#wrt cultural christianity

[aroace-ventplace]

Being in fandom spaces is honestly so exhausting. Because there'll be a character who explicitly expresses disinterest in sex and romance, and most of the fandom will headcanon them as gay/lesbian. Any aspec headcanon will get called homophobic or assumed to be coming from a place of "Christian purity culture" (no I'm not a Christian, wasn't raised Christian and am not from a Christian majority country. Your assumption is racist and xenophobic actually).

Then there'll be characters who are confirmed to be aro/ace. These characters are always shipped with literally every other character and shippers would be like "but aros can still date! And aces can still have sex!" But then you headcanon a character who used to be in a relationship as angled or oriented aroace, and the entire fandom will be like "but this character has been in a relationship before, so they can't be aspec!" These aphobic double standards are infuriating.

YEAH, i've seen all of this so many times i've lost count. i understand that the people who say these things want to see themselves reflected in characters they like, but... so do aspecs. why are our headcanons and interpretations of relationships always treated as less legitimate? why is canonical aspec representation and coding so universally ignored? why does existing as aspec in fandom spaces always have to feel like an uphill battle?

(...and sometimes we get to see new and exciting variations of aspec erasure when certain (allo) creators explicitly say it's totally fine to romantically/sexually ship their aroace characters. that's been a fun one to see play out.)

i stopped interacting with fandoms a long time ago - finding other individual people who don't just tolerate but are actually EXCITED to discuss aspec readings of series has been far better than any fandom experience i've ever had. still, it sucks that larger fandom culture is so hostile to anything outside of the norm (basically: shipping two cis allo white men) that so many people have had to splinter off into their own small groups. i don't have much hope, but maybe one day we'll get to a point where aspec perspectives won't be entirely erased in mainstream fandom. maybe.

[girlwarlock]

i get so frustrated sometimes by some of my irl friends' like. total defeatist nihilism about certain things?

like my sister was talking to this one friend about the bill in debate in the US to vastly widen the scope of the government's ability to retrieve personal data from and block access to certain websites/groups/whatever (oh and also ban a specific video-based social media app but that's just a pretext for the wider bill) and like.

the friend was all, "i don't give a fuck about this bill because the government already has the ability to access and use all of this data, so there's no point fighting this one," and i just wanted to scream at her, like.

IF THE US GOVT FELT LIKE THEY ALREADY HAD THE RIGHT AND ABILITY TO DO THE THINGS THIS BILL PERMITS, THEY WOULD NOT BE TRYING TO SHOVE THIS BILL THROUGH.

like. rules limiting the state only apply to the extent that the state is willing to enforce them on itself, but as long as such rules exist the state has to play along with them to a certain extent. eliminating the rules would just expand the envelope and let the us govt find new boundaries of privacy and dignity to shove against

[hyenaswine]

it's like white privilege. you don't opt out of it. it's a way of discussing systems of power, it's not a personal attack. does cultural christianity also make you stupid or something?

[crimeronan]

guys. okay. rubs my temples.

i have blacklisted every word u can Possibly think of to block posts i do not want to see and somehow keep seeing them. so Please know that this is not a shit-starting post. hence why it's unrebloggable. because i legitimately just want to communicate to people in my immediate sphere.

it is... Not Acceptable Or Appropriate... to make/reblog posts referring to a collective of "jews" or "jewish people" in response to israel's genocide of palestine.

what i mean by this are posts along the lines of "what jews don't realize is-" "i wish american jews knew-" "can't wait to watch jewish bloggers come up with the worst takes imaginable-" etc etc etc.

it is similarly Not Acceptable Or Appropriate to refer to rabbis, synagogues, jewish practice, and other aspects of judaism/jewish culture as a monolithic hivemind that's loyal to israel. this includes "you're all being brainwashed by your rabbis/synagogues" "synagogues are zionist institutions" "stop speaking hebrew until your people stop committing war crimes" etc etc etc.

your kneejerk reaction (if u are a leftist goy) will likely be along the lines of: but it's simply like referring to a collective of british people or american people wrt imperialism, colonialism, and war crimes. you don't mean LITERALLY all jews, just like you don't mean literally all brits or americans.

this is unfortunately a false equivalence because of the antisemitic history and violence behind the idea of Monolithic Jews and Dual Loyalties. there is a quick overview of some of The Problems here; jewish scholarship and discussion of this is incredibly broad and varied... because jewish people are incredibly broad and varied.

like i'm fucking begging. you have Got to knock it off. i was gonna say something snide about how it's telling that i'm seeing a lot more posts About The Jews than about the fundamentalist christians who fanatically support israel's right-wing fascist govt, but like.... god i don't care i don't care i don't want to be writing this. It Just Sucks.

