ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

fair enough ymp

nb personally, everything is nature, including everything you note

i struggle to understand where youd stop calling things natural, tbh

'you'd' there is the wider sense, not yourself ymp

So, is anyone in this joint a believer in one of the Big Three who regularly observes the rites of their religion? I'm curious.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 10 February 2024 07:17 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

that was a big oversight in the original options

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Saturday, 10 February 2024 07:19 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, and I thought that was funny seeing this poll. It's standard fare for my experience though. You can be religious, or you can have an interest in culture/intelligent-discussion/idunnowhatrewecallingtheworldthatilxcaresabout?. The mingling of the two is a strange fire and water trick to some people I meet. As an 18yo it took a while for my stoner band buddies to release the religion thing wasn't a bit ("How do you listen to pavement and believe in God" looooooooool). Given religion's popular presentation these days, both from itself and from others, I get it. I think it's unfortunate! But whatreyagonnado?

I've recently embarked on a relatively casual study of physics and it's made me question the rest of reality.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 10 February 2024 09:53 (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Me too! Spend my whole damn life denigrating those science nerds as 4-eyed losers who wouldn't know reality if it punched em in the face but ya know what? They actually know a thing or two about this whole world.

*realise

A close mate (atheist) and I typically circle back to punching down on the epistemological arrogance of the positivist world view as a unifying end to any discussion about God/religion. This joke, after years or re-reunning it, sadly led me to believe Science was actually boring and wtf everyone go study the humanities like actualy human beings? Doing some Scie study has cured this. Those dweebs are really onto something

One of the many things that fascinate me about the field (what little I know about it) is how far removed it is from our/my every day experience. I mean, the fundamental components of the universe may reside in 11-dimensional shapes? Being a math dunce especially, I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

On the macro level, the various ways of speculating about multiple universes are mind-blowing.

one thing im not sure ive picked out before from my thoughts is the treatment of belief as a choice, either way, which ofc it isnt

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Saturday, 10 February 2024 02:41 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

He's a crypto-calvinist! Burn him!

One of the many things that fascinate me about the field (what little I know about it) is how far removed it is from our/my every day experience. I mean, the fundamental components of the universe may reside in 11-dimensional shapes? Being a math dunce especially, I really have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

On the macro level, the various ways of speculating about multiple universes are mind-blowing.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 10 February 2024 10:37 (fifteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, the micro stuff blows me away. I literally never did chemistry, so learning its general concepts for the first time... I really appreciate the imagination in it all. This crazy-technical riff on pre-socratic philosophy which has now become a tool that has built our entire modern world? The macro wonder and awe, religion covers that area for me. But science is doing some mind boggling stuff in investigating the micro which makes me feel like an absolute caveman at times.

in all realness my trouble with believing in the Christian God has been, if what he and his Son said are so important, why has he been ok with letting everybody fuck up the message so badly for the last 2,000 years, like...for a long time the two of them are stage managing everything, and then just disappear forever and in some cases the Biblical canon is still in dispute!

old religious like the Bible are constantly evolving through a fusion of horizons between the readers and the text, so they are something like alive. as with a work of art, that in between space is way more vital and interesting than original meaning or intent. by regarding any kind of appropriation as a corruption of something pure i think we kind of surrender a lot of the value of an ancient organism like a book that provides access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of *specific users* in *clearly identified interpretive communities* because they considered the meaning of their very existance through this book.

You can be religious, or you can have an interest in culture/intelligent-discussion/idunnowhatrewecallingtheworldthatilxcaresabout?. The mingling of the two is a strange fire and water trick to some people I meet.

idk Haela-Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix might like a word? like the most overtly religious art that gets a lot of "hipster kisses" is enough of a counter argument by itself, maybe- A Love Supreme, God Only Knows, obv you don't have to actually be religious to appreciate religious art, that in fact the values of our "specific interpretive community" have to meet the art. but if you really want to bury your head in the sand there is still some ineffable spirituality about certain artworks and cultural artifacts that our comfortable modern context can't just conveniently neutralize, it has to be reckoned with.
and i even wonder if there might be a remotely-Christian aspect to e.g. the feelings a lot of us have about the reflexive indifference poor people constantly face & with which they are regarded - "No room at the inn". just calling youself an atheist or not having spiritual beliefs doesn't automatically sever your ties with the lineage and influence of religious interpretive communities because we aren't separate.

