of human history-- there is hope as long as there is kindness between people.

We need to learn to sit in discomfort, stare at the hurt and the violence and the hope and not put it down, even when we want to.

There is no third book in this series-- but we decide what it looks like.

-

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

"All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”

[nerves-nebula]

I’ve never really recognized it as “religious trauma”, but I’m nodding along to ur list. It’s just kinda stuff that happened. Except for the few things that grown me was kinda at like ‘that seems a little bad actually-‘

I remember being 7 and first thinking what if God isn’t real as I was trying to sleep. So it’s like midnight and I’ve just had this world breaking thought that immediately had me spiraling down two trains of thought: Im going to hell for thinking that, and, what if he isn’t what the fuck. So of course I’m freaked out and I’m pretty sure child me needed a fucking hug or some assurance or something, so I went to my parents room, which woke up my mom. At which point I realize, I can’t tell them my actual problem because it was a thought I was ashamed of having, and I didn’t want to run the risk of getting in trouble for some nebulous comfort that was frankly unfathomable cus my parents suck. So I just said felt sick, and took “sorry” my mam gave me as comfort enough (which in hindsight is not a great response to that), and just had to go back to bed with all that. That shit stuck with me. I remember at Sunday school, maybe months or a year later, when one of the teachers said doubt was put in our minds by the devil, I was so fucking relieved.

And there’s the fact that I didn’t know other religions were a thing. I didn’t know there were other blends of Christianity. I lived in a small town and I just had never been touched by that concept until I moved at 11, and one of our religious education modules was on Judaism. Everyone else was just learning customs and calendar stuff, and I was having a whole epiphany. I was so confused until halfway into the lesson, and I realized they were talking about not being catholic. I literally searched the library for a book that would explain this arcane concept. And it was just such a mind blowing experience. I was couldn’t comprehend why no one had ever mentioned other religions if there were so many. And how did it make any sense that there were so many. The differences aren’t subtle. Point is, it was a whole thing.

If I hadn’t moved I would have been made to do my confirmation that school year. And that’s not okay! The whole point of that sacrament is that you’re choosing Christianity, like your old enough and conscious enough to make that choice. Adult in the eyes of the church and all that. Baptism but leveled up. But they make children do it. Unrelated, but when I first learnt about it I was 8, and there was a girl in my class that never had to religion with us. Which was the weirdest thing to me at the time, because sure there were people that didn’t have to do Irish or English, because they had different first languages. But religion? I always found that so weird. But she literally just. Wasn’t catholic. And I just couldn’t conceptualize that. It didn’t occur to me that could be an option.

Jesus, raising kids with a religion is brainwashing of the highest order and no one can change my mind on that. Sorry for rambling at u, that post just made me think.

If I hadn’t moved I would have been made to do my confirmation that school year. And that’s not okay! The whole point of that sacrament is that you’re choosing Christianity, like your old enough and conscious enough to make that choice. Adult in the eyes of the church and all that.

my girlfriend said this exact same thing when i was forced to be confirmed. said it didnt count but tbh that feels like a cop out. like its something ive been forced to do, like a spiritual violation or something, it still happened. but, eh, whatever

Jesus, raising kids with a religion is brainwashing of the highest order and no one can change my mind on that.

not sure i agree with you here, but i can agree that a lot of the ways kids are raised within Christianity is cult-ish and brainwash-y and bad.

[satanicallypanicky]

my kid, 10, has been raised thus far without religion. as best as we can, at least, living in Utah and her having two sets of solidly LDS step-grandparents (both parents have remarried to ex-mo's). she knows *of* religion, of course, but not a lot of specifics.

while we were riding the train home on Friday night, she mentioned something about not understanding why Christians put crosses on everything. I asked her if she'd really like to know, because it's kind of a grisly story. She, being ten and super into fantasy violence right now, said YES without hesitation.

so I told her about ancient execution methods in Roman-occupied Palestine and about Constantine's "conquer under this sign" dream and about Christian Rome's attempts to de-paganify everyone they came into contact with thereafter. this of course involved some reference to a certain gentleman from Nazareth that was crucified. we talked a little bit about what Jesus taught about, the arguments about if he was real or not, and even mentioned some miracles he was said to have performed and how that might have made people feel who were nearby at the time.

again though, I'm an ex-Christian and my daughter is not and has never been religious. this was instructional conversation about Christianity from an outsider to an outsider. not induction into Christianity, just "this is the beliefs of this culture that surrounds us and we cannot escape from, it is good to know some of it so you will recognize it when you see it".

while we were bringing the conversation around again to my daughters first question (crosses, the execution of Jesus, why to Christians put it on everything) we pulled into a station. A child who had been sitting somewhat nearby walked past us to the door and turned to say "GOD BLESS YOU" extremely loudly, followed by his mother, who also stopped, touched my shoulder, and said "thank you for teaching her! keep the faith alive!"

my daughter and I turned back to each other with identical looks of confusion then laughed - these people had clearly just heard me talking about Jesus and had missed the entire actual content of the conversation. also we are both VERY VISIBLY queer and I was wearing an inverted pentagram necklace (outside my shirt, for once).

it was extraordinarily strange.

this story doesn't have a point, except I suppose that if you're going to eavesdrop, at least do a good job.