That's It. It Just Sucks

while i'm here, since i don't plan to talk about this anymore unless i have important resources to share: ACTUAL helpful things you can do are to keep an eye on the news and communicate with your own governments. for americans (just bc i am american) -- the biden administration has pledged to work with israel to allow humanitarian aid into gaza. it's important that the public pressure for that to happen continues & that the documentation of what's happening in palestine continues.

the more you guys turn your issue into an issue with "the jews" or "jewish people," the more time we're going to waste explaining why this is not acceptable or appropriate. which is frustrating because there is shit out there that Matters A Whole Lot Fucking More Right Now.

so keep talking about what matters. and please please PLEASE think for two seconds before you make any posts referencing jewish people.

[thatneoncrisis]

oooh ok feel free to ignore this since it isn't the ask game technically, but how do you feel tamsyn pulls punches with john? where do you think that could improve? i'm curious and i love hearing ur analysis of this stuff

ok so this is just my own personal opinion. but after reading the series like three times ive basically come to the consensus that tamsyn is much more in tune with writing john as kiwi and not as maori

and its not that is completely erased from the text. but you REALLY have to hunt for it as opposed to him being kiwi which is incredibly obvious in the way he talks about his old life in ntn. i dont think i would have even known he was maori if she didnt say gideon was and i was actively looking for it. but she kind of treats characters being indigenous as like a cool fun fact rather than an active part of their identity. and this is related to a much longer and more draining conversation about how race/ethnicity even WORKS in the empire which is set 10000 years in the future. we as a society Right Now cant even agree on what race cleopatra was do you like. get what im saying

anyway what im trying to get at is the empire, designed and run by One Guy, the Only person who remembers earth culture, actively deciding to model its systems of government, religion, military, language and aesthetics after staples of western imperialism (like most of the names are pulled from greek or roman or biblical figures) is one thing. because i understand the books are actively christian, tamsyn is catholic theres like Commentary on those elements. but there is no commentary as to why a polynesian guy would Actively gatekeep his own culture from a world HE made. they are clearly speaking english, gideons name had to be TRANSLATED to kiriona, theres a decent chance shes not even pronouncing it correctly. thats fucking insane. the characters in tlt are living in a cultural genocide by magnitudes that we cannot even comprehend and they cant even like. talk about it they cant THINK about it. the text hasnt given them time to. does he think theyre not worth it? why not? these are questions the text isnt interested in asking let alone answering

even when theres an opportunity for contrast, ie new rho, its all done in broad strokes of vague descriptions of Other cultures. we suffer speaks in accented house. what accent? pyrrha can speak 4 languages including house to varying degrees. what languages? she makes pikelets in the morning this is obviously a very nz/aussie thing, so this wartorn city Also has them theyre just a universal constant. new rho is just kind of described as Apocalypse Desert City, it could look like fucking LA for all i know and nothing would change

tldr tamsyn wrote very good kiwi characters and im obviously talking as someone who isnt kiwi but Is not white but her like aversion or indifference to writing inarguably indigenous characters in a way outside of their physical appearance wrt how it informs their ideals and motivations could be more. just More. this is literally one of the most insanely cruel things john has done and nobody in universe can even call him on it because hes scrubbed all traces of it from existence what if we exploded

[nanomooselet]

While not every decision made in the English dub is one I would have made, there are so many touches that genuinely delight me, and here's one.

When healing the Plant, Vash talks to it. The subs I have translate what he says as "I can hear you. Don't worry."

In the English dub, what he says is, "I can hear you. Don't be afraid."