Someone's been reading their Gadamer lol. I agree though: it's a funny idea to apply the death of the author to the Bible, but at least from the Christian perspective, if the Bible ain't *interpreted* then it's a dead book like any other dead book. Religious texts gain their meaning when they are engaged by their (always contemporary) readers. The beauty and chaos of a changing faith is that it actually wrestles with its text. That wrestle can lead to awful consequences like genocidal justification or anti-semitism, but it can also lead to beauty like emancipation or radical forgiveness/generosity. Obviously the Bible, or any text, is not entirely what we make it. We're not radical relativists. It (and everything) has a substance, a sache, but any engagement with it is always going to be a partnering of today and the text.

I'm not saying religion and art has no overlap, I'm not that silly! Just making a generalization that the ilx temperament of unrestrained cultural digestion and critique is not typically partnered with active religious practice

I dunno if socialists would appreciate your suggestion that care for the poor is tied to the culturally religious history they have been born into. Whether right or wrong, don't think you'll win anyone over with that direct line of thought

You can be religious, or you can have an interest in culture/intelligent-discussion/idunnowhatrewecallingtheworldthatilxcaresabout?. The mingling of the two is a strange fire and water trick to some people I meet.

idk Haela-Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix might like a word?

whatever it is that she's doing certainly _seems_ like a strange fire and water trick from where i set, haha. i'm not totally unversed in christianity but i gotta say _93696_ means a lot more to me as art than it does as theology! i do see whatever she's doing as sharing basically nothing with, say, "awesome god".

in all realness my trouble with believing in the Christian God has been, if what he and his Son said are so important, why has he been ok with letting everybody fuck up the message so badly for the last 2,000 years, like...for a long time the two of them are stage managing everything, and then just disappear forever and in some cases the Biblical canon is still in dispute!

old religious like the Bible are constantly evolving through a fusion of horizons between the readers and the text, so they are something like alive. as with a work of art, that in between space is way more vital and interesting than original meaning or intent. by regarding any kind of appropriation as a corruption of something pure i think we kind of surrender a lot of the value of an ancient organism like a book that provides access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of *specific users* in *clearly identified interpretive communities* because they considered the meaning of their very existance through this book.

i mean it does come back to robert wyatt to me so often, "god song". "god song" captures something really important about my approach to religion, which is very much "what the fuck, god?" all the shit i hear people say. if "god don't make no junk", why the hell did i need to get an orchi? i'm with neando here. you know why i hate the christian god? not enough fucking _smiting_. people for 2000 years have been using him as a pretext for practicing hatred and violence against queer people. and what the fuck has god done about that? nothing. he is _responsible_ for what people do in his name, or he is dead, or both. either way, you ask me if i want to attack and dethrone god? you betcha. why the hell _wouldn't_ i? this is a being i should love, i should respect, i should _revere_ and _worship_? i mean, god, i love bill fay, but his existence, his deep, profound, meaningful faith, doesn't erase the unremitting abuse christianity has perpetrated in so many ways, so many forms, over the course of my life, doesn't negate the fact that christianity _still_ perpetrates that abuse from the highest places.

if we storm heaven, if we attack and dethrone god, is that bill fay's god? has he had anything taken from him? i don't know. i trust bill fay to take care of himself and those he loves. i see no reason to believe that i wouldn't be one of the ones he loves. bill fay, he's one of the ones i love, and i love him for his faith, and yet i hate god, and i hate christianity, and i want to see... i don't want to see the churches burned, but i want to see the abuse the churches perpetrate _stopped_. i love bill fay and i accept that he thinks of himself as a christian and that word means _nothing_ to me, in the sense in which he uses the term. that's a him thing.

i don't know if any of that makes sense. religion is one of those things, god is one of those things, the more i look at it the more it dissolves into incoherence.

xp Oh, i know absolutely nothing about Christianity tbc! it's more likely the other way around.

Just making a generalization that the ilx temperament of unrestrained cultural digestion and critique is not typically partnered with active religious practice

got it. i don't know of anyone else on ilx whose religious or spiritual practice is the central thing in their life, but who knows? and "unrestrained cultural digestion and critique" is not me, i only listen to 5 or 6 records. maybe you're onto something.

Kate i was writing a response to one of your earlier posts in my initial post and it was taking way too long and i had to abort, hopefully to return. Sorry :(

I have lived and worked in neo-pagan/witch spaces and there were a lot of Queer people of Christian backgrounds who i love who were and are still deeply wounded by the church the communities and barely made it out alive and i get it.

