#weird theology

[inbabylontheywept]

All that remains: Part I

In the land just past the Decapolis, by the tombs of the city's most ancient forebears, there lived a man called Legion. Some days, he howled like a beast, laughing as he savaged his own flesh with the jagged edges of stones. Other days he wept like a child, teeth chattering even as the sun blazed overhead. But more days still, he lingered in the quiet spaces, haunted but lucid: A stranger to the land and a stranger to himself.

He called himself Legion because he was made of many parts. Memories without attachments, stories without endings. Fragments. Worse, he felt like he could only hold a few of the pieces at a time. Trying to assemble himself felt like an endless effort of cupping his hands together tight, filling them with details, reaching up to his mouth, and realizing they had already slipped through his fingers. An endless thirst for which he had no cure. 

The town called him Legion, because they remembered what he often forgot: That he was a Roman, as well as a former soldier. If he’d been anything less, they’d have driven him away. Instead, they fussed over him endlessly, all too aware that to harm a single hair upon his head was to invoke the wrath of the largest army the world had ever seen.

(Which was a problem, because he was all too willing to harm himself.)

On Legion’s good days they simply gave him space. He’d tried describing once, all the things that could bring his demons out: The clash of metal, the twang of a bowstring. A scream of pain. Those were easy enough to remember and avoid, but others were not. Certain phrases in Latin, ones related to marching, used for giving directions. Certain smells - the roasting of pork, the burning of sulfur. The way some men from distant lands braided their hair. 

So many little things. 

They were a lot to keep track of, and the cost of failure was high. It seemed easier for the people of the town to simply avoid him altogether. That it let them ignore his suffering was simply a pleasant side effect. 

On his bad days, they had to intervene more directly. He was strong when he was well, but his sickness could make him almost invincible. Whole teams of men would be sent into the tombs while he screamed and roared, and it could take them hours to tie him down and pry the rocks from his trembling fingers. To put a rolled up rag into his mouth and silence the phrase he shouted over and over, summoning more demons into himself with each incantation: TORNA MIRA, TALIS EST COMODUM MILES BARBATI. 

Sometimes, it took more than a day of being restrained that way for him to find himself again. They’d send children out to the edge of the town to listen, and when he finally went silent they’d travel back to free him from his chains. It was a beastly, shameful task every time, and Legion made it worse by never being angry. Without fail, the first thing he said every time the rag was removed was:

Συγγνώμη, δεν ήθελα να σε τρομάξω.

Forgive me, I did not mean to scare you. 

Everyone knew that the way things were being handled wasn’t enough. Everyone, even Legion, knew how things would end. They just weren’t sure when. 

It turned out that it was longer than six years.

[brothermouse]

One of my favorite silly debates to have with my Mom is: Did Adam have a belly button? The only caviat to this being that before we debate we have to agree that we're sticking with a strict creationism route rather than letting it turn into an evolutionary debate

I think is mostly boils down to how much heavy lifting the phrase "made in our image" is doing. Adam's appearance was probably not a complete copy of God the Father's because that "our" implies that Heavenly Mother's traits got mixed in there. (That opens up a whole new can of worms as to whether Adam was a femboy but I'm not gonna get into that).

A bellybutton is basically a scar, so would God pass on a scar he had to his creation? (assuming that Adam was created without a womb) BUT THEN! that brings up another question as to whether God has a bellybutton. In Mormon theology, God was once mortal, but we have no guarantee that his mortal form was mammalian. Heavenly Father could have been born from an egg, or through budding, or something we've never seen before that grossed Him out so much that He decided that He wouldn't create anything that reproduced like that.

I propose that it is statistically likely that, assuming a strict creationist scenario, Adam did not have a bellybutton because our Heavenly Parents don't have bellybuttons

[canisalbus]

Imagine if Machete was Muslim instead of Catholic. His name would be something like Saif سيف, and Vasco would probably be something like Dhahabi ذَهَبِيّ

.

