#religion and censorship

[z34l0t]

Burning Beatles records in Waycross, GA. [photo from United Press International, August 1966.]

[yesterdaysprint]

Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, January 11, 1929

[queerism1969]

[wronghands1]

[q8qwertyuiop8p]

I was blown away by this post and need to talk about it, or I will never sleep lol. I wish I could show you our entire conversation but the OP deleted all my comments so I couldn't screenshot anything.

https://whereserpentswalk.tumblr.com/post/747399887511060481/the-nazis-that-you-see-in-movies-are-as-much-a

"Nazis weren’t atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons."

The nazis, including Hitler, were absolutely not supporters of Christianity, you don't even need to be a Christian to see why this is so problematic. The main idea of Christianity is that Jesus is the Messiah, the one and only Son who loved the world so much he sacrificed his life to pay the debt of our sins.

Jesus isn't just not Aryan, or not white. He is a Jew. Christians literally worship him, seeing him as both fully human and fully divine.

Hitler taught that Jews were inferior, the scum of the Earth, deserving of inhumane treatment and death. Why would he support a religion that worships a Jewish man as the Messiah?

Furthermore, the gospel teaches that ALL people, regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, etc. We're made equal in the eyes of God, and that we all came from the same two people.

Hitler taught that the Aryans were the superior race, and preached the inferiority of anyone else. Why would he support a religion that so blatantly contradicts his teachings?

But wait- if Hitler and the Nazis were against Christianity, why did they employ Christian rhetoric in speeches? Why did they negotiate a treaty with the Vatican?

If you are a psychopath vying for support and leadership in an overwhelmingly Christian nation, are you really going to talk about how useless you see Christianity, or how it is a threat to your rule? Of course not. Hitler was a demagogue. He wanted to appeal to the common 1930s German citizen, which meant he would need to appeal to Christians.

It wasn't until he had secured power that he could finally show his true colors, breaking his promise to the Vatican to not interfere with the rights of the church. Among the many groups persecuted in the holocaust were Christians, especially Roman Catholics. Clergy in Germany and other territories were closely supervised to make sure they didn't contradict the Nazi teachings, Catholic organizations were shut down, and many prominent Christians were sent to camps for forced labor and execution.

I pointed out some of these the the OP, to which they responded

How stating that the Nazis weren't supporters of Christians and that Christianity cannot coexist with Nazism makes me a holocaust denier, I don't know. I'm not the one denying that a certain group was persecuted by the Nazis (the OP stated in a comment of theirs that the Christians put into camps were only attacked for their ethnicity, not their religion) and trying to make it look like the Nazis actually loved and cared about that group.

I also don't understand how Christianity is inherently antisemitic. I asked the OP what about it was antisemitic, so after deleting all my comments, they blocked me. If you have the answer, let me know, I am genuinely curious.

It makes me sad to see that people actually believe this kind of propaganda. Also, if you're going to make a post about the evils of Nazism, you probably shouldn't use misinformation to villianize and scapegoat a group, or censor people who speak out against said misinformation. Just saying.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Nineteen Eighty-Four was not supposed to be an instruction manual."

Yet so much Orwell's writings ring true today. Big Brother Watch is determined to make Nineteen Eighty-Four fiction again.

[kafkasapartment]

Morton’s three-part text, primarily focused on detailed observations of the region's Indigenous people, plants, animals, and resources that could be exploited by white settlers. However, it also contained a critical section at the end, where Morton provided a harsh critique of the Puritans and their society, including their treatment of Native Americans. This publication posed a threat to the young colony and its residents' covenant with God.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Insane Satanic Panic Moments

[sparkling-pink-lemonade]

Got an ignorant hate comment. Felt it deserved it's own post. It's a long one, and technically isn't doing anything productive as I blocked the person. I just like yelling into the void. Mind the tags.

1) You're funny. I'm agnostic, and wasn't even raised christian. It's like an atheist saying "Oh my god" (this can't be real/that's ridiculous) or "God save me" (I'm doomed). "My brother in Christ", what would normally be a term of endearment and familiarity in a christian setting becomes very condescending and 'holier than thou' if said to any non christian (not just jews). Because of that, outside of a christian setting, it's now a term of sarcasm and mockery to point out someone's stupidity and ignorance. So the fact you jumped into a defensive standpoint, calling someone you know nothing about antisemitic over a post that wasn't even directed at you, tells me a lot more about your insecurities.