[tonydaddingham]

heh im happy to answer questions!! :D im actually not out to anyone online as muslim and so this is incredibly fun for me to talk about sgjkgh

metatron! now i have to be honest, i had never really heard of metatron till.. couple weeks ago when i watched s2! and it seems that this isn't an uncommon thing too, there's much more description of metatron in jewish literature than islamic, his name isn't mentioned in the quran at all iirc, but given the other similarities in religion i thought to look it up and found that! he exists! but i don't know what the whole.. beyond the veil thing entails, really. 😔 not even sure what this "veil" is. regarding metatron i have basically no knowledge at all. we're all learning here!

but! the free will discussion... oof. honestly this is a big topic. as it should be, but a lot of young muslim kids ask this question of.. if everything is predetermined, how can God judge us for our mistakes? we're told we have autonomy and choice to do what we want (which is what makes us human.) but Allah has also predetermined everything. uh. so [shrug] the analogy that stuck with me most was that if a child is given two options for food by their parent, the parent will know what they are going to pick, but they still have the choice. its flawed like all analogies but it is a good framework i think. there's also the thing about Allah knowing everything that will happen but not actively enforcing it? its definitely confusing. i hope i made any sense at all ;-; again happy to answer any questions if that has raised any but i can't.. promise i'll give good answers sjkfhgh [gestures at these paragraphs]

israfil! well, judgement and resurrection are very closely linked. iirc, israfil is the only being (along with god) to know when the day of judgement will happen. he'll blow the famous trumpet once to end all life on earth except himself, and blow it again to resurrect everyone that has ever lived. nods. the second coming doesn't trigger this, but it does signify the end of days.

i hope that answered everything? sorry this was so long 😭 in my defence . uh. i have no defence. my apologies. but thank you for asking all this!! its rare that ppl show interest in my little special interest <3 - 🌙

hello again 🌙 anon!!!✨ well in that case im very honoured you are sharing this with me, anonymously or not, thank you!! thank you for your follow-up ask too; hope you don't mind that i answer both on this post? keeps everything neat and tidy, especially if i need to refer back to it at any point!!!

i was going to put the rest of this ask under a cut but fuck it the below 2nd ask is SO IMPORTANT.

re: metatron, i did do a little bit of reading on their mention in the quran and it reads that uzair (who is possibly ezra?) is also the metatron...? not a question necessarily, just a mark of slight confusion that i need to look into further, haha!!!

free will: that's such a beautiful analogy... i guess it may not necessarily be a predetermination of only one path, but multiple different ones, and it's our choice which one we choose, even if god knows which one will be chosen. but that god doesn't tell us what will happen when we make that choice, because that would influence our decision, and as you said - either way doesn't enforce it. that i believe crosses over into some catholic thoughts on predestination, im not sure, but either way would strike the balance between god being omniscient, and her creations having free will - making the two compatible.

israfil: brilliant, thank you for clarifying, especially where the second coming might link to the day of judgement!!! follow-up q, i read a bit more about the day, and where (if ive read this right), each person had their book of deeds that supports whether they go to heaven or to hell. sort of related: where does the book of life fit into this in Islam? is each person's deeds reviewed, handed back to them in whichever appropriate hand, and they are then scratched from the BOL?

stars: that's... that's not brainrot talking, that's bloody ✨illumination!!!✨ wow!!! even if the star shower scene was before demons existed, the suggestion that the shower started after the angel who crowley was (AWCW) began to ask questions - something that firmly foreshadowed the fall - and given that aziraphale was the one to make him start questioning/then hurriedly cautioned him against asking them... the symbology of AWCW not necessarily protecting him from things that chase away demons, but protecting him from being implicated in whatever punishment was to come??? protecting him from the fall??? my GOD, im ASCENDING. oh my god oh my god oh my god

(wait --- going by the above from 🌙 anon, was i potentially somewhat right in this and this??? like obviously not exactly right, but that aziraphale was himself implicated in the fall, and AWCW protected him/defended him? FUCK)

[malcifer85]

So I have nobody to talk to about this in my life currently but I'm having, not exactly a crisis of faith but of belief I suppose. I grew up ostensibly as Christian, a rather laxidasical branch of luthernisim I believe. At the time I believed whole heartedly in the entire shebang. My father seemed to do it mostly to humor my mother I think. Sometime around second grade he dove into Eastern philosophy and religion which a fervor and pretty quickly abandoned the Christianity thing. This had a big effect on me.