The English dubs add a lot of texture WRT Christian and religious symbolism (since it's a culture they know very well and can rely upon those who speak the language to understand), but this might be my favourite. Be not afraid.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

I've been thinking a lot about the houses, specifically how they might correlate with WH's theme of religion. The parts in the livestream trivia where Clown talked about the houses is really interesting, how Home is the only "alive" house but all the neighbors believe their houses are alive to some capacity. And the fact that the holidays are to celebrate their houses, where human holidays are usually to celebrate deities/religions.

The only thing on the website that still has this religious theme is the So Below page of Wally (possibly) worshipping Home. Perhaps Clown removed the cross cufflinks and Baphomet imagery so WH could be an allegory about religion instead of straight up about Christianity. The houses/Home could be metaphors for deities and the neighbors are their followers, even if their perception of religion and what it means is probably very different than humans'.

i was wondering why i had a hard time answering this message yesterday, and i think it's because i never really saw welcome home as a story about christianity or even religion as a whole, in either its current iteration or its earlier drafts. i think there is a very good chance that it's one aspect of welcome home, but... how do i say this.

when i see posts from clown talking about what he feels welcome home is about, i get the impression that at its core, welcome home is a story about alienation - from society, from one's environment, from one's peers, even from one's own self - and Specifically about alienation that comes as a result of changing (or at least desiring change) in an environment that upholds stagnation/the status quo/etc. as The Ideal. not Quite the same as but very similar to nostalgia poisoning, two peas in a pod. and i don't think it's a coincidence that this can be used as a criticism of the practices of Many christian denominations in the usa, a country in which christian hegemony is still very strongly felt in many aspects of daily life (let alone back when welcome home was airing in-universe or when its supposed creator, ronald dorelaine, was growing up.) i suspect that part of the reason the christian symbolism seems to have been reworked into something more subtle between welcome home's 2019/2020 concept and what we have now is because:

A.) it would have been rather on the nose, even hokey, to have the world of welcome home (the in-universe show) be a textually christian one when you don't really Need welcome home to be an explicitly religious production to demonstrate the idea that art is shaped by the culture/society in which it exists and/or its creator(s) hail from.

B.) it was originally less ... nuanced? idk if that's the word i'm looking for, but - i do not think it is a coincidence that wally's old cross cufflinks were a holdover from a time between the version of welcome home we are familiar with now and a draft in which wally seemed to be much more overtly, Aggressively antagonistic in his status as the center of attention, and was pitted against a much more straightforwardly heroic character who was on more equal footing with the rest of the neighbors. i Suspect that if any of what i just said comes into play, then perhaps the current iteration of welcome home is the way it is because it leaves room to acknowledge that even people who are hurt by this upholding of stagnation as the ideal willingly perpetuate it anyway, for a number of reasons.

BUT to get back to the actual ask: since we have no idea what's actually gonna happen in welcome home at this point in time, let's say that none of what i just talked about comes up even once and that the concept of The Home is really what we should be focusing on here wrt the religious symbolism, or at least that the two are not mutually exclusive. in this case, i think it's less that the houses themselves are metaphors for deities and more that, like - the importance of homes in the world the neighbors live in is so great that the only way it can be expressed in terms that a human could understand would be through the lens of religious/spiritual beliefs. i am intrigued by the idea that each neighbor has their own relationship to this belief though, and how that may effect their environment in the future. Much To Think About.

[lesbianchemicalplant]

I sympathize with wanting to reclaim or rehabilitate the “cultural christianity” concept, there's a kernel of something useful in there, but at the moment it's mainly a shibboleth of anti-secular radlibs. like the concept is primarily used on here to browbeat people into either siding with entrenched reactionary elements in our communities, or at least not supporting anyone moving against them

maybe my perspective is skewed by just how much of this shit I've seen from ju\\mblr specifically, but from where I'm seeing it the term is enmeshed with anti-secularism and defense of things that other jews are contesting and seeking to dismantle (e.g. smearing Yaffed as “culturally christian”)

(and this in addition to the problems with similar concepts like “protestant work ethic” etc. which maybe have some specific usage that's Fine, but in practice are mostly just invoked wrt effects of capitalism and not remotely unique to protestants or christians in general. I worry that even a rehabilitated concept of Cultural Christianity would be applied similarly)

[sexcromancy]

I've made this post before basically but the thing is (brag) my dad is pretty great and I have a good relationship with him. but I undeniably have Father Issues. and the best reason I've got is they come straight from the source. aka God. original daddy. and it is really really really really difficult to untangle the incredibly complex mess of feelings I have wrt being raised Christian and believing quite earnestly in God and Jesus as an adult and hating the Catholic church and Christian hegemony as a whole and cultural patriarchy and wanting to buy into a force greater than myself and resisting that urge and, on top of all that I'm having a tough time at work, so I might be an atheist but I GENUINELY don't have time for all that!!!

