#religious feelings: complicated

[oleandro-drag]

saint sebastian tended by saint irene but they're both drag artists

felt like this might be something this site would enjoy

on stage: oleandro & delfi oraakel, photographer: peroksiid (on ig as oleandro_drag, delfi_oraakel and peroksiid)

[musings-of-a-prodigal]

Any other queer christians essentially feel like class traitors? Especially as someone who's just coming back to my faith for the first time since I came to terms with my sexuality, I kinda feel like I'm betraying the queer community in some way. I love God, but I'm so uncomfortable with institutions, especially since these institutions have had such a large role in oppressing us.

I've found a church I like and that is affirming, but the fact is that churches like mine are the minority. I don't know how to reconcile these things, these parts of me. Am I betraying myself, my community, my very dignity by becoming so invested in these systems with such a vile past and present?

[mpreg-nouveau]

Since I'm in a Kurt Wagner mood...If y'all don't think Kurt Wagner's Catholicism isn't a huge crutch for being abandoned by both his mothers you are dead wrong.

Dude probably has a little figurine of Mary he talks to and prays to on occasion. Hell maybe has his own little collection of them. He fell into the "Mary is every Christian's mother" mindset hard. Probs refers to her as his mom sometimes reflexively. Dude has a rosery on him at all times and probably prays with it whenever he thinks too hard about his abandonment to comfort himself. Knows the Fatima prayer and hail holy queen. Has visited the various Mary centric holy sites and absolutely believes in the story of our lady of Guadalupe, Fatima, and the crying Mary statue.

You can talk shit about the Catholic church all you want to him. Talk shit about God and religion and he will nod along and listen respectfully. You say shit about Mary tho he will stab you.

[andromeda3116]

gah now i'm getting On My Shit about the discworld again and like i've said what i want to say about the witches and the watch but there's also small gods like i will never be over small gods i finished it and i was like... has this... has this healed some of my religious trauma?

if you've never read it, the plot is thus: on the disc, gods get their power from belief. therefore, the more believers a god has, the more powerful they are. and so, there is this god -- om -- who has risen in power, who has a country devoted to His worship, which hunts down and slaughters heretics and infidels, to whom people pray multiple times a day and make pilgrimages to His holy city, which has a huge citadel and huge structure of a complex religion devoted to his worship. and, on a whim, He comes down one day to see how things are going.

and discovers that he has no power.

that, in this country of millions who profess to worship Him with all their hearts, there is only one person left who actually believes in Him.

and there's a lot of meat there, and a lot more plot to delve into, but the core theme ends up boiling down to this:

can you forgive your god for how they failed you?

and do they deserve that forgiveness? how can they earn that forgiveness?

because ultimately, the forgiveness that the messianic archetype is embodying is not that of the god's grace, but of the people's -- to forgive their god his absence. to give their god another chance to be their god.

and whether or not you, in the end, can forgive, it gives you the language to realize that this is what you were asking for with your last prayers. whether or not you can ever go back, whether or not there have been other reasons since that have convinced you further, it gives you the language to accept that your god failed you. and it is not your fault.

this book speaks loudest, perhaps, to those of us who left our church with grief, not with anger. with hurt betrayal, not with the fires of defiance.

it didn't change my lack of religious belief, but it helped me conceptualize my feelings about the church, the things that went deeper than intellectual arguments. about that sense of betrayal, that hurt, that twisted-up knot within me that it had built, and it gave me the mirror within which i could see that i had been failed by my beliefs. it wasn't that i hadn't believed enough, it was that my belief had been betrayed by the absence of an answer.

there have been other reasons since then that have cemented my atheism, but small gods made me stop hating the church i used to love, because it made me recognize why i hated it so much and said "you're not wrong, it didn't have to be this way. you were betrayed and you were failed and you can let it go, now."

