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No, but I had a friend in highschool who thought Ouija boards could actually summon demons
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Jul 24, 2023 10:49
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BiggerBoat posted:^^^Who recorded an album called "Satanic Majesty's Request" and had a hit called "Sympathy for the Devil". It's Asian
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Jul 24, 2023 12:02
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Lemon Trees posted:Why are Americans, Christians, and especially American Christians so braindead? Because American Christianity is an aesthetic and a manufactured ethnic group. American Christians have like zero observances that they even really stick to besides like, going to Church on Sunday, the spirituality aspect of it is basically non-existent. It's an utter void of a religion.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:29
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Most American Christians have zero desire to indulge in any deeper theological introspection or meaningful spirituality, almost all of it is just a ceaseless begging for the love of a God that seemingly demands good deeds yet rewards utter spiritual laziness simultaneously. It's more a frantic denial of death than anything approaching philosophical or even emotional depth.
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Jul 24, 2023 15:31
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the holy poopacy posted:Do evangelicals even really believe in the denial of death bits? I grew up Catholic and I've always been amazed at how little lip service modern evangelicals put into the eternal life bits. Like, the crowd I grew up around were surprisingly mild and secular for how much church they did, and I don't actually know how many of them thought intellectually that they were headed for a Heaven, but they spoke of death with deep reverence and emotion. Evangelicals will nod along with the preacher but the way they talk about death and the hereafter seems trite in comparison, it always sounds like they're just checking off boxes. I dunno, maybe I'm just projecting. As someone who went to way too much Sunday school in a very typical American Christian church, they weaponize fear of death a lot while they're trying to convert people, but they especially instill it in kids when they're at church camps with no parents around, if they don't bring it up, it's because they're caught between moments of fear and doubt where they want to avoid it by not talking about it, and the occasional bit of faux euphoria when they think they've convinced themselves that they actually believe. A lot of conservative Christians are vacuous in either two ways, they either go to church out of compunction and basically never think of it outside of that (or in extremely superficial ways, eg, "thoughts and prayers") or out of some artificially manufactured Evangelical zeal where they think they can will belief out of pure animus. In American Christianity, death is about punishment and reward, there's no concept of going to God to shed worldliness and the prison of the body, but rather they pretty much believe they'll go to heaven the same as they are now and will spend an eternity like... hanging out I guess. Again, there's no theological introspection there at all, they don't even think about what life after death could possibly even mean, like what is a personality without hormones or the proclivities of brain matter? People they don't like go to hell because that's the worst thing they can imagine happening to someone and hatred has a much higher perch in their hearts than any sort of respect for humankind. That's why they don't talk about it in reverence, because they're not even loving thinking about what it could mean. They're avoiding it by trying to believe in God. They still don't actually want to think about it, God is a defense mechanism, not a calling. Most of them don't really believe, it's just extremely basic conformity and also trying to assuage personal insecurities about their status in life by engaging in the typical pyramid of "success" that conservatives believe will automatically make you happy, Family, Work, God, and Freedom (these of course are expressed in insanely perverse ways in America). The fact that this guaranteed rulebook American Dream bullshit doesn't work out for the majority of them just means they haven't driven up their martyrdom complex enough, perhaps working 70 hours instead of 60 a week and bragging about it on Facebook will finally make them fulfilled. There's a "study" where they concluded that American conservatives who are additionally Christian are "happier" but I'm pretty sure it's just them disingenuously equating the "success" of having achieved the American Dream in some perfunctory way with actual happiness. They think happiness is property and a checklist of conformist bullet points to meet after all. After having spent so much time with these people I cannot stress enough how much of their lives are spent in denying the scary feelings they feel inside themselves. Fear that they aren't good enough, fear that they aren't manly enough, that people don't see them as powerful enough, that they aren't meeting the checklist fast enough, that their lives will be meaningless if death is empty, etc. It's no mistake they tend to be massive bigots because fear rules their lives in a completely different way than it does like, your average poor, nominally leftist person. One person is miserable because of actual, worldly, material insecurity, like not having enough money to live, receive healthcare, or having a job that isn't soul sucking, the other one is miserable because the insane complexes in their brain lead them to have impossible standards that are impossible because they are unnatural and bizarre, while they ignore all those material woes and even welcome them to stoke their martyrdom complex. They'd rather aggrandize all their fears and kneejerk emotions as some kind of willful emotion brought on by the majesty of biological determinism and the word of God. All American Christians think God acts and believes just as they do. Which is pretty emblematic of how they think, you'd have to be brutally arrogant and additionally incredibly loving stupid to think that if God existed he would be so incredibly limited in mental scope. Even a demiurge wouldn't be such a basic bitch.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:14
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