[creekfiend]

Just wanted to say thanks for "people from culturally Christian backgrounds" because that seems like a good way to phrase it, and I'm going to try to remember to use it when I'm talking about this sort of thing. (I try to not be a dick to people, when possible, and trauma's messy and complicated.) I'm sorry that some people are being horrible in this whole discussion, and I hope you are doing okay.

I'm doing fine! I really sympathize with most of the people involved in this tbh (except the outright antisemites of course lol) bc like I HAVE seen a lot of reactive and reductive and unkind blanket statements about this by some jumblr people in which they are condescendingly explaining other people's realities to them. Which is my LEAST favorite thing. Jumblr can also be really... umm, dog pile-y in a way that I find frustrating and unproductive. However. I think it's also fairly obvious that most of these reactions are trauma responses, and while that isn't an excuse it is an explanation and provides additional context that I do not feel is irrelevant. For jews we have constantly been told 'well simply stop being jewish' like all the time by everybody, often at gunpoint. So like, when I see nonjewish atheists assert that stuff jews are TELLING you they have gone through "literally never happens" that ALSO REALLY SUCKS. like so so bad. Cannot overstate how much that sucks. Cannot overstate how much it sucks to see ppl I sympathize with deeply wrt their mistrust and hatred of like, organized religious authority, align themselves with people who refer to jewish atheists as "religious nationalists" for refusing to divorce themselves from their ethnic backgrounds/culture/community/traditions. That rhetoric is Just antisemitism in a form that has been used to cause real and violent harm to us in living memory.

Also really alienated by the idea that one must be This Vitriolically Angry About Religion to "count" as an atheist. Like what? That is bonkers. I do not understand why the people making seemingly reasonable posts about "actually here's some interesting writings by people from Islamic cultures or majority Hindu cultures or orthodox jewish cultures outlining the ways that the authorities in these societies have used religion to cause harm on a systemic level" (objectively true) seem to be aligning themselves with people who are doing the SAME THING TO JEWS that they resent being done to them -- e.g. condescendingly explaining to us that our negative experiences with a certain type of atheists Don't Exist or Don't Count or cannot possibly be rooted in antisemitism.

I find the whole thing depressing and troubling. I don't tend to follow jumblr because of the aforementioned issues I have w it but this backlash seems to me to be disproportionate and really hateful in a way that... combines poorly with the increased antisemitic sentiments being lobbed at jews from all ideological sides recently. I wish we could all be more congizent of 1. the role trauma is playing here for everyone and 2. the inherent lack of productive discussion that can be had when two parties are simply Trauma Responsing at each other back and forth endlessly.

Then there's the people who just get super aggressive about people "believing fake things" but I'm not sure there's any help for them. Sure wish that the nonjewish atheists who are not like that would disavow them though! I certainly am more than happy to say "acknowledging a cultural/societal dynamic that privileges one religion and culture as default and that existing in thay culture might cause people to have unexamined assumptions about other religions and cultures" should not be weaponized against individual people in order to bully them by insisting they are a thing that they manifestly are not (atheists aren't Christians. The fact that atheists from Jewish backgrounds will have Jewishness shackled to them regardless of their degree of identification with Being A Jew is actually bad and a function of antisemitism; it is not an aspirational dynamic we should be applying to other people simply because their cultural background is privileged over our own in our society.)

Like can we stop talking past each other and try to understand where people are coming from

People are expressing a lot of hurt and anger about atrocities and systems of oppression that I ultimately feel are totally interconnected. Because of this hurt and anger most people are not being precise in their language or prioritizing connecting or actual dialogue about this and instead focusing on dogpiling and gotchas. It's discouraging.

