[linkspam] My nipples are essentially indistinguishable from an extremely disgruntled turtle

[kaberett]

That is, they are presumably in there somewhere, but they have Retreated Into Their Shell and are Not Coming Out.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest:

• Karen Armstrong on the myth of religious violence (circa 2014)
  
• A camel through the eye of a needle, and other wild tales of translation
  
• Mount Taranaki (Aotearoa) has been granted 'living person' status
  
• Brutalist cuckoo clocks ("Cuckoo Blocks")
  
• Book and the Dragon: a tiny nine-page comic about queers and libraries and dragons (silveradept, I thought particularly of you)

Comments

[ewt]

I'm not a historian, but she has certainly oversimplified the writings of the Hebrew prophets: some of them are very "look, being kind to the widow and orphan and the alien in your land, mercy and justice and stuff is what the Lord wants" but there is also a really strong "hey, intermarriage is basically death and you, yes you personally need to avoid the unclean foreigners" strand. But that's at least partly because the gathering of various of the books into a canon was happening as a sort of attempt to construct a communal identity that made sense of the Babylonian exile...

So, yes, can confirm that it's All A Bit More Complicated, at least on the scriptural front, even though I'm not exactly a specialist there either.

I have a soft spot for Karen Armstrong as her work was a comfort to me at a point when I was re-exploring Christian faith, but I don't think I'd look to her for serious exegesis.

[recessional]

Yeah it's a very similar kind of " . . . you have simplified to the point of kind of being a lie" on the history fronts of stuff that I know intimately, and pretty sure it's the same on the history fronts of stuff that I'm more passingly acquainted with.

(Like for instance no, the mediaeval Franks - for example - did not have the WORD "secular". But they certainly DID have a sense of there being things that were governed by custom that was there inheritence from pre-conversion times through the Customs and Customary Laws of the Franks that were for the most part quite disconnected from which religion they were or weren't part of, and in fact the ability of Xtianity and later Islam to be adapted to fit "over" local cultures without requiring them to rewrite from the ground up - that is, the sense that there was a "secular" culture as well as a "sacred" set of customs and divinely appointed behaviours - was actually part of the key to their success. Ditto a similar process with Buddhism in other places - that you could adopt this set of metaphysical understandings about the universe without having to cease the patterns of non-religious, "worldly" cultural behaviours and organizations that you'd had previously.

This is in fact a separation between secular and sacred. It is not the SAME separation we have, but to act like the conceptual separation didn't exist or was somehow invented by Martin Luther is LUDICROUS and ahistorical and . . . like I'll stop there because I can keep going but.)

[ewt]

Well. and separation of identity and separation of politics aren't always the same thing, and "separation" isn't always what it looks like on paper. I think it's fair to say that, say, in Luther's time, church politics and state politics were intertwined in a very different way to the way they are now. In the UK, Christians still get some major festivals off from work and it's a constitutional monarchy with an actual established religion which has bishops in the House of Lords. But it's my understanding that nobody here seriously expects the "C of E vote" to change anything come election time, while in the US which is, as I understand it, pretty big on separation of church and state, going after the Evangelical Vote is... like, a thing.

(My understanding could be wrong. It frequently is.)

I wonder if some of the "but this was just the done thing, not, like, a special religious thing or anything" mythology comes from a perception that being meaningfully religious in a communal way is often actually hard work, but feels as if it shouldn't be. I mean, it's hard work being the kind of religious Christian I would like to be, even in a country where my denomination is the established religion, because it turns out churches don't just run themselves and are subject to all the same entropy as anything else plus a really good helping of the geek social fallacies, and most of my co-religionists are both less liberal/progressive than I am and less interested in integrating their faith practices beyond an hour or so on a Sunday morning and maybe the odd meeting during the week. (I am literally doing a PhD to recover from burnout associated with this.) When I was exploring conversion to orthodox Judaism in my 20s it was super hard work, because all that was still true (though the GSF were much less prominent) and it was also a minority culture and religion. And it's so easy to fall into nostalgia for a golden time when everyone went to church because that's where their social life always was, and nobody moved away because of course they didn't, and to tell ourselves this story that if Society Were Different then keeping the whole thing going wouldn't be so much work, without actually checking whether it was true, and without thinking about why we feel like it isn't supposed to be this hard.