#it’s not my *exact* experience - there’s no christian identity stuff which is a major part of my journey

[moonmoonthecrabking]

should i have gone to sleep? yep. did i instead read imogen obviously in one sitting (lying in my bed)? you bet.

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

--

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

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The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

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There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

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Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

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Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

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Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

[opentruthministry]

So a couple of days ago over on Twitter, where I continue to fly just underneath the radar, I broke the Internet. Of course, I made the fatal mistake of thinking, "Folks will think before reacting" (duh), "Folks will look up the terms and see what I'm talking about" (duh), "People will realize there is a background to what I'm saying" (duh again). Instead, articles were written, and once again, I was written off as a waste of flesh...nearly 40 years of ministry gone!  What on earth did I say?

Well, actually, one tweet did not get much traction, but the other did, yet they were related.  Here they are:

Hey folks...

Jesus endured all the trauma needed to accomplish redemption and reconciliation.

Dragging your emotional trauma into the fellowship and making everyone else feel guilty for it is the perfect poison for the Body.

Get over yourself.

It's all about HIM, not YOU.

=======

That was the first one. Pretty basic, back to the Scythian Test, Colossians 3, new identity in Christ, freedom from the past, newness of life in Christ, Christian identity rather than a worldly one, basis of unity for the Body, all that stuff that is currently being rejected even by the evangelical elites. But then came the next one, the one which broke the Internet:

When you start with man as image-bearing creature of God, you can understand why sympathy is good, but empathy is sinful.

Do not surrender your mind to the sinful emotional responses of others.

=======

Now, fact of the matter is, I packed more than sufficient context into those two sentences to have stopped 95% of the absurd blow-back that came my way IF people were not already fully infected with the "empathy is required of everyone and is how you are loving" balderdash of a rapidly dying culture. I mean, check it out: 

1)  I made the context that of creation, with man as the image bearer---the exact opposite of the secular worldview.  Should have been a context-setter.

2) I asserted a direct contrast between the goodness of sympathy and the sinfulness of empathy.

3)  I then made it clear what is sinful about this use of empathy: it involves the surrender of our minds to the sinful emotional responses of others.

Plenty there to explain the point?  With just a little reflection, yes.

But all you need to do is read through even some of the around 200 comments (let alone all the sub-tweets, and even an article by some guy named John Reasnor) and you will see that the majority who read the tweet either lacked the capacity, or willingness, to listen to it and think about it.  Now, it is Twitter, and that is part of the program there, in all honesty.  Who really makes the effort to think before responding with emotion?

So allow me to briefly expand. Man is God's creature. God has created man with a mind, the capacity to think, to reflect, to meditate. Man is told to be disciplined in these things. In fact, the greatest commandment is not "feelings, nothing more than feelings," but is "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength." You do not give that commandment to your cat, or your Siamese fighting fish. Man has the capacity to direct his passions, control his passions, rule over his passions, and the first two commandments (love your neighbor as yourself) prove it.

So I am actually functioning on the radical idea that God lays out for His creature man laws and guidelines and we are to live within them, seeking to love God and think His thoughts after Him, glorifying Him by living in His creation as He has commanded. And yes, I believe man is to master, control, and utilize his emotional life in light of divine truth.  We are not to be mastered by our emotions.

So what is the problem with empathy today?  We are, in fact, told to weep with those who weep, but that assumes those who weep have a reason for weeping that is in line with God's revelation. We are not to weep with the drug dealer who accidentally drops his stash down the storm drain in New York City. We are not to weep with the bank robber who botches the job and ends up in the slammer. We are, plainly, to exercise control even in our sympathy. We are not to sympathize with sin, nor are we to sympathize with rebellion, or evil. 

But the new cultural (and it has flown into the church as well) orthodoxy is: you shall empathize.  You shall enter into the emotions of others AND YOU SHALL NOT MAKE JUDGMENTS ABOUT SAID EMOTIONS.  By so doing YOU SHALL VALIDATE ALL HUMAN EXPERIENCES AS SUPREME.  The greatest sin of all today is to say, "The emotions that person is experiencing are the result of sinful rebellion against God, and hence do not require my validation, support, or celebration."  HOW DARE YOU!  That is the great rule I stepped upon, and must now pay the price.

