#religious studies rambling

[menlove]

christianity is insane to me bc in like 90% of academic discourse on ✨why is it so violent✨ they blame it on monotheism as a whole and claim monotheism is inherently violent and intolerant and all that is a rant for another day but

I'm constantly just sitting here like

[points at the roman empire]

[nikoisme]

So our professor was talking about guardian angels and stuff during religious class and the way he described it sounded fun. Like,, i have this buddy that tags along with me until death. Makes a disappointed face every time i mess up. Swats at the devil to keep him away from me. Probably keeps me from tripping on a rock and dying. My wingman perhaps. And we travel through heaven and hell for 40 days after my death before i go in front of god or something. Will they hold my hand. Like,, will they coach me and hype me up before the judgement like "you got this" and give me a thumbs up. "God here's the human i've been assigned to watch over" and presenting me all like "don't mess this up".

I don't think my priest would be at all happy with this interpretation LOL

[twoheadedoddity]

John Gaius and the Gospel of John

Ok. Here we go. I've spent the last little bit annotating my copies of tlt in detail, and I've been focusing a lot on the biblical references— especially John's confession chapters in NtN. I'm essentially cross-referencing the verses alluded to in the chapter titles with the actual content of the chapters, and recording some thoughts/observations. Not entirely groundbreaking, but I want to be thorough.

I'm building off of posts by @todd-queen here and here; go read these posts because they exploded my brain. The cipher. wow.

Please bear with me and if you read nothing else, read the entry for the final chapter.

Side note: I'm mostly using the New Revised Standard Version (the one I'm most familiar with) and sometimes the New International Version.

John 20:8

"Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed." (NRSV)

This is the big one—as has been previously pointed out, the fact that Muir got this verse to fit as the first numbers of the cipher AND be so relevant melts my brain. Immediately, connotations of Harrow breaking into the tomb at 10 (the first person to ever so do), seeing Alecto, and wanting to live. She saw and believed.

This chapter consists of John setting up the context for the cryo project, the Earth dying, all that. The main link is how the verse fits with Harrow's story.

John 5:20

"The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished." (NRSV)

John and his crew are trying to buy time amid the projects getting shut down. Their power gets shut down anyway, and miraculously, the bodies that John touches don't decay. This verse speaks to both the first pieces of John's powers and foreshadows the more drastic "miracles" that will come later.

John 15:23

"Whoever hates me hates my Father also." (NRSV)

The crew realizes the link between John, his eyes changing, and the intact corpses. They try to experiment to see if anything will bring about changes in the bodies. Nothing does. He names them Titania and Ulysses. He moves the corpses' hands from across the room for the first time. Not really much to link the content of the verse to the content of the chapter here if you ask me?

John 5:18

"For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God." (NIV)

The crew wrestles with the implications of what John can do—in a way, the idea that John could be chosen in some capacity, or that John can now play at being God. This is also the chapter where they decide to stream on the internet; so, you could maybe say that the verse foreshadows the ways they'll be targeted due to John's actions.

John 8:1

"While Jesus went to the Mount of Olives." (NRSV)

The verse, in context, comes right before Jesus demonstrates to a group how none of them are without sin, and shows mercy/forgiveness to a woman that others were wanting punished.

As for Jod—his little necromancy twitch streamer gig starts to take off. People start coming to him for help or healing or miracles. His words, he's "playing Jesus." Obvious parallels to the sections (such as the above verse and those that follow it) where Jesus is teaching folks and performing miracles. Interestingly, Cristabel intervenes, telling John he's wearing himself too thin and that he's making the same mistakes as Jesus by never turning people down. So John sets a limit to one hour of miracles a day.

The cult really gets going. The authorities turn up. The choice is get taken down or do something drastic. John chooses something drastic—COW WALL. Cow wall scares everyone into leaving the cult alone for a bit. I think, in a lot of ways, this is the chapter that was foreshadowed by the previous chapter's verse, if we really want to draw parallels that far?

John 19:18

"There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them." (NRSV)

John mostly talks about the politics of the FTL program—more funding stuff, the way cryo was dropped, the inconcistencies with the program, the trillionaires rushing ahead with stuff. I'll be honest, I only vaguely grasp the corporate-funding-technology-science-and-capitalism side of John's story. But I don't think there's any link here.