I have to go to work RIGHT NOW :(

my spiritual practice is hormones and mushrooms

is that anything?

if I frame it as consuming the body of christ as part of my christian worship it makes it sound more legit doesn't it? like I'm not just fucking around? even though I probably take my sacraments more seriously than the average church goer does when they eat the thing

I was raised with religion as a thing you had to do for some reason but were a mug if you actually fell for it. so that's where I'm coming from. but I do want to actually fall for the thing. I always did. not the christian thing but the thing that you surrender to and it all opens up

and whatever it is it's kind of indifferent to concepts like "good" and "bad" and "me" and "you" and "life" and "death" in a way that is awesome and scary and beautiful and all the other adjectives

Christianity in its infancy, with its lack of canon and dogma, was far more interesting. people actually believed Old Testament God and New Testament God were warring Gods and New Testament God kicked the old one's ass to save the world from him

(it is not exactly hard to understand why they might have believed that, God from Old Testament to New Testament was like Willie Mays Hays being played by Omar Epps instead of Wesley Snipes in Major League 2)

haha I get references

everything becomes boring once people decide what it is

that seems to be when they get violent too

or maybe the violence is an attempt to force the divine into a shape that the kind of people who run empires approve of which is not very nice for most people but then it's all they have left to appeal to regarding their condition so

I have lived and worked in neo-pagan/witch spaces and there were a lot of Queer people of Christian backgrounds who i love who were and are still deeply wounded by the church the communities and barely made it out alive and i get it.

― Deflatormouse

i know you get it... queer perspective on, like, particularly christianity is so fundamentally different from non-queer because of the trauma christianity has caused so many of us and because despite that the belief, the faith, it _means_ something to us. not the doctrines, the thing it's trying to describe. like there's a couple of ways people are talking about religion here, i'm not saying either is right or wrong, but there's:

On the macro level, the various ways of speculating about multiple universes are mind-blowing.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

and then there's:

my spiritual practice is hormones and mushrooms

is that anything?

― Left

i spent a _lot of time_ immersed in the former and these days i'm a lot closer to the latter. oh by the way left yes, that is something, grats on the mones, they're awesome, and uh for future reference personally i love ilx but i don't find it necessarily complements any entheogenic experiences i might or might not have.

if I frame it as consuming the body of christ as part of my christian worship it makes it sound more legit doesn't it? like I'm not just fucking around? even though I probably take my sacraments more seriously than the average church goer does when they eat the thing

― Left

like i was talking about this last month in a, uh, contextually inappropriate space, contextual appropriateness is a challenge for me sometimes but seriously there is a huge overlap between a lot the ways people talk about religion and my queer experience, me saying "you look the same to me, i grew tits" isn't just a line. there has been this deep inner change that's been part of my transition, one that is immeasurably greater than softer skin and so forth. when the matrix came out my second oldest brother was like "bah this is just the allegory of the cave with bullet time", twenty years later i reminded him of this and said "so yeah it's pretty obviously a trans allegory not a plato thing" and he said "who's to say plato wasn't trans?" which is annoying mostly because he was right. and with neoplatonism being the philosophical foundation of pauline christianity...

but i'm _not_ a christian, i don't look at it from a christian perspective and mostly that's because of what deflatormouse was saying, christianity has deeply wounded me, christianity for the entirety of my life, and as far as i can tell for its entire history, has hated queerness. my... this is not facts, this is feelings, but i feel like queerness was here first, it was ours, it was our birthright, and religion comes into the garden and takes it and says "no, we are the outsiders, we are the ones who don't fit, all those feelings you have, it's about our divine god and about our moral principles and not about your deep-seated _queerness_. the church is the only place that will accept your gay ass, we are life, outside us is death." that's how i feel about christianity, how i feel like they've acted. and i am outside now, an it is only death insofar as they keep trying to destroy us to prove their point. it is vast and terrifying and nameless and beautiful.

when people who haven't done it think about GRS they have all of these ideas and conceptions about it and it's nameless, wordless, impossible to explain to those who haven't been through it, what it means and what it _doesn't_ mean. that yes it hurts and that physical pain is the smallest part of it. i was reading my fears before GRS and it was me saying things like that it would be the worst pain i'd ever experienced, which it wasn't. what GRS was for me was, perhaps the ultimate form of embodiment for me. by which i mean that dissociation was that my body didn't feel like _my body_, it was this meat puppet, this fleshsack that i walked around in, something i would rather have done without. and i start taking these... i can talk about the change in scientific terms but it's so at variance with everything i ever learned about the world and my body that it genuinely does seem more accurate to describe it as _magic_, to describe E as a _reagent_ (particularly when the endos don't ever do the fucking research to figure out what the hormones actually do). and the apotheosis of that, what i might describe as _transsubstantiation_, came after the surgery when i was in the shower for the first time and gently cleaning the area.

