Hi!!! I'm Flick!! I like The Witcher and Good Omens and Marvel things and I like books lots. My pronouns are ze/hir/hirs/hirself, I'm genderfluid and I'm ace!! Header by the incredible @kickassfu
So the answer here is simply, "The History of Antisemitism in Christianity".
I can unpack that, but it's literally that simple--the Early Christian Cult spent a lot of time and effort distancing itself from Judaic practices, and observing the central holiday of the Jewish faith wasn't going to accomplish that!
Unpacking that, here's the deal (under a cut to spare your dashes):
During the era of the Roman occupation of Judea, Pesach was one of three pilgrimage festivals of the Jewish year, where Jews from across the known world would travel to Jerusalem. Somewhere in the vein of a quarter to half a million people would be making the journey from places all over; at Pesach, they would be offering animal sacrifices (this is what those livestock salesmen were there for who Jesus harassed and attacked, btw; there was a designated courtyard in the Temple specifically for them to sell unblemished animals suitable for the sacrifice). Now, in this era, there were political/religious divisions of various types with different answers to "How to be a Jew?" The Pharisees were one group that focused on the Torah and finding the divine in daily practice, while the Sadducees--who were more dominant at the time--focused on the Temple observance. (There were also the Zealots and Essenes, but they aren't as relevant, being militant nationalists and ascetic monks, respectively).
But then the Romans destroyed the Temple in 72 CE at the end of the First Roman-Jewish War, and the Sadducees form of religious observance died with it. And when the Judeans rebelled against Rome again sixty years later, and Rome crushed them--killing half of the population and taking half of the survivors as slave labor to work construction across the Empire--the Pharisees ended up "winning" by being the sole Jewish group that could offer Jewish continuity and identity in exile, modifying the old pilgrimage festivals to suit when we were forbidden--on pain of death--to return to our homeland.
And that's where Rabbinic Judaism and its rituals and ceremonies came from--in the hope and cry of a people enslaved in chains away from their homeland desperate to hold onto a sense of who they were with continuity to the old, built on the bones of what came before. The Passover pilgrimage and sacrifice became the Seder, with all of its ceremony and meaning, ending with the call of "Next Year In Jerusalem!"...
Next year, we get to go home.
...
*cough* Sorry.
So, what's going on with Christianity during all of this?
Well, they realized within a few decades that preaching to their fellow Judeans wasn't going anywhere in getting new converts to the cult, because Jesus didn't fulfill any of the qualifications for being the Jewish messiah. As a result, they started preaching to Roman gentiles, jettisoning a lot of the Jewish laws and traditions (circumcision, kashrut, a bunch of the texts, etc) in the process to make the religion more appealing. The New Testament gets written, including the New Covenant and putting their own derivation on the old Passover pilgrimage festival--Easter and Holy Week.
It's quite simple: The Jewish Passover focuses on the foundational mythos of the Jewish people. It speaks about the Exodus from Egypt, culminating in Sinai, the giving of the Torah, and the Mosaic Covenant. But the Christian Easter couldn't focus on those, because they would add legitimacy and sympathy to the people that the New Testament literally demonized as the Synagogue of Satan (Revelations 2:9) and repeatedly compared to snakes and vipers (Matthew 3:7, 5:22, 12:34, 23:33, and Luke 3:7).
Instead, they focused, with their Holy Week observances, on their foundational mythos--the life, death, and rebirth of their god--and blamed the Jews in the process (Matthew 27:24–25) instead of the Romans who arrested him, tried him and executed him--along with the focus on the New Covenant that he had ostensibly founded to replace the Jewish Covenant.
But this wasn't quite enough. Anti-Judaic sentiment in the early Church was so strong that, even though the Easter holy days were literally derived from the Jewish Pesach, they needed separation from the Jewish rites. By 325 CE, at the First Nicaea Council, they declared that they would be computing Easter using their own criteria, rather than use Jewish methods for calculating the dates for Pesach, and this got baked in deeply into Christianity as it continued to spread--and with it, demonization of Jews and any hint of Jewish practices in Christianity. "Judaizer" was an insult, and Christians suspected of following Jewish practices got excommunicated, exiled, and executed, the hate was that deep.
And around Passover itself, numerous bits of antisemitism became part of Christian culture, with Blood Libel being perhaps the most prominent--the accusation that Jews would kidnap Christian children and murder them so that we could use their blood in our matzos. Host Desecration was another favorite.
So now it's centuries later, and Christians spent most of the last two thousand years making it abundantly clear that they shouldn't be celebrating Passover--frequently through killing people, including their own.
And now some Christians, who are bereft of any deep roots in their religion and ignorant or unconcerned of all of that history, are looking at Judaism's rituals as something to steal for themselves.
But, no. The modern Passover Seder was not what Jesus' Last Supper would have been, and Christians who want to pretend that it was in order to host a "Christian Seder" are basically going, "I know that my ancestors tortured and murdered yours for eighty generations for this holiday, but I want this now, so I'm just gonna take it and slap my god into it."
