how about the men who are apparently weak enough to "stumble" when seeing an underage girl's developing breasts are just not fit for Christian heaven and by constantly accomodating them, you are actually getting in the way of God's plan to send only the righteous to heaven? Because a guy who puts his own comfort over the safety of another person isn't that righteous after all and won't get into heaven either way.

(I don't really believe in Christianity btw, I am just trying to follow the argument of not cause men to "stumble" instead of teaching them how to be a righteous person. in my opinion, the latter would get them into heaven at a much higher rate than just making girls vulnerable to car accidents)

Today I read the first published public speech by an African-American, and boy, the Wikipedia article on Jupiter Hammon had not prepared me for how disturbing the message of the speech is. To my modern ears, in fact, it seems over-the-top to the point of making me question at some point whether Hammon was being satirical or otherwise trying to employ some rhetorical trick.

I had heard about the common invocations of Christianity to quell any rebellious ideas among the enslaved population in pre-1860's American ("be good slaves and obey your masters and you'll have your place in heaven"), but this speech displays it in a sort of extreme purity, and I wasn't expecting to hear it from a speaker who was himself black and enslaved. To boot, according to the Wikipedia article, several abolitionist groups of the time approved of and published this speech!

The personal significance to me is that, both in my personal life and in my political views, I have a strong tendency to lean towards moderation, initiating change but only "within the rules", in a way that appeases those I'm in conflict with, etc. This speech is to remind me of the absurdities that can be reached when this is taken to an extreme. (Counterpoint: Hammon may have held some views and produced some writings that were more radical but which his masters wouldn't let him make public.)

The single-minded nature of Hammon's promotion of Christianity is also extreme enough that it would shock me if I hadn't encountered evangelicals in my own time that talk that way. Hammon apparently was in favor of African-Americans learning how to read (which I think was in contrast to the current enforced norms) but only so that they could read the Bible and only the Bible:

I will beg of you to spare no pains in trying to learn to read. If you are once engaged you may learn. Let all the time you can get be spent in trying to learn to read. Get those who can read to learn you, but remember, that what you learn for, is to read the Bible. If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good. But the Bible is the word of God, and tells you what you must do to please God; it tells you how you may escape misery, and be happy for ever. If you see most people neglect the Bible, and many that can read never look into it, let it not harden you and make you think lightly of it, and that it is a book of no worth. All those who are really good, love the Bible, and meditate on it day and night.

This is all a sort of softer echo of the quintessential fire-and-brimstone speech from almost half a century earlier that I posted about a while back.

I desperately need people to understand that Orthodox Jews having a lot of kids is very different from Fundamentalist Christians having kids. Fundamentalist Christians have a lot of kids because they want to raise a Christian army. Orthodox Jews have a lot of kids because of a thousands-of-years-old extinction anxiety rooted in history.

Jews make up less than 1% of the global population, and continuous genocides and ethnic cleansings have threatened our existence. The global Jewish population still hasn't recovered from the Holocaust, and we still haven't recovered from so many genocides. There's a reason we still talk about the Ten Lost Tribes- the trauma of so many of our people being stolen from us.

I've seen people mock people who genuinely *do* want a lot of kids, as if every one of them is lost and brainwashed. There are modern, progressive people who really *do* want to have lots of kids, even if it means being pregnant multiple times, because the Jewish population is *tiny*, and our existence is always threatened.

There's a common saying that sprung up after the Holocaust - "Six kids for the six million".

Don't talk about every person wanting lots of kids being "brainwashed" until you understand the deep desperation Jewish parents face to not disappear off the face of the earth. Until you understand the trauma of losing so so many of your people, and desperately not wanting your people and culture to be lost forever.

Marci A Hamilton: The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, knows how he will rule: according to his Bible. When asked on Fox News how he would make public policy, he replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” But it’s taking time for the full significance of that statement to sink in. Johnson is in fact a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy. He was most candid about this in 2016, when he declared: “You know, we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic. Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy. Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade.

