thegreatandpowerfulversy

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

buncha people decided to join the israel-palestine conflict on the side of the conflict

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

The revolution needs you to brush your teeth.

This ask went hard, but you are correct.

The revolution needs you to brush your teeth. Crippling pain and debt from having bad and rotted teeth makes you easier for the oligarchy to control.

The revolution needs you to brush your teeth.

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

idk i just think it’s wild how leftist communities and the queer community especially treats its members like evil incarnate the moment they break from the community’s unspoken rule book of moral perfection

i support zionism — defined as jewish self determination in the jewish ancestral homeland, a concept that is in line with the principle of supporting indigenous sovereignty yet completely vilified by the greater queer community — so i must therefore also be a racist, a transmisogynist, etc etc.

i’m the same person i have always been. i’m the same person who protested for george floyd and who donates to good causes when possible, the same guy who has gone on at lengths about the importance of unity amongst trans people, the same guy who generally speaking cares a ton about examining my own biases, etc etc.

and yet i have morons in my inbox fucking constantly, telling me how i deserve death and suffering when a couple years ago i only got a message like that once or twice a year, usually from transphobes. now i get those messages from self described leftists and queers. gee i wonder what happened almost 2 years ago…

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves A stately pleasure-dome decreed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

An early 20th century postcard against the coercion of motherhood and promoting the usage of contraception.

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

photo: ElI Bond

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

i think the reason "fiction affects reality" trips so many people up is because they think it means "engaging with media that depicts uncomfortable subjects will taint your soul" when really all it means is that "fiction is meant to reflect certain ideas of the world intentionally or not, and it's going affect your perception of it, if you don't go in with a healthy bit of skepticism"

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

i don’t need a “day off” or a “weekend” i need to respawn in a clean apartment with all my responsibilities reset and the complete certainty that nobody hates me

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

you ever get pissed off by somebody’s mindset? like damn.. you really think like that?

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

Thanks, Anon!

-submit your poll!-

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

I have tried to share the Gospel with Jews but many of them are not receptive and some of them even acted offended. Why are they so opposed to Christ?

It took me a minute to remember that almost nobody I know irl knows I'm on Tumblr...so this can't be a friend trolling me.

I think this question may be sincere, so I'm going to treat it that way.

Anon, Judaism isn't what you have been taught to believe it is.

Let's get apophatic

Judaism is not a broken and incomplete prequel to your own religion

Judaism is not proto-Christianity and has no Jesus-shaped hole.

There's nothing missing from Judaism. It doesn't need or want original sin, blood atonement, tests of faith, or eternal hell.

Jews are not waiting around for you to rescue them with your gospels. We've heard your good news many times.

Jews are not spiritually lost, incomplete, chained to the law, or trudging through some 'Old Testament' swamp hoping a Christian will come along and throw us a rope.

Judaism didn't freeze and die out in the Bronze Age.

Judaism didn't end with Isaiah, it didn't die in the desert, in exile, in captivity, or in the diaspora. It kept going through the destruction of the Second Temple, through the Mishnah, through the Talmud, through centuries of rabbinic debate, mysticism, legal thought, and lived tradition.

This idea you have that others should be grateful to hear your good news...and your hurt feelings when you don't get the response you hope for...?

That's because winning new converts to your faith was never actually the point of this exercise.

Now let's talk a bit about what Judaism is

Jews who practice Judaism have a full, coherent, spiritually rich tradition. You can tell that's true by the way that Christianity and Islam both based their own faiths on cribbing from ours.

This isn't an opinion, Anon. Read any serious Christian historian on the history of Christianity.

Judaism is a living thing which is much, much older and more enduring than whatever your preferred flavor of Protestantism might be. Again, this is not opinion, this is fact.

The Good News you're eager to share has historically been very dangerous to us. We're rightly wary about the intentions of people attempting to push it upon us. If you don't understand that, i urge you to address the chasm of your ignorance of your own faith.

Jesus is neither the problem nor the solution for Jews, he's simply not the point.

The God of the Jews does not:

Create humans as sick and wrong...

Command humans to be well despite creating them sick...

Sacrifice himself to himself...

...In order to spare humans from the sinfulness...

...with which he himself created them

Jewish theology isn't perfect (no theology is), but it is much more internally consistent and reasoned than any of the Christianities I've studied...and it does not have the dim Christian view of human nature. It does not use the promise of eternal reward or the threat of eternal punishment to coax or frighten people into social compliance.

