apparently, evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick passed away last night
let us remember him by taking a moment to laugh once again at this classic
It brings me comfort tonight to know this sacrilegious Satanist is burning in eternal torment.
What I take from Chick’s and others’ condemnation af atheism as inherently amoral is that they themselves would do absolutely anything if they didn’t believe there is an all-powerful guy with a big stick standing behind them, and I find that terrifying.
On an August morning in 2012, about 150 men, women and children gathered at a sacred spot in the village of Biacou, in northern Timor-Leste. With sacrifices of a goat and a pig and the blessing of the land and sea spirits, the community inaugurated the village’s tara bandu, a customary law of the indigenous Maubere that governs how people interact with the environment.
Tara bandu was outlawed under the Indonesian occupation that lasted from 1975 until 1999. Since then, Maubere communities across the country have been bringing tara bandu back to life as a way to guide more sustainable use of their local natural resources.
In Biacou, at least, the tradition appears to be resonating with residents as there has been just one violation of the tara bandu in the six years since its inauguration.
This is the third story in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Maubere’s revival of tara bandu.
Read the other stories in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Maubere’s revival of tara bandu:
Hands up if you’re still mad that Christianity took over most of the world, displacing the ancient local religions and destroying records of them so we’ll never know the details about them
I’m not mad about that as much as I am that Christianity took lessons about unconditional love, forgiveness and kindness and turned it into a worldwide conglomerate of guilt, shame, judgement and hate that is literally crippling innocent children for life- all over the planet for generations upon generations.
Last original post for the day (sorry, I just have so much to say and add on to concerning conversations jumblr has had before I created this account)
But let’s talk about “Christian culture”
You know how you hear Christianized atheists try and say they “aren’t Christian/Christianized because you know they don’t believe in G-d”
And we, as religious minorities in the west, have to explain that that’s not how this works.
This is the problem with seeing religion as “just religion” and not a whole entire culture.
Ive seen secular people wear crosses (upside or downside doesn’t matter)
I’ve seen secular people say “Merry Christmas” and celebrate Christmas or celebrate Halloween
I’ve seen secular people give “something up for Lent” because “they need to be more healthy”
I’ve seen atheist people dress up as Jesus or the Christian European version of what people think G-d “looks like” or dress up to what Christians think the devil looks like
I’ve seen atheist LITERALLY GO TO CHRISTIAN PRIVATE school (source: me, I was the atheist that went to Christian school. Before you ask, no my mom was agnostic she had no interest in Christianity but saw it as better education and other reasons)
I’ve seen secular workers complain about how they don’t have Easter/Christmas off because you know, “everyone has off those time”
I’ve seen atheists literally trying to prostelyze their lack of religious beliefs to others.
I’ve seen many Christianized secular/atheist people do things that are inherently from Christianity or Christian centric, you know why?
Because, as religious minorities stress, religion IS NOT just “religion” something you can shed once you stop believing in it.
It is a CULTURE (especially ethnoreligions)
If you’re an atheist who was born into a Christian society, community, or family you do things you don’t EVEN realize stem from Christianity.
You will never ever be able to divorce yourself from that narrative.
ex-Christians who convert to another religion (like me) have incredible trouble already erasing and unlearning Christianized behavior. And some behaviors we may never unlearn
So it’s no wonder, that ex-Christian atheists are the same, in fact worse when it comes to Christianization. Many secular and atheists spaces in the west are in fact, Christianized, and have no want to unlearn Christianized behaviors. So many of you stop being religious and suddenly think “I’m not Christian anymore”
When that is not how it works
Christianized secular/atheist folk please realize: you can never EVER stop being christianized and that your form of secularity is in fact thriving and hasn’t been oppressed (at least compared to other religious minorities) for a long long time.
Sorry I had to be the one to explain to you that you benefit from other religious minorities oppression not because your secular but because you’re Christianized secular.
As an ex-Christian and Christianized atheist I can say 100% this is true in my case. It’s actually very interesting to observe all the ways I am culturally and spiritually Christian in my thinking. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being Christianized, but it is wrong to deny your own influences and gaslight religious minorities about the unthinking cultural dominance you assert over them. In the Western context this seems to be another case of cultural/religious privilege, in that people who are part of the dominant culture don’t have to think about their cultural influences and assume they are some kind of nonexistent “neutral” default.
