so i might be stepping out of line making this post but i feel it needs to be made so yolo i guess.

i know a lot of millenials have a sort of knee-jerk negative reaction towards abrahamic religions (really mostly christianity and judaism) and i understand. really, i get it. my dad is a pastor, and he used his religon to abuse, demean, and control me at every opportunity. he regularly tells my sisters that he’s “so sad im going to hell” and other sundry passive aggressive nonsense, so trust me i get it. i understand how a certain religion can be triggering to someone.

but there is a very important point here, and i really hope you understand this.

you cannot let it make you prejudiced, and, let me be clear here, im talking specifically about antisemitism.

i know exactly whats going on in your head, because for a long time it was what was going on in my head. you hear the word “judaism” and you have flashbacks to sunday school and the old testament and all the times you sat in a church and felt personally attacked, and you associate that with judaism and jewish people because most of the things that upset you were in the old testament. 

you can have your triggers, but you can’t let those triggers become an excuse to further marginalize a minority thats already attacked from literally every position of power there is. every major religion has leaders who are antisemitic, every country has a history of marginalizing jewish people, every person on the planet grows up in an inherently antisemitic world and has to unlearn that sort of toxic mindset.

and maybe this post should have been made by a jewish person, or somebody with more education on the subject than me but i think its really important that people don’t let their personal experiences with organized religion turn them into the kind of prejudiced person that hurt them in the first place. 

as a romni i have a shared tragedy with jewish people, so i feel like it was easier for me to step back and be like “woah, your thought process here is super toxic and you need to stop” but i feel like a lot of white christian-raised people don’t really have that touchstone and need somebody to be like “wake up, what you are doing is wrong”

I can remove this if you want but I feel a strong need to reblog

as a jew, i’m gonna add to this.

first of all. we don’t have a lot of allies speaking for us genuinely, instead of because of some sort of twisted “jesus was jewish” or “i can secretly defend my faith or politics using jews as pawns” so when y’all do it means a lot. we don’t see it much, so don’t feel bad for making this post.

second of all, the part that you didn’t know, through no real fault of your own, is that the version you learn in sunday school or from non-jewish sources? that isn’t even remotely how jews understand that source.

jews have a totally different relationship with our holy text than christians do. every jewish person is expected to know the “old testament” cover to cover then to freely access and participate in millennia of commentary and debate on it. the core book of jewish law is just a book of debates and discussions, many of which don’t even come with firm answers. and whenever it’s printed, it’s printed with centuries worth of commentary in the margins.

if you have and issue with or felt personally attacked by any part of the “old testament” i can guarantee that there are pages and pages of jewish commentary about that from the point of view you were looking for and several dozen you haven’t even considered. jews have never stopped questioning and arguing about this thing.

so when non-jews make the assumption that our religion is some sort of backwards or primitive thing based on a text they don’t care for, they are doing jews a double disservice.

i guarantee you some 1st century BCE judaen made the point that not eating shrimp because a book says to is kinda silly far more eloquently than you did, pal. heck. there’s a rabbi in the talmud who just straight up becomes a heretic.

judaism has been around and has been evolving as a culture and a religion longer than christianity has existed. it’s one of the oldest living traditions on the planet and its still growing and evolving.

i was going to add exactly the same thing: anything you learned about jews from christian sources, anything you learned from the “old testament” (which is obviously not our term for it), has nothing to do with actual judaism, our beliefs, or our practices. antisemitism is intrinsic to christianity, so if you expect them to tell you the truth about us, think again.

i also feel like it may be relevant to mention that this can also prevent a lot of secular/ethnic jews from wanting to connect to judaism as well. when you’re raised in a christian society, you internalize a lot of what you see & hear, even if you dont know or believe in the specific religious aspects of it.

i really only had interactions with christianity growing up, first through being dragged along to church with friends (usually after a saturday-night sleepover) & later when, through no fault of my family, i ended up at a baptist middle school for 3 years (listen, it’s a looong story). it was at this time i was also realizing i was attracted to girls, so obviously the environment was very toxic & damaging to me.

i came out of that place never wanting to have any interaction with religion ever again. i had no interest in connecting to my jewish identity on a spiritual or even communal level. christianity paints judaism as basically half-christian, only more punitive & primitive. over a decade later, when i finally began to sit down & actually learn about judaism, i found it was the complete opposite.

i’m not going to go into all the differences between christianity & judaism here (as tempted as i am), but i want to reiterate the above commenters & say: if you only know about judaism from christian sources or from a christian perspective (culturally or religiously), you don’t actually know anything about judaism. don’t associate our beliefs with what christianity taught you, because i guarantee you’ve been lied to about us your whole life.

