god, EVERY YEAR one of the local churches puts up a big sign that says “HE IS RISEN”, and EVERY YEAR whenever I see it I just think “OH HE IS, IS HE??? WELL IF HE IS RISEN THEN HE WILL NOT BE ALLOWED AT MY SEDER, LEAVENED MESSIAHS ARE NOT KOSHER FOR PASSOVER!!!”
I also post about this on my blog every year but
that’s okay
because
IT’S OBJECTIVELY HILARIOUS
EVERY
YEAR
Tags:
#Tumblr traditions #Passover #Easter #puns #this post was queued to ensure proper timing
Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“We’re getting to that.” He waved.
*
The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s. He couldn’t NOT have communion.
“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts. Jesus will understand.”
Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.
A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible. It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.
They were a SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of? So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.
Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”
The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.
Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.
*
“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.
*
At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.” Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.
“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.” Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.
“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone. Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”
“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.
“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right? Doesn’t look like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.
What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”
He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.
“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.” he nodded thoughtfully. “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”
“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.
And so, the plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.
This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.
“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?
“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails.” She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel. “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”
Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.
*
Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.
Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.
Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses, down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.
Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman. Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.
However, two things happen that were not planned on
1. Dad misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this, however because
2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.
Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.
However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.
There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that.
Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:
“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”
…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.
*
“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked. I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.
“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”
“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.
*
As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”
“No.” Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.
It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.
“No. That’s crazy.” She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.
“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.
“And you- you didn’t… Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?” the archbishop demanded of my father.
“Do I look like I can jump that high?” Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.
Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?
Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.
*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.
If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or Paypal, as telling stories on the internet is my only source of income right now. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it!
god, EVERY YEAR one of the local churches puts up a big sign that says “HE IS RISEN”, and EVERY YEAR whenever I see it I just think “OH HE IS, IS HE??? WELL IF HE IS RISEN THEN HE WILL NOT BE ALLOWED AT MY SEDER, LEAVENED MESSIAHS ARE NOT KOSHER FOR PASSOVER!!!”
So you all know that I’m a fan of Atlas Shrugged, but I don’t think I’ve told the story of how and why I first read it.
Once upon a time in senior year, I was an atheist at a Catholic high school, a brilliant asshole ready to Discourse with anyone who held still long enough. Fortunately it was a Jesuit school, so lots of people held still long enough. And this Jesuit school had a yearly senior retreat called Kairos, where a bunch of students and a handful of teachers would disappear from Tuesday to Friday and do Stuff. I knew approximately jack shit about Kairos, because it was under a very heavy no-spoilers norm and nobody leaked spoilers, at least not at me. But it sounded cool, because the word was in the front of those Time Quartet books and I was a huge Meg Murray fangirl, and anyway I have never been able to resist a secret meeting. So I signed up.
Now, the general impression I got from what little people would say about this Kairos thing was that it was about opening up emotionally and getting close with your classmates, and also something something God, and that it would permanently alter your brain. None of my friends were going because they were all sensible people whose response to “mindhazard warning” is not “I want it inside me”, and I was exactly as alienated from the rest of my classmates as ~asperger’s plus a whole lot of effort could make me, so signing up for 96 hours of Deeply Serious Neurotypical Jesus Party was the equivalent of opening a .exe you got off pyRatBay.ru. So of course I resolved to be as charitable and open-to-it and nonsnarky and taking-it-seriously as I could manage, and then start in on Atlas Shrugged as soon as I got home. Y’see, my very liberal parents had warned me against all things Rand when I was in middle school, citing mindhazard. And I had previously read The Fountainhead and hadn’t really understood what was going on (because I was too distracted by Dominique’s various issues to focus on the plot), and Atlas was advertised as “Fountainhead but not for pansies”. So I decided that immediately after doing one potentially brainfucking thing was the best time to do another one, on the theory that they would either 1) cancel out and leave me net unaffected or 2) stack weirdly and fuck me up extra hard, and either of those sounded like fun.