[sapphosremains]

“and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.”” - John‬ ‭20‬:‭27‬

“handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.”” - ‭‭Luke‬ ‭24‬:‭39‬

something about god inviting us to touch his wounds, ordering us to examine the corporeal evidence of where we killed him, telling us how to penetrate him, telling us to penetrate him

something about how we access the sacred heart through the side wound

something about god telling doubters to prod and poke at his wounds only to find the truth

something about ‘handle me’ something about ‘place it in my side’

something about divine mercy as god invites us inside the wound that we created so that our doubt may be assuaged

something about catherine of siena drinking from the side wound after christ bows her head to it

something about the majority of stigmatics being women and the side wound just existing

something about a man penetrating christ to see if he’s dead, and christ inviting us to penetrate him to see if he’s alive

[occultesotericart]

Etching print on a book plate, 1551 /// serpent absolutely chowing down on the hand of god

[victusinveritas]

[dearlittlefandom-stalker]

Romans 5 is really hitting me at the moment with this Yoda-like wisdom.

[saintmachina]

Today, a sacred sex worker or a devout penitent or a woman who was perhaps both bears witness to the Divine made flesh. A God pierced and penetrated, a God who delights in being devoured, a God who dissolves the boundaries between clean and unclean via carnality, via incarnation.

Today we affirm that bodies are good, that the earth is worth saving, that sweat and blood and tears and semen can be holy offerings. Today we honor a God who chose to experience humanness, even unto death.

Today we celebrate not just life eternal, but life embodied now.

[undaughtered]

i think this is controversial but i do legitimately think (and this trend is starting to emerge, very slowly but very surely, in religious and theological studies, especially among scholars of comparative religion) that judaism can wrestle christianity back from christians on some level. not practically, obviously, but it is really is about time christianity was reappropriated by the people it has been used to oppress including and perhaps most especially jewish people. not in a messianic way, obviously, but in the sense that jesus as a historical figure was a jew, a jew who loved his religion and culture passionately, and the jesus movement was, long before it was christian, a jewish movement.

[purpleweredragon]

"[Gustavo] Gutierrez considers the objection that such militancy is inconsistent with the Bible’s teaching that we should love our enemies. He replies that combat with one’s enemies does not necessarily involve hatred. It may be for the enemy’s good. In any case, one cannot love his enemies until he has identified them as enemies. Cheap conciliation helps no one."

Liberation Theology, an essay by John M. Frame

[inbabylontheywept]

The Mormon Heretic, and the Leviathan

I have decided to make an explanation of how a Mormon heretic gave me the idea for my short story, Leviathan. It is very long explanation, mostly focused on the fascinating theology the heretic created on accident. The explanation of how it led to the story will only be at the end. You have been warned.

So, a short explanation of the heretic: He was a seminary teacher of mine that had deep dived into theology and Jungian analysis and the views that he'd come out with were just... fascinating. He didn't really consider this stuff heresy, because he didn't think it wasn't directly disagreeing with normal doctrine, just adding stuff into the margins. I think that his definition of Godhood and the nature of God was so alien that it was essentially an entirely new religion wearing the same terminology as the old one like a skinsuit. Calling it Christian would be stretching the word to the point of meaninglessness. And without further adieu, his beliefs: He was big on the idea that Jesus/God and GOD/Elohim were separate entities. He based this on the fact that Elohim refers to a plurality, while there are later words for God that are purely singular. He'd envisioned this sort of weird cycle where the God Cluster (Or Big God, or Elohim, or the Monad, he used a lot of terms for it) is this sort of outside-of-time entity that encompasses everything in an unconstrained sense. To exist in this way is to be incomprehensibly lonely, because there is literally nothing in the world but you. So it would, occasionally, go mad and cut out a temporary pocket of reality where it could not go. Sort of the "God creating a rock so heavy that It could not lift it" moment. This God-Cluster would then manifest a sort of physical reflection of itself in these constrained spheres, a self-that-was-not-the-self. That physical unself would go through apotheosis as a rite of passage, to create something different enough from the Monad that it would temporarily alleviate the isolation of being everything. So the God that there was with Eve and Adam was basically just a fetus-demiurge, and the reason that paradise failed was because it was still learning how to not suck at being a God. That was Lesson 1. Lesson 2 was the flood, which was really important because it was, according to Heretic Teacher, the first time that God felt shame. It had not blamed itself for the loss of Eden, it had blamed us, but this time it knew that it had overreacted. After Lesson 2, it spent a couple thousand years mulling over why it kept failing to predict humans and decided to try being one. That was Lesson 3, and the experience went so unbelievably badly that it decided it wasn't going to keep micromanaging us until it got its own shit together. It also gave it quite a bit more sympathy for us in our condition, and basically promised us that it was going to be nice to us, and to please be nicer to each other. This whole little thing relates to the prompt because, in his eyes, the grand cycle of existence seems to be based around the higher powers creating separations within themselves to avoid loneliness, with the goal of each split to be finding a way to reform into the big thing again, thesis-anthesis-synthesis style. We were mini-runs of the demiurge, who was using us to try and understand Itself, and It was in turn a mini-run of the monad, who was using it to try and understand itself and also as a way to pretend that it is two things, because being the only thing is very lonely. In this context, I made the Leviathan as the singular state, and humans as the sort of temporary split within it. That's why it eats people. We were always part of it. We were just a weird embarrassing stage in its life cycle.

