#especially in religion

[damnedserenity]

why does media insist on making lucifer a poor little meow meow who did nothing wrong and god straight evil to have people sympathize with him?? like bro you can absolutely make a prideful, spiteful and pitiful little guy with a kind merciful god and STILL have all the angst you want and I gurantee 500% that everyone would eat that shit up

[symphonyofsilence]

Let the poor man rest.

[hilacopter]

if you think jews are white people you are antisemitic and also your reasons for claiming not to be don't go far beyond "persecution bad and also i don't want to be branded with a bad label"

[schizononagesimus]

yo can we actually talk about harrow's blood face paint and veil at the beginning of htn for a sec. i know a lot of people poke fun at it but for me as someone who grew up in a veiling religion with the constant threat of that veil being taken away it's like... not being able to wear that veil IN FRONT OF PEOPLE? that's like being naked before god. it is terrifying and traumatic to not be able to wear a veil or other religious garments. at the end of the day it's not even about god specifically, like i could meet god and even if he said to take off the veil i wouldn't, because it's for me. it's for her before it's for god. i felt for harrow so hard at that part of the book and i get that she's just a scrungle but i would love if we could portray occasionally the nauseating forced vulnerability and sense of injustice you would feel at your religion being stripped from you.

[seeliekid]

logan w/ a mutant reader BUUTTTTT

OK BUUUUUTT. imagine a reader w/ an angel mutation that’s been around since like the dark ages/medevial period and is lowkey the reason as to why christianity is a thing. like was just flying out in the open one day and people spotted em and was like “omg i love it” and bam.

BUUUUTT reader did in fact meet logan in the 70s and did in fact hook up with him but due to the fact logan doesnt remember shit — he doesnt recognize em when he “re-meets” them at xavier’s school. why is reader there, you ask? well after a life full of doing whatever the fuck they want and never dying, they figured they could have a somewhat peaceful life with other people like them!

BUUUUTTT theeeennn once logan and reader get together theyre the freakiest couple in existence because reader lowkey likes getting logan’s claws involved in bed. and each time logan manages to scratch reader, the rachis of each individual feather of their wings dig into logan’s skin!

aka logan with an older reader because mmmm i love when old meets older

𖤍

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

Does it ever hit you that Martha sat down in New New York and told the Doctor that she needed his honesty more than she needed to go home and that religious music played in the background at that scene and it was almost framed as a confession, in the most religious sense, and go a little bit feral? That as early as her third episode, she was framed as his equal, equally divine, equally a doctor, able to confront him, able to make him honest, able to sympathize with him, able to abide with him? That so few companions have ever spent so much time in one time period with the Doctor (1969/1913, for example), being with him/her, not running, just staying? That for every fucking thing Ten did wrong as John Smith/after coming back to himself in Human Nature/Family of Blood, he trusted her enough to leave himself vulnerable and human in her care, because he trusted her as a Doctor, because she was just as much a Doctor as he was? That Martha was, more than any other companion of the Tenth Doctor's, his equal, that her final speech about not being second was not just talking about her not being second best to Rose but about being second best to him? That she finally understood what had been true from the moment that they met and she closed Stoker's eyes and the Doctor realized that she had not just bravery and cleverness but a kindness that he had forgotten, that Martha Jones, more than anything else, has been and always will be The Doctor?

[louisegluckpdf]

maaaan i'm not even heated about it because i should've known better but i wish i could post about the bible as a cultural and literary document without weirdos flocking to my blog 😔 i've always loved the storytelling of the bible (even though i left the church!) and there's so much to unpack when you view it as a piece of literature instead of a piece of scripture! but alas........oh well theres other books

[youprivilegedfucks]

Hatchetfield shows as metaphors for how humanity is harming itself:

TWDLM: we are killing our planet and everything is our fault

Black Friday: capitalism and consumerism and empty-promises politics are bad but we keep not doing anything about it

NPMD: adults aren’t helping or listening to kids and using religion to cover/push away things you don’t want to talk about is actually really harmful and does have consequences

[death-of-cats]

Jon II, ACOK

Davos II, ADWD

Bran III, ADWD

A Ghost in Winterfell, ADWD

Theon I, TWOW

Theon as blood sacrifice to the Old Gods.

