#christianity is not the default human belief system

[meatcrimes]

huge pet peeve of mine is when something very clearly christmas related is labeled “holiday”. like “holiday tree” “holiday nativity scene” or fucking “holiday ham dinner”. you’re trying to be inclusive but it’s not inclusive at all, you’re just universalizing specifically Christian things and erasing non-christians in the process. “holiday” no longer is inclusive, it becomes exclusive. i literally promise you not every religion that celebrates a winter holiday is going to eat ham

[jessicalprice]

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it's plug-and-play: you don't have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don't have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian--to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is... everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that's taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We're going to come back to how Christianity isn't actually modular, but for the moment, let's talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don't have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that's modular. It's deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can't just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture's indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious." But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn't actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It's easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures' colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place--the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic--and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It's more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn't just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized--they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It's the "natural order" to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you're basically telling the person you're proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of "that's how everyone is, though."

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to "fix" them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it's definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It's all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It's all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they've accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as "religious" and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as "neutral" or "normal" actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they'd look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN'T neutral. So the idea that that's what "secular society" should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, "enlightened" life that most Christian atheists envision is one that's still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don't see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It's obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn't truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they're not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it's actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it's invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it's definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity--a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture--to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just ...swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s... not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism--it’s fine to just... be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

[kick-a-long]

Hi I'm the previous anon and I have to say - everything you added was spot on!

I want to say something extra that has been bothering me for a long time.

I can't help but feel like there are specific (major) traits of antisemitism that always appear in every other form of bigotry. As a person of many different minority groups, I am not saying antisemitism is worst than all the other forms of hatred or downplaying the rest at all. But I see these traits that I feel like are inherently antisemitic appear everywhere else and I can't stop thinking "this shows bigotry starts and stops with jew hate"?

For example, I'm from country A (not saying where for personal reasons). In this country, (mainly) Arab Christians have moved here due to religious persecution. They are a very small group and have become wealthy due to 1) transferring of wealth or 2) they used their intelligence to make businesses. Due to assimilation into whiteness, they have become "white people" as well. As a result they are victims of the "they control the country and are behind everything bad" narrative. I would argue that "they control the world" is a uniquely antisemitic belief and it goes to show how people default to antisemitism to destroy any group. Additionally, I would argue antisemitism is truly people's map to the world and they use it to navigate. Moreover, Indians in Africa had also been accused of doing the same "controlling". Now there is a lot to be said about assimilation and doing anything for power and minorities being pit against each other for division but regardless of the nuance, these negative emotions (anger, frustration, sadness, etc) tend to lead back to antisemitism? Indians in Tanzania experienced random acts of mob violence in the 1920s/30s similar to pogroms (important to note: these were not common but their existence still highlights something).

Human beings love an easy, concrete group to hate and project onto hence the reason why the left loves nazis so much (they are their easy punching bags). As a result, the hatred stems from an antisemitic belief and morphs into anti- whatever the "nuisance" is, no matter how justifiable the hatred is.

Like when people hate immigrants and chant "they will not replace us and take our jobs", am I not supposed to think everything is a big antisemitic conspiracy?

!!!this this this^^^^ I agree so much!!!

antisemitism is older than racism, literally. it was around before the concepts of race or nationhood. it was around when feudalism and slave labor was the main economic system. jews were blamed for being poor and stupid just as often as for being smart and rich. jews have always been a convenient 'other' because we have always had to identify as a diasporic group from somewhere else with different customs based on living somewhere else.

antisemitism is in most other forms of bigotry imo because it's the prototype for it, since the roman empire and the destruction of the second temple. probably before.

I think it's pretty accurate to point to aspects of it in other bigotry because it's where hateful troupes were tested and popularized for thousands of years. what's wild is that people don't even realize what antisemitism does or how it's useful to maintain power structures. it's the most time tested way to scapegoat and distract from real problems and unite against real power structures that fuck up people's lives. you see antisemitism spike around economic crisis or huge cultural swings from liberal to traditional, but you never see the blame fall on changing the laws that caused the economy to crash or try to build bridges between liberal and traditional aspects of society. you just have the scapegoat of jews, or minority populations, or homosexuals, or X, or Y... but eventually the story is always explained with jews as architects of it.

conservative states could look at the successes of LGBTQ entertainers from those states and celebrate how their tradition bore that success (true or false) but instead they reject it. southern states could celebrate the black civil rights leaders from there and the parts of their culture that generated that rebelliousness (true or false) but they reject it. you can see it all over. jews are the only ones who are adopted as "from here" when they succeed and "jewish cabal" when the tide changes. it's the conditional oppression and conditional acceptance that alienates us from all other groups.

all bigotry is based on antisemitism but antisemitism is different than all other bigotry, imo.

[fantasyinvader]

The thing is, Byleth being called “The Flame That Seeks Their Destiny” in their SS ending card, it kinda sells that the route was Byleth's story. Sothis called them that at the beginning of the game when she saved them from Kostas, she calls them it again when she sacrifices herself to free them from the Shadow Realm, and then Byleth is referred to as that again in the ending. It makes it sound like \Byleth remains the same person they always were, but at the same time they do show character growth in White Clouds. Said growth results in them fighting Edelgard by default, with the options that unlock joining her being framed as “changing the story,” indicating Byleth wouldn't do those things naturally.

The result to go against this results in Byleth being referred to as the Wings of the Hegemon. In their supports with Hubert, Byleth asks to be killed if they can't maintain their “humanity,” but owing to the Buddhist symbolism of the game humanity would mean their ability to reason and act in a humane manner. Reason and acting in a humane manner in a route that goes against the worldbuilding of the game, because as the devs said they did that worldbuilding in support of Snow while Flower thematically is about having different beliefs from the rest of the game and mowing down everyone who stands in your way as a result. The route even gets called out as the Animal Path by Dimitri, an animals in Buddhism don't have the ability to reason. It creates this irony as Byleth is... not in a good headspace here, can even enter into a pact to duel to the death with Jeritza in their shared ending, and believe if they should be killed if they can't hold onto their humanity despite the route implying thy already lost it. Byleth is unknowingly saying they should be killed, meanwhile they have stopped seeking their own destiny and instead merely become an extension of Edelgard.

This is some fucked up shit, but it goes further. They're symbolically linked to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven through the Sword of the Heavenly Emperor. They're supposed to remove rulers from power who fall into the category of hadou, which Edelgard calls her path in her S support. The game makes it out that Byleth supported a tyrant, and that by walking “A Path of Thorns” (invoking Christianity) they failed to do their duty. Not just as the upholder of the Mandate, but even as a teacher because they were supposed to guide their students yet not only let themselves be swayed by Edelgard but brought their entire class with them. Byleth is supposed to be someone who has smiles listed as their like, but in their S support with Edelgard they're told that people MAY have been happier with how things were (and recall, Edelgard has been ruling as a dictator). They may have been happier being able to rely on others rather than Edelgard forcing a system where people are supposed to rely on themselves, and Byleth also lists helping others as an interest.