The Great Empathy Commandment has been very useful in the degradation of Christian morals and ethics, let alone evangelism, pastoral counseling, etc. Sixty years ago it was almost unthinkable that the Christian people would, by a majority, think homosexuality a "gift from God," but that is the case today. Why? Empathy.  "Walk a mile in their shoes. Consider their life. ENTER INTO their emotional experience." Then it went from simple homosexuality to the redefining of marriage.  Now, polyamory, polygamy.  And with 2015, every form of gender-destroying "experience."  You must empathize. You must "enter in" or your are "unloving." Already the push to empathize with those who naturally experience "intergenerational love" (pedophiles) is in the academy and the culture. Marrying your cat or your Siamese fighting fish is just around the corner.  Just empathize with the experience.  Validate it. Then submit.

I did not intend to write a book, but let me point out the obvious. For a Christian, especially within the fellowship, we are to love one another. And it is that commandment to love which precludes sinful empathy.  When I see a brother or sister who is experiencing what they call "trauma," and I first (before diving in with them) inquire as to the source of said trauma, and then discover it is rooted in rebellion, in sin, or in simple ignorance of God's truth, the LAST thing they need from me is the validation of their emotional responses. They need me to stay OUT of their emotions, stay firmly planted on solid ground, and reach out a hand of help.  I can sympathize with their situation, but I cannot ENTER their situation, not if I actually love them.  But that's a definition of love which is about as heretical in today's culture, and, sadly, in today's church, as my heretical tweet above.

[quranreadalong]

Notes before we get started

Here’s some stuff you need to know before we actually get into the Quran itself.

ORDER OF THE QURAN

The Quran isn’t in chronological order. Instead, the longest suwar (chapters, singular=surah) are generally in the first half, and the shorter ones are in the second half. No one knows the exact chronological order, as in which of Mohammed’s “revelations” came first, but the suwar are generally divided into Mecca and Medina suwar.

The Mecca suwar were from Mohammed’s earlier years as a “prophet” (610-622 AD), while the Medina suwar were from many years later, after he had gathered followers and established a Muslim base of power in the city of Yathrib, which he called Medina (622 AD+). Some suwar are a combination of “revelations” from both eras! In a small number of cases, it’s hard to tell where/when the majority of a surah came from, but I’ll point those out along the way. As a general rule, the Medinan suwar contain lists of rules and descriptions of events in Mohammed’s own life, whereas the Meccan ones are mostly just Mohammed yelling at people and telling them to stop being polytheists; most are devoid of rule-and-regulation stuff.

The reason why I tend to use the word surah rather than just “chapter” is because of this--suwar that directly follow one another aren’t necessarily from the same time period or concern the same topic. Each one is pretty self-contained. A surah in the second half of the Quran is usually earlier than one in the first half of the Quran.

The Quran is fairly intolerant and extremely repetitive. I’m serious: it is not laid out like a mythological history book like the Torah is, so if that’s what you’re expecting, then... don’t... expect that! It’s just a long collection of Mohammed’s rants. If you have never read it before, and the only thing you know about it is that Muslims believe it is the most beautiful book of all time, please temper your expectations now.

Mohammed’s early “revelations” (ayat, singular ayah) are noticeably more poetic than the later ones from Medina, which are often tedious lists of rules, Biblical stories, and chastisements of The Disbelievers, which get worse and worse. We’ll see that right away in the second surah. Don’t worry, though, it’s not all tedious crap. There’s plenty of interesting stuff to discuss within the Quran’s pages.

Finally, because there are so many suwar and they come from different points in Mohammed’s lifetime, some parts of the Quran seem to contradict one another. But never fear: the Quran contains a handy-dandy provision in which seeming contradictions are resolved by Allah abrogating older ayat/verses with new and “better” ones: the later verse replaces the earlier one. As we go along, we will keep that in mind.

Wikipedia lists two suggested chronological organizations of the Quran, though as you can see, there’s some variation. I’m going to be reading the Quran in its standard order, but I’ll note whether it is an early, middle, late Mecca or Medina surah at each one’s introduction.

