stop thinking everyone you loathe will be tortured in the earths mantle forever
cope some other way this isnt healthy
not to be secular but the being that made the universe isnt reading your thoughts and weighing them against a book of rules to decide if you will get torn apart by demons forever or go to six flags with gramgram
and the important part of this isn’t that you’re wrong it’s that treating this as the default human experience is literally madness and makes you unhealthy and dark
there can be an afterlife babe stop trying to game it
christianity is fueled by trauma and spreads by creating it
i could couch this more but honestly yeah the teachings of jesus are neat but the text of the bible is cruel and twisted and unsustainable and that book did not solve humanity
it’s just a void you can stare into forever and pull others towards BY DESIGN
pascal’s wager: if indeed life as we know it is a temporary fragile miracle then you should definitely spend it dragging your family and neighbors into a cult about torture
I know a lot of very good Christian people who I care about deeply and I certainly don’t think Christianity is bad by default. But, I’ve been thinking a lot about the amount of religious trauma that I have lately. But like I grew up being afraid of Hell and thinking I could see demons as I went to sleep at night. I spent my adolescence afraid of the rapture and getting left behind. I had nightmares and panic attacks about these things into my adulthood because they were pumped into my brain from my earliest memories.
There was one time when I was a teenager that my family went to the grocery store and didn’t wake me up when they left. When I woke up I tried calling them on the phone and none of them heard their ringtones. After the like fourth attempt, I started to freak the fuck out. The only explanation my brain could think of was that the end of the world had started and everyone I cared about had been sucked up into heaven leaving me to deal with the end times alone. At this point I started panic dialing every single person I knew from church and progressively got more and more scared every time I got a voicemail. Eventually, I got ahold of my youth pastor and felt too embarrassed to say why I was actually calling, so I told him a lie about forgetting when youth group started that week. I was so close to crying at this point that I had to spend the rest of the time before my family got home telling myself that surely my youth pastor wouldn’t get left behind, so I was probably fine.
It was so hard to calm down and I basically had a mini version of this experience every time I was alone cuz one of the pastors at my dad’s church had been preaching constantly about the end times being near and how the majority of Christians weren’t true believers and wouldn’t be saved cuz they weren’t good enough. It got to the point that I had to ask my dad and step mom if I could go to a different service cuz this guy’s ‘teachings’ freaked me out so much.
Beyond these more specific anxieties, the doctrine of original sin and eternal damnation stuck with me and constantly ran in the background. I believed that I was a fundamentally evil creature and that there was nothing I could do to change that. I was taught that only Jesus could get rid of my evil nature and that redemption could only happen after I died, so I had to live with it for my entire life. It really fucks you up to have this headspace as a child.
Add one more brick to the rubbish heap:
And, on top of all of those- the Hell, damnation, obedience mantras, shaming, guilt tripping, terror, torment and tribulation, fundamental flaws of being human-ness and having human thoughts and actions, especially as a kid, because like, fuck, literally not being able to have well developed forethought, etc.
Add to it: Sons of God.
Eve was the downfall of humanity. Lilith became a fucking demon for daring to open her mouth and question her husband. Lot’s wife didn’t even deserve to be named for her sins- his own daughters were depraved beings. Hagar was at fault for the conspiring against her by her master and mistress. Sarai was at fault for laughing. Dina was at fault for being raped. The widows were helpless but for the intervention of the prophet. It was Miriam who was punished for their offenses, not Aaron. Even Jesus was gracious and showing of his extreme mercy and love- he went and talked with the woman at the well. He saved the harlot. He allowed Mary to listen. (When she should have been serving, in that her sister was right. Is God, then, a liar?) “‘I do not permit a woman to open her mouth, but if she has questions, let her ask her husband at home.’”
“Make no mistake, God has no daughters; we are all sons of God!” “Brothers in Christ”
(How many times did I beg? I just wanted to be righteous too)
And this is why I’m Jewish now. So much of this is twisting of a divine text by greedy men who sought to subjugate the world.
Also, as a Christian fundamentalist I tried to “martyr myself” for being queer.
And yes, that means I thought I was commanded by G-d to commit suicide.
The dominant doctrine of Christianity is a disease.
“I love you and know what’s best for you, so you have to do what I want or be punished forever.” and “I’m only hurting you because I love you” are all things abusive parents say and do.
People who really love you don’t try to control you that way.
