#i'm not jewish i just have a great deal of respect for the faith and the culture

[simptasia]

antisemitic trekkies have a staggering amount of gall

[queer-geordie-nerd]

I really hesitated about whether I should write this or not and I'm still unsure, tbh, because this really, really isn't about me and as a goy, I know I have the enormous privilege of being able to, if I so chose, to be quiet and go back to my normal, unperturbed life.

In the months that I've taken a vocal position on my blog - condemned antisemitism, both overt and less so, and advocated my support for the Jewish community, both in Israel and in diaspora, I have had appalling amounts of hate mail, I have had people and fandom blogs I enjoyed interacting with unfollow and block me, and I've seen people I had a great deal of respect for enthusiastically support rape and terrorism as "resistance" while completely believing they have the moral high ground and I'm some evil genocide supporter who should kill myself.

And I don't regret for one second the stance I've taken, because I feel to not have done so would have gone against everything I believe to be right, but sometimes I just feel so very sad about it all, that talking about and advocating for people facing horrific persecution is somehow so deeply unpopular that warrants such reactions. I feel like I've lost so much of the joy that I had being in certain fandom spaces and I've definitely lost faith in a lot of people.

And absolutely none of this even comes anywhere close to the daily betrayals and terror that Jewish people around the world are facing every single day and I feel like even saying any of this is taking up space that I shouldn't be, but I'm just so sad.

[lvebug]

DNA. -What was your muses home life like?

I FORGOT TO ANSWER THIS I AM SORRY

her home life is very lovely! andie's fortunate to have always grown up in a great home. i'm going to focus just on her time with her uncle (which is most of it) but it was lovely with her parents too. being unexpectedly in charge of raising his 7 year old niece at 25 and while also dealing with the grief of losing his sister is not what tommy had expected for his life, but he steps and does the best he can. it definitely makes for an unusual home life, as he doesn't act much like a dad, but he ends up having all the best traits for a parent. he's open & honest with andie and even at 7 treats her with respect. in part because he doesn't quite know how to treat a child so he just treats her like... a person.

the jewish faith was something very important to andie's family and andie's life before her uncle, and it falls away somewhat when she goes to live with him. they only rarely do a very simple shabbat and mostly only participate in the biggest, most common holidays. but the ideals are still there. tommy's a firefighter and everything about that is already promoting the ideals of helping others and healing the world. (tangent about his being a firefighter is it means andie's got odd hours by herself sometimes. the fire station is very accommodating and tries to give tommy as regular shifts as possible, but andie also comes to grow up in part at the station and in part just by being watched by a community of her dad's peers who all are great babysitters.) but tommy also encourages charity work & helping those in need. it's something that they do together a lot. overall it's a hectic, loving and good life.

[bleakbluejay]

Free-write: Relationship with Religion

Suggested by @apollos-olives <3

Most of my life, I was very neutral on religion. My family was Christian by default, as it often is in the US. We didn't really go to church or pray before eating or talk about faith, we just passively identified Christian. My Nana (great-grandmother who did a lot of the raising me) was Presbyterian, some of my extended family is Catholic, some of my extended family is Jewish, my dad was Wiccan during my childhood, my mom's mom is Baptist. I didn't go to church, unless a babysitter or my mom's mom took me. The one time I can recall praying as a child was when I was 5, huddled under blankets asking God to protect me from ghosts (one of my biggest fears and biggest triggers of my psychosis).

However, when I got older, and learned more about other faiths and other people's relationships with faiths, and started making more observations myself, I started to connect with god.

One of my favorite bands since I was 15-16 years old, mewithoutYou, comes from a mixed background, with their songs diving into Sufi, Jewish, and Christian themes and imagery. The way mewithoutYou talks about religion and divinity struck me in a very personal way and inspired me to think about religion further.

From my personal perspective, I do believe in Something. It's not my business to know what that Something is. I call it the fates, I call it luck, I call it god. I can "feel" that Something inside of music and nature and the connections we have between each other, so those three things are sacred to me, and I try to nurture them as best as I can. Make music loudly, respect nature quietly, and love everyone with everything you've got. I believe that Something can send messages to us sometimes, in dreams or symbology -- whenever I'm feeling extremely unwell mentally, I often happen to see blue jays (which I feel extremely attached to), as an example. For the afterlife, I lean into reincarnation. At least part of the way. Something about old souls and young souls, y'know?

I've thought about joining an organized religious structure for the sense of community. I've leaned towards Judaism as the philosophies of Judaism suit me better than most others. I was talking with a rabbi about "conversion", but with the whole disabled situation, I couldn't go to see him without risking my health. It was an hour walk, for an abled person, from the nearest bus stop. Perhaps it's something I'll investigate in the future when I have more autonomy.