My childhood was difficult, to say the least. I won't be trauma dumping right now, don't worry. Let's just say I didn't fit in at school or with other kids and my father had a nasty temper and my mother is a whole other can of worms. I was a deeply unhappy and troubled child. I was also extremely bright and imaginative, and in the tiny speck I grew up in this was NOT normal nor wanted by any except my parents. For all their faults they tried to do the best they could with the limited tools they had.

I remember one night I was once again crying myself to sleep. I was roughly 8 or so years old I believe. I was praying my little heart out, begging God to make things better. At the very least to simply take the pain away if even for a little while. He never really did...

Well after that it was over by degrees and by the time my father died my faith was toast. I should add that all through my childhood I was having strange experiences that most people would call paranormal. From constant nightmares and visions of all manner of nasty beasties in my room at night to ghosts and UFOs. Hell my earliest memory is a paranormal one! I'm in my daybed (think a cross between a crib and a toddler bed) and suddenly a pair of grotesque hands reach up around the sides, as if someone were under the bed as if to hug me, it was not a hug. I remember the hands squeezing my stomach and chest harder and harder until I couldn't breathe. Then my mother walked in and they were gone! I asked her about it years later and she remembers me having mysterious scratch marks on my torso at around that age.

The next event that stands out I was probably 6 or 7 and my mother was getting to head to work. At the time she had very erratic hours so it would have e been somewhere around 3 or 4 in the morning. She was in the bathroom showering, putting on makeup etc and I was lying in my bed trying to go back to sleep after she woke me up. Next thing I know there is a light shinning in my window. It was instant. There was no gradual brightening like headlights coming through a window. It was a small light gradually getting bigger like a flashlight (besides I was on the second floor) it filled my entire very large bedroom window completely. Of course I was terrified and began to scream for my mother. No more than 3 or 4 seconds could have gone by and she was there and the light was gone as if it never existed.

There were numerous UFO sightings, mostly with my father driving at night on the county roads in the boondocks. Perhaps some other time I'll talk about HIS close encounter on the very same roads.

He died when I was 11. It devastated me. Yes he was abusive, mentally and emotionally not physically thank God. But compared to his father he was a damn saint. He was also my mentor, my hero and my only friend for the majority of my childhood. This eventually led me to abandon western religion and delve into any and every alternative. Tarot, Psychics, Buddhism, Hindu, Daoisim,witchcraft and wicca as well as some darker paths. I'll only touch on a couple incidents for illustration purposes. A big one was the premonition of my father's death. I had a dream that my former dare officer had been at my door telling me someone died and I remember being so confused why she was there then crushed at the death but at the time I simply assumed it was another of my strange dreams. A week or two later my dare officer woke me up and stood in my doorway telling me my father was dead. There countless times a sudden powerful feeling saved me from trouble, or jail, or worse. There were speels and rituals that payed off spectacularly, and backfired just as spectacularly. I could go on and on the point is I was a true believer in this as well.

It all came to a head when I was about 16. I remember lying in my bed late at night. The street lights were streaming in my bedroom windows, one in each. Then I was overwhelmed with a feeling of foreboding and revulsion. Suddenly it was as if someone had pulled a blindfold over my eyes as my room went pitch black. Not the darkness of the city. Not the eigengrau of closed eyelids but a total and complete absence of light. Then as I peered uselessly into it I realized I COULD see something. It was as if hundreds, thousands, of these THINGS that were darker even than the darkness were crawling and writhing and sliding around each other everywhere I looked. Somehow I knew they were hungry and they were there for me. I was terrified. Reverting to the instincts inherent in every child in history I threw the covers over my head and cowered in terror. Then something in me snapped. I don't mean that as a metaphor I LITERALLY felt something in me crack or break and I screamed NO! Not in fear but in anger! I said enough was enough and to this day I have no idea precisely WHAT I did but the darkness, whatever it was, was blown away and out of my room in an instant.

Life went on and I grew older. I had completely stepped away from anything occult or paranormal. I threw myself into impericisim with a vengeance. I studied all the science I could on my own. I was a rationalist and proud of it. I chocked all my youthful adventures up to the drugs or mental illness or just about anything I could rationalize it away with.

