#religion /////

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[bebs-art-gallery]

Flood Destroying the World (1866)

— by Gustave Doré

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jireš, 1970)

[theoscrupulosity]

Ok, now seems a good time as any to say

Donald Trump is the antichrist.

There are so many things that point to this. Like his assassination attempt. In the Bible, it says the antichrist was cut and half then made whole again, right? The Bible has a history of metaphors, so they likely didn't mean literally.

And, Trump is religious. He's on religions side. This was bound to happen to.

Pray, people, do good things. Repent. I won't, because I'm a hypocrite, but get into Heaven.

new reason to stay alive: outlive the trump presidency. In fact, outlive Trump. He isn’t immortal. We can live to see the day he's guaranteed to never be in office ever again and we can make sure he knows that he'll never have enough power to kill you

stay strong, friends, this isn't your fault

[witchrealms]

(x)

[dailyeffectiveprayer]

Dear God, I'm thanking You before it even happens.

[yameoto]

and christ, forgive these bones i’ve been hiding

[theunrealkptano]

My honest opinion is that we'd be better off with Christians who actually give a fuck about people being able to live happy, fulfilling, and secure lives wielding a vorpal theology that can eviscerate fundamentalist "christians", strangling* them with the wretched doctrines that flow out from their severed bellies, and leave the hollowed out husk of Evangelicalism at the city gate to rot as a warning to Christians who would dare to flirt with social dominance again ... ... Those same Christians need to be able to turn around and wield that same theology as the embodiment of humility and love the gospel requires toward the suffering and outcast. You know, Christlike Christians. Sure atheist commentary would be great, so would any support from any religious person who gives a shit what happens to people. The truth is, that we need to clean our own house. The problem is, most "christians" will read something like this and be offended that I said "fuck", rather than breath in the breath of God breathed fresh air that pneumatically energizes a Christian in faith toward every good work. To you I'd like to say, your savior will not recognize you - only darkness lies ahead for you. *chill bbygrl this is not literal.

We need the obnoxious atheists back. I know they engineered their own destruction by being annoying and pretentious, but it has become apparent how essential to the ecosystem they were. The religious fanatics have become too bold without their natural predators. Jesus wojaks would have been torn to shreds in 2011.

[toffeenutcrunchlatte]

[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]

[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:

[dailyeffectiveprayer]

If someone is on your mind, pray for them. God may have put them on your mind for a reason.