#the atheist experience

[thekimspoblog]

The lack of popularity for Bryan Steeksma is criminal.

[chaosartisan]

In case you feel like you have to vote trump for religious reasons.

[timewasjustadream]

If you need an argument for why abortion should always be legal, Forrest makes some good ones in this.

[bli-o]

“You dont want kids? I said the same thing at your age. You’ll realize later.”

“You’re trans? You’re too young to know that. You’ll grow out of it.”

“You’re an atheist? You don’t actually disbelieve, you’re just mad at god. One day, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess.”

“You’re a leftist? You’ll become more conservative eventually; every generation does when they come into contact with The Real World™️”

“You’re gay/ace/queer? You just havent met the right man/woman yet.”

If you say any of the above things give me your personal information so i can harm you

edit: the terfs found this post. Y’all fuckin KNOW a teenager saying “give me your personal information” is a joke. You’re literally just being vindictive to have something to say.

anywaysy crazy how u guys r aligning with people who like theocracy and homophobia and heteronormity just because you hate trans people. It’s almost like you, my fellow hoes, are really damn predictable.

Edit 2: i love how after that first edit terfs mysteriously stopped interacting

[i-am-trans-gwender]

If God is willing to prevent chasers, but is unable to then he is not all powerful. If God is able to prevent chasers, but is not willing then he is not all loving. If God is both able and willing then where do chasers come from? If he is neither able nor willing, then why call him God?

(i'm only half joking.)

[marietheran]

I hate the term "religious guilt" because most people who use it are severely muddling up (a) religious OCD (b) some messed up heresy like "it's wrong to be happy" (c) religious doctorine you don't agree with but aren't sure whether you're right not to

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I am all for atheism, but I will say that watching a short video where a person said one of the reasons they were an atheist is because people uncritically follow their parents' religion was rather funny because

Most of my jewish friends are converts, and all of our parents are still of a different faith. In fact, one of the people at shul joked that we ought to study the phenomenon of ex-catholics becoming jewish because they've seen the "catholic to jewish" pipeline so much.

I think what bothered me more about that video was focusing on religion being Right, especially about g-d. I can only speak for myself, but I didn't choose judaism because I thought it was correct (at least, that isn't my sole reason), but because it enriched my life in a way that nothing else has. I think focusing on the idea of a Perfectly Right religion is too shallow an endeavor.

I think the third layer that makes this funny to me is I (semi-jokingly) call myself theistic, agnostic, and atheist combined

[the-meme-monarch]

idk if this is just my brand of aroace-ness or the fact that I'm aroace combined with whatever neuroses i have but i literally cannot stand the idea of someone being attracted to me. it just makes me scared and sick to think about. I was bullied in school but the only times I was scared to Go was after the two instances in like middle and then high school where someone(two different people) told me they liked me/wanted to date me. i felt Disgusting and violated at just being told Basically 'i think you're pretty do you want to go out sometime' which I don't imagine is good for a person to feel that way. But the thing is i don't even really have much body dysphoria like it's Fine my body is Whatever but I've never been more mortified with the thought of someone perceiving me than then. I used to refuse to wear shorts bc I didn't want people even looking at my Legs

[ave-immaculata]

fellas we're once again wrestling with imperfect vs. perfect contrition and why imperfect contrition with a firm resolution to not sin again and promptly receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation doesn't save

[venndaai]

I had an overall good intake session today with a new therapist but towards the end she hit me with "I'm an empath, and it sounds like you are too, I can help you with that. tell me about what you sense from other people's energy. does it nourish or drain you" and things got a little awkward when I replied with "I am autistic and do not make eye contact and I am completely vibes blind. when I said I consider myself empathetic I just meant I get very sad when people tell me about horrible things they are going through and I imagine how hard that must be for them."

[plechtigheid]

Atheists don’t owe you coddling btw.

Atheists can be loud and angry and mean I promise your religion and it’s several million followers (billions in the case of Christianity and islam) will survive an evil Reddit atheist saying some mean words.