The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults. Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.

Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America? When rulers insist the law should be driven by a particular religious viewpoint, they are systematizing their beliefs and imposing a theocracy. We have thousands of religious sects in the US and there is no religious majority, but we now have a politically fervent conservative religious movement of Christian nationalists intent on shaping policy to match their understanding of God and theirs alone. The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker, by a unanimous vote, have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.

[The Guardian]

Actually, no, I haven't really changed at all since middle school. I'm still the same deeply creative weirdo with ever-growing eclectic interests. A happily blooming nerd. If I learned about something in school, I wanted to explore it at home, on my own. That's really how the electronics disaster happened. I'm actually incredibly grateful Mom and Dad monitored my Internet use. I am way too curious sometimes. And I have to see shit for myself extremely often.

I wasn't let back out properly as a specific part until sometime in the sixth grade. It was partially the cats, but also realizing Nanny probably wouldn't be around much longer. So when she did die, I was more relieved than anything else. I used to feel bad that I hadn't cried for her.

But she was stifling me and trying to tell me what to be. She didn't like me being curious about makeup? I was low-key kinda thrilled when I got makeup for Christmas in my senior year of high school. I like color. A lot. I used to constantly change my favorite color. Now I just say I love the entire rainbow.

And I had to hide that I absolutely loved Pokémon. I think she thought it was glorifying violence, but it's more like competitive high-contact sports. Either that, or it was the racism. Frankly, probably both. It's probably the one thing she might have been worse than foster care about. But honestly, watching all the stuff that had to do with entirely different cultures was so good for me. It still exposed me to to new ideas and lessons when I actually needed it. Among them, I started passively absorbing any little bit when Taoism or Buddhism were significant themes. Paired with Bible study on Saturday morning, I guess I managed better than I thought.

She was surprisingly ok with when I was really into western fantasy like Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I think she was also ok with Power Rangers and ThunderCats (the original). At least she validated my love of learning new things and legit gave me old text books (that I don't know where she even got) to look at science subjects at home.

I think that really started in the seventh grade when I got so obsessed with astronomy and in particular, black holes. It just amazed me how unfathomably massive the universe is. How far it goes, how long even light takes to travel through it. I couldn't help but find the divine in the actual, physical cosmos. And it was there with every part of it. I would think, ‘How can everything in this physical reality be bad if God had said it was good in the beginning? Surely we haven't corrupted everything. Cats and dogs know about compassion, in a sense. That's good and beautiful.’

It wasn't hard at all to be better than foster care, but she actually was. She did encourage me to ask questions if I was confused. She clarified a lot of the literalist theology so I could start to understand it. I think I asked to study the bible with her, with that very hope. According to Dad, she could keep up with devout Catholics. I had two different children's bibles at her trailer, plus she bought me my own standard bible when I was ten, for my birthday. She and Mom took me to the book store at the mall, and had them print my casual first name with my last name at the bottom right corner of the front in silver letters.

Fun fact, someone actually jokingly asked if I'd grown up Catholic because of my apparently deep knowledge of Christianity. That was during the summer last year. The irony of my current proximity to the nearest Catholic church is not lost on me.

What fucked me back up was how I was treated during high school a lot by peers and family, and largely I just got angrier more than anything else. I was trying my best to do better when it all started going downhill fast again. But apparently I was still not good enough. My cousins suddenly became spoiled brats because of my needs frequently not being met entirely, but they seemed so much better adjusted. They didn't understand, and I didn't know how to break my silence. So I started lashing out because i really didn't have the social skills I needed. So yeah, I was definitely an asshole at times. The bullshit from foster care got a refresh, and I was forced to submit to their training again.

Never had any serious issues with Grandma, though in typical moody teenager fashion, I was sometimes a brat.