Without spoiling too much, Kairos was a potentially mind-altering trip. I had a few moments of feeling not totally alienated from humanity in general and my classmates in particular. I also learned that my classmates were very unlucky people and that my father fundamentally Gets me as a person and is the same type of person, but that’s another and much less bloggable pair of stories. It started out pretty fun, but my suspension of disbelief contrarianism was wearing off pretty hard by day 4, as was my ability to enjoy … stuff in general? I was some mix of overstimulated, sleep-deprived, emotionally exhausted from fighting my introversion, and generally mentally contorted. The fact that my boyfriend was in town the weekend after was deeply healthy and necessary, because at that point I really needed some social interaction I could enjoy without putting in intense effort to be both faker and more genuine than I ever normally get*. So I spent the next day using cuddles as a mental walware scanner and the day after reading Atlas Shrugged, which turned out to be impossible to put down. All told I spent about 96 hours in Christian Extrovertopia, 24 resetting, and the next 96 in Objectivistland. I think the Rand did cancel out the Kairos a bit; at least it got rid of the “You Must Love Everybody” effect. And then my model of Dagny Taggart took up residence in my brain and has basically never left, but has at least stopped commenting on literally every experience I have.
TL;DR:
*explanation of what I mean by this available on request.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”either of those sounded like fun”) #Christianity #Atlas Shrugged #storytime
#Easter #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #oh right I guess it *is* Easter isn’t it #they de-synced with Passover seventeen hundred years ago and I’m still not used to it
When I was in high school, they made us do “devotion” every morning.
Every
Fucking
Morning
They would march us into an auditorium and pack us together and scream at us for an hour about how much Jesus loves us, which is why He threatens us with fire, and if we don’t want to burn we have to let Him come inside our hearts and/or orifices.
Jesus Christ: Scumbag Boyfriend
And, as a Jewish atheist, I was too lesbian for this shit.
So I did the obvious thing, of course.
I hid
In my classroom
Where everyone else was hiding.
Alison Morais: A Fucking Genius
But then the teachers found us
Because, like, how could they not
And they decided that the appropriate punishment for five delinquent kids refusing to participate in forced-worship
…Was to make them lead worship services.
My Teachers: Also Fucking Geniuses
So then they marched the lot of us to the auditorium and said that we would each have to give a sermon on a Biblical passage of our choice.
And we would each have to speak, on stage, in front of the crowd, for five minutes.
We were told to vote on who was to go first. Everyone made the logical choice and voted for the person they thought would be best able to deliver a speech on short notice.
Translation: Those FUCKING ASSHOLES threw me to the wolves and I will EAT THEIR CHILDREN.
So then it was time for me to use my mouth to serve my scumbag boyfriend Lord and Saviour.
I read and commented on The Lord’s Prayer and made sure to really put OOMPH into it. I was FABULOUS. The crowd went wild; even though they usually hated this part of the day.
Charisma: 1
Honesty: 0
Achievement Unlocked: Standard-Issue Religious Leader
But! There was one problem! Remember that I was supposed to go for 5 minutes, right?
This took me 4.
I had no idea what to do for the last minute, so I just looked at the rest of Matthew 6 in case there was something good.
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.
So then I started bullshitting
Because of course I did
And I basically was like:
You see this thing we do where we assemble each morning
And are forced to listen to the teachers pray at us
When clearly they’re praying for us to watch instead of for their own spiritual betterment?
And then the teachers were like:
Alison, what are you doing
Jesus is telling us that this is morally wrong
ALISON NO
He’s saying G-d hates it
Your mum hates it
Uncle Joe hates it
That creepy guy in the white van who sells chloroform-flavoured ice-cream hates it
ALISON STAHP
And if you do it you’ll be tortured in hell forever and ever; amen. Good night, Detroit! See ya!
ALISON GET BACK HERE YOU LITTLE BITCH
But I was gone
Tags:
#storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Christianity
so my wife (who was raised catholic) likes it when I get drunk and talk about popes. this is because 1) I am a delightful drunk and 2) i know a confusing amount about the history of the catholic church (especially considering that I am Jewish) and so since I am very tired, which is a bit like being drunk, I will share with you some of my favorite popes. with apologies to all devout catholics in the audience, what are you doing here, turn away now, abandon all hope ye who enter:
Pope Nope: Otherwise known as Pope Celestine V. Pope Nope was the founder of the Celestine Order. Pope Nope lived as a hermit in quiet seclusion and modesty. Pope Nope absolutely did not want to be Pope. After sending an angry letter to the Church saying they should pick a Pope ASAP (they’d been hedging on it for like two years), the Church said, ‘This is it. This is the guy.’ Pope Nope promptly tried to flee the country. The Church sent people to physically drag him to Rome. One of his first edicts was to declare that the Pope was allowed to abdicate. Surprisingly, he abdicated five months later.
