#religious morality

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"If the only thing keeping you from being a horrible person is your religion, you are already a horrible person."

You're not "good," you're just obedient.

How is it that you have never figured out the best way not to be hurt by others is to not hurt others yourself? Even chimps figured that out.

[vegetabletaxi]

this is just a bunch of text and barely a comic sorry, but i really wanted to talk about this stuff even if i don't have the energy to properly draw

[wendel-luxes-worldly-wondering]

Welcome to Wendel Lux's Worldly Wondering, a place where we'll explore the intersection of philosophy, spirituality, and the human experience. In this inaugural post, we'll be delving into the pitfalls of a leaning on a religious morality mentality. Is it possible that the very structures meant to guide us can actually hinder our growth and understanding of the world around us? Please, take a moment and ponder, as we unpack this complex topic and challenge ourselves to think beyond the confines of traditional beliefs.

A religious morality mentality can be comforting, providing a clear-cut set of guidelines for how to live one's life. However, it can also lead to a narrow and unnuanced worldview, where anything that doesn't conform to one's beliefs is seen as 'other' or even 'wrong.' This can create divisions, foster intolerance, and limit personal growth. Blindly adhering to a set of rules without questioning them can hinder one's ability to empathize with others and develop the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate our complex, ever-changing world. It's essential to find a balance between holding onto one's beliefs and being open to learning from diverse perspectives and experiences.

In a world that's constantly evolving, it's crucial to question our beliefs, empathize with those who are different, and strive for personal growth. This doesn't mean abandoning one's faith or values, but rather, being open to learning from diverse perspectives and experiences. As the poet Rumi said, 'Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will meet you there.' Let's start a dialogue in the comments below, and let's wonder together.

[thewitchfarhan]

Religious Absolutism vs Religious Pluralism

I have a new benchmark by which I judge Religious and Spiritual Traditions.

If a religion, religious tradition, or spiritual tradition teaches/preaches Religious Absolutism* - then congratulations! This tradition is an organization that seeks to control and dominate humanity, and in my eyes these organizations are to be avoided at all costs.

*Religious Absolitism is the belief that all of humanity should follow only one religion. It is the idea that only one particular religion is considered true or valid, and asserts that all people should adhere to that specific faith.

For those who may have this objection; it doesn’t matter if you personally believe in Religious Absolutism. If you align with a religion that does, then you are supporting its beliefs and are just as guilty as the religious authorities you may or may not agree with.

As an example: The Catholic Church teaches that everyone on Earth should convert and become Catholic - and that this Religious Absolutism is the only way to achieve peace on Earth.

If you call yourself a Catholic, then you are vocalizing your alignment and support of the Catholic Church and its doctrine.

Don’t agree with Religious Absolutism? Don’t agree with what the Catholic Church teaches? Then don’t call yourself a Catholic!

Religions should exist as a choice - as one of many valuable ways to connect with the world, the cosmos, and divinity. I am a firm believer in Religious Pluralism* not only spiritually but morally and ethically.

*Religious Pluralism acknowledges the validity of multiple religious paths and promotes coexistence and mutual respect among different faith traditions.

Saying or believing that everyone should choose or be forced to “choose” the same religious or spiritual path is disgusting, controlling, and all around evil.

[spyroz]

if anyone needs help identifying things that can become moral scrupulosity OCD obsessions/compulsions, heres a list of some i've experienced:

rereading your posts/texts over and over

checking your notes and/or followers list frequently to "make sure" bad actors aren't interacting with you

checking OP's blog before interacting with posts

compulsively opening a social media tab to look at your notifs and then closing it, over and over

fearing ways that things you say/do (or don't do) could be taken in bad faith. being anxious that your words/actions will be misconstrued as morally wrong, bigoted, rude, or aggressive

feeling guilty or obsessing over whether you should or shouldn't have reblogged a post

feeling like you aren't "allowed" to disengage from online discourse or unfollow people who post it

fearing you're being stalked, talked about, or called out behind your back. fearing you'll never be forgiven and that people might even celebrate your disappearance or death, even though you havent done anything wrong

searching your own name/username to see if anyone is actually talking about you

imagining defenses you would make against nonexistent heinous accusations or arguments against you, to prove that you didnt do it

feeling like you have to roll over and become a doormat when others are cruel to you, because it could cause strife if you do anything other than grovel or apologize

having trouble enforcing your own boundaries out of fear that they are somehow "wrong" or unethical

ending up surrounded by people who have all the "right opinions" but are super mean and unpleasant, and make you feel like you have to walk on eggshells

fearing that just HAVING moral ocd makes you a bad person somehow (for example, i often fear that having moral ocd is somehow pushing a 'stranger danger' or misanthropist agenda, even though i actually have a lot of faith in my fellow humans)

some of these bullet points are not inherently bad on their own, but if you find yourself having this kind of anxiety very often, that's not normal, and it's time to get offline or even seek professional help if it's impacting your life

this list is catered to how online culture influences moral scrupulosity, it is not indicative of how everybody's moral scrupulosity functions, and it is not exhaustive

[autisticrosewilson]

You're all fucking wrong about Catholic Jason he wouldn't feel guilt about Jack shit, ESPECIALLY not killing. He would get the All-Blades and be convinced that this is God's go ahead and divine confirmation that he's right about everything and all of his opinions are valid and everyone who opposes his worldview is a moron blinded by idealism and naivete.

