#like... monotheism stuff

[bookish-bi-mormon]

Okay, listen. So, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (and mormonsim and general) we believe the Godhead to be three separate and distinct beings, right? Joseph Smith saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ at the same time so we don't subscribe to the notion of the Trinity (that God is one being, simultaneously Father, Son, and Spirit). So then there are multiple gods right? If Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are all different people then it's more than one. But no, church leaders say, they're united in purpose so we only worship one God, because even though they're different we worship the Father in the name of the Son, which makes it as monotheistic as possible.

Then bring in the belief in Heavenly Mother. She is equal to Heavenly Father. She also helped form the earth and create the Plan of Salvation. So now there are two Gods right? But then people say no, God is actually the term to refer to our Heavenly Parents working in tandem. They are only really God when they are united.

and I KNOW that technically we are a Henotheistic religion (meaning that we acknowledge the existence of multiple Gods but only worship one) but I just think it would be fun and funky if we were polytheistic. We have a Father, a Mother, and a Son. Plus the Holy Ghost who is like Their helper/conduit for humanity. It's a really small "pantheon" but I like it. idk. I wanna pray to Heavenly Mother, I have developed a separate relationship with Christ that is similar but different to my relationship with Heavenly Father. And the more I start to frame Mormon lore that way, the more I feel like it makes sense and isn't just trying to get the Protestants off our backs.

#yeah I said lore #I like it better than doctrine cause it includes the unofficial and forgotten teachings #which are sometimes cool (although a lot are problematic) #queerstake #tumblrstake #monotheism vs polytheism vs henoteheism #mormon #lds #mormon witch stuff

[chaoticbuggybitchboy]

(Context: I am a white American and was raised strictly atheist)

Shoutout to like ,,, 7(?) year old me who was for some reason incredibly interested in islam and I am pretty sure now that had I had any sort of choice in religion I would have converted to islam. I’m 16 now and my views have shifted significantly and I could not explain to you why my younger self felt so set on a religion that I had rarely been able to interact with, but I still find myself wandering back towards islam (and then wandering away very quickly when I remember that it’s strictly monotheistic and that’s something I don’t really believe)

#cw religion #religion #cw religious themes #I have whatever the opposite of religious trauma is #I was punished for having any sort of religious beliefs and my mother would vilify religion regularly #I can’t ever settle on a religion now though bc there’s always More to my core beliefs than I can jam into a religion #There’s a few like Judaism and Islam that interest me as ways of life but there’s that monotheism thing that I simply don’t believe #look at this whole entire universe and tell me that there’s just one god? Nuhuh man #Honestly the satanic temple slaps though from what I know #they’re like “just be nice and stuff” #Islam

[oscalesoffeeling]

realistically delruk is as weird about the force as i am about g-d. btw. not force-sensitive, just weird about it in a deeply religious way.

#Obviously. #is belief in the force a wide enough idea to stand in for judaism or is there like a specific sect of belief in the force that is the #in-universe equivalent to what judaism is to monotheic and/or abrahamic faiths in general? #i've jokingly said na.boo is where i'd be from bc it's swampy like illinois but idk what the in-universe equivalent to illinois would be! #ald.er.aan is another one that i feel is obvious for me to be from but whether that makes my guy's mundicide funnier or not is #up for debate! 'i'm literally sleeping with an ald.er.aanian 🥺' oh honey. #ellie rambles about stuff #he spun the stars on his fingernails (tag) #apparently there's a large community of ald.er.anians on na.boo so that might very well be the fix for delruk's origins. #my s/is tag

[cherepizza]

Wow it's been more than a month. Didn't realize that. I guess I have something to show but uhh my sketchbook got under heavy rain so paper here it's a little wavy. It's a miracle it had so little damage considering what happened to my other stuff. Also nights proceed to get longer and I wasn't lucky to take better photos. Anyway..

All beacons' religions are based on mythology and existence of numerous gods and spirits inhabiting the world. The closest thing they have to monotheism is a religion formed around the existence of a transcendent all-present force (spirit) which, however, cannot perceive the world and interact with it by itself, only being able to do so by splitting itself into many different "sides". Only sides are able to maintain physical bodies and though they all come from the same source and it the end would become one again, they are treated as completely different entities. There're 8 major sides – 8 major gods, other deities are considered lesser. Aand I'll just leave it there because I'd better wait for the time I have a fine picture depicting gods to have at least something accompany a ton of sentences that would come describing them.

