most insane reddit comment i've gotten is someone saying that they had a brief catholic phase because "sex should be for procreation only" just seemed "right" to them. And then they realized they were an atheist but had a breeding kink.
see also:
happy easter from the united states :)
what is going on in America
I…? No???? Is this a regular occurrence???
Bitch Ive never even seen this shit in new jersey don’t lump us in w your HELL IS REAL billboard ass states
The idea behind “Christmas doesn’t have only religious aspects, also cultural ones, therefore everyone can [read: should] celebrate it” is premised on the idea that the only reason not to celebrate Christmas is because you’re not allowed to or there’s something stopping you. Setting a side the fact that there are strong cultural reasons not to, the central point here is that celebrating Christmas is a default or even an obligation for which people need to have a sufficient excuse not to. It still means Christmas and Christianity are centered.
Like, imagine me going around trying to convince people that Rosh Hashanah has plenty of secular aspects, like apples and honey and gathering with your family, therefore anyone can and should celebrate it! And getting upset when people are like “that’s fine but it’s not my religion so I don’t feel like it.”
And then if I was like “okay but it doesn’t matter that it’s not your religion because it’s not about religion! it has non-religious aspects!” Like obviously that would be missing the point!
If you interpret “religion” as meaning “belief” or “faith”…
If you think all religions have a dualistic afterlife, such as the duality of “heaven” and “hell”…
If you believe that someone’s intentions or internal feelings are more important than their actions…
If you think that religious texts are to be taken literally, are unchanging, and are authoritative…
If you believe that you have an obligation to make all others believe like you or think like you, or that you must protect others from believing in the wrong thing…
If you believe culture and religion are severable…
If you believe Christmas or Easter is a secular holiday…
…you might have some internalized Christian hegemony to examine.
You know what I love? Calling it "Christian Mythology." Referring to their god as "The Christian God." Refusing to conform to the idea that their religion is any more valid than anyone else's.
Oh, it makes them spicy. Gets them all twitchy. They wanna fistfight me in a Denny's parking lot, but they know they can't 'cause I'm right.
but mom how will other people know that you, a white Texan, are a Christian
same
Jesus
I bet those two are couple now..
I’m gay
me too
This is such a great story
update from Houston pride 2019! we’re friends
*drags hands down face* there's a dude I know from high school who is one of my Facebook friends. His heart's in the right place and he's come to me to learn about gender diversity and stuff, so I feel like it's worth it to stay friends with him. He generally doesn't bug me (I have his posts muted from my feed because his memes are annoying but not offensive), he learns from me graciously, and I think it's important to remember there are perspectives outside my own, and I have a more or less benign connection to that through him.
How. Fucking. Ever. He does truly irritate me sometimes. I made a post today bitching about a pandora ad I heard that proselytized by preying in people's insecurities and disadvantages, and I finished it off by saying "it's exhausting to not be Christian in this world. At least I know my ancestors could relate. 🙄😠"
He commented by telling me that his family was super Christian and he hadn't had contact with them until 5 years ago and blocked them as soon as he unfriended them. Then signed off with #cantrelate. Like... then why tf did you feel the need to talk about it on my post? Maybe he just doesn't know I'm Jewish, so he doesn't get what I'm actually talking about? But regardless they're such different situations that it baffles me that he felt the need to say "huh, reminds me of this other thing. I don't get your thing at all though."
Anyway I'm just complaining about it here to get it out of my head without snarking at him.
Don’t believe the whitewashed version of Billy Graham in all the obituaries right now. Even his supposedly progressive stances in the 60s are largely exaggerated.
The reality was a good bit more complicated: Once the Freedom Buses started rolling South, and civil disobedience spread in the early 1960s, Graham’s support for civil rights dissipated. When King wrote his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1963, Graham told reporters the Alabama preacher should “put the brakes on a little bit.” He began to criticize civil-rights leaders for focusing on changing laws, rather than “hearts.” He mocked King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, saying, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” And he broke with King altogether over his opposition to the Vietnam War, which Graham enthusiastically championed.
He was also good buddies with Nixon, a fellow anti-semite
When the tapes that sealed Nixon’s doom came out, and the vulgarity and hatefulness of the president were revealed, Graham pronounced himself “shocked” at the kind of language the president used, in addition to his criminal behavior. It would be decades before tapes of Graham’s own conservations with Nixon were made public. In brief conversations from 1972 and 1973, Graham comforts and cheers Nixon during his darkest hours, partly by engaging in anti-Semitic banter.
