[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]

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.