#the hebrew is essentially what he just said

[fromchaostocosmos]

I'm very frustrated with how the various youtubers and streamers talk about Ben Shapiro.

Because they do not understand or have the proper context when talking about him and everything he represents.

They also often go into antisemitic territory when mocking him, while it is unintentional and something they may not not even know they are doing, they are doing it none the less.

When they mock his voice or call him Shabibo that is actually antisemitic territory.

Due to a history of Jewish people having our names stripped from us and voices and names mocked. Now I too find his voice to be personally annoying, but I won't mock it because of said history.

It is not about the curtsy that Ben Shapiro deserves or doesn't deserve, but rather about deciding when it is okay to employ antisemitism against a Jewish person.

The answer is never.

The overwhelming majority of these commentators are not Jewish and the few that are Jewish don't seem to know any of the important details that make what Ben Shapiro says so dangerous for all Jews and such a false representation.

See what is not presented in discussions about him is that Ben Shapiro is not there to pull in a Jewish audience he is there as a token Jew to help further pull in an christian audience.

That is what makes it all so very insidious in nature. And sadly some Jewish people get fooled by this too because they do not look beyond the front facing facade he wears like costume, but they do not actually listen the words he says.

Ben Shapiro harps about a 'war on christmas' which no Jewish person would seriously do or care for. Especially any Ashkenazi Jews with our very long long history of being murdered in mass on xmas. Christmas eve is became seen a spiritually impure night that it would be called Nittle Nacht in Yiddish and Jewish people would purposefully not study Torah that night.

American Jews, like many others who belong to non-christian religious and cultural groups, have to deal with living a majority Christian country and country that culturally Christian and only makes concession for Christianity.

Has Ben Shapiro ever talked about that or the actual fights to get time off for our Holidays? No because that doesn't fit the narrative. But business having employees switch from 'merry christmas' to 'happy holidays' most certainly does.

Ben Shapiro has explicitly stated that he believes that conception is when life begins which is something to no in keeping with any Jewish held belief anywhere.

We hold life begins at first breath, the mother comes first (I wrote mother because that is wording used in the various writings, but really it would be the pregnant individual comes first), and that it doesn't just need to physical health on the line it can also be one's mental health at stake in order to need an abortion

Ben Shapiro talks about Judeo-Christan values, which a bullshit term that was created after the Holocaust to make it seem like Christian Antisemitism played no role in what happened and that the Church was not a guilty party. It is also a term that essentially holds Jewish people hostage.

He uses this term and talks about these shared values. So I have to ask what values?

Is respecting the elderly, caring for the sick, kindness to others, tending to the poor, and such? Because those are universal values and can be found in pretty much every culture and religion.

What about original sin? Heaven and Hell? Can someone be the literal child of G-d? Does G-d have literal hands, a actual face? What is the gender of G-d?

Just some questions to start with since you know we clearly have the same values and stuff.

Because Judaism would say: No such thing as original sin and in fact Hebrew doesn't have a word for sin we have words that mean things that wrongly translated in English as sin, but no, word for sin. We hold all people are born blank we go through and have experiences and make choices and those choices speak to who we are.

We believe in This World and The World to Come and the spiritual washing machine so to speak, but no a big nope to heaven and hell. No to Satan too. There is the HaSatan which means prosecutor who is as the name means in the Ultimate Court.

When we say "we are the children of G-d" it is poetic flourish and is metaphorical not literal no one can be the literal hild of G-d.

Same way we anthropomorphize G-d so that we have an easier time contextualizing G-d because otherwise it can be hard to wrap your mind around.

G-d is both genderfull and genderless at the same time. It depends on what you are talking about, in what context, and what aspect of G-d of you using. For example the Voice G-d and Presence of G-d are both in the feminine in Hebrew.

These have just been a tiny amount of examples from a vast vast array them.

My point is that if all these people are going to talk about Ben Shapiro especially ones with large followings please bring on someone who is actually knowledge and qualified to talk about this so the facts can properly be presented and explained.

Like I on occasion will listen to Leftovers podcast in background it hosted by Ethan from H3H and Hassan Piker and in the most recent episode that I was listening, which I had to stop because I was getting to annoyed by, they where talking about Ben Shapiro.

It was very frustrating for me. I get that Hassan might be very politically involved and knowledge about stuff, don't really know I don't watch him, but I was thinking the whole time that this is not an area you know.

You are talking about Jewish stuff and things related Jewish views points and you have no clue what you are talking about. You are talking about a religion and culture you just don't know anything about and are trying to debunk Ben Shapiro.

It will not work because you don't have necessary information and understanding to do so.

And you are missing the biggest point of it all which is again Ben is there as a draw for Christians. Because for these kinds of Christians having a Jew give a stamp of approval gives it some kind veneer of legitimacy.

It validates them and allows them to not have to feel guilty for crimes against Jewish people that they are party too.

This doesn't mean they like Jews or want us around or interested in our problems or helping us.

It is all about them in the same way they have Candace Owens tell them all the thing they want to hear so they never have to self-examine or reflect on anything and can assuage their white-guilt and keep of being horrific anti-Black.

They don't care about Black people or Black issues because they listen to a Black woman talk.

It is all for self-serving interests that they have been Ben and Candace there. While many seem to get that point (if you didn't get it before well get it now) in regards to Candace Owens and the purpose of her employment they miss that very important detail when comes to Ben Shapiro.

#ben shapiro #antisemitism #jumblr #christian antisemitism #evangelical antisemitism #protestant antisemitism #an essay of a post

[facingthenorthwind]

So while reading Halo Effect, I naturally became obsessed with the one (1) Jewish character who turns up twice, one as a brief mention and one to write a single letter. Because I am extremely normal, I am writing a fic about him. Technically I've only written the first half (the second half is Peter and Thomas meeting up with him), but it's self-contained. It's been written for literal years, so I figure I should at least post it on tumblr. I hope you enjoy it, @alex51324!! (Also I haven't Yiddishised the Hebrew yet because I only know the standard pronunciation but I'm going to get someone to do it before I post it on AO3.) Hopefully this is comprehensible to non-Jews?? Please let me know if not.

Is it breaking a mitzvah if I say mourner's kaddish for someone who might not be mourned otherwise without a minyan? At most, there's a Green who has a J on his identity disc on one of the wards, but he's currently on so much morphine I don't think he'd remember the words, Issac wrote to his father once he finally got back to his unit. Honestly, he didn't much care what his father wrote back — if God didn't like him saying kaddish for Fitz, God could come down here and tell him what alternative he had. He asked his father to send a candle so he could light it for Fitz, but crossed it out and asked him for ten candles. Fitz may have been the first, but he sure as hell wouldn't be the last.

The news of Fitz’s death had preceded Issac’s return, but nobody had touched Fitz’s belongings yet. Cruelly, the most essential things, the things that meant most to him, had gone down with him, but Rouse eventually laid out everything that was in Fitz’s rucksack so they could decide what they should send back to his family — well, his brother. Fitz had said he didn’t have any other family left. 

They decided they’d split his cigarettes between them — Scogs tried to crack a joke about how Fitz had always been so free with his cigarettes it was almost like he wasn’t gone, but he trailed off, and no one laughed. His large collection of letters went in his rucksack, of course (he seemed to get them constantly, all from different people; sometimes he had even acted as some kind of go-between, passing on information from one letter-writer to another, as if they couldn’t just write to each other themselves). The scarf he’d worn every day from Christmas until mid-April, when even he couldn’t deny it was too hot, went in as well — Issac had always thought privately that it was fairly ugly, but then again, if he tried to knit a scarf it would probably turn out much the same. 

Dawson got Fitz’s copy of Prester John out of his own pack and removed his bookmark before handing it over to Rouse. “He’s made some little notes in it,” he said. “Nothing all that interesting yet as I can see, but it doesn’t feel right to keep it.”

Rouse packed it and Scogs didn’t mention that he had been next in line to read it. One of them could write home to get another copy, probably. Issac was sure he could — he had already received several yellowbacks which he’d left in the break room once everyone had read them so they could find a new home. Fitz’s sewing kit, playing cards and the various other things he’d been sent went on top and by the time they were done there was an all-too-noticeable hole where Fitz had once slept. 

It was only then that Issac noticed Rouse had gained corporal’s stripes. It made sense — Fitz needed replacing and Rouse was an obvious choice, being the smartest of the lot of them. He congratulated him, but Rouse wasn’t offended that he didn’t quite hit the right tone and his smile didn’t reach his eyes. Rouse’s didn’t, either.

When he arrived at the wards for his next shift, Captain Russell clapped him on the shoulder and gave him an extra ration of brandy. And then they just had to get on with it.

