#religion sucks

[skvlldonotcry]

[pnrmntl]

[blackaltarapparel]

Find us a better design to offend your Christian friends and family around the Easter dinner table! Don’t worry, we will save you some time & tell you this is the best one on the market! 🤘🏽

WE SHIP WORLDWIDE! 🔪

⬇️

[motionlussyinwhussy]

Religion sucks. That’s it, that’s the post.

[seizuredream]

The hubris in dealing with absolutes concerning the unknown is why I will never agree with atheism nor organised religion

[disteal]

a collection

[apostate-in-an-alcove]

The Christian audacity to assume that every non-Christian, especially non-believers, are secretly miserable and unfulfilled because they're not Christian is definitely in one of the top ten insulting and degrading things Christians believe about other human beings.

[solargeist]

that homophobic artist is kinda funny to me bc, like, Philza would ban her in his + his friends chats, Cleo and Wels made fun of people like her on twt not that long ago, multiple Traffic members are queer, and all of them have vocally supported queer people during pride month like, why are you here ?

[klynnlastname]

What My Bones Know - Stephanie Foo / Dear Wormwood - The Oh Hellos / Alicent Hightower - Olivia Cooke / Letter to My Father - Franz Kafka / Ptolemaea - Ethel Cain / Lacrimosa - Nicola Samori / The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath - Sylvia Plath / The No You Never Listened To - Meggie C. Royer / The Reluctant Bride - Auguste Toulmouche / On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers - Minda Honey 

The Queen Who was Taken From

[mintpopz]

its honestly really disappointing to me at least that Adam is just gonna end up as a Mammon reskin. Like, I dunno I saw his design and I had some interesting thoughts about the first Man, yknow? I found it interesting that they have him demon like features, suggesting that maybe underneath his holier-than-thou appearance and attitude, he really isn't that different from the sinners he kills. But he hides that part away, acting formal and polite and as much of a good little Christian boy under the eyes of God. When God isn't looking though? He would show his true colours instantly....

But no. They just made the angel say fuck.

[pnrmntl]

[llitchilitchi]

I get hating certain political systems and trying to abolish totalitarian regimes but at the same time many of them are so interwoven with our history and society they have become tropes and when I consume media with a setting where the monarchy is absolute and revered then I am playing my part and sucking that princeling off

[cxlandine]

helio thoughts//tw religion, christianity

i know this is likely an unpopular opinion since a lot of this fandom has religious trauma, but i would kill for some redemption for helio or some positive helioic representation. it'd be just good, complex worldbuilding if it were solely fiction, but since it's so referential to christianity that ally literally says jesus instead of helio on several occasions i think they either have to really differentiate it or maybe add some complexity to the current 'all 'helioics' are bigots, your faith is evil' angle. because in fiction you can do that, but real religions aren't that simple. im not religious myself, but there have been times where i've been in really bad situations and the most welcoming, caring people are pastors. there is a good side to christianity, and in freshman year kristen wasn't a bad person. she believed in all the good things those pastors did, she helped victims of human trafficking, she fought against her family's racism even before she met her friends. her family was horrible and she was indoctrinated into a cult with the harvestmen, but her faith wasn't bad. religious trauma is not inherent to religion, it's abuse that people use religion to justify.

since s1 i have desperately wanted a good character to be introduced who worships helio like kristen did in freshman year with love and acceptance because that's who they believe helio is, and i don't want them to be proven wrong. tracker didn't give up on galicaea after kristen told her what she was like in the astral plane and worked to change her worship, and i think it would be really interesting to see someone like buddy go tracker's direction with helio instead of just rehashing kristen's character arc.

[tanadrin]

So besides "all religion is a pathetic cope" what exactly is the point of all your recent posting?

Religion isn't a pathetic cope! Religion is fundamentally hard-wired into who we are. This is something both Dan McClellan and David Bokovoy talk about quite cogently: we are evolved to detect agents in the world around us, that agency-detection mechanism errs on the side of false positives rather than false negatives (bc false negatives tended to get eaten), and that plus other cognitive systems like our relentless pattern-matching ability and our capacity for theory of mind produce some quite complex intuitions about the world, out of which a sense of the supernatural almost inevitably falls.

Dan McClellan in his interviews on Mormon Stories in particular talks about the cognitive science side of religious studies, and the experiments done to try to get at the underlying intuitions, and he points out that in these experiments it becomes pretty evident that both atheism and the more philosophically complex forms of religion most readers of this post are probably accustomed to are the result of highly reflective attitudes toward the world; the intuitive sense of supernatural agency tends to ascribe very humanlike qualities to supernatural agents--I am reminded of some of the stuff @transgenderer has posted about the Mbuti and the Ainu and their beliefs in a parallel "spirit world" that is very much like our own, where the spirits live lives very similar to the ones we do.

When you add in the ways that religion taps into other important human social functions--collective mythmaking, social organization, the creation of networks of trust and reinforcement of particular identities--it becomes clear that religion is something which fulfills what are for many people important psychological needs, and that (in some form) we will always have something like religion with us. Now, "religion" itself is kind of a tricky category--in religious studies it is apparently accepted as a truism that "religion" is just "anything we call a religion," because it lumps together what are often some quite heterogeneous phenomena, and the original formation of the category was in discourse by mostly-Protestant Europeans trying to understand the cultures and traditions of the rest of the world mostly with reference to (again, mostly Protestant) Christianity. So as long as we're aware that this is a very loose category, and everything above has to be taken mutatis mutandis so far as it applies to individual members of the category, we can talk carefully about religion in general terms.