THE AHADITH

While Islam requires one to believe that every word of the Quran is true, there is another element to the religion called the ahadith (“traditions”, singular hadith) which are basically collected sayings about Mohammed and his followers. Essentially, if a subject is not directly addressed in the Quran, Muslims turn to the ahadith collections to figure out what is or is not permissible. Allah forgot to mention a lot of stuff in The Perfect Book, apparently. So occasionally I’ll need to link to some ahadith.

The problem, of course, is that many of the ahadith passages are full of shit and blatantly made up. Early Muslim scholars dedicated their entire lives to figuring out which ahadith were reputable, and when I quote a relevant hadith, it will almost always be from one of the two most reputable collections, called Sahih Muslim and Bukhari. Maybe we’ll read some of the collections later, at least the sahih or “strong”/highly reputable ones. My Big Fat Ahadith Read-Along would be…. an experience.

TAFSIR & SIRA & HISTORY

Some things in the Quran are incomprehensible without consulting outside sources that explain what a particular verse is about and what the historical context of the verse is. There is a genre of Islamic literature called a tafsir that collects ahadith relevant to a certain verse, and sometimes I will link to one of several highly-regarded tafsir collections when a part of the Quran requires it.

Every now and then I’ll also bring in excerpts from a sira (a “biography”/hagiography of Mohammed and his followers; the one I'll quote from is by Ibn Ishaq and was written in the 8th century) or a history book (usually al-Tabari’s) for the same reason. It is impossible to read the Quran without referencing these things at some points, because people, places, and events are mentioned but never explained. Understanding the changing situation and power dynamics between Mohammed and his various enemies is also crucial for understanding why the Quran gets progressively more violent and intolerant chronologically.

The tafsir collections, as well as the history and sira books that I link to, occasionally give more than one explanation for a certain verse/incident. When there is historical disagreement about a situation or reason to doubt any of the sources I listed above, I will be sure to mention that.

CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH SOURCES

Much of the Quran involves rehashed stories from Judaism and Christianity--but often the details are strange and don’t come from the Bible/Torah. This is because Mohammed enjoyed collecting and then copying stories he heard from the sects around him, and not all of those stories had any basis at all in the Bible. Some parts of the Quran are clearly pulled from the Talmudic writings of rabbis, while others are clearly pulled from Christian apocryphal texts. I will link to the sources of those non-Biblical stories when they come up.

TRANSLATIONS

corpus.quran.com is my go-to translation site. It lists seven highly-regarded English translations, all side-by-side. I’ll be using the Pickthall translation. In the event that Pickthall’s translation is noticeably different from the others, I’ll make a note of it and explain the controversy over the word in question. (There are some people who will tell you that you cannot read the Quran in any language other than Arabic or else you won’t understand it. These people are full of shit and you can feel free to ignore them. Hundreds of millions of the world’s Muslims cannot understand Arabic. Any debates over the meaning of a certain word also apply to the original untranslated Arabic word. All the translations on that site are regarded as very well-done and scholarly.)

THE HISTORICAL QURAN

Regarding the historical validity of the Quran itself, the content has remained mostly unchanged since the 7th century. There is a debate about how much of was altered between the time of Mohammed and the last years of the 600s AD, but it is generally agreed that the majority of it has remained the same.

There is, however, evidence that during Mohammed’s lifetime, the Quran was a changing document, and some verses were removed from it on Mohammed’s orders, both in the early and late periods of his prophetic career. Some were once believed to be part of the Quran but were later deemed non-revelatory. This is a form of naskh, or abrogation, a concept that is addressed within the Quran itself. The other form of naskh involves a later verse superseding an earlier one, but both remaining in the Quran. We’ll get to all that.

It is less clear whether anything major was added to the Quran after Mohammed’s time. The first written Quran was compiled only after Mohammed’s death, and it wasn’t fully edited and standardized until the time of the third caliph. The written Quran itself also changed over time, as the Arabic script of early Islam was not the Arabic script we use today. For example, diacritics (little dots above or below Arabic letters: ت/t and  ب/b) were not in use in the early days. Identical letters were used for different sounds, which was, as you might imagine, somewhat of a problem. So eventually they were added in to help people read the damn thing. In general it is believed that the addition of diacritics did not alter the meaning of the Quran in any huge way, as the Quran in its verbal forms (there were multiple different ones, though Mohammed said that was fine as long as the meaning remained the same) had already been memorized by several people, but it really isn't possible to know for sure.