2) Yes, you're right! It is perfectly reasonable to not WANT people with an involuntary attraction to real life children to INTERACT with your work. But let me lay out a few things. Stop using that word, it does not mean what you think it means. Being attracted to fictional characters depicted as kids in a form of media that is (at least in a non indie setting) designed, and written by a team of adults, fudging up the looks and behaviors of their characters compared to reality to be more appealing to a wide demographic, is not pedophilia. Pedophilia is a mental disorder, where an attraction to children who can't consent is causing direct harm to yourself or those around you in your day to day life. This usually presents itself as crippling distress for the person with the disorder due to their intrusive thoughts, and fear of losing your friends and family should they find out about your disorder. By calling an attraction to fictional character depicted as children "pedophilia" you are doing what's called pedojacketing. Which is a false accusation against someone in attempt to rally others by appealing to their disgust to ruin the life of another person. It causes major harm by both trivializing a serious and often debilitating mental illness into a "voluntary perversion", while also trivializing the seriousness of child predator allegations by equating the sexual abuse of real, breathing children, to that of fictional story that never happened. Most predators aren't even pedophiles, they are attracted to the power imbalance and control, not the kid itself. But that's not what proship is, it's an ideology that people should be allowed to have their own space to enjoy whatever fiction they want without harassment or censorship. And guess what, that doesn't mean we aren't entitled to your space. If our ideology makes you uncomfortable, it's your right to block us and keep us from interacting with your art.

But get this, consuming and interacting are two completely different things. Consuming means you've looked at a piece of art, you watched a video, read a piece of literature, or played a video game. The moment you post something to the public, and not somewhere with restricted access, you forfeit all right to decide who can consume your media. AO3 is a public website, even if you choose the lovely option of only showing your work to people who are logged in (which anyone can get an account), you can't then decide who is allowed to view your work. When you post media publicly, it is impossible to discern every single person who has consumed your work. At best a site may have a "views" counter, or in AO3's case, hits, but it will always remain anonymous. As such, if you don't like the idea of a proshipper consuming your work, congrats, you will never have to know.

Interacting however means that you've consumed a piece of media, and are now making a public display about your consumption where the creator can see it, that individualizes them from the rest of the crowd. A comment, a post, if the media has a non-anonymous "like" function, or non-anonymous subscription/follow function. Most people are sane, and don't go out of their way to do background checks on every single person that interacted with their work. But if it comes to your attention that someone who makes your uncomfortable is interacting with your work where you can see it, then you have the tools to make it so you'll never be able to see or hear from them again. They will still be able to consume your public work, but now you've curated your personal experience.

But if you're so paranoid and disgusted by the idea that someone you find icky or gross might be able to consume your content without your consent, then you have to take responsibility for your own experiencing it and revoke your consent from the wider public by removing your content from a public platform.

This person was deluding themself into believing that consumption was the same thing as interaction and that the existence of a dni means it was the public's responsibility to regulate their online experience for them, and was getting upset at the realization that they can't regulate a public space the same way as a private one, and that people they don't like will be able to see their public work even if they will never know about it.

[exvangelical-christian-nerd]

Some thoughts on Harry Potter, my complicated relationship with it, and the censorship I grew up with

TW Religion., swearing, and mention of adult content type things

Y'all, if you told younger me that I would one day be too liberal for Harry Potter, I would probably have laughed at you. It is really interesting what things come full circle. Growing up, I had to hide my enjoyment of it because all my friends were like "Magic bad." And now I have to enjoy the bits of it I do enjoy privately because JK Rowling is bad. How did this happen? My life is a joke.

This story has played a very important role in my life and I refuse to let some terf ruin it for me. Especially since my main enjoyment of it has been fan content anyway. But I also refuse to give her any platform or support. Sometimes I'll see merch that I want, but I can't buy it (even if I had the money) because royalties. So yeah basically all I've got now is Etsy and Tumblr, and anything I already had. Honestly the hardest part sometimes is I'll see something and want to get it for the young fans of Harry Potter in my life, but for the afore mentioned reasons can't (Occasionally I'm a bad enby and I breakdown and buy something, but it is rare).

This story did so much to help me break free and pushed me into self discovery.

Sirius Black was my comfort character during covid and helped me through some serious (pun intended) dysphoria, when I was in a really bad place. And long before that, Drarry (I know, I'm not proud of that either) and Wolfstar content was some the first, if not the first, openly gay content I actually allowed myself to enjoy. And I'm not alone in that, I've also seen other conservative Christian young people allow themselves to be comfortable with, or at least permit, the existence of Wolfstar. Do you know how huge that is? How important? You know what? If Rowling makes herself so conservative that the conservative Christians allow their children to start reading those books, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe some more baby gays will see themselves.

Even as a young kid these stories made me work through different things, even if I didn't realize it at the time.

