#modern day religion

[frnkmush]

doubt this will get anywhere, but does anyone have any good information on current day catholicism???

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 171

Danny would like everyone to know it was a complete accident. Look, normally he was really good at not altering the timeline! He was! 

But the dude was definitely not in the right Time, and he had to get his trust which took so long, like damn he thought he had anxiety. Seriously though, kevlar in the 1700s? Yeah that wasn’t right, and Peepaw always complained about the messes that the speedsters caused, so he was trying to prevent a mess by tugging the dude away and helping him out. 

Falling in love maybe a little, was not in the plan. But honestly the man had a worse sense of self preservation than he did as a teen and was also straight up adorable, in a wet cat  who could kill you sort of way. 

So maybe he helped the dude grab a child that was going to be drowned. It wasn’t like anyone else saw them! Even if similar situations might’ve happened a few different times. 

Still, no one saw them! 

So why is there now a small cult who worships the Shadowed one and Radiant one, aka his companion (who would not give his name save for B, which, fair, probably didn’t want to accidentally wreck the timeline either) and well, him?! At least they worship them as guardians of children, but uh. Should he maybe, perhaps, fix this…? 

[ehlnofay]

something that always really galls me in fantasy is the lack of cultural exchange... all part of the weird emphasis on race as like. a species difference. this one goes in this box that one goes in that box and never the twain shall meet. but you have different peoples living right next to each other over massive time scales and you're telling me there has been no intermingling? no sharing and melding of ideas aesthetics and customs? I'll kill you

[straightlightyagami]

why isn’t christmas 40 weeks to represent the duration of pregnancy

[talesofwhimsy]

I'm 100 pages into Moby Dick and they just got on the goddamn boat

This book actually kinda fucks hard it's great?

[latterdaysainttemples]

Inside the Brasília Brazil Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Read the Church Newsroom article. Learn more about Latter-day Saint temples, their functions, and find a temple open house near you.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

one thing i'm really really fascinated by is the fact that everyone in the modern pokemon world seems to consider the deities a power source, nothing more. the games generally imply that knowledge of the legendaries has been lost to time and legend and only preserved by a select few who keep to the Ancient Ways but i don't really think that sounds likely. i think they might be common knowledge people just don't seem to. conceptualize them as greater than in the way that we generally think of them. "this is a divine force that underpins reality and has been worshipped since antiquity" is not a thing that seems to have any problem coexisting with "i'm going to put this thing in an engine and make it my tool." and it's very frequently the baddies doing this which maybe weakens the point a little but very rarely is the point of contention with the bad guys "hey you shouldn't do that to god" that's kind of like, never the part of their thing that people object to. it's always their motives, never their methods. when the Good Guy (local ten year old) catches god and makes it their new partner, nobody has a problem with it! and people joke about this but i'm saying it might imply a way deeper facet of society than people give it credit for.

and is this maybe trying to force the round peg of pokemon legendaries into the square hole of actual religion. very possibly! the games aside from pla certainly seem only very occasionally interested in treating these creatures as gods or godlike or worshipped in any way, and far more often just want to treat them as regular pokemon But Stronger. so it's maybe not reasonable to try and say these entities are deities. but the problem is they are! it's not like this isn't supported textually, it's just... not a part of canon that canon is actually interested in. dialga, palkia, the lake trio, kyogre, groudon—these things are gods. canon can mince words and call them legendaries and "worshipped as deities maybe sometimes" but when you get to the point where you're discussing something that represents a fundamental force governing reality and/or can end the world on a whim then idc what you call it. that's a god.

but the problem is that they are gods and also pokemon, they're both simultaneously. and people in the pokemon world seem to have worked this out, and have had the collective realization that the gods are truly not exempt from their own rules. they can be captured, they can be subjugated, they can be used. this also ties back in with the whole anarchism discussion obviously but it's just the fact that like. it goes way deeper than everyone being fine with the ten year old putting the lord of time in a ball. the entire world operates on the premise of "eat your gods."

does that like... contradict worship? can you be faithful to something knowing it's been used as a tool?

[menlove]

have to do a paper focusing on modern religion instead of religious/cultural history i have suffered more than jesus

[makuta-kotok]

Idea for my CoTL fanfic, now known as The Bleeding Heart AU. Narinder and Lambert both have opposing views of God and religion.

Lambert is a pastor of the local church, who wears a false face of piety to conceal their more insidious desires.

Narinder is a broken man forced to sell his body to survive, with only a rosary to remember his parents.

Lambert believes God gave them a free pass, Narinder believes God won’t give him a second chance.

[wathanism]

hi, i recently found your blog. as an ex-muslim also interested in paganism, can i just ask where you learnt about wathanism and if there are any specific resources on the pre-islamic arab gods that i could use to learn? i'm not arab, i'm pakistani, and i've looked into ancient subcontinental religion pre-islam, but i'd also like to learn about wathanism, since i've never heard of it before in my life despite actually looking up pre-islamic arabia's gods. thank you :)

hi hun 💕 sorry for taking forever to reply to this, i've not been very active on this blog for a lot of reasons right now. but regarding your question, i think my answer is gonna be super disappointing lol. resources are def very very limited, and a lot of what's available isn't translated (much of it is in arabic, but a lot is also in various now dead languages).

there is an english & arabic speaking community on reddit and discord dedicated to wathanism, which is really great and i'd highly recommend it. the discord has a section on books and articles, most of which are academic and peer reviewed in historical journals. since this is a religion that was largely wiped out and has very few people interested in studying it and few resources to even examine, learning about it is kind of a huge undertaking that involves a lot of niche academic texts and a lot of cross referencing.

