fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2323 ]

[ SECRET POST #2323 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2323 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

__________________________________________________

08.

__________________________________________________

09.

__________________________________________________

10.

__________________________________________________

11.

__________________________________________________

12.

__________________________________________________

13.

__________________________________________________

14.

__________________________________________________

15.

__________________________________________________

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 069 secrets from Secret Submission Post #332.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I didn't mean all writers, and I didn't mean the general themes that people are referring to above. I meant the authors (mostly fan authors) who either brag about their atheism or bash religion.

Religion gets a LOT of hate on the internet, so it's frustrating that the only time it can be discussed is in fiction, because you can then dismiss it as fiction (I hear the term "kid's stories" often).

ayrt

What prevents you from discussing religion with other religious people, outside of fiction? It seems that people with a common interest should naturally gather to discuss it... or do you mean religion as it specifically relates to fandom?

I mean that there's a stigma that if you're religious then you must be less intelligent than the average atheist. Most websites that I'm on (tumblr espeically) seem to regard religion as explicitly fiction, treat it as childish, see no reason why anyone would believe any of it, etc. So religious people therefore stay mum.

ayrt

I see. I, personally, cannot bring myself to believe it. But I can see how/why others would (I would expect for the same reasons I decided Religion I Was Raised With was not for me).

And hell, you have to go to school to be a preacher, right? (A quick google suggests there's some debate on the necessity of formal education, but still.) Religious people know their shit. More than a few may be batshit crazy, but that goes for any classified group of people.

Fun fact: I just discovered today through random link-clicking that Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian minister. I defy anyone to question that man's worth.

NA

Religious person here, adding to the discussion. I can't speak for other denominations, but at my church, our minister puts in extra work "behind the scenes". She doesn't just turn up on Sunday and then just lounge around for the rest of the week eating chocolate. There's behind-the-scenes work involved - planning, talking to people, trying to get stuff organized, etc.

Also, from what I've gathered, to become a minister or a priest, you don't just read the Bible - you study the extra stuff outside the gospels, the historical & cultural context that things took place, and the work of past scholars and all their different interpretations.

~* The More You Know! *~

This. When I was growing up**, the ministers in my city were on call 24/7; and if they weren't available, there was a list of standby elders "on call."

But ministers were expected to drop everything, at all hours, to go to hospital/bedside/front door/etc when they were called. Not all of them showed up (or were particularly helpful when they did), but the majority of them did, and they were helpful/supportive/etc.

**There were over a thousand people in my local congregation, so my anecdata may not be representative.

Re: OP

mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com - 2013-05-14 15:42 (UTC) - Expand

IIRC there are quite a few of us believers (from at least a few major religions) here on F!S, and whenever religious-themed threads/secrets/GC come up, the atheists and agnostics here seem pretty chill with it/us/etc.

Breath of fresh air compared to Tumblr, tbqh. And it is actually the preaching on Tumblr that sets my teeth on edge. Like nails down a chalkboard. It is so bad. So. Bad. *shudder*

DA

Preaching on tumblr? Where? (I've never actually seen this before, so maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong places.)

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-05-14 00:02 (UTC) - Expand

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-05-14 04:15 (UTC) - Expand

Re: OP

mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com - 2013-05-14 15:45 (UTC) - Expand

protip: tumblr is not the rest of the world

If you visit atheist websites, you're going to get an atheist point of view. There's no way that "most websites" regard religion as fiction, as the majority of people in the world are religious.

I'm sorry if encountering points of view other than your own made you feel bad, but it's nothing those of us with minority beliefs don't encounter all the time. If you think being called childish feels bad, imagine what it feels like to be called a hell-bound whore who hates babies and America.

Oh God, that's the worst.

Actually, no, the worst is when such writers write fictional stories in which it is obvious or provable that no gods exist, or in which religion is evil, and somehow expect that to function as a serious critique of actually-existing religion

looking at you, Melinda Snodgrass

....Bzuhwha? I don't remember that from her Star Trek novels. That was a long time ago for me, tho.