Many religions practices and ceremonies are performed at altars. The most simple home altar is a wooden table, low enough so that a beacon would have to kneel down to perform any ritual. The most common offering is food, other offerings include things associated with a specific god. Watered down alcohol may be poured only on certain celebrations. It's a very uncommon practice and in some households it's not allowed and has to be done secretly. After all, you want your gods to be sober to do their duty.

Living creatures sacrifices are also practiced, but sacrificing other beacons is forbidden (at least on the territory of the forementioned "all comes from one spirit" believers). Animals cannot be sacrificed on wooden altars and it's quite rare for a beacon to a have a stone one at home, so cooking and eating a designated animal or specific parts of it (obviously offering a piece to the gods in the process) on a celebration is usually enough.

An interesting religious thing are these sticks made from wood or bone, always coming in number of 8. If their owner didn't make them themselves, they may have some standard decorations and phrases pre-carved but most part of their sides would always remain empty for the owner to fill. Each stick is devoted to one of the major gods and contains an encarved list of things which a beacon wants to ask for from the deity. An altar is not needed when you have sticks but you should still make an offering if possible.

The sticks also serve as some sort of passport as encarvings may contain information about beacon's place of birth, place of work, profession, number of children and other things like the kind of crop their village grows even if the owner has nothing to do with farming but wants the crop to be protected anyway.

All stick sets are personal and follow their owner to the grave. However, taking copies is not frowned upon. Keeping the original set for yourself and leaving a copy with the deseased is also fine but the ritual of changing sets should be performed by close relatives who wish to keep the original sticks as a memory. Otherwise it might be considered disrespectful.

#speculative biology #spec bio

[tanadrin]

@maaruin

Hinduism is probably a good example for how Roman-Platonist Monotheism would look like without the Jewish origin of Christianity: the theology is monotheist but to an outside observer the rituals look like they are honoring various gods, because polytheist practices have been re-interpreted in a monotheist way. Christianity is unusual not in its monotheist beliefs, but in that it required its followers to stop performing the traditional (polytheist) rituals.

I want to expand on this bc it touches something else McClellan mentions--how being the organized faith of the Empire really changed Christianity, or at least Nicene Christianity. Before it became institutionalized, there was a lot of room in early Christianity for different, contradictory Christologies (like Arianism, which was basically mainstream at one point); it's only with the Council of Nicaea that a compromise form of all these Christologies has to be hammered out (because the institutional church needs dogmatic harmony), and the boundaries of orthodox theology have to be policed--and can be, eventually with the full backing of state power. Before the most you could do was expel members of your church who disagreed with you, maybe refuse association with other churches whose theology differed too much. Once you have state backing you can use that authority to exclude heretics; and, later, once you are the official religion of the Empire, you can have heretics punished by the state.

I think this harsh ideological boundary maintenance really becomes a part of every state-backed church, but of course it's the Roman one that is by far the most powerful and most widespread; and even post-Great Schism and the fall of the western empire, the need for Catholic rulers to be in good with the Pope, and thus to enforce Christian orthodoxy within their territory, has the same boundary-maintenance effect.

McClellan contends that without this forced institutional compromise--which is what the Trinity is; "three persons with one substance" and stuff like "100% divine and 100% human" is not just "a mystery," it's functionally a nonsensical contradiction, and the reason why so many attempts to explain the Trinity fall into heresies like modalism or partialism is because the Trinity is wording-by-committee aimed at producing phraseology that most people at this one ecumenical council could tolerate, even if they didn't like it.

And by "most people" here we mean a very particular kind of educated Greco-Roman elite; a lot of early theology is shaped by what is conceptually acceptable to these guys, steeped in stuff like Neo-Platonism, and maybe doesn't have all that much to do with the peasant religion version of Christianity elsewhere (indeed, get your average theologically-untrained Christian of any era to try to explain something like the Trinity and I guarantee ninety-nine times out of ten they will produce an explanation that is technically a heresy).

All of which is to say I agree; a counterfactual "monotheistic" late-antiquity religion in a world without Christianity, but with the same Greco-Roman influences, would look very much like Hinduism; it would have a big split between, like, the everyday version of the religion and the theologically elucidated elite version of the religion; and I think it's the latter that would resemble Nicene Christianity on a lot of points. But then, folk Christianity often is very different from "orthodox" Nicene Christianity in the world we do inhabit, also.

#the council of nicaea is the one where santa claus went around punching heretics #(supposedly)

[itswalky]

So were your parents on the anti D&D train? Because the idea that it would lead to devil worshipping was already tenuous, but did they ever buy into the idea that it would let you learn real magic? Because that seems like it would be an advertisement for the game. Besides, if you're obsessed with monotheism, just avoid playing a warlock or a cleric and you'll be fine.