We do not know who was the first to compile the Quran into one book, as there are conflicting ahadith on the matter. We do know that one of the first to compile a written Quran was a scribe named Zayd ibn Thabit, who put it together in the year after Mohammed's death by bringing multiple fragments of text together and supplementing it with the assistance of those who had memorized some verses. The caliph Uthman used Zayd's text a base for the “official Quran” and had variant texts burned (a fragment of one surviving older copy is here; it does have some added words, subtracted words, a missing verse, etc compared to the Uthmanic text). It’s generally believed that this is more or less identical to the Quran that we have now, but the earliest surviving near-complete copy that we have dates to the mid-eighth century at earliest. If any significant material was added to or removed from it in the preceding century+, we have no way of knowing it.

(I finally wrote a post on this whole process that u can read here if you want!!)

So we're just gonna ignore those problems, since neither we nor anyone else can answer the questions they bring up. For the purpose of this read-along I’ll be treating every word of the Quran as something Mohammed actually said. Now settle in and get ready to read the most beautiful book of all time.

Without further ado, I present: How To Burn Your Kafir: The Noble Quran

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

[nightcoremoon]

I felt really uncomfortable at pride only because of a tent with a giant sign that said "foreskin feels SO GOOD, stop circumcision today!" the reason for this is, well... that feels really kind of... antisemitic. and also, I feel a bigger issue than male circumcision is female circumcision so it was also kind of buying into the misogyny in certain sects of radical Islam by being silent about that. and also I still have issue with public pride stuff being so overtly sexual when queer kids are present, and it really fucks things over for them when society is already so ready to take anything they can to support their vitriol; same reason why I feel uncomfortable by seeing dildos and shit. I mean, I know that allosexual queer people wanna be proud of their sexuality and stuff but equating gay pride with dildos is not only ace erasure but also buying into the false belief that kids and young teens shouldn't be able to self identify in the queer community because it's directly associated with fucking. which isn't AT ALL the intention, but it makes it so much harder for them because they've got to deal with society's bigotry in a way that adult queer people don't have to deal with. it's kind of ageism in that regard; adulthood privilege, if that's a thing. which I believe it should be since the fat community (if that's what they're called; body positivity movement isn't really linked to that in an intrinsic way, it's just a popular part of it) are tacking fatphobia onto queerphobia & racism & antisemitism & misogyny & ableism (as if they're equatable to systemic oppression (which is a different topic entirely that I'm not gonna get into now)). children aren't able to make the same decisions adults are when it comes to their gender identity and expression and other stuff like that, even though identity as a concept is brought into our psyche way before a lot of other things: before our fucking TEETH come in, for christ's sake. but i digress. [edit- read this passage with a critical eye plz] in the long run, it maybe would be best to stop circumcision. it doesn't affect hygiene, and the Torah/Quran/Bible passages that talked about circumcision are all in the bits that the (alleged in the Jews' (and maybe Muslim's, honestly idk very much about Islam) case) messiah Jesus said were no longer relevant, and even if the books genesis leviticus exodus et cetera old testament stuff were still relevant today, we're all going to hell because tattoos and trimming facial hair and women speaking in churches and being born gay and eating pork and shellfish and wearing clothes of mixed fabrics and being raped or sexually assaulted are all equally bad, which is a bunch of fucking bullshit. this could sound like I'm being an antisemitic piece of shit for saying their belief system is wrong, BUT... those books are 60% translation error and 30% editing by the corrupt as all hell papacy/vatican, at least as far as the western world knows, so western jews and catholics and baptists and a whole host of outdated, broken, and worthless systems of belief are just flat out wrong anyway. but only certain sects of certain parts of certain faiths. circumcision should definitely be a choice that adults can make for themselves, but infants do not consent. I feel you must be at least of legal age to at least vote or get a tattoo or buy lottery tickets to consent to any kind of surgery performed on your body (aside from life altering things like cleft palate, appendicitis, kidney transplants, sexual reassignment surgery for people old enough to have a gender identity strong enough to induce gender