John 5:1

"Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals." (NIV)

^ He goes up for a festival (the KJV uses the word feast, so I keep rotating that word in my brain too) and in the next verses encounters sick people in a pool. He heals one of them.

John faces no consequences for Cow Wall and other crimes. If nothing else, his influence grows. He and his crew have a barbeque and talk about their plans.

At the barbeque, big bright lights go off in my brain that point to the word feast in the KJV. This literally isn't anything. Like I don't think it's a very meaningful connection to make here. But my brain keeps going "I connected the dots!" I didn't connect shit "I connected them!!"

John gets approached by an important organization and he agrees to help them. So now he's remotely controlling the corpse of a big world leader to fool the world into thinking he's alive, in exchange for a lot of money and a city-destroying weapon. Great. Comparison between Jesus' miracles of healing and John's necromantic reanimation "miracles."

"Could you give him a permanent pulse? Could you make it so he bleeds if he gets hurt? Could you fix any current degradation to his corpse? Could he talk, if we wanted him to?" (NtN 271-272). This is a quote that @/todd-queen pulled from the text, and it fits really well.

John 3:20

"For all that do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed." (NRSV)

More FTL stuff. The nomination for that. John finds out that the plans that were progressing for FTL and the evacuations were dubious at best—just trying to make it look like progress. John is furious, and decides to lean into the necromancer-cult-leader-twitch-streamer act even more, gaining even more sway.

I think something could be said for the verse—being all about evildoers hiding and preventing their deeds from being exposed—can be linked to the trillionaires lying and covering up the ways they are interfering with the FTL project/evacuation plans. And how John tries to expose them. I'd be able to give a more concrete argument if I understood the FTL plotline better but for some reason I struggle so bad with it.

@/todd-queen also links it with this quote, about how John and his crew hide the nuke, intending to never let it see the light of day. Which is also a good connection imo. "We kept laughing that it came with a manual. I think we were scared of what would happen if we stopped laughing. We pulled up the floor and put a safe beneath the lino and swore we were never going to use it." (NtN 279).

John 9:22

"His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue." (NIV)

John grows in power. People come to join. It becomes an international sort of crisis. The first violent exchange occurs, and John uses the energy burst from the deaths to commit atrocities. One could link the verse to the various authorities coming after John and arresting anyone trying to join his cult. John certainly would. I hate him so much.

John 1:20

"He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, 'I am not the Messiah.'" (NRSV)

The chapter where everything goes to shit. FTL accelerating their escape attempt to mere days and then hours away. The attempted coup with G1deon and the nuke. John's crew is convinced this is the end; Cassiopeia and Nigella getting married. John reveals that he also has the corpse puppet ready to start a nuclear armageddon, as a backup threat to prevent FTL. Everything goes to shit at the cult compound. Cristabel shoots herself to make John figure out how to work with the soul. Everyone kills everyone else and John starts the apocalypse. Becomes God using the collective souls of the population and that of the earth. Obtains perfect lyctorhood with the earth, creating Alecto. The order of events for the actual nuclear apocalypse are unclear, because John is self-contradicting and a liar.

The actual contents of the chapter are... a lot. All over the place. But it's the most raw and visceral part of John's confession, which kind of fits nicely with this particular verse—given that it's from the section about John's (the Baptist, like, from-the-bible John) confession.

While I haven't covered the alternate ARC chapter numbers, I need to point out that this chapter is John 1:9 in the ARC. "The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world." (NIV). Seems pretty fitting for the chapter where he becomes God and begins the process that will become the resurrection, right?

John 5:4

This verse doesn't exist in the NSRV and many other versions, because in recent translations scholars think this verse wasn't part of the original. It is:

"From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had." (NIV)

The first connection, of course, is John picking and choosing who to bring back. Healing, resurrection. Yeah.

In this chapter John answers some of Harrow's questions. It's hard to tell which bits he lies about, exactly, but Harrow knows that he's full of shit. She decides to find the truth, and find God—probably not John in the end because he's a horrid lying sham—and walks into the River.

