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yusratoth · 2 years

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On recent events at the Temple of the Heart

This will be of interest only to a small number of people. Sorry about it.

The Temple of the Heart is a discord server -- if you know you know. Although the admins are evidently unclear on whether it is a religious community or not, on tumblr, the only place it advertises, it heavily brands itself as a Filian and Dean space. The "recent event" is unremarkable as discord servers go -- a single admin has been abusing her power while the rest of the admins, a tight-knit old guard, congeal like cops around the worst tendencies of their most outwardly aggressive. The rest of the team may as well not exist at all except to back her up.

Erin is a bully and her slanders against me are unacceptable. Others go along with them not because they think she's telling the truth, but because she is a bully and will jeopardise their position in the community. In this community, I am generally well-liked, and have quite a bit to gain back by clearing my name.

For instance, this shit's false, and like, obviously so. You gotta have worms for brains to think I think this.

Women should be financially independent and allowed to vote. I'm a communist from Albania, and my model for womens' rights is contained in this speech and other Albanian communist speeches from around the same time. I've linked to this speech in the server numerous times and explained my sympathies to it, and the idea that I'm some sort of secret communist with a secret agenda is absurd. I'm not a feminist sympathiser because the movement as it exists now is a tool of imperialism, and because it has no history in my country, not because I (a financially independent woman, not to mention a lesbian) don't think women should be financially independent. Any idiot can tell I got under her skin and now she's trying to slander me.

I'm not going to argue that I shouldn't be banned from TotH, because I should be. It's an intensely reactionary space. The inciting incident -- a crime for which I am not sorry -- was when I called Erin a thatcherite and asked if she'd ever had a job (the answer is no) after she downvoted an Uber driver for saying God is male, and then going on an insane rant about how taxi drivers literally shouldn't be allowed to talk to her, a white British woman. I'm not the bad guy here and anyone who has had a service or gig industry job will immediately understand this.

Erin's claim that I'm "too political" is particularly outlandish because Erin routinely defends the British monarchy and openly advocates for the de-industrialisation of Europe -- political stances if I've ever heard them. Banning me for defending an Uber driver is the most poignant, emblematic way that the politics of the monarcho-fascist, TERF-infested server could have manifested themselves, and my pride is fully intact after being banned because of it. There's no hill I'd rather have died on.

She is now, as I predicted, convinced that I have a "spy" in the server, and banning people without warning about it while the other admins sit around with their thumbs up their asses, afraid to stand up to her because they see how she's using her immense power in the community to attack my reputation in the most ridiculous possible way and alienate me from other people in the community.

PS: There's more than one spy, if by "spy" you mean "person who is on speaking terms with me and thinks you've gone insane and we laugh about it together". They all fully expect to be banned at one point, because by now everybody does.

Why are you here?

The admins, a tight-knit old-guard of orthodox filianists, have attacked me for not being a Filianist or a Deanist. This is not entirely accurate, and the reason I've rejected the label is basically semantic. I've asked a few times for a more broad goddess spirituality role in the server, to no avail, and because I have not wanted to proselytise my own religion, I haven't pushed it. Privacy is the lifeblood of religion in my opinion and I feel like this understanding of mine is well-understood. It's not often that we talk about what happens in private prayer in the discord server, because we're all adults, and that's not a social expectation. In my country, religion is a private matter, and even close friends and even spouses are not entitled to any information about it ideally. I've never felt that to be a barrier to getting along with other people in the server, though, and I've had no problem continuing conversations about religion while maintaining respectful boundaries -- in fact moreso than most other people in the server -- and I've never felt like these boundaries vary wildly from those of other people in the server.

Erin's conviction is that a Deanist is someone who thinks God is female. To me, this is nonsensical, and completely at odds with my understanding of both gender and monotheism. This does not, however, mean that I'm uninfluenced by the broader goddess spirituality movement and by Filianism in particular. Although the admin team have maintained that it's not strictly an exclusive space for what they refer to as "orthodox Filianists" and "broad Deanists", the admin team openly see it as their role to police the boundaries of orthodoxy, defined in the most British of ways -- which is to say, poorly. To elaborate.