------

Fitz’s brother never replied to the letter he sent, so Issac kept saying kaddish for him past the thirty days that were traditional. He knew there were lots of reasons he might not have written — maybe it got lost, or he didn’t want to hear from Issac, or any number of perfectly innocent explanations, but as Issac watched men die day after day he couldn’t stop thinking about how if Fitz’s brother was dead, there was no one to remember Fitz as family. 

He said it for eleven months, as he would for a brother — four months longer than he’d known him. About six months in, Rouse wrote to him saying that he’d been stationed with Fitz’s brother at a CCS. He was a corporal, apparently, and Rouse said he reminded him of Fitz — that they said some of the same things, though in temperament they were pretty different. The war dragged on.

He kept a list of people in his units who died as he transferred from place to place, but it quickly became clear that he couldn't light a candle for each of them. The list just kept going, a litany of names followed by the date of their death in the Gregorian and Hebrew calendars. Jerry Scoggins, 30 September 1915/22 Tishrei 5676. Billy Dawson, 2 October 1915/25 Tishrei 5676. Fred Keighery, 4 February 1916/30 Shevat 5676... It felt like keeping track of their yahrzeits was more of a motivation to note the Hebrew date than keeping the holidays, since it wasn’t like he could, not really. Even as he tried to pray every day for whatever service he had free, the words of the festival services just made him homesick, and he didn’t have any of the things you should have: matzah or his mother’s blintzes or a lulav. 

He wrote to Moishe about studying the RAMC periodicals at Shavuot instead of Torah; it felt... oddly fitting. He knew, logically, that this war was man's fault and God didn't have anything to do with it, but that didn't provide any comfort when he was on death watch, sitting beside a man who gasped as he drowned on dry land. If the only control he had in this hell was giving two fingers to God, then he was going to take it. 

His father sent him a machzor so he could pray Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but he got to Unetaneh Tokef and didn't even have the energy to be embarrassed when someone found him crying ten minutes later. Reciting the ways people would die in the coming year — who by water, who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast — felt absurd when he could list just as many from who was on the wards. Who by phosgene, who by sepsis, who by bullets? And for the machzor to claim that repentance, prayer and righteousness averted the severity of the decree — that sure hadn’t fucking worked for the soldiers getting killed. It hadn’t worked for Fitz or Scoggins or Keighery or— 

By the end of 1917 he could no longer go over the top, having lost his hearing in his left ear from a shell exploding too close. The letters he received detailing how his nephew he’d never met could talk in whole sentences now and how Mr Rabinowitz had fallen and broken his leg felt like missives from a world he would never return to again; how could he, when all he knew was the war?

The Armistice meant the supply of wounded slowed, but he didn’t go home — he was stationed at a general hospital, so there were still plenty of cases coming through. Even when they offered to send him home because he wasn’t regular army and they were well aware that the other corps had mostly got the wartime recruits out… he knew it was cowardly, but he accepted the offer to stay on until the RAMC left France. He couldn’t picture how he was going to fit back into the Leylands, and perhaps if he put it off long enough he’d finally work it out.

He did not.

When he finally got off the train at Leeds, it felt a little like a fairytale — he kept being shocked that he could recognise the buildings as the train came in, and it sounded the same as it had before the war. The back of his throat began to ache, though he wasn’t sure why, but before he could focus on that his mother was calling his name and hugging him. Had she been there the whole time? She gave him a kiss on the cheek and led him to everyone else — there was Shoshie, who grinned at him and then prompted the child hiding behind her legs to greet his Feter Itzik. While the nephew he’d never met hid his face in her skirt, his father embraced him with a decidedly gruff, “Son.”

And at last there was Moishe, his smile twisted by the scarring on his face. He looked like he understood the slight bewilderment that must have shown on his face. “Glad they let you go eventually,” he said, slapping him on the back. He spoke into his right ear, probably noticing that Issac had turned so he could hear the people in front of him more clearly with it. 

“Yeah,” Issac said, not trusting himself to say anything else lest he start crying. 

“See, he’s not scary, Dovid,” Shoshie said, having coaxed his nephew out in front of her. “Say hello.”

“Hello Feter,” he said at last. “Why don’t you have a face like Feter Moishe?”

“Dovid!” Shoshie said.

Moishe shot Issac a grin. For the first time in too long, Issac laughed.

#emma writes things #halo effect #alex51324

[thesherrinfordfacility]

clearing out the drafts of Random Things I've Noticed if you can't tell but here, have another one - this building on the end of aziraphale's row of shops, on the other side of the record shop:

now im fairly certain about two things. first, it's called 'Alf Laylah wa-Laylah' - translated to english from arabic as One Thousand and One Nights. i can't quite tell at this quality if the writing below it is hebrew or yiddish, nor if it's a translation of the text above it (although, as best as i can tell? it isn't? but not sure)

im also not entirely sure on the relevance of the reference - if there is any to be had - to the story compilation that is One Thousand and One Nights, to tell the truth. the immediate thought that springs to mind is how scheherazade tells the king countless folk tales and stories over 1001 nights in order to keep him in suspense of hearing how the stories end - so he essentially stops killing women as revenge for the infidelity of his wife (it's a whole thing), whom he eventually pardons/spares from execution.

all the tales - as well as returns to the 'present' - include debate on philosophies and ethics, and explore various themes and topics, but regardless... my thoughts are somewhat jumping between this, the questions around the reliability of events as presented in s2, the flashbacks and the Lessons, etc. maybe that's not the link to make here, but it's all im coming up with so far.

but back to the building, and the second thing: think that the stars on the bottom half of the building, in the specific configuration they're shown, are the kaheksakand (estonian) / auseklis (latvian) - an eight-pointed star representing fertility and life, the triumph of light over darkness, as well as used as a protection symbol against evil (aptly placed outside the door).

there's a lot to go into re: the symbology behind '8', including its relationship to the concept of balance and harmony, especially in nature. the eight-pointed star in general, not just in the above exact shape, has dozens of cultural, religious, and mythological links (tbh it's probably featured in some capacity in nearly every culture), but i think particularly apt is how it links to venus aka. the morning star.

in the interest of keeping this brief (im sure cleverer people may wish to clarify/develop this more!!!), and keeping on track with where its place may sit in the show, i think it's first of all potentially of interest how this building is lit, given the above. we see the shot of the bentley arriving to whickber street in ep1 at night, and this particular shop (?) front is the most brightly lit... might mean nothing, might mean something:

but when the demons descend in ep5, a good portion of them appear out of the mist from that direction; a green mist (green shop?), reflecting the hell vibes we saw in ep1 etc. that being said, when crowley starts sensing Trouble Is Afoot earlier on, he's looking in all directions and certainly we see some demons behind him (in the direction of the dirty donkey) when he confronts this particular little gang of them, so unless some demons started arriving ahead of schedule, they may not have all come through this building:

but. we know from eric that the lift is broken, and the only other routes are the small lift, one at a time, or the stairs. shax obviously arrives in style, but the other demons? taken the stairs. what if this front is that exit onto earth? but just the back stairwell?

there's so many potentially loose threads to weave in here, and im sure i'll come back to this at some point, but felt it was an interesting design choice nonetheless, even if it ultimately means naff all✨

#good omens #i'll come back to this im sure #props meta #thats probably the most accurate tag for the moment

[neechees]

Ooo could you elaborate on the historical version? I'm curious

We don't know a WHOLE lot about historical Jesus, but we know that there was definitely some Hebrew dude named "Jesus" living in Palestine (specifically Galilei/al-Jalīl), that he lived close to around the era that Christian Jesus did, and that he was causing some problems for the local government, and was definitely crucified.

Specific details of his life and the historical accuracy of events & interpretations of the Bible are very debated and discussed on what exactly might have happened, but the first paragraph are essentially all the basics of what is generally agreed upon about information on historical Jesus based on evidence.

What i find so interesting is just that I wonder what this guy was ACTUALLY doing to have spawned a whole religion because, despite what angle you take or what religion you are, historical Jesus and his activities to make people believe he was the son of God (which, he may not even have said this or believed this about himself) makes me wonder about it. I love history, so naturally i like the historical angle, and the idea of just some guy causing such a ruckus at that time is just waaay cooler to me than an actual "son" of God.

There's a whole video on historical Jesus here if you're interested

#jundaydream

[widthofmytongue]

The other night I had drinks with coworkers. I increasingly dislike all of them. The topic of the Coronation came up, unsurprisingly. One of my colleagues said ‘we should have done what the French did’, and me and one other kinda went ‘haha yeah!’ and I thought for a moment that maybe I wouldn’t be in the political minority, even if these people will never be dedicated to the pursuit of global communism. My boss said, unironically, ‘what did the French do?’