Right. Ok. Now back to this verse not being accepted as part of the bible anymore. On one hand, many of the Christian sources explaining its removal talk about how older, more accurate manuscripts do not contain this verse, so it's more accurate for more recent translations to remove it. Interesting. A chapter where Jod is clearly falsifying information being named after a verse that is supposedly not genuine. Tamsyn Muir your game is incredible.

Please direct your attention to this reddit post. The verse could also have been removed to focus attention on Jesus' healing power rather than having an angel also be doing the same thing. The post puts it better than I can, go read it, but essentially: John is trying to focus the attention on himself—the idea that he's the source of the world's power.

Choosing John 5:4 for this final chapter of John's confessional was very, very deliberate. I would like to shake Tamsyn Muir's hand and also ask her oh so many questions.

Final thoughts: I definitely that the main purpose for the choices behind most of the verses were primarily to fit with the cipher. But, where possible, Muir would have wanted them to fit somewhat with the contents of the chapter.

However, where things were very, very deliberate, were the first and last of these chapters—20:8 and 5:4. There is no doubt in my mind that these verses were handpicked for how incredibly relevant they are.

A lot of what I've pointed out has been pointed out by other people as I've mentioned throughout this post. I'm glad to be bringing it all together and freaking out over it, even though I doubt I'm the first to do so.

[twelfth-dykector]

CROWLEY AS AN RE TEACHER!!!! CROWLEY AS AN RE TEACHER!!!! I REPEAT!!!!! CROWLEY AS AN RE TEACHER!!!!!

[yourbodymyarchive]

jon sims is simultaneously a christ-like figure and also an eve-like figure and isn't that crazy? jon wanted knowledge and he was willing to hurt himself by biting into the forbidden fruit, but he wanted to share that knowledge—at least, what he considered relevant to share with others—and it hurt everyone else, in so many ways, and he didn't even feel guilty about it. he doesn't understand that sometimes ignorance is okay. obsessed with knowing everything, obssessed with paying for it. he died and was resurrected and he came back wrong. people looked at him like he was everything the universe needed, like he was going to save them and change their world and give them fear and bread. it's too much for one man to take.

he bit into the apple. he thought it would feel better than being in the dark, but now he's just scared. all the time.

it was too late to make the sacrifice play, at the end. to end it all, so that no one would ever find themself in that beautiful garden again. the complexities of being human and wanting more, all the time.

[catliker49]

Hello again!! Very busy.. 2 weeks until I'm back to Normal! I am progressing on my animation slowly but steadily :o) And then we will back in business and I get to focus on Welcome Home again!! YAY!!!!!!! Ooh speaking of.. my pins came! And I am wearing them on my funny eyeball cardigan, hoohoo...

[starrysharks]

In one post you mention that you needed to make designs for wrath and gluttony (if I read it correctly I think they’re supposed to be parts of the assassins) and I was wondering who are the other deadly sins? (If the answer doesn’t contain spoilers that is, if it does then ig I’ll ask who’s your favorite assassin to draw so this ask isn’t mostly useless)

so there are 7 deadly sins in total, all ranked from least to most formidable/powerful/prolific/etc -

7. vivica de la crux aka envy

6. needles of the church (+ pins) aka sloth

5. dice demonné aka greed

4. lunette strikewhite aka pride

3. V.A. angel aka lust

2. gluttony

1. wrath

you'll notice that dice demonné hasn't been mentioned yet until this point! he's not a spoiler unlike the last two assassins (who are between designs, i've even been considering rebooting their concepts entirely or swapping around their ranking). he's one of the more lighthearted assassins so his sin is expressed pretty literally through a casino, where he's the high roller who makes and wins crazy bets and puts people into bankruptcy!

but, by day, he acts as a priest for the church, who has the same people he cheated the night before come to him confessing their sins and asking for forgiveness. he basically says "pay a tithe and god will forgive you" - when they can't pay any longer, he has them killed. usually it's enemies of the organisation who get put in this trap. (or sometimes in the middle of a game, he'll get pissed and have people killed regardless. witnesses are just given hush money.)

he has a cane to defend himself, but doesn't really fight on his own - he has his two sidekicks to fight for him, just like how needles has pins. (ignore how i forgot to draw kimberly's gun.....) they're nuns by day and casino girls at night!