The thing that I hate about atheism as a movement is that it doesn’t just want to critique the hegemony of Western Christianity, it wants to kill spirituality. There is no joy, there is nothing about it that isn’t founded in a pessimism that sees itself as so self-important that it cannot exist outside of destruction. The face of atheism is a white male disgruntled ex-Christian who decided that if he can’t find joy in religion, then nobody else can. There’s a leftover missionary sensibility to “enlighten” people to atheism that exposes itself as racist, antisemitic, and islamophobic, that’s ultimately not unlike the dominance exerted through colonial Christianity
Every butthurt atheist on this thread who’s going #NotAllAtheists and whining about how this isn’t them needs to shut up and learn to read. OP specifically said atheism AS A MOVEMENT, that is the New Atheist/anti-theist assholes who spend all their time shitting on religions and religious people. Not all atheists are part of that movement; I hope most of us aren’t and we are by and large nice and reasonable people, though you’re certainly making me doubt that last part. If it’s not about you then it’s not about you, like Jesus H. Christ get over yourselves.
Yeah I know he’s Buddhist. That doesn’t mean his cultural Christian influences are any less, though. Even atheists in the U.S. are frequently very Christian in their culture. Also George’s understanding of Buddhism is kinda shit if the PT are anything to go by.
There’s more than just Christian themes in Star Wars though, and George’s religion should have nothing to do with how the movies from either eras our judges. If you’re judging a person’s understanding of their religion based off their movies than most the filmmakers would have shit beliefs.
I live in the US and there’s many other religions in the country, not every atheist came from a Christian belief system. I was raised Muslim and Catholic, but I chose to be Agnostic.
We can’t judge people by their religion unless there’s firm proof that’s what their motivation was from.
That’s kind of the dilemma of literary hermeneutics. We often tend to interpret things based on the writer’s religion or the religious influences they might’ve had or what was going on politically in their country at that time but in the end all we do is guess. Not to mention that there is never such a thing as THE interpretation, no matter how much information we collect about George, JJ, RJ and the current time and context. Then we won’t ever be able to seperate ourselves from our own socialisation which will – no matter how hard we try – influence our judgement. And even those of us who grew up in the western world have very different thinking patterns that won’t only be different from each others’ but also from those of the writers, not to mention the differences that occure between people literally from all over the world. So even when I for instance write that TLJ is a result of RJ’s racist and sexist thinking patterns, it’s just the most logical conclusion I came to, but it’s still an interpretation. (but if people interpret his work that way it’s bad, no matter what RJ’s intention truly was, thus he would need to apologize and reflect on his writing anyway) So the OT as a Christian story is an interpretation. Every parallel we discuss, no matter how likely it seems to us, is an interpretation. That doesn’t mean we should stop doing that of course (LOL then we could throw all literature studies into the trash) but we have to be aware of it.
Like I forget it sometimes as well but I have the feeling so do many of you. It’s a normal thing bc some of these conclusions are so natural to us that we forget or never realise where they came from. But I can for instance say that the OT as a Christian story or TLJ as a Christian story seem completely alien to me. (even more so with TLJ) And I did grow up in a Christian society too. So it’s just one way to interpret it which seems very likely to some people but unlikely to others. And what truly influenced George… maybe even he doesn’t know. Same for RJ.
“If you’re judging a person’s understanding of their religion based off
their movies than most the filmmakers would have shit beliefs.“
@themandalorianwolf Isn’t that pretty much Hollywood in a nutshell 😂 What I’m talking about, however, is Yoda’s prattling about how attachment is bad and so on, which people keep saying is Buddhist when it’s more a bastardized understanding of Buddhism popular in the West. I have written about this before (link).
And where did I judge someone for their religion? Like, am I being accused of Christophobia or Buddhaphobia or something here? 😛 I don’t have anything against Christians or cultural Christianity in of itself–I’m a very culturally Christian atheist/agnostic myself. My issue is with people discounting the clear Christian themes (forgiveness, redemption etc.) because of George’s religion. I didn’t bring his religion into this, I made a plausible reading of themes in the story, which is one of many possible readings as @thelastjedicritical said, and someone brought up George’s religion to invalidate that. So I retorted that someone having a different religion or no religion does not discount prior cultural influences. I know that from personal experience, as I said.