And of course, despite his kinder-gentler reputation, he was both a theocrat and a homophobe
Graham’s special gift was portraying himself as a different kind of evangelical. The most famous and most heavily self-promoted Christian of the entire 20th century was big on promoting his humility, and his personal moral rectitude. He famously insisted that everyone call him “Billy.” He refused to make himself insanely wealthy, taking only a comfortable (and publicly disclosed) salary from his organization. He instituted the “Graham rule” for himself and his associates – he’d never be alone in any room with any woman but his (long-suffering) wife, to avoid temptation and even the appearance of impropriety. It was a purposeful strategy to ignore the Elmer Gantry-ish excesses of the famous American evangelists who’d come before him. And it worked like magic. When scandals destroyed some of his imitators in the 1980s, like Jim and Tammy Bakker, Graham’s operation looked even more like a model of rectitude in comparison.
But despite his showy flag-waving, despite the conflation of Christianity and Americanism that he trafficked in, Graham was no small-d democrat. Quite the contrary: He was an ardent theocrat. “Every type of government has been permeated with corruption, evil, and greed,” he proclaimed in the wake of Watergate. “But there’s one type we have not tried. That is a theocracy, with Christ on the throne and the nations of the world confessing him. Someday His flag will wave over every nation in the world.”
Billy Graham reputedly mellowed and became more tolerant of religious differences in his later years, even as he turned over his vast empire to his more overtly bigoted son, Franklin. Maybe, he even suggested at one point, you didn’t have to be a born-again Christian to attain heaven. But he never evolved on the “gay question.” Quite the contrary, in fact. At a rally in 1993, he speculated that AIDS might be a “judgment” from God. “I could not say for sure, but I think so,” he said. He knew this was bad PR, and two weeks later, he apologized. “I don’t believe that,” he claimed, “and I don’t know why I said it.” But he never disclaimed the infamous “My Answer” column from 1973, never took back his description of homosexuality as “a perversion that leads to death.” In 2012, in his last public act, Graham took out full-page newspaper ads in 14 North Carolina newspapers calling for passage of a law banning same-sex marriage.
I’m sorry to excerpt so much of this article but it’s so good and important, and I didn’t even get into the author’s personal struggle with being born again at a Billy Graham event while simultaneously being condemned to hell for being gay, at ten years old.
Next week, Graham’s corpse will lie in state at the Capitol rotunda – only the fourth private citizen to be so honored, and the first since Rosa Parks in 1995. This is a disgrace. But in a certain way, it’s also right and fitting – as oddly appropriate as Graham’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If Billy Graham was, ultimately, a conniving hypocrite with a layman’s grasp of the Bible and a supernatural lust for earthly power, he was also a quintessential American success story. He was not so much “America’s pastor” as its greatest evangelical entrepreneur – the man who launched a whole separatist (and lucrative) Christian media culture, who laid the foundations for megachurches and prosperity ministries, who brought Jesus back into American politics. He was a public-relations savant, a shameless sycophant who whispered sweet nothings to power in lieu of hard truths. He demonstrated what fortunes could be made, and what human glory could be attained, by transforming evangelical Christianity into a patriotic corporate entity. If that’s not American, by God, what is?
exams would never be scheduled on christmas. no important sporting event would ever be played on easter. it’s about time that jewish holy days are given the same respect.
Exactly.
I should add that this isn’t limited to us Jews, either. In the past two years or so, both the Olympics and and the World Cup coincided with Ramadan, and a lot of Muslim athletes were left in the really shitty position of having to choose between either not fasting or putting their athletic performance at risk. If Christians had a fasting month, you bet your ass no sporting events would take place until it was over.
I am here for the Religious Solidarity movements.
This year Christmas is on 13 Tevet, but last year it was on 3 Tevet, and the year before, it was as late as 22 Tevet! Christian holidays are so confusing. Why don’t Christians just make up their mind about what day a holiday is on?
I think there is no greater sign of our Christian-Normative society then the fact that people genuinely believe that Hanukkah is the most important Jewish holiday.
Once you’ve been polytheist/pagan for long enough to forget that most people haven’t any idea that real life polytheists and pagans are actually things that exist, the world starts looking mighty odd.
Christians get a whole month off to celebrate christmas but we can’t have 3 days off.
