#weird theology
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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.
#historical fiction#weird theology#thanks sam kriss#i liked writing this but i am mostly relieved that its done so i can write something else#bible fiction?#cant believe i left mormonism just to keep writing bible fanfiction lol#its like my peoples legacy to keep doing this#the ol' family tradition#theism
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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
#tumblrstake#lds#mormon#lds church#ldschurch#just mormon things#mormon church#ldslife#weird theology#silly debate
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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
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#I don't know Arabic so I can't weigh in that much but if you say so!#it seems like these mean “sword” and “golden” respectively that's neat#Machete wouldn't be able to cling to his Catholic guilt in that case#I don't think Islam has the same concept of original sin that Christianity does#I'm simplifying but it's a belief that humans are born with an innate tendency for evil sinning is part of our nature#and staying on the positive and in God's good graces requires a lot of repentance which can lead to excess guilt and shame#I could be wrong but I'm under the impression that this idea of a manufacturing error is a very Christian thing#sorry I know you didn't sign up to hear me try to talk about big theology things and I don't want to make it weird#but I find this stuff really interesting I unironically like to read and think about how religions work#and how they shape things they come in contact with#in Machete's case in particular his troubled relationship with God and his career choice are big parts of his character#and why he turned the way he did and thinks the way he does you know#answered#kachavashka#Dhahabi is such a regal sounding name#I'd steal that in a heartbeat if I didn't already have one extremely gold-coded character
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Etching print on a book plate, 1551 /// serpent absolutely chowing down on the hand of god
#old book#old art#illustration#witchy things#engraving#gothic#alchemy#occult#artwork#esoteric#medieval#renaissance#French#literature#witchy art#serpent#art#etching#line art#weird#dark fantasy#theology#obscure#religion history#archaic#archaeology#museum#art history#old gods#hermetic
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Romans 5 is really hitting me at the moment with this Yoda-like wisdom.
#bible#bible verse#yoda#star wars#me being weird#seriously though Romans doesn't get enough credit for world-view-changing theology 😅
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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.
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#occult memes#embrace the weird#reject modernity reject tradition#a secret third thing#occultism#bogomilism#catharism#fully automated luxury gay space gnosticism#theology#theology memes#religion memes
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i should write a novelization of the life of jesus
#something weird. i’m surprised more people haven’t done this#there’s this weird code of silence around the bible that i think kind of sucks#lots of films but no literature which is weird#fiction too is theology
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Im doing so good at just staying over here with my dislike of Hazb1n Hotel but nearly every single thing I learn about it justifies my haterdom to myself
#i just found out Lilith is a major character and I'm CONFIDENT the writer just took the name out of Jewish apocrypha and made up new lore#using Jewish mythological figures in a setting clearly based on christian theology isnt a new thing but its still obnoxious#when most of the characters are OCs with no mythological basis it makes it feel extra weird to take a real name and get it so incorrectly#*i* was mistaken about jewish demonology and Lilith in particular for most of my life because of similar ways she's written by Christians#sorry i just dont trust the Christian south park fan to handle jewish mythology respectfully#hell literally doesnt exist in jewish theology in the way the show portrays it#so to make Jewish figure who is literally not a part of Christian works the QUEEN OF HELL#i know ive been going in circles but that just feels sooooooooo weird
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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.
#cosmic horror#mormon#exmormon#mormon theology is weird but this guy really took it to another level#he only really talked about this with my class because he was retiring the next year#this guy was close friends with lindsey stirlings dad weirdly enough#who worked in the same seminary building in mesa#you gotta respect people who see a weird thing and then just go to town making it weirder#Babylon-Lore
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"[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
#liberation theology#christianity#Gustavo Gutierrez#religion#unfortunately the website which had this essay also had some cringe articles like transphobic stuff#along with general weird centrist white american christian stuff#but I've been thinking about resistance and oppression and loving the enemy lately...with - you know - all that's going on#so I think this is a great point
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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
#since he was five when he was brought to the temple I think he'd probably do better outside the order than most ex-jedi#I just like to think of him kicking around out there like the jedi order's collective weird cowboy hobo uncle is all#rael averross#star wars#master and apprentice#claudia grey making up a whole guy to establish that qui-gon was actually the stuck-up party pooper out of dooku's apprentices... exquisite#she was so right for that#his and qui-gon's character developing sparring match *is* basically a theology debate tho so you know. still a nerd lol
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sometimes i think that with everything going on in the world i might be more religious than i thought.
it's still hard for me to believe in a higher power or a god because i am so heavily and wholeheartedly a science person, as well as when i was younger and really was religious it felt like nothing i prayed for ever worked and all my trauma kept coming, no matter what i did
i think as i get older and have more of a idea of the world i've come to terms with being religious but not believing in a strict power. that i can find comfort in religion and the community i grew up in but i don't have to adhere to the exact definition of religion i thought i did when i was younger
#this is a weird post. i dont normally talk about religion with people#most of my friends have a differing view than me and it just always feels weird#sometimes it feels lonely. i never really considered myself that religious but im realizing ive been scared of the reaction from people if#were to say that i was. and i should work on that.#religion#theology#jewish#jewblr#judaism#jew#hebrew#yiddish
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Man I cant get to thinking Abt Richie and his potential relationship w religion as he gets older. Do u think that he eventually gave up on it, but always hoped somewhere in his mind that perhaps God still loves him. Do u think he lost his faith all at once or slowly over time. Do u think pennywise might have killed it, and moving away from the only people who have ever truly loved him for him buried it. Do u think.
#dying. its too late for this shit#ethel cain the things u do to my brain....... uvhvhav#Richie Tozier#sorry can't help it im a weird theology freak and richie being raised christian and actually believing it as a child got me fucked up#<-which. yes i am aware rhat kn the 50s/60s its obvs much less likely that people (esp kids) would question religion and as a whole the us#was a much more christian and christian-adjacent country bir STILL#might need to throw up. to purge the demons. u know.#IT 1986#IT Stephen King#richie rambles
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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
#dorothy day#catholicism#saints#catholic worker#liberation theology#20th century catholics#it's a little weird seeing another person my dad knew be considered for sainthood#antiwar#peace activism#peace movement#plowshares movement
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I know being like “communism is religious” is an extremely annoying thing to say but I’m reading a book called red demiurge which is about the legal history of the soviet union and honestly that title is not hyperbole
#red demiurge#only getting like 60% of it bc I don’t know that much about soviet history or law#or really anything . but like I’m reading about them moving an entire industrial plant#like physically disassembling it and moving it along with all the labourers#as well as equipment resources etc#bc of the german invasion#like they can’t afford to lose the factory so they just. move it lol#and like honestly just reading about it does evoke a sense of like#this is very close to a divine act you know#I know political theology is like contentious and I’m not fully familiar with all of those arguments#but like I am sometimes persuaded by the general concept#the state is the closest you get to like divine acts of god#aside from natural disasters and shit#to rhetorically capture the power of the state you sort of end up just talking about god#anyway sorry I’m being insane I’m high rn I think I’m gonna go play animal crossing#please don’t be weird in my notes abt this thank u <3
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