I was absolutely raised in an anti-D&D home. I don't recall if my parents believed it was about real magic or not. It probably depended on which 700 Club segment my mom watched last.

Even though I'm an atheist now and don't believe any of that rubbish, I still have a general psychological aversion to magical stuff. Which is fine, because it means I never got into Harry Potter.

[gideonnavtheninth]

Only the best for the Third House. Strap in, I get real deep in research for the titles on the Third here!!

Okay, Mouth of the Emperor has always been interesting to me. It doesn't align as cleanly as the other titles for other houses usually do, but I'd guess it has something to do with either the fact that they're a super gossipy house on the surface level, OR … their cannibalism habit. Now, I'm not saying that this might have to do with John's whole Cannibalizing-The-Earth-To-Achieve-Lyctorhood deal but I'm not NOT saying that. Anyway, "The Procession" is a fun one. This is a REAL symbol heavy one, so keep all your hands and feet inside the ride. First and foremost, this (X) article held my hand through this whole infodump, so read it if you wanna see where I'm drawing my stuff from. So, I googled "The Procession", and was immediately graced with the title "PROCESSIONS, TRINITARIAN" which, putting a word that has to do with the number 3 in the same title as the thing I am researching for the third house is.... pretty good, honestly. Anyway, unlike other houses, the third house is REALLY really into the 3 thing. Like, okay, third house has 3 members show up, cool, not on the nose at all. In the bible, you have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which as far as I'm aware don't really map onto the third house members, but they DO tie into the running theme of three with the Processions. Likewise, "the Holy Spirit is depicted not only as a divine power but also as a divine "person" speaking though the mouths of the apostles" also has to do with the "Mouth of the Emperor" thing (Double Plus, it ties into why the sewn tongue was between a ninth house member, being the house of the sewn tongue, AND a third house member, mouth of the emperor! not to mention the tie between the ninth house is also pretty interesting when you think about how even numerically, nine is three, three times. Just saying) The article also brings up another running trinity theme

triadic formulas that entail both distinction and equality among the three divine persons (e.g., Mt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:13; Eph 2:18; 3:14–17; 4:4–6; 5:18–20; Rom 8:14–17, etc.)

The article generally talks about the theological debate that comes about having your one true god being 3 gods in a trench coat, and what that has to do with monotheism, which I'm sure someone could tie into the locked tomb but I'm looking more into exactly what's up with this whole "Procession" thing, and we have not yet gotten there. We will continue to not get there, because of course, there has to be something else I spot. Of course, it's minor this time. "The Legacy of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Scholastic Theology." Okay, interesting. Augustine isn't even third house, but just a funny detour to have spotted. He always felt more Third house to me than Fifth house, but sure. Augustine pitches an interesting theory. Firstly, "the Lover, the Loved, and the Love" is really interesting and I would love to deep-dive on that, but I really feel like the "mens, intellectus, and voluntas" is the key thing here. I feel like you can map this onto Nona in a lot of ways, and not to get two books ahead of myself but the third is pretty prominent in NTN, just sayiiinggg....

Anyway, here we see something something procession all the way at the bottom. What's up with that, can we see finally what I was supposed to be researching this whole time? well...

I'm killing my brain with paragraphs of religious theory, but generally the procession ties into the concept of origination. It's separated into Transient Procession, a term existing outside what proceeds it (E.g. baker and his cookies) and Immanent (E.g. that story you want to tell that exists only in the confines of your brain). Now this is used to explain that the trinity is just products of the whole, that being the one god. I actually think there's a strong case to be made that this parallels Nona, Alecto, and possibly the Earth. All different states of the same being, in this case. I think you can probably tie in the resurrection beasts into this concept a lot too. We can also stretch this to mean the Third house is, in a way, either representative or tangibly an extension of the Emperor. And, this actually does have some substance when you think about the titles. All of the houses are SOMETHING of the emperors. Tangibly, they're his resurrected planets, but title-wise, they're his Strength, Mouth, Hope & Sword (curious that 4th house gets two and both the ninth house and eight house get none), Heart, Reason, and Joy. Of all of these, Fifth house and Third house are parts of him, his mouth and his heart. We also have the HANDS of the emperor, his lyctors. Everything else is either an emotional piece of the emperor, like his hope or strength, or they serve a physical purpose, being his sword or shield, or in the case of the Eighth and Ninth, both "keepers" (When we get to the Eighth, I'll circle back to this one) So it's possible we could specifically be seeing them as the Transient Extensions of "God" or John, as opposed to his Immanent Processions. Okay, procession other meaning is a lot simpler.