There's a reason I didn't really come out of my shell again until my junior year of high school. I decided to try to be more brave the year before, since I knew I'd graduate in Ohio. I got better at my art and creative writing, and it seemed to give me a way to connect with others. I decided to go for the culinary class at the career center because hey--good food--and the only thing that was in question was my literal birth date and legal age restrictions with the student restaurant. I got in. Mom and Dad made absolutely sure it was paid for. So I decided to do another nuts thing and go try out for the spring musical. I met one of my closest friends that way. Truly a charismatic character (gonna tag you, @themerrymutants I miss you). I felt accepted and encouraged, like family is supposed to make you feel.

Memories are really just flooding in now, it's a just lot to process. Maybe it's because while answering the person on anon, I opened up a lot of my own psychological cupboards. I never really said a lot of that at once, let alone even explained my logic behind it all. It put a lot of things into perspective for me.

And I just can't help but think, oh, shit, I actually am competent. But I was constantly second-guessing myself because so many of the people around me were hellbent on judging everything I did. Now I understand that in those cases, they most likely feared how authentic I am. Some people, more or less depending on where I was at any given time, thought I was pretty cool because I was so authentic.

I stopped fronting almost entirely when Mom died. I still hadn't recovered at all from literally anything, and didn't know how to handle that. It took cycling through different roles to find something productive for me. I shattered, and ended up pushing most of my remaining idealism into the then-evolving Lilitu.

But I was always at my best when I was true to myself. There were still plenty of people who loved me for who I really was. And that was just enough to keep going. That is precisely what fueled my spite against others who didn't like me. And Mom sure as fuck never quit going.

-Era 🍎😺

All religions have some truth because we’re all humans dealing with the same problems that come with existence and that pushes people to create similar framework for coping with their reality. BUT that is not proof that a religion is actually true because having a lot of believers or sharing similarities across cultures/countries doesn’t mean your /religion/ is true. It means that humans are all very similar and respond to things like pain, loss, change, morality, exploitation and oppression in similar ways. The solution is ALWAYS other people. Anything that encourages you to ‘other’ another human being is bad. It’s harmful, it’s wrong, and it will not provide you with the peace you seek.

People need a framework to cope with reality and people across the world invent religion to cope. Religion is NOT where you find the truth. People are where you find the truth.

Cannot stop thinking about Girl Defined aka the dark dark abyss of Christian fundamentalism and purity culture.

These ladies are both MARRIED WITH CHILDREN and still continuing to post 40 minute long videos urging their followers to throw out their romance novels - whether smutty or not - because it's a temptation that will make their souls impure. (and no, neither of them have actually read a word of Colleen Hoover's books lmao.)

And Kristen (right) keeps talking about how EVEN HAVING STAYED A PERFECT VIRGIN UNTIL MARRIAGE - after that, you still have to 'fight for purity' when having sex with your husband? Constantly repressing any 'impure' feelings or fantasies that are not 'God-honouring' like Jesus Christ lady I'm sorry but that sounds like hell. No thank you.

(PS I believe Kristen actually once coined the term 'mind virgin' so. Do you what you want with that information.)

So did Tim buy the promise ring for Heidi? It means he is going to court her? Then promises to marry her? Not American. Have any other fundies done this?

I was just talking about this with @filthyfundie lol, Tim getting Heidi a promise ring is actually so unnecessary given their chosen system of 'dating'.

So the concept of a promise ring outside of fundie land is that it's a symbol of commitment before you decide to get engaged. Like a little more serious than just dating, but not officially fiancés yet. And the only time that's made sense to me is when a couple wants to show commitment but can't get engaged yet for whatever reason, like sometimes long-distance couples will do it if they want to wait and get engaged in person and can't do that for a while, but they still want a symbol of commitment. Or really young couples who feel like it's not the right time to get engaged will get them until they feel stable enough to plan a wedding.

But for a fundamentalist like Timothy who practices courting it makes zero sense........for people who practice it, courting 'officially' is essentially the same thing as being engaged, it's why they have such short 'official' engagements. It's just explicitly understood that courting someone means you intend to marry them, so a promise ring feels super redundant. Especially since she'll probably be getting a real engagement ring in like, 6 months max anyway?

