Drivebyhaiku @ Drivebyhaiku @lemmy.world

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Ditto. Not a particularly a religious person (spiritualist more generally) and generally pretty critical of the Church but bloody tired of people who have been religion burned taking it out on others who are just clinging to comfort to get by in a hard world. Lemmy has a rather large Christian Atheist community. You know the sort, the "I don't believe in God but the God I very stridently don't believe in is the Christian God" type of person. It does come across as fairly insecure at times. I am reminded of the way I used to behave as an angry teen.

I think we are seeing a historic waning of faith and a reassessment of cultural values...but looking at the cycles of things that generally means there's a backlash which might be still building or we might be facing it right now. I think it's far better for those traumatized atheists to build solidarity with people inside the faiths who are pushing for and building the foundations for changes as "enemy of my enemy is my friend" alliances. Sadly a lot of them seem way too busy trying to attain personal catharsis by just scalding anyone who treats religion with respect.

What the fuck kind of question is "Remind me who murders people like you"?

I will remind you, you didn't come into this conversation speaking calmly and plainly. You didn't state your point in a respectful way that gave any benefit of the doubt as to where I was coming from, you flew in from left field to a reply I made to someone else with " Hey idiot, JESUS doesn't EXIST!" sort of phrasing with the expectation that I was a Christian and your intention was to hurt and mock.

You engaged with every point I made from the perspective that I only deal and support with Christian groups and once I mentioned I was trans you started trying to use that to twist the knife and push your point. Then pulled the "Well I have a trans person in the family so I am not a bigot" routine. Heads up that flies about as well as the "Well I have a racial minority in the family". It's using your daughter in law as your justification, reducing her to a shield in your arsonal and that is also not okay.

My issue with you is not your beliefs. My issue is your angsty Christian Atheist teenager in full rebellion routine. Your rudeness and the anger that makes you lash out at even the mildest mention of "religion". Would you have been so strident if I had been talking about Hinduism? Buddhism? Probably not because you make it pretty clear right off the bat you were hurt specifically and you have a score to settle and your aim is to give back whatever it is you got to anyone with even a fairly neutral opinion of Christians as a series of individuals. That isn't an atheist perspective, it's a trauma response. I used to behave the same way when I was a teen but I grew the fuck up and gathered some perspective and moved on with my life. I would hope you do the same.

Ah yes. Your trans relative. How very noble.

Your condescension is grating. Stop making your religious trauma other people's problem.

I mean she also using "transgenderism" which isn't exactly nomenclature either so the evidence seems to be that she's not actual speaking English but instead Conservative "Newspeak" where satire goes to die.

Well the weird thing with that is that performative bisexuality on the part of a woman inside a heterosexual relationship framework where the idea is that it is in service to a man's desire for sexual liasons with multiple female partners is sort of conceived by some people as "heterosexuallity plus"... A lot of the moral panic doesn't kick in unless another male partner is introduced or there becomes strong evidence that the female partnership is continuing to happen when the male isn't around.

I could totally see one of these arrangements developing into a full blown romantic affair between two women but the compulsory heterosexual frame work providing more than enough internal gas lighting and refusal to reflect so they never connect the dots that they are in fact queer. It's basically the distinction between kink and identity.

Internalized homophobia be a trip.

Everyone. Everyone murders people like us.

It doesn't matter if the person who kills you does so because they believe their God believes you are obcene or if the person simply thinks you are mentally ill and endangering their convenience to treat you however they feel you deserve to be treated. They don't even need to resort to dirtying their hands themselves most of the time. All they need to do is make life so endemically miserable that fighting to survive becomes insurmountable.

You want to point the fingers elsewhere because you want to blame all the ills of the world on the Christians but believe me when I say they aren't even represented in half of the problems I deal with regularly and there is a significant number of people of faith who are in this fight with us. While you might not share their beliefs they still deserve your basic courtesy but you seem to consider nothing but screaming at them like a rabid ape.

My general issue with atheists is that they are generally complete asshats about people who do believe in anything and even the suggestion that any belief system other than their own should be taken seriously as a potential core function of identity causes them to go on a massive hostile tirade where they treat everyone else in the room as an idiot.