Across history, more Jews have chosen death than baptism and that should tell you something. We've been asked, cajoled, and threatened with dispossession, violence, and death to trade our integrity for the supposed salvation we don't believe in many times before...and we said no.

We'll keep saying no.

Even secular Jews like me reject Christianity because it doesn't make sense to us.

We might embrace materialist reason, silence, humanism, or maybe one of the non-theistic forms of Buddhist practice, but we're not going to embrace any ideology requiring us to swallow the premise that we're broken and need to be saved by a religion which has actively, deliberately misinterpreted and persecuted us for most of the last 2,000 years.

Your failure to understand this context is further evidence that you don't know or understand the history of your own faith.

While you're solving that problem, please read a book about comparative religious studies.

Huston Smith's The World's Religions is an easy read and a great primer from a devout Christian on how to learn about the faith traditions of others. You could also watch this series Smith made with Bill Moyers (another devout Christian...a Baptist pastor, if I recall correctly).

For an amazingly educated, articulate, Christian take on the Hebrew Bible (which is the polite term Christians should use rather than 'old testament') try reading Episcopal Archbishop John Shelby Spong's Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.

It may surprise you to learn that I have read the synoptic gospels at least a dozen times and feel the same affection for them that I feel for The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha or the Tao Te Ching.

I really appreciate the teachings of the Jesus of the synoptic gospels.

It's his fandom (starting with Paul) which I find largely toxic.

The Christians I love, those with whom I speak openly about religion, who have remained friends for decades (including clergy and devout Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians) are the ones who learned enough about Jewish history to stop trying to cram Jewishness into the box Christianity invented for its own purposes.

Jews and Judaism don't fit in that box because it isn't ours.

Jews are unwilling to cut off parts of themselves in order to assume a box-fitting shape you find more pleasing and flattering to your own faith and worldview.

If you're lucky, the Jew you approach to evangelize will be someone like me who is more familiar with both Hebrew Bible and your own synoptic gospels than you are, and who will patiently explain your factual, logical, and rhetorical errors to you...but when you encounter Jews with less patience who respond with hostility?

That's on you, and the sense of rejection you feel is the whole blessed point of the exercise.

But your evangelism bothers me less than how careless and unthoughtful you are about your own religion.

My ancestors and family were persecuted by Christians for their faith, but I have read the gospels of your savior and his church with an open mind and an open heart. I have taken them seriously and considered them carefully and deeply. I've discussed them with devout Christians, learned a great deal from those discussions, and have expressed my appreciation of those texts, the Jesus contained therein, and the beautiful way that some Christians make their God's omnibenevolence the center of their faith.

I'd bet everything I own that you haven't ever seriously studied anyone else's religion.

I desperately wish that even a tiny fraction of Christians would do as Smith and Spong have done and return the courtesy to the Jewish people, texts, and ideas from which their faith was born, but you, like most Christians, know next to nothing about the religion in which Jesus was born, in which he lived, and in which he died.

When you've fixed that - when you've spent a fraction of the time learning about Judaism that I've spent earnestly learning about your religion? C'mon back and I'll listen to your arguments with an open mind and engage with you to your heart's content.

Until then, you'd be wise to keep those arguments and your evangelism far, far away from Jews. Each attempt just widens the chasm between us.

Condescending to us about our faith when you know nothing about it (and seemingly precious little about your own) demeans us both and is unworthy of either faith tradition.

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

(Source)

The Federal Reserve's independence — which is considered to be important for a well-functioning economy, as it allows them to set unpopular-but-necessary measures to minimize inflation — is guaranteed by the Federal Reserve Act.

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

so here's what I've now done to make the internet usable as a person living in the UK without handing my ID and/or facial scans over to random third parties:

signed up for a ProtonVPN account

set up a tunnel from my router to a ProtonVPN server in Sweden

written a python script to query DNS servers for social media domains every 15 minutes and collate the results into a list of IP address ranges

created routing and firewall policies to block connections to those IP ranges on my normal connection and send them through the VPN tunnel instead

set up a second, personal VPN so I can make my mobile devices connect to the internet through my home network even when I'm not at home

now it's time to open source this whole thing so others can enjoy using the internet the same way they did three weeks ago