i have never had the experience of carrying and giving birth to a child, never will, so i can't say how similar what i felt was, but from the way i've heard it described, my experience _felt_ similar. newborn babies, they aren't pretty, i wouldn't say. one is polite and says how pretty they are and they're red screaming and in pain. the same way, i never really thought of genitals, any genitals, as being "beautiful" before, and here for the first time i see it and i say "my god, it is so beautiful", even though it's, i mean, i've seen the pictures, it's swollen, red, painful. there was lots of blood. there was lots of blood, and i said to myself, out loud, "this is my body, this is my blood", and it seemed real and true for the first time. my body felt like my body. my blood felt like my blood. not christ's. _mine_.

so i am not a christian, although i am inspired by a lot of what i have learned from christianity. i am not a christian because christianity took my body, my amazing queer body, from me, and i have taken it back. and science and craft and art, all of these things go into it, and i acknowledge them, and what also went into it was something i can only describe as _magic_. it's something i have experienced, it's real, and people can come up with all kinds of explanations for it, just like they came up with all kinds of explanations for gender, and they seem reasonable and they make sense and they're, at best, inadequate. at best, they fall short.

Going back a bit to darraghmac, yeah sure everything people do can technically be classified as nature.

I am sometimes inclined toward that point of view. But bear in mind that it makes the following words meaningless: artificial, man-made, synthetic, anthropogenic.

There are a lot of people who wish to preserve those words and the distinctions they represent. I don't know what to tell those people. If everything a human does is natural, then there is no way to ever call anything unnatural ever again.

Again, I am fine with that, but I am sure there are people out there who would like to distinguish between the general category of human actions/creations (like, say, Los Angeles or religion) vs. slime molds, algae, and the migration of the wildebeests.

Sorry if that sounds extreme - to clarify, if you want to define everything humans do or have done as a _subset_ of "natural" then there is no semantic quarrel.

In this view, Greater London is nature. The internet is nature. Cruise ships are naturally occurring phenomena.

If everything a human does is natural, then there is no way to ever call anything unnatural ever again.

Now you're getting it.

Greater London is nature. The internet is nature. Cruise ships are naturally occurring phenomena.

Sure. What's a skyscraper if not a termite mound for humans?

A question that I'm thinking about a lot lately is the level of consciousness (as humans understand it) at which point the urge to alter one's appearance comes into play. Like, animals put on elaborate sexual displays (in almost every other species it's the males trying to appeal to the females, which is worth thinking about too), but they don't change their appearance to do it — like, you don't see a bear scraping off its fur, or a bird plucking out its feathers, to be "prettier". So clearly there's some kind of threshold of consciousness at which point the animal (human being) becomes aware of, and dissatisfied with, its physical form. And sometimes that escalates/evolves into "I am angry at the god that made me this way."

it makes the following words meaningless: artificial, man-made, synthetic, anthropogenic

you might want to give that a bit more thought. most things that fit into one broad category can also fit into a sub-category. the fact that birds are animals doesn't make the word avian meaningless.

Aimless, pleas see the subsequent post. I am okay with subcategories. It's just really bad semantics.

Also interesting digression, unperson.

There are fun topics about how sexual selection and natural selection work together in lockstep. Peacocks (or whomsoever) get longer and more resplendent tails (or whatever), but there is a point at which it just becomes stupid because you can't move. Desmond Morris and Jared Diamond to thread.

It is interesting that you bring up human consciousness and agency in this context. A peacock doesn't decide to have a more colorful tail. A middle-aged human male can decide to buy a fancier car.

Perhaps the topic is getting a bit far from religion at this point. But yeah, if there is a God in the traditional sense, He/She clearly doesn't care about us being lost and confused about our relationships with ourselves and one another. Or He/She wants us to figure it out on our own. Which is cool, I was gonna try and do that anyway.