Now, we don't really see the third as a very orderly place, but it's entirely possible that they serve a purpose in order via a ceremonial force. They're probably the most amorphous in their necessity to John. We know he needs soldiers, we know he needs scholars, we know he needs warm bodies for the war, and we know he needs a spot to put his barbie vessel. But what really is the third to him? They aren't the masterminds of the sixth, but they're exceptional at blackmail, and information gathering. In this way, unlike any of the other houses, they're exceptionally skilled at keeping things IN line. This isn't the most conclusive answer, but it's the best I got. I'm sure there's a lot more here, but this is my surface level stuff! help me out here, drop your thoughts!

Crazy to believe we spent that long on just the MIDDLE title, but well, it wouldn't be the third house without an annoying amount of hidden complexity. Not to be outdone, the last title will have to garner it's own post! Still... Still on page 2 of the book. Hopefully the WHOLE reread isn't me writing paragraphs for every 3 words (... unless?)

#tltreread #gtnreread #tlt meta #the locked tomb #third house

[gayleviticus]

I'd be v interested in reading an academic discussion of tropes of killing God and corrupt churches in Japanese fantasy media bc it strikes me as curious that these are narratives that tend to resonate a lot w western audiences as well, even tho Japan's religious landscape is to my understanding quite different (w a high rate of atheism that doesn't at all get in the way of people practising religious rites, and stuff like homophobia seems more like general cultural prejudice than specifically religious). what do these kinds of narratives mean to Japanese people who aren't necessarily reading them against the social backdrop of monotheism/christianity/catholicism (even if these games clearly invoke that imagery a lot)?

[jedidiahjunior]

What type of Christianity do you follow?

-The Bible kind (eye roll ), Jesus not a man (which I guess is the polite way to say fuck bill got hard), they worship in a baptist church

(Austin makes a quip about how if the mic had a clip he could put it in his beard)

Is Austin still flipping houses?

-No

How many kids do they want?

-4-5, joy doesn’t “feel done” yet

Have you considered moving out of Arkansas?

-Not seriously but if God called them they would (I would love an in-depth explanation of how one knows when God calls one to do something like moving far away …..)

Are they still IBLP?

-No! Never as a couple and they spoke early on in their relationship of not using IBLP “literature” and such. “Have our own relationship with the Lord” -joy

Are they doing a name theme with sons? Gideon, gunner…

-No, Gunner was almost named Bowman James and they didn’t realize both boys wound up with G names until after they’d written gunners birth certificate

Are they going to read jills book?

-Yes! Joys already read jingers book. “If your family member wrote a book about your family would you read it? Duh!”-Austin

Dream vacation?

-Alaska!

What does it mean to put God first in your home?

-Honestly all they answered was just…. Barely coherent. Be the same in the home as in church? Whatever that means? Teach the children about him? That’s not vague. Keep the home pleasing to Him? Give me one (1) specific on how to do that I beg y’all!!! And then there’s a spiel about praying…

Do joy like Austin beard?

-yes but she’s getting bored with it. And then there’s a Totally Healthy banter about how joy was going to shave it of while he was asleep (impossible but ok) but Austin threatened to do the same to her eyebrows so she’s dropped the idea

The key to a successful marriage?

-Fight for your marriage, but fight together and not against each other. Austin is apparently very good at apologizing

Does Gideon like his swim classes?

-yes

What is evelyns favorite song?

-blippi, cocomelon…..

What has Gideon been learning about in Bible time?

-Old Testament stuff! King Solomon and monotheism

What is Gideon’s best joke?

-First he says VBS, then Sir laugh a lots

What does Evelyn want to be when she’s bigger?

-a princess!

[bakurapika]

Fellow ex-christian kid who's words were HEAVILY censored (I wasn't allowed to say something "sucks", "crap", or even call things stupid). By far one of the most validating things I ever learned is that "taking the christian god's name in vain" refers to stuff like claiming your own opinion or belief is actually biblical or claiming committing things like genocide in the name of the christian god. Basically doing evil and claiming it's divinely condoned. It does not, in any way, refer to teenagers saying coh my god". I felt very vindicated when I learned that after countless lectures.

yeah, at some point you realize that "taking _ in vain" isn't a phrase you hear anywhere else.