Yes! I am honestly so glad to hear non-Jews saying it, because Jews say it a lot and it never gets much traction outside of those circles. I made a post like that and got a bunch of Jews saying “yes this” and a bunch of edgelord culturally-xtian atheists saying “uh sweaty actually Judaism is just xtianity lite and is responsible as much if not more so for all the shitty things I hate about Catholicism/evangelicalism/my personal denomination.”

I’m in a weird position between these worlds because I left fundamentalist xtianity and converted to Judaism, and even though I don’t believe in the things that hurt me anymore, I still have the trauma from it, and it’s really hard to process that/find likeminded people when a lot of them are blanketly anti-religious. Judaism, like a lot of religions, is an ethnoreligion, and it is inseparable from culture. Someone can be a Jew and be totally secular or atheist. When people say stuff like “I wish all religion would go away,” they’re advocating for cultural genocide, not just of Jews but of a lot of indigenous groups that have kept their religious traditions despite imperialistic universal religions like xtianity and Islam trying to deliberately destroy them (it is important to include Islam in this as far as world history, and it would be inaccurate and a disservice not to, but that also must be balanced by the fact that in the West Islam is a minority and is not to blame for what xtianity has done). With universal religions that seek to convert people, there is a distinction between religion and culture, because that is the only way they can convince people to go along with it. That is not a distinction that exists in many, maybe the majority, of world religions. These people do not understand this, because they only know xtianity and assume it can be directly transposed, but it can’t.

The minor comment I have as far as what’s written already is just a warning that “Abrahamic” is 99% of the time not an appropriate term. The problem is not that the term itself is bad, like how “judeo-xtian” is a bad term created with bad intentions, but because most of the time people use it, they are using it as a blanket term in a situation where a blanket term is not called for, and doing so still reinforces the perception that there are a lot more similarities between the religions that fall under this heading than there really are. Generally, you can just say whatever religion you’re really talking about, which is usually xtianity. I think people also are often afraid to say xtianity out of fear that they’re not being inclusive, and I am here to tell you that it’s 100% ok to just say xtian, and you will be correct most of the time, and in this case it’s still way less harmful to be accidentally not inclusive than it is to perpetuate the belief that they are basically interchangeable with some aesthetic differences.

I am glad that non-Jews are saying this. Non-Jews should be saying this. I’ve seen a few blogs with bios that say stuff like “ex-Catholic, not anti-religious” and that’s a good thing. But there are still quite a few people in the ex- circles (as well as the majority of atheists who feel the need to be vocal/proselytising about their atheism, which I also point out is just the same exact xtian belief that there is a Single Right Way and everyone else must be made to conform by whatever bullying is necessary, dressed up in different clothes) who do not understand this. I get that they are dealing with trauma there, but that is not an excuse to harm minorities. I have trauma, too, and I like to think I deserve to be able to talk about it with people who have similar experiences without the constant stress of having them be antisemitic. You can be angry at the group you came from and what happened to you; no one is saying you can’t. Just don’t be a jerk to minorities.

It is also helpful to you. Being raised in these kinds of groups gives you more unconscious beliefs/philosophies than just explicit religious belief. Being able to understand that things like guilt, your views about morality etc come from your religion/culture (and the religion that influenced that culture, even if you are not part of it) and are not objective truths about the world is extremely difficult to teach and pretty much has to be learned on your own, and it has the capacity to be powerfully healing, but you will never get there if you can’t first accept that not all ideologies are the same. So being able to identify the true source and cause of your pain and anger is important to you as well as to not hurt minorities.

If you want an example of antisemitic bias in cultural Christianity, here’s one common crypto-antisemitic belief you can unlearn right now:

🛑❌🚫“the god of the Old Testament is vengeful while the New Testament god is loving”❌🚫🛑

It’s simply not true.

Why is this belief so common? Because lots of people get their basic religious understandings through a Christian filter. This particular belief is rooted in the Christian concept of supercessionism a.k.a. replacement theology: the belief that Christianity is the updated Judaism 2.0, and that Jews are too stupid to abandon their now “outdated” 1.0 religion. The Old/New=hate/love division privileges highly biased Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, and repeating it supports the belief that Judaism is deluded, incorrect, and barbaric.

neiiiiiiillllll

sometimes I think about how red is the first color in the visible light spectrum to be absorbed in ocean water

and how many deep-sea creatures evolved to be red as a stealth adaptation, making them near invisible when there’s little to no light present

and it makes me think. If there’s never any visible light present in these animals’ lifetimes, if no ROV shines a little flashlight in depths that would otherwise not have light, would these animals ever get the opportunity to actually be red? that might be a stupid question.

imagine being a little deep sea creature and having no idea you’re red until something comes along and shines a light on you except you still wouldn’t be able to tell because you’re probably colorblind. anyway. I don’t know where I was going with this post

Is color relative? Or inherent? Or both???