I'm a secular humanist jew with complex feelings towards both jewishness and atheism as concepts and movements. I want to understand and connect with people based on our common ground.

This is I guess all me being a big baby who is unsuited to internet fights but this one specifically feels really hurtful to me because I feel like my reality is being ignored and denied. I suspect a lot of people are also feeling that way. Which might be a good place to START the discussion to be honest.

[traegorn]

Hi! I'm not sure if youre necessarily the best person to come to with this question, but a friend of mine is trying to figure out their wedding and wants to do a handfasting, but is worried about cultural appropriation. This friend isn't pagan, wiccan, or a witch but also isn't Christian (we are usamerican though, so "traditional wedding" here would be a Christian ceremony and they arent keen on that), and also isn't Celtic or anything from that region (theyre Chinese but thats a complicated thing for them). I dont know whats drawn them to a handfasting specifically, but they've always been kind of interested in these things (they've known me for most of the decade I've been pagan). Anyways sorry for giving you maybe more info than was needed, if you know anything about cultural appropriation wrt handfasting or anyone who might have more information, I would really appreciate it!

Okay, folks these days are so jumpy it's frustrating. Cultural appropriation isn't about never using something from another culture. It's about closed and open practices, it's about dominant groups taking from marginalized groups, and it's about the complex power dynamics in our society.

In short: it's okay to use things from cultures other than your own as long as it's not a closed practice or from a marginalized group.

Handfasting is not from a closed or marginalized culture.

Relax.

I hope it's a nice wedding.

[shadeslayer]

prev, the porn poll, is so. interesting. like theres a lot wrapped up in porn esp paying for porn (sex shaming, body shaming, whorephobia, whorephobic misconceptions abt The Porn Industry, christian purity culture and the idea that you need to have One Person and Marry them and they must be Everything to you and cater to Every emotional need u have or else youre not in love enough or ur doing it wrong) and i think ppls takes on it do speak a lot to of theyve ever actually engaged with sex work beyond the pop culture idea of "pornstar bimbo/sex trafficking" (rather than the reality of buying porn which, in my exp, often is individual creators or websites that are vehicles for individual creators, and the reality that a lot of free porn is stolen and often is harder to trace the origins of it and if its ethical or not bc it gets ripped stolen re-uploaded so often, and even if it was ethically created it may not be ethically shared bc it may be paid content thats been reuploaded nonconsensually) and if they have a constructive relationship to sex, jealousy, and sexuality within a relationship

and i do think people who are poly and/or who engage in the kink scene understand it better - esp w kink scene ppl bc u understand more explicitly that sex work is work, that there is a financial business transaction to be had wrt sex whether its buying content or its buying toys or tickets to a workshop, and theres an understanding that there are things your partner plain cant do and the line of fantasy to reality. ive bought porn vids of kinks i dont really have any interest in doing - i just liked the scenario or the performer(s) for fantasy fuel. just because you get off to something doesnt mean you want it irl, or that it would be Possible irl bc of fantastical kinks like micro/macro or bc of the inherent contradictions to Existence. my partner is one person, they cant be both thin and fat, both flat chested and big breasted, both tall and short, both hairy and shaved, etc. & expecting one person to meet all your needs in every sense is a good way to get yourself in a super uncomfortable unhealthy relationship where you begin to resent each other

and also i think its really cool and intimate to share porn recs with your partner. and also i find porn is a lot more queer and diverse and kinky when you buy from creators rather than scroll past 50 videos on pornhub that are all basically the same video of two white skinny cis ppl fucking doggystyle

[keshetchai]

@highlighteretcigarettes okay so just posting tags separately because that post was getting long and this is now a whole side topic BUT!!! Re: witch-washing.

Bullet points just to organize my thoughts:

Wrt to the marketing of it all, this is something I noticed first in bookstores as someone who used to constantly hang out in the religion sections as a tween. It used to be that in chain bookstores "New Age" was either right next to general religion (aka mostly Christianity and then small spots for everything else), OR one aisle over. Nowadays I've noticed chains like B&N put MUCH more distance between the two areas - like one of my local ones has them in wholly different floors. And it's now "Spirituality" I think? A lot of the category labels seem to no longer say neo-pagan/pagan or even new age, it's just "spirituality" and "astrology."

