#conservative christianity cw ?

[squishe]

its so funny to me that ppl on tumblr are so obsessed with policing peoples identities. i tell cishet people im a transmasc multigender lesbian and they're just like "yeah ok that sounds about right", and maybe i get a couple of good-faith questions. and then you have a bunch of chuds on here dedicating so much time and energy to tell people that boys can't be lesbians and girls can't be gay men and bi lesbians aren't real

literally noone cares as much as y'all. i am so serious. there are much bigger problems out there than lesboys and turigirls and bi lesbians and bi turians. maybe focus your energy on political action instead of harassing people whose identity you refuse to understand

[chelledoggo]

what conservatives say: "Judeo-Christian" what conservatives actually mean: "i really just mean Christian. i'm adding in "Judeo" to make people think i don't hate Jews when in reality i despise them unless they can provide a means to an end for my Christian beliefs and "biblical prophecies." i absolutely am not afraid to leave out Muslims, though."

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Are There Evil Animals?

Originally posted on my website at https://rebeccalexa.com/are-there-evil-animals/

There’s a great discussion over on BlueSky about animal species unfairly seen as villains. Folks are posting pictures of species that we feel get a bad rap (I chose to highlight the gray wolf and snakes.) Ironically, I also had a note in my calendar, placed there months ago, to write about whether there are good or bad animals. So–today’s theme is whether there really are “evil animals”, and what makes them separate from “good animals”.

Please keep in mind that I am coming from a western perspective as an American of European heritage, and cultural views of various animals vary from species to species and culture to culture. And, of course, individual people within a community may disagree. But let’s stick with general trends in western viewpoints. Also, I am not going to wade into the issue of invasive species and whether they are “good” or “bad” from a moral sense, though I did get into clarifying what makes a species invasive a while back.)

There are certain animals that seem to draw the ire of people more than others. Spiders and snakes are two groups that are frequently relegated to the undesirable group of “creepy crawlies”, are the subject of many people’s phobias, and are all too often killed simply for existing. I’ve seen people post pictures of their pet snakes and spiders, only to have others reply “If I saw that thing anywhere near me I’d kill it”–something I bet they’d never say about someone’s beloved pet dog or cat. Slugs are seen as gross and slimy, bats will supposedly fly into your hair, and even pet domesticated rats will get looks of revulsion.

While all large predatory animals have seen their numbers plummet in the past couple of centuries due to overhunting, gray wolves and coyotes face extra-venomous persecution. Barry Holstun Lopez’ classic work Of Wolves and Men, and Hope Ryden’s God’s Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote, both explore in detail how these canids are not just controlled, but gleefully slaughtered by those who proudly display “smoke a pack [of wolves] a day” on their trucks and hang rotting carcasses of coyotes they’ve shot on fences alongside roads. The reintroduction of wolves in particular has been hindered by the protests of those convinced their livestock will all be killed and their children carried off. And Ryden’s work tried to counter the sentiment of all too many people that “the only good coyote is a dead coyote.”

Lopez in particular tackled the idea that wolves were specifically evil because they had supposedly been sent by Satan himself to plague good God-fearing people. And while many wolf-haters today probably don’t recognize the roots of their hatred, they still pursue the extermination of the species with religious fervor. Snakes, similarly, were maligned not just because a few of them are venomous, but because of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. The bible is full of parables and metaphors involving animals that place them in either the “good animals” category (like sheep) or the “evil animals” category (like goats.) And while western society is becoming increasingly less Christian, the cultural influences of centuries of Christianity can still be felt.

Thankfully, advances in science have offered a much more nuanced view of animals, and nature in general. We know for sure that the Earth is much, much, MUCH older than 6000 years, and that the many species that have come and gone over the eons came to be through natural selection. At their core, every species of animal (and plant, and fungus, etc.) is a living system whose most primitive purpose is to make sure its genetic material is successfully replicated. Far from making life into a strictly mechanistic process, I feel that this just makes the many adaptations species have evolved over time that much more fascinating.

Take the gray wolf, for example. Long legs help them to run swiftly, but they have solid endurance as well and can trail prey for many miles. Broad feet keep them from sinking into snow, like snowshoes, and keen hearing, sight, and smell help them to locate prey. They can dispatch said prey with sharp teeth which also allow them to shear off pieces of meat which is then broken down by an efficient digestive system. Far from being solo predators lurking in the shadows, wolves have complex social lives, and a pack is generally composed of a primary pair with their young from various years. They work together to raise each year’s pups and find food, and they spend quite a bit of time playing with each other or sleeping off a good meal. All of these adaptations work together to make an organism that has successfully passed its DNA down through many generations. It’s pretty impressive, thinking about the complexity of all of the tissues and organs and systems that go into making one single wolf, and how DNA holds the key to its own preservation and replication in increasingly complex packages.