If a conservative Christian kid is enjoying these books, y'all, let them. The fact that they are even allowed to read them is huge. If a conservative Christian adult is enjoying them, let them, the fact that they are willing to read them is huge. Honestly, you might have thought these books would cause you to be possessed by the devil the second you touched them, from the way they were treated when I was a kid.

Even if the author is a massive problem, and she is, there's still a lot of good in these stories. And you never know what could happen, and you never know the risk someone took just to get their hands on that series. In conservative Christian circles, the kind of media allowed in is so controlled. Even once you hit a point where it's no longer so controlled by your parents, picking up a "bad" book or other piece of media, can result in intense shaming and ridicule. As a full grown adult, I still hide things, frequently. I still get "sat down" by my parents for lectures on my "spiritual safety", and I don't even live with them any more.

You never know another person's history. Even if you've walked right beside them the whole time. You can't know everything. For some people just watching Disney Characters kiss is big, because it's something they were taught is dangerous. And everything secular is so... villainized. I honestly thought "Call Me Maybe" by Carley Rae Jepsen was about pr0stituti0n, for years, because what I had learned was that all secular music had adult themes and hidden messages.

Shows making a joke of cross dressing and trans people were some of my favorites, because they were some of the only places I ever got to see myself. Bad representation is still representation, and if it's all you have access to, you cling to it like a life raft. I still have things I watch that are just... honestly awful in some respects, but I watch them because they made me feel seen.

All that said, calling people, media, and fandoms out on their bullshit is still important. It's very necessary. But saying people are categorically this or that for liking something, maybe not. I've said it before, blanket banning or promoting is not often a good idea. Suggesting someone look into why they like something or how they engage with the content? I'd say that's good, important even. I'd say always be mindful of how and why you engage with content as well.

[camelpimp]

Someone skipped leg day

[cringeisfreedom]

People need to stop making up rules for things that don’t need rules

This in general but mostly I mean with moral superiority/purity. With a general decline in religion and with the enforcement of religion people are making up new things to be unnecessarily rigid about. I think this especially because I’ve noticed this in far left spaces and among the same groups that are very anti-establishment and government/religion.

Guilting people for things beyond their control is also wrong and not much better than religion just because it’s less systemic. So hot take maybe people should be less rigid about moral rules and beliefs

[mywitchcultblr]

Corporate Puritanism

Back in the olden days people were puritan because they feared God's invincible hand, but now we are entering a new age of puritanism where sexual content are driven to death because of the invincible hand of capitalism and corporate tyranny, you can't even say 'sex' on youtube. The most ironic thing is, there are people, even those who claimed to be progressive and hates capitalism who cheer for the death of sexual content and even supporting corporate puritanism because sex is 'icky and bad'.

Yes I'm looking at you the people who say NSFW should never be allowed on tumblr again

[ophilosoraptoro]

With all this Candace Owens/Ben Shapiro drama, almost all the Daily Wire personalities have chimed in on it. Jordan Peterson has been oddly silent about it though, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, he's never struck me as someone who unnecessarily gets involved in drama, especially if he doesn't have anything useful to contribute to the discussion. On the other, he's also definitely the type of person who speaks his mind openly and honestly when something is unfair or unjust. I don't suspect he's remaining silent because the heads at DW have ordered him to be, since doing so would undermine practically everything he stood up for against the Canadian Parliament.

I'm definitely not saying he's complicit (in either side) if he remains silent. It's just odd that Jordan has had nothing to say so far.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: Oct 2, 2023

On September 25, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) announced that they were cancelling a panel discussion titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” originally scheduled as part of their annual conference in Toronto from November 15–19. The cancellation and subsequent response by the two organizations shows the extent to which gender ideology has captured academic anthropology.

The panel would have featured six female scientists, specializing in biology and anthropology, to address their profession’s growing denial of biological sex as a valid and relevant category. While terminological confusion surrounding the distinction between sex and gender roles has been a persistent issue within anthropology for decades, the total refusal of some to recognize sex as a real biological variable is a more recent phenomenon. The panel organizers, eager to facilitate an open discussion among anthropologists and entertain diverse perspectives on a contentious issue, considered the AAA/CASCA conference an optimal venue to host such a conversation.

The organizations accepted the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel without incident on July 13, and planned to feature it alongside other panels including those on politically oriented subjects, such as “Trans Latinx Methodologies,” “Exploring Activist Anthropology,” and “Reimagining Anthropology as Restorative Justice.” Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, was one of the slated panelists. She had intended to discuss the significance in bio-archaeology and forensic anthropology of using skeletal remains to establish a decedent’s sex. While a 2018 article in Discover titled “Skeletal Studies Show Sex, Like Gender, Exists Along a Spectrum” reached different conclusions, Weiss planned to discuss how scientific breakthroughs have made determining the sex of skeletal remains a more exact science. Her presentation was to be moderate; she titled it “No Bones About It: Skeletons Are Binary; People May Not Be,” and conceded in her abstract the growing need in forensics to “to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity” due to “the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.”

