Deconstruction - Tumblr Posts
Christianity isn't popular "because God is real".
It's popular because of a history in which conquerors and colonizers and other oppressors fought for centuries to force their populations to believe it, because christianity is a very useful tool that preconditions people for rule.
Memoriam for Knight Errant
Her honest trembling was the very last straw.
So she shoved him quickly out, bolting it all closed.
He banged at the door in accompaniment as she lit match after match.
His eyes asking, ‘Why--?!’
Through the window, the look of smoke the nerve-ending sizzle of flesh as she sat calmly, casually, busy being consumed.
Glasses melting red; skin curling like autumn paper her frame tensing silently as her nostrils inhaled the flames--
‘--why do you not scream?’
‘Because, I don’t deserve it’, her one bloodshot, dim-seeing eye steadily stared, ‘the screaming.’
Her bones are there, even now.
Her own ruined palace of torment: sculpture of ashes, slagged windows charred wood the bones yearn the bones
beg and beg and beg
to scream.
Caged in dry calcium dust hanging in the air all around that open sky grave the pressure of air built up in lungs no longer there.
But she has had her way. And nothing in all the human world will allow those bones their desperately wanted release.
A knight beyond her very end. Suffer, and rightly so. This, her legacy to no one.
The Strange Candle
The strange candle burned out and all the shapes of the room took up masks and clothes unfamiliar.
Such an infinite collection of greys, foggy white, dark corners of placid black fidgeting in new skins.
I had a teapot but I do not know where that is now I could not take up a notebook if I tried the tables have melded with other things I knew.
I had a bed but it is occupied, soft quilts stirring. Sighing, they will wake.
All the clear objects have gone and I fumble to hold onto the sight of anything in this new fragment of multi-verse and time. This world is not mine …but will it be?
Windows are a lifeline now even as the night falls with a tremulous calm I recognize the light on the bark of the tree the lazy drone of a hovering dragonfly the sun going on its way to sleep the day bleeding out onto the grass.
I'mma boil it down again:
Do ye think maybe capitalists are giddy as fuck when we assert that human beings are inherently awful, and that humanity is worthless?
Do ye think you can drum up enough dedication to defend something that you allow yourself to see as worthless?
Where puritanical thinking inevitably leads us
just so you know, you have some followers who enjoy/write fanfiction. not saying their urls rn bc i don’t wanna air out dirty laundry in public but if you want them so you can block and report, just say the word and i’ll dm you a list
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thank you all new followers, reposters, likers and general supporters
I think that's why stuff like Palworld are so successful.
Yes, it makes fun of certain elements in Pokemon
You have guns
You can catch people
You can eat your Pals (this has been implied with Pokemon for a while)
But you can tell that it's made with genuine affection towards what it's deconstructing.
Treating your Pals right is more practical than being a slave driver.
Catching humans is horribly impractical (the cops WILL be on your ass) etc
Reading deconstructions made with love for the genre will change your life.
The different Christian theological assertions about the nature and state of humanity vary so widely, from “made in god’s image and being restored to that image”, to the above toxic reformed or Calvinist bullshit.
But they are all based on the unfalsifiable assertion that humans are ruined and marred in some way which they are responsible for yet incapable of correcting (allegedly, until you get to the actual acceptance, adherence, and demonstration of these theological assertions), an inherent flaw not/by design (depending on who you ask), that we caused and that must be fixed, but fixed only by some external source (due to aforementioned flaw), through varying requirements, rules, and degrees of adherence.
The most insidious of these is faith itself, because it is intangible and therefore cannot be measured or reliably tested—anyone can question your faith, (including yourself), can challenge it, deny or reject it, based on their own feelings about whether or not you played your constructed role appropriately enough for them, as they arbitrate on behalf of god because of their superstition in the equally intangible “authority”, “calling”, or “ordination”.
No one knows, no one has any idea. We’re all just making our best guess about life and what’s after, if anything. But when we move beyond our personal aspirations, desires, and beliefs, and apply them forcefully (even in our own mind: “anyone who doesn’t believe will be eternally punished”), through dogma for things that can’t be proven — or else we’d all already know it, or could know it — we abuse our “neighbors”, our fellow humans.
Believe what you want, but you don’t get to tell other people they must believe the same thing to whatever standard you feel like on a particular day or season in your life based on what someone else told you.