[i-eat-deodorant]

Tell me about your onions.

here's an onion. i'm so funny.

ahem.

ok real talk though i've been doing a couple brief dives into the reincarnation aspect of buddhism/hinduism, which haven't been super applicable to COTL so far. which is a shame, bc it has such an interesting take on rebirth and resurrection within the nature of religion.

in COTL, death is seen as semi-permanent and a boon. lamb uses it to their advantage via the nature of game protagonists being able to restart from a save point when they died. the ritual of resurrection is groundbreaking for followers, and i headcanon that the ritual of rebirth is the main reason why TOWW got imprisoned. it is very much a loaded gun in the COTL world.

but buddhism treats rebirth as not only a nature of living, but something that needs to be escaped from. literally something that one must fight to be unshackled from, to break past samsara and reach ascension via nirvana. it's such an interesting viewpoint to consider and explore, especially bc my interpretation of lamb has them never being willing to become this resurrecting figure in the first place. as much as the red crown has been a boon for them, it's also acted as a bind. they will always have both their mortal and godly vices.

in both hinduism and buddhism there are multiple schools of thought that tackle the continuuity of resurrection, aka "what is carried over when one is reborn?"

now suppose narinder did not carry everything he had as TOWW to his mortal form. what is lost, and what is gained?

if i were to adapt samsara into my cotl fics i'd focus less on actual death and more on metaphorical ones. which, ok bear with me here, is a huge part of my personal philosophy.

humans are not static; we grow and develop, and in doing so we shed prior versions of ourselves like metamorphosis. a sort of ego death lite, if you will. when faced with a traumatic event, the person you once were is not the same as the person you are now. that is the kind of metaphorical death i'm talking about; the death of a former self.

but what exactly marks the new self and the old self? nothing, theoretically. we can make the boundary as low or as high as we want.

consider the ship of theseus: if a huge portion of my body is replaced every 7 years, can i definitely say i am who i was 7 years ago? what part of identity and self stays constant, when my personality's changed drastically? am i a stranger with the memories of someone else?

now narrow the boundary. if the self is physically static, then every time a cell dies, the self dies.

using that technical definition, technically i die and am reborn every single second. a metaphorical death and a metaphorical rebirth, and what gets carried over?

something something life and death are two sides of the coin of change.

that's why i kinda keep emphasizing lamb's impostor syndrome crisis about themselves dying in both soul and body during the execution. that's why i divide narinder's life into such stark epochs (mortal, bishop, imprisoned, mortal again). that's why i love treating their afterlife not as a continuity of their character development, but a second chance. ship of theseus, broken down and rebuilt anew.

it's not nirvana. but it's making the best out of your own personal samsara.

and just. there's something so poetic about narinder and lamb reincarnating as gods of death, because the only way to die repeatedly is to live again after each one. a taste of permanence in the impermanent, without ever reaching that finality that they embody as gods. they represent the very thing they are and aren't. it's a paradox that makes perfect sense the moment you remove the black-and-white boundary of life/death that dictates they must be opposites.

and this is what i love exploring. breaking down the barriers of identity and death in the metaphysical sense, in two characters who are defined by so much loss in their lives. (metaphorical) death, treated as redemption, treated as healing.

lamb, offering a hand up to a newly reborn narinder. i died, i got up, and i live.

[utilitycaster]

I think another element of Orym's involvement in this whole plot that is getting misconstrued or otherwise used inappropriately is Liam's statement that Orym can't be objective about this.

It's true that he can't be objective about the person who murdered his husband! I think very few people would be! But that doesn't change the fact that it is in fact completely and yeah, objectively true that the Vanguard murdered his husband because they wanted to get to Keyleth to test if Vax would show up, and so Keyleth's guards obviously tried to prevent an attack on Keyleth, and not only were they killed for defending her, they were killed in a way that specifically prevented resurrection, to no known benefit.

Orym's lack of objectivity doesn't mean he's in the wrong or that he should have to make himself to see the other side of "maybe the people who killed innocent guards as part of their moon experiments have a point." It just means that, for example, even if Abbadina is very pleasantly and calmly saying "oh I don't have any stakes in the moon thing nor do I know this guy who talked over the ley line broadcasting system, I just think he's right about the gods," he's going to leave the house and sleep outside instead of calmly listening. He's not going to be able to make that more general and detached argument about power and murder that Laudna and Ashton can make (also informed by their past experiences, but a little more removed). This is, for him, extremely personal; but he is still correct.

I think a comparable if obviously much less morally/theologically fraught example would be that Laudna, understandably, gets upset when Ashton talks to her about his own experiences with loneliness. It's a great scene, because both characters have experienced pretty profoundly lonely times in their lives.

Would it be appropriate for someone to say "well, Laudna obviously can't be objective here; she's relying too much on her own past experiences to inform her judgment, so we should ignore her"? I think it's pretty obvious that's an absolutely fucking stupid thing to say; but that's what people are saying when they're bringing up Orym's emotional response. People are still allowed to have pretty strong subjective feelings about things that objectively happened.

[atheismvids]

Video description:

This short documentary is intended to show the world what it is like to be an African-American Atheist. American culture often assumes that being Black also means being religious, and the mainstream media reinforces this stereotype.

[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.