#christianity mention
I bet Rick Astley struggles with lent
ok so you know that thing of how a lot of christianity is just like. a thing? like how people who don’t go to church or believe in the bible still celebrate christmas and lent and easter? that thing. yeah. that experience is made so much fucking weirder when the specific brand of christianity at least one of your parents grew up with was catholicism. you wind up assuming a whole bunch of shit about christianity as a whole that turns out to be specifically a catholic thing.
the first funeral I went to not as a tiny baby was for my Irish catholic grandmother and boy did that fuck up my expectations for all funerals.
went to a protestant mate’s baptism when we were 14 and had not trained at all for the amount of hymns we were expected to sing, given that the only previous protestant church service I’d been to was my grampa’s funeral two years previously and I just figured the amount of hymns were because it was a funeral. no. it’s like that all the time there. and they don’t even give you the wine and crackers afterwards.
Just had a distinct memory of trying to explain the trinity (which I wasn’t actually told about in church because my family never went) to my Muslim now-ex, on a park bench, using the only shared vocabulary we had at the time, which was pokemon. Actually I do miss being 16 sometimes. but only for dumb reasons.
Nathaniel OFMD Buttons has an intact and cohesive spiritual framework through which to understand the cosmos and in this he is almost alone among the cast. His only company in this category is Jim’s Nana, an early visionary leader in the young religion Knife Catholicism
as much as christians want it to be the case, someone talking about their religious trauma with christianity actually isnt “propaganda” nor is it unkind or rude to literally talk about how things they did hurt you. instead of buckling under a victim complex maybe you should examine how you yourself have probably promoted things that hurt people instead of getting mad that someone who is literally oppressed by christianiy isn’t specifying which brand hurt them and apologizing for talking bad about it because i promise you the denomination doesn’t matter. there are so many of us from all denominations who were traumatized, you’re very entitled if you want people to step over your feelings because you’re in a specific one.
If a group doesn’t believe that there can be any legitimate criticism of their group and/or legitimate reasons to leave (or no one can ever reach whatever standards they have for either), that’s a massive red flag that the group is controlling and abusive
Can we please, please, please, please retire the phrase “culturally christian”? Or at least not use it as a blanket label to apply to people who don’t claim it? I didn’t spend years trying to separate myself from something that is constantly used to justify causing people harm for the most inane of reasons and can’t be proven to be true even by the fundamentalists who insist it must all be literal fact (despite it not being intended to be read as literally true in the first place), nor the years keeping my life as secular as I can manage, just for someone who doesn’t even know who I am to shove me back into it because I happen to still celebrate the secular version of a few holidays. You can’t just label someone without their acceptance of said label.
And yeah, I know I’m probably gonna get at least some flak for this, even though my issue with religion is moreso towards those who use it to harm people or insist that it is literal fact and that people like me are either stupid or willfully ignorant for not being convinced of the same thing. I’m just so tired of seeing people talk about “culturally christian” and knowing they mean “literally anyone who grew up being taught even the vaguest of christian teachings and/or celebrate some form of Christmas or Easter regardless of whether or not they themselves are christian”.
I would have also suggested retiring the much-less-often-used phrase “christian atheist”, but it turns out there actually are self-claimed christian atheists–those who accept philosophical teachings of jesus without believing in the supernatural stuff–so that phrase should be kept for those who call themselves as such and they are as valid as any other decent person with or without belief.