Pope Douchebag: Pope Boniface VIII. Came on after Pope Nope. Declared first Catholic Party Times (jubilee) in Rome in 1300 (in an attempt to revitalize Rome in general, and yanno raise money, an ongoing theme in this story). This should’ve made him kinda cool, except he pissed of the King of France and the poet Dante Alighieri, who he sort of let get kicked out of Florence. This resulted in Dante Alighieri writing one of the most beautifully elaborate revenge fics in Western literature. Now, Nope Douchebag (as a modern Dante would surely have called him) wasn’t dead when The Divine Comedy was published, but Dante made sure that in Inferno, the chapter related to hell and all the lovely punishments waiting there, to have a character point to a flaming hole in the ground and say “AND THAT’S WHERE YOU’RE GOING, POPE DOUCHEBAG. THIS HOLE. IT WAS MADE FOR YOU,” so there’s that.
Pope Evil: Pope Alexander VI aka the Borgia Pope aka that guy you get into a slapfight with in Assassin’s Creed 2. Alleged crimes include extreme amounts of nepotism, murder, rape, bribery, etc, etc. He probably wasn’t actually necessarily as evil as everyone always says (most of the incest and murder stories were told by his political enemies) but bribery and nepotism was sort of just what you DID when you were Pope back in the day. He probably did not look like Jeremy Irons. He did, however, paint really tacky images of his favorite mistress all over the papal bed chambers which led to…
Pope Badass I: aka Pope Julius II deciding ‘screw this I am NOT sleeping in a former Borgia love nest’ and so he decided to commission the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica aka one of the the biggest loudest holiest of holy ‘oh father in heaven how will we even do this?’ pieces of catholic architecture in the world. Pope Badass did not believe in doing things half way. Pope Badass wanted to be remembered. He commissioned an assortment of remarkable artists at the time. Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, like, a ton of ninja turtles. In the mean time, he also did little things like decide to retake the Papal states, the territory around the city of Rome, which the Church had lost over the last few centuries. How did he decide to do this? By ordering all the cardinals to suit up, get their armor on, go on a road trip, they were going to war. If a local government didn’t do what he wanted fast enough? He excommunicated the whole city. Pope Badass didn’t do anything half way. He originally commissioned Michelangelo to build his future funeral tomb, but forever annoyed the grumpy artist because he kept pulling him away to work on new little side projects
like
yanno
the Sistine Chapel.
Yeah.
Party Pope: Pope Leo X, Medici Pope – yeah, from those Medici. Party Pope was not about to let being a member of the Catholic Church stop him from living the high life of Florentine nobility. Party Pope believed in huge banquets for all his friends and selling lots of indulgences to pay off that big basilica Pope Badass decided to build. Party Pope held a big banquet in which gold plates were thrown in the river. Party Pope had an actual real live pet elephant with red shoes. Party Pope kept conveniently putting off the letters written by a fellow by the name of Martin Luther, who kept writing him to be “uh, hey Party Pope, maybe you are partying a bit too hard, maybe you should like, cut down on that a little….” Party Pope did not stop partying.
Look, we’re not saying the Protestant Reformation was kind of his fault.
But
The Protestant Reformation was kind of his fault.
Pope Buzzkill: Pope Adrian VI. German. Didn’t change his name upon accepting the papacy. Arrived in the massive Roman hangover left by Party Pope. Decided “okay, yes, Catholics, we are partying too hard, let’s do something about that” and proceeded to try and pass a number of very strict laws and measures to try and curb the partying ways of the Church at that time. He was deeply unpopular for this. Because COME ON, Pope Buzzkill, it’s the RENAISSANCE.
He was so unpopular that, after his death, the Catholic Church did not elect another non-Italian Pope for some 500 years. Pope John Paul II. Yeah. As in the guy who was Pope 20 years ago.
They really didn’t like Pope Buzzkill.
