#i like atheists

[nateconnolly]

hi! this is @arkefthos , on my main; love your blog! i wanted to ask as well, is that lyric in your intro from rainbow kitten surprise? quite a nice surprise honestly!

Yes! I had their album RKS constantly playing during one of the most transformative periods of my life. I listened to them going on loooong night jogs thinking about God and stuff. They were playing during the precise moment I stopped being an atheist, so, for me personally, the quote relates a lot to the topic of this blog. Like thinking about divinity, thinking about the cosmos, working out your place in the world by trying to figure out what the world is...

[officialspec]

i always roll my eyes a little bit when someone openly looks down on people who are religious/spiritual. ur telling me youve never made a wish before?? never sent a little prayer out into the universe???? get real

[possession1981]

THE FIRST OMEN dir. Arkasha Stevenson, 2024

[yashley]

[perplexingly]

Also, slowly making more and more BotC illustrations

[menlove]

the way this website balks at the term "culturally christian" is so funny to me like. oh shit you mean the religion our government and culture is structured around might impact you even if you're atheist and ESPECIALLY if you're ex-christian? noooo it's the people using it to describe a phenomenon of western culture that are wrong

[inamindfarfaraway]

The Exorcists’ Masks of Virtue

The vast majority of Exorcists in Hazbin Hotel have a notable design element that other angels don’t: their masks are missing an eye. Specifically, the right eye.

I believe this is a reference to the Bible, Matthew 5:29. Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

He’s being hyperbolic. Mr Free Healthcare was not pro-mutilation. What he means is that you have to be willing to make sacrifices to prevent sin. The context of the eye metaphor is him condemning adultery and warning that even something as easy, casual and small as a look full of lustful intent can lead to further, worse sin if you don’t notice your sin, hold yourself accountable for it and do the work to not let it influence your decisions. This will probably be hard. It could be very, very painful. Changing your perspective can feel as horrible as plucking out your eye, so many people can’t bring themselves to do it. But although it won’t feel that way in the moment, it’s healthier for our general wellbeing in the long run to abandon traits and behaviours that damage ourselves and/or others.

(You may notice that Jesus’s teaching that you can have sinned, redeem yourself by giving up sin and thus escape damnation is the founding principle of the Hazbin Hotel. You may also notice that it contradicts everything the Exorcists believe.)

The Exorcists seem to follow this idea of painfully excising badness for the sake of the greater good devoutly to the point of placing it above teachings like ‘Thou shalt not kill’, with their job being to remove sin, in the form of sinners, to protect Heaven. Hence the missing right eyes. They’re a declaration of moral righteousness and inability to stumble.

But the truth is that the Exorcists all have their right eyes. Their flawlessness is a facade. Underneath, they are untouched, think themselves morally untouchable and, as shown by their horror and outrage when even one of them is killed, would much rather be physically untouchable too. This perfectly represents their complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own faults, let alone improve. They are never the ones who sacrifice. They force the sinners to sacrifice and don’t compensate it with any salvation. They metaphorically rip out the sinners’ eyes, but still condemn their entire bodies as inherently, permanently sinful. So they’ll just have to do another Extermination to get the other eyes! And another one to cut off their right hands! And so on until there’s nothing left.

The only exception to the rule is Vaggie, both in appearance and character. Her mask has the left eye crossed out instead. Even before her expulsion, she’s set apart to the audience as an Exorcist who has the capacity to, shall we say, see a different side of things. Her mask having its ‘sinful’ right eye reflects her understanding that the Exorcist worldview is wrong.

When she almost kills a demon child, her hateful vision clears. She discards the part of herself that’s an unquestioning, merciless agent of death, terror and grief… and as punishment for what Lute perceives as treacherous weakness, gets her eye plucked out.

Of course Lute leaves her with only the ‘sinful’ eye. It brands Vaggie forever as the inversion, a perversion, of what the Exorcists are meant to be.

You know, all this talk of eye removal in the Bible reminds of another line - ‘an eye for an eye’. Adam directly quotes it in “Hell is Forever”. He uses it to frame the Exterminations as Old Testament-style punitive justice; the sinners did harm and so they receive it. But putting aside the debate about how ethical the concept of revenge is, the entire point of taking an eye for an eye is that it’s proportional. The punishment fits the crime. If someone cuts your eye out, you shouldn’t murder their whole family in front of them and then slowly disembowel them to death. That would be the sin of wrath. You should just make them pay without excessive pain or collateral damage. This is the fairest form of revenge.