Like is color physiological and determined by the shape of whatever pigment cells that will always absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others?

or is color meaningless if there’s no light to absorb and reflect?

Is it completely relative because the way we percieve color is subjective, how even within our own species there are so many different kinds of ways people can observe color?

makes you think

Red light doesn’t make it to the deep ocean from the sun, but that doesn’t mean red light doesn’t exist at that depth!

The stomiidae, which include the viperfish, dragonfish, and loosejaws, are one example of a deep sea animal that evolved to perceive and produce red light because it isn’t naturally present in their environment and most other organisms never hit on that adaptation. In most of this group, tiny red lights can be switched on and off throughout their skin to communicate with their own kind in secret. More threateningly, some of them have high-powered “floodlights” of pure red just beneath their eyes; almost no other deep sea fish emit actual BEAMS of light to illuminate what they’re looking at because that’d make them a shining beacon to every larger predator in the area, but since it’s red, the only risk ends up coming from their fellow red-light hunters and those remain just uncommon enough to be worth the chance. In many members of this group, most of all the loosejaws (hence the name), almost the entire skull can naturally detach from the rest of the body on specialized stalks at lightning speed so that their long, hooked jaws can grab prey in an instant, almost the same exact motion as the arm of a preying mantis:

If you were a little fish in this scenario you would see absolutely nothing but darkness around you and possibly feel pretty safe, because maybe you’ve evolved to blend in perfectly with the surrounding void and you can’t see any blue or yellow or green lights coming to get you. You have no idea that there’s been a spotlight right on you all along until its owner’s face flies off to impale you and shove you whole into its giant throat all in less than half of a second :)

by the time you realise that sex and gender are seperate, but also gender and gender expression are seperate, and also sexuality and sexual gender preference are seperate, and also sexual attraction doesnt equal sensual+aesthetic attraction, and also romantic attraction doesnt equal intellectual+sensual attraction, youre so fucking done with labels you just wanna abolish it all and most ppl dont get this far into it

I'm feeling a lot of pride in my alloaro identity today. I think that's such an unseen thing. Sure, it exists, it can be found. But so much of being alloaro is feeling shame and uncertainty and isolation. It deserves so much joy and pride. Being alloaro is really neat and badass, actually. It looks in the face of amatonormativity and sex negativity and runs in the other direction. It is such a radical, positive way of life. It gives so much autonomy, agency in relationships and life. As much as there is negative aspects to being alloaro, there is just as much, if not more, joy. Alloaro people deserve to be joyous, deserve to have pride, and we should.

Funny dog and rabbit what crimes will they commit solve

important!!!

transcript:

A person with a somewhat masculine voice says in a higher pitched tone, “Blue hair is weird!” They then change their voice to their regular tone, and say, “I’m gonna teach you this how I would teach a child. I don’t know your life story, but for the sake of making this an educational video, I’m gonna use stereotypes, so only take what resonates with you.

One child is born in a seemingly functional, to their awareness, loving family, while the other is getting quite the opposite. You can’t choose that you’re born with it, so you’re put out in this world and the majority of your peers are like you, and the majority of your teachers, parents and authority are like you, and the majority of the media out there is showing people like you. So all of the kids that are not depicted by this media feel erased and different immediately from the time they’re born, how they are born. You may feel too feminine as a boy, too masculine as a girl, like you’re in the wrong body, like you don’t think exactly neurotypically as everyone else, you’re too thin, you’re too thick, you’re too dark, you’re not dark enough. Kids like this immediately understand the struggle of not being accepted by the majority, and if it’s not the peers doing it, keep in mind they have the same authority and media only depicting the majority of one type of person.

So both the outcasts and the masses are gonna ask the same question of how do I fit into society, and the majority of the authority and media is gonna be saying things like “God is the answer,” “man marries woman,” “girls are this way, boys this way.” You have a set amount of rules that if you have no reason to question, you’re not gonna disagree with. But when this world has taught you it’s not for people like you, you’re gonna ask, “why is it that way?” which brings us to, “who is teaching us this?” Oh, people from this era or earlier, who’s making this stuff, people in this era or earlier, “Let me do my research on who taught them that stuff.”

A common flaw with human beings is that they accept societal norms that are only in place for a little bit over their lifetime because they never lived to see a reason to question it. When you are born in a world that’s seemingly against you, you have reason to research why these traditions are in place, and you say, “Wow, if I happened to be born in the 1900s, pink was for boys and blue was for girls, and cheerleading is for boys and heels are for men, and the bible was changed to be anti-gay”. It’s almost like what we are taught is unreliable and not inherently factual, and in the time this was being taught, no one in the masses was disagreeing.