of course in the original, it doesn't refer to christianity but to judaism - but even that has some interesting roots behind it. (after spending most of my adulthood as an agnostic atheist, I converted to judaism ... and am still an agnostic atheist but with an asterisk and "it's complicated" lol) i like to read torah in as many ways as possible - commentaries, figuring out how people historically read it, and what the little we know from archaeology can tell us about how it was originally interpreted.

it is my VERY humble onion as a layperson (as always, i am not a rabbi, i don't speak for any other jewish people, etc etc) that most of the torah was written in the context of "other gods exist but aren't as cool as our god." idk, regional patron gods made a lot more sense once I started viewing them as analogous to mascots of their local sports team. like we don't believe those literally exist but we will still go fuckin crazy for em. i've never watched an entire football game but i do get a swell of pride and recognition whenever i see a packers logo

man im rambling. i think my point is that it's one thing for a modern religion to project its own meaning on the past (like how xtianity's trinity explains away the "we will make..." in genesis, which is indeed the plural - without the trinity, you wind up with a big theological question mark if you're married to the monotheism-has-always-been-true thing) is understandable and valid as far as that goes, but trying to figure out what the "original meaning" of the text is, that's a historical question more than a theological one imo. and it can be interesting and cool to try to figure it out, even if we'll never know the actual One True Answer. w/judaism i feel like there is so much more textual tradition of criticism that i can say more confidently that our modern interpretation is just as valid as ancient interpretation... i would feel less confident saying that about xtianity

#christianity tw #ex christian

[alicentsgf]

think its really funny the catholic church kept compromising with polytheistic populations in order to convert them and created the saints and stuff and now they're like "But TheY'Re NoT goDS! Okay!! they just have very specific spheres they have control over and you should pray to them before trying to confer with the big boss man upstairs this is still monotheism because i said so and make sure to pray to the earth moth- i mean Mary!! pray to mary the mother of creation God! ........anyone want some blood to drink?"

#catholicism #catholic tag #virgin mary #religion #theism

[rowboataobwor]

Guys, I figured it out!

Monotheism is an allegory for video games.

The Old Testament was the original game.

The New Testament is a massive, full game overhaul DLC to mixed reception.

The Quran is a reboot that got REALLY popular overseas.

The Book of Mormon is also paid DLC, but it's like the Sims 4 My First Pet Stuff Pack, since it's DLC to a DLC.

Original doctoral thesis idea, do not steal

#bible #mormon #sims 4

[interlagosed]

Hi Hibi, hope you’re doing well.

I’ve just started my final writing project for uni and I’m trying to write a fantasy religious system. How did you write Revolución and duotheism to be so believable??

First of all, thank you for saying those stories are believable!! I feel like Revolución was a fever dream so I can't really say how that came about because even *I'm* still shocked that happened lol BUT at least with duotheism in TSOR, I can describe my thought process a bit! This is going to be long and possible unhelpful I'm so sorry lol.

TL;DR: what is the central tenet of the religion (if you had to boil it down, what is the elevator pitch of the religion?); what are people's motivations to follow the religion?; if the religion is successful, why is that (either geopolitically or individually)?; if the religion is a niche/persecuted religion, why?; if people leave the religion, why?; what are the consequences of leaving the religion?; and how does this serve the story? Another thing I would consider: is the religion/are the deities "real" within the universe?

I don't think this is dispositive at ALL but it helps that I myself am religious so I can put myself in characters' shoes and think "Okay, what would need to exist in a religious system that would compel basically an entire continent to follow a religion?" And then, the second question: "What would compel heresy to such an extent that an entire country would leave the religion?" Religions are super simple at their heart: what is the core tenet? There tend to be a few common organizing principles, and I thought it would be cool to play with the idea of balance as the core principle of my religion. Monotheism would look too similar to real world religions, and I didn't want to deal with the complexities of a pantheon, so I figured a two-deity religion would be both unique and well-positioned for balance. But I also didn't want to have it be as simple as light/dark. I wanted to think about balance as something other than a scale. So I created the Goddess first, as a deity that is much more like familiar to us: all-powerful, containing multitudes, but also capable of being basically what each individual worshipper needs her to be (which is why Charles sees her as a mother figure, but Carlos, for example, would see her as an Amazon warrior). But to make her more fallible, I gave her the trait of needing to be worshipped in order to protect her faithful, and of then manifesting that through a chosen family that would basically assure her worship.

The Unknowable One comes in as the left hand of the Goddess, basically. The way They manifest balance in Duotheism is by intervening to maintain the Tapestry (or fate). So the Goddess is much more grounded in the day to day of worship, and of human lives, whereas the Unknowable One has a macro view of the entire universe and all of time. They work together, but to very different ends. So the Goddess has her chosen family, and the Unknowable One is much more reclusive. They do not need worship in the same way—but they need individual agents with whom they can work to keep the general throughline of the universe straight. Hence Lando and Blanca, as the two heirs of the Duotheist countries, being chosen as the Unknowable One's agents.