it's a grind basically lol, but the discord is great because it's a place where people who are very passionate about reconstructing the religion will trudge through those sources very diligently, not just as a detached academic study but as a spiritual "i want to apply this in my own daily life" kind of way, ykwim? so that's very cool. i can't speak to the community too much, cause i mostly just use it as a reference point and don't talk much with people, but it's the most concentrated place of quality knowledge on the subject i know of.

the best crash course, easy to read article i personally know of on the matter is still this paper (if you copy the link into scihub you should have access to it), just bc it hits on the specific things i'm most interested in without being incomprehensible jargon. the way i practice my religion is probably not the most historically accurate tbh; for me, it's just about living by the values of respecting your community and heritage, and i think this paper does a great job of explaining why those were such important values to the old arab pagans. the people on the discord can def give you a better sense of what the practice looked like in Ye Olden Days.

also worth noting: if you're hoping to find like defined, clearly laid out mythology about the arabian gods like there are stories about norse or greek or roman gods, that's rly not what you're gonna find (at least not as far as ive ever known to exist). for the most part, the things you're gonna find are about what people valued, what rituals they had, and how they lived. the vast majority of info we have on the gods is like "people prayed for this goddess to bring good crops and for that god to protect the village," but rarely if ever are there detailed narratives or myths like there are for other old religions.

[awakefor48hours]

my hot take is that if a lot of the people on Tumblr were around in the US in the 1950s and 60s, they actively would have opposed civil rights and racial integration. I've seen far too many posts here on Tumblr that are just takes that are half a step removed from advocating for reestablishing for racial segregation that use a veneer of progressive language

Yeah... a lot of people on this site don't know how close they sound to colonizers and it's scary.

[rotzaprachim]

Much observed but also highly entertaining the extent that fundies are worse at every discernible “home making” skill than many a group that they claim to be part of the Them group keeping women from their true roll as home makers

[solvicrafts]

What gets me about certain people being so fucking pissy about Bob not writing much about Eilistraee (until the last fucking trilogy where EIlistraeans featured heavily) is that

a) Bob basically built drow culture up from almost nothing, and Eilistraee came after he started writing Drizzt

b) no you guys really don't understand. I own the first 4 modules drow appeared in. There's... not much there. And it hasn't aged well.

c) and the Big One: he has a specific vision for his specific characters when it comes to the narrative he wants to explore, from sexual abuse to religious trauma, both of which are fucking complicated and for most people just switching deities isn't enough to fix that.

I have religious trauma that I still struggle with to this day and probably will for the rest of my life to some extent, and it's fundamentally different in nature from what most people would probably expect, and the thing is even though I am happily polytheistic and very enthusiastically into it, I still struggle a lot with certain things because every time I get into my religious practice I have to actively force myself into (or out of) certain things because my whole relationship to religion and spirituality is complicated and messy.

It would be easy and frankly incredibly superficial for Bob to decide to just have them all convert to half-assed Neowiccan ~woo~ drow Jesus Eilistraee to *~*save their souls*~* and call it a day

BUT HE DIDN'T DO THAT

Partly because she wasn't his creation and other authors were writing her at the time so he really couldn't, and partly because it's a shitty message to send.

Sometimes people benefit from converting to a new religion or following a new deity. Sometimes people don't.

I benefited from gradually converting to my religion, but it's come with a whole different set of complications and hasn't been a smooth journey for me.

Just going from extensive religious trauma to switching deities does not fix your problems, and for a lot of people it realistically can make them much worse.

but also

you don't have to be saved by a deity in order to have value as a person

[ascendandt]

when you have even the slightest curiosity in precontact american history or how the bible was written the book of mormon becomes about the stupidest piece of shit text to exist on the earth

[fatmaclover]

unfortunately its looking like my first fic will probably be some macden bullshit because i cant stop thinking about their codependency. however maybe afterwards i will write some charmac being a couple of queers. not in a romantic way or anything itd literally be a glorified charlie coming out fic

[the-story-of-how-we-died]

I saw someone say Matt's portrayal of polytheistic religions was a very Christian (and ahistorical) view on them. And while I agree with the general statement, I think they were presenting their point dishonestly - specifically to make it seem like this was specifically a fault of Matt (which, to be clear, it isn't. Pretty much every modern representation of polytheistic religions is filtered through a monotheistic lens; D&D, Pathfinder, Tolkein, Rick Riordan, etc.). I could write a dissertation on the differences between modern and historical presentation of polytheistic religions, both in worships and entertainment (and I might one day), but rn, I wanted to focus on a single point that they presented: missionaries.

To be very clear, I agree that the most prolific, modern-day proselytizers are Christians, but saying it's 1.) ahistorical and Christian to present followers of a polytheistic religion as proselytizers and 2.) that Christians were the first proselytizers is just false.

To both the first and second point, Buddhism had missionaries sent across all of Asia and southern Europe (to modern-day Greece, in fact) in 3BCE. They were called "Dharma Bhananks"*, and, eventually, nearly converted all of India (and surrounding islands). And it wasn't just Buddhism - Jainism, Islam**, and Sikh were also (and still are, in some contexts) focused on converting outsiders.

So, to say that putting missionaries inside your D&D game is ahistorical, and, somehow, a Christian view of religion is just false.

* I can't find a primary source that confirms this name for Bhuddist missionaries. It seems there's a bit of recursive citing, where sources are citing each other but not a primary source. As best as I can tell (and I do not speak Sanskrit, so take this with a pinch of salt), "Dharma Bhanaks" or "Dharma Bhāņaks" translates to "truth-reciter", so it seems plausible?

** I know Islam is not a polytheistic religion. My point was that even non-Christian monotheistic religions proselytize.