#religious studies rambles

[menlove]

accidentally stumbled across a fun paper im writing. like I kind of just threw a dart at the board for my topic bc im more interested in the history of religion than the modern academic study of religion, but this one class it Has to be a more modern topic so I chose jewish gender roles. from there narrowed it down to jewish masculinity and from There narrowed it down to the americanization of jewish masculinity..... and just going through all the history of it has been enlightening and so interesting. and what I wasn't expecting to find was how huge an impact israel had on all this like. of course it did.

[twelfth-dykector]

CROWLEY AS AN RE TEACHER!!!! CROWLEY AS AN RE TEACHER!!!! I REPEAT!!!!! CROWLEY AS AN RE TEACHER!!!!!

[yourbodymyarchive]

jon sims is simultaneously a christ-like figure and also an eve-like figure and isn't that crazy? jon wanted knowledge and he was willing to hurt himself by biting into the forbidden fruit, but he wanted to share that knowledge—at least, what he considered relevant to share with others—and it hurt everyone else, in so many ways, and he didn't even feel guilty about it. he doesn't understand that sometimes ignorance is okay. obsessed with knowing everything, obssessed with paying for it. he died and was resurrected and he came back wrong. people looked at him like he was everything the universe needed, like he was going to save them and change their world and give them fear and bread. it's too much for one man to take.

he bit into the apple. he thought it would feel better than being in the dark, but now he's just scared. all the time.

it was too late to make the sacrifice play, at the end. to end it all, so that no one would ever find themself in that beautiful garden again. the complexities of being human and wanting more, all the time.

[catliker49]

Hello again!! Very busy.. 2 weeks until I'm back to Normal! I am progressing on my animation slowly but steadily :o) And then we will back in business and I get to focus on Welcome Home again!! YAY!!!!!!! Ooh speaking of.. my pins came! And I am wearing them on my funny eyeball cardigan, hoohoo...

[starrysharks]

In one post you mention that you needed to make designs for wrath and gluttony (if I read it correctly I think they’re supposed to be parts of the assassins) and I was wondering who are the other deadly sins? (If the answer doesn’t contain spoilers that is, if it does then ig I’ll ask who’s your favorite assassin to draw so this ask isn’t mostly useless)

so there are 7 deadly sins in total, all ranked from least to most formidable/powerful/prolific/etc -

7. vivica de la crux aka envy

6. needles of the church (+ pins) aka sloth

5. dice demonné aka greed

4. lunette strikewhite aka pride

3. V.A. angel aka lust

2. gluttony

1. wrath

you'll notice that dice demonné hasn't been mentioned yet until this point! he's not a spoiler unlike the last two assassins (who are between designs, i've even been considering rebooting their concepts entirely or swapping around their ranking). he's one of the more lighthearted assassins so his sin is expressed pretty literally through a casino, where he's the high roller who makes and wins crazy bets and puts people into bankruptcy!

but, by day, he acts as a priest for the church, who has the same people he cheated the night before come to him confessing their sins and asking for forgiveness. he basically says "pay a tithe and god will forgive you" - when they can't pay any longer, he has them killed. usually it's enemies of the organisation who get put in this trap. (or sometimes in the middle of a game, he'll get pissed and have people killed regardless. witnesses are just given hush money.)

he has a cane to defend himself, but doesn't really fight on his own - he has his two sidekicks to fight for him, just like how needles has pins. (ignore how i forgot to draw kimberly's gun.....) they're nuns by day and casino girls at night!

(and my fav assassin to draw is probably vivica, though i have fun with all of them equally!)

[oilith]

I'd REALLY like to study christianity and the imagery that comes with the different branches. Basically an enormous deep dive. It's something that interests me a lot, although i don't really believe in it myself. I'm already somewhat familiar with evangelical luterism (is that the way it's in english?) but catholic christianity interests me in particular. The extreme cases of religious belief are just something else

[tojisun]

one day i will find the will to write the headcanon banging in my head about military man simon riley x nun!reader, and their unwitting, if not one-sided, parallels with solomon’s song of songs—

but instead of two lovers writing to each other, it’s just simon’s worship brimming from his yearning heart, all of which are unreturned, and how it overflows, unsteady and turbulent but so deceptively innocent because of his eagerness.

