#sorry about all the religion talk

[repurposedmeatlocker]

It is odd to me how so many people, including some hardcore Peanuts fans, seem to not acknowledge the connection between the depiction of The Great Pumpkin (or at least Linus' dedication to it) and religious faith.

I mean...in general a lot of people kind of ignore or side-step the role that religion plays in Peanuts. The most I see is usually directed at the recitation of the bible passage of Jesus' birth in the Christmas special, but that wasn't an isolated incident. References to the bible, and quotes regarding it and its morals are displayed at various points in the strips.

I don't believe that The Great Pumpkin was intended to be a stand-in for a religious figurehead initially (according to Schultz it was mostly because he thought it would be funny if Linus confused Halloween and Christmas with each other), but considering that Schultz has a very detailed (as well as somewhat complicated) relationship with Christianity, I think the similarities between the two are more than coincidental.

I will emphasize, I don't mean this in a way that "Linus follows the religion of some demon figure" (if you want to interpret it that way, go ahead, but I personally find that concept way too simplified as well as uncharacteristic as to what I think Schultz is doing here). I see it more as a conversational question about what our relationship with religion and faith is. Is it possible to believe in the existence of something without never actually beholding it? How far will we go in our belief, and is it ultimately worth it in the end?

[aidens-ocean-galaxy]

Sometimes it really hurts how some people view my religion

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

one of the reasons i object to the random assignation of words like "mythology" and "folklore" to some medieval literature (and by random i mean interchangeably and with no real consideration of what they mean) is that when you look at what gets called mythology and what gets acknowledged as literature, it's very othering, it's very noticeable that english and french material generally gets to be literature* and lit in celtic languages is folklore, and it often obscures the actual historical context of that material. in particular it obscures the literate, learned institutions that produced that literature whether courtly or ecclesiastical in favour of attributing it to some nebulous voice of the people that ignores the complex web of influences and powers that shaped those stories

if chaucer isn't folklore then a fourteenth century irish text isn't either. if shakespeare isn't folklore then a sixteenth century irish text isn't either. etc etc. the anonymity of the author does not make it any less a self consciously literary production within a learned environment with influences from classical and contemporary literature written to support political aims or to respond to contemporary events

folklore exists, and is not these texts (it does a disservice to folklore and folklorists to assume you can approach them in the same way methodologically tbh!). mythology exists, and is a difficult-to-discern thread that runs through some of these texts (i find the dindsenchas elements particularly convincing as mythological, but otherwise it's hard to identify what's what, particularly when authors are making classical allusions all the time). but what the majority of these texts are, at face value, is literature. the way that they get othered and made out to be somehow more primitive and magical just bc they're in celtic languages and (usually) anonymous really pisses me off

*arthurian material is the exception but this usually relies on some vague notion of celtic origins so it's actually the same phenomenon wearing a different hat

[icewindandboringhorror]

examining a seemingly normal image only to slowly realize the clear signs of AI generated art.... i know what you are... you cannot hide your true nature from me... go back where you came from... out of my sight with haste, wretched and vile husk

[hybbat]

I do think a good chunk of the 'cringey atheist' stereotype did come from the fact that, especially americans, regardless of their actual religious status are just casually christian and refer to things through a religious filter and that isn't seen for how overwhelming/obnoxious/frustrating it is. Its absense, such as when writing a story and things like "oh god" or other casual references are remove or replaced, is seen as notable the same way people find the cast being all women or queer being 'abnormal'.

And I think more people, especially here on tumblr, should take a moment from ragging on some kid being "cringey" saying god doesn't exist or making atheist jump around like dancing monkeys to establish they're one of the good respectful ones before they ever even begin to talk about their own thoughts, and examine why so much content just inserts god into a conversation that had nothing to do with religion like it's the expected norm, the same way they examine the invasiveness of casual heteronormativity.

[jewishbarbies]

the new jubilee video with Ben Shapiro is so fucking annoying because of course the black leftist says all jews are white, replying “it’s a religion” when Ben tries to correct her, like can we ever get some poc/jewish solidarity with this performative shit. or even, GASP, a black/brown jew. because I’m so fucking tired of this ignorance in leftist spaces, and if the white leftists are too scared to mention it they’re going to have a poc friend that will, because they’re both just as fucking ignorant when it comes to jews. it’s getting clipped and rocketing around social media with people in the comments agreeing and doubling down on the blatant ignorance and antisemitism of the interaction, like thanks guys we really needed MORE of this right now. you’re so fucking helpful, jubilee.

