#religion ///

[illustratus]

The Angel of Death by Evelyn De Morgan

[dailyeffectiveprayer]

Trust me... God won’t let you down! He will bring justice. He will pay you back for what you have lost or was stolen. While you wait, be thankful and know that God’s timing in your life will be perfect.

[soup-mother]

it really is hard not to block people doing the "those people aren't really Christian" thing over like homophobic or transphobic Christians.

yes i get that you're trying to be supportive and show that Christians can be supportive, but you're literally just changing what counts as Christian so you don't have to be associated with the bigoted ones. that's not actually helping anyone, it just speaks to your own insecurity

[hed-romancer]

the comments on this post ("but what about X? They deserve to be locked up forever/killed!") are eerily reminiscent of what Christians will say to me every time i explain that I can't believe in a god who is all-loving and all-powerful but still sends people to hell ("But sinners choose to go to hell! If they didn't want to, they shouldn't have done what they did!" and the omnipresent, " But what about Hitler?").

systematically, a majority of this country has been taught to be uncaring to the suffering of people who are deemed "unrepentant sinners" since they were young children.

when i expressed doubts on hell being fair as a kid, I was told to just "trust god". hell was useful as a tool for scaring people into believing in god and doing the "right thing", but as soon as you question the ethics of it, you're told to just have faith. similarly, prisons are useful as a tool for scaring people into following laws they might not have otherwise followed, but as soon as you question the ethics of it, you're told "but some people deserve it" and to have faith that it can be reformed (it can't).

Prison abolition isn’t a solution to interpersonal harm. It’s meant to be a solution for the violence of prisons.

[fuckyeahreligionpigeon]

[stumpyjoepete]

My favorite religious beliefs are the ones that neither make a lot of sense nor follow from a straightforward reading of the canonical texts. Dumb ideas that only a very clever person could have come up with.

Top three that I can think of off the top of my head (please add more):

Rabbi Isaac concluding that Melchizedek (a guy who shows up in all of two sentences) must have born circumcised, since he's "salem" (perfect) but was born before the promulgation of the commandment he would have needed to follow in order to be so. Really have to peel back the layers of the text to figure this one out. *ducks*

Immaculate conception. One reading of this is that theologians painted themselves into a corner with original sin and came up with a superfluous non-solution to their self-imposed problem. I guess the other reading is that the Catholic church rejected the Gospel of James as scripture and then canonized its views 1400 years later, as a meditation on the divine mysteries of paraconsistent logic.

What happens when two exclusive cannibals have a baby?: 1. Aristotle thinks most of the aspects of the mind/soul must be physically embodied to exist. The exception is the intellect, but it's unclear whether this "intellect" is compatible with the folk notion of a soul (e.g., personal memories persisting after death). 2. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) answers in the negative. We all have immortal souls, but they're actually just the same soul. All the personally distinctive stuff is the (mortal) body. 3. Thomas Aquinas hates this, but is wedded to Aristotelian philosophy. I can't say I understand his synthesis, but he does insist on a belief in the bodily resurrection in the end times. The embodied parts of your mind/soul are ultimately restored to you; it's only mortal in the short term. 4. Ok, but what happens if you lose an arm? Well, what happens if you lose an arm and someone else eats it? {increasingly elaborate thought experiments about cannibalism and resurrection}

[insvnitx]

Ibn Uthaymeen رحمه الله said:

“If a person were to guide you to the road leading to a city you intended to reach, you would consider that a favor they have done for you. So how about the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, who guided you to the path leading to Paradise? It is his right upon you that you send blessings upon him. Peace and blessings be upon him.”

(Fatawa Noor "ala al-Darb, 210/12)

[shesalewa]

Woah, I didn't know they modernized Jesus and Judah

IS THIS YAOI DOOMED ENOUGH FOR YOU?! IS THIS WHAT YOU PEOPLE WANTED?! 😭

[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.

[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.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[ondonasand]

Look man, I just firmly believe in Transubstantiation of the Flesh, and that I am literally, not metaphorically consuming the body and blood of Christ, the Risen Lord and Savior.

Unlike those godless protestant heretics.

He was in th e middle of explaining catholicism to you and you burped without covering your mouth

[nando161mando]

[politijohn]

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[dailyeffectiveprayer]

Someone said the greatest stress reliever in the world is trusting God.