My brother, listen, do not be afraid. I have descended into Hell to talk About forgiveness. Yes, Pilate, with you. With others too - with everyone who’s here. But you first. Even Judas, my old friend, Must wait a while for me. We have a while; The sempiternal agony of Hell Exists outside of human history.  Souls killed in every century are here Millennia before and after you. You stand among those millions who share An everlasting sentence for the crime Of “just doing your job.” Your job killed me. Your job ripped my skin open with a lash And drove me, bleeding, shambling up the hill Where your job drove an eight inch iron spike Through each hand and each foot, and hoisted me Towards the sky and left me there for hours To slowly suffocate. You did your job To many more like me. Their names were all Forgotten as they rotted on the cross Unburied. Hell is teeming with the souls Who did their job, who served the empire well - Not just your empire, all the ones that rose And fell, before and after your own Rome’s. You asked me once what truth is. That is it. That is the truth about your whole life’s work. You know this and it sears worse than the flames. But that is not why I descended here. I’m here about forgiveness. Listen. Please.

In the beginning was the Word of God. That’s me. Like you, I had a job to do. By me all things were made, and without me Was nothing that was made. The universe Was my life’s work, the empire that I served. My father’s will for Mankind was my law. One act of disobedience was enough To sentence every one of you to death. I did my job, and did it thoroughly: The hands that made the stars built every tomb. They sculpted tumors, planted neat rows Of plagues in human lungs and skin and guts, Conducted rousing symphonies of storms, Earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, and wrote In stone: if you survive all this, the time itself Will kill you. Yet this law, My Father’s Law, No - our law, I share blame for it - forbade The dead to die. Infinities of pain, We gave as punishments for finite crimes. My father made me judge, and I looked down On human beings. I saw their sinfulness And built sparse Heaven and a crowded Hell. I thought this law was justice ‘til the day I learned what it is like to be condemned.

Pontius, I have no right to punish you. I killed you. I killed everyone you loved. I tortured you, but this ends here. You’re free. All Hell breaks out today. I will not judge. From now on, I refuse to do my job. I am not Christ the King. I abdicate. How you repay your debt to those you killed Is your own cross to carry - they decide Whether they will forgive you when you meet In Paradise. And Pontius, I forgive You for my death, of course. How could I not? But I’m not here to tell you that, I’m here To ask, to plead, for what I don’t deserve From everyone in Hell, but first from you. Brother, when we last met I said to you That you would have no power over me Were it not given from above, but now I bow my head, give power from below. I beg you for the one gift only you Can give me: I have sinned against you, please Brother, can you - will you - forgive my sins?

Man I fucking hate how people on this site think Calvinism is the default for Christianity and Christian theology.

Like I'm gonna pull my hair out. Guys, guys, come with me to medieval Christianity where we had *ninety* FEAST DAYS A YEAR and where REFUSAL to ENJOY God's creation was a MORTAL SIN.

Puritan ideas about humanity being separate from the world and all physical pleasure being sinful weren't the fucking norm please guys I'm begging you...

(not that suffering was seen as negative 100% of the time, and fasting was absolutely part of the faith but not everyone was expected to live like a monk who took a vow of poverty. Also wait until I tell you that like, 80% of cheeses we have now were invented at monasteries and that often, rich youngest sons were sent to live at monasteries bc it they weren't Franciscan (iirc) life was pretty fucking sweet for a monk!)

Part of the reason I get so spun up on explaining how deep the roots of Calvinism are in American philosophy and life is because of exactly this! It's part of the American mindset to think that the way we do things here is Just How It Is, and to look past all the weird shit tangled up in the roots.

Like, no, Puritanism isn't actually how medieval monks thought! Puritanism was considered Real Fucking Weird and deeply heretical! Calvinism? Deeply weird! Deeply wrong! They had to fuck off to another continent bc people thought their shit was weird-to-the-point-of-being-illegal.

Calvinism puts every person in competition with every other person for one of a few Limited Spots In Heaven. That's not how you build a functioning society, actually, and that's why I keep yelling about it.

Life is here to be enjoyed, and G-d's creation is here to be enjoyed, and that's one thing that my Jewish ass and medieval monks actually both believe.

YES!!!!

Like, medieval Christianity is one of my hyperfocuses and I get so exhausted with people slandering it based on the beliefs of Calvinists!

There's a LOT of valid things to criticize in Medieval Christianity, but this whole "you have to suffer to be righteous and ANY enjoyment is spitting in God's face" is NOT ONE OF THEM!

And re the tags; I was raised by a lapsed Catholic who went into the weird Christonationalist America-as-will-of-God Evangelical Christianity that the GOP has as standard now, and that drove me into my obsession with Medieval Christianity in a lot of ways, because it was SO DIFFERENT than what (most) USAmericans seem to think of as "default Christianity" and seeing those roots makes the way Calvinism has completely warped the faith in the USA especially really fucking baffling....

Haha fun fact one of my cousins is named after John Calvin. When people are like "what level of religious weirdness were you raised on?" I just sort of wave my hands towards that. That. That is what I was raised on.

But yeah. There's a lot to criticize there, he said Jewishly, but "this life doesn't matter at all and only the life to come matters" and "enjoying life at all is a sin" both are not concepts that really exist the same way in medieval Xianity. The idea that "the past is like now but worse, dirtier, and meaner," combined with Calvinism laid over top of assumptions about medieval life, has given us a deeply distorted view of what people used to do and believe.

And that's dangerous in a lot of ways, but i think one of the biggest ways in which it's dangerous is that it allows people to look at fiction written about medieval Europe and feel secure and a little smug. "Well, maybe we're [list of bad current news items] but at least we're not that bad. You could be living 700 years ago!" It leads to a sort of almost... mental passiveness? because they think they're already better than how it Used To Be.

I need to go eat lunch so maybe I'm not as clearly explaining this as I need to be.

I don't know if this is anything, but it also makes it much easier for us usamericans to dismiss "Ye Olde Dark Ages." If we're so much better and better off than our nasty, brutish and short forebears, then we can simply ignore that part of history and daydream about...I don't know...resurrecting the Roman Empire

No, that was exactly what I was saying, yeah. We are already so much better by default in our own minds and therefore we can just coast.

Fun fact - "The Dark Ages" is no longer considered to be an accurate term in academia because. there was was plenty of culture and learning etc happening, and that Petrarch (the scholar who coined it in the 1300s) was an Roman Empire fanboy who ignored the vibrant culture around him.

aka daydreaming about resurrecting the roman empire is how we got puritanism and calvinism in the first place

There’s nothing funnier than American Trad Caths revealing that they’re just Presbyterians that think Baroque looks cool

Oh my fucking god all this is too fucking funny. Lucking forward to having an anti-pope in Houston, Texas. Instead of the pointy hat maybe he can wear a white cowboy hat.

I need people to stop being so funny because I can’t keep re blogging this shit

I am breaking my hiatus briefly for one specific thing because I need at least my followers to understand that the problem here, like the reason (despite all the jokes) isn't that the guy thinks Papa Frank is wrong.

Thinking the pope is full of shit, or that the current sitting pope is actually an anti-pope representative of the devil who has charmed his way into St Peter's seat, or that the current sitting pope is actually a heretic even, is a very common Catholic thing. It happens all the time. I know this isn't part of the popular image of Catholicism but in practice how actual Catholics relate to that on a personal level is varied and broad and depending on the pope you will encounter one kind of person or another announcing that this one is actually Satan's agent or whatever.

Catholics often think the wrong person is on St Peter's throne, even if they'd never quite say it in public. That just happens a lot.

So does just sort of . . . ignoring the pope. Like this specific pope, what he's said today, just sort of not paying attention to it. Yes, of course he's the head of the church but that doesn't mean we have to agree with him.

There's nothing that radical about either believing that the wrong person is pope, or that the pope is wrong. And it's not new, either: these same kind of twerps were mad about John Paul II's papacy too, and were mad that Benedict's didn't actually go as far as they wanted him to go back the other way. It would be eye-roll worthy but not particularly surprising if this guy were simply to announce that obviously Francis is the Anti-Pope or False-Pope.

That's not what happened here or why this is so incredibly mind-bogglingly fucking funny.

This guy is absolutely hysterically mockable because what he's protesting here is the right of the institution of the papacy to have absolute control over the clergy. He is saying that the pope as an institutional figure should be subject to checks and balances and "process". That the papacy should not have absolute, unquestioned and unquestionable authority over the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution.

It is very normal and quite Catholic to object to the specific person who currently occupies the role of St Peter's heir. Objecting to the person, the specific occupant, is a totally normal Catholic thing!

Being shocked and appalled at how the powers of the institution work and implying that they should not work that way? Saying "what are you saying popes can just exercise absolute authority?" like this is astonishing or somehow against the Principles of the Thing?

That is basically as anti-Catholic as you can possibly get. It is in fact. Protestant. The absolute unhindered unquestioned authority of the pope over the institution of the Church was at the core not just the Protestant Reformation but of every single major fight the Roman Church got into with the Orthodox Church(es), every fight they got into with the lay nobility, every fight they got into with any of the local national churches they would successfully subsume, this is like, possibly the most intense core of the specific Roman Catholic institution: the Pope has absolute authority over the clergy.

The provision of law that allows the Pope as head of the institution to remove this idiot bishop at his will is LITERALLY A CENTRAL TENET OF THE INSTITUTION.

Of course as has been elsewhere pointed out, he didn't actually even do that. He did go through the customary process of investigation and discipline for a bishop, which this idiot bishop defied before being removed from his office, because it turned out that there was far more wild shit up with this dude than his objection to Francis' interpretation of canon law as applied to eligibility for the sacrament of baptism.

But that the institutional figure of The Pope has the right to dismiss, remove, relocate, or otherwise preside in judgement and authority over all clergymen in the Roman Church at all times is so absolutely central to the institution of Roman Catholicism that objecting not to the fact that this specific pope did a bad thing but to the idea that The Pope is in his role as The Pope can do this thing is basically being a Protestant.

And that's fucking hysterical and also so, so stupid.

There’s nothing funnier than American Trad Caths revealing that they’re just Presbyterians that think Baroque looks cool

Nah, nah what you've got to do if you don't like the pope is appoint your own pope. I hear the climate in Avignon is lovely.

The reason Joseph knew Mary didn't cheat on him is because he knew Mary was Trans and she was begging to god for Joseph to get her pregnant and god helped a bad bitch out

Mary was a trans woman

Share this to make Christians angry

seriously though this has been something i unironically can get behind. biblically, it tracks. there are other instances of miraculous pregnancies and they are all women unable to conceive(mostly being too old) but if Mary was cis the miracle is kinda minor compared to the others. Mary being given holy bottom surgery, on the other hand, is a miracle that will actually get the neighbors talking

Creating a new sext of Christianity lets go, we are throwing out all the shitty parts

In general, I think it's currently really important for progressive Christians to be very loud about being both progressive and deeply religious Christians, and for everyone else fighting for progressive values to be supportive of them doing just that. I know that's like, idk, counter-intuitive or cringe or whatever, but seriously folks, the alternative is that progressive Christians have to be quiet about their faith to be accepted within broader secular and interfaith progressive advocacy, which means that the regressive asshole Christians (a) sound that much louder and (b) dominate the USian religious landscape all the more. That's a problem, for all of us.

We need people pushing back within the faith as well as outside of it, because that destroys any edifice that this is about Christianity and religious freedom.

You can be a devout Christian and also:

And in before regressive Christians come shouting at me that (1) what do I know, I'm a Jew and (2) no lol you can't because of ___ reason:

My source is that I've personally met and talked to Christians of great faith and integrity - people who embody the closest forms of kindness I've seen to what Jesus himself advocated - who are each of these things.

It is 100% possible; you just choose to believe otherwise.

At this point I think it's time to start preaching and claiming the moral high ground here.

Right-wing evangelical Christians want you to think that they're the moral ones, when they EXPLICITLY defy the word of God. They routinely:

.......and plenty more. These are not just a few bad actors; this lifestyle is ENCOURAGED by this irresponsible and immoral cult. They are leading people astray into a life of sin and a culture of callous cruelty.

Is this the Christianity you want the world to know you by?

@yoshiofyellow lol we were talking about this last night

The Sheep and the Goats

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

remembering that time I explained on Twitter that Jews are 0.2% of the world’s population and control like 1.2% of its wealth

while Christians are 30-something percent of the world’s population and control 55% of its wealth

so, like, there IS a minority of the world’s population controlling the majority of its wealth

Christians.

and of course a bunch of utter walnuts were like “SEE??? this proves that Jews ARE disproportionately wealthy!!!”

which, like, sure

sure

we have $1.20 to Christians’ $55

but sure, individually we average out to having a bit more pocket change than the world’s average

a couple of things, though:

-those are AVERAGES—it doesn’t mean that every Jew you meet is wealthy, especially because…

-we are such a small population that the existence of *one Jewish billionaire* would skew the average, learn what an average is ffs, if there are 10 of us and 1 is a billionaire and the rest of us have $0 dollars, on average we each have $100,000,000 but in reality 9 of us still have $0 dollars

-y’all killed off a LOT of our poor people less than a century ago which also tends to skew the average

The minority group (in the sense of being less than half the population; they’re still the largest religion) controlling the majority of the world’s wealth is Christians. Sorry about your favorite conspiracy theory.

i want to print that out and staple it to ppl's foreheads. a lot of the jews who fled extreme violence, genocide, and ethnic cleansing were only able to do so because they had the funds. those who couldn't afford to leave were killed. and those who were barely able to scrape by enough to escape usually were forced into assimilation wherever they immigrated because poverty doesn't give you much of a choice.

I feel like Brennan’s mention of Narnia’s storytelling playing into his like… non-Christian beliefs and like… enforcing it to him feels like it echoes the way that CS Lewis described Philip Pullman of His Dark Materials fame as being an extremely Christian sort of Atheist.

And I think it might be that Lewis, and the Narnia series pulls from Christianity not all the horrifying traumatic bullshit everyone who has been harmed by it relates, but rather specifically the morals and messages from scripture and psalm and such that are about like.

The things that have shit all nothing to do with God or Christ or actual Christianity. It’s stuff that’s about ‘hey. we were made to love each other. And sometimes that takes sacrifice.’ and you don’t need to be Christian to feel that.

and I think… And I know as a former Catholic with conflicting feelings about organized religion and an actual religious affiliation more likely classified as “you do you, bud, just don’t hurt anybody.”  I feel like the reason Narnia despite being Christian allegory still is able to resonate with so many people is because it doesn’t assume it is correct by way of being Christian. It’s an author’s thesis explained in a story, with like… an actual story told to sustain the arguments.

Like sometimes you can read a thesis and agree with an argument and also come to a completely different conclusion. That can be the power of a well thought out research paper and I think that is the difference with Chronicles of Narnia. Sometimes if you write your position well enough people can come to their own conclusions given the information because you included all of the information and they can still view your research as important because even if they don’t agree with your conclusion they see that you didn’t let your conclusion bias your research.

That is how you can be friends with someone who has a different opinion, and I think it’s cool. and I think also British Christians are different from American Christians. I’m sorry Americans but my first interaction with an American Christian was a random woman approaching me in a mall asking if she could pray for me and then abruptly being swarmed by a group of small children commanding Jesus to free my body from Satan. So. Sometimes. Perspective is weird.

Fun fact! Water actually turns “blood red” when it is contaminated by sulfur creating sulfuric acid. And scientists have discovered that around the time of the plagues a volcano went off that disturbed Egypt’s environment. So the plagues are scientifically proven. The other parts of the plagues are explained by the sulfuric acid river making the animals leave the river and escaping into the human population.

WHY DIDNT ANYONE TELL ME THE PLAGUES WERE PROVEN

if anyone wants a full list heres how they happened:

basically they all stem from a massive eruption of a volcano on the island of santorini off the coast of greece. the ash then floated over to egypt which kickstarted the plagues

1) blood: the ash carried the mineral cinnabar, which has the capability of turning water red

2) frogs: the ash also had many toxic and acidic substances so naturally, all the frogs are gonna flee the river

3) lice: given what was going on insects would have burrowed into dead animals/peoples skin and laid eggs, which then hatched

4) beasts: everything is getting poisoned from the ash and toxins, causing animals to freak the fuck out/die

5) pestilence: toxins again

6) boils: the ash would have caused storms that carried acid rain which when it fell, would irritate peoples skin causing boils

7) hail: the storm again

8) locusts: again with the insects and the amount of dead bodies and such which attract more insects. a lotta insects basically.

9) darkness: the ash covered the sky, blocking out the sun

10) slaying of the first born: given that children’s bodies were found in higher numbers than others, some archeologists think they may have been sacrificed to stop all the destruction, but they aren’t 100% sure about that. this is just me but I would say another possibility is that babies/kids are a lot more susceptible to toxins and shit, so while an adult may have been fine or gotten a bit sick, it might have been very dangerous/deadly for kids or babies

the volcano would also attest for the parting of the sea weirdly enough. the red sea was in fact the ‘reed’ sea, and was very shallow, probably waist deep or so. given the amount of shit dumped into the ocean from the volcano, this wouldve caused a tsunami to head towards egypt. the water would get sucked out from the reed sea right before the tsunami hit, letting people pass it easily, then the actual tsunami would hit, fuckin up anyone who tried to follow.

another theory is that the red water was caused by algae, which would cause the frogs and stuff to jump out as well. the algae also carried substances toxic to animals so if they ingested any they’d get sick and die, so more insects. in this theory there was a sand storm coincidentally that caused the rest

some sources: X X

The volcano wasn’t ON Santorini - it WAS Santorini, then called Thera. It completely blew away the Minoan settlements on the island and was one of the largest eruptions in human history. 

this is blowing my fucking mind

I love that if you really boil all this information down, what you get is something approximating “the sinking of Atlantis caused the 10 Biblical plagues of Egypt” which is, like, one of the greatest mythological mash-ups I have ever heard of.

it never ceases to amaze me how so many people still think that in Christianity Hell is the place for bad people and Heaven is for good people. like, is “Christians go to Heaven and everyone else gets damned” really not common knowledge?

The sheer number of culturally Christian and apparently functionally illiterate or terminally uncurious Christians is absolutely insane. Like, even at Evangelical churches, you get people who scrape close to full folk religion syncretism with ghosts, witches, demons, crystals, angels, and the Rainbow Bridge as important parts of their beliefs.

I think “You only get to heaven by being Christian, good non-believers go to hell” is such a self-evidently monstrous and manipulative belief that a lot of people can’t imagine believing it so they just assume it must be a fringe belief.

Yeah like “Most Christians are wrong, the actual, REAL Christianity says x” is like… at that point - who cares. If half the Christians believe x, then half of Christianity says x, because Christianity is comprised of Christians and the things they say and believe. Official doctrine says one thing, but in the West at least it’s only a pretty small slice of the Christian population that actually cares about official doctrine. And there are different doctrines all claiming to be official that disagree with each other!

As far as I can tell, the standard operating procedure for the average person-that-calls-themselves-christian seems to be that, like… They believe that God is Good, and base what they think God thinks is good based on what -they- think is good. The average modern-western-liberal-christian, if they think being gay is fine, assumes  that god thinks being gay is fine. Because if god thought being gay was bad, He wouldn’t be a very good god, would he. And they know he’s good, because he’s God, so therefore God *doesn’t* hate gays.

To clarify, there’s a large proportion of people who subscribe, openly and explicitly, to “Grace not works” doctrines of various kinds, among other things because as I recall there’s support for exactly that in the New Testament.

It’s a major part of American Christianity and while I don’t know the exact numbers it’s hardly a fringe doctrine or an obscure theological point; it’s a centerpiece and point of constant preaching for a lot of large mainstream Christian sects.

It’s like… I dunno, Amway or something. A lot of people are built so that they take one look at it, go, “Scam” and assume everyone else is built the same way but that’s not actually true.

As a non-American, before coming on Tumblr, I have only seen “grace not works” once, in one (1) book where it was a statement from a character no-one liked and no-one agreed with.

So... you know. “In Christianity” in that original post is doing a lot of works that it really ought not be doing.

Rating The Major Early Christian Heresies

(Note: I am leaving out gnosticism and Manicheanism. Gnosticism is a bucket term for too many different beliefs to summarize succinctly; I could do a whole post just rating different gnostic beliefs. And the Manicheans were not even really Christian. It was a totally separate religion that blended Christianity, gnosticism, mithraism, neo-Platonism, and even Buddhism. For the record, the gnostics and the Manicheans are both 10/5 fucking chad heroes of weird esoteric Christian-adjacent religious bullshit.

Note 2: "Where are the Cathars!" "Where are the Bogomils!" I said EARLY Christian heresies. I ain't here to talk about no johnny-come-latelies.)

Docetism: Jesus was a hologram. Because the world of matter is inherently corrupt, it is inconceivable that Christ ever had a physical form. His apparent """body""" was a phantom, or illusion. This inherently denies the death and resurrection, as there was no body to die or resurrect.

5/5 stars, this is the kind of wet and wild shit I like to see.

Montanism: Super into prophesizing, and they believed that anything revealed to them as a prophesy in the grips of religious ecstasy superceded the word of Christ himself.

3/5 stars: you're on extremely shaky theological ground here, but I like the potential for shenanigans, and I give them an extra half a star for letting women be bishops.

Adoptionism: Jesus was a normal guy, conceived in the regular way, who God adopted upon seeing that he lived a sinless life. They believed that Jesus only attained his divine status after his adoption.

4/5 stars, because imagine you're Jesus in this scenario. What a weird day that must have been.

Sabellianism: If you can't wrap your head around the Trinity at all, this is the heresy for you. Adherents of Sabellianism believed that there was no difference between the 'persons' of the Godhead: there is just the one God, who manifests himself at different times and for different purposes in different ways.

3/5 stars because it makes a lot more sense than the canonical interpretation, but it doesn't whip any ass, you know?

Arianism: This one holds that Christ was created by God, but is not the same as God. It demotes Jesus to being kind of like a lesser deity. This one has really stuck around, it's cropped up over and over again throughout the centuries. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe a version of Arianism.

4/5 stars just for being the last man standing.

Pelagianism: Pelagians rejected the doctrine of Original Sin and the belief in humanity's inherently sinful nature. Official Catholic doctrine holds that man is doomed to sin, and only by God's grace can he transcend his total depravity. But the Pelagians believed that you don't actually need God's grace or intervention (which includes, you know, Christ's entire existence and ministry) in order to do God's will and lead a good life: you can just...choose to be good.

5/5 stars, these sound like really nice people.

Donatism: So if I'm a bishop or whatever, and I administer a sacrament to you (baptism, making you a priest, etc), and then I am subsequently excommunicated, the Donatists believed that my excommunication rendered every sacrament I had ever administered null and void. I'm gonna be honest, I don't think this one holds water at all, and I bet these people were pretty insufferable. Basically what they're saying is that in order to serve the church you need to be absolutely pure and without sin: which no one is, except for, apparently, the Donatists themselves.

No stars.

Marcionism: The god of the old testament and the god of the new testament are two different gods. The god of the old testament they called the Demiurge, and should be understood to be the god of the Jews, who were still due a messiah; and the god of the new testament was the Supreme God, who sent Jesus Christ in order to reveal himself.

5/5 stars. This is Judeo-Christian polytheism and I'm fucking here for it. Plus, after Marcion was done editing everything out of the new testament scriptures that contradicted him, all he was left with were like 10 of Paul's letters and a highly edited version of the Gospel of Luke. The brass balls on this guy for saying that every other apostle could eat his shit gets this one a whole extra star.

Monophysitism: Christ was not human at all but fully divine. Docetism can be viewed as a kind of Monophysite heresy, but the Monophysites did believe that Christ was physically on Earth. They just didn't think he had a human nature and believed he was incapable of suffering.

2/5 stars because Christ's humanity is obviously what actually makes him interesting and his suffering is what makes his sacrifice meaningful. Doctrinally they're on pretty firm ground though, the early church easily could have broken their way. Emperor Justinian I wanted this to become orthodoxy, but he died before his plans could go into effect.

Apollinarianism: Jesus had a normal human body and a normal human soul, but he was fucking mind controlled to spread the word of God. He had no conscious mind of his own and was born into this world solely in order to serve as a meat-sleeve for the eternal Logos.

5/5 stars. What the fuck. What the fuck.

@apocrypals

So nice i reblogged it twice 10/5

The strange thing about growing up in conservative Christianity and then leaving it behind is that there are a lot of secular/progressive spaces that engage in similar thinking while sincerely believing their ideas are counter to conservative ones. So I thought I would just make a list of things I was taught within conservative Christianity, the stuff that was either the core of our beliefs, or the social dynamics that we created. Some of the language I use is specifically either scriptural, or Christian-speak.

This list isn’t to say “stop thinking this way.” This is actually intended to simply be informative because sometimes social justice spaces assume, “we are crafting our ideals in opposition to conservative ideals therefore whatever we think surely must be the opposite of whatever they think,” without ever seeming to know that their language and ideals look and sound the same.

So, let’s begin:

Sin-leveling: x is bad, and y is bad, and all bad things deserve an equal reaction

Sin-leveling part 2: because all things are equally bad, there’s nothing wrong with inverting the consequences. Hurting others becomes acceptable (because it’s no different than doing something distasteful), doing something distasteful is unforgivable (because it’s no different than doing something harmful)

Avoid all appearance of evil: if I assume that your behavior looks wrong, then you are wrong, even if further context would say otherwise. You should avoid doing anything that others would see as wrong because you are not allowed the benefit of the doubt or to defend yourself.

Sin by association: x company contracted with y company. Y company engages in something sinful, which means x company approves of said sinful thing which means if you purchase from x company, you are condoning, supporting, and have actually committed the sin.

Think only on what is good: or as the pastor of my old church liked to call it, “garbage in, garbage out.” Whatever ideas, thoughts, words, arguments, stories, pictures, books, movies, songs, friends, love you put in your head will create the desire to become that. If you want to be good, you must avoid any bad thought because you will “slip” into wanting it and then be unable to stop yourself from being it. (For example, type into google “is secular music” and click on the autocomplete of “a sin”)

Language as an in-group test: if you do not describe your life, experiences, and beliefs with the exact same vocabulary and in-group speak, you are either not really one of us, or you’re someone who hasn’t thought through their ideas as deeply as I have.

By any means necessary: Also known in the ex-Evangelical world as “lying for Jesus.” If my words create the necessary beliefs and actions in others, then it doesn’t matter if I am exaggerating, saying half-truths, or using manipulative language, because I’m saving others and helping them do what’s right.

Touch not God’s anointed: any critiques of those our community trusts, critiques of those we’ve deemed “the good ones,” are actually people trying to sow discord and disunity to destroy our community and their voice should be silenced because they must be lying.

Judge not lest ye be judged: A scripture that we throw at people when someone says our leadership is abusive, a scripture we cry is being taken out of context when we want to harshly critique someone ourselves. 

There’s more, lots more, but this post is already fairly long. Once again, though, this isn’t intended to be combative. I just want people to know the actual social dynamics that a lot of us grew up with in conservative Christianity communities, so they know when sometimes they’re sharing those social dynamics, not countering them.

Someone wrote a post several years ago (2013? 2014?), noting how some specific queer tumblr trends at the time were starting to sound exactly like conservative christian messaging/propaganda.

Like remember when “you are valid” became a really popular platitude on tumblr? Everyone started saying that, and I didn’t really question it until this post pointed out that going around telling strangers “you are valid” “your identity is valid” is just as empty as and meaningless as telling strangers “Jesus loves you.”

See also: “your fav is problematic” / “none of us are without sin.”

I don’t remember when I saw the post, but I think it was around the same time so called tumblr progressives decided to like, cancel the creator of Steven Universe for some really dumb reason.

I wonder what Christian meme groups are like. I mean some Christians have the biggest victim complexes in the world and if you couple that with first person perspective memes, you’d probably get memes like:

Oh thank fuck it is my time to shine

These are all from a Christian meme group that I joined for some reason but fell in love with

I’ve been consuming Christian memes since I was about fourteen and they’re all like this. Also:

May I add:

ok i spent hours looking through christian discord servers for these

Some personal favorites I’ve encountered

I’m not sure if any of these count as blasphemy exactly but happy sunday yall.

This goes so well with what my mother says.

‘God has to have a sense of humor or else he wouldn’t have created us.”

Listen I know I’m Jewish but this shit is too fucking funny for me not to reblog

It’s Sunday y'all

I may be an atheist but y'all I lost it

D E A D

MUST. ADD. TO. LIST. FROM. R/DANKCHRISTIANMEMES

My time has come

My time to shine

Jesus was not a liberal, conservative, capitalist, socialist, communist, anarchist, libertarian, or fascist, on account of the fact that none of those things would even be coherent as concepts until more than 1,000 years after his life. This is, for some reason, incredibly hard for people to grasp

That said, Jesus went against the government and the church, asserted that traditions were made for people and can and should be bent for convenience/necessity, fed poor people and hung out with prostitutes.

We can refuse to use words to describe it, but he HAD political views as described in the Bible.

Jewish, Muslim, and other non-culturally-Christian kids shouldn’t have to lie about Santa.

It’s time for me to get more anti-Semitic hatemail! With a topic very near and dear to my heart: The way so many Non-culturally-Christian (NCC herein) families and tiny little children have to bend themselves in order to carry the lie Culturally Christian families want to maintain about Santa. 

If you are here to tell me “We tell our kids that Santa is a part of MAGIC, and he’s about the SPIRIT of Christmas, and so he IS real for some people, and then we teach about NICE LIES” please rest assured that I do not care. I also do not care for you to tell me how non-religious your Christmas is, if you have Santa, you’re still doing Christian culture. Just, stop. Please, I’m begging you. 

If you do Santa, please listen to me, because this is written for you, in a lot of ways. 

I feel so sad this time of year because all my Jewish groups are full of parents strategizing about how to keep children that are around THREE TO FIVE from “ruining Christmas magic” for others, and how much have we bought into assimilation that we believe this is our JOB? That our very small children with whom I would not expect to keep something a secret between dinner and dessert are meant to carry the burden of this cultural albatross for a culture that already overwhelms their every day? 

My fellow NCC people: If you really want to participate in the Santa Lie, I’m not going to stop you. This is your choice, choose your life, choose your choices. A great many people I respect give their kids some song and dance about it being a “fun pretend game” that Christians play, and while I might quibble that a fun pretend game means both sides know it’s pretend, that’s your choice. 

But I also want you to ask yourselves: Why should we feel like we have to? Because we clearly do! If we didn’t feel like we had to, you wouldn’t be putting so much emotional energy into it, I wouldn’t be writing this knowing I was gonna get some more fun comments about being a kike, and our kids wouldn’t have to worry about telling the goddamn truth. I cannot be the only NCC person who feels this way, and I can’t even be the first one to SHARE these feelings, but I’m telling you, so you know: You do not need to pick this up for your children. 

Christmas runs, in the US, from late October to January. It’s the fucking fourth quarter. Those of you who are culturally Christian cannot possibly understand how aggravating and tiring this entire thing becomes, especially when you have kids and you have to deal with the fact that they are SATURATED with this feeling of otherness. When you get older, it’s easy to deal with, but when you’re tiny? It’s hard enough when supposedly non-religious schools are doing doves and trees and santa crafts, singing “holiday songs” (Christmas carols) and the like. I can’t pull my kids out of school for 6 weeks. 

And then we add them being villainized for telling the truth about Santa. Even though I tell my child the rest of the year that the truth is important. You cannot want diversity among your friends, and for your child to experience diverse friendships, and then hold that you deserve to live in a bubble every final quarter where your kids runs no risk of finding people who believe differently. Culturally Christian parents should not be holding NCC kids accountable for breaking the Santa myth. They’re literal children. It is not their job to construct this for you. 

But Doc, how would you feel if someone told your kids the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, or God? 1) We don’t do the tooth fairy, because I feel not great ways about that! 2) Jewlet will know plenty of people who don’t believe in God. 3) It is fucking HILARIOUS to me that you think Jewlet will not meet with a majority of people who don’t support and share our family’s beliefs. 

I’m asking all culturally Christian parents I know to do better. Please don’t tell me how worried you are that Jewlet will “spoil Christmas” for your kids. Please reconsider making children responsible for something you’ve chosen to set up, and don’t villainize kids who come from NCC families for telling the truth about what they believe. 

NCC families: You don’t have to keep doing this. I know it really feels like you do, especially if you have an interfaith family with cousins who do Santa. But you don’t. 

this whole thing is so fucking wild to me

culturally christian here

ukrainian

no-one I have ever met ever believed, or tried to make me believe, that Grandpa Frost (Santa Claus post-soviet de-chistianized version) is real

...admittedly this might be partially post-soviet legacy but

well, it is what it is, and I’ve grown up knowing that these were fICTIONAL CHARACTERS

there was actually this nice space of ‘i mean they are fictional but also *eyebrow wiggle* maybe not’ abt house spirits and the like, cute cozy superstitions

but actually maintaining lies like that? i dont think thats a thing at all and just

hi the magic of the holiday is 100% preserved without lies

children like games of pretend and are 100% down with consciously pretending they are being given presents by an old man in a winter coat who only comes around once a year

they also like when once a year in school/kindergarten one of them dresses up as that man and theres a whole play about it for New Year

its magical! its wonderful! its cool!

(it also completely doesnt need christianity i swear its 90% the same custom minus Jesus and THERE WAS SO LITTLE JESUS TO TAKE OUT ACTUALLY)

I don’t believe in him, but if you do… how do you ignore this?

THIS!!!!!!!

I think Bo Burnham put it best

(From God’s Perspective (x))