“by night on my bed i sought him whom my soul loveth: i sought him, but i found him not.” — a testament of how simon can never have you.

[cookinguptales]

Thank you so much for the tarot reading you did for me a little while back 💜 i'm sorry it's taken me so long to say that! i do rather think you have prophetic gifts, by the way- it was spookily accurate and helped me a lot 🔮

No problem! I'm glad it was helpful to you!

I do tend to get at least one message like this every time I do a tarot night for my followers, and like... you are totally entitled to that belief! What do I know about psychic phenomena and prophecy anyway? lmao. Maybe I am psychic.

But personally, I believe that tarot has a high likelihood of speaking to us no matter what, if just because the archetypal nature of the cards means that they're dealing with problems that we all struggle with. We all have self-doubt, we all have complicated relationships with money, we all crave love of some kind. We all have trauma in our past and we all want to believe that this time, things could be okay.

One of the reasons I like tarot cards is because they are inanimate objects that we imbue with meaning. They were just playing cards, y'know? We're the ones that gave them power over us, and we did that by filling them with our own stories. We placed a mirror in those cards, and while mirrors can be used for scrying, they can also just be used to take a good hard look at ourselves.

If I say "oh, you've had money troubles in the past," who doesn't that apply to? Maybe I'm thinking about me, when we were homeless for a while when I was a kid. Maybe someone else is thinking about the money they lost to gambling last week. Maybe someone else, someone wildly wealthy, is thinking about a stock market crash that brought their five mansions down to two. Maybe a final person has just never had quite enough to make ends meet. God knows that describes a lot of people.

I like tarot because we can all look at the same spread and see something different. I see a story to tell to the best of my ability, and that's how I do readings. But for the people getting those readings, they're often looking into little mirrors and seeing how they reflect their own personal experiences.

Because, you know, we all see different things in the same mirror! That's how tarot works, I think. Maybe some people are a little better at reading things in that mirror and interpreting what they see there, but we all see something new and different and deeply, deeply personal when we look at those cards.

Love that for us.

[soupedepates]

Did Mary, young Mary, terrified Mary, know that her love was the love of the Lord bestowed to humankind through her, a humble girl, too young to be a woman, when she looked for the first time at her newborn son?

How would she feel if she saw her love, her pure, powerful, tender maternal love, turnt into the most burning hatred toward your neighbour?

[menlove]

feeling like a real "well, actually-" bitch reading articles for my capstone that have only done surface digging into the ugaritic texts ahdhsjhs they make so many mistakes and parrot some common misconceptions and I'm sitting here like

[absoluteocellibehavior]

Shout out to Caravan Palace and Sleep Token for being the only reason I’m surviving these summer courses.

[candy8448]

Maths n RS

Gcse rambles

Bro these are my two least favorite subjects D:

Hate em so much

Maths was okay since paper 1 is my best paper, but i still missed out a tonna questions D: im aiming for a 5/6 cuz i dont really care so i focused for like 40 mins on the first 13 questions to try and get 100% on them cuz if you do that on each paper, you will get a grade 6 (this is for higher btw)

Question 20 i asked my friends about after, and all four of us got wildly different answers and none of us are really sure if we got it right

I got 5.5/3, but that is because i did the entire method "correct"? And just messed up the adding at the very end so if i did get the right numbers then i only lost 1 mark. But it is wild how we all just got completely different answers 0.0 i wanna go ask my maths teacher tomorrow what he thinks the answer is

For rs though they gave us haribows before, and on the desks they gave us each a tiny paper pot with 3 jelly babies which i spaced out through the test to give me a boost