(There’s a reason that a well-known book about surviving abusive parents is called “Will I Ever Be Good Enough?”)
How messed up is that? That this huge group of people have looked at the world and all the cool stuff in it, and decided that the entity in charge of it is an abusive parent writ large?
You do not deserve abuse. You do not deserve to be hurt for being you. Or for not obeying someone’s interpretation of a translation of a translation of something written thousands of years ago. Or for not meeting some arbitrary standard of “good enough”.
I do not care if something claiming to be God Themself is pulling that shit, it is not okay. Ever.
And frankly I’m suspicious of anyone who DOES think they’re actually “good enough” under that metric.
i was raised jewish by two jewish parents. i was told regularly by my friends and my friends parents that i was at serious risk of going to hell. they were worried for me. i worried for myself. my own parents said there wasn’t a hell, but everyone else was so sure. scientists said there couldn’t be hell. as a jewish kid and a lover of science and a lover of justice and compassion, i thought– surely there couldn’t be hell.
but everyone around me was so sure. so i grew up scared. i had a nightmare when i was about nine or ten where i was falling into hell, and a demon saw me falling, and he said, “you’re going to wake up this time, but next time you won’t.” and i’ve thought about it, on and off, for twenty years now.
i’m still scared sometimes. what if we’re wrong? i do my best anyway: we have to believe in justice, we have to believe in truth, we have to believe that it’s enough just to try. what if i’m wrong? what if hell is out there somewhere just waiting for me. i’m still scared sometimes, and i still don’t understand it.
i don’t think god and hell can exist in a just world, in a fair system, and if they do exist then it’s our duty to fight them both and reform that system. all i can do is live, and try, and hope.
but also: fuck everyone who ever told kids about hell. seriously, just, fuck them. what a bunch of assholes.
Just the idea that life, in all of its majesty, is a no-do-overs test to see whether you deserve to be tortured for Eternity is so sadistically cruel that it borders on the Insane. And the fact that you can avoid eternal torture only by meekly accepting your position in a hierarchical power structure should be making you very suspicious.
reblogging this to remind fellow Catholics that there are a lot of people suffering because of badly taught Christianity
I think that the greater something is, the more dangerous the corruption of it is
we have to be sympathetic when people come at us with these kinds of accusations, because there are genuinely people out there who have used perverted forms of Christianity to abuse people
there’s plenty of desperately needed evangelization to be done within the Church as well as without
“freeing up half the population from the endless tyranny of pregnancy“ Ernest, your misogyny is showing
What made you think of misogyny when you read that? The first thing I thought of was Sofia Tolstoy’s diary detailing the misery of 13 pregnancies.
My grandmother had to marry a man she didn’t love (and never came to love him either) due to cultural norms. She had 7 children. When she was ready to leave my grandfather, she discovered she was pregnant with baby number 5, my mother, and realized that she couldn’t get a job to support the kids because she was going to be pregnant THEN have a new baby to take care of at home.
My mother was born in 1957, a noticeably not good time for women to get divorced. In the USA, it wasn’t until 1975 that women could get their own bank accounts in their own name. My grandmother was a smart woman. Whatever her plan was, she had just figured out how to make it work and a baby made it all collapse.
My grandmother always resented my mother. Anytime my mother discussed having any goals my grandmother would say, “well what makes you think you could do that?” My mother has ASD and NPD, how do you think being raised in an unloving home effected her as a neurodivergent child? What type of mother do you think she became? (Hint: terrible and abusive.)
Forced pregnancy is a form of domestic abuse A woman cannot get pregnant alone. Men have absolutely used their role in conceiving a child to control women, clip their wings, and keep them vulnerable and dependent on their husbands.
Men, and misogynistic cultures, have without a doubt exploited the vulnerabilities that come with pregnancy in order to oppress women.
but it’s so, so important to recognize that a woman’s natural ability to become pregnant is not the evil thing here. We are not naturally oppressed by our own bodies. Our bodies are good.
The problem is not something that women do naturally. The problem is cultures that fail to accommodate women, fail to support them, or even force them into situations that are less than ideal (to say the very very least) for having children.
idk it just grosses me out that this man is saying that the problem comes from women’s bodies, and not from these outside causes, causes which are often a result of men objectifying women and not fully recognizing their human dignity.
all that being said, I do agree that the majority of these developments are very good, because they are based on the truth that women and men have equal human dignity