I also never stated that Christianity is the only religion in the U.S., I know how diverse it is ethnically, religiously and otherwise. However, it’s just fact that the U.S. is a heavily majority Christian country with some 70% of the population belonging to some sect of Christianity (link), so the statement that atheists in the U.S. are frequently–not exclusively, I never said that–culturally Christian shouldn’t be controversial.
He’s been condemned by other Muslim leaders, and some local imams have even refused to greet him. But Imam Daayiee Abdullah – believed to be the only openly gay imam in the Americas – is proud of his story.
He was born and raised in Detroit, where his parents were Southern Baptists. At age 15, he came out to them. At 33, while studying in China, Abdullah converted to Islam, and went on to study the religion in Egypt, Jordan and Syria. But as a gay man in America, he saw that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Muslims had unmet spiritual needs and he became an imam to provide community support.
“Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. And because of the necessity in our community, that’s why I came into this particular role,” he told America Tonight about his journey.
His first act as an imam? Performing funeral rites for a gay Muslim who died of AIDS.
“They had contacted a number of imams, and no one would go and provide him his janazah services,” he said, referring to the Muslim body cleaning ritual. That pained him.
“I believe every person, no matter if I disagree with you or not, you have the right as a Muslim to have the proper spiritual [rites] and rituals provided for you. And whoever judges you, that will be Allah’s decision, not me.”
It’s one of the mantras he lives by in his work, even as others condemn him.
ARE computers flammable? I feel like they’re probably not?
This depends entirely on how much uncooked rice you have shoved in the floppy drive.
…Ok I feel like there’s a story behind this.
There is, yes!
After I quit school, I worked briefly as a computer repair tech. Going to people’s houses or businesses, fixing their various bugs, etc. While I would rapidly decide that field was not for me because of the one businessman who needed multiple “cup holder” replacements (you know, you push that button and that plastic holder thing with the hole comes out … I think it is technically call the “Cup Depository Tray”? CD, right?), he is not the most memorable encounter. No, that goes to one of the nicest ladies I ever encountered on this job.
She called us out because her computer had stopped turning on, and wouldn’t even make a noise when she tried to push the button. One day it had just shut off while she was using it and stubbornly refused to come back on, and could we please see what we could do to fix it?
So I go out there expecting some wire had gotten loose and there was no power getting to the machine or something. It happens sometimes if a machine gets banged around enough, or if someone fiddles with it wrong or is careless putting it together, computers are finicky like that. But as soon as I get to the box itself, I know it isn’t that simple, because of the smell. I have smelled computers with dust all up in them, that isn’t uncommon, but this is just vile and, more importantly, entirely new.
I am now more curious than afraid, so I open it up and there is a mass of goopy off-white mush spilling all over everything, parts of it are burnt to circuits, there is almost nothing untouched by the mass. But by far the worst off is the A drive. That is the obvious source of the problem, and the thing has … not “exploded”, but more burst from the pressure of whatever this stuff was.
So I ask the woman if she had used the floppy drive recently and noticed any problems, and she says no, not until the whole machine stopped working. But I come to find out what she used it for.
Turns out this woman was a devout Shinto practitioner and believed that her computer (among other things) had a soul that needed to be respected an honored. Which, fair enough. But she chose to honor it by feeding it a grain of rice every time she had to wake it up and disturb its rest. For years this kindhearted woman had been putting a grain of rice into the A drive every time she turned it on or woke the thing up from sleep mode. And eventually that was enough pressure to break the drive and start spilling out onto the internal bits, where the heat melted it all and caused no end of problems.
After that it was a simple enough thing to explain that there are better ways to honor and take care of your computer’s needs, what with virus scans or defrags and the like, but that poor device was entirely lost.
I guess the moral of the story here is that you can try your best to be good and still wind up hurting people? Maybe? Or else it’s that even the most horrible out of context problem isn’t nearly as frustrating as one middle aged jerk who won’t freaking listen when you tell him that CD trays are not for your dang coffee cups!
The end~
ok but im so taken with the fact that she was feeding her computer to apologise for waking it up?? thats so sweet????
This is why Mr. Fry will always have a seat at my table.
Amen.
I was having a conversation about religion with this guy and he asked me what I would do if I got into heaven and had to sit next to God. I told him I wouldn’t take the seat.
L.J.'s Obsessions 