But these genes and adaptations do not make the wolf “evil”, any more than herbivory (other than the occasional nest of baby birds) makes a deer “good”. And that’s the thing: at its heart, nature is amoral. Not IMMORAL, mind you; amorality means being not at all concerned with right or wrong, good or evil. Wolves and deer prey on their respective foods, and deer and plants have defenses they use to try to keep from being eaten. That doesn’t make them inherently bad, and they aren’t rubbing their paws (or hooves) gleefully together like some cartoonish villain as they think about killing their next meal. It’s just the way of things, ever since the first eukaryotes evolved two billion years ago and began eating other living beings.

So why, then, do we persist in seeing wolves as evil animals and deer as good ones? Well, we’re judging them by human standards, and specifically western, Christianity-influenced standards. We’re pretty biased, because we think that any species that does things we want them to is good, but those that inconvenience us are bad. We like hunting deer and we only really get annoyed with them if they eat our crops (which can also be solved by eating them.) But while wolves may eat our livestock (and the deer we want to hunt), we can’t really eat them, and so their value to us isn’t enough to keep them in the “good” category. Although wolves gave us dogs, the wolves that remain will not bow to our demands, so dogs become the only nice and respectable wolves we will accept in our lives because they directly benefit us, whether as working animals, companions, or both.

We can see this pattern among other species, too. Those that we find beautiful or useful, and which do not significantly impact our lives in any negative way, get to be good. Any that cause us problems end up being bad. Sadly, “I saw it and it scared me” is often enough to relegate a species to being a problem. Even though spiders do a great job of keeping our homes and other environments free of flies, ants, and other insects that might, say, spoil our food, we persecute spiders because we see them as scary. In the vast majority of human-spider encounters there is no way the spider could possibly get close enough to bite, and would only do so in self-defense–yet in many of these encounters the spider loses its life just for being there.

We don’t even think twice about squashing a spider or other “bug” that made the mistake of being visible. Demonizing animals as evil means that we don’t have to feel any responsibility toward their preservation. And, in fact, you can extend that whole idea of “evilness” to nature in general. Nature, until recently, was mainly seen in the west as something to be tamed and tied down, turned to agriculture, industry, and other good human-benefiting pursuits. Preserving wild ecosystems is seen as wasteful by the sort of person who only sees dollar signs. Why should we reintroduce wolves if they get in the way of our raising livestock? Why should we protect old growth forests instead of cutting them down for profit? Why should we restrict fishing to help fish populations recover from generations of overfishing, when it might mean a drop in seafood revenue?

In the end, the whole good/evil dichotomy as applied to animals is just a symptom of our selfishness. Those of us who understand the complexity of ecology also grok the concept of existence value, which I just wrote about in my last article. This concept allows us to get out of our self-centered viewpoints, showing how a species (or ecosystem) is important simply for existing, regardless of whether we can use it for something or not. I also think it’s important to drop that idea that a species can be inherently good or evil, and instead take Henry Beston’s view that they are “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Like them, we humans are also the product of billions of years of adaptations and evolution, no more or less amazing than any other species. We’ve spent too long trying to make the whole world dance to our tune alone; we need to give the other beings space for their music, too, and appreciate its beauty as much as our own.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[liskantope]

Half a year ago, I got myself involved in a thread which compared trans rights to gay rights and tried to make a case that, in terms of arguments for each, the issues are not as directly comparable as a lot of people seem to think. A lot of my perspective comes from a sort of an empathy I feel with the non- religiously conservative, non- radical feminist motivations for doubting some of what this social movement is pushing for, particularly with regard to its disconnect with how more traditional people view identity categories.

This portion of a recent interview on the YouTube channel Nonzero (see until 47:43) is a stunningly crystal-clear illustration of the attitude and motivation I was trying to describe at the time, so much so that I think it's instructive and kind of fascinating to watch, even if it's almost so extreme and ridiculous as to come across as parody. (Warning: a certain kind of non-conservative, non-TERFy transphobia, which I'll quote bits of below.)