Like that’s really all I’m asking for. 3 days. 2 days of Rosh Hashannah, and Yom Kippur. I don’t care about regular classes, that’s inevitable, I’m asking not to have midterms or finals scheduled then. That’s all.
Ya know what I’m gonna throw Eid in here too because a lot of people have mentioned it in reblogs, which according to google is 1-3 days long. So basically, there are 2-4 midterms and finals you need to schedule, and we’re asking you not to schedule them on 6 days out of the year.
This really shouldn’t be hard.
Indeed, I had previously quoted former MLB player Gabe Kapler, who once made the justification to play baseball on Yom Kippur by saying:
“I am not really a practicing Jew. It would be selfish to be a practicing Jew on only one day.”
It would seem that many people have been led to believe that observing a Jewish or Muslim or Hindu holiday is cheating unless you are sincerely devout.
Well, I have an important message for those people:
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO NON-CHRISTIAN SECULAR OBSERVANCES
This is important, so I’m going to say it again:
Think of all the times you have been chided by secular Christian friends for not celebrating Christmas.
“It’s not really even a religious holiday anymore,” people will tell you. “It’s just a nice time for families to get together and celebrate.”
Well, guess what? So is Rosh Hashanah. So is Eid. So is Diwali.
A secular Jew might not want to go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to fly home for Rosh Hashanah dinner to be with their family.
A non-practicing Muslim may have lost interest in regular religious practices, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still look forward to Eid celebrations.
A lapsed Hindu can still have fond memories of celebrating Diwali as a youth, and want to continue on with their family traditions.
There is no written rule that says only people from Christian backgrounds can be non-religious and still celebrate their cultural holidays. There is no law that says only Christmas and Easter can be boiled down to family dinners and fun festivities.
BEING A SECULAR PERSON FROM A MINORITY FAITH DOES NOT INVALIDATE YOUR RIGHT TO YOUR OWN CULTURAL BACKGROUND.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t prayed in years or don’t believe in God. If you want a day off for your holiday, take it. No matter what, it’s still yours.
About ten days ago, I wrote a series of posts regarding the difficulties Jews and people of other minority faiths encounter in western society when it comes to having our holidays respected and recognized. I got a lot of feedback from Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, etc. echoing my sentiments (some of which was absolutely heartbreaking), and I have additionally seen a variety of other posts on the matter that underline my point. When reading all of the notes and comments relevant to these posts, I noticed a very similar theme reappearing time after time:
“I didn’t take off for X holiday because I’m not that religious, but the scheduling was very inconvenient for my more observant friend or family member.”
Indeed, I had previously quoted former MLB player Gabe Kapler, who once made the justification to play baseball on Yom Kippur by saying:
“I am not really a practicing Jew. It would be selfish to be a practicing Jew on only one day.”
It would seem that many people have been led to believe that observing a Jewish or Muslim or Hindu holiday is cheating unless you are sincerely devout.
Well, I have an important message for those people:
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO NON-CHRISTIAN SECULAR OBSERVANCES
This is important, so I’m going to say it again:
Think of all the times you have been chided by secular Christian friends for not celebrating Christmas.
“It’s not really even a religious holiday anymore,” people will tell you. “It’s just a nice time for families to get together and celebrate.”
Well, guess what? So is Rosh Hashanah. So is Eid. So is Diwali.
A secular Jew might not want to go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to fly home for Rosh Hashanah dinner to be with their family.
A non-practicing Muslim may have lost interest in regular religious practices, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still look forward to Eid celebrations.
A lapsed Hindu can still have fond memories of celebrating Diwali as a youth, and want to continue on with their family traditions.
There is no written rule that says only people from Christian backgrounds can be non-religious and still celebrate their cultural holidays. There is no law that says only Christmas and Easter can be boiled down to family dinners and fun festivities.
BEING A SECULAR PERSON FROM A MINORITY FAITH DOES NOT INVALIDATE YOUR RIGHT TO YOUR OWN CULTURAL BACKGROUND.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t prayed in years or don’t believe in God. If you want a day off for your holiday, take it. No matter what, it’s still yours.
With the High Holidays coming up, I wanted to share this again.
I feel very strongly that we need to start normalizing non-Christian holiday observances (both secular and religious) throughout the year for people of all backgrounds.
If you’re Jewish, next week is a good time to start.
I’d be nice if my employer would let me, say, trade Christmas for Yom Kippur as a day off…but unfortunately, Christianity is enshrined in law, even though it shouldn’t be.