Actually I think this is very intentional. I think I've seen this in indie bookstores too, but B&N is a definite for this: they shelve next to diet, health, and cookbooks now. Not religion. Keep in mind I grew up in a red state in a heavily Christian area, and back then, new age was still in the same general area as the rest of religion at the local Borders or Walden's or B&N. Now, it's holistic health, diet, exercise, cookbooks, and spirituality.

It doesn't escape me that this is entirely "things we can market as lifestyles that someone can buy into." These publishers clearly broke into the capitalist market and have thrived there. I suspect that for the booksellers and publishers, the distancing from the rest of religion (a "status quo") is intentional. It's like what hot topic is to goth subculture.

Although like you said, I don't think this is limited to chain stores even. I've seen plenty of small new age/spirituality/pagan shops irl, and can't recall a single one that didn't also sell tons of cheap mass produced trinkets, often hyping up their hand crafted quality or the exoticness of the item obtained. Cheap mass produced junk is probably in every religion of course, but yeah, there IS a bigger sense of "buying things" in some religions more than others. Christian evangelicals do this with precious moments figurines and their wall o'crosses decor. Pagans have their own versions of that kind of spiritual consumerism. I do often walk away with the sense that if there was a market population to support it, it would be just as capitalistic and hallmark-y. Lots of shit on Etsy is mass produced and repackaged too.

Idk if it's also free elsewhere off the top of my head, but there's an article you could read free on jstor if you sign up - search "plastic shamanism" and man oh man. 10/10 article about cultural appropriation and mass marketing of indigenous religions to non-natives.

(You probably relate to this sentiment): I am Begging EVERYONE, pagan or not, crystal bitch or otherwise: STOP BUYING LAPIS LAZULI!!!! STOP. WHO EXACTLY DO YOU THINK IS EARNING MONEY FROM MINING IN AFGHANISTAN? PRAY TELL?? Stop buying this one expensive blue rock for your energy aura or whatever.

(Also this one): Also as the child of a parent who grew up in a mining company town, and whose grandfather was a chemist for the company, (and who loved me a shiny rock long before crystal everything): stop buying overpriced rocks constantly. At least CONSIDER how they obtained these particular rocks before you buy them willy nilly. Don't buy 30 million crystals and geodes and whatever else mined and polished and all of that, and then claim to love the environment without any sense of irony. The best and coolest rocks are the ones you find and pick yourself anyways, everyone knows that.

I think this is true of any religious objects but like, the best ones are either personally crafted OR made by small artisans and it just sucks that a lot of small businesses try to pass off their goods as things they actually personally designed (even for factory production) or made, when they didn't do either. I personally have taken a lot of time purchasing/obtaining my permanent basic Judaica for a variety of reasons, my feelings about consumption and things (and Jewish thoughts on craftsmanship and beautiful things), being part of that. I think a lot of people have that struggle, where religious objects so often are kinda...produced like they're just future garbage - again, in any religion.

[eastgaysian]

anyway unrelated to anything. this isn't a fully formulated thought but there's something curious to me about the like, broader construction of christianity as white but at the same time atheism is also white. the first explanation being that people of color don't exist as real people with belief systems to the kind of left-leaning whites that tend to have these discussions. there's also i think a shallow understanding of christianity/the way people outside of europe engage with christianity where it's always an external colonial force and there's no possibility for people of color to have agency wrt their religious practices, and syncretic beliefs and practices aren't acknowledged as having cultural significance. probably the worst disconnect imo is that like someone from an urban WASP-y background is going to have no concept of there being a practical purpose for religious practices, that is maintaining community connections between people from the same background. which is not necessarily a positive thing wrt enabling manipulative or abusive practices within a community and forcing someone to maintain religious ties in order to maintain community ties but it being a total blindspot for white people who want to Talk About Religion is deeply frustrating

[yamayuandadu]

Oh thank god I'm not the only one who thinks that there's no real evidence for any Aphrodite-Ishtar connection and that what evidence does exist is tenuous at best.