#i didnt know people besides mormons were taking jewish holidays
@itsaburgerwitheverythingonitnow, oh yes. Evangelicals are co-opting Jewish holidays and culture wholesale, to the point of having Deep Cover Missionaries infiltrating Orthodox Jewish communities (one was just uncovered this past week after having spent 15 years pretending to be a rabbi) and having made up a Christian denomination that uses the trappings and appearance of Rabbinic Judaism as an effort to trick Jews into converting. Still others steal Torah scrolls and mishandle them, or take Shofars and blow them whenever, hold Christian seders "to get in touch with Jesus"...
Everything Jewish--and I do mean everything--has been taken and forcibly reinterpreted in a Christian context by these people as part of a widespread "Philosemitic" attitude. They love "Jews". Not actual Jewish people or our right to have our own practices, no, not those. Just their idea of "Jews" as we're connected to their undead god--and we, and our culture, need to be brought to the worship of that god by any means necessary. Since violence didn't work for a few thousand years, now they're trying perjury, theft, and lies.
@buttermyfeet, the "traditional" way for Christians to celebrate Passover was to show up at a Jewish home as a mob, screaming that the Jews had sacrificed Christian children, and kill everyone inside.
The recent trend of "Christian seders" is the result of post-Holocaust Christians views shifting from "Let's kill the Jews in the Name of Jesus!" to "Let's steal the Jews' culture and make it all about Jesus!"
Oh, sorry, I forgot another Christian Passover tradition: Accusing the Jews of Host Desecration! Where we apparently steal/kidnap a consecrated Host and "torture" it. Great excuse for killing and/or driving the Jews out of a city and letting the local Christians steal their property.
You can see why we're a bit... irked that present-day Christians like to take the Jewish seder and make it all about Jesus.
Lots of Christians like to claim that they have a right to Passover because Jesus celebrated it. This is wrong.
Yes, the last supper was a Passover celebration, sure. But it's not our Passover celebration. Jesus lived when we had a Temple, so he probably took a lamb to the Temple and sacrificed it and then ate it.
We do not know the way animals were sacrificed or what rituals were used on Passover, because the Romans killed all of the priests (Kohenim) of the Temple in 70 CE. All of that knowledge was lost, asking with knowledge about the layout of the Temple and cleansing rituals. Jews were forced to flee Judea and enter the diaspora.
At around 200 CE, the earliest versions of the Talmud are written. The Talmud is a huge, huge book of laws and religious arguments and musings. It's about forty volumes today, if I recall correctly. The Talmud regulates a lot of the nitty-gritty on laws in the Torah. For example, the Torah says don't drown a calf in its mother's milk, and the Talmud expands that to mean never mixing any meat (even poultry) with any dairy. That's to provide a cushion around the Torah itself so people don't actually break the Torah. Modern Jews can't eat cheeseburgers, but Jesus would've been fine with it. (Probably. I'm not a scholar on Jewish life in 0 CE.)
Furthermore, Jews follow a Haggadah (literally, the story), a book that guides the Passover service. This was first written in about 170 CE. Of course, that version is wildly different from what we have now, but basically, Jesus would have celebrated in a completely different way. The Haggadah lists food to use as sacred symbols and adds a few related stories that are not biblical... And happened after Jesus died.
If we're assuming that Jesus celebrated Passover for the last supper, he probably told the story of Exodus and ate matzah. That's the only similarity to today's Seders. Everything else--the wine, the four questions, the Seder plate, the charoset, the songs, opening the door for Elijah (a practice that started so Christians could see that Jews weren't sacrificing babies)--all of that is purely Jewish and Jesus never saw it or observed it.
Passover is very, very important to Jews. It does take up roughly a fifth of the Torah. It is a story about Jewish liberation from slavery and oppression. It is not for our oppressors to have.
If a Jewish person invites you to a Seder, cool. (My Seder this year will be four Jews, a Greek-Orthodox man, a Methodist, a Catholic, and former Muslim who's now atheist.) If you want to learn about Jewish culture, cool. But please, for the love of all that's holy, do not have a Passover Seder that revolves around Jesus. My evangelical cousins had a Seder that claimed the four cups of wine were Jesus's blood, which is so offensive, I can't articulate it. This is a story that precedes Jesus by two thousand years; he's not in it and it's not about him. Please celebrate Easter and have fun doing it! And don't twist our rituals to be about a different religion.
Shoutout to allo-aro boys. You are so beautiful and handsome and powerful and your identity is so valid and you aren't hurting anyone by existing in the world and living your life as you like.
With covid on the rise and the vaccine readily available, more and more businesses are requiring their employees be vaccinated, and to prove that, they need a vaccination card.
Now, this is a problem for people who don’t want to be vaccinated, and there’s some people out there who are turning this into a business opportunity.
Meet “5starjazzii.” She has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and quite a few hustles. You’ll notice in her description “founder of antivaxmomma2.”