As for why the flood is a recurring motif, that teacher talked a lot about the flood. He was fascinated with it, considered it the primary sin of God against man, and in turn, a sin by God against Itself. That one day, as we progressed back to unity with mini-God, all of our pain would become Its pain, and that as it progressed back to unity with the Monad, our pain would because its pain, and that in this way, even the Gods would be held accountable for forcing us to deal with some amateur hour schmuck of a deity for the first several thousand years of our existence. The universe is just a lonely god trapped in a room, arguing with a sock puppet, and occasionally getting so heated that it punches the sock puppet into the wall and hurts itself.

I don't even know how he came up with this number, but he'd estimated that something like a trillion people died in the first flood, which was comparable to how many people had died since. Even as a teenager, I had this weird realization that the synthesized proto-monad of our world was going to be comprised mainly of drowned, which was unsettling. Our world was the world of the drowned God.

I could write more about the weirdness of this guy. He was fucking fascinating, both because of his beliefs, and also because he genuinely viewed himself as a normal Mormon. But this is how that guy accidentally helped me write cosmic horror. By truly and genuinely believing in one.

[vaguely-concerned]

since his ultimate fate is unknown to us for now, let's as a fandom get together and manifest that the watsonian explanation for rael averross being nowhere to be found in the clone wars era is that he quit being a jedi and is out there getting laid and going to therapy, rather than because he, y'know... died horrifically or eventually succumbed to the dark side after all or suffered similar jedi-related work hazards

[kallypsowrites]

I think perhaps Mr. Reed should have channeled all of that energy into running a game of Dungeons and Dragons. He'd get the exact same high of putting players through mind bending shenanigans and existential questions but without the CRIMES

[pigeons-with-jello]

i just need to sit here and have every drop of info on theology injected directly into my mind

[victusinveritas]

Recognizing a Saint in the Making

Friday, November 8 was the birthday of the famed Catholic activist and writer Dorothy Day. Born in 1897, Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement during America's Great Depression, setting in motion a newspaper and a global network of houses to feed the poor that still operates today. Once regarded by the FBI as a security threat for her anti-war, anti-nuclear writings and public demonstrations, today Dorothy Day is being considered for sainthood in the Catholic Church.

In 2015 when Pope Francis spoke before a joint session of the US Congress he too celebrated the life and legacy of Dorothy Day. View a clip from our award winning PBS documentary Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story here. https://vimeo.com/1026591854/6d1a642f74?mc_cid=349a33d87e&mc_eid=f7178ceaa2

The full film is available On Demand or on DVD as part of the Prophetic Voices series.

Robert Ellsberg, featured in the film, recently published a wonderful story in U.S. Catholic highlighting how Pope Francis and Dorothy Day are kindred spirits. Read it here. https://uscatholic.org/articles/202410/the-common-vision-of-pope-francis-and-dorothy-day/?mc_cid=349a33d87e&mc_eid=f7178ceaa2

[puzzlebug]

i think what i love so much about eve² is that at her core elegy is a person searching for answers and certainty. and her life becomes entwined with avie’s-a god- this ultimate unreachable force who should be able to tell her what she wishes to know- and avie doesn’t know either.