RE: https://kokoro.garden/@lillian/117356068040925628

To translate this to secularese for people that look at this page that have religious trauma they're not past, this is correct, and what it means is that if someone tried to beat the belief in a cruel, vengeful deity into you, they lied, they cherrypicked, they failed to conceptualize and resolve the paradoxes, they failed to have any literate reading, and they taught you to take everything literally which is why you're still in a reactionary fit, but their cruelty was evidence of their evil and you were right that they couldn't be right, and I recommend this as an example that in the entire history of thought, it was never about the name of the ontological root object, it was about one's relationship to it.

The reason all beliefs become tools of the wicked, even the powerful apparatus of science which has itself become a terrible war machine as well, is not intrinsic to those beliefs, it is intrinsic to the nature of empire-as-a-system: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-chelcicky-on-the-spiritual-battle

Genuinely the logic that it's apologia to point out that something had powerful revolutionary beginning and was soured by its encirclement by the Roman empire by someone who wants to salvage the baby from the bathwater makes little sense, it is approximately the same as saying that science is evil because western medicine got its start vivisecting African slaves and to this day denies the vast majority of women's health problems exist, gaslighting and extorting them continually. If anything, as far as "number of women tortured" the two are pretty neck and neck and as far as "number of superweapons created" goes it's basically not even a contest, you losers actually built the damn atom bomb. I have lived these torments, hating women and being encircled by empire is an everyone problem.

There are a million corrupted institutions and they're all pointing at each other like spider-man, and you keep falling for it because you're not well enough read and you don't realize that it's the same class doing these things to us over and over and the same beggars and tireless servants who keep saying in every guise and tongue what the truth is about it, but you are always saying "my fair kingdom and their barbarian encampment" and that's why it never gets any better. You do not impress me because your religion is different or you don't have one, and you do not impress me if your idea of social change is just trashing and campaigning. Are we razing the palace and passing out bread or not?

dollar worshiping kkkristians and reddit atheists do not @ me about this shit because I was at the beggars and prostitutes and lepers convention and you weren't there, you aren't feeding anybody, and you certainly don't think about who you might hurt by spewing illiterate self-righteous non-sense about how your identity makes you intrinsically better than everybody else. all that matters is that you show up and actually try, it doesn't matter what language you speak or what you look like or who you love

there, that ought to lower the rent.

@somebody i gave the treatise you linked a read, and i would be curious to know more about what you think and feel about it. this was my first contact with Chelčický and there were various things which surprised me.

@somebody tbh I think a lot of reddit atheists came from very conservative Christian backgrounds but haven't deconstructed how their upbringing has shaped the assumptions they make about virtually every other religious tradition. they still think all religions are basically reskinned versions of whatever abusive system they grew up with, with the possible exception of trying to twist Buddhism into a mere "secular mindfulness philosophy"

I come from a Jewish background and even the most Orthodox Jews I know have more thoughtful and complex interpretations of the Bible than anything an enlightened reddit atheist has ever said to me

and although I never got deeply interested in being observant myself, I think if you live in the US like I do then some degree of biblical literacy and understanding multiple perspectives on the Bible is important to comprehend politics better