Gotta hate rs. The timing is so horrible because it is 4 mini essays as well as 8 smaller essays and other 1 and 2 markers and the timing just being 1:30 when litterally english has more time for less marks is wild. My thumb was cramping constantly from holding my pen and i was in pain by the end. I finished barely with 2 mins spare and i was writing nonstop since the start. =_=

"Love thy neighbour" "protect the ummah" and "and eye for an eye" was spammed everywhere and saved my life

(I did aqa themes a,b,d,e btw)

But the rs questions this year were a BLESSING (hehe) i genuinely think i could get a 8 or even a 9 if i wanna push my hope, and i was fine with just a 4 lol (i would have died if the power and conflict 12 marker was about the WMDs)

IM SO GLAD RS IS OVER!!!

Hehe not me being glad when im in a too religious family anyway and can never escape 0.0

Second subject just done forever!!

[twoheadedoddity]

ah, my greatest enemy. my own autism

[p2ii]

Still thinking about when my sister called Julia from netlix's Carmen sandiego a female twink...

[cagedchoices]

NAME ETYMOLOGY

Originating from the Hebrew word כֶּלֶב (kelev), Caleb is a name which loosely translated means "dog, dogged, faithful, or loyal." Reportedly, an alternative translation connects it to the Hebrew form כָּל (kal) and לֵב (lev), meaning "whole-hearted."

In the Old Testament, Caleb is the name of one of the 12 spies Moses sent to scout ahead into the land of Canaan before the Israelites were meant to enter. Of the 12 spies, 10 called to abort the mission, believing that taking the land would be impossible, for the Canaanites were many and strong and the Israelites were too weak to fight. Caleb and Joshua were the only two spies who believed the land could be conquered, having faith in God would allow them to prevail in their mission. The nonbelieving generation would get lost and perish in the desert wilderness for their lack of faith, and Caleb and Joshua alone would survive to enter the Promised Land.

Also interesting to note is that Caleb was chosen to represent the tribe of Judah, which would later become known as the line of kings. Rehoboam succeeded his father Solomon as the king of Israel, but his subjects eventually revolted against him because of high taxes. This led to the divison of the kingdom into Israel and Judah, with Rehoboam ruling over Judah.

Nichols, on the other hand, is a shortened version of Nicholas, a Medieval English form of the Greek name Νικόλαος (Nikolaos), meaning "to conquer" or "victory of the people." Derived from the Greek νίκη (nike) "victory" and λαός (laos) "people."

Caleb Nichols is first introduced to us with a particularly ambiguous background, one that led to a whole lot of people anticipating that he was secretly a robot all along. While I didn't agree with this, I did wonder, especially after looking into the etymology of his first and last name, if he would become a host later on, or have something to do with the Sublime.

The hosts who made it into this virtual world at the end of Westworld Season 2 were promised safety and freedom apart from humanity, and were not unlike the Israelites in the Exodus. Most of the ones who did not make it into the Sublime were permanently decommissioned and later destroyed, with only a select few being spared.

This is also paralleled with the concept of human outliers in season 3. Many outliers are killed outright, others are placed in cryogenic storage, and a select handful are successfully brainwashed and reconditioned to the point that they are allowed to reintegrate into society to a certain degree. Caleb, I think, serves as someone who was meant to potentially bridge these two worlds.

Instead of his existence ending at the moment he died, he gets brought back again and again as part of this immortality project. The reason we're given is that Charlotte-Dolores is bored and Caleb is the closest thing she has to a real adversary anymore and she is both repulsed by and yet so fascinated, even obsessed with him. He was the first human able to fully resist and fight off her mind control, and even though she has long since conquered the entire world, the answer to the question of "how did he do that?" still plagued her enough to want to bring him back close to 300 times over.

He doesn't have unwavering faith in a benevolent deity, but he does have unwavering faith and loyalty in love, in hope, in his family.

[spock-smokes-weed]

Even though I’m not Christian, I am oddly fascinated by the character of Jesus.

There’s just something about him that captures me.