So what use is He/She anyway? They didn't intervene in the 1860s or 1940s. They aren't intervening now. If it's a guy? Fuck that guy.

the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him

that's me in as much as God is the patriarchy (the ultimate dad/boss/cop/king)

Kate I love your embodied love so much I think that kind of thing (whatever it is) is my actual religion

Milo: "if."

wow <3 <3
beautiful post Kate

I remember Barry Scwabsky saying something in a review of a video art installation about how "pretty" is the exclusive domain of the young, and older people are left to investigate the beautiful and the sublime. I think of that often.

a lot of what's been called Christian "theatre" itt seems designed to be humbling and that can be really wonderful and beautiful in the way gyac's post describes and i have enjoyed the privilege of experiencing it as an outsider without being confined by the doctrine in any way other than through indirect cultural osmosis. Witchcraft nowadays is usually framed in terms of "empowerment" and drawing and harnessing power for obv reasons, but i suspect also in part because this sets it up in opposition to Christian humility. It is also washing away the histories of oppression by pagan religions, and subtracting all the horror, the vulnerability to terrifying malevolent agents and spirits in the traditions it draws from. If this is a healthier version of religion, great, but of interest maybe re: the question raised upthread about whether belief is chosen (i do not think there is a simple answer). Personally I really like the idea of a Robert Wyatt-like god who is frail and delicate and sensitive and compassionate, wounded and wise. I would choose a god who embodies many of the qualities of Robert Wyatt. Fuck omnipotence.

I think the natural:mad-made dichotomy is an important acknowledgement of humankind's limitations, intellectual and otherwise. It expersses, idk, the limits in our understanding of design systems in nature, our shortsigntedness- like once you recognize that humans are part of nature, these terms become more useful imo, not less.

i have a friend who makes art that tries to recreate the intricate beauty that ordinarily results from biological processes... he talks a lot about how he would never be able to copy something like that freehand, that he has to first understand the process and then create a genative system(?) or whatever along similar lines...

the trauma christianity has caused so many of us and because despite that the belief, the faith, it _means_ something to us. not the doctrines, the thing it's trying to describe.

*exactly*
at least, that's what i've noticed in a lot of people coming to occult religions and practices from Christianity, they need an outlet for that faith without the dogma and the doctrine... but a lot of the time they apply something of a Christian framework. not a moral or dogmatic framework, but i generally have no trouble picking out who grew up Christian and who grew up secular according to how they parse material (the key thing is maybe that those fron Christian backgrounds will often embrace diverse interpretive traditions and find meaning in reconciling their disparities into a cohesive whole, where secular kids will be eager to separate them out).

Cristian love as it applies to queers and other groups (the faithless) AIUI sometimes = we love you for the Christian you have the potential to become?

Actually i *can* think of one poster here who is Christian and queer afaik. Christianity is huge, and diverse, it might help to be circumspect and to avoid painting all Christian communities with the same brush...

idk there's a bunch of stuff here i wanted to respond to and it's too all over the place but the context for a lot of it is something i want to spell out here even though it might be too obvious or taken as a given:

like, i don't actually understand climate science. i trust in scientists because i've been conditioned to place my trust in one group over another, not because i am a rational anything or a clever bullshit detector. at the end of the day, it's because of my social connections, the circumstances i was born into. this is nothing to be smug about! and there is no reason really for the "othering" of religious people because it's all the same shit, right?

standard disclaimer about not accusing anyone in particular of smugness but it's way easier to spell it out than tie myself in knots playing whack a mole...

oh yeah, i thought about whether there are religious culture conoisseurs in my life, and of course there are. a lot of them don't talk about it much or at all in certain spaces, but some *have to* talk about it because it's what they spend a lot of their time thinking about. how these talks often start IME 'let me preemptively correct some of the misconceptions you probably have about me". the challenge isn't so much that it will encounter resistance or hostility, or even necessarily that it will be awkward and uncomfortable, it's more like when you say you are an active practitioner of x tradition you are immediately confronted with a million misconceptions about who you are and what you do, and nobody has the strength to explain away all of them. it's much easier not to bother.

the first one i usually have to correct is that i don't see myself as "religious" or "spiritual" at all, my practice is utterly devoid of any mysticism or spiritual discipline but like a lot of people who have aspergers and schizophrenia-related disorders i am "superstitious". Actually milo's "vulgar animism" is way more accurate, and that's the reason i bring it up. What this "vulgar animism" looks like day to day:
https://www.tiktok.com/@wrenwrite/video/7318431658573712670

In this view, Greater London is nature. The internet is nature. Cruise ships are naturally occurring phenomena.