Now I knew this was a bad sign, but me and person who initially referenced the French Revolution tried to sort of extol a few key details of the abolition of monarchy and formation of the First Republic, with probably disproportionate attention on the Terror. But anyway, my boss said something like ‘my knowledge of history isn’t great before the war’, and I asked genuinely ‘which war?’, which was interpreted as a sarcastic joke.

Anyway, this led to talking about WWII. Someone said something like ‘well the Second World War was unique among wars because it was essentially good versus evil’, to which I interjected ‘well kinda more like evil versus evil, right’. The response to this, from all three of my colleagues in the conversation, was ‘oh right, the Soviets’. I think if you follow this blog (or especially my politcal sideblog) you may have encountered my generalised view of the Soviet Union. Keeping in mind that it was Gevurah ShebeHod (since most of my personal posts seem to mark some significant point on the Hebrew calendar), I tried to rein in my response, and just said ‘interesting that when I mention the evil superpowers of the Allies in WWII you say the Soviets but not Britain or America.’ So the following dialogue came out of this:

Colleague (with history degree): Well I don’t know much about Roosevelt’s policy or ideological allignment... Me: Well he kinda committed genocide against the Navajo. C(whd): ...Churchill may have been a shitty guy... Me: Well he kinda committed genocide against India and Palestine. C(whd): ...But Britain essentially had to go to war with the Nazis. Me: To safeguard their material interests though, right, not for the altruism of saving the brutalised people of Europe. C(whd): Well Britain didn’t have any interests in Poland. Me: Well I think upholding a status quo is a very strong material interest for imperial Europe, but I was really talking about North Africa and the Middle East. C(whd): But those regions weren’t threatened by Germany, but by Italy. Me: Do you honestly think Churchill or whoever was thinking in such a two-dimensional way as to see these powers in a vacuum? [I wish I’d said ‘I think they were pretty threatened by Britain too, and remain so.’] Colleague who’d followed silently: Well every government has done horrible things at some point. Me: And yet when I mentioned evil versus evil, you all glanced right past the genocidal empires of Britain and America to look at the Soviets. Boss (unironically): I didn’t think when I mentioned the war that we’d be talking so much about genocide.

Now I wanna leave this on a couple crucial points. One is that I am very overt about being Jewish. I mention observing religious festivals; I use lots of Yiddish and occasionally Hebrew phrases; I have a hamsa and a Star of David badge on my backpack, as well as on the jacket I was wearing that night (I also have a Lenin badge on the jacket). The idea that these three white English men entered this conversation about WWII with a Jew and then were surprised (it was very clear they were all surprised and uncomfortable) at the mention of genocide is baffling to me, but I think all too common. I didn’t even mention the Shoah (although I think I did eventually say something like ‘I don’t think invading other countries is the greatest evil for which Nazi Germany is remembered’).

At some point later in the conversation I said something like ‘for all the negative views abounding on the Soviet Union, speaking as a queer Jew, I think I’d have preferred to live there than in Britain at the time’, to which my colleague with the history degree replied ‘well I obviously can’t speak to that’. It was very clear that he meant he can’t speak to Jewish and I guess queer identity. Now this is not the first time I’ve encountered this, but I think it’s an important phenomenon to observe. I once said to another colleague ‘well, there are lots of people in this country who want me dead because I’m Jewish or nonbinary’, and she said ‘well I can’t even imagine what that’s like’.

What I want to rhetorically ask is: why can’t you imagine it? Why do you imagine you’re safe from these same people? First they came for the communists, then they came for the Jews, then they came for that guy who wrote the poem! Eventually they’ll come for you too, when they drum up some new group to hate and mobilise against. If you can’t imagine what it’s like for fascists to want you dead, maybe you should try?

[postsforposting]

the god damned shaking camera in GO s2

No, literally.

These aren't the only time the camera shakes--specifically the camera, and not the environment, like when the characters stumble and lose their footing because the actual ground is shaking. The camera is also not terribly smooth in s1 either, but it's far less noticeable. In the last gif, that's the present day--so this happens in the present too, not just the past.

Every single one of these moments where the camera shakes happen at a crucial moral, character-point: a point that changes the characters' values, who they are.

What is actually shaking, though? The camera is essentially our view; in s1 our view was god's view. That makes the camera-view the sky, aka the heavens. The heavens are shaking.

Biblically, a "shaking of the heavens and earth" is a common phrase, and it's tied to the end times. Shaking of the earth is used to indicate god's presence and power--in GO we saw Satan's arrival shake the earth, and when angels and demons arrive they often cause a little quake. The shaking of the heavens refers to the destruction of the enemies of the righteous, of Jesus (keep in mind this is about real Christianity, not GO itself):

For Hebrews, the “shaking” of heaven and earth refers to the judgment of the enemies of God. This is what God promised at the enthronement of Jesus. God said to Him: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Heb. 1:13, ESV). Thus, Jesus has defeated the enemy (Heb. 2:14–16) and been enthroned (Heb. 1:5–14), but the enemies have not yet been destroyed (Heb. 10:11–14; 1 Cor. 15:23–25). But God will destroy these enemies in the future, when He will shake the heavens and the earth. The shaking of the heavens and the earth means, then, the destruction of the earthly powers that persecute God’s people and, more importantly, the destruction of the evil powers (Satan and his angels) who stand behind the earthly powers and control them. God has also announced that He will “shake” the heavens and the earth, which means that He will destroy enemy nations. Many modern translations of Hebrews 12:27 suggest that the shaking of the heavens and the earth means that they will be removed and forever gone. The Bible is clear, however, that God will create new heavens and a new earth (Isa. 65:17; Rev. 21:1–4), and we will be resurrected and have a new body (1 Thess. 4:13–17; Phil. 3:20) on this earth. Thus, the “shaking” implies the cleansing and renovation of creation, not its complete removal. What is here will be re-created, and it will be where the redeemed live. There are some things, however, that will not and cannot be shaken. They include the righteous. They will not be shaken because they trust in God. The Creator sustains them and guarantees their survival. Note that in Hebrews, permanence and stability are associated with Jesus. [...] In the final judgment, those who hold fast “in Jesus” will not be shaken (Ps. 46:5).

There are some things, however, that will not and cannot be shaken.

The characters in scenes where the camera shakes are not themselves shaken. Why not? They're not the enemies who are being destroyed.

What is, then? Who, or what, are the enemies?

Hate, distrust, bystanding, the morals of heaven, all that nasty stuff. You know, evil.

In the first gif, the angel who will be Crowley creates the stars with Aziraphale's help, shares info and concerns with him, and shields him from the fireballs. The scene gently bops around, but the true shaking is during the creation of the nebula and at the end as shown in the gif. Any angel could have happened by and could have participated up until the end, but Crowley shows us he doesn't really care for just anyone: he doesn't introduce himself. His act of shielding Aziraphale at the end, then, is meaningful and specific to Aziraphale, for specifically him, not just anyone.

During the Job flashback, there are several shakes, but it's most obvious during the ox rib temptation and feast. Crowley does not judge Aziraphale for indulging, and they both experience changes: Crowley learns he's not alone in doubting and being a black sheep, learning to trust outside himself and especially in a group that's done him harm, and that he enjoys someone else's joy; Aziraphale learns physical experience, that not everything he's been told about himself and his people is true or trustworthy--the first steps to doubt, and the first steps to trusting. What is reduced is distrust, indifference, and lack of care for people you are supposed to hate.

The demon attack on the bookshop forces Aziraphale to take drastic measures, specifically acts of war, to protect two humans. He permanently discorporates a lot of demons to protect both Gabriel and the humans. Gabriel has harmed him in the past, tried to kill him, and the humans have done nothing to help him, indeed they put themselves in this situation by refusing to leave when he told them to and who caused the problem by allowing the demons into the shop. Aziraphale is showing how far he will go to help others, even others he himself does not like, others whose predicament is both their own fault and who have put Aziraphale himself in danger. He believes it's not right to allow demons to have them: sinning, even against an angel, should not result in eternal punishment in hell, and he's willing to go to war over this. That's the final evil to be purged, of course that would shake the heavens, literally and figuratively.

What does all the Biblical stuff mean for the GO universe?

The afterlife system is an enemy of Jesus. God herself is an enemy of Jesus. Perhaps we don't hear god this season because she's being transformed, or utterly destroyed, by the second coming herself: it is written that all enemies will be destroyed, and what is written must come to pass. Will god herself be overwritten, like Gabriel was? Will god fall, like her own angels fell, and be remade? Will her identity too be lost, like Lucifer's was lost? Like Gabriel's was threatened?

Rebirth is a huge theme; it's what the second coming actually is, both for Jesus and for humanity. Jesus is reborn, and Jesus is god. Perhaps whatever happens to Jesus, also changes god herself. Perhaps the universe itself will be reborn too, with a new god, where the Fall never happened, where the horrors of the bible never happened, just like in s1 where Satan was never Adam's father. It would be a perfect symmetry, where god was never humanity's mother, and that would reach back to before the beginning to change when god originally planned it. It would change god herself, as it changed Satan himself, and rippled through all reality.