The interviewee, Norman Finkelstein, feels violently averse to using "they/them" pronouns purely because it would be implicitly affirming what in his mind is an untruth. (Presumably he would not want to refer to a male-presenting student as "she" or a female-presenting student as "he", for a similar reason, but this doesn't directly come up.) He appears to have no other motive, but the motive of not liking to "play along" with someone else's factual untruth is plenty for him. There is no particular social conservatism evident in him; he states plainly that he's fine with androgyny, of people dressing/presenting any way they wish, and that stuff doesn't bother him in the slightest, because that doesn't involve saying things that are untrue. Politically and philosophically he is obviously left-leaning, pro-science, and non/anti-religious in most areas: he repeatedly likens affirming someone's gender identity to affirming that the world is flat or that climate change isn't real or "all the craziness you attribute to the Trump base". Not pronouncing things that imply a factual untruth or deny objective reality is sacred to him as a professor and an intellectual, is what he is saying.

Also, this:

I'm not insulting anyone. If I'm calling you a "he", it's not like I'm calling you the N word or I'm calling you a c*** or something. It's just a relatively stable identifier.

Notice how completely uncomprehending Finkelstein is of the notion that not affirming someone's claimed identity (on the basis of what he believes to be objective reality or established definitions of words) could possibly be an insult or convey lack of respect or qualify as dehumanizing treatment of someone else. That a refusal to affirm someone's claimed identity (on the basis that it denies objective reality) is somehow a form of dehumanization is a completely unfathomable concept to many.

Now I find Finkelstein's perspective flawed on at least half a dozen counts, and fallacious on a particular fundamental level in conflating different types of "objective facts" (something that Robert Wright, who takes a much more reasonable, kind, and open-minded agnostic view on all of this, gently tried to push back on him about). I do think Finkelstein had some good points later in the excerpt about not forcing jarring changes in language down everyone's throats -- this is how I feel about artificial and ugly terms like Latinx, for instance, and I would have had some issues with xie/xir and the like becoming widespread nonbinary pronouns -- but in my opinion these points can't be applied well to using singular "they" for nonbinary people. Moreover, Finkelstein comes across as hardly more than a crusty, curmudgeonly jackass throughout, one who proudly and stubbornly adheres to a disagreeable absolutist view and refuses to open his mind to where his defense of that view might be flawed.

(More minor point: in arguing that mispronouning someone isn't a form of insult, he compares it to factually saying someone's hair is white or that their muscular dystrophy will prevent them from running a 4-minute mile. But, while maybe "insult" or "dehumanization" wouldn't be the best way to describe these things, they are certainly rude in certain contexts: you probably shouldn't call attention to someone's hair being white if they are sensitive about aging, for instance. Similarly, calling a nonbinary but male-presenting person "he" is pretty unkind if they don't want to present as male and are sensitive about it. But Finkelstein clearly isn't the kind of person to prioritize others' feelings over his duty towards "objective reality" in this way.)

But I contend that this is simply an extreme and rather dickish version of how tons and tons of people think, because in terms of the history of social justice and civil rights movements, it is brand new for a movement to be so heavily based in the objective truth of internally-felt identities and accusing people of fundamental dehumanization when they refuse to affirm them. And yet, activist rhetoric sounds as if this is simply part of how identities always worked and what dehumanization always meant, rather than something that appeared on the scene just yesterday.

There is certainly still a major constituency of conservatively religious people who believe that everyone should only do with their bodies what their bodies were "created to do" or whatever, but conservative Christianity is very weakened in our culture since it lost the last major culture war, and I think a lot of people in that camp still also fall into the category of finding it incomprehensible nonsense to say that an identity category is whatever each of us says it is and that it's dehumanizing ever to imply otherwise. I believe it's simply a misconception to assume that the pushback against trans activism is comprised mainly of fundamentalists and TERFs. Norman Finkelstein is an (albeit extreme) example of someone who appears to be neither, and my perception at least in the US is that most people are neither, but that a great many Americans, if not a majority, don't really get the "identity is whatever you say it is" concept and at best are bemusedly humoring it as long as it doesn't get too much into their faces.

(On each day of this past weekend, I was in a different public place -- a bar restaurant and a coffee shop -- and overheard part of a conversation about how "the people in such-and-such social group over there all ask about and share pronouns and a bunch of them go by 'they'", and in context this wasn't being attacked in any way, but it was being treated as bemusing and only semi-comprehensible.)

As Tumblr user Bambamramfan once said, people (particularly scientific-minded, non-faith-y people) really don't like to assert things they don't actually believe (don't have time to look up the post right now; the way they phrased it was something like "Americans don't like to lie about what they believe" and it was in the context of lesser-of-two-evils voting, a topic on which I emphatically disagreed with Bambambramfan, but I consider that particular point to be wise). I wish this were more recognized in social justice activism communities in general, and both that more rhetoric were crafted and ideological assumptions were more carefully examined with it in mind.