Hell, they list trustworthy allies. Edelgard's summary in Japanese even has her say she is just as she appears, but the twist is that she is also the Flame Emperor the player has been fighting this entire time. She has been lying to Byleth, and those lies ended up resulting in Jeralt's death and Byleth crying for the first time in their life.

Plus, going Flower locks Byleth out of a paralogue where Rhea leaves her shield for them. It's Byleth's post-TS paralogue, unlocked by having at least one support level with Rhea, and they lose it for betraying her.

When you look at these sorts of things, it's kinda depressing how much both Pat and the fandom has twisted Byleth's character, yet they're also desperate to say that Flower is good for them. It doesn't fit with how they are in Heroes, Cipher depicted them opposing Edelgard, Hopes actually showed people what they were like and let them know they didn't like being the Ashen Demon, and then there's also Engage. The Byleth we see outside of Houses is more consistent with a Byleth that fights Edelgard, a Byleth that seeks their own destiny rather than being an extension of Edelgard.

Really, it just shows how different Byleth is from the Western fanbase.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Even as adherence to orthodox Christian belief waned and a secular liberal culture became the default mode of life in the West, religious moral assumptions long continued to be considered axiomatic. Some even regarded them as universally inherent to humanity, a framework on which a progressively more atheistic culture would construct an ever more peaceful, just, and enlightened society. But this is not what happened. Instead, like Wile E. Coyote, we made it past the edge of the cliff only to witness the return of moral gravity. Instead of a humanistic atheism, Davidson argues, something different—something ancient—filled the void left by Christianity. Paganism has made a comeback.

This doesn’t mean that kids have started making sacrifices to Zeus and Thor (though interest in Wicca and other modern forms of playacting at witchcraft has surged, especially among young women). Rather, as Louise Perry has explained in these pages (“We Are Repaganizing,” October 2023), paganism is better thought of as mankind’s default outlook on the world. The pagan worships the immanent, including worldly gods and worldly things, and so what he ultimately comes to worship above all else is power: power in the world and over it. In Perry’s words: “To put it crudely, most cultures look at the powerful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing something right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some failing of their own, whether in this life or the last.” It was Christianity’s “topsy-turvy attitude toward weakness and strength” that made it so revolutionary—and so anthropologically odd. So now, as societies revert to the pagan mean, moral beliefs we mistakenly thought were unshakably foundational, such as that every person possesses inherent human dignity, or that unwanted babies shouldn’t be abandoned to die, are being upended in favor of the old ways. Thus we end up with growing public support in the West for policies such as state-facilitated euthanasia.

Davidson’s most important contribution in Pagan America is to explain how repaganization can be expected to change the character of the American state, alongside society more broadly. Until now, America has been governed largely by the tenets of political liberalism. But as Davidson points out, liberalism always relied on “a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish”: the Christian faith. And as the nation repaganizes, “we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing”—neither in spirit nor in law. “As Christianity fades in America,” Davidson warns, “so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms.” The state will no longer allow the principle of individual rights or conscience to override its desires, and it will not hesitate to use force to get its way, even if that means violating previously sacred norms by, say, threatening to break up the families of those who refuse to submit.

The pagan state, on this view, will not pretend to maintain any sort of liberal neutrality. Instead, Davidson argues, “We will have a public or state morality, just as Rome had, which will be quite separate from whatever religion one happens to profess.” What will this state morality consist of? Davidson believes we can already see it being instantiated everywhere: a solipsistic focus on self-expression, self-empowerment, and pride; a radical emphasis of unabridged individual autonomy and liberation from all customs, taboos, and constraints, including all duties and relational ties; an extreme aversion to boundaries and limits on desire, and the self-creation not only of all aspects of personal identity, but of the body, nature, and reality itself; and ultimately an undiluted worship of the self and the will to power, hidden behind a mask of empathy, tolerance, and the language of the therapeutic. Under this regime the strictest of commandments will be that it is forbidden to forbid anything. [...]

Davidson predicts that life under this regime will be characterized by oppression and coercive violence, and that this “violence will be official—carried out by government bureaucrats, police, health care workers, NGOs, public schools, and Big Tech.” Those who refuse to render the expected moral sacrifices to Caesar are likely to come under intense pressure to conform, hounded not only by the state but by all the aligned institutions of American society. They can expect life to become very difficult: their bank accounts closed, their ability to travel restricted, their access to education and employment limited. The threat of arrest and prosecution for “extremism” and other vague crimes will loom constantly. Such an environment of totalitarian coercion should be expected because, in addition to delineating loyalty, the doctrines of official ideologies always serve as a means of coordination and mobilization across the disparate elements of a regime. By permeating every level of the many institutions of the American managerial apparatus and determining the thoughts and behavior of their members, from journalists to judges, the new pagan public morality will become integral to the function of the system as a whole. In other words, we will live under a pagan integralist state.

Davidson, for his part, does not shy away from accepting the inevitability of this future. “America as we know it will come to an end,” he writes. “Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire.” Only the wealthy and powerful will do what they will, while the rest suffer what they must. “What awaits us on the other side of Christendom,” he declares, “is a pagan dark age.” And “in the second decade of the twenty-first century,” he writes, “we can say with some confidence that this dark age has begun.”

It is for me always a bit of an odd experience to read someone who is even more pessimistic than I am. I get an eerie tingling sensation, an unwelcome and unsettling suspicion that things aren’t as bad as all that. In this case something nagged at me as I reread Davidson’s thesis. Something seemed not quite right . . . Ah, there it was: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is the slogan he repeats many times throughout the book to encapsulate the core proposition of paganism, ancient and modern.

This, it strikes me, is wrong. The pagan of the ancient world may have held a moral worldview alien to ours, but he was no nihilist. Quite the opposite. For the pagan, immanence was indeed his lived reality. And that meant that everything around him—every tree, every blade of grass, every gust of wind—was suffused with spirit and enchanted with meaning and symbol. Everything had soul. The divine was alive and present all around him, for good or ill. Every swooping hawk and every moving star could be an omen of fear or favor, a story revealing a glimpse into the workings of fate and the drama of the gods. Everything might be true, anything was possible.

But not everything was permitted. The world for the pagan—as it remains for many tribal peoples today—was rife with taboos and solemn duties. Guests must be protected and treated with complete sanctity under a strict code of propriety, lest one attract the wrath of the gods. Sacred ground must be maintained in absolute purity. The best sacrifices must be offered to honor and placate the ancestral dead, or to ensure the continued right working of the universe. The flame of the sacred hearth must be tended at all times, the proper rites continuously performed. A Roman wife must be carried across the threshold of her new household with great care that she never touch the boundary, for her transit was not only between families but across divine realms.

Our dim and pallid modernist world could not be more different from the pagan’s. Here all has been reduced to mere matter, moved about by the collision of atoms. There is no meaning in the wind. There are no spirits in the trees nor stories in the stars. We can no longer see them. Nor for most of us does God seem, as the early Christians felt deeply, to permeate each breath and every stone of creation with his energy, present at once in all things and beyond all things. Ours is a profane, mechanistic world—a dead world, in which the vast majority of us have, perhaps literally, lost the ability to perceive that it is still alive. Instead, in our drab materialism, most of us live in a kind of self-imposed virtual reality, obsessed with predictability and technocratic control.