― Virginia Wolfman (Ye Mad Puffin), Saturday, 10 February 2024 18:35 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

these are all naturally occurring phenomena

i went for a hike in the internet last week

attributing importance to something just because it has happened is imo a bias that needs shaking off

cannot go against nature, that's what love and rockets told me

Breaking news: the world is sometimes disagreeable

Kate I love your embodied love so much I think that kind of thing (whatever it is) is my actual religion

― Left

awww, thank you so much :purpleheart:

-

the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him

― papal hotwife (milo z)

hear me out here milo

for starters, the motherfucker gave me testicles. i absolutely could stop there. i'm a girl and _he gave me testicles_. the penis, i mean, fine i guess. i have no particular use for the product, but you know, i can see the appeal. they're great on other people. it's like stacy cay said, "penises on girls is like pineapple on pizza - it's actually really good but a lot of people are huge bitches about it". testicles on girls, though? that's not hawaiian pizza, that's fucking altoona-style pizza. now, imagine you were an altoona-style pizza. how would _you_ feel about your creator?

but you know what, that's fine. people are born all kinds of ways. people are born with a lot worse problems than just being a girl with testicles. i mean, it's pretty easy to take care of, right? a couple of snips and some hormone replacement therapy and all's right with the world. nothing to make a big deal out of, really.

except that this motherfucker has spent two thousand years telling his followers that my being a girl with testicles is somehow _my_ problem, not _his_, that i'm at fault, and because of _his_ little fuck up i'm supposed to spend my entire life with completely unnecessary crippling gender dysphoria? what the fuck, god? take a little personal responsibility here.

not only that, it turns out, haha, it turns out that i'm not the only little whoopsy-doodle god did. it turns out the world is CHOCK FUCKING FULL of girls who he went and stuck goddammn balls on, and men who he gave ovaries to and who, by the way, fucking _menstruation_, i'm sorry, how the _fuck_ is anybody going to worship a god who thought _menstruation_ was a reasonable thing to saddle human beings with? i mean as much as i hate balls, holy god menstruation is what we in tech would call "user-hostile design". don't think for a minute that i feel bad for missing out on menstruation. menstruation is clearly complete bullshit.

anyway, it turns out after a _great_ deal of _herculean_ effort the innumerable trans people finally figure out what the fuck is going on. it's pretty hard because it turns out the followers of his cockamamie word have taken over the entire world and taken over all of the other people who had not perfect but often _far more sensible_ ideas about gender than goddamn _christianity_ and just completely overwrote everything they believed with this fucking toxic bullshit. i mean, look at this shit:

"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own."

that's a fucking cornerstone of the goddamn Christian religion, 1 Corinthians 6:19. i grew up singing motherfucking hymns about that bullshit. yeah no fucking wonder they don't like it when we start talking "bodily autonomy" and "self-determination". it's the exact opposite of everything these bastards stand for.

and that's not even getting into all the _other_ shit people do in the name of this god, do in his name without him lifting so much of a finger to stop them. i mean, again, the testicles are kind of a nitpick, really, in light of all that other shit. no, he casts his benevolent, all-seeing eye over all this and says "this is fine."

i'm supposed to give this guy a free pass because some of the people who love him and worship him have somehow turned out to be pretty cool?

nah.

-

Actually i *can* think of one poster here who is Christian and queer afaik. Christianity is huge, and diverse, it might help to be circumspect and to avoid painting all Christian communities with the same brush...

i mean i think highly of lots of people who are/were christian and queer. richard penniman. chris bell. doug pinnick. just off the top of my head. there's a long history of it, and that faith goes deep, and that faith is that profound, and the institutions who defined and inculcated that faith, i mean... i find it hard to believe it did them any favors.

i mean honestly i have mostly empathy, because like you say, one comes from this position of trauma and this position of being abused and, like... to get personal, i fucking love my mom, you know? that doesn't make what she did ok, but i still love her. to be queer and a christian, that's a special thing, because, like, in some way to be queer one also has to be _anti-christian_. either that or dismiss everybody who doesn't believe in the exact sort of christian god you believe in as heretics. like there is some value and power to truth but that's kind of a tough sell for me, you know? i don't know if i'd be easily persuaded of that.

like, i don't actually understand climate science. i trust in scientists because i've been conditioned to place my trust in one group over another, not because i am a rational anything or a clever bullshit detector. at the end of the day, it's because of my social connections, the circumstances i was born into. this is nothing to be smug about! and there is no reason really for the "othering" of religious people because it's all the same shit, right?