At the end of s1e6, we do hear god say: "Perhaps the recent exertions had had some fallout in the nature of reality, because while they were eating, for the first time ever, a nightingale actually did sing in Berkeley Square. Nobody heard it over the noise of the traffic, but it was there right enough."

How do you make a horrific god into a good god? You don't, unless you reboot it and utterly remake it. Perhaps that's why there is no god in s2, because the nature of reality has changed. Perhaps that's why there's weird time issues. Perhaps the nature of miracles changed, and what was previously impossible is now possible, or the opposite.

#good omens #shaking camera

[creature-wizard]

Why David Icke’s reptilian aliens are sparkling antisemitism

If you’re unfamiliar with the rhetoric of antisemitism and the politics behind the ancient aliens movement, you might not be aware of just why David Icke’s take on reptilians (which he published in The Biggest Secret) is so harmful. After all, what does proposing that the British royal family is secretly a bunch of space lizards really hurt? The British royal family will probably never be harmed by Icke’s nonsense, but a lot of other people are definitely put in danger by this book. I’ll try and sum up some of what’s in it, so you can see why. Icke borrows from Erich Von Daniken’s (extremely racist) idea that the Babylonian gods were aliens from space, and he claims that European royal families are of “Aryan-reptilian bloodlines.” From the start, he has placed the source of what he believes to be a contamination of the human species in the Middle East, among a culture regarded as Semitic. He claims the reptilians established the Babylonian Brotherhood, a secret mystical order that apparently has nothing better to do than rule and oppress humanity. Like many amateur historians and wannabe anthropologists, Icke falls into the trap of assuming that if two cultures have anything alike, then one must have derived from the other. He brings up spurious - if not now-debunked- claims about modern Christianity being identical to various pre-Christian traditions; EG, such as Jesus and Horus being identical. He also tries to claim that the Babylonian Brotherhood is in control of all major religions right now: Eannus, it was said, held the keys to the doors of heaven and he was the sole intermediary between God and humanity, therefore any belief not supported by him was false and should be condemned. This was a wonderful tool for the Babylonian priesthood to impose their will on the populous and exactly the same scam has been played by their successors, the Christian priests, the Rabbis and the priesthoods of Islam, Hinduism and all the rest. If you’re mostly unfamiliar with religions outside of Christianity, you might find this plausible enough. You might not recognize that the assertion that all religions work like Christianity as David Icke knows it - IE, claiming to have an exclusive monopoly on truth and salvation - is absolute bullshit. Icke claims that the reptilians eat human flesh and drink human blood, and claims they instituted the practice of human sacrifice wherever they went. The notion of a blood-drinking cult can be traced back to pre-Christian Rome, when Romans would accuse early Christians of drinking actual human blood. Later, Christians would shift the accusations against Jews, accusing them of drinking the blood of Christian children. In other words, this is blood libel. He claims that the Babylonian Brotherhood is controlling “apparently unconnected companies and institutions like politics, banking, business, the military and the media.” Guess who else has been accused of controlling banks, the media, etc.? Icke claims that most people who call themselves Jews aren’t actually real Jews because something something Khazars from the Caucasus Mountains. This is an old antisemitic canard.

Icke singles out the Jewish Rothschild family as one of the reptilian bloodlines. Like a good white English boy in denial of his own people’s racism, he claims that Aryan reptilians were responsible for the Nazi party’s belief in white supremacy. This is one step away from the Amerifash and Britfash belief that akshually, the Nazis were secretly Jewish/manipulated by Jews all along. Icke claims that the reptilians essentially dictated the entire Hebrew Bible to the Levites during the Babylonian Exile and claims that Jews are supposed to take the Bible super literally. He tries to play off the people he considers to be real Jews as the poor manipulated victims of this terrible conspiracy, and basically acts like hate and violence is the religion’s true core. You can tell that he’s never done any research into how Judaism is actually practiced whatsoever. He claims the ADL is run by the Babylonian Brotherhood, because he can’t imagine anyone having any legitimate reason to take offense at his bullshit. Besides all this, the book is filled with a dazzling amount of fake history that has the same amount of validity as “popcorn starts with P, P rhymes with C, C sounds like sea, therefore popcorn is harvested sea foam!” However, if you don’t have a great sense of history or linguistics, the problems with Icke’s claims may not be readily apparent. He claims that “mummer” derives from “Mohammedan”, which is easy enough to debunk with a quick visit to an etymology dictionary. He claims that the name “Elizabeth” derives from “El-lizard-birth,” which - no. Not everything he says is total baloney - sometimes he gets a few things right, but ya know what they say about stopped clocks. It’s also very clear that Icke just doesn’t understand or appreciate how cultural osmosis works; he really doesn’t grasp that different religions can have things in common simply because they were practiced in the same area and ideas naturally drifted between groups. It can’t simply be that early Christian artists depicting Mary and baby Jesus were simply influenced by images depicting Isis holding baby Horus, oh no; it must be the work of his mustached-twirling Babylonian Brotherhood. There’s a lot more garbage in this book that I could go into, but I think this should be enough to demonstrate that this whole idea of blood-drinking reptiles controlling the world is just another manifestation of antisemitism, nothing more.

It’s worth noting that the messy, complicated history of religion is actually pretty widely acknowledged among scholars and academics these days. Bart D. Ehrman, for example, does a great job covering the history of early Christianity, and you can easily find his books or find videos of him talking on YouTube. These channels are also great: Digital Hammurabi ESOTERICA ReligionForBreakfast Finally, I do want to make one thing clear - just because David Icke’s reptilian conspiracy theory is antisemitic, doesn’t mean that the idea of reptilian entities is inherently antisemitic. Dragons, divine serpents, and whatnot are found in religion and folklore all over the world, many of which are benevolent or at least neutral.

#david icke #reptilians #racism #antisemitism #history #pseudohistory #aliens #alien #extraterrestrials #reptilian aliens #nazis #conspiracy theories #conspiracism

[jessicalprice]

the two trees

(reposted from Twitter)

Been reading a lot about religious abuse and a lot of people writing about it talk a lot about Eden and the trees, and I'm feeling like it's time for a little thread about the trees. 

So. Everyone knows this story, right? 

Cool. Where was each tree located in the garden?

Here's the text. (Incidentally, "Eden" is the same word, essentially, as "edna", pleasure--when Sarah hears the promise that she will bear a son, she laughs to herself at the idea that she will have "pleasure", eden/edna, again.) 

And here it is in a different translation (Hebrew and English are so different that it’s hard for a single English translation to capture everything about the Hebrew--in this case, while I generally prefer Everett Fox’s translation, it doesn’t capture the link between adam (the human) and adamah (the earth/soil).

They both basically preserve the structure of the Hebrew as far as where the trees are: “the tree of life in the center of the garden... and the tree of knowledge of good and bad.”

So in the center, we have the tree of life.

And... somewhere, there's also the tree of knowledge. (Tov v'ra, "good and bad," is an idiom that means "everything"--the English equivalent would probably be closer to "Knowledge from A-Z”.)

Ok, so, we've got the tree of life called out as being at the center of the garden. And somewhere in the garden is the tree of knowledge. And then we get instructions.

So if you want to read this literally in English, these instructions are given to Adam, because Eve isn't around yet. But as I noted above, adam in Hebrew is also just "human." (adam from the adama, an earthling from the earth, a human from the humus.)

And there's a popular Jewish reading that says that the first human was actually male AND female, and Eve wasn't *created* from Adam--the first human was split into two. So maybe she was around. But if you want to be literal, the text only records this instruction to the man.

Anyhow, we have the tree of life in the center, and the tree of knowledge somewhere, and the man gets told don't eat from the tree of knowledge, and Eve doesn't exist yet (at least as a separate being).

So, Eve gets separated/created, and along comes the serpent, with a question that is already framed incorrectly (a tried and true lawyer technique--people will jump to correct you and accidentally admit things). “Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”

So, we don't know what Eve has actually been told, or by whom. Did God give her the same instruction God gave Adam? Did Adam have to pass on the instruction to her? Did he do it correctly?

So let's look at her answer:

What’s interesting here is that while the translation inserts the “other” to make it make sense, it’s not there in Hebrew.

What’s even odder is that the first sentence is actually in the singular:

and said the woman to the serpent from the tree-of-the-garden we will eat

is the closest I can get to word-by-word, one-to-one translation. 

It should be in the plural construct form, atzei-, but instead it’s in the singular, etz-.