Only in such a meaningless world can the proposition “nothing is true, everything is permitted” make any sense to its inhabitants. It is not, then, the slogan of paganism, but something else entirely: the worldview of materialist modernity, produced by the centuries of metaphysical drift that first pushed God out of the world and then pushed the Western mind deeper and deeper into cold rationalism—and from thence into the great disenchantment of the Enlightenment, then on to the unprecedented murderousness of the twentieth century’s utopian revolutionary theories, then the bleak relativistic nihilism of the present. Though Davidson does include a chapter on the rise of materialism, overall his book glosses over this nearly thousand-year devolution. Instead the narrative largely reverts to a simple binary: There was a pagan world; Christianity triumphed over it but never dealt it a mortal blow; now we are sliding from Christendom back into paganism.

Is this really what is happening? C. S. Lewis, for one, was always skeptical of such claims. He wrote that he found it “hard to have patience with those . . . who warn us that we are ‘relapsing into Paganism.’” The whole notion relied, he said, on the “false idea” that secularized former Christians could return “by the same door” through which they’d entered the present. In reality, this is impossible because to a post-Christian materialist the pagan world of symbol and spirit remains wholly unintelligible. “A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.” In fact, he pointed out, “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”

So who is right? Are we repaganizing or not? Perhaps both are right, in a way. Lewis is probably correct that what we’ve seen so far can’t quite be described as a straightforward return to paganism. But something is now happening: Amid our broader civilizational turmoil, the zeitgeist does seem to be shifting dramatically, shaking off the remnants of tepid, Christian-influenced secular liberalism in favor of something new, inchoate, and potentially very dark. So far it is not Christian. But—and this is I believe by far the more important point—neither is it the soulless materialism that Lewis feared had already conquered the world, severing us from the past and from the divine. 

What we seem to be seeing is a broad and accelerating reaction against and rejection of the materialist framework of Enlightenment modernity. It is now observable throughout Western culture and politics. The young would-be feminists flocking to “WitchTok” for advice on how to conjure love and manifest success are hardly atheists. Neither are the young men of the right who, if not crowding back into traditionalist churches, grope for a spirituality of strength, vitality, and meaning among the aesthetic ruins of ancient warrior cults. These are people searching for the sacred, even if they don’t know where to look. In fact, sometime during the last decade, the atheist movement seems to have quietly died off as a cultural force.

What is happening? Citing a recent wave of religious conversions by formerly atheistic public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson has argued that we are experiencing the beginning of a “Counter-Enlightenment.” The centuries-old Enlightenment consensus, including the idea that the materialist-rationalists’ “dead facts” could serve as a guide to existence, has, he believes, turned out to be badly wrong, and now an epochal reckoning is building. (As for his own contribution, Peterson said he’s now writing a book that aims—he remarks offhandedly—to “demolish the atheistic argument permanently.”) I think he is right: The whole edifice of modernity is in crisis. But this should be a cause for Christian hope, not panic. In fact, it seems possible that our time may witness a transition not into Davidson’s new “pagan dark age,” but out of what Lewis called the true dark age of modern materialism.

More than a hundred years before Peterson, the German historian Oswald Spengler predicted that, beginning sometime in the twenty-first century, “a last spiritual crisis” would shake a declining West and lead to a resurgence of religiosity, a long era of renewed piety that he dubbed a “Second Religiousness.” Spengler based this prediction on his reading of the life cycles of many major civilizations, all of which had, in his telling, been brought low by an “age of theory,” in which a hubris of materialist rationalism crystallized into self-induced mechanistic madness, decadence, and civilizational decay. In time, however, this epoch always came to an end, as “the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics presents itself afresh.”

“For us, too,” writes Spengler, “let there be no mistake about it—the age of theory is drawing to its end. . . . In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger.” But first civilization would be swept, as in every historical case, by a temporary period of bizarre superstitions and syncretic cults:

Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

In the end, what “starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness” concludes “as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms” of that “first, genuine, young religiousness” that once drove the civilization to cultural greatness. Spengler was predicting a sweeping re-Christianization of the West.

Could this really happen? I do not know. What I am confident of is that, before Christianity could ever flourish again, the iron cage of materialism would indeed need to be broken and the world re-enchanted, filled again with an immanence of spirit. It is the materialist worldview—not pagan foes—that has for centuries smothered and subverted Christian faith and passion.

But with the veil of materialism lifted, could we expect that paganism, too, might have a chance to flourish again, as Davidson predicts? That the West might face a “dark enchantment” as much as a return to the light? Yes, I think so. The deadening effect of materialism has undermined paganism no less than Christianity. Freed from its grip, we may all be off to the races.

In that case I’d say: Do not be afraid. This situation would be familiar terrain for the Church. After all, it was precisely in the pagan world, amid its simultaneous suffering and enchantment, that the Christian faith spread like wildfire. There is no reason it should not do so again. Even in the worst case, if Christianity finds itself badly persecuted, as in Davidson’s pagan America, persecution may ultimately give it new strength—as it so often has.

So perhaps the rise of a little paganism is a necessary development for renewal—a cause for hope, not despair. It may end up merely preparing the way, as it did before. At least I find a wry poetry in the idea that, should we face a great relapse into paganism, the Enemy may have inadvertently planted the seeds of a greater Christian triumph. God does seem to have a strange habit of winning that way.

[galacticlamps]

White in the moon has a really nice sound to it! I might need to add it to one of my playlists

I'm sorry bc I know the proper response to this is something like: "I'm so glad you like it!"

But instead I'm gonna go on a mini rant bc I'm like. having such a moment with that whole album right now, tbh. For some reason that song & a couple others kinda remind me of Holding Achilles (I would not yet go so far as to say they actually sound similar - that show is very much still on my mind as the default these days, so it's totally possible I'm being Guy Who's Only Ever Thinking About That Show: getting a lot of That Show vibes from this)

but also! also - there's Cutty Wren, which opens with a definite resemblance to the pipe music in Macra Terror and shares its title with a Two/Jamie/Victoria Short Trip. And then also on the album is a cover of Adam Lay Y Bounden, of all things - which aside from just being a fascinating (yet Christian) perspective on Original Sin Being Worth It, Actually - is also the specific carol the PDA The Roundheads mentions Jamie hearing & recognizing on his date visit to the Frost Fair with the Doctor! The song itself is already so much to think about, but pairing a song about how giving into temptation in what's canonically (Church canon, I mean for once!) regarded as the biggest mistake/fall from grace in the history of the human race is actually something to be glad of because of this world we're all currently living in & never would've had if not for that first transgression - pairing that with that specifically early-days Jamie caught up in the whirlwind of his new adventures through time, in a private little trip the Doctor's taking him on to make him feel better about his place in all this & less ostracized from Ben & Polly as the senior companions... Look, it does something to me, that song, & maybe one day I'll be able to verbalize its significance in my personal Jamie belief system better than that

So yes this album is one I'm pretty darn in love with for still having no idea what it's meant to be about (I think it was written about a book I haven't read?). But I'd definitely recommend!

[femkethefaineant]

First, I need people to know this is not a hypothetical. I repeat: this is not a drill. People really do say 'christ-mass' isn't actually christian and therefore not culturally christian, same as culturally christian atheists aren't christian.