If you are as big an asshole about any belief than your own functionally you are basically just Christianity 2.0 as far as trying to flatten the spiritual landscape. When people become hostile towards you with that behavior you earn it. I don't know what religious trauma got you where you are but taking it back to the drawing board for a hard think about how you are turning it around and inflicting it on others.

No I don't think Jesus was particularly up on Greek philosophy but it's not actually all that hard a philosophy to hit upon. Most of the stoics did so in isolation because essentially it is a trauma response. Sometimes someone randomly pops up out of the landscape with a similar idea call it the convergent evolution of ideas.

And Yes, convincing Christians is in part my deal because I am queer and as a whole we need to fight these beliefs just to stay alive but Christians aren't going to become athiests. You do not fight belief with disbelief, they spit that back in your face because that's not how faith works.

But by all means act a complete social paraiah that makes the work harder by making them believe that people are trying to rip away what's precious to them. Drive them to believe they are persecuted and call them idiots so they dive back into their book and their churches with a self righteous relief at having dodged the devil once again. Ask yourself what that ego hit of proselytizing your atheism with vicious slow burn rage looks like from the outside and then look at the men on the street corners telling us how we're all going to burn in hell waving their holy book and ask yourself if your behaviour towards others is all that different.

It is my fault for being too ambiguous in my phrasing.

But yeah... Dude's teacher going "and THAT'S Socialism" is essentially the effect at play. When you hit all the reinforced points of Conservative emotional reactive training with just a bigger hammer they don't know to look for the cues that the author and the message are at odds. . A lot of the rhetoric of Conservativism is based more on vibe than on solid social or media literacy so if you just replicate the vibe the programming kicks in to stop thinking critically. They do recognize it as hyperbole... Most of the time. I have known some spectacular idiots

You've probably noticed but all but the absolute most obtuse satire does not work on conservative audiences.

Point of order regarding the hostility here - I am not a Christian. Closest spiritual philosophy I ascribe to is Shinto. I dislike Paul in a general sense because I am a trans non-binary person and I grew up in a town where Christian kids were awful to me mostly based off the sex negative nature of Pauline doctrine where I intuit the man was a sex repulsed asexual who really was fond of telling other people what to do and setting that up as the default state of Christianity is very good at creating situations of sexual/religious trauma.

I study the bible and the origins of dogma for historical purpose to help make greater sense of the complex nature of how individual schisms of the church impacted the world. I am aware Jesus has the same situation going as Aristotle and Confucius where what we have of his philosophy was written down by his students or his students students. It's at best a warped lens.

Still the picture painted that remains of Jesus, or this idea of Jesus... does have some identifiable philosophies. Mostly comparable to the classical stoics.

But at least part of the situation in figuring out the formation of the early church and the development of is to look at the early adopters. The bible is not meant to be be read through as a full endorsement of every rule. Leviticus for instance is "the rules of the tribe of Levi" and are essentially a snapshot of the sort of rules created by the priesthood of that particular time. It gives context of where dogma comes from potentially so that one can extrapolate what is God's law and what is cultural. There is no divorcing Paul from the modern church due to him being the core around which the whole thing aelf legitimizes... But a Church, any church or the conception of an organized church is not Christianity. As movements go using the document as a historical document (more or less in the same way we would use Monmont or Herodotus) you can recontextualize a very different conception of the religion and there is nothing really to stop you from following it.

Ah, I see I was unclear on some points.

I am not saying the author is a conservative making a bad faith arguement about Socialism. Quite the opposite. He's a leftist making the strawman cold war anti socialist rhetoric and turning it up to 11 to be absurd. But this actually has nothing to do with the intention of the author. While Vonnegut was for the most part was known for his anti-war anti McCarthist bent not all of his catelog is cohesive. Harrison is one where his intentions, at least in his writing execution, were fairly grey. He was writing the Conservative conception of Cold War depictions of Socialism and civil rights advocacy but its one of those death of the author moments where the satire struck some perceived "truth" with a conservative audience. Knowing the author it is generally leftist is what allows you to unlock the actual possible intentions of the satire but that effect is sometimes negated due to an unfortunate habit of the polarized audience.