But the more I learned and studied the fringes and bleeding edge of our scientific understanding the more I was questioned my dismissal of the paranormal. Then I began meditating. Then I tried LSD and mushrooms. A whole library of books have been written on THAT subject and they are well worth pursuing but not today.

Now here I am. I have no idea what comes next. I have always been, but never more so than now, in need of a mentor. A teacher a guide someone to show me the way. I've had to flounder and stumble through all this more or less alone for my entire life and frankly it's exhausting.

[mycomori]

the anti zionism = anti semitism laws just passed by the us house of reps is fuckin terrifying and i hate it so much and the worst part it is, aside from palestinian americans, if will overwhelmingly effect american jews protesting the use and equation of their religion to the war crimes of the zionist regime of israel. this law will put palestian americans and their allies protesting the genocide of their people at risk just as equally as the jews around the world protesting the zionist state of israel and their utter disgrace to the jewish faith. zionism is a disgrace; an utter spit in the face of the jewish faith, and yet they have the audacity to cry anti semitism when someone criticizes their over a half century of war crimes. when jewish people around the world from leaders to casual observers agree this is a fucking disgrace and it’s disgusting and anti semetic to equate the zionist state of israel w the jewish faith. that’s the kinda shit neo nazis want. they want to paint the jewish people as nothing it war criminals and use israel as a so called example. when really all israel is yet another demonstration of the united states control in other countries and purposefully keeping them unstable through consistent colonial expansion and us backed support of these so called governments. they’re scared of the internet, just like they’ve always been scared of knowledge. because knowledge is power and they rely on ignorance and desperation and keeping people in such poverty they don’t have the energy to focus on anything else. we’ve proven we can make a difference. that’s what scared so many people in the filling class about the pandemic. everyone was out of work so they actually had time to think as process and feel and act on their beliefs. it’s what they hate it’s what they do their god damn best to surprise and guess what thinking it at all is an affront to them. fuck them. i grew up in the catholic church. i know better than anyone how deeply the depravity runs. our country is brain washed so deeply we can’t even recognize it cause it’s been goin on for so many years. the world hates and laughs at us for fully understandable reason. we hate and laugh along too. except we’re stuck here. cause our parents or grandparents though the us was a place to prosper. a place they could escape their decades of poverty. but it didn’t turn out dod it? if i was my nonni id be a pissed ass ghost. all that work to give your kids a better life and it’s just more bullshit and suffering. fuck it am i right? if i could talk to nonno and nonni as teenagers now i would be lost forever speaking a them. i never even met nonno armando. but i wish i could. i’ve always wished i could. if i click ahve super power it would be to speak with the dead. nothing much else just sit down and converse w them and pass along messages between them and the living. i would hope someone would do that for me once im dead too. but its sad innit. we’re a sad sad sad family. we all suffered and continue to suffer so much. but the living of us push forward despite it all. hit it sucks. it fucking sucks. to mourn both the dead and the living. to mourn at all. it breaks my mind.

[anamericangirl]

Since you mostly get hate asks on Tumblr insulting your intelligence with nonsense, I thought I’d give you an actual question:

As a mother of children approaching college age, I am always curious how young people with very solid, principled belief systems managed to resist the siren song of lefty liberalism. That ideology is hard to resist when you are young, idealistic, and very naive (i.e. 99.9% of your asks!)…especially to the realities of human nature while approaching an age that is naturally characterized by hubristic rebellion. I have a very close relationship with my kids and have always talked with them about social issues (age appropriately, of course) - something my parents never did. I do see, however, a tendency now in my daughter to think first with her feelings before confronting realities and facts first, or really investigating an issue. It makes me nervous she will fall prey to what so many young women get sucked into when striking out on their own in college. I should add: we are an agnostic household (unfortunately). My son voluntarily asked for and we gladly provided a study bible he reads often, and he did a deep dive on world religions. My daughter, though being in honors and AP classes, isn’t really into pleasure reading and philosophical discussions the way my son is. Many of her friends though are raised in religious households. I am kindling the small flame a of never-before-held belief in God myself now in my 40’s - which I have spoken with my kids about - but we do not attend church. Neither of my kids are allowed to have social media, and I’m pretty careful about their screen time - phones are turned in to my room before bed every night, no exception.

All this to ask: do you (and anyone else reading this I guess!) have any tips from your own experience for what kept you anchored in reality and morality through an age that is noted for “less-than-fully-informed-rebellion-for-rebellion’s-sake”? Was there something your parents did, or did not do, that helped you stay grounded?

Thanks for the sincere question!

I don't have any children and I can't imagine how difficult it is these days to keep them grounded. My experience growing up was a bit different, of course, as I'm sure you would understand since this radical leftism ideology wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is now, although the groundwork for it was certainly there. And social media was a very new thing so it wasn't filled with propaganda. That's one thing that I think is having a very big influence shaping the minds of children today.