Second, they didn't really steal it; many people already had their own holiday that happened to be on the same day because humans like partying on solstices. The christians just started celebrating Jesus day and over time the non-christian traditions were forgotten and neglected in majority-christian regions. The pagan holidays were forgotten because there were no more pagans. They didn't actively push yule out the way other holidays are now being pushed out of christian worldviews. You know that narrative of Hanukkah being 'just Jewish christmas' and getting annoyed at the phrase 'happy holidays'? Actively preventing existing religious groups from celebrating their own holidays while framing them as jesus-day anyway? That's what stealing a holiday looks like.

Third, if I take a piece of wood and carve it into a cross, it's now a cross, whether that wood was mine or no. If I take a party and give it christian values, belief systems and thought patterns, and a focus on christianity as default for religion, that's culturally christian, no matter what it was before.

Go celebrate Yule, I do too. But don't pretend it makes christmas any less christian.

now that it’s november and the dreaded holiday months are here can we all agree that if a muslim or a jewish person is complaining about cultural christianity, and you go on that post and say “well, christmas isn’t even christian it was yule and christians stole it”, then i get to hit you with the thousand energy beams attack

[seashellsoldier]

The 1619 Project

Nothing gets under the skin of wingnut paleoconservatives and their antiquated, hypocritical mythology faster than the thought of non-Caucasian, non-Christian, non-hetero people being humanized, empowered, or simply heard on equal terms. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project (https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf) was essentially the ignition point for their renewed ire, but it truly started after America elected, and re-elected a Black man to the Oval Office. 

Launched in August of 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans arriving to America, hypothesizing their history here, as well as that of the nearly 600,000 other enslaved Africans, plus their tens of millions of descendants, starts in 1619. The United States of Hypocrisy was built on the genocide of the indigenous and the enslavement of Africans. This is indisputable. The crazed cult of the GOP is trying to silence this history for their own revisionary myths, often cosplaying with confederate flags and Homelander capes and Viking hats. While the 1619 Project has fair criticism on some issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project), the ability for Black (and Latino and Indigenous and everyone else) to begin their cultural history where they see it starting is crucial to understanding the complexity of History writ large and the dynamic multiculturalism of the planet, then as much as now. This is New Historicism, telling history from the bottom up, not the top down, which began in the 80s. Bibles, bullets, and bacteria carved the world up under the age of Empires and destroyed so many cultures, languages, and belief systems. Those empires have receded into history (except in the eyes of sociopathic madmen like Putin and Trump and Xi Jinping), but their ghostly echoes persist with abject lies, weaponized disinformation, willful ignorance, systemic racism, and white nationalism. We must unite to destroy the GOP. 

Hulu has a new miniseries dedicated to this project and I feel it should be watched by all (https://press.hulu.com/shows/the-1619-project/). As well, the Pulitzer Center has a free education materials for all those brave teachers and librarians fighting for true freedom, actual equality, historical accuracy, and the voices of the historically ignored, repressed, and exploited (https://1619education.org/about-1619-project). 

Know your ACCURATE history. 

[apieters]

Still getting caught up on Dracula Daily, but I’m at the section where he’s driving up to Dracula’s castle. All that’s been going on is that he’s enjoying the pretty mountains and noticing that the local peasants suddenly get all weird and creeped out when they figure out that he’s Dracula’s realtor going to pay the Count a visit.

Now, obviously, we know (since Dracula’s become a pop culture icon) why everyone is so freaked out, and we’re all collectively screaming “No, Jonny-boy, don’t go up there, listen to the peasants!” But one of the biggest sources of dramatic irony in Dracula is that the characters all assume they live in our world—the real world—a world where of course vampires and werewolves and ghosts and other Halloween creatures don’t exist because it’s the modern era, and nobody believes in those old superstitions anymore, except for uneducated peasants in backwater parts of the world, but certainly not sophisticated modern urban Englishmen. And literally everyone believes this, until the reality of their situation bites them—literally!

This assumption of our reality can be a source of terror or comedy, depending on how you read it. The terror comes when you realize that Dracula was basically an urban fantasy in its time, and that the events were supposed to seem as eerily realistic as possible, because everyone believes exactly the same things about reality as you do, and has no reason to think that there’s a demonic monster trying to move in just a few blocks down from your very real London flat because just like you they’re reasonable people who know vampires don’t exist, but the deal already went down last month.

Dun-dun-duuuuuuuun!!!!

But it’s also hilarious because we know that Jonathan Harker and friends all live in a horror story; that vampires are very, very real in their world; and that Dracula is very obviously a member of the undead. The fact that Harker and Co. all believe they’re still living in the real world in spite of very blatant evidence to the contrary is legitimately really, really funny.

Christian Content Incoming, Skip if you’re not into that kind of thing

(You have been warned)

In keeping with my Dracula-is-a-Christian-allegory belief, it’s interesting to notice how Stoker portrays the anti-supernaturalism/naturalistic outlook of his day.

On the one hand, it seems entirely rational. By the late 1800’s, most people did not accept a lot of Christianity’s supernatural beliefs. This was the heyday of classical Darwinism (especially Social Darwinism) and the liberal Protestant theologies that tried to de-mythologize the religion and re-interpret it basically as another ethical system. By the 1890’s it’s safe to say that amongst the fashionable and influential classes of society the default way of looking at the world was thoroughly non-supernatural. Many people in Jonathan Harker’s social class would have believed that life evolved from non-life over many eons in a dead, mechanistically predetermined but ultimately directionless universe operating on the principles of (Newtonian) physics and chemistry as conceived at the time, although there was believed to be a definite trend toward complexity and superiority from earlier to later life-forms and as humans evolved from apes into modern men and—as Neitzeche hoped—into “supermen.” This was a perfectly normal way of understanding the world, then as well as now, though in our era mechanistic pre-determination is less fashionable, Neitzche has given way to Sartre and Foucault, and we’ve upgraded our understanding of physics to the quantum mechanical models.

Still, the spiritual realm was then and is now largely denied and supernatural phenomenon are interpreted or reinterpreted in the categories of preferred study by the natural sciences. Visions and spiritual communion is understood in terms of psychological and neurological states, religions are studied primarily as social and political institutions, and even God Himself is often conceived of as the sum total of the energy in the physical universe in an way almost reminiscent of certain forms of pantheism.

But what if the old tales were not the errors of a prescientific, primitive culture trying to do science and failing miserably? What if they actual got it right—not on accident, or metaphorically, but were dead-accurate all along? What if people were living in a supernatural world and didn’t realize it, denied it even, to the point that obviously supernatural phenomena would be misunderstood as soon as it was seen?

That’s the fundamental difference that really exists between orthodox Christianity and modern naturalism, and Stoker decides to explore this clash of fundamentally different worldviews fictionally, except instead of addressing real issues of debate, he uses a placeholder—vampires. What if vampires were not only real, but the old peasant “superstitions” were dead right? And now let’s drop someone with a modern, naturalistic worldview, whose core tenant is the denial of the supernatural, into that world and see how they fare. The result is a dark comedy at best, and a terrifying horror story at worst.