[kipotz]

The thing about being a secular israeli jew on tumblr. Is that while the jewish culture of american seculars gets muddled with american christian culture (which is FINE. I'm not doing jew replacement theory. Assimilation is a normal process), and almost all the diaspora homies on here are orthodox or reform jews (along with some of the israelis but not a majority) it feels really confusing when ya'll talk about the religious aspects of your judaism. I am entirely jewish. My identity is built around my judaism as one of it's core elements. But also wjat the fuck are you guys talking about i have no clue what any of this religion stuff is! And i don't feel less jewish but it's so confusing lol

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

Ted saying that no driver has had this level of attention on them since Michael Schumacher...

Gentlemen, a short view into the past; Max's debut season, his Red Bull debut, the literal rule changed as a result of his debut in the sport... oh and everyone and their mother calling Kimi Max 2.0 and Toto's second chance at signing debut!Max since he failed the first time around...

[splatoon-confession-box]

Seeing Christians use splatposts to shove Christianity onto people is depressing and it’s worse that seeing among us crew mates or other memes.

[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.

[gossippool]

fuck it 1.5k words of logan exposition that's part of the first chapter of an unpublished fic i won't be done with anytime soon. this backstory is partially inspired by the origin comic. tw mentions of violence, death, child death, self-harm etc. etc.

-----

The first time Logan killed an innocent, he was ten years old. He could name many moments in his life that felt monumental—'canon events', or whatever shit Wade calls it—but if he really had to name a point of no return for him, it would be then. All the way back then. He wonders about fate, often. If it was possible that things could ever be different. Then he remembers. His past comes back to him in flashes still, even after two hundred years. His ribbed, rough bones splintering the skin between his knuckles for the first time, the deafening quiet of the night broken by his howls and his mother’s screams, the gunshot before that, as if all the world had been contained in that one room. Her body underneath his, wounds gaping—maybe her throat, maybe her chest, or her stomach—and guzzling dark, dark wine. His grandfather’s mouth moving, the spit on his tongue. The words made no sound—he couldn’t remember what his grandfather had said, nor what he'd sounded like. But he'd known. So he'd run.

He'd had a decent childhood, before it all. Decent enough that he hadn't thought of life anywhere else, at least, or maybe that spoke of something that was the opposite of decency. Regardless, he'd felt… clean. He hadn't known about his claws then. How could he? His own mutant brother had been cast away, erased from the family legacy, with no explanation as to why. But now his claws resided in him like an itch under his skin, dead weight when he moved. He felt their presence in his fingertips even when they were retracted, and now when he thought back to the before, before he'd had the claws, he thought that maybe he'd felt them then too. He just hadn't known it.

It had been an accident, killing the mother he'd longed to see, the one he'd missed even when she was alive. But it being an accident changed nothing.

He'd been filled with a quiet sort of rage since then, the kind that simmered low in his blood, unnoticable on some days but intrinsically a part of him nonetheless. His anger was its own organ that kept his body running unprompted, and if he let himself accept that he was angry, let himself feel it, it took everything in him to not claw his way through the anger. To not claw at himself until he reached bone, to hear the unnatural, inhuman screech of metal against metal.

He'd released it in increments, chopping wood and lugging wheelbarrows and running with the wolves, and beating up the occasional man who deserved it. That was in the early stages, when every exhale released puffs of anger into the cold air.

On bad days—the bad days were the normal days—he wondered if he had been born defective. Not just in his claws, but born to be full of fear and hatred, to not know where to put any of it. Born to reap the consequences of his brother's failures in the form of neglect and frigid silences, of the bond of family only through blood and nothing more. In unleashing himself, he'd become his brother, maybe. A mantle of generational disappointment passed on for him to bear.

On worse days when he hated himself to the point of self-mutilation, he recognised that it may have been inevitable. A buildup of pressured anger in centuries-long microdoses that eventually forced its way through his fissures and burst out of him, destroying everything in its path.

He sits in this bar now, indistinguishable from all the others, unwanted again, always running. He bears the looks and the whispers like a wooden cross, dragging the weight of it on his back down Gethsemane streets—sacrificing himself for what the people feel it right give him, what he knows he deserves: contempt. The bartender pours him another drink with what looks like anger, but also pity. Pity is kinder than anything he’s been dealt for the past few years.

