#1 Native Bee Enjoyer🐝🐝🐝

Textile Fragment with Artemis and Actaeon Undyed linen with tapestry-woven coloured wools. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, appears suspended in the air holding a bow and wearing a crown of arrows, while Actaeon stands beside her leaning on a reversed spear or staff. The central and side panels are decorated with dancing figures framed by scrolling vines, floral borders, and scattered red blossoms. In the early Byzantine world, mythological scenes such as this signalled cultural sophistication and knowledge of classical literature. The textile was likely produced in Panopolis (Akhmim, Egypt), a renowned centre of luxury textile production.

I think that better scientific and historical literacy plus better critical thinking skills will lead to many supernatural concepts being rejected. A consequence of this will be more atheists. This is fine. There is no evidence that gods punish anyone for not believing in them, and every instance of belief that they will can be traced back to certain socio-economic anxieties or agendas.

I think better socio-economic conditions will also produce an environment where more benign forms of theism and supernaturalism will feel more reasonable, where there's less "you'll go to eternal punishment if you stray from God's holy way" and more "I think God loves everyone and wouldn't allow anyone to suffer eternally" and "I know angels exist because I saw one when my grandma was dying." People like this aren't really a threat, so I'm not worried about them.

Doing the right thing (like taking care of people and the environment) is considered more important than having the right beliefs.

Acknowledgment of religion as a social technology that can promote community cohesion and strengthen social bonds.

Acknowledgment of religion as a psychological technology that can give people a sense of order and grounding.

Participation in rituals, holidays, ceremonies, etc. are voluntary, rather than mandatory.

Honesty and transparency regarding the historical origins of holy texts, religious movements, etc. is normalized.

Holy texts are approached as inspirational, rather than infallible.

Authoritarian, hierarchical institutions fall out of favor. Scholars and ritual specialists still exist, but nobody has absolute authority.

Things like appeals to supernatural force ("do this or God will punish you!"), spiritual FOMO ("you'll miss out on Heaven if you reject these teachings!"), and spiritual bribery ("do this and you'll go to the best version of Heaven!") are recognized as manipulative, red flag behaviors.

Acknowledgment that extremism comes out of experiencing things like stress and insecurity, is always fear-based, and is not actually desirable.

this is a good and very honest question and i appreciate it. to start with, i'm saying what i'm saying for multiple reasons; yes, its very true that if we fall for the alluring draw of saying that rape is an evil terrible thing that only evil terrible people can do, it both excuses their actions as inevitable and agency-less rather than active choices made in disregard of a targets wellbeing or consent, there's the matter of falsely accused innocents (happening especially to members of minority groups) facing life ruining punishment, and then it also does make meaningful rehabilitation much more difficult for the people who are willing to go "i have seriously harmed someone in deeply personal, violative ways, and i want to be able to understand the depth of the harm i've caused and make amends for it in what ways i can, even if that just means solo work and therapy completely disconnected from the possibility or idea of getting forgiveness from my victim. i want to be accountable and i am sorry for the damage i've done", because it posits that there is ultimately no point to actually trying to learn or grow or try to understand or empathize with the harm they're responsible, since because they're part of the rapist subhuman group, it will be inevitable for them to strike again as a part of their nature.

Out of the near-infinite reasons of the past, present, and future, how many of them could have been caused by your actions? Every choice you make is less than a molecule in an ocean of cause and effect.

Yes, there was a reason for the earthquake, flood, or cancer. But it's not your fault. A bullet falling from the sky does not seek out someone who deserves to die. A drunk driver doesn't veer off the road to hit a teenager who just had sex for the first time. Glaucoma doesn't descend on sinful eyes.

Pain and tragedy is not sent to punish or bring glory to a higher power. It simply happens because somewhere in a line of collapsing dominoes, physics and biology tipped one over. There is no moral path that makes you too good for this world, nor too evil. The world simply is.

People have reasons to hurt each other. A dog will bite that hand that feeds if it is also the hand that beats. But another dog will bite a stranger because biting is all it knows.

Everything happens for a reason. Anything can be traced backward in time to an origin, and more often than not that origin is random, innocuous, and completely amoral.

A butterfly's wingbeat is a reason. There is no lesson to be learned, nor action to be taken. Tearing the wings off every one will not stop a hurricane. Terrible and beautiful things will continue to happen, as long as the world exists. The only thing we are destined to face is the indifference of the universe.

Like Zan pointed out, Evangelical Christians are taught that positive emotions are actually the Lord moving through them, rather than their own personal reactions to their experiences. Meanwhile, Evangelical church services are deliberately engineered to elicit these kinds of of feelings in people. It's pure emotional manipulation.

Similar ideas are found in New Age spirituality, where "spiritual discernment" is frequently boiled down to "does it make me feel good or not?" People are taught to evaluate politically charged information based on whether it, for lack of a better term, sparks joy. Now, determining whether or not something sparks joy is a wonderful way to decide whether you want to keep your old tea kettle, but here we're talking about information that people will base crucial personal and political choices on.

Meanwhile, New Age influencers do everything they can to make sure they're sparking joy for you. Let's take Paul White Gold Eagle, for example. His videos are constantly talking about things that sound exciting, like messages from archangels, dragons of light, and emerald transmissions. This type of baiting - joybaiting, I'll call it - is meant to hook you emotionally and make you think that this has to be true because it elicits that oooough, shiny reaction. Next thing you know, you've been joybaited into falling down the conspirituality pipeline and you believe some version of QAnon's conspiracy theories.

This kind of thinking is even dangerous in pagan circles. You find yourself thinking about a thing and noticing a lot? You feel an intense pull to study it? You'll find people out there telling you that you have a spiritual connection to it, like, maybe you were part of it in a past life. And maybe you go and get a past life reading, or even undergo hypnosis. And now you, the whitest gal in the surburb with zero familial connections to any Native people, feel entitled to appropriate some form of Native spirituality because you felt fascination with it, or what you thought it was, and now you're contributing to white sage decimation and spreading around some sort of Native-flavored form of neopaganism as if it's actual Native spirituality.

Or maybe you fall in with a neopagan cult leader who uses your fascination to convince you that you knew each other in a past life, and you were led to them in this life so you could continue some important work in this life, and they pull you completely into their bullshit.

Finally, it's dangerous because it encourages stalkers. A lot of stalkers are people with incredibly powerful fixations on others. These types of beliefs get them convinced that their victims are actually their soulmates or twin flames or whathaveyou, and make them feel justified in engaging in stalking behavior.