not as edgy as my theme would suggest

#405 Luxray

Its autumn so here's a perfectly fitting pajamas just for her.

statement statement

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.

But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.

Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.

This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.

Something as ubiquitous as using a possessive pronoun about my body makes it seem conceptually distinct from myself, which is, more often than not, conceived as something intangible that can be separated from the body (and survive in some form, according to Christian doctrine).

Even talking about embodiment, the way that we exist in the world as physical beings, is historically connected to the idea of a soul existing within a body. A soul is 'embodied' by being placed in a body. But what I want to convey is that my mind and body are one, and that both are perceived through my senses (inner dialogue is typically heard or perhaps seen). Perhaps, as philosophical physicalists are so fond of claiming, my mind is an emergent property that certain types of bodies (humans) developed through evolution.

However, because the English language developed alongside culturally Christian ideas about what it means to be a person, it is so hard to convey this without either adopting language which seems to undermines my point or by breaking grammatical rules.