(and my fav assassin to draw is probably vivica, though i have fun with all of them equally!)

[oilith]

I'd REALLY like to study christianity and the imagery that comes with the different branches. Basically an enormous deep dive. It's something that interests me a lot, although i don't really believe in it myself. I'm already somewhat familiar with evangelical luterism (is that the way it's in english?) but catholic christianity interests me in particular. The extreme cases of religious belief are just something else

[tojisun]

one day i will find the will to write the headcanon banging in my head about military man simon riley x nun!reader, and their unwitting, if not one-sided, parallels with solomon’s song of songs—

but instead of two lovers writing to each other, it’s just simon’s worship brimming from his yearning heart, all of which are unreturned, and how it overflows, unsteady and turbulent but so deceptively innocent because of his eagerness.

“by night on my bed i sought him whom my soul loveth: i sought him, but i found him not.” — a testament of how simon can never have you.

[menlove]

what they don't tell u abt getting into academia is sometimes getting a huge pile of books from amazon about one very niche topic for free can feel like christmas

[cookinguptales]

Thank you so much for the tarot reading you did for me a little while back 💜 i'm sorry it's taken me so long to say that! i do rather think you have prophetic gifts, by the way- it was spookily accurate and helped me a lot 🔮

No problem! I'm glad it was helpful to you!

I do tend to get at least one message like this every time I do a tarot night for my followers, and like... you are totally entitled to that belief! What do I know about psychic phenomena and prophecy anyway? lmao. Maybe I am psychic.

But personally, I believe that tarot has a high likelihood of speaking to us no matter what, if just because the archetypal nature of the cards means that they're dealing with problems that we all struggle with. We all have self-doubt, we all have complicated relationships with money, we all crave love of some kind. We all have trauma in our past and we all want to believe that this time, things could be okay.

One of the reasons I like tarot cards is because they are inanimate objects that we imbue with meaning. They were just playing cards, y'know? We're the ones that gave them power over us, and we did that by filling them with our own stories. We placed a mirror in those cards, and while mirrors can be used for scrying, they can also just be used to take a good hard look at ourselves.

If I say "oh, you've had money troubles in the past," who doesn't that apply to? Maybe I'm thinking about me, when we were homeless for a while when I was a kid. Maybe someone else is thinking about the money they lost to gambling last week. Maybe someone else, someone wildly wealthy, is thinking about a stock market crash that brought their five mansions down to two. Maybe a final person has just never had quite enough to make ends meet. God knows that describes a lot of people.

I like tarot because we can all look at the same spread and see something different. I see a story to tell to the best of my ability, and that's how I do readings. But for the people getting those readings, they're often looking into little mirrors and seeing how they reflect their own personal experiences.

Because, you know, we all see different things in the same mirror! That's how tarot works, I think. Maybe some people are a little better at reading things in that mirror and interpreting what they see there, but we all see something new and different and deeply, deeply personal when we look at those cards.

Love that for us.

[maxisanangrywell]

Winter's Heart

Jessie still remembers the first time she walked over the frozen lake. How it cracked beneath her feet, and instead of it freezing further like it did with her brother's touch, how it melted instead. The cracking and groan of ice, before she fell through to the freezing water below. She remembers how her brother had scrambled to help, pulled her out of the water onto the land, crying out for their mother.

She remembers it all. The worried lines in her brother and father's face as her mother pushed through, taking her into her motherly embrace with a soft smile. She had laughed, pushed the wet hair from her daughter's eyes and kissed her forehead. The clouds cleared, sun shone, and Jessie had felt warmth. The bone chilling freeze, had lifted so quickly, and she felt so warm, she fell fast asleep in her mother's arms, listening to her father laugh, and felt brother's silent stare.

She doesn't know when it happened. The screaming. She just knows that since she was a child her parents had fought. The wind howled and picked up with her father's wrath. Dust devils that they once had played in now turned into violent clouds, whirling and destroying anything in their way. Her mother brought the moon with her cries. Jessie was left to herd her siblings, Jack, Dawson and Danielle into the storm shelter as she braved her way to the altar.