Christianity is like omg no ofc abuse isn't okay no true Christian would ever believe it's acceptable to tear somebody down and control them. Anyway have you heard that you're a worthless maggot and you should be thankful that God has the mercy to love someone as terrible as you so you better do what he says even when it hurts or you'll be sorry
You are the only one who lives your life, the only one who lives in your body 🖤
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It has consumed so much of our time and attention and energy. The processing is good and necessary, but the freedom, no longer directing our attention and energy to it…that is something really wonderful 🖤✨
I was going to use this blog to vent my exvangelical frustrations, but I find myself dwelling on it less and less.
I’ve been giving my brain the space to enjoy this life I now lead without the expectations, shame, and guilt that came with my religious past.
Oh I will still definitely have my moments because I’m still mad. It’s just not a daily feeling any more and I love that for me. 🥰
Welcome to my scrupulosity
Where god can do whatever he wants and to pray against any of it is to reject the will of god which is a sin and is selfish which is a sin and is fearful which is also a sin and is prideful to think I could ever have anything other than whatever god decides for me whatever that is and that’s also a sin and so much sin in infinite layers and unknown hidden corners of my heart and mind that even I don’t know and only the spirit of god knows so I must continually pray to expose every facet of my divide deceitful heart so that I can see my sin which god is waiting for me to be willing to see and I’m never willing enough which is also a sin
But oh my god aren’t I so spiritual, so holy, so earnest, always in prayer, gifted with discernment and words of wisdom and words of knowledge and prophecy and what’s that? I should be leading and teaching and speaking and shepherding others
Hey-o religious trauma is real and Christianity reinforces trauma and rewards your coping mechanisms which perpetuates the trauma.
Do you know how you cope with the cognitive dissonance of believing a good god can kill you at any time in any way because you deserve it and it’s his will and would be loving? You disappear. You “die to yourself”, aka dissociate. You cease to exist except in an animated body rehearsing the speech and behavior of theological dogma.
In actuality, your morals are the choices you make based on your values, derived from your ethics. If you lose your belief in god and decide human catastrophe and suffering is funny and something to be celebrated, that’s a you problem and even with a practicing belief in god, you will gravitate toward theology that still reflects those values, as the artist did.
We don’t have to think this way or see things that way. We don’t have to believe that humans are irreparably flawed For Some Reason. We can select different beliefs based on different criteria we choose to highlight and emphasize, and live accordingly.
ok i had to go read minna sundberg's christian coming-to-faith comic and this is literally a flaming trainwreck. like i don't think there's been a single scene so far where i wasn't like ''okay this is literally insane i think you need therapy"
The Christian conditioning to “pray and wait on God’s will” fucked up my life. Decades of choices, plans, skill building, wealth building, lost and unrecoverable, sacrificed to god and the church.
The years that the locusts ate were my good, young life poisoned by scrupulosity, the locusts were the high-control rules and conditions the church wielded to eat up my life.
There are three rules:
1. If you do not go after what you want, you will never have it.
2. If you do not ask, the answer will always be no.
3. If you do not step forward, you will remain in the same place.
Scrupulosity nearly killed me—the belief that my inner world was being constantly surveilled by god, and that every emotion and thought was a potential sin if there was even a hint of it not being worship, not being complete dissociative submission, the thought or feeling wasn’t pure,
Christianity not only exacerbated childhood trauma but then rewarded my reaction to it: die to self, be a nothing who only exists to be a conduit for god, which requires constant inner prayer, endlessly asking god to search my heart and reveal any sin, to forgive me for things I didn’t yet know but he surely did, to forgive me for needing to be patient with me.
And wow did that kind of inward examination and devotion to prayer skyrocket me into leadership—“you’re so faithful, you are so in tune with god, you are such an example.”
I nearly literally died because I refused to take care of myself, in fear that going to a therapist or a doctor was not trusting that god was capable, or that God’s will was to not heal me and I was going against that—
the cycle of not trusting feelings and thoughts, or my own body, never knowing if this was god testing me to build character, to build perseverance, to develop hope…isn’t that godly? Isn’t that holy? Isn’t that sanctification? Why would I ever pray against god doing that in me by asking for healing? Why would I ever reject his will for me to experience those things by going to a doctor?
“Wow, you have such tremendous faith!”