dysphoria, etc), the exact same way I feel we should handle any baptisms or things like that. because I fucking hate seeing 5 year olds get baptized when odds are they might not even still be christians in a few years, because I can guaranfuckingtee you that the kind of parents who would let their kids get baptized that young are the kind of parents who coerce their kids into doing so, inducting them into their religion turned cult. and I feel the exact same way when conversation turns to circumcision. do you know why? because I was. and I wish I wasn't. I deeply, deeply wish that I had my foreskin, because as much as I've told myself I should be comfortable with my penis as it is, I wish it was easier to tuck, which it would be if I still had my foreskin. tmi warning, btw. and I get that it's part of Jewish upbringing and culture and heritage to circumcise their babies and have a bris because their God says that it's encouraged to force your kids to being raised in a certain way and take away all of their potential future autonomy and brainwash them into also being Jewish, but god damn it, I disagree with it wholeheartedly and would not choose to follow Jewish belief myself. however if anybody would dare to tell them they can't do it themselves or are less of people and deserve to die because of it, those people can go fuck themselves since you can disagree with a person's lifestyle and not be bigoted against them in some situations. religion is a lifestyle choice, but sexuality is not. [Keep in mind that most of my knowledge of Jewish culture is through my grandmother's Christian lens so I probably talked out her ass for the majority of this whole entire passage.] so I mean. I agree with the sign. I also disagree with the sign. I'm torn in two. I've got points of view that will probably draw the attention of a lot of Discoursers™ who will all call me a nazi and tell me to kill myself again. I'm literally saying that entire systems of belief for a lot of religions are bullshit. I'm criticizing some logical faults in certain fundamental aspects of cultures I don't have the authority to speak about. I said things that can and WILL be taken the wrong way. but do you know what separates me from bigoted assholes? I know that I could be- and more than likely am- wrong about at least one thing I said here in this post. If I am wrong about something, anything: if I misunderstand, and don't have the correct information for anything at all, please let me know. My experiences are NOT universal and I have experienced the world through a very very VERY narrow scope. I'm only human; my brain is only capable of operating on information it has. So if something said here strikes a chord with you, please tell me so that I can unlearn that particular piece of ignorant bigotry. I don't want to be prejudiced against, discriminatory against, or aid the oppression of, any group. But if you know what's good for you don't just attack me because that's not how to talk about shit like adults. Ask for clarification, don't just take all the things I say out of context. Let's have a civil and rational discussion about intersecting bigotry, and how things aren't all just in black and white, and how opposition for one type of perceived bigotry can, in the right lens, be framed as being supportive of another type of perceived bigotry. To summarize: I'm conflicted about a sign. I'm conflicted about sexualization the LGBTQ+ I'm conflicted about fatphobia inclusion I'm conflicted about ageism I'm conflicted about the autonomy of children I'm conflicted about many religions I'm conflicted about religious corruption I'm conflicted about baptizing children I'm conflicted about aspects of Judaism I'm conflicted about my opinions but I'm NOT conflicted about the way to talk about things rationally online also I wrote this coming off of a suicidal depressive low at 4:00 in the morning while hopped up on caffeine after a very emotionally turbulent night and full of shitty non-food, so I may come to regret saying a lot of this later on in the morning, and apologize in advance if I super offend anybody over a misunderstanding of what I said, or a lack of foresight on my part, or having an opinion reinforced by society's love to brainwash us into being really bigoted against minority demographics. this surprise rant is also not even mostly written by me, I dissociated like two minutes into writing half in the middle of the first paragraph hence the probably reason why it went WAY off the tracks and I didn't get back until writing this current sentence you're reading now. [bracketed remarks got written right now]. don't send hate anons, we're all hopefully more mature than that. in all honesty this whole post might get zero attention whatsoever because my followers clearly don't care much about my personal life since I have to guilt trip them into validating me most of the time. I'm gonna wrap this up because it's just so fucking long right now and I'm STILL FUCKING WRITING MORE and it's 5:15 in the morning and I have to be awake in three hours. all because I hate myself.