#religion ///

[divinum-pacis]

December 25, 2024: Kyiv, Ukraine People wear traditional attire as they mark Christmas Day with a carol-singing event outside St Michael’s golden-domed monastery Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

[fuckyeahreligionpigeon]

[dailyeffectiveprayer]

THANK YOU! AMEN!

[alanfromrochester]

Hanukkah coincidentally starting on Christmas reminds me of when the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic/Protestant formulas for dating Easter happen to have the same result

[witchrealms]

(x)

[bebs-art-gallery]

The Song of the Angels (1881)

— by William Bouguereau

[warde0]

[leche-flandom]

Okay this gave me flashbacks to Nam. First off, my husband and I are raising our daughter without religion. So it was extremely confusing when, years ago, the kid led me a circle of toys she had arranged in front of the fireplace, told me to kneel in it, and tell Santa (via the fireplace) what I want for Christmas. And she that she had already told Santa this way, and she'd give me privacy. Even more unbelievable than that was the fact that I actually did it because it was 2020 and I had nothing else to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cookies represent the body of Santa while the milk represents the blood of Santa

[stormyromance]

Let me tell you I was beyond disappointed after leaving christianity and going to "alternative" spirituality to learn that "alternative" spiritual teachers believe a lot of the same crap about sexist gender roles that the christians do.

[prokopetz]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[heresylog]

I don’t care if you make fun of Catholicism as long as it’s accurate! The best humour has its roots in the truth.

[thewitchofclubs]

I appreciate this post. I don't celebrate Christmas at all anymore. Sure, I'll occasionally visit family if I feel up to it so they can enjoy their holiday with loved ones, but I view it the same as being a guest at someone's house during any other holiday or rite I don't personally celebrate. It's still a religious thing. I'm just viewing it from an outsider POV.

As for the holiday similarities, syncretism is a thing that happens, and has happened throughout all of history. Plenty of pagan religions syncretized or borrowed from cultures they integrated with, traded with, conquered, etc., but we still view them as independent practices.

Don't get me wrong. I also have no issue with people who celebrate it as a day to relax with family, food, and gifts because let's face it, there's not many days that most people get off work / school at the same time. I can't blame anyone for taking advantage of that.

Nor do I have a problem with people who choose to celebrate some combination of holidays because that's what works for them as an individual. But I dislike being told that different holidays are "basically the same thing" when I don't view them that way myself.

'Tis the season to unpack some stuff about Christmas from a minority perspective:

Christmas is a Christian holiday. The fact that many celebrate it in an irreligious way (which is valid!) does not change its origins, connotations, symbolism, nor what it has historically meant for religious minorities.

The idea that Christmas is "secular" (read: neutral) is a product of Christian hegemony and the blindness of many in Christian countries to the permeation of Christianity as "default" culture.

When someone says they don't celebrate Christmas since it's a Christian holiday, it is not actually reassuring or helpful to say something along the lines of "oh well it's just a secular day of family & presents for everyone! So you can celebrate it too!"

Though the above statement is usually well-intentioned, it is often distressing to hear because it is untrue and is erasing our lived experiences. The reflexive effort to make Christmas universal is a cultural reverberation of the millennia-old evangelizing effort to make Christianity universal, and as such, can be very uncomfortable for religious minorities.

[inbabylontheywept]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[soup-mother]

still thinking about "decolonising" missionary work.

the way you decolonise missionary work is by not doing missionary work

the way you decolonise missionaries is like this: