I love hell I am hell

Some of you really think suffering conveys moral authority and it shows

Responses to suffering can be noble. Suffering itself is just suffering. What are you even saying, that torturers, rapists, and abusers do their victims a favor by ennobling them in the purifying fire of pain? That’s fucked up.

And if you answer the argument that X is an abuser with “X is an abuse survivor how dare u!!!” then congratulations, you have engaged in a complete non sequitur. Abusers and abuse victims are not mutually exclusive classes of “complete monsters” vs. “people” my God please grow up.

Some of you really think suffering conveys moral authority and it shows

Responses to suffering can be noble. Suffering itself is just suffering. What are you even saying, that torturers, rapists, and abusers do their victims a favor by ennobling them in the purifying fire of pain? That’s fucked up.

the thing folks living in Christian dominant cultures gotta realize is that even if you’re not Christian, your basic understanding of religion and spirituality and morality is still being filtered through a Christian lens. your very concept of what religion is and does is filtered through that lens.

This is what I call cultural Christianity, for those who are still confused

“But everyone celebrates christmas.” No. No we don’t.

“Religion is based on complete blind submission and not asking any questions ever”

No. That’s Christianity.

“Religion is totally focused on the afterlife and getting into heaven and avoiding hell”

Nope. Christianity again.

“Religion is about pushing your beliefs on others and trying to get them to convert”

Still Christianity.

love me some casual supersessionism in my doctor who! (spoiler: i don’t.)

look. that “twist in the sequel” line is, objectively, wrong–”love thy neighbor”, as the show puts it, is in…vayikra, which is in…what the show calls the “old testament”. doctor who frequently elides facts for clever quips and major plots alike, and that’s fine! it’s fiction! but this particular elision (and the dichotomy it sets up) plays into a classic antisemitic trope: we jews of the “old testament” follow a backwards, ~pharisaic (ayy) law and G-d of anger, brimstone, sin, and death…only the christian interpretation brings morality and empathy to the table, only the christian bible teaches a god of love. this argument’s entire premise is that our tanakh is oppressive and legalistic, that it not only must, but exists only to be interpreted into goodness by the christian bible. 

this is not to say that we don’t have violence, oppression, or tragedy in our holy text–we do, and it’s our job to wrestle with every word of it. but you have that violence too, and, culturally, have enacted it on such a gargantuan scale…and this line is a hint of one of its expressions: when we, as the barbaric and raw-hewn legalists of old, are theologically (and so often physically) subjugated to christians, the “complete” ones. i hope i don’t have to tell you how much violence has been enacted on our people by christians wanting to complete us (or erase us. two sides of the same coin.)

i liked most of the episode! great casting and a nice historical romp! just leave out the antisemitism next time, please.

Is anyone willing to break down what this means into simpler terms? I’m not really able to comprehend this as is, sorry

Basically, the idea that the concept of “loving your neighbor” and tempering legalese with compassion and empathy is solely a Christian addition to Scriptures and that the Tanakh (or as it’s referred to here, the Old Testament) is entirely fire and brimstone, law with no chance for mercy. It’s claiming that those J00z only care about following the law with no leeway or interpretation (which is ridiculous, the Talmud is entirely interpretation).

Basically, by claiming that mercy and empathy were only encouraged in the New Testament, it’s throwing Jewish people under the bus by claiming we are still entirely following oppressive and legalistic practices with no room for interpretation.

Except, if I wanted to, I could fill a small book with verses from the New Testament that don’t show compassion or empathy and another small book with understanding and empathic verses from Torah.

Basically, supersessionism is claiming that Christianity “completed” Judaism (despite often wildly different outlooks on the same events) and that if only those pesky, stubborn Jews would just realise that their entire cultural and belief systems hasn’t been needed for millennia (can you sense the dripping sarcasm here?).

Last original post for the day (sorry, I just have so much to say and add on to concerning conversations jumblr has had before I created this account)

But let’s talk about “Christian culture”

You know how you hear Christianized atheists try and say they “aren’t Christian/Christianized because you know they don’t believe in G-d”

And we, as religious minorities in the west, have to explain that that’s not how this works.

This is the problem with seeing religion as “just religion” and not a whole entire culture.

Ive seen secular people wear crosses (upside or downside doesn’t matter)

I’ve seen secular people say “Merry Christmas” and celebrate Christmas or celebrate Halloween

I’ve seen secular people give “something up for Lent” because “they need to be more healthy”

I’ve seen atheist people dress up as Jesus or the Christian European version of what people think G-d “looks like” or dress up to what Christians think the devil looks like

I’ve seen atheist LITERALLY GO TO CHRISTIAN PRIVATE school (source: me, I was the atheist that went to Christian school. Before you ask, no my mom was agnostic she had no interest in Christianity but saw it as better education and other reasons)

I’ve seen secular workers complain about how they don’t have Easter/Christmas off because you know, “everyone has off those time”

I’ve seen atheists literally trying to prostelyze their lack of religious beliefs to others.

I’ve seen many Christianized secular/atheist people do things that are inherently from Christianity or Christian centric, you know why?

Because, as religious minorities stress, religion IS NOT just “religion” something you can shed once you stop believing in it.

It is a CULTURE (especially ethnoreligions)

If you’re an atheist who was born into a Christian society, community, or family you do things you don’t EVEN realize stem from Christianity.

You will never ever be able to divorce yourself from that narrative.

ex-Christians who convert to another religion (like me) have incredible trouble already erasing and unlearning Christianized behavior. And some behaviors we may never unlearn

So it’s no wonder, that ex-Christian atheists are the same, in fact worse when it comes to Christianization. Many secular and atheists spaces in the west are in fact, Christianized, and have no want to unlearn Christianized behaviors. So many of you stop being religious and suddenly think “I’m not Christian anymore”

When that is not how it works

Christianized secular/atheist folk please realize: you can never EVER stop being christianized and that your form of secularity is in fact thriving and hasn’t been oppressed (at least compared to other religious minorities) for a long long time.

Sorry I had to be the one to explain to you that you benefit from other religious minorities oppression not because your secular but because you’re Christianized secular.

@attackfish

As an ex-Christian and Christianized atheist I can say 100% this is true in my case. It’s actually very interesting to observe all the ways I am culturally and spiritually Christian in my thinking. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being Christianized, but it is wrong to deny your own influences and gaslight religious minorities about the unthinking cultural dominance you assert over them. In the Western context this seems to be another case of cultural/religious privilege, in that people who are part of the dominant culture don’t have to think about their cultural influences and assume they are some kind of nonexistent “neutral” default.

There’s more than just Christian themes in Star Wars though, and George’s religion should have nothing to do with how the movies from either eras our judges. If you’re judging a person’s understanding of their religion based off their movies than most the filmmakers would have shit beliefs.

I live in the US and there’s many other religions in the country, not every atheist came from a Christian belief system. I was raised Muslim and Catholic, but I chose to be Agnostic.

We can’t judge people by their religion unless there’s firm proof that’s what their motivation was from.

That’s kind of the dilemma of literary hermeneutics. We often tend to interpret things based on the writer’s religion or the religious influences they might’ve had or what was going on politically in their country at that time but in the end all we do is guess. Not to mention that there is never such a thing as THE interpretation, no matter how much information we collect about George, JJ, RJ and the current time and context. Then we won’t ever be able to seperate ourselves from our own socialisation which will - no matter how hard we try - influence our judgement. And even those of us who grew up in the western world have very different thinking patterns that won’t only be different from each others’ but also from those of the writers, not to mention  the differences that occure between people literally from all over the world. So even when I for instance write that TLJ is a result of RJ’s racist and  sexist thinking patterns, it’s just the most logical conclusion I came to, but it’s still an interpretation. (but if people interpret his work  that way it’s bad, no matter what RJ’s intention truly was, thus he would need to apologize and reflect on his writing anyway) So the OT as a Christian story is an interpretation. Every parallel we discuss, no matter how likely it seems to us, is an interpretation. That doesn’t mean we should stop doing that of course (LOL then we could throw all literature studies into the trash) but we have to be aware of it. 

Like I forget it sometimes as well but I have the feeling so do many of you. It’s a normal thing bc some of these conclusions are so natural to us that we forget or never realise where they came from. But I can for instance say that the OT as a Christian story or TLJ as a Christian story seem completely alien to me. (even more so with TLJ) And I did grow up in a Christian society too. So it’s just one way to interpret it which seems very likely to some people but unlikely to others. And what truly influenced George… maybe even he doesn’t know. Same for RJ. 

“If you’re judging a person’s understanding of their religion based off their movies than most the filmmakers would have shit beliefs.“

@themandalorianwolf Isn’t that pretty much Hollywood in a nutshell 😂 What I’m talking about, however, is Yoda’s prattling about how attachment is bad and so on, which people keep saying is Buddhist when it’s more a bastardized understanding of Buddhism popular in the West. I have written about this before (link).

And where did I judge someone for their religion? Like, am I being accused of Christophobia or Buddhaphobia or something here? :P I don’t have anything against Christians or cultural Christianity in of itself–I’m a very culturally Christian atheist/agnostic myself. My issue is with people discounting the clear Christian themes (forgiveness, redemption etc.) because of George’s religion. I didn’t bring his religion into this, I made a plausible reading of themes in the story, which is one of many possible readings as @thelastjedicritical said, and someone brought up George’s religion to invalidate that. So I retorted that someone having a different religion or no religion does not discount prior cultural influences. I know that from personal experience, as I said.

I also never stated that Christianity is the only religion in the U.S., I know how diverse it is ethnically, religiously and otherwise. However, it’s just fact that the U.S. is a heavily majority Christian country with some 70% of the population belonging to some sect of Christianity (link), so the statement that atheists in the U.S. are frequently–not exclusively, I never said that–culturally Christian shouldn’t be controversial.

For the life of me I can’t figure out this argument that Finn’s sacrificial charge at the cannon was hateful and Rose’s “not fighting what we hate” line worked as a coherent expression of theme. The arguments I’ve seen for Finn’s charge being fueled by hate are basically made up to make Rose’s line work and have weak bases in the actual canon scene. Here are some I’ve seen, with counterarguments:

Argument: The mission was pointless because Finn already knew no one was coming to save him and he was going to kill himself out of spite.

Counterargument: There’s no basis in the actual filmed scene to say the original reason for the ski speeder mission–earn time for allies to arrive–was invalidated. Confirmation that their signal was received but not responded to only came after Rose crashed into Finn

Argument: Finn said earlier at Canto Bight that it felt good to hurt the war profiteers with the falthier rampage, while Rose said no, it was worth it to set the falthiers free, which was clear foreshadowing that Finn was driven by hate and a desire to hurt while Rose was focused on love and freedom

Counterargument: Okay, to vent a little, that exchange was plain bad and rendered both Finn’s and Rose’s arcs absurd. It was a really weird and abrupt switcheroo from when Finn was the one who was temporarily awed by the beauty and glitz of Canto Bight and Rose was the one who wanted to put her fists through the town. Plus, given that Rose was the one who tased a wounded Finn into unconsciousness and paralysis because she was so angry at him, it’s kinda rich to see her play the saint without any kind of apology or amends.

To get to the main point, If this exchange was meant to be foreshadowing it was poorly done because the two situations were so different. On Crait Finn was trying to save his friends and preserve hope for the future, attempting to destroy a weapon for that end isn’t inherently hateful

Argument: Finn was bathed in red light, which in Star Wars means he was on the Dark Side of the Force

Counterargument: Effects like lighting can be a nice supplement to storytelling but can’t override the actual story. Like Jesus Christ you really don’t have arguments, do you?

Argument: Finn was mistaken about his sacrifice having any impact, Rose is a technological expert so she stopped him from sacrificing his life meaninglessly.

Counterargument: Actually Finn recognized the technology while Rose didn’t, he has way more reason to know how the First Order’s tech works, and TLJ showed him to be Rose’s peer in terms of technical knowledge and ingenuity.

Even if we accept this argument, though, at best it says that he was being ignorant or incompetent, not hateful.

Argument: Finn was angry during his charge, unlike Holdo and Paige who were more serene.

Counterargument: So being kinda mad that the fascist organization that kidnapped and enslaved you is now going to kill all your friends = being a hateful Dark Sider? Being angry at oppression makes you the moral equivalent of your oppressors now? And if Finn had been more calm and serene about sacrificing himself to save his friends, would the exact same act cease to be hateful?

Argument: Rose said Finn was being hateful, so it must be true.

Counterargument: I saw this circular reasoning from more than one person. Again, you know they don’t have any arguments when they work backward from the conclusion. I mean maybe it’s possible the scene was just poorly written and the movie was incoherent as hell?

@thehungryvortigaunt That’s what tipped me over into actually writing this post after stewing over my growing irritation at these arguments. This is just one of the ways in which TLJ is heavy-handedly and nonsensically Christian, and fandom is falling all over itself trying to validate its idea of Finn and Poe as scary and violent when in fact they are the ones who are frequently targeted by violence.