Everything else just sort of came together as I wrote the story. Because it's fantasy, I could make things more magical, which is always fun! But I wanted to keep actual magic limited to the Leclercs instead of spreading the magical elements too thin. Other stuff is fantastical, but only the Leclercs are magical. Also I'm a geopolitics girlie so I really enjoyed thinking about how religion would work in this context.

As for the Heresy, it was as simple as looking around the world and being able to say "Some people will abandon their deepest held convictions for a shot at power" and also "Some people love their power so much that they mistrust anything that brings about change in their status." It's just a matter of thinking through how those qualities can be manipulated by politics.

NO CLUE IF THIS IS HELPFUL. I added the tldr questions up top hoping they'll actually be useful to you. GOOD LUCK AND KEEP ME POSTED.

#hibi answers #tsor #hibi advice #is that the tag??? i forget

[will-o-the-witch]

Hi, I hope you don't mind but I thought I'd come to you to ask a couple questions. It might be long. Also, brief conversion therapy mention tw.

I've been having some personal issues with my spirituality lately and I can't seem to get my head around something. For context, I've been raised pretty much predominantly by my Jewish grandmother but I'm technically not considered "officially Jewish" (no official Conversion, mother doesn't consider herself Jewish) and I don't call myself Jewish, obviously out of respect. I've been a Demonolatrist for many years and consider myself a witch, and I've been interested in Jewish Demonolatry, folklore, spirit work etc. on and off. I've just always been hesitant about it because I'm not sure if I'm overstepping any boundaries here considering Judaism is a closed religion and I'm not sure if I can go through the process of becoming Jewish to follow this path. (I don't think it's possible, but it's doing my head in. Would it be offensive/wrong?).

I believe in God 100%, but I don't necessarily worship Him either. I've a very odd relationship with God because I was a victim of gay conversion therapy at our local temple during my childhood and it's kinda dulled my views on Him. It's a kind of "I love you, but you hurt me really bad" relationship. Regardless, I still pray. I would feel comfortable following Jewish culture, customs, holidays, and I've thought it through a lot, but I just can't bring myself to fully worship God and only God. It'd be more like "yeah, God exists and we're cool these days but we have an iffy history".

I'm just curious. How can I approach Jewish witchcraft from the perspective of not wanting God to be at the centre of my practice? Or, more specifically, is it possible? Because Judaism is supposed to be monotheistic...

Ooh, this ended up being way longer than I thought it would. Thank you very much in advance if you decide to take time out of your day to answer this, and I genuinely hope I don't offend. I would love to hear what you have to share on this. It's been on my mind for a fair while now.

This is a really really interesting question! Thank you for asking it.

To start, your relationship with Gd to me feels like a distinctly Jewish one, so I wouldn't worry too much about that aspect. It's very normal if not expected to wrestle with Gd and want to fight Them in the yard sometimes. Obviously anything shared willingly with you by your family/community is fair game, but if you don't consider yourself Jewish you may still need to convert to get into the Deep Stuff. That said, there are totally Rabbis out there who would be willing to work with you. (When I told my Rabbi I considered myself a polytheist, he just replied, "Actually there's a decent argument for that if you look at X, Y, Z...") At the end of the day, your relationship with the Divine is your own, and it's okay to wrestle with the texts, disagree with some of them, and cobble together what feels the most Right for you. What helped me personally wrestle with the monotheism was pouring over religious texts and realizing Jews often define and relate to Gd in a way that is actually quite different from how we envision Pagan deities. HaShem is much more synonymous with how we describe the Universe or the All, and by definition there is only one All. Pagan deities can still exist within that framework. What works for me may be different than what works for you! As for witchcraft, it is 100% okay to not have your craft, even the Jewish elements, center around HaShem. Even many devout religious people are secular witches! It's all about where you believe your "power" is coming from and whatever you bring into your work.