I truly think the bible has many harmful/unhealthy teachings. People will try to deflect and say only when it’s twisted by abusive people or taught “wrong.” But no, I think it has harmful teachings at its very core. As an example:
When certain emotions are labeled as bad/evil/a flaw or something you just “shouldn’t do” it prevents many people from being able to process emotions healthily. See Ecc 7:9, Ecc 11:10, Col 3:8, Phil 4:6, James 3:16 as a few examples. I went through my life as a christian never really fully processing anything, and I was so emotionally unhealthy. Instead of viewing emotions as neutral signals from my body and sitting with them and letting them move through my body, I would read the thought terminating cliches of “don’t be anxious give it to god” or pray about it and continue to be disconnected from my body. I would feel shame when experiencing normal feelings of jealousy, anger, anxiety and feel like I was spiritually failing. That shame would cause me to continue to suppress those feelings instead of hearing and processing them, and it could cause it to come out in dysfunctional ways. And I see this in hundreds of people who are Christians in my life.
I’ve written a good bit about this on here and on Twitter X,
the way that authoritarian ideology, specifically salvific ideology (that is, ideology that purports humans must be saved by some external means due to some internal fault), teaches that you must separate True self (“capital T!”) from your humanity.
C. S. Lewis famously wrote, “you don’t have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body.” This emphasis on the soul and the diminishing of the physical has legitimate psychological consequences, especially when pushed through a values system that determines whether or not you are pure enough to receive not just god’s love, but his attention, his favor, his protection in your health and safety, and every possible aspect of your conscious life and your eternal retirement.
Gnosticism asserts that your body—any tangible human identity and experience—is corrupted, and only the soul can be purified. Evangelicalism insists that it is not gnostic, that Gnosticism is a heresy, but it continues to teach this existential division. One scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit acting as a sword that separates even the spirit from the soul, and this is taken up in further teachings about divisible consciousness: your flesh, your soul, and your spirit. How the hell does this work? They teach you are a spirit, who has a soul (a self, your feelings and personality) that lives in a body, and the spirit is what ascends and is perfected and made whole at the end of all things. Even factions that believe you get a physical eternity teach that your current body is either renewed, made new, or you get a new body entirely.
Your current self (the only one you have ever known and as far as you are capable, can ever know) is an offense to god, one he graciously tolerates until some time which only he has determined to make all things perfect. You are stuck.
How is any human being supposed to address this and live accordingly? Especially really serious believers who really care about getting it right to demonstrate how much they love and trust god?
The teachings get overly complex from there, trying to substantiate themselves with esoteric phrases and hidden wisdom, but the application is what remains consistent: your current conscious and physical self is corruptible, has already been corrupted, and who you are must be saved and sanctified, and even that is not enough because there is still yet another stage when “the kingdom comes in its fullness” and it’s finally complete with a Brand New Self that is not corrupted like you are now.
There are different interpretations of what that existence will be like. But for the earnest and intensely faithful of us, what else can we do now but “die to ourselves”? We become shells of people, an entity occupying a body, trying in every way to allow ourselves to be taken over by god himself, to be a conduit for his will to all humanity that we encounter. Our desires and preferences are selfish and sinful, or conversely they have been transposed with the will of god.
Often times we merry-go-round or see-saw between these extreme ends, in a desperate attempt to be So Pleasing To The Lord, and in the process we either reject any intrinsic sense of self, or we outsource it to the divine. It is so profoundly confusing to live this way, and the easiest way to make sense of it is to decide that you are nothing, and nothing you want matters.
For a time, I was asked to be a youth pastor at my small church. This was something I never wanted to do. I felt so uncomfortable, so unqualified, not at all gifted, and very unsupported materially and relationally. And because of that, I wondered and eventually “trusted” that this must the will of god because he wanted to purge me, he wanted to force me into submission and to force me to trust him because I couldn’t do it without him, and this was his good gift and perfect love. After all, the bible teaches that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. If this is what god will do, through my suffering and struggle, why would I pray against that, ask god to change that? I stop existing, my fears, discomfort, and desires do not matter, and I only need to die to myself, give up every concern and hesitation because God’s love is poured into my heart.
The worst part of all this is that if you grew up in an abusive home, your survival mechanism of dissociation is not only reinforced in an authoritarian religious community, but it is rewarded—you’re so faithful! You have such a beautiful spirit! You’re such a servant! You are an example to the rest of the body of Christ!
The abuse-survival mechanism-reward dynamic can be extremely difficult to untangle. Who are you? If you grew up in this, there is likely never a time where you truly felt like you knew yourself, that you mattered, that your interests, preferences, and needs—all the things that make you human and shape your unique personality/self—were valid. How do you heal from this if you don’t know what you want or who you are because it was a deadly, existential threat to even think about?
It is possible, it is. Sending and extending courage to all those recovering from chronic, spiritualised dissociation.
Who wants to talk about borderline alterhuman identity acquired through cult socialization and separation of the self from human identity at an early age
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