I'll preface this with stating that I do not question possible external influence on Greek mythology where the evidence is solid - ex. I do think it's more than plausible that both Athena's birth and much of Kronos' character do go back to some half remembered iron age leftover of Kumarbi cycle. I'm even semi-optimistic about the possibility Hecate really was in some capacity an Anatolian import. I also think some of the opposition to these theories is bad faith (including here on tumblr). This being said, yeah, it's a theory that I just do not think has much merit. It boils down to hammering things from various locations and time periods into a vaguely Aphrodite-like shape - from Old Babylonian school texts to Christian polemics - even though the similarities are negligible. Tbh Ishara or Nanaya would be closer character-wise to Aphrodite given bigger focus on love and marriage, but ultimately I really do think this is effectively just a leftover of orientalist 19th century theories in which some deities were deemed unlikely to have pristinely Greek origin because they didn't fit an idealized image of Greece. I think these theories were cast into oblivion where they belong in the case of Dionysus but they still linger here and also wrt Ares but Ares is a whole other can of worms that I plan to eventually write a short post on. It does not really help that people who preach this ignore that Greeks would be most likely to come into contact with ANE deities on Cyprus or in Cilicia - areas which... aren't known for their association with Ishtar. for And when you look at the evidence from the time when Aphrodite plausibly came to be, ie. late Bronze Age, neither coastal Ashtart in Ugarit (who had nothing to do with love and really if we have to make Greek comparisons would be much closer to Artemis) let alone Shaushka inland in Anatolia offer a close parallel.

I also think most authors involved in this do not actually care about Inanna/Ishtar(s). They basically just use literary texts, and not even recent critical editions. They are stuck with an early orientalist image which hasn't been updated since the 1880s and which just lumps together 90% goddesses from anywhere between Istanbul and Tehran regardless of historical context. I think it's a part of a broader pattern which ultimately has presenting Greek religion as more ancient than it actually was, tbh. It's not about acknowledging influence of Mesopotamia or any other cultural sphere (note that the influence would most likely be coming chiefly from Anatolian contemporaries like Lycians and Lydians - in whose case we do have a solid grasp of the transfer - or from earlier petty neo-Hittite kingdoms or early Phoenician statelets, not from Mesopotamia, but I guess these are not worthy of impacting The Classics) on Greece, it's about making a few handpicked details into a demo version of Greece.

[nohkalikai]

hi!!!!

ok first thing: i was mentally screaming SAME at everything in ur recent posts—need to overexplain!! feeling so uncertain about faith because of *gestures at evangelical fundamentalist world* yet so incapable of leaving it!!

and feeling so fED UP & WEIRD at being a national minority + (supposedly) part of a global cultural imperialist majority. it is FUCKED UP sir

also omg i did not know u were not out at church aaaa. all this time i thought u had found a cool affirming and reasonable church outside home and u were being cool there. somehow this helps with my near constant crises of identity + struggling with The Church. anyway ilu i hope better things for us

HELLO i hope you don't mind me posting this publicly.

but yes to everything. it's such a strange sort of cognitive dissonance at best and actively endangering at worst! to have to come to terms with white ppl not wanting you till you subscribe to the racist ways they do religion, hindus not wanting you either bcs you're better dead to them or completely secularized, and our own community at large, rife w islamophobia and all sorts of incredibly right wing beliefs.

i don't have a proper analysis to offer wrt how to make sense of minority in the sheets hegemony in the streets, i'm sure many people who have come before me have already done that LMAO.

i like (love) this personal essay by a friend of mine:

also yea lmao i stopped going to church. i was going mostly out of compulsion and to maintain a sense of familiarity in a completely new place. but something about going to centuries-old churches that claim to be inclusive and welcoming made me laugh. like, come ON. no matter how political the pastors are or how inclusive the community is, i can't shake away feelings of discomfort and anger. and i suppose that's been my brain's cue to remember all of paul's letters regarding the body being people instead of a building blah and blah. but i can't be fussed atm.

i guess that juggling all this cognitive dissonance is a lifetime thing, very much mediated by the outside world. i've long reconciled that my faith cannot be amorphous immaterial faith that i learnt of in bible studies; it HAS to be a material faith (thinking of Ambedkar and mass conversions).

and it's like yea, we grow up being critical of christianity in all its forms but it refuses to let u go. and that can be incredibly stifling sometimes or incredibly comforting.