u/SouthernTraderX

A Religious Experience That You Can Actually Have!

A Religious Experience That You Can Actually Have!

Brothers and Sisters,

We all long for something transcendental, something that goes beyond any one of us, that provably survives even death. Please join me in celebrating one of the only religious experiences that we can actually have—right now!

This is the antidote to Eastern Orthodox (or any other) Christianity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89XHz7d3H_Q

Feel what it means to be fully, joyously alive!!

Here is my God.

This is my religion.

u/SouthernTraderX — 1 day ago

The Greatest Artist to Ever Live

I'm absolutely convinced that David Bowie was the greatest artist to ever live, or who will ever live. Genius upon genius, there aren't enough superlatives in the English language to describe him, or enough philosophers in the world to understand his utterly transcendental masterpieces:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOy7vPwEtCw

I am in complete awe.

u/SouthernTraderX — 1 day ago

When the Priest Makes the Sign of the Cross, Have you Ever Wanted to…

When the priest makes the sign of the cross at you, the expected response is for you to cross yourself.

Has anyone ever felt the urge to make the sign of the cross right back at him, to see what would happen?

If that happened in your church, what do you suppose would happen?

reddit.com
u/SouthernTraderX — 3 days ago

Worse Than False

I've often said that "Christianity is worse than false; it's boring."

I can't think of any times where I've been more bored than when I was forced, for two decades, to attend Eastern Orthodox Church services and stand in place for multiple hours.

Looking back, I view my experience with my church growing up as a cultural one, primarily rooted in shared ethnic identity. That is, it was mostly a social venue with weird cosplay (the church services) and endless standing in place thrown in.

There's no way that outsiders would have been accepted. Anyone who didn't speak our native language would have been viewed with suspicion. Outside guests might have been reluctantly tolerated at a particular social event, but they had better be white.

I wonder how much of my estrangement from the religion that I was born into comes from the inconvenient and shocking at the time (but, on my part, completely hidden) truth that I'm gay. That was a big-time no-no in a muscular, patriarchal, proto-Identitarian religion of working class immigrants in various Exodus waves after WW II obliterated Europe.

Estrangement is one thing, but veracity is quite another. I simply didn't buy any of the metaphysical or epistemic claims. Over time, I went from a state of feeling embraced (through the plausible deniability of my gayness) to alienated because, for me, there would never be a wife and children.

With the passage of time, once close friends would move away. Some even died young. And with each subsequent college degree (one, two, three, four), eventually, what little residue of religion remained for me became no more. Now, I view it from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist or social psychologist. I see it as a purely cultural phenomenon.

And with each stepwise displacement from my cultural origins, I lost something more of my social identity, until now, I find myself estranged from non-academics, yet wary of academics because their outlook is so bleak. We find ourselves precisely in the state that the true prophet of modernity, David Bowie, foresaw and wrote about on his masterpiece album, Heathen: post-religious, drowning in despair, enslaved by corporations, and exhausted.

Cultural templates are the easy fallback, if you fit in. If you're "white and delightsome," try Mormonism. Black? Southern Baptist. Gay and Eastern Orthodox? Let me translate into English from my native language the screaming from the second-floor apartment of a 60-some-year-old protester as people marched below him in a gay pride parade in the capital city of an Eastern European country: "Kill, kill, kill the fags!!" (Translating literally, he screamed "pederasts;" for this man, the two are identical.) Ironically, the anti-gay response was led by an Orthodox priest, who was surrounded by a sea of supporters holding Orthodox icons and crosses.

Oh, the irony!

There is no hate like Christian love.

(And if you happen to be gay, stay far away from sports Orthobro gangs in Eastern Europe.)

reddit.com
u/SouthernTraderX — 4 days ago

Endless Standing Is Torture

I was born into the Eastern Orthodox Church, and ever since I can remember as a very young child, I hated the services. I found them unbearably boring, couldn't understand Church Slavonic, thereby rendering the experience meaningless, and found the repetitiveness truly intolerable.

But the thing that simply pushed me over the fragile edge of sanity was the endless standing. Why, and what for!?

If other people are crazy enough to ruin their joints by standing in place for three hours at a time (at the bare minimum), that's fine. I wanted to sit, preferably for the entirety of a service!

Even as an in-shape teenaged tennis player, I couldn't handle the endless standing.

What other church does this? It's completely insane!

My objections to the hours-long standing in place are that:

  1. It's physically harmful (and thus self-destructive): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4591921/;
  2. It's unnecessary and avoidable;
  3. Given the avoidability, its persistence is irrational and cruel;
  4. It accomplishes nothing useful;
  5. It's an enormous waste of time that could be far better deployed in the pursuit of education, art, relationships, adventure, entertainment, exercise, rest, helping others (e.g. through the practice of medicine), or pleasure; and
  6. It breeds resentment.
u/SouthernTraderX — 4 days ago