Regardless, Stoker accurately portrays three important facts through his fictional story:

Reality is what it is, regardless of what we believe about it.

We perceive reality through our worldviews, our preconceptions about the what is or is not worth considering about reality.

If we believe incorrect things about reality, it can hurt us.

Stoker uses Dracula to explore the nature of belief and unbelief, and shows the dire consequences of persisting in untrue beliefs. The question we the readers are left with is:

In what kind of world to we live? And do we believe the truth about our world?

[jasongracedefenseattorney]

brb i started seriously thinking about the afterlife in the riordanverse and now i have a stress headache bc there are so many religions that are canon and just figuring out who goes where must be miserable so here’s my attempt:

A Greek or Roman who died would go to the Underworld to be put into Elysium, the Fields of Punishment, or Asphodel, but this quote seems to imply that the Underworld is the default setting for the afterlife:

“Three judges. They switch around who sits on the bench. King Minos, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare—people like that. Sometimes they look at a life and decide that person needs a special reward—the Fields of Elysium. Sometimes they decide on punishment. But most people, well, they just lived. Nothing special, good or bad. So they go to the Asphodel Fields.” -The Lightning Thief

and it also backs up this afterlife being the only option later on:

“But if he’s a preacher,” I said, “and he believes in a different hell.…” Grover shrugged. “Who says he’s seeing this place the way we’re seeing it? Humans see what they want to see. You’re very stubborn—er, persistent, that way.” -The Lightning Thief

so you would assume that all other afterlives are just Mist versions of the Underworld. except clearly not because the Norse gods actually exist and have their own afterlife.

“Yes, sir. The Hotel Valhalla. Congratulations. You’ve been chosen to join the hosts of Odin. I look forward to hearing about your brave exploits at dinner.” -The Sword of Summer

so at this point one would reasonably say “okay so if you’re a Norse descendant you go to the Norse afterlife but otherwise you go to the Greek/Roman one”, which is already just so silly sounding but then you have actual Christianity involved since Jesus exists:

“Because Anno Domini, in the Year of Our Lord, is fine for Christians, but Thor gets a little upset. He still holds a grudge that Jesus never showed up for that duel he challenged him to.” -The Sword of Summer

so Christianity exists! and you can’t just say they go to the Christian-Mist Underworld bc most people in the Underworld end up in the Fields of Asphodel (as previously stated) and Christianity doesn’t really have any long term equivalent since Purgatory is like a holding cell type deal. Christianity is either eternal paradise or eternal damnation, no third option and ESPECIALLY no option for reincarnation.

but then you have Islam too since Samirah is a Muslim, so one can reasonably assume Allah also exists.

okay so every religion seems to exist in this world (i haven’t read Kane Chronicles yet but i’m assuming there is some mention of an Egyptian afterlife), so really it feels like you go where you believe and if you don’t know your belief, you just end up in some kind of Afterlife lottery system? except Thomas Jefferson and Shakespeare and the televangelist preacher were all Christians so they should be in Heaven or Hell, not in the Underworld. Anyway, the whole system is giving me a headache just thinking about it.

[sometimesrosy]

I am worried about inclusiveness in my story. I've had these characters in my head for more than 10 years, maybe even 15. When I created them I was a child. As I grew up, I started "upgrading" my story & making it much more fitting to my age now, an adult. However, I don't have much inclusiveness in it. It's in a high fantasy world. The main character is bisexual, & his ex-boyfriend has darker skin. But other than that... I'm having a hard time changing the characters from what I imagined them.

This is a good and complicated question. I’m glad you asked.

There are problems here, and I think you’re finding you’re confronting them but you can’t quite identify them.

The thing about inclusiveness, about adding diversity to your work, is that it can’t really be solved by surface changes like-- oh this character is black now, all better.  BECAUSE diversity is actually about more than just the color of a character’s skin.

Diversity is about differences of life experience, culture, mindset, history, perspective, values. It’s about recognizing that the world is not just one, standard existence, but a multiplicity.

We are in a time now that is *changing* the way we understand people and identity. 

You started this story when you were a child and didn’t recognize all these complexities, and to tell the truth, society itself didn’t really recognize them at a larger level. There’s a reason why you as a kid didn’t see them.

Because our culture as a whole has identified white people as the default people. Specifically white, middle/upperclass, christian, able bodied, straight, cis men as the default person. ANYTHING you have other than that has to be identified, otherwise, we assume they are the default person.

The HERO is always this default person until we define them as otherwise, female, Black, poor, atheist, deaf. Oh look. There’s a new character who has a distinctly different experience than our default person. And you then have to WRITE them with that experience in mind, or you’re just writing the default person in a mask that is only skin deep.

So what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s not really diversity if you just change the color of your character’s skin without letting it reflect upon who they are as a person. And then how that affects your story. You can’t JUST make someone in a wheel chair without changing their part of the story on a fundamental level, don’t you think? If you switch your character from non stated but assumed Christianity to Judaism... how does that affect your story or character? And if it doesn’t, well lets say it’s irrelevant to the story, then how do you share that bit of background of the character, make it authentic and not seem as if you’re just checking boxes on the diversity list?  Do you even know enough about Judaism to write them fairly or will you just toss in some yiddish-- “Oy, what a shmuck!” and leave it at that? Ok well maybe your fantasy world doesn’t have Jewish people. Fair enough. 

But now I need to question your world building. Is everyone in your book of the same culture? Are there different races, religions, creeds, classes, ethnicity? If there aren’t, why not? Are you writing a world where no one travels? Where there’s an oppressive force that requires everyone to worship the same gods? Even JRR Tolkien had multiple races, languages, belief systems and cultures. I say “even” because Tolkien is often taken as the “whiteness model” of fantasy. The British/northern European ideal.

You might be attached to the way your characters look. You’re also probably attached to the world view that white is the default. We all are, frankly. The first novel I wrote I made it about a blonde white woman from the Bronx, where I am from, where blonde white women are few and far between. And I didn’t address how this white woman lived in The Bronx surrounded by mostly brown Latinx people. To be honest, I think I had internalized that concept of white people being the default, of ALL books being about the white experience and that was just how you write a story. If I were to rewrite that book now, I would make her Latina. I could keep the main story the way it was, but switching her to Latina would require a hefty rewrite as her character, experiences, understanding, perspective and the way she looked at herself and her world would be different. 

What you need to do, IF you want to add diversity to your novel, is to do a major overhaul of your understanding of what it means to be human and how our differences and intersections shape our identity and experiences. That means a major overhaul of your story. 

OR you could leave your story the way it is and don’t add diversity to what seems to be a complete story already, just to fit the times and concerns of the day, STILL do the work of overhauling your personal understanding of diversity, and then in the next book, build that diversity in from the bottom up. 

Even if you leave the book with everyone looking the way they already do, you might try adding an AWARENESS of race, diversity, otherness, bias, bigotry, etc. White people ALSO move through this world with people who don’t look like them. Acting like white people don’t have any repercussions from living in this racist society is making a statement that not only is the white experience the default experience and the way things should be, but also racism is just a given and doesn’t need to be examined, since it only affects POC.