I think being homeschooled was something that helped me a lot since I wasn't exposed to leftist propaganda at a very young, impressionable age by a person who was trying to indoctrinate me. My parents were very aware of what I read, watched, and listened to. Even though I was allowed social media my time on it was limited and I didn't have a phone until I was in high school (but cell phones were still pretty new too). I couldn't even listen to music if my parents didn't see the lyrics first. And in some cases it may have been too strict but they were young and still figuring out parenthood and these things got much more relaxed as my siblings and I got older. And this is not to say that I was never exposed to other ideas, I absolutely was, but I was exposed to them through age appropriate filters. All through middle school and high school I took classes that taught me how to think, not what to think. One I specifically remember was focused on learning about several different political and historical views, but the class set a foundation on how we should approach ideas and a standard through which they should be analyzed. Learning how to research and how to think was probably the most helpful thing because as I got older and started exploring other ideas (and I did go through a phase where I was persuaded by some more leftist ideals) I knew not to just accept what I heard or what I read in my textbook, but to use the same research and judgment skills I'd been using all through my schooling.

And I'm rambling a little bit lol so I apologize but even with all that college is where they get you and it's hard to avoid. So many of the friends I had growing up who were conservative became flaming liberals once they went to college and still are to this day. Some of my siblings are more left leaning than right leaning and one of my siblings definitely thinks with feelings first. It's hard to avoid propaganda and not be sucked in to it when it's in your face all the time and it's the angle through which you are being taught. But it sounds to me like you are setting a very good foundation with your kids by talking about these things with them and letting them explore other ideas while you still have control of the situation. College was definitely not the first time I was exposed to the ideas I was presented with while getting my degree and if it had been I think it would have been more challenging to think critically about them. I just know whenever I heard a new idea whether it be in school or wherever, I knew to question it and research it from more than one angle before accepting it.

I know this might not be helpful and it's more a story of my experience rather than advice but like I mentioned I'm not a parent and it is so different today than it was when I was growing up because now these harmful ideologies are going after children while they're young and it can be really challenging to combat the messages the world is pushing in the faces of children. But to me it sounds like you are already setting a good foundation, creating standards and not just leaving your kids to come face to face with new ideas unprepared because in college they'll definitely have their beliefs challenged. And I really hope this was somewhat helpful as I know I rambled and went on a bit of a tangent and hopefully others can chime in with their experiences and what helped them!

But side note I'm excited about your new spark of belief in God! Please reach out if you have any questions! I'm not a theologian but I've been a Christian for a long time so I know some stuff :)

[the-annotated-antichrist]

Act II, Track 04 - Dagger of God

Song links: Spotify - YT Music - Apple - Tidal

While Seth meets his semi-divine and totally not suspicious future right hand, Johanna has her own spiritual experiences. She meets with her two confidantes, Agnes and Mare, in secret to show them a special, holy dagger that she has. It is the only weapon that can kill the Antichrist.

[Johanna:] Behold this dagger Dagger of God, wrapped in this cloth Purpose it has only but one [Agnes:] Unveil the prophecies and what this blade must do So much I've heard Tell me if it is true [Johanna:] Dagger of God has come to me The Antichrist - my nemesis Dagger of God - do touch the blade We all must be ready and brave [Agnes:] Nothing but this can kill, conquer the evil one Oh Lord tell me, what will of this become? Blessed be this dagger, this dagger of God

This is another mysterious reference to prophecies. I wonder about the background. Did God appear to Johanna just like Satan appeared to Seth? Did he physically give her the dagger? This is never explained. Remember when Johanna said Helena's marriage to Seth was predestined and when the people in Hail Caesar! made reference to a "foretold age of reason"? It seems people in BA are familiar with a lot of prophecies (Agnes states that she has already heard of Johanna's dagger) and Seth is not the only one with supernatural contacts.

Anyway, let's talk about Johanna's two sidekicks for a while... I hadn't realized until I wrote these texts how often Agnes and Mare appear. They probably have more "screentime" than all other characters except for Johanna, Helena and Seth.

Agnes' birth name is Agnessa Azarova. Led by an early interest in religion, she moved from Moscow to Rome, converted to Catholicism and changed her name to Agnes. She is played by Ulrika Skarby, who also sang the alto vocals on Lemuria, one of the most popular songs by this band.

Mare Aravena is the child of refugees from "disease-ridden Corsica". She was born on the boat that took her parents off the island and was named after the ocean. She then went to Rome as an adult and joined the Order. She is played by Lydia Kjellberg.