I'll end by saying, as I've probably said before, that I'm not claiming just because certain ideological assumptions in trans right activism are fundamentally brand new, that they are wrong or shouldn't become adopted by the wider community. Lots of fundamental ideological assumptions that we are obviously better off for making the default, such as "people owning other people is a gross moral evil", were once brand new at least on a society-wide scale. What I complain about is activists completely refusing to acknowledge or even be aware of this novelty, and so refusing to critically examine it, to defend it on its own merits, or to meet others where they're at.

[mallgothchloe97]

project 2025 is definitely a Christian nationalist movement trying to turn the US into a fascist Christian theocracy. it's another Doctrine of Discovery 1452 & 1493

[its-lick-the-lollipop]

Hello tumblr! It’s been a while. I have another post in drafts that I will be publishing later! But let’s talk about @reversedshinyoumaru aka @gravitybeetie on twitter!

Now we were discussing AI art and I don’t actually defend it. But I said Marshie’s art is probably less likely going to be used for machine learning and teasingly called it “special”

What followed was me being called an extremely offensive term

"Degenerate" is a buzzword used by neo-Nazis and the alt-right to refer to all kinds of people that they consider to be sexually or otherwise immoral or deviant.

That includes a lot of different kinds of people: sex workers, women who have sex outside of marriage, people in interracial relationships, drug users, anyone with an STD, anyone with any sort of paraphilia fetish or kink, Jewish people, political progressives, and of course, all LGBTQ+ individuals.

It's extremely sexist, homophobic and bigoted.

"Degenerate" is also a eugenics term. It expresses an opinion that someone is subhuman, literally less evolved than normal humans, in a biological sense. It's an insult to someone's DNA.

It's the kind of word that there's never really a very good reason for using to refer to anyone. Everyone human is actually human, not literally subhuman, no matter how much we might dislike them.

Also they were told to do this as seen via curiouscat.

I didn’t send the ask but why would I deny that you used right wing buzzwords on a queer person?

Or that you are ableist?

Remember that it’s autistic and disabled people who are called a freak the most?

[writerofweird]

This post made me want to try to sing one of my poems to the tune of O Little Town of Bethlehem (UK version), and so I chose The Happy Christian as I felt it would be most appropriate.

Lyrics are below:

This poem contains references to conservative Christianity, homophobia and transphobia.

There’s a very happy Christian, Who is always grinning, He claims he will bring salvation, To everyone who’s sinning,

When you see him, he’ll clap his hands, And sings a song that will not end, Until he feels he has convinced you, That Jesus is your friend,

That nothing else in this world matters, That you should hear him well, For if you do not heed his words, Then you belong in Hell,

He’ll also sing and claps his hands, About who he says should be gone, Anyone who’s gay or trans, He says don’t belong,

In the world God created, So as he laughs and beams, He’ll demand those he hates should die, And giggles at the screams,

This is a very happy Christian, Who sings of Heaven’s gates, But there’s nothing that makes him happier, Than bigotry and hate.

[kkoraki]

phil vischer vs. fundie bluechecks is my favorite full contact spectator sport

[zeawesomebirdie]

I take back every negative thing I said about The Heart of Christianity it's actually a great book (at least as far as ive read so far)

[chelledoggo]

the fundies are mad at the "He Gets Us" superbowl ad, not knowing that He Gets Us is a conservative psyop lmao 🥴

[betty-bourgeoisie]

I hope I’m not being a complete dunce, but paganism briefly came up in a conversation with a friend of mine and I was hoping you could explain it to me 😅 (I��m not Christian). I understand that it can be a sort of Christian branch(?) but I’ve also heard it being used to describe like- non Christian related religions.

And honestly, though I’ve grown up in the United States, and a few teachers when I was younger brought it up quite a lot to (grew up in the Bible Belt lol), I never really figured out what it was?

Is it a broad term or a specific term? I understand if you can’t answer or but do you recommend any sources to read about pagans? Where pagans came from and all that? Sorry if this is super random, but I’m not sure who else I can ask-

This is a complicated question because "Pagan" or more accurately "Neo-Pagan" is a very broad umbrella term, and the answers to "what is it", "where does it come from", and "what's a good source on it" really varies depending on what type of Paganism you're talking about.

Here is the working definition I usually give people: Paganism is a general term for religions that have multiple gods/goddesses and believe in magic. These religions are usually based in the worship of nature.