idk to me this is kind of a semantic argument, because there _is_, in fact, strong empirical evidence for climate science. can i personally validate all of it? no. it is social in the sense that people i trust tend to accept it, but that trust is not blind trust. it's not like, oh, i like this person, it's oh, this person consistently behaves in a competent, respectful, and trustworthy manner. i've tried over and over again to belong to all sorts of different christian communities, and all of them have lost my faith through their own actions. because they couldn't consistently behave in a competent, respectful, and trustworthy manner. because they made excuses for wrongdoing or covered up wrongdoing instead of opposing it, or misrepresented their own beliefs, or again and again acted in contradiction to the things they claimed to believe.

when i look at science, on the other hand... i see plenty of abuses, plenty of bias, plenty of misrepresentation. people talking bullshit about chromosomes and gametes. and it works because science is not based on _faith_, it is based on _evidence_, and because it makes no claims to infallibility. i've read this before - ask a creationist what will change their mind, they'll say "nothing". ask a proponent of evolution what will change their mind, they'll say "evidence". that's the difference.

I remember Barry Scwabsky saying something in a review of a video art installation about how "pretty" is the exclusive domain of the young, and older people are left to investigate the beautiful and the sublime. I think of that often.

tell you what, i'll make young people a deal - they can be beautiful and sublime, and my 48-year-old ass gets to be pretty. i think that's a fair compromise. i mean, just because i missed out on 43 years of girlhood/womanhood doesn't mean i don't have a right! :)

Orwell's embittered atheist quote isn't a critism of anyone, the post just reminded me of it - I generally think it's the most reasonable attitude to have toward the Abrahamic God. If there is an omniscient, omnipotent being that allows misery and suffering, that is necessarily an evil being.

Totally. Given omniscience and omnipotence, plus eons of time and oceans of material, THIS is the best you could do?

oh i didn't realize that was a quote, whoops

ok so imagine george orwell was an altoona-style pizza

gnosticism is hot these days now that the stoicism bros are fading along with their crypto fortunes

yeah dick made gnosticism sound way cooler than it is, most of the original source texts are motherfuckers acting like they're OT VIII and talking like that means they get to treat everyone else like a Suppressive Person, saying shit like "well see the reason people don't understand the inner truth we do is because they're not real people at all, they're just bits of string made by the demiurge and have no souls of their own"

that said my most surprising realization of the last couple years is that "auditing" was actually a good idea and works, as far as i know no gnostics ever came up with the idea of auditing tho

in trans terms, the closest thing i know of to gnosticism is the "feminine essence" theory, also called in the past "internal hermaphrodite" or "uranian" (great wikipedia quote: "in a broader definition there were also American Uranians." missed a trick in not going with "Uranian-Americans", tho.) i toyed with it for a while, the idea that my external form was a false manifestation of my inner, hidden nature. hell, more than toyed with it, i believed it for a while. i don't now. i don't think i was born a woman. i do think i was born queer, but that was never exactly a "hidden nature", it was an overt nature that i learned to hide because it was actively punished.

i don't blame transfemmes who make sense out of things by concluding that they have a "female essence", as long as they don't say cis people are made out of string and have no souls.

isn't the uranian thing related to the whole *fucking weird sorry* trend among upper class homosexual men of spiritual veneration of the purity and innocence of pederasty, in contrast to dirty vulgar plebian sex between men or with women?

the divine feminine stuff feels terfy to me when cis women do it but I guess it's fine for transfemmes if they need it

I would be really down for a satanism where his/their nonbinary and hermaphroditic and poly/pan nature was taken seriously and not just used for shock value but I've never come across it, probably exists online somewhere

isn't the uranian thing related to the whole *fucking weird sorry* trend among upper class homosexual men of spiritual veneration of the purity and innocence of pederasty, in contrast to dirty vulgar plebian sex between men or with women?

the 19th century thing, yeah, it's fucking hard to talk about because the number one thing that gets said about queer people is that we're "groomers" and child abusers - you know, DARVO shit. but then i look at queer history, both in upper-class victorian times and classical antiquity, and pederasty was actively valorized by a lot of these folks

i guess in some ways it's not terribly different from respecting, say, germaine greer as a feminist thinker, but daaaaaaaaaamn.

