#xtian

Laik y me compro unas chispop. 🧜🏻‍♂️✨

Because they, too, find zealots to be lame and irritating.

Beauty is deceiving.☠️

#DesignYourUniverse #MusouBlack #FreeYourself #He #Him

I wanna remind everyone that Xtians stole, erased and diluted everybody’s ancient traditions and cultures and they’re still doing it. Yes, they did it in Scandinavia too and Jól, the original way, is the decolonized/deXtianized Xmas 🧡

It is open to anybody willing to learn or curious. It is also completely doable without seasonal-section-shopping or even corporations at all. Go get some regular ass oranges, cut them into wheels, dehydrate them in your oven, decorate with them and celebrate Yule or Jól instead if you wanna get festive in some way. You can also use some oranges to make a stovetop potpourri and make your home smell good. They either represent the memory of the sun in winter and/or the wheel of the year if you’re pagan. Get firewood and carve deep enough holes for some regular, non-Xmas-marketed tea light/pillar candles (yes they can be fake if you can’t have candles, it’s the intention and comfort that counts) and decorate it with greenery from Mother Nature outside your own home. This is an actual Yule Log. It’s not a cake. Use some of the wood and learn how to whittle and carve something for your family as a gift. You only need a pocket knife, but you can get fancy tools now if you want to. As long as you’re not getting anything from the seasonal section, you are not contributing to it. Buy the generic, non-Xmas products off-holiday/season. Don’t go out on Black Friday.

You can get candles from a local or online candle shop or such if you’d like. Your local farm might also be selling firewood. Might have to get oranges from the grocery store or hopefully if you know a farmer’s market that has them, definitely use that instead, but they aren’t an Xmas specific item.

You can support your local Xmas tree farm or if you have winter-adapted trees around your home and put reindeer snacks, healthy vegetables for wildlife on it for “Santa” if you have kids, also, again, anything from outside. Santa and his 8 reindeer may come from from Odin and Sleipnir, the Loki-born, yes Loki, 8-legged horse. Leaving out cookies, getting clothes for Xmas, and Decorating Xmas trees may come from leaving for the Yule Lads and the Yule Cat to leave you alone and treats out offerings on/near trees to the Wild Hunt in Scandinavian folklore. You don’t have to believe this religiously, but it’s important to question what you’re fed from birth about the world.

Anarchists are materialists. We understand that there is a real and concrete basis for the way society is organised right now:why here are rich and poor, why there are order-givers and order-takers, why there is starvation and misery on a massive scale — and we understand how this can be changed. Religion sees such things as “God given” and acceptable, the poor being rewarded in the afterlife for accepting “their lot” in this one. This means that anarchism and religion stand diametrically opposed to each other.

Religion, by its nature, must be authoritarian — whether to a greater or lesser extent. It must be based on “faith”, on obedience. The reality we face is of churches that play a particular role in the oppression of women, of gays and of all who seek to change the traditional authoritarian family. They play a very real role in the repression of sexuality. It is no coincidence that fundamentalists of all religions, from Iran to Ireland, are in the vanguard of the movement to push back the the gains made by women in the workplace and in the “sexual revolution”.

The strong hold religion has in Ireland cannot be seen just as a result of historical factors, today it offers something that many people want. It “explains” all sorts of natural and personal disasters as the “will of God”. It offers hope in a world of misery, ignorance, ‘poverty, frustration and alienation — the promise of a better world in the hereafter is a powerful addition. The way to take away this basis for religion is to provide a much better life, not in any “hereafter” but now.

To break the power of the churches we need a strategy that combines our vision of a better world in the here and now with struggles that bring people into conflict with clerical power and show up religion as a prop for the status quo that stands in the way of their needs and desires. The authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the churches have to be confronted.

We support the demand for separation of Church and State. It is wrong to say “....but we oppose the State as well”. Of course we do. It is a tactical question dictated by the sort of society we are living in right now. We oppose the wages system but that doesn’t stop us fighting for higher wages. This means fighting against clerical control of hospitals, schools, youth clubs funded by the taxpayer, community groups, etc. It means fighting for the best possible secular laws in the areas of divorce, contraception, sterilisation, abortion, etc. These struggles force the churches to come out openly against what many people desperately want, and so weaken their support. A victory on any of these issues both lessens church influence and proves that the clerics can be beaten; which in turn creates the possibility of involving more people in the next battle.

We regard religion as a private matter, within society s a whole. It should enjoy no special privileges, tax reliefs, powers, influence, etc. Membership of a church should carry no more of the above than would membership of a sports or drama club. We stand for equal rights for religious, non-religious and anti-religious views.

Within the revolutionary organisation — which is a specifically materialist body — it is not a private matter. It is part of our programme to take up the battle against the power and influence of the churches. This does not mean that we deny membership to religious believers. We do not. But they must understand that our politics will inevitably bring them into conflict the clerics. They will, for example, be publicly selling our paper which calls for divorce, abortion, an end to religious control of education, etc.