Pope Weenie: SO THEY ELECTED ANOTHER MEDICI TO THE PAPACY. YEAH! CLEMENT VII! PARTY POPE II! THINGS WILL BE AWESOME NOW! WE CAN HAVE MISTRESSES AND BRIBE EVERYONE AND GIVE OUR NEPHEWS HIGH POLITICAL POSITIONS AND
wait
France and The Holy Roman Empire are at war right now?
wait, why is Charles V coming over the scenic Italian countryside with all those really angry men
Yes, ladies and gentleman, through a general inability to manage the conflicting pressures from France and and the Holy Roman Empire, Pope Weenie wound up preciding 1527 over the Sack of Rome, in which the Holy Roman Emperor parked his expansive army in that big half constructed basilica that Pope Badass had decided to start building way back when.
Oh, and Pope Weenie didn’t grant Henry VIII that anullment he wanted. We’re not saying that the formation of the Anglican church was his fault. But it was kinda his fault.
Pope Badass II: Common lore says Pope Badass II aka Sixtus V got his start as an illiterate swineheard born to a peasant family in the Papal States. He rose his way up through the ranks through guile, beautiful oratory skills, and a will of iron. Pope Badass II was aware that as Pope, he did not have long on this earth, and he would get shit DONE. When he looked at that unfinished basilica that Pope Badass I had started, Party Pope had sold indulgences to fund, and Pope Weenie had let troops run through, he said “You know what this needs? A finished dome.” He asked his architect how long this would take.
“Five years,” said his architect, trying to be optimistic. It would really take more like ten years, given all the work that still needed to go into and–
“Great,” said Pope Badass II, “Do it in two.”
AND THEN IT HAPPENED.
Pope Badass II also is amazing for his response to the sinking of the Spanish Armada, in which Queen Elizabeth managed to blow up a ton of ships belonging to Spain, which was at that time only, you know, the most powerful catholic nation in Europe. Was Pope Badass II pissed at this defeat against protestant forces? Who knows, but HE ALSO SEEMED TO THINK THIS WAS THE FUNNIEST THING HE’D EVER HEARD AND PRETTY MUCH WENT AHAHAHA THIS WOMAN WHO OWNS HALF AN ISLAND JUST TOTALLY WIPED THE FLOOR WITH THE SPANISH THAT IS AMAZNG HE WOULD TOTALLY MARRY QUEEN ELIZABETH IF HE WEREN’T POPE.
“Imagine what progeny we would have!” <— pretty much the quote. yes, ladies and gentleman, this is the VICAR OF CHRIST declaring that he would totally do Queen Elizabeth I.
Sadly, Pope Badass I also did some things that were not so badass. He was responsible for a lot of the Catholic Church’s harsher stances on birth control and abortion, of which we still see many the effects of today, so perhaps this puts maybe a bit of a damper on the true badassery he could have otherwise attained.
But one cannot deny he had excellent taste in ladies.
And also he got them to finish that dang dome.
And that’s my Pope Rap. Please feel free to add to it if you are a giant nerd like me and have collected random trivia about medieval and renaissance artists and political figures. Perhaps, now that I have written this, my wife will no longer have to hear me talk about this every time I have like, half an appletini.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
But probably not.
okay but like
what about the dueling popes?
so like in 1378 the old pope died and the romans basically rioted because they wanted a roman pope this time, god damn it. only there was no canadate to be found, so the cardinals decided on a dude from naples because apparently that was the next best thing. only, and keep in mind all of the shenanigans above: this pope was too crazy. becoming pope had flipped the crazy switch, and he just like. went nuts. had a terrible temper, mad-eye moody levels of suspicion, and worst of all, a reformast! so most of the cardinals literally ran away to Anagni, and get this – elected another pope. Celement VII.
that’s right. suddenly we had two rival, legitimate popes.
so of course they, the popes, demanded that all the catholic countries take sides. this of course went over quite well, and in no way added to the shit that was the Ferdinand Wars.
during the entire western schism, as it became called, there ended up being eight popes, with at one point three at the same time. Three popes.
it’s too bad that Benedict and Pope Gregory XII both backed out of meeting at the last minute because otherwise we might have gotten the coolest meeting of fight club ever.
Reblogging because The Battle of Three Popes is some important Lord of the Rings business and this must be shared.
All the pope stories! All of them!
…Is it bad that I knew about most of these guys already?