The background of these two characters never comes up in any of the songs, but it is mentioned in the inlay and I found it interesting that the people behind this work cared to give them a backstory at all. For reference - the Solovyov book does not contain any female characters, so all of them are invented by Therion. Johanna has a few commonalities with Solovyov's character "Elder John", but he only appears in one scene really and Johanna is very different from him. Her name is similar to his, but she is also based on Joan of Arc, who is called Johanna von Orleans in German.

Anyway. Helena overhears the entire above conversation in secret and, depending on how much she knows about Seth and Johanna's thoughts, may now be aware that her sister plans to kill her husband.

[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

[john-barkston]

Me venting about life:

you know i don't consider myself queer even tho I am Aro / Ace and can find either gender attractive. I have short "boy" hair because I think it finally makes me look like /me/. I am comfortable in my body. I don't believe in marriage or having kids. I don't believe in god. I think religion (yes all of them) is a poison. It took me until my late 20s to realize this about myself. And ever since I've never felt like I couldn't be this person except I am heavily reminded every time I talk to my mom, that she wouldn't like who I am....or at least who I am would devastate her to the point of physical heartbreak.

There's a loooot of family drama going on in the background right now and long story short, im the only person my mom feels comfortable unloading to. which is fine. my dad is dead. her parents are dead. her siblings are insane so not a lot of options, oh, problem, shes also mega christian and she still thinks (or at least hasn't told me otherwise) I am also some what christian. She weeps to me, tells me she doesn't think she can go on like this, how she is hurt by my brother's actions. And I get it. It sucks. It seems like her own son doesn't want to be around her / wants to keep the grand kids from her. There's a lot to unpack about his marriage but we won't go into that either. but I can only offer her an ear. I cannot give advice. The advice I would give would be too harsh, or in the case of GO TO A FUCKING THERAPIST, too secular or something. She never really believed in therapy even though she desperately needs one. (There is A LOT more to this i am not sharing but i promise i am not trying to make this about myself lol even tho it ends up about me T v T ah)

anyway......drama aside She continues the conversation and makes a silly little comment about a conversation she had with my childhood bestfriend's mom about why neither of us are married. (its a joke about how we were scarred for life from a heinous and impromptu "sex ed" bible study thing at an event we went to. We were in 6th grade and they had the whole "you're gonna die and go to hell and get stds and here's some nasty pictures on a fucking projection screen." She tells me how mad I was about it, and how it upset my friend so much. And how they can laugh about it now but obviously it was upsetting and uncalled for. -the did not know it was happening btw. gotta love church events just doing whatever they want in the name of god) This may be a joke, but I know she thinks something wrong must have happened for me to not be married and have kids. She blames her bad relationship with my dad. She blames silly things like this. She blames ....well idk what else, but she's never stopped to consider I don't want that life, because hmmm I just don't!

ugh anyway I lost my steam....point is, I can never be true to my mom. She is way too emotionally unstable for me to come out with it. I want to. I want to be me. I see my friends getting to be themselves around their parents, talking about queer shit, just being human, but i'm always keeping my mouth shut or dodging conversations with my mom, and of course I will always be there for her because I love her but, man, it's rough. I am so sorry for everyone who has ever had to keep their true selves from their family. AND I DON"T EVEN HAVE IT BAD LOL. I am the most vanilla queer you can be.....but man even then....

thank you for coming to my ted talk. it is very lame that this tumblr post is my vent blog L O L but oh well. typing it out helped and publishing it makes it go out into the void and away from me so yeah.....= v = bye.

[chaos0pikachu]

Cinema Sins and early 00's pop feminism really fucked up people's media literacy

HCA wrote the original short story about a dude he had unrequited feelings for and also religion; in the original story mermaids don't have immortal souls therefore can't get into heaven. The mermaid goes up to shore, falls in love with the prince and decides she wants him & an immortal soul. Sea witch stuff happens - her tongue gets cut out in some translations woo! - she gets her legs, loses her voice, but every time she walks or dances she's in great pain.

It's all a metaphor that her love for the prince causes her great pain; the prince adores her but as like, a bro. He calls her his "little foundling", and she's his constant companion but like, in a bro way. He also kisses her and cuddles her but again, in like, this doesn't count as anything man, summer experimentation am I right we're just bros. Like wow I like you sooooo much, you're everything I could ever want in a spouse if you only, like, were this woman I've idealized. Eventually the Prince meets a Princess who he believes is the woman who saved him from the shipwreck and is like omg you! you're the one! and they marry like that night.