Then she goes on:

and/but from the fruit of the tree that is inside/in the center of/the essence of the garden, said God do not eat from it and do not touch it lest you die

So, first, let's get something out of the way: she adds to the instruction. The original instruction didn't contain anything about touching.

(And if you're going, eh, so what?, well, the Hebrew here is SUPER-terse. If something gets repeated, it's significant. And if it gets repeated with a change, that change basically has flashing lights over it.)

So either: 

God gave Eve different instructions (Adam wasn't told not to touch; she was). 

Adam relayed the instructions to Eve and added the part about not touching.

Eve added the part about not touching.

If the story wanted us to know that God gave Eve different instructions than God gave Adam, I'm pretty sure we would have gotten a scene with that. 

So either Adam or Eve engaged in the first instance of the rabbinic practice of "building a fence around the law”. The practice of building a fence around the law is, if the Torah says "don't cook a kid in its mother's milk," you don't eat milk and meat together just to be sure. It makes the law stricter. (BTW, for Christians: Jesus was super-into the rabbinic practice of building a fence around the Torah--if the law is "don't murder," he says don't even get angry with someone.)

And the instruction is changed in another way: 

God tells Adam don't eat from the tree of knowledge. 

Eve says we're not supposed to eat from the tree in the center of the garden (which has already been identified as the tree of life in 2:9).

So, the serpent says, you're not going to die, your eyes are going to be opened and you'll be like divine beings, knowing tov v'ra (literally good and bad, but colloquially, everything from A-Z).

And so she eats from... the tree. The tree in the center of the garden? The tree of knowledge? Nope. Just the tree.

Oh, and btw, the text is literally: she took from its fruit and ate and gave also to her husband THERE WITH HER (imah) and he ate. This entire time, the shmuck was standing right there not saying anything. All those stories about her running off to find him and seduce him? Heh.

Funny how the majority of translations just... don't translate that word.

So anyway, God asks them if they ate from the tree God had commanded them not to eat from (God initially identifies the tree of knowledge, Eve identifies the tree in the center of the garden--it's like the text is doing a shell game with the trees.).

There's a lot I could say about how bad the "pangs of childbirth" translation is (it's work, an explicit parallel to Adam's work of tilling the soil). Equal weariness for equal work, but that's a whole different discussion.

But then we get God speaking (unclear to whom, or who can hear), saying "we can't let them also eat from the tree of life" or... they'll live forever. But they were already eating from that tree, no? They had permission to eat from everything except the tree of knowledge.

So what's going on? Midrash goes WILD about the trees. It was two trees with a single root system, it was the same tree, one tree was the root system of the other, etc. I haven't encountered it, but there's probably stuff about the trees switching places somewhere.

Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, goes even WILDER, collapsing space and time. Adam and Eve were originally a single being, and so were Lilith and Samael, and those two in their combined form were the tree of knowledge, they got split when the fruit was plucked, which is why Lilith is so pissed.

But also, the serpent was Samael and the tree was Lilith, there's stuff I can't remember exactly with the tree and the flaming sword of the cherub guarding the way back to the garden being somehow related... Jewish mysticism doesn't always treat time as linear, so.

But I keep coming back to those two instances of:

Eden as paradise.

Sarah laughing to herself at the idea that she will have pleasure (edna) again in her old age. It's a root that doesn't occur all that often, so the link between those two instances rings out.

And you can read the text as God imposing punishment, like a vengeful parent. You can also read it with God as an overprotective parent, who wanted to keep the knowledge of what inevitably awaits adults--toil, exhaustion, and ultimately death--from the kids for a little longer.

But adulthood holds joys kids can't experience, too, like the joy of bringing life into the world. And birth is intimately connected with death. They are inextricably linked, the departure from the garden of Eden into the world of toil and death, and Sarah’s edna at the idea she will have a child. 

As bioethicist Laurie Zoloth observes in Born Again: Faith and Yearning in the Cloning Debate:

Birth, in its messy, uncontrollable tumult, is the closest moment we ever have to facing our own death, of course. The Jewish rabbinic tradition requires women to re-enact this by the ritual immersion and the public recitation of the prayer of rescue, both acknowledgments not only of the obvious risk involved in physical childbirth (a fact rather cheerily forgotten in all of the cloning debates) but also of the fact that the birth of a child re-states the ending of the self. It is the entrance into the room of your life of the he-who-will-hold-you-as-you-lie-dying...

At stake will be how it is to love like that, not the chosen one, not the close-as-can-be replica, but the surprising stranger who will live at your side... The act of parenting is the act of encounter with the other who is both not-you and of-you, your future and your responsibility, your obligation and your joy. In this way, we all learn to have the stranger, not the copy, live by our side as though out of our side.

God is not a human parent, but perhaps the departure from Eden is the moment when humanity becomes the beloved stranger, who is both not-God and of-God, future and responsibility, obligation and joy. 

I think here of one of our readings for Yom Kippur here:

You are our Beacon; 

we are Your burden. 

You are our Enigma; 

we are Your frustration. 

You are our Call to Conscience; 

we are Your critics. 

You are our Touchstone; 

we are Your loyal opposition.

Perhaps as a species, we’re still teenagers. 

What the link between birth and death, expulsion from paradise and the promise of a child, seems to tell us is that they’re the same tree.

Life beyond childhood and knowledge and death are all of a piece. Or, you can read it as both of those concepts--life/innocence and knowledge/death playing peekaboo with you throughout the text. 

But in any case, textually speaking, there is something VERY WEIRD going on with the relationship between those two trees.

And, most importantly, there is NOTHING simple about this story. It can't be read literally, and it's too mysterious to serve as a just-so story about men and women.

Photo credit: Johannes Plenio

#judaism #torah portion #torah #eve #sarah #gan eden #garden of eden #jewish texts #twitter

[chaoslynx]

Aww the fanart with asheiji and kids... <3 It gave me an idea for a fic: Ash and Eiji's child(ren) notice that something isn't going right in one of their friends' life. Obviously they're too young and naive to realize that their friend is being abused at home. But Ash sees, and knows... Merry XMas and Happy New Year!

About an AshEiji [child], I'd like the name Layla for a daughter. Aslan (or Arslan/Arsalan, which is a Turkish name and not Hebrew like Yoshida thought) is the hero of a popular Persian epic. And Layla is from a famous Arab piece, Layla and Majnun, the middle-eastern version of Romeo and Juliet.

Ash has noticed that Layla's been a little ... off, for a while.

She's always bene a little introspective for her age, and generally just a good kid. Gets that from being raised by Eiji, Ash guesses. No way someone raised by someone that good could end up with a cruel bone in their body, even if Ash is the other parent. At least, that's what Ash has to keep telling himself to try to get the idea that Layla won't end up like him.

But she's been even more withdrawn lately, like she's thinking about something beyond her years.

Ash doesn't like it.

It's not quite familiar in a way that's especially concerning to him, but it's uncomfortable enough to see that he's worried. And she's been brushing him off when he asks, but he's determined to get through to her. Layla is his daughter, after all, as weird of a situation as that is for him to realize sometimes.

"Hey kiddo," he says one day, when she gets home from elementary. "You okay if we do an ice cream check in?" It's a keyword of sorts between the three of them—Eiji included—that started just due to Layla's love of ice cream. It became an easy way to talk to her about anything serious or seemingly scary. Spoonful of sugar type of situation. The ice cream makes everything a little more palatable.

But Layla frowns, now, and hugs her knees to her chest. "I dunno," she admits.

"We don't have to, but I do think it would be helpful to talk some things out, yeah? Something's on your mind."

She pouts.

"Am I wrong?" Ash says, not pushing too hard, but just a small challenge.

"Dummy," Layla mumbles. "How'd you know?"

"Hey, language," Ash says, halfhearted. Like he hasn't said worse in front of her. "Come on, let's get some ice cream and talk stuff out."

Once they're settled in with their bowls, Ash waits for Layla to speak first. She already knows that he's wanting a conversation here, since he essentially used the parent equivalent of the safe word they gave her to get her out of any situation without others picking up on it. He's inviting her to say anything and everything on her mind, but he's going to let her do it on her terms.

"... It's my friend at school," Layla says after a few bites.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Ash reminds her softly. "What's going on with your friend?"

"He's just"—Layla makes a face—"I dunno."

Ash feels a flare of anger for a moment. "Is he bullying you?"

But Layla quickly shakes her head, barely sparing this kid from the wrath of Ash Lynx. "No, more like I'm worried he might be getting bullied. Or ... something." She frowns down into her bowl, and Ash can feel his entire demeanor shift.

Ash goes almost deadly quiet for a moment, thinking of how to approach this. He can't make assumptions too quickly, but he does know that they've taught Layla enough of how to speak up for herself and what healthy friendships should look like that she's probably right if she thinks that something's wrong.