[rozugold]

Yeah I wish bein aroallo didn’t feel like the evilest most selfish thing to be. Ah well I’m not gonna think about it and instead live vicariously through my oc <33

[boysborntodie]

You all have no idea how much I think about the ‘Dally has religious trauma’ headcanon

[strifeworks]

day 6: mythology

[ratatatastic]

youre telling me you had a mic on mikksy the entire time and the moment you captured is the one between him and chris in the handshake line... "good luck buddy you have to go win it" [insert the sounds of multiple wailing cats]

the ex ranger narrative compels me and chris craddling mikksys head to his shoulder and his gives him his well wishes...

new york rangers @ florida panthers game 6 | 6.1.24 (x)

[nevermeanttoknow]

i have GOT to get weirder about soul and his religious themes

[skyloftian-nutcase]

What do you think of Hylia? I’ve seen fans paint her as the true villain of Zelda series. Many of which blame her for the reincarnation cycle, and pretty much every bad thing that happened after SkSw’s era.

I have strong feelings about the fandom’s treatment of Hylia, but I’m gonna try to keep this chill.

Long story short, the hatred for Hylia doesn’t make logical sense.

It’s based on the erroneous assumption that Hylia caused the curse (fun fact, if people bothered playing the game they’d see that it was Demise who did it), or it’s based on botw Zelda’s struggles and frustrations because the story is told from her point of view. Oh no!! Hylia is evil because she didn’t listen as Zelda pleaded!! That’s not how prayer works, guys. You don’t get what you want, you get what you need, and Zelda’s major issue stemmed from her father, the pressure on her, her own insecurities, her lack of training and guidance. It’s a two way street to make things work - for all we know Hylia was trying to reach out to her but Zelda couldn’t hear her over the beratement from Rhoam screaming in her head or the whispers of the people echoing in her brain or her own questioning if she could even do it.

So basically, fandom’s Hylia bashing is based on poorly thought out arguments. Also they use characters who don’t even know who she is??? Like, Time, Legend… they have no freaking clue who Hylia is, guys. Her character didn’t even exist when their games were made. Maybe people are trying to make continuity or something, but Hylia was never mentioned in those eras.

Now! Did Hylia do questionable things? Yeah! Yeah, she did! But you know what else she did? She sacrificed herself multiple times to save her people, she fought her own war to protect everyone and the Triforce. She sent people to Skyloft to protect them while fighting alongside those who likely chose to remain. She died in her battle against Demise. She planned on coming back as a mortal, giving up everything she is, so she could finish the job and eliminate the threat. Yes, she used Link - she took a calculated risk, choosing someone with a pure heart who had the fighting prowess necessary if the need arose, and she befriended him. Yes! She used him! It’s messed up! But she also did everything she could to guide and protect him, and she tried to just do it herself without him if she could.

All that being said, sometimes Hylia bashing makes sense in the context of the narrative and the narrator. If your character/narrator has a beef with her for some reason, then yeah, they’re gonna criticize her. Doesn’t make them right about her. 🤷🏻‍♀️ But the idea of the fandom vilifying her is just… stupid.

Sometimes I don’t think it has to do with the stories at all, it’s people venting frustrations they’ve had with religious groups. I can’t fault them for that, but when I see that connection it kind of feels like a smack in the face and really freaking hurts, because God and Christianity aren’t people’s bad experiences, but I’m not opening that can of worms. I can’t control everyone’s experiences and nobody wants to hear me say that just because a person or group of people acted like hateful morons doesn’t mean that’s what Christianity is about. So anyway.

I like Hylia. Demise caused the curse. Hylia was trying to stop him before he even had a chance to utter a word. Demise’s curse led to bad things happening.

[minecraftbookshelf]

Fic Snippet: Complicated Relationships

Religious trauma comes in some interesting flavors when gods walk among you.

random little snippet from The AU In Which All the Marriages Are Arranged that i thought y'all might like

~500 words, canon-typical gods and possession talk, also some referenced murder.

-

Xornoth had been inside Aeor's church exactly once since...since Everything.