Her sisters show up and are like "here's a dagger from the sea witch kill that bitch ass dude and you can rejoin us & live for 300 years!" the mermaid obviously doesn't kill him, tosses the knife, and jumps into the ocean turning into sea foam. Except when she does literal angels come down and are like "hey girl you've had a rough go so God said we'll do you a solid since you didn't kill that man. Work for God for 300 years and you'll go to heaven!" so that's what the mermaid does, happily ever after~

HCA basically said, "I may not get my man but at least I have God."

The Disney version follows the story pretty closely but takes out the, uh, religious bits lol and actually gives the mermaid her happy ending. Howard Ashman was a gay man, who also, tragically, died of AIDs before the production of Beauty and the Beast (which he also worked on) was finished. In the ending credits you can see a dedication to him from the crew "To Howard, who gave the mermaid her voice and the beast his soul".

You can also see Howard, who wrote the lyrics for Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, influence thorough-out both stories. The songs for Little Mermaid were written before the script, during the story treatment. Howard wrote Part of Your World, Ariel's "I Want" song before anything about the love story was even finalized. He talked specifically to the crew how Ariel had to have a strong motivation, what does she want? To become human, and she had to get that by the end of the movie was what he told the crew. The film wouldn't work without her being motivated to the goal. It was never about Eric, Howard wanted Ariel to want to become human for her own reasons. He changed the story from a metaphorical story about unrequited (same-sex) love, that only God could heal after great sacrifice, to one where the heroine was motivated all her own to exist, happily, healthy, and openly in her own body and accepted by those around her.

Ariel doesn't go through a self-actualization arc, but Triton does. Metaphorically, Triton reads almost more like a homophobic parent who has to accept his queer child.

Triton hates humans, but more so, Triton rejects Ariel's wants, desires, and refuses to accept who she is. Part of Your World reflects Ariel's frustration and sadness lyrically over her father's rejection of her true self. You'll notice, Triton is NOT upset in the film that Ariel might be in love, in fact, he's over the moon about it! He only gets upset that Ariel is in love with a human ie the wrong type of person. He lashes out violently, Ariel runs away from home, he realizes his mistake and regrets his actions. At the end of the movie he realizes that Ariel's happiness, her living as her true self with the person she loves, is more important than his own prejudices. He has to love his child for who they are so they can be happy.

So yeah, the mermaid gets her happy ending (and she didn't even need God this time!) and the last line of the film isn't some ode to Eric it's Ariel to Triton, "I love you daddy". Because the core relationship in the film isn't Ariel and Eric, it's Ariel and Triton. It's about a young person wanting desperately to live as their authentic self in a society that rejects them, their own parent rejecting them, and how that parent comes to accept them in the end.

I find it an interesting coincidence of the universe, that the original story was written by a man about his unrequited feelings towards another man, later adapted by a gay man who had a longtime partner (who accepted the Oscar on Howard's behalf for BATB) but still had to hide b/c of the stigma around AIDs towards the community. How both versions of the same story showcases two very different experiences of queer identity reflective of the time periods in which they were made.

And yet, the most common bit of commentary regarding the film is "she gave up her voice for a man!"

“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

[boct-kimerakal]

The Eye..

it’s a trickhawk AU but rex is here too. trickhawkrex AU even.

ehrm okay so basically i got a bit too insane and like hey haha. here’s this. the three of them are young adults working for an agency known as the eye (fun fact: it’s a reuse of an old AU) which has one purpose and that’s to eliminate dangerous supernatural entities. and BY GOD will i use this squint a little at the misinterpretation/misuse of + modern day exoticism of asian mythology by mainstream media. and also to stab at my own hypocrisy (yet again) (as most of my original lore does)

... also monster hunter trope funny. yeah i’m probably going to private this because i feel weird about talking about lore entwined with cultural backgrounds online HAHAHA. do i just feel uncomfortable discussing the topic because i’m deluded into feeling like it’s going to be tokenised and capitalised on?! but also i don’t want to sandpaper them into pop culture!! like our backgrounds do matter & can be so important to context & not used as just a gimmick actually

ehrm considering this takes place somewhere in the UK (might retcon/redevelop. i always struggle with working with real places, and ones i’ve never even been make me worried!!) the current brief background concepts (and BEAR WITH ME!! THIS IS SUPER BIASED. THIS A PROJECT BORN FROM BIAS) are

a) i was thinking trick is of anglo-indian (father’s) and malayali (kerala specifically, mother’s) ethnic heritage, with family in kerala? raised christian but disconnected from religion. that got made worse by the whole pseudo-yakshini thing where after they almost died, they kind of became halfway one and now ask their mother a lot about her heritage (before she got married, converted and immigrated. which by the way my aunt is a hindu convert to catholicism but she still creates shrines except for catholicism now. which is fascinating and i’m leaning into this a lot) i feel like it leans more into folkloric than religious but we’ll seeeee? i was thinking also trick and their mother both identify with queerness in some capacity and it’s something they talk about. trick moreso in social gender and body stuff and their mother moreso in sexuality. also! their mother is a professor of some kind (her original lore has her in some akin to sociology BUT. HM.), father in something government. which is vague. and there’s a lot of govt. jobs. so give me a MINUTE.