She would watch as the two tore themselves apart. She watched in detail how the glasses would shatter. The beautiful chalices celebrating each momentous occasion starting to crack with each hurl of hail, each gust of wind. The darkness made it impossible to catch before they fell. One by one, ruby chalices fell off the altar, ground into nothing but dust and anguish.

Jessie doesn't remember much. She's the embodiment of Spring. She has to help somehow. That's all she remembers thinking. Naivety, childish. But good hearted. She should have turned, and should have comforted her siblings in the storm shelter. But her parents, what would happen to them if she didn't stop the arguing? The altar would be ripped from the ground, and then? What would happen next?

So she cries out, pleading with the deities that formed her. Why? She cries, begging for a glimpse of sight into what made them so angry. To see if she could fix it. Only the tender age of eleven, and already trying to be a healer. She had been one unknowingly since she was 6, but she hardly remembers it.

The Gods turn to her, and focus their attention. The child is watching. Her mother would say, but her mother and father's anger persisted. The tornado would leave, but as would her Father. The morning would rise as her father returned, but it was always tense. Always unsteady. The atmosphere too humid, too thick to truly breathe in that sigh of relief she craved.

She would be lying if she had said there were no good parts. There had been. Simply too many few and far between. Of course, mother and father would blame her absence for it. She often sought comfort in the Primordial beings that controlled the Void. She spent more and more time there.

One day, at the tender age of 15, she was outcast. Her father's tornadoes and hail, the ones she was weary but admired turned on her. The very things she tried to study, threatened to consume her. Leave her for dead. She felt a shift, had been feeling it for years. Now, threatened with her father's yells and mother's tears, she felt herself truly snap. The air turned frigid, and she felt herself scream. The very foundation shook and crumbled. Her chalice gifted to her slammed off the shelf, broken and cut her arms.

She had returned to the Void, the Rulers had laughed until they saw the wounds upon her arm. They turned onto her parents, but it was too late. Spring fell into Winter. Everything shifted. Her brother that was Winter, forced to adapt. He is now Spring. They didn't visit Jessie often, too afraid of her frigid temperatures, her growing blizzards. Afraid of what their parents would say.

Years pass, and the apologies taste rancid in her mouth. The Void is pushy, and she must apologize to the Gods who smirk. Wasn't it fun, pretending to be an adult, Spring? Her father grins. It's too wide. Too happy. Happy without her, happy without Winter in their lives, fucking it up. She's broken, shattered. Jessie forces a smile, nodding. She doesn't trust herself to speak. How can she? For years she had been told to be quiet. For years she was put on the burner.

There's no apologies for her, but she must apologize for her transgressions. She's the child. She's the one constantly in the wrong. She's the problem. She manipulates people into believing lies. She's the pagan heretic coming to destroy their family built upon honesty. She screams, telling them their altar is misplaced. Their light does not shine on every corner of their kingdom as they claim. They are LIARS. They don't deserve her.

She's forced to apologize. She feels horrible. Constantly dragged into their orbit when she begs to be set free. Communication between them is less, but not as much as it should be. She screams, and shouts, and her Gods mock her. Now, she suffers in silence, with anger brewing inside. The pressure hissing like boiling water in a kettle. She can feel herself winding up like a toy, about to pop about to scream.

She falls.

The joyous Spring now turned to eternal Winter. Threatening to freeze anyone who goes near. Cold, windy. Violent. Like the man who had raised her. Complacent. Like the woman who stayed. Broken. Like the girl who tried too hard to catch the chalices that fell.

She doesn't want to be this way. She's told by the stars above that she is kind, sweet and caring. But how can she be when every time she looks in a mirror she sees the amalgamation of all her father's anger. The negligence of the Gods who had promised to watch her, protect her, then never showed up at all. We were busy! Her Gods scream. We were trying to work the harvest, to provide for you. She understands, but to Jessie it won't ease that hurt. Won't ease the fact that the Gods had shown up at Jack's first prayer. To Danielle's breakfast. To Dawson's aid when he cried out.