All that said, if you do choose to become a Jew I would hope it is for more than just being able to access closed mysticism! You're already connected to the culture so you've likely already taken on some of that Peoplehood and generational trauma, but you also become a target of antisemitism rather than an observer which can be difficult.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Knight Tube: Andrew Doyle on The New Puritans

Stephen: I used to spend a lot of my time, most of my time in fact, going for fundamentalist religion. And then when this new ideology reared its head, I picked up on the themes pretty quick. And a lot of people who'd been following my work for a while sort of thought it was a deviation. And it was very difficult to explain to some of them that it's basically a continuation. Going for dogmas, tribe mentality, blasphemy codes, things like that. Bbut a few people would say, how can you call it a religion? It's been referred to as far left, progressive, woke, etc. And then how can we possibly label it a religion, when there's no god in the sense that a monotheism would have?

Andrew: Well, there have been lots of people who have argued that social justice, or what we call social justice, maybe the woke or critical social justice, is a form of religion in an authentic sense rather than merely as an analogy. People like Vivek Ramaswamy, John McWhorter, James Lindsay.

I'm using it more in terms of an analogy by which we might fully comprehend it. Because I think it has all the hallmarks of a religious movement. People can see that there's all these very powerful ideologues in positions of clout in society, and that they are doing all this kind of damage, and that they they brook no dissent, and they have a very specific sense of what you must believe, and they will police that through what we now call cancel culture, and they can see all of these things, and they ex-communicate those who who step slightly out of line, and they they brand people as heretics effectively. You even had that case with the protest outside of Netflix around Dave Chappelle where someone was shouting at one of the protesters to repent saying repent, saying "repent, motherfucker." So even using the language of religion themselves. And by framing it in those terms, it makes it accessible, and I think that's why I wrote the book.

Because above all, I think the reason why the new puritans are winning is because people don't understand them. It's because they use progressive sounding language to describe themselves. Things like "progressive" when they're not, they're regressive. They talk about "social justice" which sounds brilliant. They talk about "anti-racism" which sounds brilliant because we're all opposed to racism. They talk about equity, which is a bit of a fudge, because most people think they're talking about equality and they're not, they're talking about something different. But they use all these ideas, these phrases. They call themselves "left-wing" even though I don't think they are. And so people go along with it. Decent people think, oh well, I'm for all those things, I'm for equality, I'm against racism, so I'll go along with it.

But then they've also started to notice that actually, it's weird because the outcomes of this movement aren't that. The outcomes are creating more racial division, even outcomes such as the mutilation of children because of the extremities of gender identity ideology.

So all of this sort of stuff is now starting to make people nervous, but they still don't understand it. If they see it as a religion, then it makes sense because, as Stephen Weinberg, the physicist said, in a world where you had good and bad, you have good people doing good things and bad people having bad things but for good people to do bad things that takes religion. And that's the same with any ideology isn't it. But once you see it in those terms, once you see the chief proponents of this movement as high priests setting down their edicts and their decrees, once you see it in those terms, it really does start to make sense and clarify. And I think that's why I've done it that way. But I'm not saying it's a religion in a literal sense.

Stephen: Perfect answer. Might be worth a quick digression on Titania McGrath now. You're the brains behind that excellent piece of satire, in book form, Twitter form, and for a while you were doing remarkably well predicting the future with that account. You'd think of some absurd excessively woke claim about culture or society and put it out there, and life truly does imitate art in that sense. And I suppose my question would be, is this ideology, in regards to satire, does it make it easy to satirize or is it harder to satirize because it is so absurd?

Andrew: Well that's a good question. A lot of people think that things have gone beyond satire now because when you read these stories, they do seem so self-satirising. When they're talking about how fire engines are racist, or you know, cheese is homophobic, or whatever it might be. And you just think it's so silly, so stupid. But actually they believe it.

And if you'd have said, if you'd have made a joke, say 10 years ago, about there's a major invasion, Russia invades Ukraine, and on that morning the Ministry of Defense puts out a tweet saying, we're having a really great LGBTQ coffee morning where we're talking about pansexuality, and then on the same day you also have a front cover of the Daily Mail talking about how MI5 and MI6 are urging their spies to reconcile with their white privilege.

Stephen: Putin must be shitting himself.

Andrew: But it sounds so, it sounds like the stuff of fiction doesn't it? And if you'd have made that kind of joke about 10, 15 years ago, you would have thought, well it's funny but it's obviously never going to happen. We're in that world now, and I think we've kind of not noticed that seismic shift in a way. We've just been kind of carried along on this tide. All of the stuff that we now take for granted.

The fact that the police are routinely investigating non-crime. The fact that there are NHS clinics who are effectively fixing gay children through sterilization and medicalization. The fact that we have a broad movement calling for censorship. The fact that you now watch comedy shows on TV and scenes have been taken out because people at the BBC think you shouldn't watch certain scenes. The fact that there was a school board in charge of 30 schools in Canada that has removed thousands of books from school library shelves, and burnt some of them, and called it a "flame purification ceremony," in the name of progress.