Everyone’s born in a box, but we weren’t all born with default settings, so we learned that humans can express themselves however they want. The way you think that only natural hair colors is normal, or how you dress is the right way, or blue hair automatically makes you weird, or pronouns equals liberal, that is taught to you. If this existed in the 1900s, this would be awesome [he points at blue hair], and this would just be english language [he points at pronouns]. When you’re wildly accepted by the masses, I see why you wouldn’t want to step down, you’re at the top of the pyramid. But the reason that we dye our hair blue is that the only people that wildly accepted us are other people who weren’t afraid of being different.

Now listen, maybe you just like authentically being a part of the masses, maybe your true self likes this stuff, that’s fine. But you also have to acknowledge that you were taught to avoid anything that would get you bullied or a negative reaction by the masses. So therefore, who’s really the top of the pyramid? [He flips the pyramid drawing upside-down].”

End transcript.

2022

1. DRESS LIKE SHIT

2. KEEP YOURSELF SAFE

3. STOP WORRYING ABOUT HOW YOU APPEAR

4. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOOD

5. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WALK ON YOUR KNEES

6. ABORTION

7. TRANS RIGHTS

Fuck society lmao, I will have s-xual attraction without romantic attraction as much as I want <3

This zine is a practical guide to self-teaching herbalism freely and for free. Download from itch.io or email mildewamyx@protonmail.com to request a hardcopy.

Donations gladly accepted via ko-fi.com/herbalistatlarge but not required.

WHATS HAPPENING IN SERBIA RIGHT NOW

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Cheap/Free Seeds & Plants

If you go to any given store, you’ll probably have to spend ~$3 (USD) per packet of seed, that adds up quickly if you have big plans for growing your own food.  Here are a few ideas for how to get cheap/free plants for your upcoming garden.

The Free Seed Project - www.robgreenfield.org/freeseedproject/ USA ONLY. If you can’t afford seeds, are growing food for others, and/or a first-time gardener you can sign up to get seeds through the free seed project.  In 2020 they were able to send out seed packets to 5,000 families/groups and this year they are hoping to do 10,000.  Their seed packets contain ~12 different kinds of seeds including carrots, kale, and herbs.  This is completely free, no postage charges.

Free Heirloom Seeds - www.freeheirloomseeds.org They have sent seeds internationally before, contact them for details.  Free Heirloom Seeds will send 4 free packets of seeds per year to any household that signs up.  There are many many varieties to choose from.  They ask for donations ($1.25 (cheaper than SASE)) to cover shipping, but will send you seeds anyway if you can’t afford that. If you’re looking to buy seeds for an entire garden, they suggest a $10 donation to cover shipping for 15 packets of seeds.

Keep reading

On this day, 25 December 1914, 100,000 troops on the Western Front during World War I held an unofficial truce where they refused to fight one another. German troops began singing “Silent Night” in German, French and English, along with other Christmas carols. They decorated the trenches with Christmas trees, lit candles and hung multilingual banners wishing opposing armies “Merry Christmas”. Across much of the front artillery fell silent, British troops joined in the carol singing and both sides began to shout Christmas greetings at one another. On Christmas Day, soldiers began to climb out of the trenches to fraternise with the other side, bring back bodies from no man’s land and exchange gifts like tobacco, chocolate and alcohol. In several areas there are first-hand accounts of often-improvised football matches being played. The truce covered about 100,000 men, almost entirely on the Western front however there was also a small truce along part of the Eastern front between Austrian and Russian troops. Fighting continued in some areas. Henry Williamson, a British private, wrote to his mother on December 26: “In [my] pipe is tobacco. Of course, you say. But wait. In the pipe is German tobacco. Haha, you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh dear, no! From a German soldier. Yes a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday the British & Germans met & shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, & exchanged souvenirs, & shook hands. Yes, all day Xmas day, & as I write. Marvellous, isn’t it?” British authorities were extremely angered by the mutiny, and ordered that soldiers engaged in informal truces be court-martialed. Learn more about the Christmas truce in our podcast episode 38 with Srsly Wrong about mutinies, available on every major podcast app or our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/05/26/e38-mutiny-with-srsly-wrong/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1883807388471069/?type=3

“how can you be intimate with someone if you’re aromantic??”

sharing secrets, trusting them with your life, telling them about that stupid thing you did when you were 14 and haven’t told anyone else since, being there for them any time day or night, talking til three in the morning, letting yourself cry around them, sharing grief, sharing joy, getting excited about the things they’re excited about just because you love to see them so happy about something

an aro positivity post 😭😭😭 that lists ways to be intimate with someone 😭😭😭 that doesn’t alienate the touch averse 😭😭😭 and people with no/low empathy 😭😭😭