And like the assumption with promise rings in the secular world is that you don't have to make a commitment like that to your dating partner until you're engaged, but you love them so much you're doing it anyway. Whereas with fundies like the Rods, that idea isn't even entertained in the first place? All romantic relationships are just assumed to end up in marriage. Anyway that's probably just me thinking more about the promise ring than even Tim did.

Also I'm not sure if other fundies have done 'promise' rings, but I know a few did 'purity' rings, which are more about staying 'pure' til you're married and are generally given by parents. I'm pretty sure the Bates family did this with most of their girls, I know Carlin and Katie at least had one.

Hey, psst, Pat Robertson died today. I just got a news headline.

🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

as a follow up: did you feel your self worth as a christian was tied into attendance?

These are some pretty sucky afterlives (or lack thereof) if you ask me. Is this really the best you can come up with? Go get some better afterlives, sheesh.

The roots

I keep picking guilt from my branches. It is a festering, thorny weed that I did not sow. It peels open my eyes to stare upon ceilings and windows and my blanket covered toes. How do I get rid of it without burning myself from the inside out?

And isn’t it hilarious that they claim religion is a cure from the problems of the world? As though they are not the insidious trespassers who poured poison into the soil.

Eden is calling for their heads on gilded plates of gold, their tongues already forged in silver.

I see the church as the propagators of the downfall of society. The hate they call love has rotten too much of the good and the beautiful. My teeth ache at the saccharine falsity of a smile on church property. My chest is hollow.

Father?

Were you ever there to forsake me?

Or did you leave your work to the crafters of hemlock and nightshade— the so called body of Christ, knowing they would bring your unjust wrath well enough on their own.

This is such a good look at what Christian nationalism looks like within homeschooling, told by two former homeschoolers who ultimately moved away from the authoritarian environment they were raised in after having children. It resonated with me both as someone who was raised in a similar environment and as someone who has suffered the consequences of leaving that way of life behind (before I ever had kids, thankfully)

But it also brought me up to date on the current state of homeschooling in the USA - an estimated 3 MILLION kids are being homeschooled right now with little to no oversight from any regulatory body

Some of those kids are being homeschooled because of special needs their local schools cannot support, because of racist school systems, or because of a desire to protect them from violence

I would guess based on my past participation in homeschooling organizations that a large percentage are being homeschooled in an attempt to indoctrinate them into Fundamentalist Christianity and Christian Nationalism

This is a real driving threat to civil liberties and to the rights of children in our country, as Matt highlights in the video - there is no resource for them to understand or report abuse within these communities, and these are very politically active groups. We were groomed to be political activists and politicians, just as we were groomed to deny our sexuality, submit to authority, and have as many children as possible

Matt is a kind and effective interviewer, and I appreciate that he took the time to spotlight this movement and the impact it has on both families and our national politics

NEVER understood why super antisemitic Christians think they going upwards when they die. You think Jesus is going to let you in being asshole to his cousins???? That's what you think??? You're hatecriming his greatnieces and you he's just gonna let you get away with it????

I think that healing the system is less like just putting a jigsaw back together, and more like entirely creating a glass mosaic statue. It's because of how shattered we are. We were broken before we even had the chance to feel any sort of unity. We were turned against each other so quickly in foster care.

Nanny, our great-grandma, refined all the programming from the Pentecostals to be more like her beliefs (Seventh Day Church of God). It's because after we came back from foster care, she entirely took over our religious indoctrination. It was like this for probably just under six years, until I was about eleven. I think. The dates are incredibly fuzzy.

I think our best goal for healing is some kind of thriving, fluid multiplicity. We may always contain multitudes. That's ok. If we can find a way to consistently shift what we are to suit what we need to do along our personal standards of ethics, then I think we should. It's ok to have a fluid identity, like water. Don't silver roses reflect their surroundings, but remain themselves all the same?

-Annie ❓😺