b) rex is from a taiwanese family with a taoist background. taoism mostly because i’m projecting a little bit again. i totally love being mixed and knowing nothing from either side guys. wow this hasn’t been showing in recent lore at all. anyways! rex is a international student whose parents are foreign (and they’re finance people) with a permanent residency in the UK. thinkin. his maternal grandmother and grandfather moved in recently too due to getting old and safety concerns. i’m not fully sure about this yet but yeah. also there’s abandonment guilt here. also his family tree is more like a family forest btw he has like 6 uncles & aunts on his paternal side. lunar new year visits back are hell for him. i may actually change this to be hongkong but i’ll have to think about the implications of that and kind of stare a bit at political stuff so hold up.

c) i’m torn between making hawks an international scholarship student or having immigrant parents and being raised here. hawks is also central asian, but i’m once again struggling to decide between uzbekistan and kazhakstan. because background is important but like not in a put-you-in-a-box way. agh, sorry i think i really dislike when characters are caricatures of cultures as an attempt at representation? i feel like this has been out into words before in a way better than i will though. anyways researching cultural and economic information is not something i’m awesome at so it’ll take me a sec. the family is irreligious but there are some ideas of spirituality her parents have that she also possesses. she has a half-brother. her family being nuclear and very estranged from her relatives due to her mother remarrying feels like crucial information to mention.

i want to also involve the culture of their setting too and the other non-native cultures that have been infused into it because i feel like that’s cool and neat for countries with large immigrant populations and. ponderous. hm. i feel like i lost the plot thinking about the background LAWL okay back to the beef of it. oh that was terrible to say.

PLOT CONCEPT?! > comically borrowing some ideas from The End Of Times which is an old dead lore world of mine. wait hey.. actually.. this can be referred to as the conceptual successor of that.

trickhawk is a lot worse in this by the way. hashtag mutual parasitism! so this is not the same as original trickhawk sorry not sorry.

The Eye is a publicly known agency that deals with supernatural threats that have suddenly become commonplace after some kind of seal was broken. workshopping this but it’s your usual lame “oooh myths are real and this ancient secret society that has been dealing with them forever gets officially recognised by global governments as an enforcement body but also like. it’s a sovereign entity with no official oversight and everyone is kind of worried about that actually.”

trick and rex were both employed by it around the age of 17 and have been partners since. they were part of a larger team as apprentices before going solo. rank at the lower levels of this organisation is probably relaxed and field agents get a lot of free roam since they tend to have unique abilities and also this used to be a SECRET society up until 30 years ago and stricter administration hasn’t caught up with it well.

trick is here as a result of being kind of afflicted by a curse maybe. yakshini-adjacent abilities that they gained at age 15 after getting straight up hit by a car, which have been freaking them out. they’re essentially partially undead and not pleased about it. supernatural ties are luckily an employable skill in this world so boom! that! and rex is here due to receiving a divinely blessed weapon which i think is also the cause of some guilt in his family. the power he wields has ties to the goddess mazu and oceanic themes. which fun fact! trick also values coastal symbols due to their family in kerala. i think it’s something that binds them.

UHM SO. trick and rex meet hawks in school and gets called away to deal with a supernatural thing that happens to be in the vicinity, hawks stubbornly and unfortunately gets involved. finding out what trick is, hawks offers blood to trick for a ticket into the agency which she believes will help her out. why. great question. I’M FIGURING THAT OUT.

hawks getting involved in some level of magecraft (something not innately magical employees of the eye tend to do) as a result of needing to succeed makes her siphon magic off of trick who constitutes as a magical creature. yay they’re both parasites. this is not symbiotic as they’re both being harmed? rex kind of is there to heal both and maintain the cycle. FYI rex’s divinity does contrast a bit with trick’s more malevolent mythic nature but. thinking of how yakshinis have different regional interpretations. thinking about that but not doing anything with it.

anyways oh my god this is so cringe and tropey AND UGH I HATE IT BUT I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT FOR WHATEVER REASON. them as a trio dynamic is so appealing to me all of a sudden. also trick’s exaggeratedly friendly obsession with hawks in this AU is hitting me some kind of way. (it’s me going “oh i saw a character dynamic i like but it’s not me-coded enough. going to do it my way now”)

also! new tag.