He holds the shot glass like a communion cup, imagines that in it is his mother’s blood. When he drinks it, he thinks forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me of my sins. But he knows he won’t be forgiven. He doesn’t know anymore if he even wants to be. Because his sins have been building up for two hundred years, clawing at each other to get to the insurmountable top. He is sin. Every inch of his body, from the roots of his hair to the skin under his fingernails, has been stained with blood that he has washed off over and over again but still feels. If he’s forgiven, if all his sins are taken away, he doesn’t know if there would be anything left of him but metal and a hardened heart.

It may absolve him of some guilt, he thinks, if he could say he remembers them all—all the people he’s killed, all the ways he killed them. He doesn’t. They hadn’t been important enough to him then, besides the life that they held in them that he starved to take away. And when his claws pierced through their flesh and muscle and bone, he drank up the lifelessness in their eyes like morphine. The high kept him alive, and rotted his insides. It quenched his thirst, but it didn't make him feel good. Then again, when does addiction ever?

He can't even remember the X-Men. When he had, when they'd crossed his thoughts in passing when they were alive, he could see them clear as day in his mind, vivid in saturation and detail. Now when he tries thinking of them, all he sees is questions written in blood.

He does remember one of them, vaguely, of those he's killed. All of his past is a blur now, memories seen through a fogged-up window or in a yellowing photo album. But this one he sees with slightly more clarity: a girl with dark skin and darker hair, a carbon copy of her mother. He'd killed them both twice over. It was the first time he killed a child.

And he remembers her because he’d liked it when he killed her. The tabooness of it, the special sanctity of a child's life that he had forced away, so easily. Something that people hardly dare to do. Look, he remembers yelling, to dead bricks and corpses in a dead-end alley. I'll fucking show you. They’d thought he couldn’t go lower than he already had. They'd thought they couldn't hate him more. They had no idea what he was capable of.

He remembers her screams, bloodcurdling but still unmistakably a child’s, and then her eternal silence. He remembers her mother's begging, his own mother's begging. He remembers that he had not felt an ounce of guilt in that moment, nor remorse, nor any of the gravity of her life.

Now whenever he drinks, he drinks enough to kill himself a little, in remembrance of her.

Not that that's the only reason. Because underneath it all, despite it all, through it all, he is nothing but a selfish bastard. And it's fucked up, he knows it is, but when he stopped killing people it had felt like withdrawal. More potent than any withdrawal he could get from drugs like a normal person. It was a withdrawal he's stuck with because he's more tired of kiling people than he is thirsty to sate his urge. Not the urge to kill—just the thought of it now makes him sick, clogs his throat with blood—but the urge to take all his despair and anger out on something. Everything. And oh, he's tried. Not even killing the world and filling oceans with blood was enough.

So he drinks, because nothing can satiate that urge, and the alcohol makes him forget that it even exists. You can't think about anything when you're blackout drunk. You can't see how other people look at you when you're passed out. But even in unconsciousness his body remains wound tight and tense, and he wakes up sore through every muscle.

He doesn’t believe in God, but he’s lived long enough to know enough. And he knows that God wouldn’t differentiate between the good and bad people he's killed. Blood is blood is blood. The blood of the innocent mixes with the blood of the evil, turning the lake a plagued, undrinkable scarlet all the same.

And this isn't a children's book, a bedtime story, a movie where everything gets wrapped up in a nice little bow and they all live happily ever after. He fucking wishes.

All of it remains in the back of his mind like a prowler, laying dormant and ready to pounce, when Wade drags him out of that bar; when he decides to save that asshole's timeline; when Laura tells him he's the wrong guy until he isn't; when Wade says he's the best Wolverine. He looks around him, and all the world is still black and white and bleeding red.

[my-name-is-apollo]

Phemonoe, the Pythian priestess on why the Delphic oracle has grown silent:

"...or perhaps Apollo, determined to exclude the guilty from his shrine finds none in this age worthy of opening his closed lips."

- Lucan, Pharsalia (Trans. A. S. Kline)

...

Internal screaming

[bizlybebo]

anyways since it’s the holidays shout out to religiously traumatized people, people questioning their religion, people who just got out of their religion, people considering getting back into their religion, people who miss their religion even if it ended up hurting them, people who never practiced religion, people who have practiced religion their whole lives, and people who don’t celebrate christmas/celebrate other holidays because of their religon

and FUCK the mormon church