Hey so I still see people utterly baffled by how religious fundies (still a majority in America and moreso its senate) react on certain issues so uhhh is it actually not common knowledge what the antichrist is all about? You guys know his defining characteristic is ending war, right? That he’s foretold to unite the world under his leadership by preaching global peace and solving basically every single problem in the world? So you know when you try to talk to these people about equality and togetherness they literally believe that’s what makes you an agent of the devil right???
im sorry what. so. ok im assuming they think that this is all like. to gain trust and then take over or something? because.
Yes, he’s called the “antichrist” because he’s an imposter Jesus and the majority of the world will love him when he ends all class divides and erases all borders, creating one world government with him at the top. That’s the “new world order” they’re terrified of. But they think he’ll oppress true Christian believers who see through his ruse, which is why they’re constantly looking for signs that they’re being discriminated against and panic when they lose any control over government. This is why they fear diversity, immigration, socialized anything. The less religious right are pretty clearly still running on the same logic; they might drop some of the spiritual lore but this is where they get the idea that all progressivism leads to the “real” fascism. Some believe the antichrist isn’t a literal person either but just that entire set of beliefs, so everyone protesting against war and trying to feed the hungry is a *collective* antichrist.
So from the notes it turns out people are MUCH less familiar with all this than I suspected and that’s honestly kind of alarming, guys, you should really really pay attention to things that affect so much of this country. No these are absolutely not obscure or fringe beliefs, these are MAINSTREAM with megachurches, Trump voters, the GOP and a vast proportion of the wealthy. Alex Jones and multiple Fox News hosts openly believe word for word what I described here.
And yeah as several people pointed out it isn’t even explicitly in the bible, but something some radicals pieced together in maybe only the last century. My uncles all believe it to the letter and they all believe it’s what the Bible is “supposed” to be communicating.
A lot of people are also confused as to why they would believe the peace and unity are villainous things and what the difference even is then between the “antichrist” and actual Jesus, which brings me to another thing I realize some folks CRITICALLY overlook about American Christianity, which is that they do not believe in good or bad deeds. They believe the same deed can be right or wrong strictly according to whether or not it’s performed by a believer with God’s stamp of approval. Like, they KNOW the Satanic Church and Witch Covens do community service or donate to cancer research and they are not confused, surprised, bitter or embarrassed by that at all. It’s exactly what they’re taught to expect. They believe the forces of Satan do primarily“good” things so people will think he’s just as good or better than God. So if a pastor heals a sick child with a prayer then that’s good, but if a “witch” heals the same sick child with “magic” (not something I believe exists, but they do) then that’s a false miracle from the devil and the child was better off dying because now everyone involved is a sinner who deserves hell. They’re taught to view you as a ridiculous fool if you don’t grasp this difference, and every single argument you might make is a part of the satanic trickery.
After all, they think our entire existence on this Earth is an insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things. The suffering in the world isn’t a bug to them, but a feature that God set up to test everyone’s worthiness, teach them lessons and filter out the faithless, so they actively do not believe it’s always morally right in itself to help people or save lives. Rather, certain people are just intended to suffer and die and it can be MORE wrong to help them.
Sorry to put this big ass thing on your dashboards again but I’m downright awestruck by the notes. There’s 15,500 of them at the time of this reblog and almost zero disagreement, just hundreds of people expressing absolute terror that they didn’t realize they were living under the thumb of a doomsday cult, and I’m really really sorry for that because I really did not expect to be the bearer of that news to so many. If you haven’t looked at the notes for yourself though, they’re pretty eye opening even to me, especially the next most common type of response on it:
….And something I’ve heard before but still neglected to mention:
…..so that’s all pretty nightmarish confirmation of how pervasive this mindset is around here, but you know, if the majority of reactions to this information have been either “what the fuck are you talking about?” or “yeah I WAS taught this and I’m better now,” maybe that’s a sign that it’s slowly but consistently fading with every generation?
I actually wasn’t raised religious AT ALL, and it was still impossible for me to not hear this shit constantly in the 80′s and 90′s from basically everyone outside my immediate family. It’d even crop up on television and radio stations that weren’t even supposed to be christian-oriented. Just boom, there’s an evangelist suddenly talking about how Only God is Allowed to End War and Satan Takes the Form of Kindness, like these were just normal banal perspectives to toss in between a relationship advice segment and the latest movie reviews.
I’m really proud of every person saying they escaped from that indoctrination and actually feel much better and more hopeful about the whole thing. It might not be fixed completely in our lifetimes but clearly it is fixable.
yall remember when the pillow guy was saying he had “evidence” to put 300 million people in jail for voter fraud and on the one hand you’re like “lol wtf is this bananas ass shit” but on the other hand it’s basically, like, the Rapture, right? this apocalypse/end times mentality and symbolism is pervasive and obvious within the right and it is absolutely not a joke, not just a metaphor. it’s a mainstream belief. i think it’s really tempting for even the most lapsed christians to get all huffy about how what the right wing is saying and doing is “not the christianity i was raised with“ or that it’s not the “true” message of jesus, that jesus preached acceptance, kindness, service to the poor and marginalized, etc. that’s fine and might make you feel better, but the fundamentalists who are in power / consolidating power do not give two shits about your uwu narrative of following in christ’s footsteps by doing good deeds. a sizeable chunk of the population views this entire shitshow as a holy war of the endtimes and this kind of spiritual conviction can make people do powerfully awful things to those they have deemed outsiders. from my personal bubble it really doesn’t seem like we’ve been paying nearly enough attention to this aspect. i hope i’m wrong.
baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster
everyone is a sinnerProblematicbuttrue believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesusam the most woke
casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
the answer is no
I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™ Nice Gays™ don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers
all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
sipping tea and judging people as a group bonding activity
oh, man, speaking as a queer Christian who gets regular tumblr flashbacks to my childhood in the Bible Belt, YES
-belief that small snippets of text can be analyzed out context to understand the whole work/ judge the whole person -Desire for moral choices to be easy/ black-and-white leads to belief that it is possible to find a one-size-fits all answer to every situation -Literal, rather than literary analysis, with weird fixation on etymological roots that have nothing to do with source material -Belief that there is “one true interpretation” that is self-evident and will be understood by everyone encountering the same material regardless of background -Overwhelming, internalized sense of culpability for other people’s actions/integrity/souls -Overwhelming, internalized sense of personal guilt -Pressure to evangelize aggressively -Tendency to value broad ideals before individual needs -Hostility towards coexistence/tolerance/neutrality -Hostility towards lack of consensus in viewpoint -Knowledge as contamination -Guilt/contamination by proximity -Fixation on the sexual as uniquely dirty/sinful -Belief in “thought crimes” -Argumentation via appeal to higher authority/feelings of revulsion rather than internal, verbalizeable logic -“conversations” that are actually stealth soapboxes because one side isn’t actually interested in listening -“polite requests” that are actually commands because “no” is not considered an acceptable answer -in-group language -virtue-signaling and hostility towards the outgroup -gatekeeping -communities strongly built around the idea of being the world’s underdog -appropriation of other people’s persecution/victimization -treating the concept of oppression like a trophy -glorification/fetishization of victimhood
No longer is this about the rights of students to access books. It’s now about the rights of private businesses to sell books. Anderson suggests this is a new avenue for parents to fight.
“We are in a major fight. Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools,” he said.
Holy shit this is a BIG FUCKING WARNING SIGN. Challenges to school and public libraries aren’t cool obviously, but they’re not unusual and we have a framework for handling them. This is something new and alarming in a whole new way
Republican “free speech” y'all and don’t you forget it.
This is a direct challenge to the freedom of the press and if it isn’t struck down at the first hurdle we need to make sure it never sees the second one.
On the miniscule off-chance that anyone who sees my reblog might be thinking “oh, it’s just queer books that they’re trying to ban” - A Court of Mist and Fury is a het romance. It is a het romance containing het sex scenes, written by a straight white woman.
People have been warning all along that the right-wing thought police were never going to stop with queer lit or ‘woke’ lit, and that every time they got an inch they were going to take a mile until they’d banned absolutely everything that didn’t conform to their strict right wing fundamentalist Christian views. If you were waiting for proof of that, here it is.
I’ve seen this meme in a few different forms since the Paris attacks, but as clever as it seems, it is a false equivalent.
The KKK, in its three incarnations, is primarily about “White Supremacy”. Founded during Reconstruction out of anger over the results of the Civil War, the actions of the KKK were focused on intimidating the Black population–to prevent free Black people from enjoying the liberties granted to them. The group eventually faded only to emerge again in the early 20th century as immigration to the US swelled. This time Jews and Catholics (many from the poorer parts of Europe) were the target of their racism. As immigration slowed, so to did the influence of the KKK. They emerged for the third time in response to the Civil Rights movement. They pushed to maintain segregation; once again hoping to keep Black Americans from achieving equality.
For the KKK Christianity has always been subservient to racial ideology. They were not founded as a Christian group. They were/are a Nationalist movement focused on “preserving White rule” and protecting “the White race”. Christianity is read and understood in support of that basic premise. This is an important distinction to understand.
ISIS on the other hand, as difficult as it is to state without backlash, is primarily about Islam. Their every motivation is rooted in their theology. While the KKK’s actions were dictated by racialism, ISIS’s actions are dictated by their reading of Islam. As Graeme Woodexplains,
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
Please understand, I am not saying that simply because ISIS isIslamic, that allMuslims are terrorists. I am most definitely not!
What we have is a very difficult academic query: Would ISIS exist without Islam? Some say ‘yes’–their situation is such that Islam just happens to be the ideology they are using. If Islam didn’t exist they would use a different ideology. Others argue ‘no’. Either way, they are simply not comparable to the KKK. The KKK could most definitely exist without Christianity. They wouldn’t have to use a different ideology, because they are not rooted in Christianity. This comparison obscures what the KKK is really about.
What would a fair comparison be? Perhaps the Westboro Baptist Church, perhaps Bodu Bala Sena, perhaps individuals such as Yigal AmirorShelley Shannon. Religious extremism underpins these groups and individuals. They are motivated by their deeply-held religious beliefs.
TLC could redeem itself for a decade of glamorizing Christian fundamentalists by making a reality show starring Anna Duggar as she tries to navigate a modern world as a newly single mom to 7 kids with only a high school diploma from homeschooling.
