My Ultra Snarky Gay Brother

Wants to go to seminary, to be an Episcopal priest because they have the elaborate theology he likes (he likes this medieval conception of god as the point where you can no longer follow a chain of logic.) but will let him keep his boyfriend.

He’s a freaky RISD grad.

He’ll be either the best vicar in the world or the fucking worst

One Thing Atheists Need To Stop Doing

Is agreeing with the shittiest fundies that “ultra shitty fundies are the only real version of this religion” so that you can ignore kind, tolerant, reasonable religious people

Like the Westboro Baptist Church interpretation of the bible ain’t the only valid one (and in fact misses a lot of historical context).

Most Muslims regard ISIS as a hideous and awful perversion of their faith (and actually they’re misreading the text, ignoring a lot of the context giving books of quotation traditionally used to help interpret the Koran and generally twisting it to their own ends.)

And so on and so forth.

Stop validating shithead fundies belief that they’re the true practitioners of their faith, stop putting forward bigoted, violent, awful interpretations as correct, and jeering at people who interpret their faith in a kind and tolerant way along with fundie shitheads.  That is not fucking helpful. 

Fundies misuse religious texts, often ignoring historical context, allegory and translation errors, and so on to suit their purposes.

I’m an atheist and I am so fucking sick of this utter bullshit.

I like syncretic religions so much, because they go"oh yeah, your guys are probably there too, and hey, that guy is a lot like our guy, I bet they’re the same guy".  It just seems so much nicer to go “Yeah your guy is there too” than “your guy isn’t real, ONLY MY GUY IS REAL" 

I mean like seriously, the kid who insists everyone else’s imaginary friends aren’t real and that only their imaginary friend is real is a douche lord, similarly movement atheists often kinda get “NO ONE’S IMAGINARY FRIENDS ARE REAL” and like they, like the “only my imaginary friend is real” kid, are kind of missing the point.  Maybe I’m talking out of my ass but like I feel like religions that are like “yeah this other religion’s cosmology is wildly different and in fact contradictory to my religion’s cosmology, but it’s probably also true” has a kind of understanding of what I guess I understand as what religion is useful for which is like providing a kind of framework for looking at the world, and like it’s not like there’s only one useful framework and like it seems like it’s from a more functional and less hyper literal understanding of things.  Like weirdly religion isn’t just natural and ethical philosophy, it can incorporate those things, but there’s other stuff.