The Exorcists don’t do that! The Exterminations aren’t proportional to the wrongs of all they hurt, nor was Vaggie’s brutal punishment equivalent to her extremely mild insubordination. Lute literally takes Vaggie’s eye, and more, after Vaggie does nothing to her! That’s the opposite of the phrase! Adam and his soldiers are wrathful and cruel, deriving satisfaction from others’ suffering. But they just can’t stop going on and on about how disgustingly evil the sinners are, in total hypocrisy… despite some of the sinners being far better people than the genocidal Exorcists are… it’s like they’re obsessed with specks of dust in the sinners’ eyes when they have massive logs stuck in their own. Oh hey, that’s in the Bible too!

[secondbeatsongs]

happy pride!

[vaguely-concerned]

in addition to all the other reasons the soup scene is so funny, there’s also the element of like... pulling the reverse eucharist card on god in the game of catholic uno. make god eat YOUR body and blood for once, actually, see how he likes it. the heresy of it all

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

guy who so desperately tries to find god. who wants to have faith in a higher authority to guide him out of the hole he's in. from the weight of guilt from simply existing, as the person he is. but every time he thinks he's answered his higher calling it turns out he's made the Morally Incorrect choice and his path to goodness and holiness was the road to the devil all along

[ricksanchezbignaturals]

rick baby if you're not going to hell nobody is

[nadia-cannot-think-straight]

People who hiperfixate on Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad/Oddysey and The Bible are actually the coolest mfs out there. Like yess pleasee draw more Gilgamesh x Enkidu fanart, write more Achilles angst, call Jesus of Nazareth your babygirl, nothing makes me happier.

[what-is-it-to-be-pk-esque]

Ok I know I'm heavily biased here but like I kinda love that Astarion's romance is one of the few in this type of video game where you basically end up canonically unmarried and childfree in his "good" ending? Just travelling the world??

Like it's honestly the millennial dream lmfaoo cannot believe i chose what would undoubtedly be my favorite option, first try

[vyeoh]

Losing my mind about the book of job in retrospect basically told how the season was gonna end in the 2nd episode.

As shown in the show, Job is the result of God and Lucifer making a bet regarding the nature of faith- Satan argues that humans are fair weather friends, and their worship is transactional for bring treated well. God argues that worship is regardless of how God treated humans.

This specific part of the Bible is so well known even to people not involved with an Abrahamic religion partly because the train of logic is so?? Odd?? Like yeah the old testament God is kinda super fucked up but in this one God's reasoning (as seen in the show) is basically, "I know more than you and I can do more, so you could never understand the reason for tragedy" which is. Just a WILD answer to "why do bad things happen to good people", especially if you're trying to argue that people should make an effort to be good because they have free will.

Notably, the show didn't focus on the "bad things to good people" paradox that's usually the focus of debate, but rather on the fact that like??? Giving someone more children after killing their old ones is actually really awful?? Basically, giving them a shiny new thing doesn't actually make up for the fact that you broke the old thing, which is something that the Book of Job and the Bible at large seems to misunderstand about humans.

Anyways, Aziraphale is Job. He's been fucked over by heaven so many times, and yet his faith is unshaken. One of his catchphrases is literally saying that God 's plans are ineffible and no one can understand them.

At the end of Job, Job's given a gift (note: a GIFT, not a reward) of prosperity, children, and health by God. Similarly, Aziraphale is given the "gift" of the Archangel Supreme position, to be the head of an organization that's caused him so much suffering. There's no actual acknowledgment and reconciliation of the suffering, because like in Job, that would mean God did something bad that needed to be remedied.

In this context, his relationship with Crowley is like his old wealth and prosperity; its not a perfect comparison but its something that is taken away by God (allegedly) in favor of a shiny new job and a shiny new HR approved relationship with Angel Crowley. And since Aziaphale is still drinking the heaven kool-aid, he does as Job does, and accepts his suffering and receives his reward.

[bibliosims]

arthur "art" shepherd & noah quigley

[squidgirlautism]

does anyone else think it’s kind of icky for goyim to “resonate” or relate to that “if there is a G-d then He will have to beg for my forgiveness” quote literally carved into a concentration camp cell wall or