The way the metaphor works, you’re being lowered into the water (symbolizing a grave) and being raised (resurrected) as a new creation free of sin. (Symbolically. More literally, the “free of sin” bit lasts about 0.4 seconds until you have your first conscious thought, and then you probably need more sanctification.) The question nobody ever seems to ask is, what happens to the sin afterward?
I mean, that water ought to be downright toxic. Original sin is a big deal, and in most denominations they don’t even try to dispose of the waste safely. In fact, the pastor is often standing in it the whole time.
If you haven’t seen the sort of baptism service I’m familiar with, it involves a bathtublike container maybe a third the size of a Jacuzzi, with a church leader doing serial baptizing. Any Christian can baptize someone, but usually it’s one of the ranking people in the church. Catholics probably bless the water first (it’d be weird if their religion includes holy water and they don’t use it for this) but in most denominations holy water isn’t really a thing. So there’s no confounding variable from that direction; it’s just water plus enough of humankind’s innately fallen sin nature to damn someone to Hell a couple dozen times over. And the pastor, along with whoever goes last, is standing in it.
But that very fact tells us it’s not all that dangerous. Concentrated evil sounds scary, but apparently a normal mustard-seed-sized amount of faith can protect people from it.
There’s a ritual described in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest places all the sins of the Israelites onto a goat (hence our word “scapegoat”), and then sets it loose in the wilderness. The population at the time was a bit over 600,000 (source: the for once incredibly convenient Book of Numbers). So we just have to find that goat (we can use my time machine), make it more intelligent until it’s capable of becoming a Christian, and baptize it. From a safe distance. Because seriously, that much concentrated evil is probably radioactive or something. We’re talking the sins of a nation here; this is a decent fraction of the stuff that motivates prophecies of Armageddon.
Sacrifices aren’t really a thing anymore. If I remember right, the branch of Judaism that eventually became the current one hasn’t done animal sacrifices since the destruction of the Temple back in ‘70. (The apostrophe stands for “A.D. ”) I don’t know how many Jews have lived in the last 1945 years, but it’s a lot. That many person-years worth of sin is going to mean one seriously scaped goat.
So that means, you just have to find the Ark of the Covenant, reconstruct the Most Holy Place, and get whoever’s in charge of the tribe of Levi these days to do the ritual. No time machine required. Then kidnap the goat, convert it to Christianity, and do the other ritual. The new convert rises as a new creation free of sin (in the process thoroughly messing up the parable of the sheep and the goats) and you’ve got a bathtub metaphorically full of more evil than has been seen in one place since the Crucifixion. Use it wisely.
And by “wisely” I do not mean point a squirt gun at the Pope.
WHEN LAST WE LEFT we were storing every sin committed since A.D. 70 by any Jew who was not also Christian inside a large bucket. It’s time to try more.
When you have an almost unprecedented amount of a thing, obviously you look for bonuses that stack. Several places in the Bible confirm that it’s possible to multiply sin (e.g., Isaiah here), but infuriatingly there’s no actual procedure stated for this.
The best I can find is a handful of lines from the Apocrypha, which is not canon depending on your denomination but is at least a really cool word. Sirach 3:11 says “they multiply sin who demean their mother,” which is nice and direct, but the person in question didn’t really have a mother. She was a literal goat, and probably not covered by any commands about respect for one’s elders. 23:11 says how to double a particular sin, but it only applies to oaths and doesn’t look very retroactive.
I think our best chance is in 23:16: “Two sorts of men multiply sin, and the third will bring wrath: a hot mind is as a burning fire, it will never be quenched till it be consumed…” The first one is more interesting than the second, so let’s stop there. I don’t actually know what it means by a “hot mind” but actively trying to increase the amount of extant sin had better qualify.
So after you kidnap/rescue the scapegoat and uplift it to human intelligence, convert them to Discordianism or something first instead of Christianity. Something that’ll want to go along with this. Allow the multiplication to do its thing. (The Book of Ecclesiasticus didn’t say what the sin gets multiplied by, but it’s large enough that it matters when it’s an individual doing the sinning, let alone a civilization.) Then you convert them, get them saved by grace through faith, and steal the water after their baptism. Put it in the chemtrails of jets flying over your least favorite nation or something. Have fun!
If you’re wondering what was that verse’s second sort of man who multiplies sin: “a fornicator in the body of his flesh will never cease till he hath kindled a fire.”