I've rejected orthodox Filianism mostly due to some anti-materialist passages in the Clear Recital, particularly in Teachings II and in the later passages of Teachings I, as well as because it's not compatible with my actual religious goals. The shortest way to summarise this conflict is that to me religion is about understanding the world as it really is by contextualising information within a consistent world-outlook. Because of this, I can't have "religious beliefs" working their way into my ontology.

I've been meaning to write on the anti-materialism in Teachings anyway, and I'll probably follow up on that in a later entry in this blog. This blog is a thing now, by the way, being that one of my objectives in writing this is to establish a presence in the community beyond a discord server run by a bully and her pet jellyfish. But my disagreements with orthodox Filianism does not mean there is no Dean influence in my religion. It's just that that influence looks more like other things I've read on the web or in The Coming Age than what Erin thinks it should be -- insofar as I attribute feminine aspects to genderless divinities, they're a self-aware psychological device meant to temper the masculinity inherent in the cultural frameworks which I -- along with all people -- approached them earlier in life, not an ontological claim about the nature of the Creator and Creation. In Erin's, and therefore the server's, effective canonical view, Deanism is always an ontological claim and I reject it as an ontological claim.

Due to its anti-materialism, Filianism is politically reactionary. As a member of the server I sought to temper its reactionary tendencies and I did so very effectively. The day before my ban, Erin considered inviting a long-time tumblr mutual of hers, and posted the person's blog, praising their "vibes". Within minutes I'd read the person for filth, uncovering numerous posts in praise of Hitler and Nazism.

I recently advised a member of the server to seek a promotion on the grounds that she was able to catch the error of the other editors, who came dangerously close to publishing an interview with some mildly famous far-right figure. If it weren't for her, I said, the magazine would have published the interview, jeopardising its reputation with its primary demographic, young woke people. So she should seek a promotion and become an editor. By the same token, I am evidently The Person there who knows what a nazi is and why they are bad, and I should not be banned, but I should have an admin role if the server is going to continue to operate responsibly. Similar to the magazine, without my influence the reactionary tendencies of the rest of the server are now completely untempered. If Erin had aggressed that taxi driver and banned me about it a day earlier they would just have an esoteric Hitlerist in the server, probably fitting in great.

Do I have a political agenda? Oh, yes. I have never been secret about that. It was to prevent exactly this scenario -- to prevent an esoteric Hitlerist, or an entitled British coloniser, for that matter, from sinking their claws into a small, young religion and turning it into a force for arch-reaction when all it really needs is a bit of textual criticism and some historical context.

Regardless of all of this, the influence of Deanism in my personal world-outlook, my historical interest in 20th century NRMs and the goddess spirituality movement, as well as my friendships with others in the server made me genuinely want to see the religion last and grow. Because of this, I lined up a digital maintainence worker and offered to pay the bulk of the cost, even the entirety depending on what the costs turn out to be, of maintaining it. Again, Erin was the bottleneck, I asked her a few times to get the data from the previous admin of the website, since she's the only person who knows that person. She never did it. But for my part my commitment to digital archival of the religion is difficult to question and evidently outstrips anyone else's in the server.

I will continue to be involved in the weird internet people religions community, in the same capacity, because there are people here who just want to do cool religion things without establishing themselves as a vanguard of reaction with esoteric Hitlerists and people who downvote Uber drivers for nothing, which is where being "apolitical" with Britishers historically gets people.

My religion does not allow me to claim (inherently falsely) to be "apolitical", and one that does is inferior to one that doesn't, because not only is it a lie, as there is no such thing as being apolitical, but it is also not a good ideal, because a religion that is dead to the world is, as far as I (a person who lives in the world) am concerned, lifeless.

Anyway, to the person who ran the website -- Race? If you catch wind of this, please send me all the data from the website, I have infrastructure basically lined up to bring it back online and am still commited to doing that, despite the burned bridges with the TotH discord server.

To the rest of you, your community will die if it does not establish independence from this shitshow of an admin team before it grinds the server to dust. I'm not saying they're bad people, I'm just saying that the Uber rating system is too much responsibility for them, let alone maintaining a religious community. They're incompetent.

#deanism #filianism #filianic #deanic #filianist #independent filianist #paganism #new religion #religion #theology

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