Taking a slow breath, Ash reminds himself that he needs to not scare Layla here as well. He doesn't want her to worry any more than she already is—she's such a good kid, but it isn't her responsibility to be looking after her classmates. If she's right about this—or, rather, if Ash is right about what he thinks Layla might be saying—then the adults in her classmate's life have failed him.

Ash knows what that's like.

"... What's got you worried?" Ash asks gently. "Maybe I can help him, or we can figure out someone who can."

Layla thoughtfully scoops another spoonful of ice cream. "Well," she starts, "he seems to get hurt a lot at home."

Ash's temper flares for a moment, and it takes everything in him to remember that Layla's probably talking about the normal bumps and bruises that happen with the accidents of childhood.

Except, apparently, enough of them to worry her.

"What kind of hurt?" Ash asks.

Layla drops her spoon and runs her hands up her arms. "Like here," she explains. She taps her wrists with the opposite hands. "And here."

"Like bruises?"

Nodding, Layla says, "Like when I fell down."

Ash winces thinking of it even now—Layla fell out of her bunk bed once a few months ago. She wasn't badly injured, but she did have some really bad bruising.

"And he always seems scared in P.E.," Layla continues. "I don't know what's wrong, but ... something, I think."

Ash winces, thinking of his own experiences with sports at that age. There could be any number of reasons why a kid might not be fond of physical education, but ... it's definitely not a good sign.

Ash swallows. "Thank you for trusting me with all of this, sweetie. I'm going to see what we can do, okay? We'll make sure he's okay."

" 'Kay!" Layla says immediately. She trusts Ash so strongly that all the worry she's been showing recently seems to melt out of her. She kicks her legs back and forth, enjoying her ice cream.

... Well, Ash has a new goal. Ethical routes first: he'll bring it to the school's attention first, and then follow up with a social worker and the ChildHelp hotline.

And, if all else fails, there's still a little bit of Ash Lynx left in him these days. He's gotten his hands dirty before, and he's not afraid to do it again. Not if it means he can help someone like who he used to be.

#banana fish #ash lynx #prompt fill #kidfic #MERRY XMAS???? how long was this in my inbox omfg #i'm so sorry this literally took 20min to write why didn't i do it sooner oh my gosh #sorry it's only a drabble and not a full fic -- i love this idea but i'm not sure i'm the correct writer to fully explore it right now hehe #ALSO at the other anon ... yeah why the heck did yoshida say/think that it was a hebrew prayer word for dawn ... #it's literally just turkish for lion #yoshida lying to a whole ass fandom like 'oh you didn't know aslan means dawn? yeah it's hebrew. yeah totally' #uhhh um i haven't done a prompt fill in a while. idr my tags #answers #anon #close enough

[hindahoney]

Do you think the story of the war rape of the Midianites in inherently bigoted?

The passage you're referring to is Numbers 31. The Midianites were descendants of Avraham and his wife Keturah. Relations between Midianite and the Hebrews were good at first: Moses' wife Tzipporah was a Midianite woman, and he served Jethro for forty years. They even used Hoab, Moses' brother-in-law, as a guide through the desert. However, when the Midianites worked with the Moabites to attack and curse the children of Israel, there were mass conversions to worship Moabite deities and assimilate into Midianite culture (Numbers 25:17-19: HaShem spoke to Moses saying:  “Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them. They treated you as enemies when they deceived you in the Peor incident involving their sister Kozbi, the daughter of a Midianite leader”) Midianites also severely oppressed the Israelites (In Judges: “Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help”)

So, with that background, you're talking specifically about this passage:

"Why have you kept all the women alive?" demanded Moses. "These are exactly the ones who were involved with the Israelites at Balaam's instigation, causing them to be unfaithful to God in the Peor incident, and bringing a plague on God's community. Now kill every male child, as well as every woman who has been involved intimately with a man. However, all the young girls who have not been involved intimately with a man, you may keep alive for yourselves."

The story in the Bible is that the women were part of a larger campaign to convert the Israelites to their religion and culture. It was working, so HaShem instructed Moses to stand up against them. It is a lesson against assimilation into idolatry. Were there problematic parts of the Hebrew Bible? Of course to modern standards they are, and they're not events that should be repeated. No one is arguing there are not parts of the Torah that are problematic.

But none of that is what you actually care about. This ask is a response to my assertion that Christian texts are antisemitic, which they are. I responded to an ask that essentially asked "If Christian texts are antisemitic, what should they use instead?" to which I said they're not going to use another text, they just need to acknowledge that the ones they use are antisemitic and call out antisemitism within their communities when they see it.

If your response to a Jew calling out antisemitism is "Well what about you!" your problem is deeper than one I can solve.

#ask Hinda

[impossiblefangirl0632]

Religious Symbolism in Encanto

Most of these thoughts spawned from reading, a hair on the head of john the baptist by @icarusinthesand which I highly, highly, recommend you go read if you are at all interested in the more religious aspects of Encanto.

We ended up talking about the religious symbolism in the comments and with their permission I’ve compiled the main points we talked about here. 

Tl;dr Encanto is chuck full of religious symbolism whether it was intentional or not.

Bruno’s Room

Religious parallels: 

John the Baptist (And other prophets, thinking namely of Elijah) spent a significant amount of time living and preaching in the desert

The Temptation of Christ is when Satan tried to tempt Jesus to turn against God for 40 days in the desert

Moses and the Children of Israel in the desert for 40 years

A note about the number 40: In the Bible, numbers are rarely literal and have underlying significance. Forty shows up a lot because it is often used for time periods (40 days/years) that separate two distinct epochs. Bruno’s life can clearly be divided by the point he went into the walls, when he was 40. Plus, like I said the Hebrews were wandering in the desert for 40 years (To me this part of Bruno’s life can easily be described as ‘lost in the desert’)  which represents the time it takes for a new generation to arise.

Staying on Moses for a second, this wasn’t in the movie but a lot of us seem to share the same headcanon that Bruno’s sand waterfall parts for him, kind of like the Red Sea for Moses.

The concept art for Bruno’s room shows a lot of different options they considered but I would like to bring these two to your attention.

The first is a concept that I cannot for the life of my find again but I vaguely remember it being in a youtube video. Imagine a dimly lit, slightly crumbling, cathedral interior with sand dunes instead of a floor and that should give you a pretty good mental picture.

The second concept (above) instantly reminded me of Petra (below) (World Heritage Site, very cool, has ties to a bunch of different cultures and religions including Christianity and Islam) 

Fun fact I learned today is that according to Arab tradition Petra is where Moses struck a rock with his staff and water came forth. A lot of what remains of Petra is tombs which I think is an interesting tie in with the metas other people have written about the design influences from the Tierradentro tombs that did make it into the final design of Bruno’s vision cave.

Bruno’s role as the Prophet

Icarus did an amazing job at summing this up so I’m just going to drop in what was said in the comments here. For context, we were talking about how in the fic it’s alluded to that the Priest wanted Bruno to eventually become a priest himself.

“it seems logical (to Padre Acevedo) for Bruno to become a priest. I also think he has something more expansive in mind that just being the town priest -- when he says "lead" he does mean it. Because I really think that to a devout man of faith, Bruno would be... I mean, you have a prophet, he's the son of the man who made the miracle and the woman who turned it to bear fruit for the town, it feels fated, right? It feels like that man should be Something. Nobody's talking about living saints or the kind of leadership that reshapes the world but people are definitely thinking it, before they learn to be afraid of him.”

This reminds me a lot of this post (that was meant to be funny, and it is) that in my opinion correctly points out that Bruno’s two male role models are his father, who sacrificed himself for his family, and Christ, who sacrificed himself for humanity. To me it makes Bruno’s decisions make a whole lot of sense.

The Triplet's Gifts 

The thing that I've thought about a lot before reading Icarus’ fic is how the original three gifts in a way symbolize aspects of Christ/God. Because essentially, the gifts break down into healing (this is self-explanatory), prophecy/a (potential) sort of omnipotence, and controlling the weather to me falls under the umbrella of having dominion over the earth.

Breaking that down further: 

Bruno’s gift is obvious. He’s literally a prophet.

Julieta literally heals people with food (including bread, which has so many biblical tie-ins: the loaves and fishes, I am the bread of life, etc) 

Pepa is a bit more of a stretch but consider first off, the flood that destroyed the earth, and numerous times in the Bible where there’s a drought and the miracle sent by God is rain. 

Icarus made a good point about how Pepa seems to be more drawn to precipitation even when she’s happy since rainbows need moisture.

We know that when they were younger Bruno was the golden child but it wouldn’t surprise me if at least all three were considered saints at least at the beginning. (There’s a great oneshot that explores something very similar)

There are just too many connections for this all to be a coincidence in my opinion. At the very least someone on the design team thought about it at some point given the cathedral concept art. I mean come on, they literally call it a miracle.