In other words, it is actually an available option to start with an apocalypse-causing amount of violations of the law of God—
—which has to be one of the most horrible, terrifying, EVIL things you could possibly think of—
and MULTIPLY it
by SEX.
Tags:
#puns #overly literal interpretations #I don’t think I reblogged the first part of this #I’m rectifying that now
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.
And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.
I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:
Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.
Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?
Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.
Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.
Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”
Scott: How does that apply to food?
Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.
So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.
But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:
I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.
Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.
Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.
But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.
All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.
So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.
This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.
I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.
As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.
But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.
As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?
I’ve always been a natural storyteller, and when I was little no rock nor stone in my neighborhood didn’t have a name and a personality. I also made up gods, and various colors of magic, one of which was ‘black.’ I didn’t really understand why people got upset when I talked about my fictional gods, or why my mom told me to stop talking about ‘black magic.’ They’re stories that teach you something, right? Just like the Greek and Roman and Egyptian gods.
When I finally figured out that people actually like… something else??? Religion??? People can feel a literal connection to religion stuff? I don’t think it’s even possible to explain what it is that’s different, but when I finally figured out that it wasn’t some kind of really complicated game I pretty much wet myself in terror. I still don’t really get it.
This probably has a genetic link, incidentally – my dad doesn’t have a lot of religiosity despite being raised in a religious environment and neither does my maternal grandmother, and my mother and maternal grandfather were both as atheist as you get. My mom, a girl from a Christian background who liked going to Synagogue with a friend better…for aesthetic reasons. Yeah. We don’t get it, whatever ‘it’ is; and it doesn’t have to do with exposure – I’ve been around pagans of various denominations since I was little, participated in various solemn rites, felt deep appreciation for them… and yet, nothing more. Whatever’s there for them isn’t there for me. So, yeah. Defective brain. What gives.
@ursulavernon’s talked about this, that she just doesn’t seem to be wired to click with religion the way some people do, despite being raised churchgoing.
My own relationship with religion in this context is weird enough that I’m gonna go on about it at some length, sorry. ;S Short version is that I both do and don’t “get” religion, in ways that are definitely confusing to me and possibly to everybody else.
I was raised super-conservative Roman Catholic, lots of rules and shit. I was extremely good at the rules. I didn’t at all feel a personal connection to god, but I kind of did to some of the saints, in a similar way to how I connect and interact with “my” particular focus characters from any fandom. (Saint Peter, man, he’s a doofus and he continually fucks up and he’s still good enough to be Jesus’s personal next-in-line. I found that really encouraging through all of my you’re-not-good-enough braintimes.)
And… huh, Brin mentioned not experiencing awe, I guess I do, because that’s about the only word for how I connected to certain parts of Catholic ritual. Easter always really got to me, I still kinda miss it, because – Catholic, right, sometimes-Latin-Mass Catholic, it’s this massive multi-day set of ceremonies, these special rituals that only happen once a year. You stop ringing the church bells on Thursday night, you sing the Pange Lingua, you start the Forty Hours’ Adoration. You fast on Friday, you go to service and kiss the cross instead of taking Communion, you have to remember not to genuflect to the altar that one day. And then Saturday night, and it cannot happen before the sun is down (at least by the strict rules, y’know, all about the rules my subsect), you light the new fire with flint and steel, you bless it, and you light everybody’s little handheld candles from it and carry the Easter candle into the church singing the Sequence. And that always gave me the chills, still does, because it’s this big ceremonial ritual thing, every movement and every word packed full of symbolism, and it’s sweeping around the world with the sunset. Twenty-four hours of fire and joy and new light.
So – yeah. Religion, don’t know that I really get the spiritual connection part of it. Certainly I don’t get it in the “right” way; people will try to explain to me how they trust God even when bad things happen, or whatever, and I’m just like “no. Anybody that’s got the power to stop some of these objectively awful things and doesn’t, I don’t care what their ineffable plan is, if they’re fucking all-powerful they can make it happen without X. They choose to let super-bad shit happen anyway, they’re a fuckwad.”
