#catholic socialism

[iscariotapologist]

today in church one of the priests referred to trans people as "those who are growing into the gender they were called to be" and i'm kind of enjoying the idea of like....divinely ordained top surgery

[aithusarosekiller]

The black cousins do have religious trauma to me

idk they just do

Like very strong, deeply imbedded, constant-self-doubt and fear

[wildfeather5002]

Indigenous folks, ex-christians & anyone who's knowledgeable on social issues, I have two questions that have bothered me for a long while and I believe y'all might know how to answer them.

The question: I read a webcomic about community A living on an island along with another community B with different culture & beliefs from them. Community A believes that their culture & religion are the correct ones and that members of community B are dooming themselves to eternal damnation (in a religious sense) if they don't adopt the beliefs & practices of community A.

I saw someone talking about the comic in its comment section, saying that one of the characters who's a member of community B is selfish for not adopting the burial practices from community A's religion, because according to that someone, not burying their loved one like community A believes is correct is " potentially dooming their loved one to eternal damnation".

If you're indigenous, has rhetoric / talking points like this been used against your own religious / cultural practices? Could you give any concrete examples?

If you have religious trauma / are ex christian of any kind, have people used talking points like this to guilt trip, to frighten, or to shame you into obeying religious rules? (People belonging to other religions than christianity are welcome to give their perspectives as well!)

[smokeyloki]

Forgive me, Lord, for any stumbling blocks I may have posted or written on social media.

For anything I might have written poorly, or in a moment of anger or hurt, that led others away from You, forgive me, Lord.

Give me, O Lord, an instructible heart, a humble heart, a wise and discerning heart.

Let me not be the reason someone turns from You. And if I should err, poorly spoken, unwise as I am, let even my mistakes be turned to glory when given to you in trust and repentance.

If I am to speak eloquently of anything or anyone, let it be You, O Lord.

[anghraine]

jenndoesnotcare replied to this post:

Every time LDS kids come to my neighborhood I am so so nice to them. I hope they remember the blue haired lady who was kind, when people try to convince them the outside world is bad and scary. (Also they are always so young! I want to feed them cookies and give them Diana Wynne Jones books or something)

Thank you! Honestly, this sort of kindness can go a really long way, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time.

LDS children and missionaries (and the majority of the latter are barely of age) are often the people who interact the most with non-Mormons on a daily basis, and thus are kind of the "face" of the Church to non-Mormons a lot of the time. As a result, they're frequently the ones who actually experience the brunt of antagonism towards the Church, which only reinforces the distrust they've already been taught to feel towards the rest of the world.

It's not that the Church doesn't deserve this antagonism, but a lot of people seem to take this enormous pride in showing up Mormon teenagers who have spent most of their lives under intense social pressure, instruction, expectation, and close observation from both their peers and from older authorities in the Church (it largely operates on seniority, so young unmarried people in particular tend to have very little power within its hierarchies). Being "owned" for clout by non-Mormons doesn't prove anything to most of them except that their leaders and parents are right and they can't trust people outside the Church.

The fact that the Church usually does provide a tightly-knit community, a distinct and familiar culture, and a well-developed infrastructure for supporting its members' needs as long as they do [xyz] means that there can be very concrete benefits to staying in the Church, staying closeted, whatever. So if, additionally, a Mormon kid has every reason to think that nobody outside the Church is going to extend compassion or kindness towards them, that the rest of the world really is as hostile and dangerous as they've been told, the stakes for leaving are all the higher, despite the costs of staying.

So people from "outside" who disrupt this narrative of a hostile, threatening world that cannot conceivably understand their experiences or perspectives can be really important. It's important for them to know that there are communities and reliable support systems outside the Church, that leaving the Church does not have to mean being a pariah in every context, that there are concrete resources outside the Church, that compassion and decency in ordinary day-to-day life is not the province of any particular religion or sect and can be found anywhere. This kind of information can be really important evidence for people to have when they are deciding how much they're willing to risk losing.

So yeah, all of this is to say that you're doing a good thing that may well provide a lifeline for very vulnerable people, even if you don't personally see results at the time.

[shotmrmiller]

persuading them to quit smoking by shifting their fixation to oral 👀

when the need arises you gotta give em permission to be on each other at work cuz obviously they can't stuff you in their duffle bag. getting a text like, gettin twitchy fingers.

is price around? go.

[many-sparrows]

I love you social justice oriented Christians. I love you Gary (my pastor) who presided over gay weddings before they were legally binding and before the church had come to a decision on it. I love you Conrad (old pastor I work with) for getting arrested for protesting the Iraq war and performing a lesbian wedding the minute it became legal for a couple who'd been together for decades. I love you Dr Donald Hertz for your sermons on Acts 20:27 and your life spent living out that verse and for causing trouble when you were still a student assigned to a segregated church in Birmingham and for spontaneously joining a grape boycott picket line outside of a Safeway in Berkeley because that verse says we cannot shrink away from our duty to each other. I love you Martin Luther's common chest. I love you Charles de Foucauld. I love you Oscar Romero. I love you Dorothy Day. I love you for giving me a legacy to carry on.

[spyderslut]

I know you mean well but you're defending systems of oppression. The idea that queerphobia is part of human nature is inherently queerphobic.

I apologize if thats how it came across, but I do not mean to say that queerphobia is a part of human nature. Essentially, I strongly feel that Christianity isn't an inherently evil thing. How could I not, given how deeply ive been in and researched it for several years. What I know is that people have been hurt by Christians and christian institutional power, and that an instinctual revulsion to things that have hurt you is reasonable. I know that about as well as anyone could. But it isn't always rational. It is not Christianity that is inherently homophobic or inherently bigoted or inherently domineering or imperialist or whatever. It is, rather, power. Power, as they say, corrupts. Itd be shitty of me to be extremely hostile to the Hellenic pagans as a group because of stuff the roman empire/ancient Greek city states did or as the occasional esoteric fascist does. It'd be silly/irrelevant of me to be sour with the Heathenry for the vikings bringing slavery back to Ireland. It would be irrational of me to point towards bad things people/institutions of any faith have done and declare that faith to be as a whole irredeemable/unconscionable.