It had been the night they'd taken the throne; once they'd talked Scott down from his panic enough to sleep they'd left him in the palace and gone straight to the church. They'd thrown the door open and stormed across the threshold and up the aisle to the altar. Lurching side to side with exhaustion and unfamiliarity with the added gangliness they'd gained from their most recent growth spurt. Trailing mud and blood and the smell of the soot and smoke that was all that remained of their parents' corpses.

The few priests still there had scattered. Even those who had taken their side. Xornoth had ripped the crown from between their antlers and slammed it down on the fine woolen altar cloth, staining the white and gold with the rusty-brown of old blood. Their father's blood.

"If he ever hears your voice the way I hear Exor's," Xornoth had proclaimed through gritted teeth, the heat gathered at their fingertips singeing the fabric. "Then I will burn this place to the ground, grind the ashes into the midden, and turn that statue of yours out there into so much dust."

That's not how it works, you fool! The demon in their head roared in rage, You cannot escape me. And he cannot escape my brother. It is fate! Balance! A Battle forever locked!

Xornoth did not look away from the golden antler crest above the altar. "Do you understand me, Aeor?"

There was no response in words but the atmosphere in the sanctuary shifted, the few candles still lit flickering as if bent by a breeze. A vague sense of acknowledgement rolled over Xornoth's soul and they took the choked off anger from the place in the back of their mind where Exor dwelt to mean it was an affirmative.

Xornoth had never been an elf of many words. They left the heat-warped crown there on the altar, glistening golden in the low lights.

And Scott's mind had always been his own.

His mind but not, apparently, his life, Xornoth thought as, decades later, they once again stood on those same, flawless quartz stairs, a different crown for the same kingdom settled between their antlers, a weight rendered almost invisible from familiarity.

And whose fault is that? Exor sneered. Xornoth ignored him. Turning on their heel to jab a finger at the back of the stag statue's head.

"If I step foot in here and you smite me, Scott will be sad. And he'll have to be king and then he'll never have a full nights sleep ever again and you know it."

They pause a moment. There is no response but there is no roll of thunder either or sudden stormhead over the mountains, so that is probably as good as Xornoth is going to get.

Enough procrastinating. They have a brother to apologize to.

-

AU Masterpost

[gideonisms]

I think there is probably something interesting to be said about how john tries to start the world over and create a new religion but just winds up reproducing the same tropes in the universe he built. Idk I'm not quite sure where she's going with that. I will need to read atn. Definitely something about cycles of trauma playing themselves out at the societal level & interpersonal level, something about the biblical flood probably, religion as a way that people replay certain traumas & themes in their lives

[deservedgrace]

Not to be dramatic but "did you hear about that mother?// broke her daughter's legs in two// and said 'it's too dangerous out there to walk, so I had to save you'" has lived in my head rent free since I heard it and I don't know if I'll ever be the same actually !

[jvzebel-x]

King Kalākaua-- dubbed throughout time as the "Merry Monarch"-- dedicated his life&complicated rule to establishing the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi as an independent power recognized world wide, as well as revitalizing a culture that had been nearly ground to dust under the heel of colonization. Hula-- once publicly outlawed as a deeply spiritual&religious act by the missionaries who spearheaded the war to destroy our culture-- was brought back to the public consciousness by the King, an incredibly accomplished dancer himself.

The Merry Monarch Hula Festival is the most well-known portion of his legacy, and is celebrated by kānaka&lovers of hula all over the world.

Mahalo nui loa, Ke Aliʻi Kalākaua.

[thomasthetankengine]

tumblr "lesbian elder" butches that are never older than 25: baggy loose clothes arent masc. flowers arent masc. open toed shoes arent masc. bright colors arent masc unless theyre boy colors i mean masc colors. any fashion style that isnt mine isnt masc unless its in a black n white photo of a lesbian and if it is then you arent matching the look right so its still not masc.

butches in real life: hey hows it goin

[aropride]

i think the best thing that could happen this election season is if joe biden dies in the next 4-6 months . genuinely