[alexanderpearce]

do american republican politicians understand how truly insane and fucked the way they act and the things they say seem to non-usamericans

[queenlucythevaliant]

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, emphasis mine

[monachopism]

being jewish with zero affiliation to israel and rather a generational line of activists for palestine is a hard line to walk and sometimes i wish i could just fall off

[ascendandt]

people at church literally talk to me like this

the mormon anti intellectual brain fungus will be the death of me i fear

[vanweezer]

very very personal, just insight into where im at w my family and things that bother me/have encouraged me to move out

"i know youre moving out so im just gonna say no ones kicking you out and if you feel like this is something you have to do then ok"

thanks! i know im not being kicked out! but yknow i kinda yet a weird vibe when your out of touch husband takes me to a cemetery to yell at me, tell me im just like my father/dont give my father "the time of day", and that im "mean to people who care about me" in front of his dead mother's grave in a poor attempt at guilting me out of speaking my mind. but no yeah thanks for stating the fucking obvious that im leaving on my own terms

[moonssugar]

im actually very pretentious about fantasy religions if ur gonna make a fantasy christianity please combine aspects of existing groups and get weird and sexy and insane wit it and please make up your own shit that has never existed and could theoretically but also dont mix up things that are theologically inconsistent or call x group another when theyre clearly closer to y group bc i will know and i will not be pleased that you didnt do basic wikipedia research. you dont have to exaggerate the bad things churches do the real life horrors are way more compelling to explore and need to see the light of day. if i see you taking obvious insp from one denomination and putting it on another with no consideration with how they actually work im suing you for medical damage. cant tell anyone how churches differ theologically? go back to square one. there are no marian statues in a baptist church. no anglicans are not the same church as the catholic one. yes lutherans and methodists are different. no orthodoxy and catholicism arent the same. no most protestant churches dont have priests. no you dont have to copy and paste the cultish aspects of mormonism into your mainline protestant or evangelical church i promise you its already weird enough you just need to look deeper. but please do go apeshit on mormonism though. they all have specific psychological effects and theyre not the same effects literally ask the people that left. the flavors of trauma will differ ex christians are like baskin robins ice cream. and finally if youre critiquing a religion and your critique isnt vague enough to apply to all of it — get specific. dont just throw spaghetti at the wall, talk your shit but talk it well. i should know exactly what bitch youre talking about so dont be afraid to name drop. much to be said about fantasy christian based cults in media but thats another post

[californiannostalgia]

I finally understand why atheists who were once catholics write about bones so much

I didn't realize that christian worship was built on cannibalism

maybe I should've expected that when the textbook tried to explain to me the 'eating the flesh of jesus' thing

[usertoxicyaoi]

anyway i love being asian and i love saying that out loud with my whole chest out. there's so much tradition and history in our culture and when you're in the west sometimes you fail to understand or you miss the sentiment, the reasoning, the point, of certain practices within the culture. either that, or you feel ashamed of them. until you start seeing, for example, white people doing and taking up practices belonging to the asian culture and you, as an asian, are like .... uh ............ what the fuck am /i/ doing being ashamed about it then .......

like. for example, oiling your hair. when i was a kid, my ammi would oil my hair every single time a day before i was going to wash my hair. that act, yes, held so much meaning for the both of us. it was something my naani did to her, so she did it with me. generational. it was our bonding time. it was her teaching me how we look after our hair. and then ... as i grew up, i didn't get my hair oiled by my ammi anymore. when she asked me why, i had said to her back then that i looked greasy and it was so embarrassing because i'd smell of oil when i would go to school and. yeah. she stopped doing it. and my hair got damaged. and its been years and today, i saw my ammi oiling her hair, and she just called me over, and i sat on the floor and she oiled my hair. and it just felt. like a lot. and i felt ... heavy.

and then i realised that despite being in my late twenties, there's still so much left in me to unpack and unlearn and relearn wrt me being asian. i thought i'd gone past that phase. but i haven't. and thats okay!

which is why its so important for me to have ... this space ... i guess ... where i can validate myself. where i can watch things that are asian, made by asians, doing asian things and following the culture so that i too feel comfortable in my own skin. in the people who look like me. in the food i eat. in the clothes i wear. in the languages i speak. in the art and media i enjoy. in all the big and little things i do.

but anyway. i love being asian. i wish i could talk about it more and how much it means to me when i make a deep dive and indulge within my culture and how rooted that makes me feel. i often feel like i've neglected so much of what it means to be asian, but its still not too late. and there's a deep comfort in that.