that's one of the things that makes queerness so _complicated_ for me, all the interplay between gender, presentation, age, role, and _some_ of those stereotypes - not the pederastic ones - do have a basis in reality. a lot of these labels and boundaries do seem arbitrary but there are some people you kinda want out of your movement. that's one of the things that really inspires me about early christianity, honestly, the question of setting boundaries in radical community. like paul at some point has to explain in a letter that no, not being bound by the law doesn't mean that you can fuck your mom. that's what i see in paul's epistles, navigating radical community boundaries, and a lot of that is him being disingenuous and outright lying, and i guess having seen "framing agnes" last night that's on my mind as well.

the most difficult thing i encounter is that masc = top and femme = bottom isn't just, like, a social construct. in practice i've found there's something more to it. that's something that jules gill-peterson talks about in her new book, femmes behaving in femme ways get accused of perpetuating the patriarchy.

anyway all that's a little far afield so to bring it back to topic, the abrahamic god is definitely the ultimate big dick daddy dom, and is just as repulsive as the rest of them.

I would be really down for a satanism where his/their nonbinary and hermaphroditic and poly/pan nature was taken seriously and not just used for shock value but I've never come across it, probably exists online somewhere

― Left

it's kinda weird in the us because that schism like where you had around the 19th century us civil war, where you had the baptists who were anti-slavery and the southern baptists who were pro-slavery, has kind of replicated itself in a bunch of different organizations. so in america you have the church of satan, who are fash, and the satanic temple, who are radical leftists show show up at pride every year with buttons saying "SATAN RESPECTS PRONOUNS" and are generally made far more welcome than the christian groups who started showing up, like, last year and who feebly insist that "god loves all people". that's great, meantime half my gen z friends are using "it/its" pronouns, i mean, fuck it, if that's how people are gonna treat you anyway, go with it, right?

anyway i got queer friends who've joined the satanic temple. satan definitely has a much better reputation around these parts than christianity, and it's generally done in an extremely queer context. you also see some of that in transfem black metal. but there's a lot of overlap with groups like "witches vs. patriarchy".

that said the other thing about satanism is that it's not, like, heavily doctrinally orthodox. if somebody's taking baphomet as intersex seriously, it's gonna be a personal thing. i'm sure there are furries who see baphomet through a certain lens, and i think that's cool too. i don't personally, not being a furry.

Jesus kate I love your posts on this thread. I dreamed about this thread! I'm so glad it exists!

I am not participating due to the rather-personal relationship I have with "my faith" (see Matthew 6:6), also I can't keep up with you all, love being able to spectate tho

How well-organized are they? I keep coming across stuff like this:
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/idaho-press/resolution-could-allow-public-fundsreligious-schools-put-on-pause/277-90a9884e-ea1a-4345-a67f-528661357622

They really feel more visibly effective than a lot of very well funded legal activist groups! I can't recall the last time the ACLU made headlines.

anyway i got queer friends who've joined the satanic temple. satan definitely has a much better reputation around these parts than christianity, and it's generally done in an extremely queer context. you also see some of that in transfem black metal. but there's a lot of overlap with groups like "witches vs. patriarchy".

How could they not? Satan's bad-ass.

https://i.imgur.com/2Ym5IR8.jpg

Jesus kate I love your posts on this thread. I dreamed about this thread! I'm so glad it exists!

I am not participating due to the rather-personal relationship I have with "my faith" (see Matthew 6:6), also I can't keep up with you all, love being able to spectate tho

― a hyperlink to the past (flamboyant goon tie included)

i fucking love you being here even to that extent because fuck yeah matthew 6:6! the idea that "religious community" comes from a guy who said _that_... the thing that bugs me most about a lot of atheism is they will look at the bible and talk about its internal contradictions as an argument against it. i'm the exact opposite! i love that the "prince of peace" "comes to bring not peace, but a sword". i love that the being at the root of "family values" rejected his birth family in favor of his chosen family. i love that in john, jesus at gethsemane fucking _subtweets_ the way the jesus of the synoptic gospels behaved at gethsemane. i love that genesis has two different origin stories back to back right at the beginning. i love that the "monotheistic god" of the tanakh is a composite of two different gods (El and JHVH). the christian bible is complicated and rich and contradicts itself and says so much about who we _are_. it's not actually the beginning and the end for me, the alpha and the omega, but christianity is so important to my life in so many ways, great and terrible. it's borderline personality disorder: the religion. it's faith and void and even if i put it away it's not like i never take it back out.

How could they not? Satan's bad-ass.

lonely lightbringer just thinkin bout things