#encanto #encanto meta #encanto analysis #religious symbolism #I considered adding my rant about how a lot of the fandom seems to be forgetting that this movie takes place in a majority catholic country #But that will half to wait for another day #Bruno madrigal #Bruno madrigal's room #Catholicism in encanto #religion in Encanto

[nepentheisms]

SPOILERS AHEAD for the end of Trimax. I know bookclub still has a few weeks left to get there, but @pepplemint put down some thoughts I really liked (linked below, their post includes the spoilers that I'm reflecting on). I was originally going to just reblog with comments I wanted to add, but then this post wound up way longer than I expected.

Anyways, for op, I think this essay may be of interest to you with its discussion of the final few chapters; especially this bit where the writer quotes the late Thich Nhat Hanh:

Though the Bible values understanding, it prioritizes love above all. Jesus encourages his followers to love thy neighbor, no matter what, whether or not there is understanding. Alternately, in Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh writes that “In Buddhism, understanding (prajña) is essential to love (maitri). Without understanding there cannot be true love, and without love there cannot be true understanding.” Perhaps the finale of Trigun Maximum is a blending of these two philosophies.

For me personally, the use of the Genesis allusions in the resolution of the story and the way that plants and humans switch around in acting as the god figure in relation to one another have stirred up thoughts about how there's more of a push and pull in God's relationship with humanity in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible (which has the same books as the Protestant Old Testament but they're arranged differently).

My knowledge of Judaism is pretty basic, so I'd love to hear from someone who can provide more perspective, but from what I do know, the Jewish approach to God differs from the Christian approach in that adherents are encouraged to question God (even the very existence of God is up for questioning). In Christianity, God is characterized as an all-powerful perfect being humans have to obey, but this characterization really involves a lot of retconning of the Jewish source material, because in those stories, God is not necessarily omnipotent or omnibenevolent.

In Genesis 3:22-23, God seems to express concern over the possibility of humans rivaling him. From the NRSV translation:

(22) And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”  (23) So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 

But even with the banishment from the Garden of Eden and the whole Tower of Babel episode in which God voices his qualms about humanity becoming too powerful, God also has moments in which he welcomes it when people challenge him. Genesis 32:24-32 is the story of Jacob wrestling with God and insisting "I will not let you go unless you bless me," and he gets his blessing. And it's in these verses that we get an explanation for the meaning of the name Israel - "The one who strives with God" (from the notes of The New Oxford Annotated Bible).

And what is Trigun but a story of striving between creator and creation? There's plenty of contentious striving, full of pain and conflict, but there's also the striving for understanding - a struggle to truly KNOW the other so that together, they may have a chance at building a more mutually beneficial future.

TLDR: I think the relationship of mutual contention between God and mankind as seen in the Hebrew Bible is a better analogy for the humans vs plants conflict than the Christian view of original sin cutting people off from a perfect supreme authority.

#trigun #trigun maximum #trigun maximum spoilers #trigun meta #christianity mention #religion mention #Guns&God meta

[centralkvetchmonolith]

Jaz sent me a TikTokTM

This particular TikTokTM is a cover of "I'm On Fire", by Bruce Springsteen, which cover is performed by a 22yo with the thesis "dad rock and lesbian indie are essentially the same thing".

As is typical, I said something about the vibes which made perfect sense to me but was impenetrable to my conversational partner. This, uh, caused me to wax poetical about what I meant, which is ALSO very typical, specifically for when I am talking about Bruce Springsteen songs.

To wit: "Springsteen's sheets are soaking wet because of the sort of desire that bubbles up against the stifling heat of the waning summer; the restless kind that would drive someone out to the hills on the off chance that SOMETHING could happen tonight. Thea's sheets are soaking wet because of the febrile tossing and turning that one does in the first week the boiler is switched on for one's apartment; it's a desire that turns in tightening gyre and doesn't want to move but laments the lack of movement anyway."

Thinking this hard about something I'm already autistic about triggered the dreaded hyperfixation, and so of course I immediately started listening to all the covers I could get my gay little hands on via Spotify, and assigning them months.

Soccer Mommy is April: I'm not sure for what their desire burns, but maybe they aren't either Electrelane is late July: The mumbled drudgery of summer gains steam over the course of the song; by the end the energy that's been building slowly the whole time has bloomed in a revelry in the joy of desire, much like the heat that's been building over the course of the month & season. Bat For Lashes changed the lyrics to make it straight, and embodies December. There's an arcane quality to how she sings this song, like the plodding dark of the solstice. Her desire is to feel worthy of inclusion in winter, despite being so early in the meteorological season. Chromatics is February: The desire here is buffeted about between thaw and freeze; these sheets are soaking wet from sleety rain and the hope for what could come after. Gus Dapperton is FAITHFUL to the original, putting them solidly in September. Where it differs from Springsteen's song, it is with an eager energy that hopes for reinvention. Shakey Graves has the most inventive cover so far, netting June. I heard he killed a guy. The Staves is the band that Thea Grace was shouting out, but they're distinctly March. Their sheets are soaking wet with the meltwater of the very end of the month; their desire is cooled, but by the runoff of the love they already have - no need to chase after the unobtainable. Cassandra Violet's version sure is for a motion picture (Pig???!?); the energy here is all montage. I wanna say October? AWOLNATION is January; their desire throbs like the first tension headache one gets from a truly cold day. I'm starting to have trouble focusing (blame it on my ADD) and we're running out of months, so I don't know that there will be many more. Low is late October: The Halloween spirit thrums through this song like holding hands with a girl while you both watch your first R-rated scary movie. Town Mountain has August energy…it's finally another novel take on this song, though it's distinctly "bluegrass band booked some studio recording time and sounds nothing like they did at the house concert you saw them at" so I hesitate to call it inventive. OKAY LAST ONE BECAUSE THERE ARE LIKE FIFTY OF THESE: CLAVVS is May. No I didn't pick that just because it's the only month left. No I will not elaborate on my reasons.

Here they are in chronological order according to the Hebrew calendar, ya sluts. Thanks for reading this whole thing.

P.S.: Jaz sent me the video in the first place because of my literary analysis of Springsteen's work as transfeminine and sapphic (specifically butch); there's just something about the way he says "hey little girl is your d*ddy home" that feels less like male territoriality and more like the conspiratorial wink of a dyke hoping to see you in your own right. Too, the way the narrator's class fundamentally alienates him from the (married, wealthy) object of affection and (wealthy, WASPy) masculinity mirrors the fundamental alienation that a butch woman might feel from her (presumed straight, at the very least femme) object of affection and (wealthy, male) masculine aesthetics. Look at the music video! The narrator hopes for a moment of understanding even across these gulfs!! The object of affection longs just as much, just as impossibly!!! This too is yuri!!!!!!!

#kosher queers dot gay #bruce springsteen #i'm on fire #playlist #this too is yuri #my brain eufunctions

[cosmicmote]

a couple months back

I know I touched on this before here, via mondoweiss

but today it went noticed again

and was commented on over at al jazeera

we noticed

and recalled

justin raimondo reported same behaviors over 20 years ago

from which I will briefly quote

The leering ugliness of the Israelis’ Easter blitzkrieg is darkly illustrated by the news that, having marched into Ramallah, the IDF prepared a special Easter television broadcast for this historically Christian city: “Porn movies and programs in Hebrew are being broadcast by Israeli troops who have taken over three Palestinian television stations of Ramallah, irate residents of the besieged West Bank town have told AFP . The soldiers started broadcasting the porn clips - considered extremely offensive by most Muslims - intermittently this afternoon from the Al-Watan, Ammwaj, and Al-Sharaq channels, the residents said. ‘The pornographic movies started on Al-Watan television at around 3:30 pm,’ one 34-year-old Palestinian mother named Reema told AFP. ‘I have six children at home, they have nowhere to go with what is going on here and can’t even watch TV,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s not healthy really. I think the Israelis want to mess with our young men’s heads,’ she said.” CHEAP THRILLS As the Middle East descends into the political equivalent of a sado-masochistic orgy, the porn trope forms the perfect note trumpeting Israel’s triumph. The IDF offensive, the invasion of Arafat’s compound, the vaunted flexing of Israel’s military muscle - all have the earmarks of some perverted ritual of humiliation and violation. As the IDF’s idea of Easter programming attests, the Israeli offensive projects the essential character of the degraded Israeli “democracy” - a lust for domination. After all, why does a robber, having already looted the till and gone halfway out the door, turn and shoot his victim? Because he can. For one moment, he is a god, his power to inflict death, at will, is orgasmic proof of his omnipotence. However, for a certain type of killer there is no such thing as a clean kill: he must torture his victim until the last moment, extracting every ounce of perverted pleasure out of the experience. This sadistic impulse is what drives the IDF and the Sharon government forward - and gives their American amen corner a really cheap thrill.