[galacticlamps]

very minor thing I still definitely deserve a medal for:

being raised catholic, and now as an adult repeatedly falling in love with characters that fandoms like to declare catholic, but still managing to reject those headcanons because at heart I'm too much of a stickler for accurate analysis to get behind them when i know the person in question is really meant to be anglican/episcopalian/whatever other flavor of christian

i am being, as the poets say, so brave about it

[catfishofoldin99colours]

sending guitarspear right back at you lol

I'm love them..... Adam sucks so much and lute is such an asshole and they deserve each other <3

Ok but like seriously I'm like. Adam has lost both his wives, very likely through his own fault as well as Lucifer's interference (no one is perfect or fully to blame in this particular situation, they're all at fault), and while he sucks so much and was handed these things along with being the first man and is generally The Worst .... Losing people who for all intents and purposes were supposed to be with you and love you, that hurts. It hurts a lot.

I don't condone Adams actions or behaviour, but I can understand how losing Lilith and eve, both indirectly to lucifer, would hurt, after he was given the promise of being the First Man and the creator of humanity and all that promise likely entailed.

Honestly, when I think about Adam and what's going on in his squishy little dickface head, it leads me into the same roads thinking about this show always does - is it a person's fault for believing what they're told about themselves? Are the actions they do as a result of this belief that hurt people fully to blame on them?

Heaven and hell do not exist in a vacuum in the original texts. God is not blameless, in my humble opinion, for the events that transpire and lead to the bible we know today. And I don't know how much hazbin intends to fuck around with the original text (Adam can't enter heaven in the Bible cos he committed the original sin and they've already fucked with that) but it's interesting to consider the larger implications of what they have already used and what might come later.

Adam sucks and he believes he is owed a woman's love and subservience. We know he demanded Lilith's subservience from the beginning (but who's telling that story? What are they skewed by? Is Charlie's account of the original story of Eden to be trusted? She is Lilith's daughter, and has only known hell as her home, can we trust what we says the whole time?)

But who told Adam that he was owed that? Was he made with that idea in his mind? Was he told Lilith, and subsequently Eve, would be his? Was he led to believe he could demand these things with no consequences to anyone else's wellbeing?

And if so... Is it his fault if he believes that?

These are the kinds of things I think about with these stories. I honestly don't think the show is intelligent enough or well written enough to properly go into them in a way I would find satisfying, but I do like the implications of some of the writing and what I can think about beyond that.

Anyway, back to Adam and lute.

Adams whole deal is that he's lost women who were supposed to be his, and that hurts as much as he is a dickhead about it. It makes me think that deep down he's lost the ability to trust that anyone will stay and, y'know, actually like him as a person. Yes, he sucks so fucking much, but when you're faced with the prospect of being a shitty person and having no one like you at all, or being a shitty person in control of lots of nice things, who wouldn't pick the second option? He's a human through and through to me, full of petty jealousy and righteous anger and generally a stupid mean dickhead who enjoys being nasty for fun.

Enter lute, who stands next to him with everything. Lute, who is his second in command, who not only tolerates his crass humour and vulgar language but seems to engage with it in her own way. Lute who is wholeheartedly on board with the violent eradication of the sinners, to the point that she absolutely believes people need to die if they can't live to a standard set by someone else (again, who sets this standard and why?)

Lute, who is every bit as awful and horrible as Adam is, and matches him in a way seemingly Lilith or Eve didnt.

Lute, who stayed.

They're not good people and frankly I don't want them to be - to me they're a product of being created to serve a purpose that you really don't have all the answers for and have no say in; Adam to populate humanity, Lute to destroy what heaven deems destroyable and wrong.

Who sets the terms of their existence? Do they have an agenda to fulfill? Some goal they want to reach? How do Adam and Lute, and by extension the exorcists and heaven and hell, play into this? What is the purpose of punishing people, and creating people to punish those, and who creates the rules that mean these punishments happen? By extension, who creates the rules that rewarding people like Adam and Lute happen? Why? And is it their fault if they are wholeheartedly led to believe that they are deserving of the status they have when they very clearly do not have the full picture of the situation at large?

They're so interesting to me and I love them so much.

Also I'm just a sucker for hardass terrible female characters who do not so right things and the sleazebag men they want to jump so. There.