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Lord, give every goth baddie the spiritual fortitude to post hole, amen

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I guess I should clarify that I think that endeavoring to replace indigenous religion with Christianity (evangelizing) is evil. Christianity is a social philosophy founded on Judaism. It is meant to build community and dismantle empire, not destroy community as an imperial tool, and yes I do understand that this is a mostly historically unrealized ideal, especially since Roman adoption and Nicene reform. Christianity has, however, frequently shown an aptitude for syncretism that is aligned with its mission of liberating the human family from wealth, power, and xenophobia. American Christianity especially is in need of repentance and in the absence of such metanoia will instead face a reckoning. If the people free themselves without Christ, it is the idol they have made Christ into that will be destroyed, and we will be better for it. I will welcome any spirituality, including none, before I will accept even one more day of this hideous idolatry that we call “Christianity.”

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Is anyone going to say “metaphor” is reading comprehension really that piss

“characters in fic are too good at identifying scents” is officially an “his eyes did not literally darken” level of complaint to me now like it’s about the drama it’s about the romance it’s about atmosphere it’s about taking you to a heightened version of reality!!! please suspend your disbelief at least enough for vibes-based sensory descriptions it will be So Worth It i promise

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I’m not over it. It’s like the Bible is the one thing everyone gets to be incurious about. It’s a living document that began in the late Bronze Age that pastiches Assyrio-Babylonian literature and analogizes Iron Age-to-Classical history. At a time when most imperial subject nations were illiterate, the ancient Hebrews left a voluminous, complex account of what it meant to be under empire, from Egypt to Assyria to Babylon to Macedon to Rome. It is the jumping off point for modern comparative linguistics and textual criticism. It is the single largest shared cultural material of the majority of the fucking planet. But because God doesn’t literally, scientifically exist, suddenly none of that matters? In a world where God is not real, God is realized. At a moment when it is crucial to define the “Word” of God you have forfeited your right to argument rather than engage in “superstition.” You are continuing to allow the Bible to be the prop of empire rather than its indictment for the sake of intellectual purity. Stop being academically lazy and engage with it from a place other than arrogance.

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Zinjirli, Turkey 😎

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gonna be a hater for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you HATED like viscerally hated like 1/2 star on letterboxd HATED

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The first Hellraiser is this really compelling erotic sci-fi horror whose main problem is that—deserving or not—the place it occupies in our culture is Reefer Madness but for BDSM, but the second movie adds this really tacky “BDSM? More like B-DSM-5 [it was DSM-III-R at the time whatever]” that kinda ruins the whole vibe. The 2022 Hellraiser reboot brilliantly made Pinhead an absolute babe, but it was so sexlessly bland and philosophically vacant in its nostalgia chasing that it leaves most things unexplored in a movie about sexual exploration so far-reaching it delves into an alien dimension where pain and pleasure are indistinguishable. I was gonna rant about how Anglo Protestantism dooms us to shitty Hellraiser movies because its “temporal suffering is punishment for sin” diminishes the possibility of erotically fulfilling paradigms for suffering (for all its faults, Roman Catholicism leaves open the possibility of suffering as sanctification or at the very least the Biblically accurate acknowledgement [Job, Ecclesiastes, Jesus] that temporal suffering often has no correlation with morality), but admitting I’m an Anglo-Catholic queer usually makes people assume I’m an idiot—which is a very Anglo Protestant way to practice atheism, by the way, if you were wondering why it’s not constructive or sociable 🤷🏻‍♀️

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It’s like talking about the Bible immediately shuts everyone down. If you “believe” in it, you think it’s literally magical. If you don’t “believe” in it, your default opinion is that it’s all useless bullshit beyond mining for superficial gotchas like “but you eat shrimp.”

The Bible is the most accessible late Bronze/early Iron Age-to-Classical body of literature that was developed by a people at the intersection (and mercy) of every great empire in that span of time. Yet, it is currently being leveraged by multiple supremacist ideologies to effect empire.

Leaving out all of the medieval and patristic metaphysical nonsense, it has a pretty consistent moral and political thread, even between testaments: kingdoms and other manifestations of power like wealth are all vanity and what really matters is how well you treat your community, especially the stateless, the orphan, and the widow. “God” is a devotional symbol, a Platonic ideal of justice. He is a Creator of Good and a Destroyer of Evil. If you don’t believe in God—and I barely do on my best (most manic) days—he is a useful model, a benevolent thoughtform.

If there are parts of the Bible you object to, those are places that deserve more study to elucidate context, grammar, or historical interpretation, rather than reasons to dismiss, again, an entire body of literature. Because a little bit of study will reveal that homosexuality is not unequivocally condemned, that evangelism is not mandatory, and that wealth is not synonymous with blessing. Even if they were, the Bible is not composed of perennial dictates. Context and subtext are often as or more important than the text.

Not “believing” in the Bible automatically makes you a better student of it because, unlike “believers,” you are able to see it fresh and not fall into appeals to authority and dogmatically rooted misconceptions. Biblical Studies needs more atheists! It’s literature, linguistics, and history more than it is philosophy and is narrowed at our collective peril.

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Half convinced the government sent me a free laptop full of spyware in a vain attempt to locate the ICE agent I have bound and gagged at 500 Chestnut St. #819 Abilene, TX 79602

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If you’re LGBT reblog and tag with your opinion on beer.

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weird how quick fascists went from “the world is overpopulated. close your legs. stop having kids.” to “pop out 3 babies right now. you have no choice. you have to. it’s your duty and your only purpose.” when they realized they might not have enough vulnerable individuals to exploit in the labor force if the birth rate continues declining

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Texas

evil states:

Slashington

Goregon

Wrongtana

Boo-tah

Hellifornia

Killorado

Darkota

Mistachusetts

Flordeada

New Hauntshire

Mauligan

New Jersey (like the devil)

ConnectiCUT

NeBada

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Democrats can’t bring us back from this. We’re at the point where we’ll need to create departments and public corporations, etc., from scratch and they simply are not uncompromised enough by big business. Even if they wanted to build these necessary logistical apparatuses, they won’t raise taxes or lower the military budget to effect them. These are the same Democrats who killed single-payer and made Obamacare so fragile. Money has been made too synonymous with speech by both Democrats and Republicans to run enough primaries and we’re seeing what a leftist mayoral candidate willing to meet the moment gets from his own party, to say nothing of Republican hysteria. Texas talked about seceding when Biden, a blue-painted Republican, was president. A Democrat-controlled legislature and executive, if they could even somehow overcome over a decade of judicial sabotage by Republicans, would readily cave to threats of secession and abandon reform. Our government has been permanently handicapped if we never de-Nazify and democratize. Triangulating Democrats worshipping the idol of bipartisanship cannot do that. The working class does not have the wealth for grassroots campaigning of the scale needed even if it was not compromised by downright class unconsciousness. The fucking class somnambulation of millions of “down-on-their-luck millionaires” who readily accept more of the tax burden in the belief they won’t have to worry about it when they “recover.” It’s all so fucking cooked, man.

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POV you are about the see the dumbest takes imaginable

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fucking finally

holy shit mister martin ingle in the guardian damn

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Starting my speech at the Omelas city council with a child acknowledgement statement

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When I tried writing an article about how Texas desperately needs water conservation soon, a congressman’s office called saying I was insulting farmers (I wasn’t) and my publisher at the time (who didn’t read it) said I wasn’t allowed to write about this congressman and especially not about how he was doing everything he could to destroy the environment locally, nationally, and globally.