[jellyfishhhhhhhhhhh]

nobody:

me: *likes a post*

my ocd: was that post you liked actually good? what if that person is secretly bad and people find out and then you're a bad person by association because you liked their post? what if this post has secret dogwhistles that you don't know about? and by liking it that means you agree with it! reread it 30 times until all the words don't even seem like words anymore and the meaning is mush! what? you can't tell if it is a bad™ post? see, you actually are a bad person because a good person would be able to tell. you are going to hell now! you need to think at least 5 'good' things so you can counteract your eternal damnation!!! now now now now NOW NOW NOW!!!!

[bunnieswithknives]

hey in ur peri animatic: (https://youtu.be/OCqlRuDaXYU?si=K52WDu_vw9rg7chz) that I have been permanently obsessed over since today and have watched about 20 times by now so much that I have drawn & posted stuff based on it what was that partial bug form peri had?

I haven’t watched either of the show btw so if it’s explained in the show please tell me plsssss

OK, SO the bug thing is not technically canon to the series. It's based on my own headcanons for fairy biology, but i do have justifications for it!! Fairies have very strong shape-shifting abilities, so it would make sense that the form they show to humans isn't necessarily their true form(not to mention extreme that mimicry is very common in insects). And you want to know the visible traits almost every fairy has in common? Being very small with Insect-like wings.

The fact that their humanoid form isn't their true form in actually confirmed in the show! Cosmo and Wanda are revealed to look like biblically accurate pseudo-angels in the museum episode. (I say pseudo angels because the Flaming Sword of Eden is only debatably sentient and I don't think is considered an angel. Ophanim are also debatably not angels because they don't have wings (sorry for the angel tangent I like angels))

So wouldn't their true forms be angelic then? Well, yes. But I like bugs so. Also I have more headcanons to justify myself. I like to think that they have both a true-true form (incomprehensible to the human brain, probably exists mostly in a dimension invisible to us, that looks how we imagine biblically accurate angels), and a fairy form (which is visible to humans but is naturally very insect like and tends to scare people). So, in order to interact with humans, they have to learn to shapeshift into a humanoid form but will occasionally slip if they get too relaxed/aren't careful, hence the mandibles coming out when he yawns!

The reason they struggle so much more with human forms than the animals or objects they typically turn into is that, well, they aren't trying to convince those animals or objects. The more human they try to look, the harder it is to keep up convincingly. If you turn into a really uncanny squirrel, only other squirrels will notice. If you turn into a really uncanny human, they form a lynch mob and burn you at the stake.

[scrupulosity-comics]

jock lifestyle: 1

the inner self-loathing masochistic monk that lives in my brain and tells me what to do: …also 1?

[certifiedstrawberryblonde]

Guess who is obsessed with moral orel that’s right it’s literally me. Who else’s would it be ho.

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

y'all need to get a grip. you blab all day about how much you hate bigots and hateful people and how evil it is to dehumanize anyone and then you turn around and say "kys" and "i think [x] should all just kill themselves" and other disgusting, violent and childish trash

so many people on here are just full of hatred and vitriol and turn into frenzied sharks anytime the target 'deserves it' and they think they can get away with it and not be called bad people. then they whine about how sad it is that we can't all just get along and if only all the evil people in the world would stop doing evil things wouldn't that be nicer

you're just as vicious, hypocritical and fanatically puritanical as the caricature you have made in your minds of the people you think you have nothing in common with. if you've ever told someone, ANYONE to kill themselves you're not advocates of justice, you're not artisans of peace, and you certainly don't have any moral high ground that would allow you to pass judgment on others

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Atheists like you should be gassed. Hopefully Trump goes far enough to make that legally while I disagree with Nazis on many things getting rid of scum is a good idea

Wow, that must be all that love and morality we hear religion imbues followers with.

The fact you feel totally comfortable and believe yourself to be on the higher moral ground shows how poisonous religion is.

Ladies and gentlemen, gather around and look at it. Look closely at it. This is religion. This is what it does to you. Pity it, laugh at it, remember it, take it as a cautionary tale. #ReligionNotEvenOnce

But most importantly, make no mistake that this is what is out there, what we have to contend with. And remember it when you ask yourself whether it matters if we oppose this poisonous superstitious drivel. Because this is what they promise. And when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.

What's interesting though is that you've been in my inbox before, and I both mocked and blocked you. Yet here you are stalking me again. You clearly have an obsession with me, perhaps even all atheists.

"Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite." -- Christopher Hitchens

Sounds more like you're a self-hating closet atheist. It's only a matter of time.

And people ask me why I say that religion is a mental illness. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️

P.S. Reported for making direct threats.

[beebfreeb]

In one of my older Judgement Boy posts someone left the tag "Oh this guy has DID for sure" and at the time it was not intentional but *grits teeth really hard* now it is. Don't worry about it.

[localratwithcowboyhat]

💥I’m a church‼️

(Tap for better quality)

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

guy who so desperately tries to find god. who wants to have faith in a higher authority to guide him out of the hole he's in. from the weight of guilt from simply existing, as the person he is. but every time he thinks he's answered his higher calling it turns out he's made the Morally Incorrect choice and his path to goodness and holiness was the road to the devil all along

[odinsblog]

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.

The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject.

The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.

(continue reading)