Yeah, that’s because “antivaxmomma,” her original account, got deleted, and I suspect it’s because she posted stuff like this, advertising that she’s selling fake covid 19 vaccine cards for 200 bucks a pop, but they’ll have real lot numbers on them. Now she’s been continuing this from her new account and even from her main account. She posted this the other day, explaining that she has a backlog of messages, and also that she’s looking to expand her team, so if you have computer access at hospitals or CVS, “DM me ASAP.”
Now that led me to believe that she’s either stealing existing lot numbers and putting them on the cards or she’s getting someone to enter people into the system that haven’t been vaccinated to generate their own lot numbers. But I didn’t want to make assumptions so I decided to message her and ask.
I told her I worked at a Walgreens. She said to text her ASAP. She asked if I had access to enter the vaccine information into the system and then asked, because I’m in Florida, how do people here verify they’re in the system, because in New York they have an app. And the person she has in New York doing this can provide the numbers that the people can check in the app. I explained that in Florida you have a site you can do that on and asked what exactly she needed. She told me she provides the person’s name, date of birth, address, the vaccination date, asked if I can backdate them, and then has me enter them into the system to generate lot numbers. So I would enter them into the system as if they had just received the vaccine, WHICH THEY HAVE NOT, but the system would believe that they have, and if someone checked those lot numbers, it would say their name. That made me curious how many people were doing this. She told me the woman in New York that’s doing it for her, she’s given 100 bucks a person, she’s doing at least 30 people a day, and that woman’s making 10,000 dollars a week. Do the math on that. On how many people are walking around with legal documents saying they’re vaccinated, and they are not. She’s also asked if I could provide her covid 19 cards.
Now you may ask, why would someone take the risk and do something like this? Well, it seems in her case that it’s at least due in part to the fact that she believes that the vaccines are sterilizing children as part of the Gay Agenda. Now, she’s not going to be doing this any longer, the FBI’s already been involved, but when I hear people say things like, “why bother getting the vaccine, people are getting covid who are fully vaccinated?” I have to wonder, are they?
Breakthroughs ARE a real thing, delta is a bitch and also being autoimmune makes so that the vaccine is less effective. But he's right that the numbers of those might be a lot smaller than it seems because of rackets like this and unless we have records of which numbers are fakes we can't know.
Also how the hell do people who are antivax end up as nurses? How do you make it through nursing school and are still that fucking stupid.
From the notes: they’ve added a word limit and blocked submissions from outside the us. also, copypasted text is pretty easy to filter. Apart from that…
Like, do not use “Ted Cruz” but instead make up plausible names
Sound as earnest as possible, and if you’re gonna do media? Upload lots of real-looking photographic evidence, like screencaps from Google Street View when documenting addresses. ctrl-ving the Bee Movie script is amusing but is easily detected. Blocks of bad pregnancy fanfic text would be better.
The goal is to make realistic but fake reports to clog their system.
Yes, I am advocating using publicly-available information to make these women responsible for their actions. If enough false reports are filed about them, it will be an embarrassment to the state and may cause reform.
No, I am not advocating death threats or anything. Use their names and work addresses for REPORTS. Not harassment.
Full disclosure: I love Pride and Prejudice. I just always found Mr. Darcy’s first proposal attempt funny. What do y'all think of the black and white instead of color? I used to mostly make my comics in gray scale and I kind of miss it. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts!
I know most of those following me know this, but just to make it super clear. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger/the Great Famine) was a deliberate genocide of the Irish people. There was enough food grown in Ireland to make sure everyone was alive and healthy and survived. Instead it was exported, sent to England and elsewhere for profit while men, women, and children starved in the streets. While the English landlords fucked off and evicted starving families who couldn’t afford rent. While babies were too weak to cry and died at the side of the road.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.
Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.
The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. We will not let them take our lives, we will not let them take our language. We lost so much, but we will not lose it all.
Of course the headline also avoids acknowledging the six counties. The population of the Republic of Ireland is now over 5 million, the population of the entire island of Ireland is nearly 7 million.
this is Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. it’s a really weird novel about a man going to get a haircut that’s also a pretty explicit criticism of the 1%.
the main character is a multimillionaire who’s so fixated on money and materialism that he’s basically forgotten how to be a normal human being and connect with people. that conversation above is him talking to his new wife. at one point, he even says something like, “this is good. we are having a conversation. this is what people do.”
We have terfs who admit that ace discourse was their first step towards radfem ideas. We’ve had multiple break downs of how terfs and radfems try to radialize other people by using ace/bi/pan/nb/queer/etc. discourse. We’ve had multiple break downs of how popular exclusionist arguments use the same faulty logic and arguments that radfems use.
Can exclusionists maybe finally admit that this is a problem and either drop the discourse entirely or try to come up with arguments that aren’t copied from radfems?
note how the “queer is (always) a slur (and should never be used, even to talk about yourself or the queer community or queer academia)” nonsense is directly mentioned as point 2 on the aphobe to TERF pipeline
i love this neat little ability that comes with the internet that you can choose a name for yourself, you can come up with any old nickname for yourself and it may or may not be a real name, you can be sam, milk-chan, 3000 watt ass thresher, anything you want and people will really accept it as your name in a way that doesnt happen as easily in the real world. i think its very cute
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