It’s so weird to me. When I was in second grade, I started trying to read the Bible from cover to cover (made it until Numbers, then I had to start skipping around for my own sanity).

We keep hearing about how this is the most important book to this group of people. They demand it be taught in schools, they demand that we follow its precepts, but they can’t be arsed to read it themselves?

the educational parts were actually pretty good

It’s just workbooks that you do independently and grade yourself, right? All of that seems like it’s what we’d call low “depth of knowledge.” Multiple choice questions and just memorizing facts.

There is “old earth creationism” which works along those lines. But creationists are “literalists,” which actually means they believe a specific interpretation of the text taught to them by their pastor.

Really, you’d think that most anyone reading the texts would realize that Genesis 1 and 2 were mutually contradicting…

The creative justifications for creationism that try to approach something like science amuse me. Like Kents Hovind and Ham are both too stupid and incurious to be fun; a creationist who’s at least knowledgeable enough to look at “variable c” “”theories”” is entertaining to engage with. That’s part of how I’d justify calling this a “meme” anyway - it’s one of the brighter ones manufacturing a meme to sell to the stupid ones.

I collect that kind of stuff for fun + have some exposure to Christian education communities.

Were you doing ACE? Those workbooks should be illegal.

“Obscenity” is kinda meaningless when you have a president that raped children.

Bit more complicated than that.

It’s not one-to-one, and the Romans didn’t just adopt Greek gods.

stay there for decades

Yeah. I read that book 20 years ago, and I can still vividly remember someone microwaving some meat and discovering that it was their own ass cheek, or a cis woman being accused of being trans and being sexually assaulted, someone falling into a spring at Yosemite, and of course, “Guts.”

He has a schtick with memorable twists, similar to Fight Club. I think Choke was the only novel of his I remember not really having a giant record scratch moment - Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, etc have huge twists. Like discovering the orgy heaven at the end of Haunted which really just serves to punch you in the gut - absolutely all of the fucked up things that the characters were doing to try to be famous was absolutely pointless, because everyone on Earth is killing themselves anyways.

The only fiction authors I can think of that have given me the same level of intense shock and revulsion would be Ágota Kristóf with the Notebook trilogy (which is spectacular and everyone should read) and Samuel Delany’s Hogg (which no one should read under any circumstances.)

The short story collection/sorta novel Haunted by Pahlanuik ends with the discovery that the planet Venus (I think? Might have been Jupiter) is essentially an eternal awesome orgy heaven, which everyone will eventually end up reincarnating on when they die. So everyone on earth essentially decides to kill themselves. Stores have to start locking up suicide kits because people will just take them in the store and die before paying.

That entire thing is fucked up. I read it somewhere around sophomore year of high school and existentially traumatized me. There are stories in there that somehow 4chan shock image level in just written words.

FATAL lets you generate a character with negative health that dies instantly. It’s funny to imagine someone popping into existence and then immediately realizing the setting and offing themselves.

You just went to an ash wednesday service? That was in February.

Yeah, it felt like it was sorta serving the same purpose as an Ash Wednesday, just putting some temporal difference to make it feel less Catholic. Have to say watching a passion play where Jesus is being played by a teenaged Andrew Tate fan is weird.

For wine- I have never seen anything non-red used before. It has ranged from red wine to non-alcoholic wine, to grape juice to red blackcurrant juice.

That’s what mystified me! I’ve read pamphlets by local churches arguing whether alcoholic wine is okay or not (one even arguing that the wine Jesus made at Canna was just grape juice, and that all references in the Bible to “wine” that are negative are talking about grape juice.)

But at least it’s gotta be red right? It’s supposed to be blood!

Even weirder perhaps was a teenager who was a pantomiming dumping the wafer in the juice like a cookie in milk!

Also, Mormons aren’t Christian.

Do you also classify JW’s, SDA’s and Christian Scientists as non Christian too?

How many of them aren’t alive that we don’t know of though?

The context is big here:

Gradually, the social and cultural imperialism that the missionaries brought to the islands developed into the exploitative commercial power that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.

Almost all of my books are thrifted, which gives me the luxury of no guilt. And I get to argue with previous marginalia, which is fun because they can’t respond.

This is kinda how books worked throughout most of medieval history. Paper was expensive and anyway, the margins often become teaching tools in and of themselves. It becomes a centuries long comment section, so ideas get passed down and develop through the centuries. Like one of the most important books of medieval philosophy that probably no one without a doctoral in theology gives a shit about is Peter Lombard’s Sentences which is just a collection of common comments people in about books that he thought were good for teaching. (I have been working on implementing a HTML cross reference version of it using Twine, and have been trying to parse [pun intended] a theological discussion about what it means to enjoy not use god. Larger project is to recreate an accessible “medieval curriculum” through Twine)

As much as I’d fantasize about all my books preserved as a library, they’ll probably be separated from each other someday. The least I can do is put my soul in them - tuck a pamphlet or bookmark, a movie ticket. I’ve never been unhappy seeing a comment in a book - I was reading a 60 year old middle school text recently, and discovered a kid had wrote “[clearly female name] is a MAGGOT F_GGOT!!!” which was just so fucking hilarious.

There’s also an obsession with the Battle of Tours. “Catholic” to them is more the idea of white heritage.

There’s an evolving strain of US Catholicism, exemplified by weirdos like JD Vance, who like the aesthetic of Catholicism (especially the Deus Vult thing) without really caring about any of the actual Catholic beliefs. It’s more like they have a childish misunderstanding of Catholicism as just being a more serious Christian. Which is not uncommon a misunderstanding in the south/Midwest, oddly enough - the desire for fundies to create a coalition to fight abortion in the 70’s/80’s really ended a lot of the more typical anti-Catholicism of the south.

Similar to the “American Orthodox,” which is the same idea with more of a Russian flavor.

Yeah, this isn’t “sexual repression,” this is sexual control. The point is that the attractive women is in a subservient position to you.

Then the male speaker spoke to the boys and girls together about stds and how if you have sex with one person then you’ve basically had sex with anyone they’ve had sex with, so you’ve basically fucked 1,000 people.

I was taught this in public school.

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That’s why Oklahoma does emergency certifieds! Any bachelor degree gets you in a classroom. You can fail your tests for up to three years, and then usually they’ll extend that deadline anyway! So you get people who can’t get hired to do anything else, and realize that they can just get away with sitting at a desk/ignoring everything they’re supposed to do.

Actual teachers walked out half a decade ago because it’s 60+ hr/week of being a social worker/punching bags. (Fun fact: teachers are exempt from overtime!)