Think of it as a Steven Colbert Report effect of satire. You expect absurdism to be recognized in a work based on external knowledge of the author and the level of over the top tricks you employ but your audience... If they exist on the other end of the spectrum doesn't recognize who you're making fun of because you instead miss the mark and create a warped mirror that makes you popular on both sides. Colbert, in character, was extremely popular in conservative spaces because he essentially masqueraded as an over the top demagogue and they took his satire as their own "sticking it to the libs". This particular story ended up being so on the nose to conservative belief at the time that they took it and literally and are using it as their own propaganda.

I mean you wanna be technical about it socialism is a much wider spectrum of ideas than Communism. There are definitely people who define it strictly by the presence of the worker co-op or as anti-capitalist but that's one floating idea in a nebula. Market Socialism for instance is basically a blend of capitalism and socialism where things like capitalist incentives are still maintained but regulated and systems of social support are expanded to make up for the gap of the whole capitalist "not my monkey not my circus" washing of hands of social responsibility to be an active part of a community. It's basically anti-capitalist in the same way putting up a privacy fence is anti-neighbor... So a wide spanning income based taxation could be construed as sort of Socialist but its basically the air we breathe as far as a norm goes.

But Harrison Bergeron is more like the Conservative satire of what "Cultural Marxism" looks like in practice. The strawman idea that is designed to make people clutch their individuality and random blessings like something someone wants to forcefully take away from them... It's a metaphor for things like social programs and inequality conscious measures that lift up disadvantaged people to allow them access to participate in society but not a particularly good one as it pre-supposes that lifting someone up is the same thing as crushing persecution of the naturally gifted.

Your teacher was half right, the story is about Socialism but it's a hostile framing of Socialism in complete bad faith using the conventions of science fiction to paint an overblown dystopia with hyperbolic absurd metaphors that underline the anxieties anti-civil rights advocates had when it was written.

The whole thing makes more sense when you consider that hardcore disability advocacy groups that started the path to creating the ADA basically was beginning to gain traction when the book was being written.

Pretty sure this would fall under the several parables in Christianity where Jesus or God basically tells people that exacting judgement for biblical sin is the domain and privilege of God alone and that it's not the job of people to act on it.

But if Christians didn't get pushback for being terrible to people they wouldn't feel persecuted and they all want to suffer somehow to feel like they are Christ-like themselves. The Bible is very much written from the perspective of having it's work cut out to be radical upheaval of the status quo. I don't think there was much thought that they would basically recreate the structures they were fighting against by becoming economically as powerful as nobility. When you really start digging everything from the expectation of extreme celebacy to the idea that giving money to the church is a virtue that should be rewarded with respect and prestige in the church isn't Jesus... It's Paul. The notoriously power hungry guy who who fell off a horse, hit his head on a rock and hallucinated Jesus.

Ah good old Trickle down economics scattering largess to the peasants. Interesting to see the old grift never dies.

I can begrudge the wealthy. Look at where Taylor Swift came from. She's the child of two wealthy investment bankers who moved to Nashville to support their daughters music career when she was still a tween. Taylor Swift has always been a marketing project, it's all she literally knows how to be since she was a literal child.

Billionaires also don't just have "I can live on this comfortably for the rest of my life" money they have "I can impact the world if I want to" money. If she never played another concert ever again she could travel the world and eat out at the world's most expensive restaurants and clothe herself in the most over expensive folies for the rest of her days and still leave a massive fortune to her children. Cupidity has no upper limit though so she's still focused on accruing money by changing the playing field to her advantage.

I think the most pertinent question these days is why is sex listed on a drivers licence anyway? If it's referring to phenotype why does anyone I give my ID to need to know what genitals are in my smallclothes? If it's referring to chromasomal makeup why the hell is that relevant to the guy at the liquor store?

If it refers to gender then the consideration becomes that you can't always intuit gender from presentation so that's hardly good at creating any benefit for visual identification.

ID is an issue in general for non-binary people. Here in Canada your passport and licence have to match but getting an X gender marker on your passport means your documents have a solid opportunity to subject you to travel discrimination and whether or not that ID will even be accepted abroad becomes a serious and sometimes peicemeal question.

The question of "should we allow changes of sex on identifying documents" is kind of missing the point. We should be talking total abolition of registration of sex on drivers licences.

Oh no problem, you definitely have ally vibes so I didn't think you meant anything by it, just doing a heads up since some folk legit don't know. I saw "transgenderism" was being used in context of framed as not being proper nomenclature/ used by bigots but "transgenders" appeared to be used without the same context cues.