Despite having already approved the panel, the presidents of the AAA (Ramona Pérez) and CASCA (Monica Heller) unexpectedly issued a joint letter on September 25 notifying the “Let’s Talk About Sex” presenters that their panel was cancelled. They claimed that the panel’s subject matter conflicted with their organizations’ values, jeopardized “the safety and dignity of our members,” and eroded the program’s “scientific integrity.” They further asserted the panel’s ideas (i.e., that sex is a real and important biological variable) would “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.” To ensure that similar discussions would not be approved in the future, the AAA/CASCA vowed to “undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings.”

The following day, the panelists issued a response letter, expressing their disappointment that the AAA and CASCA presidents had “chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue” on the topic. They rejected the “false accusation” that supporting the “continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community.” The panelists called “particularly egregious” the AAA/CASCA’s assertion that the panel would compromise the program’s “scientific integrity.” They noted that, ironically, the AAA/CASCA’s “decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign.”

I spoke with Weiss, who expressed her frustration over the canceled panel and the two presidents’ stifling of honest discussion about sex. She was concerned about the continual shifting of goalposts on the issue:

We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.

Weiss was not the only person to object. When I broke news of the cancellation on X, it immediately went viral. At the time of writing, my post has more than 2.4 million views, and the episode has ignited public outcry from individuals and academics across the political spectrum. Science writer Michael Shermer called the AAA and CASCA’s presidents’ letter “shameful” and an “utterly absurd blank slate denial of human nature.” Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and political science at Duke University, described it as “absolutely appalling.” Jeffrey Flier, the Harvard University distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Medical School, viewed it as “a chilling declaration of war on scholarly controversy.” Even Elon Musk expressed his disbelief with a single word: “Wow.”

Despite the backlash, the AAA and CASCA have held firm. On September 28, the AAA posted a statement on its website titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session Pulled from Annual Meeting Program.” The statement reiterated the stance outlined in the initial letter, declaring the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel an affront to its values and claiming that it endangered AAA members’ safety and lacked scientific rigor.

The AAA’s statement claimed that the now-canceled panel was at odds with their first ethical principle of professional responsibility: “Do no harm.” It likened the scuttled panel’s “gender critical scholarship” to the “race science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” the main goal of which was to “advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people.” In this instance, the AAA argued, “those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex/gender binary” are being targeted.

Weiss remains unconvinced by this moral posturing. “If the panel was so egregious,” she asked, “why had it been accepted in the first place?”

The AAA also claimed that Weiss’s panel lacked “scientific integrity,” and that she and her fellow panelists “relied on assumptions that ran contrary to the settled science in our discipline.” The panelists, the AAA argued, had committed “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship” by “assum[ing] the truth of the proposition that . . . sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” In fact, the AAA claimed, the panelists’ views “contradict scientific evidence” about sex and gender, since “[a]round the world and throughout history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.”

There is much to respond to in this portion of AAA’s statement. First, it’s ironic for the organization to accuse scientists of committing the “cardinal sin” of “assuming the truth” of something, and then to justify cancelling those scientists’ panel on the grounds that the panelists refuse to accept purportedly “settled science.” Second, the panel was organized to discuss biological sex (i.e., the biology of males and females), not “gender roles”; pivoting from discussions of basic biology to murkier debates about sex-related social roles and expectations is a common tactic of gender ideologues. Third, the AAA’s argument that a person’s “gender role” might not “align neatly” with his or her reproductive anatomy implies the existence of normative behaviors for members of each sex. Indeed, this is a central tenet of gender ideology that many people dispute and warrants the kind of discussion the panel intended to provide.

The AAA’s statement made another faulty allegation, this time against Weiss for using “sex identification” instead of “sex estimation” when assessing the sex of skeletal remains. The AAA claimed that Weiss’s choice of terminology was problematic and unscholarly because it assumes a “determinative” process that “is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.”