Any way you take it, it’s a lot of work. That’s because confronting your own biases, blindspots, assumptions and unspoken prejudices is HARD and takes constant work.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Went through the atheism # and saw some hurt Christians crying that atheists should 'respect their Christian followers and their right to believe' ?? Why do we have to 'respect' them? Why do they have the right to believe but we don't have the right to NOT believe? I'm so tired of this

Well, we really should respect people’s right to believe, as that’s a value of a Modern-era, Liberal society: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, individual liberty, privacy, self-determination, etc.

Putting aside religious superstitious bull-crap, freedom of thought, expression and belief is important to human progress. Galileo and Giordano Bruno suffered under the pre-Modern notions of independent, heterodox thoughts being blasphemous, dangerous and to be eradicated. But they were both right, and this mentality retarded our understanding of our world.

There are plenty of others throughout history who have made a positive impact through a new idea that they were free to express. People have to be free to have ideas and be able to express them so that we can evaluate them, find the good, useful ones and adopt them. And that necessarily means living with the leftovers. You can’t take the good without putting up with the bad. Or even just the expired and vestigal.

(Ironically, a post-Modern society looks a lot like pre-Modern society, with a need to control language and discourses, and abject terror of freedom of speech and deviation from orthodoxy, at the threat of social execution... but that’s another conversation.)

Of course we have a right to NOT believe. And that’s certainly the argument you should be having with any of them. The rules should apply universally. If you can’t express yourself, they don’t get to express their Xtianity.

[Insert list of bible verses instructing Xtians to be kind to non-believers, other verses telling them turn the other cheek to (imaginary) “persecution” -- but I can’t be bothered right now.]

What we’re not obliged to do is respect the beliefs themselves. We can evaluate them based on their merits, the reasons why people claim them to be true, find them stupid, irrational, absurd and reality-defying, and explain why.

We can push those beliefs to the extreme edges of our society, by articulating why they’re unreasonable, why they fail, and demonstrating better alternatives (e.g. education, humanism). As is gradually happening with the decline of religion in secular societies, fortifying the secular separation that grants them the right to have their beliefs in the first place. Separation of church and state is as important to religious freedom as it is to freedom from religion. The secularism that grants them the right to have their religion and practice it without undue influence also protects you (and society). This goes both ways.

I don’t believe what you believe, and I don’t have to. I defend your right to hold, express and live by your own belief system, but you have no right to impose any of it on me.

Someone has the right to believe that one race is superior to another, that gremlins live in their shoes, or that Battlefield Earth is the best movie ever made. Flat Earthers can think whatever stupid conspiracy shit they like about the nature of our planet, but they don’t get to have it taught in school or have all our car navigation systems fucked up to use their model of Earth. You know, if they actually had one, since they don’t.

That right stops at the boundary of their individual personage. They have no right to conscript the collaboration of others or society as a whole, to have it written into law, to act to the detriment of others based on those beliefs, or expect them to be validated and supported by those who don’t share them. What our law is intended to do is manage behavior, to standards that are fair to everyone - or as fair as possible.

We should be willing, if it’s safe to do so, to push back on religious beliefs - or indeed those of any other ideology - having a default expectation of unearned respect. And get them accustomed to this kind of pushback.

[writingwithcolor]

Fairy Tale Retellings with POC

@anjareedd asked:

Hello, Writing with Color! First of all, thank you for all you do. Second, do you have any advice for a white person retelling fairy tales, both European fairy tale and non-European fairy tales? Is it okay to retell non-European fairy tales? I would feel bad if all fairy tales I retold were European as those are over represented, but given how much white people have erased and whitewashed other culture's fairy tales I understand if that were off-limits for a white person. Thank you!

Fairy tale retellings are my favorite thing. I love reading, rewriting and creating new fairy tale-style stories with People of Color!

As you write, keep in mind:

European does not mean white. 

The possibility of PoC in European or Western historical settings tends to throw off so many. There are plenty of European People of Color, then and today. You can have an Indian British little red riding hood and it isn’t “unrealistic.” And we wanna read about them!

Still, research the history of your settings and time period. Use multiple credible sources, as even the most well-known ones may exclude the history of People of Color or skim over it. The stories might be shoved into a corner, but we live and have lived everywhere. The specific groups (and numbers of) in a certain region may vary, though. 

How and when did they or their family get there, and why?

Has it been centuries, decades, longer than one can remember?

Who are the indigenous people of the region? (Because hey, places like America and Australia would love to have you believe its earliest people were white...)

Is there a connection with the Moors, trade, political marriage; was it simply immigration?

No need to elaborate all too much. A sentence or more woven into the story in passing may do the trick to establish context, depending on your story and circumstance. 

Or if you want to ignore all of that, because this is fantasy-London or whatever, by all means do. POC really don’t need a explanation to exist, but I simply like to briefly establish context for those who may struggle to “get it”, personally. This is a side effect of POC being seen as the Other and white as the default.

Although, if PoC existing in a fairy tale is the reader’s biggest stumbling block in a world of magic, speculation, or fantasy, that’s none of your concern.

Can you picture any of the people below, or someone with these backgrounds, the protagonist of their own fairytale? I hope so!

Above: Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1760s - 1800s), British Heiress with her cousin. Check out her history as well as the movie, Belle (2013).

Source: English Heritage: Women in History - Dido Belle

 Above: Abraham Janssens - The Agrippine Sibyl - Netherlands (c. 1575)

“Since ancient times Sybils were considered seers sent by god, priestesses foretelling the coming of great events. This model serves to depict the Sybil of Agrippina, one of the 12 that foretold the coming of Christ. Notice the flagellum and crown of thrones which are symbolic objects reminding the viewer of Christs suffering.”  X

Above: “Major Musa Bhai, 3 November 1890. Musa Bhai travelled to England in 1888 as part of the Booth family, who founded the Salvation Army.” X

Above: Eleanor Xiniwe and Johanna Jonkers, respectively and other members of the African Choir, who all had portraits taken at the London Stereoscopic Company in 1891. 

“The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight.” X

The examples above just scratch the surface. Luckily, more and more historians and researchers are publishing lesser known (and at times purposefully masked) PoC history.

More Sources 

PoC in History (WWC Search Link)

POC in Europe (WWC Search Link)

The Black Victorians: astonishing portraits unseen for 120 years

Hidden histories: the first Black people photographed in Britain – in pictures

Let’s talk about oppression and slavery 

There is a hyper-focus on chattel slavery as if the times when and where it occurred is the only narrative that exists. And even when it is part of a Person of Color’s history, that is seldom all there is to say of the person or their lives. For example, Dido Elizabeth Belle.

People of Color were not all slaves, actively enslaved, or oppressed for racial reasons at all times in history! Dig deep into the research of your time period and region. Across the long, wide history of the world, People of Color are and were a norm and also NOT simply exceptions. Explore all the possibilities to discover the little known and seldom told history. Use this as inspiration for your writing.

PoC (especially Black people) were not always in chains, especially in a world of your making. 

Don’t get me wrong. These stories do have a place and not even painful histories should be erased. I personally read these stories as well, if and when written by someone who is from the background. Some might even combine fairy tale, fantasy, and oppression in history. However...

There are plenty of stories on oppressed PoC. How many fairy tales?