Dan McClellan, David Bokovoy, and the guy who originated the application of cognitive theory to the study of religion are all religious. So clearly they don't see religion as cope, or as this perspective as one that necessarily implies religion is cope.

What would be pathetic is someone who cannot tolerate the existence of an outside view of religion, either because it causes them to doubt truth claims of that religion in ways that make them uncomfortable (because the truth of that religion is deeply integrated into their personal sense of identity), or because they can only read differing viewpoints as a hostile attack, and who then sends aggressive anons to strangers on the internet as a result. That would in fact be the kind of thing that only someone with really profound insecurities that they are unloading on other people does, because they don't have the strength to deal with those insecurities themselves.

[sunnibits]

hi, curious question for any hijabis/muslims out there!! as a big tiefling fan I’ve been musing a lot on the concept of hijabi tieflings because aesthetically I’m obsessed with the mental image, but I was wondering if u could help me decide on something! :O

I’m also curious on how tails would work when it comes to modesty…. would they just have to stay hidden under skirts?? idk but I’m genuinely really interested in hearing any thoughts on this!!

[kingofthewilderwest]

Moral Orel hit me in a sweet spot. I think it’s beautiful seeing fans on different paths discussing how the show touched them. I’ve seen people who’ve left the church, agnostics, atheists, and Christians all say the show spoke deeply to them. Of course the show’s black humor on religion offended many, especially before its last season aired, but I think the show’s resulting legacy - connecting to people who’ve both left and who’ve stayed - demonstrates successful nuance to how Moral Orel was crafted.

The show’s creators have said it’s not against religion per se, it’s against hypocrites. Even with the first season, I felt that and found appreciation (frankly, joy) for what was satirized. Here was a show speaking up, exaggerating, and lampooning the facets of Protestant American Christian culture I’ve vented about in confidence to relevant friends and family - without, like many modern shows which tackle this subject do, mocking followers themselves, faith itself, and suggesting to viewers one way of life is better than another, one group of people is (ex: intellectually) superior to another.

Some people have stepped away from Moral Orel and said, “This show comforted me when I left church,” or outright, “This show taught me there is no god.” And that’s not an unfair way to interact with Moral Orel because it doesn’t preach what you “should” do there (a sign of mature writing, really). I stepped away from Moral Orel and said, “This show comforted me in the areas I get frustrated,” which assuages my feelings and makes me more confident in my faith and place within culture.

I feel awkward in contemporary culture because I was raised with minimal secular exposure - daughter of a worship pastor, student at a private Christian school until high school. Meanwhile, in adulthood, I didn't attended church functions for over a dozen years. My group of friends have largely been non-Christians who hold negative opinions about the religion and don’t live remotely similar lifestyles to what I was raised with. I love what I've learned from them. Unfortunately, this also means the cultural building blocks that make me who I am seem shared by no one I'm around, which, even though I'm in my 30s, remains disorienting.

On the flipside, I'm the weirdo with the third eye in Christian spaces, too. I’m an ever-thirsty knowledge-seeker who strives to comprehend forbidden topics from all angles. I spent my twenties researching, questioning, rebuilding knowledge, and critically analyzing everything about the Bible. Church attendees and services feel painfully artificial, with mental blockers to topics I feel are critical to understand.

In either community I partake in, I feel “off.”

I’m grateful to have been raised by parents who didn’t pussyfoot around issues, with a father who deep-dives research. Discussions, delving, and digging into the hard stuff has always been fostered. My family spoke to pastors when we disagreed with their theology. I grew up around people who practiced passive acceptance, but my family was not that.

In the last year, I’ve returned more strongly to my faith and have been reintegrating with the Christian community. In some areas, my faith has grown and, humbly, I’ve learned much from peers. Despite stereotypes, I want to note that, in certain fields, the church community has always been deep and meticulous! And there are so many beautiful and uplifting areas in the church. But likewise there are those areas that get assumed, aren’t questioned, and aren’t… responded to well by questioning spirits. There have always been areas in the church culture I find disingenuous, foolish, illogical, limited, oversimplified, denialistic, or susceptible to hypocrisy and immorality. I’m not better than any person on this planet, but I’m rubbing shoulders with a community that has different blinders than I do, who don’t even consider asking the types of questions or seeking out the information I find necessary for a solidified faith.

Moral Orel disparages the toxic elements of Protestant culture, the misinterpretations, the artificial facades, the mindless assumptions, the poorly-hidden underbelly, all the areas Christian community can and does go wrong. It makes me feel justified feeling awkward in two worlds: someone for whom Christianity is deeply important, but someone whose mindset doesn’t jive with the rest of the town. Someone who can find and wants to find the best lessons outside of Christianity. Someone who believes in questioning, rethinking constantly, raising her eyebrows at common notions within church culture, and striving for the actual love, sincerity, dedication, and goodness our faith should be based on.