Jessie was left alone. Like she had always been. She was strong, she suffered through and prevailed. But she was constantly looking through the blur of wind and snow. Trying to grasp onto any light with scrabbling hands as it faded out because she grabbed onto it too quickly, or held on for too long and tight. So now, she doesn't even walk towards the light. Turning the other way. It's better this way. She says to herself. Being lonely isn't bad all the time. She longs for something to be a part of, to love and be loved in return.

It won't happen. People say they love Winter, but do they? They don't like the ice she brings. The kind where they slip and break bones. They hate the frost, call it annoying. They hate the snow. It's never the right texture to do what they want. Never enough to build a fort, or it's too much. Too watery, or won't pack together for a good snowball. Most of all, it's too cold. It causes joints to inflame. Noses to burn, and people to shiver.

People say they love Winter, they love Jessie. She tries to show them the beauty in the frost. The intricate and elegant designs rival the lace that lined her mother's wedding dress. She tries to show them the ice. How they could fish even still, or skate upon it and play games. She tries to show them how to keep warm. She's good, kind.

Then blizzards come. Light gets low, until it's extinguished altogether. It hurts each time. She's gotten better, doesn't hold the light too close. She doesn't try to save it anymore. She knows it's a lost cause. No one stays after apologies.

She sits, at the lake. Her toes touching the water. She watches it ripple. It doesn't freeze. Not immediately. She sighs, looks up at the Stars. They beckon her to join them. She longs for it. Wants it more than anything. But she turns away. She wants to build an altar of her own. Maybe that would fix her. If she has an altar, if she grows her own harvest.

She looks up at the Stars, and she feels herself melt. Just slightly. Her heart flutters, and she feels a small warmth. She stands, and she uses the water to build a bridge. A Star reaches out, and their fingers brush against each other. She smiles, her eyes wide, reaching for something she always thought was unattainable.

[soupedepates]

Did Mary, young Mary, terrified Mary, know that her love was the love of the Lord bestowed to humankind through her, a humble girl, too young to be a woman, when she looked for the first time at her newborn son?

How would she feel if she saw her love, her pure, powerful, tender maternal love, turnt into the most burning hatred toward your neighbour?

[absoluteocellibehavior]

Shout out to Caravan Palace and Sleep Token for being the only reason I’m surviving these summer courses.

[candy8448]

Maths n RS

Gcse rambles

Bro these are my two least favorite subjects D:

Hate em so much

Maths was okay since paper 1 is my best paper, but i still missed out a tonna questions D: im aiming for a 5/6 cuz i dont really care so i focused for like 40 mins on the first 13 questions to try and get 100% on them cuz if you do that on each paper, you will get a grade 6 (this is for higher btw)

Question 20 i asked my friends about after, and all four of us got wildly different answers and none of us are really sure if we got it right

I got 5.5/3, but that is because i did the entire method "correct"? And just messed up the adding at the very end so if i did get the right numbers then i only lost 1 mark. But it is wild how we all just got completely different answers 0.0 i wanna go ask my maths teacher tomorrow what he thinks the answer is

For rs though they gave us haribows before, and on the desks they gave us each a tiny paper pot with 3 jelly babies which i spaced out through the test to give me a boost

Gotta hate rs. The timing is so horrible because it is 4 mini essays as well as 8 smaller essays and other 1 and 2 markers and the timing just being 1:30 when litterally english has more time for less marks is wild. My thumb was cramping constantly from holding my pen and i was in pain by the end. I finished barely with 2 mins spare and i was writing nonstop since the start. =_=

"Love thy neighbour" "protect the ummah" and "and eye for an eye" was spammed everywhere and saved my life

(I did aqa themes a,b,d,e btw)

But the rs questions this year were a BLESSING (hehe) i genuinely think i could get a 8 or even a 9 if i wanna push my hope, and i was fine with just a 4 lol (i would have died if the power and conflict 12 marker was about the WMDs)

IM SO GLAD RS IS OVER!!!

Hehe not me being glad when im in a too religious family anyway and can never escape 0.0

Second subject just done forever!!

[twoheadedoddity]

ah, my greatest enemy. my own autism