I think a lot of people's idea of how religion works is that it's just an oppression factory or something. I'm not even just talking about Christianity here. It's like when people choose to wear clothing specific to their religion and people try to tell them that they're oppressed and they're like no lol my family would support me if I decided against it I chose this of my own free will and people still try to preach to them about their own experience or something.

Like yeah mandatory caveat that you need to believe people about their religious trauma but sometimes it really is fine. Sometimes it's hard to tell when it's fine. Sometimes it's not fine. And that's life. Religions are connected to identity and family and politics and heritage. All extremely messy things that don't have an inherent goodness or badness to them. Religion can be a tool of the oppressor or empowerment for the oppressed. Both things can be true at once. I'm not here trying to make excuses for anyone or anything. I'm just like. It's complicated. It's all complicated. It's more complicated than a lot of you seem to think it is.

I made my friend tweet this so that I could share it with y’all on tumblr

saying “be safe” like a spell that’ll protect them

love everyone in the tags saying “it is” you’re right

God loves your body. Your intersex body, your transsexual body, your nonbinary body, your transgender body, your genderqueer body, your androgynous body. Whatever body you have, God loves it dearly.

My body was carefully crafted by the hands of God, and that is a holy thing.

We are made in an image of God few are ready to accept yet. God cares about us exiles even if the criteria of men says otherwise.

Saw a friend post a meme about Eoster being the source of Easter and CORRECTING it to say that the source was ACTUALLY Ishtar, and I want you to know that the noise I made was inhuman, darlings.

Ancient peoples are a convenient source of information because they can't correct you and you can't prove that it isn't true. And that's why you get hucksters selling you miracle rocks to unblock your past life memories telling you that the earth is actually a dodecahedron.

It happens with whatever ancient people is hot right now. Celts, Mayans, Aztec, Egyptians... if there's a hole in the record keeping where a theory will fit, someone will sell you an herb encrusted candle about it.

You want ancient aliens? That's how you get ancient aliens.

The thing is that we DO know more about most ancient peoples than people want you to believe- we know what happened to Roanoke, we know what happened to the Mayans, we have records of how the pyramids were built. Records were kept, bog bodies have been studied, this is an entire discipline you can go to school for.

There is no proof that Ishtar was an ancient fertility goddess associated with rabbits and chocolate. There is proof that she was a power figure associated with lions. Eoster is a more likely etymological root of Easter because that was the name for the month of April. Whether that is also the name of a pre-Christian germanic spring goddess associated with rabbits and eggs is a topic of debate.

"The pre-Christian Germans stole Ishtar and the Christians stole her again!" No proof. Is it so hard to believe that both these interpretations aren't fully correct? And even if they were, is it hard to believe that two agricultural-based people's might have a goddess associated with spring independently of each other?

Easter is in spring. It has symbols of spring. It is in spring because it coincides with passover. It coincides with passover because Jesus was Jewish.

It's not that deep. Let people eat their potato salad.

The guy who came up with the "Easter comes from Ishtar!!!" crap was this Protestant dude named Alexander Hislop, who was just grabbing at straws to "prove" that the Catholic Church was actually the continuation of an ancient Babylonian mystery cult and therefore Totally Evil. It's literally just a conspiracy theory!

I would like to acknowledge this easter sunday x trans day of visibility cross over by celebrating jesus's transition from dead to alive #blessup #kingofkings #mytransking

there is an insane amount of antisemitism floating around right now.

i just want to say:

Interesting how the first real decision Adam made in the Bible was to put his love and desire to be with his partner over his ability to be with God.

And then people in the church are surprised when they tell people those are the options and people choose love.

✞ 666 ✞

I mean, I get that modern-day new age "cultural appropriation is fine actually" occultist types are trying to rebrand the infanticide demon as some sort of feminist icon, but just to be clear, Lilith is taken from Jewish folklore and her role there has always been "the reason children die", long before she was coqnflated with Adam's entirely hypothetical first wife by anonymous essayist Ben Sirach - and even there, it was still as an origin story for the infanticide demon

The occultist reinterpretation of Lilith is also taken pretty much wholesale from post-Enlightenment pop Christianity and is therefore steeped in antisemitic tropes. Aside from the cultural appropriation itself, there's also the accusation - that I've seen Lilith-worshippers make repeatedly - that Jewish people deliberately rewrote and distorted their own holy texts to erase Lilith, and the attempt to cast Judaism as some sort of ur-patriarchy directly responsible for all sexism today

Anyway I found a cake mix and had some scraps of things so I tried to make cupcakes. You can pinpoint the exact cupcake where I went "lol screw this my hand is broken"

Observe my hideous but tasty children. They've given me ideas for future endeavors and represent much needed calories

AM I GLAD YOU ASKED

Soapbox under the cut because I just can never ever shut up

Oh don't go hiding these straight facts in the tags my guy. So much of our modern culture is complete crap. Why don't we drink beer? Prohibition. Why is there hardly no facial hair? Anti hippie movement. Why is there so much effing sugar? See also prohibition and also also popular culture is shelling sugar so we've gotta ~blend in~ or whatever

[Uh this got away from me again so another break to spare y'all's poor dashboards]

You can believe in magic, but watch out.

It's fun learning astrology until you start to make broad assumptions about real people's behavior based only on their birthday.

It's fun to speculate about alien civilization until you say early cultures weren't competent enough to build their own pyramids or until scientologists stalk you for every penny you have.

It's fun dressing symptoms in mystical language like "empath" or "indigo child" until you go through life undiagnosed, unaccomodated and feeling less and less human.

It's all fun and games until Tiktokkers tell you hallucinations are actually attunement with a higher dimension and that you should stop taking your antipsychotics.

It's fun to think about possession and changelings until mom starts trying to "save" her child's soul or dad kills his family for having "serpent genes."

It's fun to see natural formations as if they were manmade until you start believing cultists when they say flying saucers are Antarctic Nazis.

You can believe in magic. It's fun to believe in magic. Believing in magic is valuable stimulation. But watch out. Remember your reality checks. There's a lot of cults and scams and white supremacists out there who want to sell you something, and that longing for magic to believe in is how they get you.

I’m listening to a podcast and the guy was like:

Okay so what if we discovered God. Would the mystery stop there?? What if there is a God who created our God. What if there is a God who created that God, etc etc.

Congrats buddy you just reinvented Mormonism.

Just a quick reminder~

Not all polytheists consider themselves as pagans, and not all pagans consider themselves polytheists. The two terms aren't universally interchangeable.

(Some people use the terms interchangeably for themselves because the terms are heavily intertwined for them. This is not the case for everyone.)