Weiss, however, rejects the AAA’s notion that the term “sex determination” is outdated or improper. She emphasized that “sex determination” is frequently used in the literature, as demonstrated in numerous contemporary anthropology papers, along with “sex estimation.” Weiss said, “I tend not to use the term ‘sex estimation’ because to estimate is usually associated with a numeric value; thus, I do use the term ‘age estimation.’ But just as ‘age estimation’ does not mean that there is no actual age of an individual and that biological age changes don’t exist, ‘sex estimation’ does not mean that there isn’t a biological sex binary.” She also contested the AAA’s claim that anthropologists’ use of “sex estimation” is meant to accommodate people who identify as transgender or non-binary. Rather, she said, “sex estimation” is used when “anthropologists are not 100 [percent] sure of their accuracy for a variety of reasons, including that the remains may be fragmented.” But as these methods improve—which was a focus of her talk—such “estimations” become increasingly determinative.

After making that unfounded allegation against Weiss, the AAA further embarrasses itself by claiming that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” and that sex and gender are “historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.”

Each of these assertions is empirically false. An individual’s sex can be determined by observing their primary sex organs, or gonads, as these organs determine the type of gamete an individual can or would have the function to produce. The existence of a very rare subset of individuals with developmental conditions that make their sex difficult to assess does not substantiate the existence of a third sex. Sex is binary because are only two sexes, not because every human in existence is neatly classifiable. Additionally, while some organisms are capable of changing sex, humans are not among them. Therefore, the assertion that human sex is “dynamically mutable” is false.

Weiss appropriately highlights the “false equivalency” inherent in the claim that the existence of people with intersex conditions disproves the binary nature of sex. “People who are born intersex or with disorders of sex development are not nonbinary or transgender, they are individuals with medical pathologies,” she said. “We would not argue that because some people are born with polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), often seen in inbred populations, that you can’t say that humans have ten fingers and ten toes. It's an absurd conclusion.”

On September 29, the AAA posted a Letter of Support on its website, penned by anthropologists Agustin Fuentes, Kathryn Clancy, and Robin Nelson, endorsing the decision to cancel the “Let’s Talk About Sex” session. Again, the primary motivation cited was the panel’s opposition to the supposed “settled science” concerning sex. The authors disputed the panelists’ claim that the term “sex” was being supplanted by “gender” in anthropology, claiming instead that there is “massive work on these terms, and their entanglements and nuances.” They also reiterated the AAA’s false accusation that the term “sex determination” was problematic and outdated. Nonetheless, the canceled panel could have served as a prime venue to discuss these issues.

In response to these calls for censorship, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued an open letter to the AAA and CASCA. FIRE characterized the groups’ decision to cancel the panel as a “retreat” from their scientific mission, which “requires unwavering dedication to free inquiry and open dialogue.” It argued that this mission “cannot coexist with inherently subjective standards of ‘harm,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘dignity,’ which are inevitably used to suppress ideas that cause discomfort or conflict with certain political or ideological commitments.” FIRE implored the AAA and CASCA to “reconsider this decision and to recommit to the principles of intellectual freedom and open discourse that are essential to the organizations’ academic missions.” FIRE’s open letter has garnered signatures from nearly 100 academics, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Princeton University’s Robert P. George. FIRE invites additional academic faculty to add their names.

The initial letter and subsequent statement by the AAA/CASCA present a particularly jarring illustration of the undermining of science in the name of “social justice.” The organizations have embarrassed themselves yet lack the self-awareness to realize it. The historian of science Alice Dreger called the AAA and CASCA presidents’ use of the term “cardinal sin” appropriate “because Pérez and Heller are working from dogma so heavy it is worthy of the Vatican.” Indeed, they have fallen prey to gender ideologues, driven into a moral panic by the purported dangers of defending the existence of biological sex to people whose sex distresses them. The AAA/CASCA have determined that it is necessary not only to lie to these people about their sex but also to deceive the rest of us about longstanding, foundational, and universal truths about sex.

Science can advance only within a system and culture that values open inquiry and robust debate. The AAA and CASCA are not just barring a panel of experts with diverse and valid perspectives on biological sex from expressing their well-considered conclusions; they are denying conference attendees the opportunity to hear diverse viewpoints and partake in constructive conversations on a controversial subject. Such actions obstruct the path of scientific progress.

“When you move away from the truth, no good can come from it,” Weiss says. The AAA and CASCA would be wise to ponder that reality.

==

I miss the days when anti-science meant creationists with "Intelligent Design," flat Earthers, and Jenny McCarthy-style MMR anti-vaxers.

It's weird that archaeologists are now denying evolution and pretending not to know how babies are made. Looks like creationists aren't the only evolution-denial game in town any more.

[whalehouse1]

So apparently me yelling, “IDIOT!,” to a man on television on a news station saying, “Faith is a precious commodity and worth more than knowledge because it’s belief.,” was inappropriate because he is a minister. What next should I not call out people hawking wares on television as a way to be true Christians out too cause they’re evangelists? Cause guess what, I’m not going to stop.