Not her Star Trek novels (although IIRC she was responsible for some of the Trek episodes with some of the more... grating commentary on religion) as her urban fantasy - specifically, the Edge of Ruin series, which is just not great, and in which literally all gods are actually Lovecraftian horrors out to destroy humanity, and also people who don't believe in them are Just Better than religious people, and there's just a lot of really obnoxious, dumb stuff about religion in them, as though the fact that she made a fantasy world where atheists are inherently better people than religious people meant that it were so, or that writing divine figures as Lovecraftian horrors was in some way an effective critique of religion

WOW. That's. Yeah. I never had any issues with her writing on TNG, but maybe it sailed way over my head at that age. Def. not interested in that fantasy series tho. Thanks for the heads-up!

*tilts head* I read Lovecraft, and I honestly cannot see how one can get "effective critique of religion" from Lovecraftian gods. Dude! They are ELDRITCH ABOMINATIONS! I mean...Yog Sothoth for the more uhhhhh institutional (yes that's a good word let's go with that word) churches maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe as a very oblique, very generalized metaphor, but even that's a pretty far stretch....

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-05-14 01:30 (UTC) - Expand

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-05-14 01:38 (UTC) - Expand

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-05-14 01:40 (UTC) - Expand

Re: OP

(Anonymous) - 2013-05-14 01:44 (UTC) - Expand

Snakes can't talk, women can not become pregnant through magic, there is no historic record of Jesus existing out of magical stories written many years after his supposed death, humans do not survive being eaten by whales, humans can not live for thousands of years, the only mention of Lucifer in the bible is not about a fallen angel, but of a Babylonian king who is likened to Jesus.

There, the Bible is fake, just like every other religion ever created.

(a) None of that is relevant to the comment you replied to, and (b) that last bit isn't even relevant to arguing the Bible is fictional. It's relevant to arguing Christian mythology as commonly understood has diverged substantially from its primary sources.

Calling something fake implies someone made it up to screw with people, and I think that's unrealistically harsh in most cases. The Bible is mythology, a casserole of history and legend and embellishment and transcription errors like anything else that's been around for that long.

As long as people aren't trying to use it to deny actual empirical evidence, who cares if they do some mental gymnastics to believe it's essentially or symbolically true? (The ones who are using it to deny actual empirical evidence can hit themselves in the face with it.)

Gosh, what a devastatingly intellectual powerhouse of argument that was.

/lol, regurgitated first grade atheism for the kiddies.

So you think that an all-powerful being capable of creating universes would be incapable of using a metaphor?

(I'm not Christian, I just loathe stuck-up people.)

The thing to keep in mind is that religion get a lot of hate on the internet, but not so much IRL. The internet can be a safe place for atheists to vent, particularly if their IRL community would not be okay with their lack of belief.

Atheists on the internet can be really obnoxious, but try to remember that what happens on the internet and IRL can be very different.

Because religion is fiction? People are more than welcome to have faith, but if you're really going to tell someone with a straight face that god rides around on a thrown made of wheels that is carried around by four faced monsters is real, or that a talking snake duped a naked woman into eating vegan totes happened then you're asking to be mocked.

"mostly fan authors"

So this is a lot of wank about nothing important.

And, I suspect, only a handful of fan authors at that. Or maybe just the "HP and the Methods of Rationality" dude.

Religion gets a LOT of hate on the internet

I don't know what country you're in, but only 5% of U.S. citizens self-identify as atheists. They may be overrepresented in areas you hang out (academia, fandom) but I don't buy into the argument that religious people are persecuted or in the minority, even online.

Going online means you will encounter people who disagree, sometimes vociferously or rudely, with your point of view. If you're used to a religious bubble, this can be shocking and disturbing, but the onus isn't on other people to silence their opinions because they make you uncomfortable.

(And I'm not sure what you mean that "the only time it can be discussed is in fiction." You can discuss whatever you want whenever you want.

"but the onus isn't on other people to silence their opinions because they make you uncomfortable."

Yeah, this. I mean, I don't excuse people who are rude based on their non-religious/religious beliefs, but it seems a bit naive to expect a whole group of people to behave as a polite monolith when literally EVERY OTHER GROUP in history has never managed to do that. And the hard fact is that people being rude on the internet isn't actually equivalent to what religious organizations have been able to pull off in real life.

This, THANKYOU.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only