quakin'

I left after a couple months, I stayed just long enough to see that they explicitly believe women are inferior to men, and of course, that homosexuality is a sin on par with murder.

The whole missionary door to door thing is NOT how Jehovah's Witnesses recruit. That is how they convince their members that the world is out to get them. One of the first things they teach is that Jesus requires you to try to convert non Christians to the faith. (They say non Christian but mean non JW.)

Then they say, "look how people treat us, just for the crime of wanting to save their soul"

They have long time church members tutor the incoming members to smooth the process over. They're trained to smooth away any doubts you may have about the church.

You know an easier way to get him to lose his soul?

The myth of Judas is like every story in the Bible: it depends on how you read it.

There’s the first story, the one everyone knows, in which Jesus is divine and Judas is the betrayer and he is condemned for it. But what isn’t said is that there needs to be a betrayal; that the story hinges on it; the passion can’t play without it. And so the question becomes: if it’s all destined, if it’s fate, is Judas culpable? Was he lead to the betrayal - did he ever even have a choice? The question of Judas is the question of free will. This is why Jesus loves him most, keeps him close, never hates him - he’s part of the godhead. He knows that he’s not the only one who is sacrificed for salvation. And doesn’t Judas get the worst of it - reviled for all eternity, hated by all, written down in the book as The Betrayer? He doesn’t even get a legacy. He doesn’t get worshipped; he doesn’t even get to be forgotten. For someone to rise up, to ascend, someone else has to take the fall, and that’s exactly what Judas did.

The second story is the historical one, the one that says Jesus was just a man, and that he and Judas knew exactly what the fuck they were doing. In this story Jesus is the leader and Judas is his right hand, his zealot, the one who believes that the cause, the salvation of his people, is more important than anything else, more than anything Jesus might want, more important than any human bonds, any love or dedication. They’ve read the book. They know the stories. They know that the only way to make their revolution last is for Jesus to become a martyr. They make the myth because they are just men and the story, the story will last far beyond them. The story lasts forever. 

And so we come to the Gethsemane, only it’s under different lighting. There’s this idea, somehow, that Jesus is the innocent, that the betrayal is a blow - but he knows what’s coming. In every version, he always knows. And that changes things, it complicates things. It changes the two of them from good and evil, profane and divine, into what they were and what it was - two men giving up their lives in the hope that they could bring hope to all the people who came after them. The hero and the villain because they created themselves that way.

“But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.”

A twitter thread by Caitlin J. Stout @CaitlinJStout from Feb 25 2021 reading,

A friend asked the other day what percentage of people I went to youth group with “deconstructed” and what percentage remained evangelical. As I thought about it, I realized that for the most part it was the kids who took their faith the most seriously who eventually walked away.

Those of us who tearfully promised that we would follow Jesus anywhere eventually followed him out the door. The Queer kids, more than anyone, learned exactly what it meant to work out our faith with fear and trembling.

They told us to read the Bible and take it seriously and then mocked us for becoming “social justice warriors.”

Now they’re warning us not to deconstruct to the point of meaninglessness.

But they took a chisel to God until he fit in a box. They “deconstructed” the concept of love until it allowed them to tolerate sexual abuse, celebrate white supremacy, and look away from kids in cages.

Woke: Knowing that Eden and the Temple are shockingly clear literary foils, and that the fruit is a metaphor for the "forbidden" practices of Goddess, tree, and serpent veneration which were actually quite common in ancient Israel and Judah.

Bespoke: Theorizing that because the story is about loss of harmony with God and nature, essentially telling the story of humans transitioning from hunter gatherers to grain agriculture and civilization, the appropriate symbolic "fruit" is actually wheat itself, which is why it figures prominently in the curse narrative.