All of this stuff, if you'd have said that to us 10 years ago, this is going to happen in 10 years time, you'd have said, don't be ridiculous, that cannot happen in a sane society, in a liberal society, none of those things can happen. People can't be arrested for quoting rap lyrics, people aren't going to be arrested for posting memes online, people aren't going to be teaching children that there are a hundred different genders. You'd never have believed it.

And what worries me now is that we're so in it now, we just sort of accept it. There was that TV show on BBC where a young child is being told about how there's hundreds of genders, and we just sort of now think, oh, we shrug don't we, and we say well that's the world we're in, let's just ignore that.

My point that i'm making in the book, hopefully quite clearly, is we can't ignore that. Because for every flippant, stupid story about Mr. Potato Head becoming gender-neutral, which sure we can make fun of and you know, it's probably best ignored, it is symptomatic of a much broader problem. Huge problem. You can't ignore it.

When the Ministry of Defense, when the police, when the NHS, when the government, when the civil service are all enthralled to this kind of stuff, you can't ignore that because those are the wheels of power. So, it's funny while it's a few students on university campus who are a bit overzealous. It's funny when it's just a few things like that, a few activists online screaming their nonsense into the ether. It's not funny when the leader of the Opposition is asked to define a woman and cannot do so because he's too terrified to say what we all know to be true. That's no longer funny. Well, I mean, it is funny, but there's a really dark element to that.

#Stephen Knight #Andrew Doyle #The New Puritans #witch hunt #witch burning #Salem Witch Trials #witch trials #moral panic #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #woke activism #wokeism #woke #antiracism #antiracism as religion #gender ideology #queer theory #ideological capture #religion is a mental illness

[coupleofdays]

As a direct analogy for what goes on inside real life computers, the original TRON film is, shall we say, somewhat lacking. Just to take one example, computer programs are represented as people, but they're driving vehicles from video games? But shouldn't those video games also be people? I could go on, but that's not the point of this post (or, perhaps, of the movie). Because I think TRON does work as a more overarching allegory, using mainly theological concepts to reflect the state of computing, and the changes it was going through, at the time of its making.

The religion of the Programs in the film is of a fascinating, extremely polytheistic sort. I'm no religious expert, so I'm not sure there's any direct real-life analogy to the concept of each individual Program having their own personal divine creator, "my User". Meanwhile, the villain of the film, the Master Control Program, is trying to stamp out this polytheistic faith, and replace it with monotheism, with himself as the One True God. But in the end, his ambitions are thwarted and he is defeated by Tron and his friends, leading to all the I/O Towers in the system lighting up and Programs presumably being able to directly communicate with their Users once more.

I think that this plot can be seen as an allegory for the "personal computer revolution" that was taking place in the 80s. Early computing was of a mainly centralized sort, with users connecting to a large mainframe through "dumb" terminals, the actual work being done at one central location and the results being sent to screens or printers. But by the time TRON was released in cinemas, people could have their own, much smaller computers in their homes, creating software and documents only for themselves, without having to rely on the processing power of a mainframe. The allegory of the film, then, is that the MCP is an old mainframe trying to maintain the old order, wanting the computers of ENCOM to be simple mindless terminals, with the Users getting access to their Programs only through the grace of the MCP. His defeat signals the end of this paradigm, with Alan, Flynn and everyone else finally being able to have their own "personal computers", though still connected to eachother. If I may be so bold to say it, the world had gone from digital monotheism to digital polytheism.

I also think that this allegory is still relevant today, since current developments in the way we consume media and use the internet seems to be moving back towards a kind of centralization, a kind of monotheism. Stuff like social media platforms (including, dare I say it, Tumblr) and especially streaming services feels to me somewhat like the MCP returning, only allowing us access to media by the whims of the real-life Dillingers in charge of the big corporations. Looking at the whole HBO debacle, I can hear Walter and Dillinger arguing. "User requests are what computers are for!" "Doing our business is what computers are for!"

I would be delighted if the next TRON movie adresses these ideas, though I have a certain doubt that a film made by Disney today would even dare to suggest that streaming services are anything other than the glorious shining future of media. I sometimes get the feeling that the vaguely anti-corporation concepts of the original film only managed to slip through since the higher-ups at Disney at the time weren't paying too much attention.

#tron #tron 1982 #streaming services #monotheism #polytheism #religion #disney #allegory #access to infinity train is suspended #report to dillinger immediately #end of line #I want Uprising on DVD dammit