Many European tales have versions outside of Europe. 

Just because a tale was popularized under a western setting doesn’t mean that it originates there. Overtime, many were rewritten and altered to fit European settings, values and themes.

Read original tales. 

You might be inspired to include a story in its original setting. Even if you kept it in a western setting, why not consider a protagonist from the ethnicity of the story’s origin?

For example: the Cinderella most are familiar with was popularized by the French in 1697. However, Cinderella has Chinese and Greek versions that date back from the 9th Century CE and 6th Century BCE, respectively. 

Choosing a Setting: European or Non-European?

I do not see anything wrong with either (I write tales set in western and non-western settings, all with Heroines of Color). There is great potential in both.

Non-Western Settings (pros and cons)

Normalizes non-Western settings. Not just the “exotic” realm of the Other.

Potential for rich, cultural elements and representation

Requires more research and thoughtfulness (the case for any setting one is unfamiliar with, though)

European or Western Setting (pros and cons)

Normalizes PoC as heroes, not the Other, or only fit to be side characters.

Representation for People of Color who live in Western countries/regions 

Loss of some cultural elements (that character can still bring in that culture, though! Living in the West often means balancing 2+ cultures)

Outdated Color and Ethnic Symbolism 

Many fairy tales paint blackness (and darkness, and the Other) as bad, ominous and ugly, and white as good and pure. 

Language that worships whiteness as the symbol of beauty. For example: “Fair” being synonymous with beauty. Characters like Snow White being the “fairest” of them all.

Wicked witches with large hooked noses, often meant to be coded as ethnically Jewish people. 

Don’t follow an old tale back into that same pit of dark and Other phobia. There’s many ways to change up and subvert the trope, even while still using it, if you wish. Heroines and heroes can have dark skin and large noses and still stand for good, innocence and beauty.

Read: Black and White Symbolism: Discussion and Alternatives 

Non-European Fairy tales - Tips to keep in Mind: 

Some stories and creatures belong to a belief system and is not just myth to alter. Before writing or changing details, read and seek the opinions of the group. You might change the whole meaning of something by tweaking details you didn’t realize were sacred and relevant.

Combine Tales Wisely: 

Picking stories and beings from different cultural groups and placing them in one setting can come across as them belonging to the same group or place (Ex: A Japanese fairy tale with Chinese elements). This misrepresents and erases true origins. If you mix creatures or elements from tales, show how they all play together and try to include their origin, so it isn’t as if the elements were combined at random or without careful selection.

Balance is key: 

When including creatures of myths, take care to balance your Human of Color vs. creatures ratio, as well as the nature of them both (good, evil, gray moral). EX: Creatures from Native American groups but no human Native characters from that same group (or all evil, gray, or too underdeveloped to know) is poor representation.

Moral Alignment: 

Changing a good or neutral cultural creature into something evil may be considered disrespectful and misappropriation. 

Have Fun! 

No, seriously. Fairy tales, even those with the most somber of meanings, are meant to be intriguing little adventures. Don’t forget that as you write or get hung up on getting the “right message” out and so on. That’s what editing is for.

--Colette  

[reconditarmonia]

Dear Fandom 5K Author

Hi! Thank you for writing for me! I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3. I have anon messaging off, but mods can contact me with any questions.

Dragon Age | Fullmetal Alchemist | The Locked Tomb | Motherland: Fort Salem | Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass

General likes:

– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

– Loyalty kink! Trust, affectionate or loving use of titles, gestures of loyalty, replacing one’s situational or ethical judgment with someone else’s, risking oneself (physically or otherwise) for someone else, not doing so on their orders. Can be commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms.

– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff (possibly while crossdressing).

– Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex; embarrassment; focus on pregnancy; Christmas/Christian themes; infidelity; unrequested polyamory; focus on unrequested canon or non-canon ships; unrequested trans versions of characters.

Smut Likes: clothing, uniforms, sexual tension, breasts, manual sex, cunnilingus, grinding, informal d/s elements, intensity.

—

Fandom: Dragon Age

Character(s):

Group: Cassandra Pentaghast/Female Lavellan

Female Lavellan

Group: Charter & Rector

Genre(s):

Canon-Style Plot - Freeform

Action/Adventure

Worldbuilding

Established Relationship

Mystery/Procedural

I'm playing this game for the first time and loving Cassandra and Lavellan together so much. (I'm playing with a mod where I can romance her with a female PC!) Lavellan starts off as this confused and small and non-Andrastian prisoner who disagrees with Cassandra on so many things, but Cassandra puts so much trust and faith in her and so much on the line for her - even with Lavellans who are adamant that they're not chosen, they're just doing their best and they happen to be the ones in the position to make this choice. Cassandra is so proud to know her, and backs her up even when she disagrees with Lavellan's choices! The romance scene is really cute between two characters who are adults and have a day-to-day working relationship that isn't going to change, but are still just having fun with how charming it is in a way that builds on their friendship. Not to mention their battling together, of course - the ways they can protect each other and fight for each other's goals (and give Cassandra all the elven swords and shields), how worried they sound if the other one gets hurt...whoops, I found myself another loyalty kink ship.

I also just like playing as Lavellan generally, with how much of an outsider she feels (the "Dawn Will Come" scene is so alienating! it really works!) and how much of the game is about visiting the sites of past elven trauma and/or glory days.

My Lavellan uses the (default lol) name of Ellana, is a rift mage, sports a lovely buzzcut and vallaslin, has a lot of feelings about elf history (and visiting the Plains/Graves especially), believes in elven gods and doesn't care to pretend she's Andrastian, and besides Cass is closest friends with Solas, but don't feel that you have to write my specific PC - I'm excited to read about yours too!

But! I also love all the little hints about the work that Leliana's agents are doing, and their friendship (walking in on their card game at Caer Bronach is kind of delightful), and the letter from Rector's mother asking why he uses a code name for work (why are you ashamed of your name, Wilbur??) is one of my favorite in-universe documents. Slice-of-life or slice-of-mission with Charter and Rector would also make me really happy. Here again, just the closeness and trust and faith that these people have in one another is my jam.

Fandom-Specific DNW: Canon-typical levels of Cassandra's association with the Chantry and belief in the Maker/Andraste/the Herald shouldn't be taken to contravene my DNW of Christian themes, but I wouldn't want Satinalia fic or something focused on the Andrastian faith. Please don't put F!Lavellan in a different romance, even if we didn't match on the Cassandra ship.

—

Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist

Character(s):

Group: Olivier Mira Armstrong/Maria Ross

Genre(s):

Action/Adventure

Canon-Style Plot - Freeform

Getting Together

I'll admit: I am a shallow, shallow person who loves the heartwarming and id-satisfying Briggs loyalty-kink complex (The watch! Buccaneer handing Olivier a clean pair of gloves after she kills Raven! Constant and deeply sincere saluting! Olivier’s explanation of why she wants Miles around and her lack of patience for anyone’s shit) but would like an f/f manifestation of it for actual shipping. Post-canon or AU where Maria is assigned to Briggs, or works for Olivier in Central? Does Maria foil a plot against Olivier, or Olivier save Maria's life in battle? Does Olivier order Maria into a firefight? Hit me.