So for an easy example - Hellenism or Hellenic Paganism is a set of religious traditions that fall under the umbrella category of Paganism. It refers to people who worship ancient greek deities like Zeus and Hestia. The greek pantheon is mostly made up of deities that represent aspects of the natural world and daily human life, making it a nature based practice. Some Hellenic pagans will use spells (think candles and tarot cards type spells, not harry potter type spells) and participate in rituals as part of their worship.

But like I said this is very much a working definition, and if you really wanted to get into the weeds on it I'm sure I could find examples of spiritual groups that contradicted each part of the definition I gave and still consider themselves to fall under the Pagan umbrella. And that doesn't even begin to get into the significant number of spiritual practices that technically do fit under this definition but whose practitioners would absolutely never call themselves Pagan.

"Pagan" can also be used as a personal identifier for folks who subscribe more broadly to the even harder-to-define umbrella of "Pagan beliefs" but don't belong to a more specific spiritual tradition so 🤷‍♀️ Idk.

If you ask 100 different Pagans this question you will get 100 different answers. I guess if you want a general rule of thumb, anyone who worships ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse, or Celtic deities can probably be assumed to identify under the Pagan umbrella, but like, you should even take that with a grain of salt tbh.

If you want to see other people's perspectives Patheos does have a whole Paganism section where you can at least get a feel for the kinds of topics and ideas that might regularly come up in Pagan religious space.

[liskantope]

This is a sermon given in 1741 which apparently was deliberately intended and responsible for accelerating the Great Awakening in the New England area. It is the purest form of over-the-top fire-and-brimstone, fear-based and terror-mongering preaching I ever thought imaginable (and the link and following passage should be content-warned as such), to the point of saying the following (most of the way through, right before reaching the first signs of hopeful light at the end):

There is Reason to think, that there are many in this Congregation now hearing this Discourse, that will actually be the Subjects of this very Misery to all Eternity. We know not who they are, or in what Seat they sit, or what Thoughts they now have: it may be they are now at Ease, and hear all these Things without much Disturbance, and are now flattering themselves that they are not the Persons, promising themselves that they shall escape. If we knew that there was one Person, and but one, in the whole Congregation that was to be the Subject of this Misery, what an awful Thing would it be to think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful Sight would it be to see such a Person! How might all the rest of the Congregation lift up a lamentable and bitter Cry over him! But alas! instead of one, how many is it likely will remember this Discourse in Hell? And it would be a Wonder if some that are now present, should not be in Hell in a very short Time, before this Year is out. And it would be no Wonder if some Person that now sits here in some Seat at this Meeting-House in Health, and quiet & secure, should be there before to morrow Morning. Those of you that finally continue in a natural Condition, that shall keep out of Hell longest, will be there in a little Time! your Damnation don’t slumber; it will come swiftly, and in all probability very suddenly upon many of you. You have Reason to wonder, that you are not already in Hell.

A few notes of observation about the 18th-century English used:

As far as I can tell, absolutely all nouns are capitalized as in German, rather than contemporary practices of capitalizing some nouns that appear to me to be less consistent.

There are many contractions used, including our familiar can't, also 'tis (which I don't think was surpassed in popularity by it's until sometime a century later), but also han't instead of haven't, while 'em for them is also used liberally.

The most puzzling convention to me is that don't is used multiple times (including in the above passage) as a 3p singular form instead of doesn't.

[cultistsonly]

sorry not done with Your Christian Crossdressing Husband.

The picture they had to choose is so fucking funny.

So they are arguing that crossdressing for any reason is wrong and unnatural and spiritually stunting, right. So it stands to reason they’d pick an image that would illicit that response from their conservative Christian audience, right? Thinking along the lines of a man in a dress joke. Unfortunately for them, their repository of archaic rules and bigotry has a nice shiny veneer of professionalism to trick people into reading their garbage, so they can’t put that as the image for their article.

So instead they track down the most palatable depiction of crossdressing they can find and end up putting this fucking gateway drug of a conventionally attractive crossdresser bending over to put on heels on their website to advertise how terrible and ruinous this deviance is.

[gabetheunknown]

please help me break a cHrIsTiAn™ down into tears

he's standing on the side of the road with a huge banner that says "abortion is babymurder" and his shirt says "Jesus helps"

I want to tear him a new one, I am defo NOT in the mood to tolerate his existence, suggestions are welcome

[octarineblues]

the one thing that polish catholic education gave me is that now wherever any conversation veers into religion territory i can correct people about how exactly the catholic church works, and can therefore with confidence say that the way they think catholic church is fucked up is wrong, excuse me, it is fucked up in a completely different way, here are the underlying believes, and here are the fucking citations.