same behaviors, same culture and same society

this isn't limited to just being a christian thing

as I do not belong to the abrahamics myself

and raimondo was rather atheist

but my points being here

pornography is a weapon

pornography is a weapon

pornography is a weapon

pornography is a weapon

pornography is a weapon

of war

of their wars

of their wars

and

they do not change

they do not change

they do not change

they do not change

they do not change

they do not change

their lust for domination

it is all consuming

and Full Spectrum Dominance is official US policy

long has been and

we can all look and see who leads this, so much of it

it isn't a tiny minority being shut out

as this would be absurdum

but fully integrated

if not with humanity

as this would be absurdum

against whom they wage

and as I've said before

this is war

this is war

where definitions of peace

are merely yet another falsity

to mess with your bodies and heads

words ©spacetree 2024

#spilled thoughts #spilled ink #artists on tumblr #my writing #poetry #spilled poetry #poem #poems on tumblr #spilled words #spilled writing #original writing #original poem #original post #Palestine #America

[feedingtheflockministry]

What Manner of Love | 1 John 3:1-3

Introduction

"Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!" (1 John 3:1). As believers, we have been adopted into the family of God. Do you realize how amazing it is that you can call God your Father? No one else but those who are in Christ can call God Father and approach Him with confidence and intimacy. Galatians 3:26 says, "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus."

Your Love Is Different

The phrase "what manner of love" can be understood as both quality—the essential character—and quantity—the measurable amount. A more literal translation of the phrase is, "From what country is this kind of love?" In other words, this love is foreign. It is alien. It is an altogether different kind of love.

Jesus described His love like this: "As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you" (John 15:9). Jesus loves you the way God loves Him. God and Jesus love each other the way God loves you. Behold!

Your Behavior Is Different

The apostle Peter tied together this manner of love idea to our manner of conduct as believers. In 2 Peter 3:11, he said, "Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness?" My friend, you are a foreigner, not only because your love is foreign to this world, but because your conduct is foreign in this world. Children of God should act very differently because we are loved very differently. Our conduct should be holy and godly.

You Look Different

John continued, "Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him" (1 John 3:1). Believers don't look like the world, because we look like Jesus. We have our Father's eyes, so to speak. Again, John said, "He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him" (John 1:10).

The world did not recognize Jesus. As a follower of Jesus, the world should not recognize you, either. In fact, Jesus warned us, "If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you" (John 15:18-19). You have been chosen out of the world. You are supposed to stand out.

If you are a Christian, you are not who you used to be. But you're also not who you are going to be, for "it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is" (1 John 3:2). We won't be who we're fully intended to be until Jesus comes again. But when He does, we will be just like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

God saved you to make you like Jesus. When Jesus returns, everything God intended when He saved you is going to be actualized. You may not be much like Him now, but one day, you're going to look just like Him.

You Have Hope

"Everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure" (1 John 3:3). To purify means to cleanse from defilement. The more you let go of the things in your life—setting aside "every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us" (Hebrews 12:1)—the closer you get to Christ, to loving like Him, behaving like Him, and looking like Him. He has not left you the same as He found you. To hope means to have a confident expectancy. Our hope is not just wishful thinking—it is a blessed assurance. When He returns, you will be redeemed.

Closing

Christian poet Martha Snell Nicholson penned these words: "The best part is the blessed hope of His soon coming. How I ever lived before I grasped that wonderful truth, I do not know. How anyone lives without it these trying days I cannot imagine. Each morning I think, with a leap of the heart, 'He may come today.' And each evening, 'When I awake I may be in glory.' Each day must be lived as though it were to be my last, and there is so much to be done to purify myself and to set my house in order."

The reality is that some of us are going to heaven, but some of us are not. Are you ready? Are your kids ready? Is your husband ready? Are your neighbors ready? Are your coworkers ready? The only thing you can take with you into heaven is another soul.

Prayer

Lord, as I anticipate Your return, I recognize that there is time for mercy for those who aren't ready. Bring every person I meet into a redeeming relationship with You, that they might know Your love. Help me to love differently, behave differently, and look differently as I walk in the light. Lord, help me to delight in being set apart until Your return. In Jesus' name, amen.

#scriptures #bible teaching

[roman-catholic-mass-readings]

2nd February >> Mass Readings (Except USA)

Feast of The Presentation of the Lord 

(Liturgical Colour: White: B (2))

(When a Feast of the Lord is celebrated on a weekday there is only one reading before the Gospel, which may be chosen from either the first or second reading)

Either:

First Reading Malachi 3:1-4 The Lord you are seeking will suddenly enter his Temple.

The Lord God says this: Look, I am going to send my messenger to prepare a way before me. And the Lord you are seeking will suddenly enter his Temple; and the angel of the covenant whom you are longing for, yes, he is coming, says the Lord of Hosts. Who will be able to resist the day of his coming? Who will remain standing when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire and the fullers’ alkali. He will take his seat as refiner and purifier; he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and then they will make the offering to the Lord as it should be made. The offering of Judah and Jerusalem will then be welcomed by the Lord as in former days, as in the years of old.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Or:

First Reading Hebrews 2:14-18 He took to himself descent from Abraham.

Since all the children share the same blood and flesh, Christ too shared equally in it, so that by his death he could take away all the power of the devil, who had power over death, and set free all those who had been held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. For it was not the angels that he took to himself; he took to himself descent from Abraham. It was essential that he should in this way become completely like his brothers so that he could be a compassionate and trustworthy high priest of God’s religion, able to atone for human sins. That is, because he has himself been through temptation he is able to help others who are tempted.

The Word of the Lord

R/ Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm Psalm 23(24):7-10

R/ Who is the king of glory? He, the Lord, he is the king of glory.

O gates, lift high your heads; grow higher, ancient doors. Let him enter, the king of glory!

R/ Who is the king of glory? He, the Lord, he is the king of glory.

Who is the king of glory? The Lord, the mighty, the valiant, the Lord, the valiant in war.

R/ Who is the king of glory? He, the Lord, he is the king of glory.

O gates, lift high your heads; grow higher, ancient doors. Let him enter, the king of glory!

R/ Who is the king of glory? He, the Lord, he is the king of glory.

Who is he, the king of glory? He, the Lord of armies, he is the king of glory.

R/ Who is the king of glory? He, the Lord, he is the king of glory.

(When a Feast of the Lord falls on a weekday, there is no reading after the Psalm and before the Gospel)

Gospel Acclamation Luke 2:32

Alleluia, alleluia! The light to enlighten the Gentiles and give glory to Israel, your people. Alleluia!

Either:

Gospel Luke 2:22-40 My eyes have seen your salvation.

When the day came for them to be purified as laid down by the Law of Moses, the parents of Jesus took him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, – observing what stands written in the Law of the Lord: Every first-born male must be consecrated to the Lord – and also to offer in sacrifice, in accordance with what is said in the Law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.

Now in Jerusalem there was a man named Simeon. He was an upright and devout man; he looked forward to Israel’s comforting and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death until he had set eyes on the Christ of the Lord. Prompted by the Spirit he came to the Temple and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the Law required, he took him into his arms and blessed God; and he said:

‘Now, Master, you can let your servant go in peace, just as you promised; because my eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared for all the nations to see, a light to enlighten the pagans and the glory of your people Israel.’

As the child’s father and mother stood there wondering at the things that were being said about him, Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, ‘You see this child: he is destined for the fall and for the rising of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own soul too – so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare.’

There was a prophetess also, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was well on in years. Her days of girlhood over, she had been married for seven years before becoming a widow. She was now eighty-four years old and never left the Temple, serving God night and day with fasting and prayer. She came by just at that moment and began to praise God; and she spoke of the child to all who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem.

When they had done everything the Law of the Lord required, they went back to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. Meanwhile the child grew to maturity, and he was filled with wisdom; and God’s favour was with him.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

Or:

Gospel Luke 2:22-32 My eyes have seen your salvation.

When the day came for them to be purified as laid down by the Law of Moses, the parents of Jesus took him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord – observing what stands written in the Law of the Lord: Every first-born male must be consecrated to the Lord – and also to offer in sacrifice, in accordance with what is said in the Law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons. Now in Jerusalem there was a man named Simeon. He was an upright and devout man; he looked forward to Israel’s comforting and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death until he had set eyes on the Christ of the Lord. Prompted by the Spirit he came to the Temple and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the Law required, he took him into his arms and blessed God; and he said:

‘Now, Master, you can let your servant go in peace, just as you promised; because my eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared for all the nations to see, a light to enlighten the pagans and the glory of your people Israel.’

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.