Fandom-Specific DNW: Olivier/men, even mentioned.

—

Fandom: The Locked Tomb

Character(s):

Matthias Nonius

Genre(s):

Action/Adventure

Canon-Style Plot - Freeform

Fantasy

Nonius was one of my favorite new characters in Harrow the Ninth. His whole impossible arrival via evocation-by-poetry, battle with the Sleeper, and epic departure to fight the Beast made me very, very happy on levels I have trouble explaining. It was so heartwarming?! Because it was impossible, and because poetry won, and because they went off to do the best they could...I don't know, exactly. (Iiiii also just love that he's named for the Redwall mouse.) I'd love to read more about his life - being unprepossessing and very human but also paladin-like and really fucking good at being a swordsman, representing the Ninth House in slightly less decrepit times, his mysterious past with Gideon the First (and Pyrrha, sort of), however it happened that he died far from home in an unknown place and couldn't be recovered for burial, "chickenshits don't get beer"? Or, er, his afterlife - going to fight with Marta, Ortus, and Pro, re-encountering G1deon as allies...

—

Fandom: Motherland: Fort Salem

Character(s):

Group: Abigail Bellweather/Raelle Collar

Original Historical Witch Character(s)

Group: Sarah Alder & First Bellweather Ancestor

Genre(s):

Action/Adventure

Canon-Style Plot - Freeform

Mystery/Procedural

Worldbuilding

I fell hard for this show and Abigail/Raelle is the ship I’m most excited about - they get off to a bad start for all kinds of personal history reasons and have problems with each other, but when it gets down to the wire Abigail would do anything for Raelle and is very gung-ho about having Raelle’s unconventional but extremely powerful magic under her leadership, regardless of Raelle being a loose cannon. She told her she loved her!! <3 And by the end, Raelle also clearly knows what Abigail's going through (like when she talks her down in "Citydrop"), respects her leadership, and cares deeply about her and wants to protect her in return. I love that loyalty dynamic, and their competence as fighters/witches.

Physical combat, strength in general, magical strength, ability to work magic together, knowledge of the magical canon vs. out-of-the-box techniques...what parts of their skills and their bond could be challenged in the weird dimension that the end of season 1 leaves them in? Or when they get back home and new challenges await? (In my head, the decision not to send them to War College is not revoked; the unit becomes some kind of special-forces secret strike team rather than cannon fodder.) Maybe something where Raelle goes/has gone into a fight as a berserker-type for Abigail and then comes back to her, or where Abigail protects/has protected her soldier (her girl!! I love her protectiveness of Raelle towards the other cadets, imagine it in a battle!)? Or an arranged marriage AU where it's usual for witch soldiers to marry to combine their magic power or something...If including smut in the story, I'd especially be up for something d/s-y where the loyalty-kinky dynamic of Raelle being Abigail's weapon, at her command, is echoed in sex!

OR. The alternate history that the show has created is so interesting and I'm craving expansion of that through fic! Tell me about the Bellweather ancestor who was a slave and ended up powerful and influential enough to begin a dynasty, and how she met and was recruited by Alder. Or other enslaved witches, witches in the American Revolution or the Civil War, or the founding of Fort Salem and standardization of American military magic with its various influences, or Chinese or Jewish or Mexican immigrant witches who maybe came from different magic traditions and might have had to make the choice of whether or not to reveal that they had magic (if the system knows you because of your descent in the country?), serving their country but also binding their daughters and granddaughters forever.

Fandom-Specific DNW: Abigail/Adil (at all; if he's mentioned, please make them just friends), focus on Raelle/Scylla (dwelling on Raelle still having feelings for Scylla or on her getting over Scylla for Abigail; you don't need to retcon their having been together), Scylla bashing.

—

Fandom: Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass

Character(s):

Chaye Roznatovsky

Demon

Genre(s):

Fantasy

Canon-Style Plot - Freeform

Worldbuilding

Anything expanding on this story would make me really happy. Chaye’s years with the partisans, the comrades-in-arms she had and loved then and who else’s memory she holds or makes into a weapon, her journey to America, going by the surname of “no one.” The demon’s mirror world, its loss of that world (what exactly happened on the other side?) and its need to be where Jews are, demon Judaism? Or the future of both of them now that they’ve found each other!

Fandom-Specific DNW/Opt-In: DNW Chaye/demon. The premise of the story being what it is, I'm explicitly okay with antisemitism being a prominent feature of the story if you write something that covers either or both characters' backstory, but would prefer post-war antisemitism not to be a focus.

[cosmiccalliope]

I think most Christians need to critically evaluate their beliefs, like anyone who actively chooses a faith of their own.

I'm not going to sit here and blame the average Christian (Catholics included) for not being critical of an imperialist system they were likely born into, it just feels scummy to blame someone for what they were born to without their consent, but there comes a point when you need to sit down and just, be critical of your beliefs, being aware of exactly what you actually believe, and the system around it.

I was surrounded by Bibles and Baptists for 16 years, and it took me about 12 years to actually step back and look at what was being said around me from a different perspective. Being born into Christianity is almost brainwashing, especially if you get the "Evolution is a lie made by the devil to tempt man, the Universe is only about 6000 years old" crowd I did. Christianity has spread through Europe and the Americas like a plague, running rampant and being used to excuse so many terrible, awful things.

Original Sin of "All humans are born sinful" is a slippery slope to "All Humans are, by default, Bad" which is basically an Eco-Fascist belief. Missionary work colonizes the Word of God into people the world over, in an attempt to erase all Non-Christian faiths. Faith is the center of a culture, it gives them their beliefs, erasing that is an aspect of Genocide.

16 years of Baptist Brainwashing later, and I'm a pagan with my own answers to the God Question.

If a faith actively tries to make you feel worse about yourself for not being 100% On and Always Devout to God, if a faith takes your human failings and spins it so if you have any you are some terrible, awful person, is it worth it? Is it worth following a faith that functionally abuses you and damns you to a pit of sulfuric infernos for all eternity for faults and humanity?

I get that Not All Christians are that far, but I've seen enough to know that this isn't just some rare thing. I've had pastors that basically preached that, I've seen it before.

Do all things in honour of the Lord, but also be able to forgive yourself and others. Isn't that what Christianity is about? Forgiveness? Deliverance from sin?

If you don't step back from your beliefs for a moment and just critically examine what is actually being said, how can you call yourself a Good Christian if you don't actually know what the Bible says? Quoting Verses doesn't mean anything, those are artificially inserted to make studying easier, they can't be viewed out of context without being skewed in their meaning.

I believe all humans are equally capable of good and evil, and doesn't that sound nice? I believe the gods are ultimately forgiving and are fine with questioning, curiousity is human and questions can bring a closer relationship with the gods, within reason (the Greeks and their Hubris, you know). I think that there are valuable lessons to be learned from other faiths, other perspectives on life and the Universe.

If you're a pagan, you likely chose your faith yourself, you examined it and you know what you believe. If you were born into a faith, I think you should examine it like the rest of us, and if you reach the conclusion that the one you were born into is right for you, good. If you reach a different conclusion, also good. Just so long as it isn't that you have the only true faith and all others are heathenous sinners that need to be converted.