Those in power will take anything and everything and twist it into a tool for their continued domination. It is those people in power that get to write doctrine. It is those people that decide that the queer are degenerate. Its those people that twist the doctrines of the faiths they proclaim to represent. I simply refuse to acquiesce to the lies of the reactionary revisionists.

[kritastrophe]

john the beloved / mary magdalene

[oceanicmarxist]

During the Spanish revolution and the ensuing civil war, Spanish workers and peasants engaged in anti-clerical violence against the Church that spent centuries raping, molesting, murdering, beating, abusing, and oppressing them.

[neonbuck]

this website blows lol, just saw yet another user i follow for nice images (tiercel) trying to stir up drama against artists for drawing sexy pictures of trans characters. i cant imagine living in a miserable world where drawing trans people sexy is inherently "fetishizing" and evil

[megahorous]

Baby Lammy in SCHOOL

[intrinsicallydisordered]

A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.

— Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (no. 14)

[hyperlexichypatia]

**Cracks knuckles and wades into The Discourse**

"Can atheists be culturally Christian?" is entirely the wrong question.

Of course they can! Plenty of people don't believe in the religious doctrines of Christianity, but still do things like celebrate Christmas or Easter, have church weddings, and other culturally Christian activities. Take for example, me -- I'm a Deist who is also culturally Christian. Christianity is the religious lens I understand best, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

Plenty of atheists and broadly-secular people who live in majority-culturally-Christian places, like most of the U.S., also are often oblivious to the Christian basis of their cultural practices, and may think of culturally Christian practices are "universal" or "secular" or "for everyone." This comes up every time someone brings up the inappropriateness of public schools/places celebrating Christmas, when people come out of the woodwork to insist that of course Christmas isn't religious, they know plenty of secular people who celebrate it! (Note: This is often blamed on ex-Evangelicals, but I don't think that's fair. Ex-Evangelicals know what Christianity is. This is something I see more from people from secular families in mostly-secular areas who don't think about religious diversity because it's not relevant to their lives.) (Additional Note: Do not @ me with "WELL, ACTUALLY, Christmas is PAGAN--" No. Your history is oversimplified and bad. You are not celebrating Yule. You are not celebrating Saturnalia. You are celebrating Christmas, a heavily secularized Christian holiday with some cultural influences from European Pagan traditions.)

Additionally, many atheists/secularists/non-religious-people whose primary reference point for religion is Christianity (whether because they're ex-Christians themselves, or just because that's what they know from cultural osmosis) make broad, inaccurate assumptions about All Religion based on their projected understanding of Christianity, e.g. "I'm not religious because I don't believe that an omnipotent God controls everything in the universe and rewards or punishes people when they die." Okay, cool, but not all religions teach that, not all religious people believe that, not even all Christians believe that.

So, of course atheists can be culturally Christian, maybe without realizing it or thinking about it. Anyone who says they can't isn't paying attention! And that's why "Can atheists be culturally Christian?" is entirely the wrong question.

The right questions are "Is it reasonable to assume by default that anyone who lists their religion as 'atheist' or 'none' must actually be culturally Christian?" and "Is it reasonable to blame anything you don't like on 'cultural Christianity'?" and no! It's not!

Sometimes simply does not have a religious affiliation. And that's okay! There is a tendency to interpret "none of the above" as "Oh, so, the default thing, but a milder version of it," and that is... not accurate.

There's this vague sense that non-religious people aren't really a religious minority, that they're really just play-acting at being religiously marginalized, because after all, they're actually just non-devout Christians. Discrimination against non-religious people doesn't necessarily look the same as discrimination against religious people (like, there aren't atheist holidays that people are being denied time off work for), but it's still very real, and falls the hardest on non-religious people with the fewest cultural ties to Christianity, the very people erased by "Atheists are just cultural Christians" discourse.

Furthermore, the traits and beliefs and ideologies and biases that get called "culturally Christian" are often not actually unique to Christianity at all. Certain concepts, like an emphasis on redemption through death, are culturally Christian (although even that one is sometimes found in other religions), but to hear the people calling everything "culturally Christian" tell it, no other religion, culture, or philosophy on Earth has ever believed in virtue ethics, valued hard work and stigmatized "laziness", or been judgmental about petty infractions. Nor, I can't believe I have to say, is "Christians do it, so it's bad" a good argument against things like freedom of conscience or disability rights (neither of which are even especially popular among Christians).

The problem with way people are talking about "cultural Christians" isn't that atheists or other non-Christians can't be culturally Christian (of course they can) or that Christianity doesn't have pervasive influence in majority-Christian societies (of course it does). The problem is that people are using "culturally Christian" in inaccurate and nonsensical ways.

[bone-paste]

I know midnight mass goes super hard on the cannibalism imagery but it really got me going like. Yeah the Eucharist is just Like That tbh. You’ve been there all morning and you’re so hungry and they pull out those shitty little cardboard wafers and the wine (sometimes they had grape juice for the kids,) and they tell you that it’s the literal flesh and blood of this guy they’ve got nailed naked and bleeding to a cross on every wall around you and that scene where everyone’s tearing into each other is exactly what the inside of my head looked like at 9 years old dude. Idk how you’re supposed to come out of that experience and NOT be into cannibalism.

[lilithism1848]