I know this is going to sound petty but small point of order - transgender is an adjective. It goes before who is being described - example "Transgender people"

"Transgenders"is a word that we in the community sometimes see from sources that want to create us as a wholesale noun. Usually same linguistic place as removing " cis" as an equal adjective in language and an adjective (ie "there are normal people and then there are transgenders") or to create a differentiating noun wholesale by removing the space between adjective and noun ( ie. "that's not a woman it's a transwoman")

These may seem a ridiculously small thing but in some places these linguistic cues are used either as subtle anti-trans dog whistles on the right... And on the other side of it inside the community the kindest way we tend to use the term is jokingly when doing impersonations of grandparents and the like... ie "Those kids today and their pokemans and their transgenders! When I was a kid we had bottlecaps and we liked it!"

Technically there is a legal answer but unfortunately in the States it has different possible definitions at the State and Federal level.

In a very general sense one in part looks at intention and also all the factors around in the environment. If I were to go "we should kill the !" in a forum such as this where generally speaking we are all just people talking and hyperbole is more or less the norm it's probably not going to meet the criteria of a chargeable incitement. If I as a speaker at a podium where I have been marketed as some kind of authority - even if that is just implied by the fact I am on the podium - start winding up a crowd with the intention of setting them loose to a criminal purpose or start yelling at someone who is already weilding a gun to shoot then that's a pretty strong case for incitement. Your intention is made fairly clear and you are in a place to directly influence in an outsized fashion how events might play out.

A lot of the harmful rhetoric that goes on, while priming the stage for individual people to become aggressive and more predisposed to take out their aggressions on the target (stochastic terrorism) has been leaned on quite heavily in modern times it does so basically cheating the system. If you start low and slow and let the water appear to boil itself then it generally protects you from a incitement charge.

Issue with your first premise about Socialism... I have never heard leftist and Socialist circles take specific issue with Jewish people. Quite frankly the stereotype of the rich Jewish person is tied into the idea of Usury being a sin in Christianity but not the Jewish faith... But when was the last time you heard of the church full of fire and brimstone proclaim participating in the stock market is a sin? Answer is, you don't. Because it doesn't happen anymore. As dogma goes it was subtly retired from popular consciousness over a lengthy process about 300 years ago. The concept of "the Rich Jew" being a distinct issue for having any kind of advantage over anybody else is just the lingering unexamined myth of an era where any loan made where interest was charged had limited sources. There is no bogeyman money lender anymore when secular short term loan businesses dot the landscape.

The factor the main branches of Socialism all agree on is that the super rich should be taxed and measures made to put checks on monopolies. The faith of the people in those positions has zero relevance to that discussion. The common denominator is the amount of money made and the social ills that are perpetuated when that wealth is allowed to be unambiguously hoarded. Assuming that targeting the rich unfairly targets the Jewish people is buying into the antisemitic stereotype that paints them as the only rich predatory bogeymen of consequence.

What Conservatives often don't realize about hate speech is that there are protected and unprotected grounds. Israel is a political construct, a country. Becoming mega rich through exploitation is a choice anyone can make. Neither of these things are beyond criticism because they are both institutions independant of the body of religion. You have Jewish people who hate what the body politic of Israel is doing and you have rich exploitative people who are not Jewish.

The near complete lack of understanding of the actual hard boundries of what counts as hate speech versus legitimate targets of criticism leave a lot of moderates in your position where they are out to sea and unable to pick hate speech properly out of the dialogue and are subject to false equivency propaganda that there's hypocrisy when there's not. In rhetoric there are solid rules about what counts and until you learn them you are sailing without a compass or stars.

I dunno if religion is strictly to blame. The assumption is that the source of bigotry towards trans people is religion but that hasn't jived with my experiences. A lot of it comes more from people framing us as a logistical or social "problem" that is being encouraged rather than " solved" by the current model of care that places it's focus on the ultimate well-being of the individual. A lot of that is secular in source.

People will find any manner of sources of justification to reinforce their "ick" response. Science (or a limited understanding of surface level science) and "common sense" is often more the rhetoric that gets splashed around and are often the most brazen objectors to my identity. The "you'll burn in hell" types are actually decently rare by comparison... Generally heartbreaking to hear of don't get me wrong but only a fraction of the whole problem.