And yet. I’m comfortable with the idea of a spiritual world possibly existing. Fairies, angels, gods. I actually really like the idea of genii locorum, that hits the same button – awe, I guess? – that Easter Vigil night does, the idea that there’s this particular thing happening that isn’t physical but that’s tied to this place and/or time. (Yes, “Brigadoon” makes me cry. ;S) I’m chill with the, the fact that by definition you can’t prove a spiritual anything exists, because it’s by definition not-material not-physical and not gonna do things you can measure on the physical plane, and I’m aware that functionally it’s all inside my head…
…I don’t know how to analyze the difference here, because there’s a lot of religion stuff that I’m like “it is all inside their heads and that makes me kind of uncomfortable”. I used to pass a little corner church on the way to college that advertised “Find Relief From ANYTHING!!!”, and I really despised them just because I was in a bad enough place myself that I could see how that would be appealing but since all the relief-finding religion can do is gonna be inside your own head, that meant they were preying on vulnerable people who’d do a lot better to go see a therapist, or at least jigger their own brains without needing to pretend a God was doing it for them.
(I don’t know if my ability to more or less consciously rejigger my own brainspace is unusual. I guess it must be, because I don’t see other people talking about anything similar much. Huh. Does religion fulfill that same purpose for other people? I wonder.)
But, yeah, there’s also this stuff that I’m aware it’s all inside my head but I still like it, prefer to have it as part of my take on the world than not. – and, yeah, thinking about it, a lot of it is the stuff that gives me that awe feeling. Huh. Interesting.
(Brin suggested to me a while back, and I’m still noodling with this enough that I don’t have a real coherent answer, that part of my “I don’t actually want to fuck that but looking at it turns me on” response to things like the Grand Canyon may be crossed wires with how I experience awe. I’m noting that here because this is another datapoint in me trying to figure out that one – the Easter sunset firelight thing, for instance, doesn’t hit my “hot damn sexy” buttons at all, it’s a totally different physical feeling. *is just thinking out loud here*)
(There might wind up being a post with me trying to figure out the sexy thing at some point pretty soon, because the bit with the not-limerence in my other reblog of this post is also a datapoint on that, and it ties into some of the stuff I need to work out with how I’m writing Zaeed. That’s not this post, though.)
Yeah. No real conclusion here, but since I hadn’t though of religion as one of the things I experience atypically until I saw this reblog, I wanted to write about it.
One of the problems with Tumblr’s note system is that I can’t like this post without unliking your other post.
I don’t know if my ability to more or less consciously rejigger my own brainspace is unusual. I guess it must be, because I don’t see other people talking about anything similar much.
I think that’s what they call “self-modification”?
I don’t think I’ve done much in the way of re-jiggering, but then I haven’t really tried. Most of the things I do are attempts to better understand the way I currently am, which is also something I see a lot of in your posts.
I haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, but extrapolating from stuff I have seen, I expect my reaction would be “I am uncomfortable with how much emotion I am not feeling”. I once described the feeling as my soul bumping ineffectually against the barrier you transcend when you have a transcendent experience.
(Mind you, the alternative might be worse. I tend to dislike overwhelming emotion even when it’s a positive emotion. *gestures at perseveration*)
It’s worse when it’s an awe-inspiring thing that’s been specifically hyped. I grew up in the Northeastern Mega-City hearing about how wonderful the stars were, how it was so much better when you could see them filling the sky rather than a dozen scattered points, how the stars were our birthright and everyone I’d ever known, including myself, was incomplete as a person because of not having regular access to their full glory.
I still haven’t seen the Milky Way in person, but I’ve been far enough out in rural Ontario at night that the stars were into the triple-digits. It was…the absence of feeling was like a feeling in itself. I felt empty. I felt broken beyond repair, too damaged even to assess the extent of the damage. The stars were supposed to fix some flaw I’d been carrying for so long I couldn’t even perceive the lack, but whatever it was, I could not be fixed. I could not be saved.
(It was pretty, I could tell that much, but I have a very limited appreciation for beauty. It ties in so much with awe.)
Tags:
#one of my tags is #things that make me uncomfortably aware of my apparent inability to feel awe #it’s mostly pictures of the stars #with a bit of ill-advised venting about religion #sounds about right #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
I was at a Presbyterian church today (PCA, not PCUSA), and NONE of the hymns were in common meter. Not one. Until the end. The last song was this one, so I had to restrain myself from shouting “CLOSE ENOUGH! Praise the tyrannosaur!”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #there is actually some context for this #but it’s probably still funny in a somewhat different way without it
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 