I think that's all I have to write at present. If you have comments or questions, you know my inbox is always open. I love to talk about stuff and I love thinking about things in a focused way (as opposed to the thousands of hamster wheels of thought I usually deal with). This free-write wound up less a free-write and just a write but, hey, as long as my fingers are going.

[nightcoremoon]

kinda wanna celebrate hannukah and other jewish holidays for no other reason than to help normalize it and pave the way for actual jews to celebrate it in my area because I'm gentile (I've got some jewish lineage but it's like an eighth to a quarter if that, I'm just white) but despite all of that I still have great respect and empathy for their culture and beliefs and they deserve to have as much leeway with their faith and stuff as the christians and christian atheists do with christmas. this may just be the satanist [temple not church, fuck lavey] in me talking but every religion deserves the same equal rights and if they're gonna cram xmas down everyone else's throats they better deal with me acknowledging the holidays of not only the pagans and jews but also the muslims, buddhists, hindus, sikhs, shinto, etc, I'd even say the pastafarians too if their belief system wasn't just a front for their antagonistic atheism and was a real faith. and fuck all the cult religions; calvinists, mormons, fringe protestants, white catholics, etc. those aren't real and deserve no respect or protection

[aro-dynamic]

hey! i was scrolling through the notes here and i think it's been a while, but you seemed to be asking in good faith so i wanted to add another two cents. the post is about people who don't care about their friends and are just pretending to be friends to preach to them, but you brought up a different situation and a good point imo! i wrote a very long post because that's just what i do, but i can summarize if needed. :)

you're right that if you're (general you) an evangelical christian and you make genuine non-christian friends and you want to bring the gospel to them so that they're saved, that can be an act of love. it must feel like a terrible burden to worry that most of the world might be damned; as an ex-evangelical christian, i imagine my immediate family's secular life fills my aunt with great sadness. i don't have belief in as fixed an afterlife as the christian heaven, but i'm an irish polytheist and my partner is a hellenist raised catholic, so i guess it'd be a bummer not to see them in tír na n-óg. it means accepting death of a loved one as final, and gods know humans have trouble with that.

but back on track, the thing about friendship is that healthy friendships aren't just built on acts of altruistic love or a drive towards the "greater good" of saving someone. those kinds of friendships are the kind that burn out really fast.

respect of boundaries and personal independence/autonomy are just as profound expressions of love, and the thing is, even you believe with every fiber of your being that you're saving someone for eternity, if you push your religion on a friend, you're not respecting them as a person. they might already be pretty confident in their religious beliefs or lack thereof. heck, they might even feel that you're the wrong one! many religions, despite not proseletyzing as much as evangelical protestants, are just as earnest in their beliefs.

and it can touch upon old wounds, too! you don't want to do that to a friend. for many folks, there's been centuries of historical precedent to be wary of folks trying to convert you, whether it ends in pogroms or forced boarding schools. and on the flip side, i personally have a lot of serious trauma surrounding my childhood church as a queer person. if someone kept pushing that with me, even if they believed it was the good and kind thing to do, i don't think i could be friends anymore, for my own mental health.

(i'd say in this day and age, when evangelical churches show up in voting blocs that sway elections and strip people of their rights, that there's a very current justification for this worry, unfair as it may seem.)

a big part of friendship is built on another kind of faith, too- the faith that a person we love will do what's best for themself. you can encourage someone to seek therapy or end a relationship or quit their soul sucking job, but you can't do it for them. and likewise, i don't think you can change someone's religion for them without sacrificing this idea that they're their own person. that doesn't mean you can't say that praying helps you deal with stress if they ask! or even that you can't go to church with them if they want to come. though i'd make sure the week's sermon isn't gonna be on how awful nonbelievers are, cause a conversion through fear and manipulation isn't the best conversion, or the best friend move.

i once got accused during my bible study program that i didn't love my jewish best friend enough because i didn't want to evangelize to her, knowing her religion was just as important to her as mine. my instructor (one of my heroes) told me it'd be on my conscience if she went to hell. so this question feels really personal to me. i guess i want to challenge folks to treat friendships as multidimensional. knowing when to back off should be just as much an act of love as many envision sharing the gospel to be.

tl;dr disrespecting boundaries is a jerk move to a friend, christian or not. don't be a jerk. let people be their own people and love them as they are. that's the least selfish friendship you can have.

something that rly creeps me out…..occasionally ill see videos or articles for christians or christian missionaries that say something like “what you need to do is make friends with non christians and really get them to trust you and THEN you start preaching to them and bringing them to jesus” and that is….man how much would it hurt to know that the only reason someone’s hanging out with you is to convert you to a religion you were never interested in. maybe this is a real friend, someone you really really feel like you connect to, and all of a sudden you cant hang out with them without being scared they’ll bring out the jesus stuff.