#fundie stuff

[countingandsnarkingon]

Do we think 2026 will be a relationship heavy year, as in are we going to get any public confirmations or announcements? I feel like, kind of yes? Multiple Duggars are of age, there’s at least one Bates in a relationship And Ellie and Adallee just made their IGs public. Plus, if I don’t get at least one Rodrigues courtship next year I’m gonna lose it.

Renee, come how with a man I need another unhinged wedding

[warmhappycat]

Is it finally happening!?

[gossipgirldefined]

I fell down a Pinterest rabbit hole to hell

[fundieofatime]

I'm back, I guess.

Things are calmed down and my mental state is 70% better and I've made some changes for myself and yeah let's get on the world in general and fundies in particular!

[talenlee]

Women Are Slaves

… You know I’m sure there’s time I’m going to regret presenting these Fundie articles with the premise of the Fundamentalist Position just stated up front in order to argue with them. I’m sure someone could take me out of context with these contentious topic sentences, but I’m not too concerned. After all, this involves talking about what’s in the Bible, and typically, Christians don’t like reading the Bible.

Here we are in the smoochiest of months, the time to talk about love and romance and wonder and the joys of relationships (for those that get that joy, and there are all sorts of other people who do not, in fact, have any joy, and you know, you do you, aros). If I talk about the Bible, specifically, the Bible as ostensibly engaged by the Christian Fundamentalist people of my youth and background, then of course we’re going to talk about the most traditional forms of love: That of one man, and another man, who is paying the first man for ownership of undamaged property.

Yeah, the Christian conception of ‘marriage’ is pretty messed up.

First things first, the Bible doesn’t ever tell you how to get married. There’s no listed ritual or particular behaviour, it’s not documented, and it’s not seen as necessary for any particular purpose. In the Bible, animals and fish and birds are told to ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ and then, so to are Adam and Eve. Now, that either means God thinks that all the animals should be forming mating pairs and having weddings, or he doesn’t mean that humans should be. I always assumed that the marriage vows we saw people exchange in church came from the Bible, and it turns out that as with so many things, no, that book doesn’t include that.

The Fall, described in the Bible, which is the Christian all-purpose excuse for why things suck and how we shouldn’t be holding God accountable for the awful world he made, does include a specific idea that the husband shall rule over a woman. This idea being early in the storytelling of the culture makes a lot of sense; you tell the stories that justify how the culture works, and if there’s a culture of misogyny where women are property of their husbands or fathers, it seems likely the people with the power would agree upon a vision of the origin of the world that justified that kind of behaviour, right?

Part of the problem is just there isn’t really a word for ‘married’ or ‘proposed’ in the Bible. There is no relationship anywhere in the Bible, as indicated, that is entered into consensually by two willing partners, and based on love. There’s just nothing there, and the terms used for going from ‘no wife’ to ‘having a wife’ is the term used to pick things up – or, in the meaner phrases, seize. The way you determined that you owned a woman was by uh, having sex with her, there wasn’t some kind of ritual to justify it, no transactional relationship or declaration in the public. And that’s why so many of the guys in the Bible have multiple sexual partners, and some of them get called Wives. Hagar was a slave to Abraham, after all, not a wife, even though he absolutely had sex with her and had a kid.

It’s also all through the Biblical law codes as well. Violations of women’s bodily autonomy – sexual assault, y’know? – aren’t addressed as crimes of violence or abuse, they’re addressed as crimes where there’s a fine and an obligation for financial recompense. The sanctity of the woman’s value as a virgin is important to her being considered to have value, and that’s why she can be stoned to death for not being provably a virgin on her wedding night.

One of the favourite metaphors Christians in your Ray Comfort space, is that they want to present the gospel story as being a ‘love’ story. Now, setting aside that these people are liars who should be spit on in the street — in my opinion — then they are kinda right. The story of the Bible, the idea of Christ’s relationship to the church, is very aptly metaphorised by a romantic marriage story of a wife, which makes sense because that’s a metaphor the Bible itself invokes. The people who experienced this form of ‘marriage’ would probably see the situation as making sense if they used it as a metaphor, right?

It’s a marriage as they know it, in that the Christian represents valuable property, there’s any number of them, and their duty in the world is to preserve their sanctity and their purity in the world in order to be presented ready to be used by their owner when he arrives. God has made us into the property, and Jesus is coming back to take us. There’s nothing we can do, because the agreement is already made between two people. The Calvinist position is kinda strong on that front. On the other hand it does imply that you can escape from the marriage by running away.

Anyway, look, bear in mind, all of this is the stuff that the people who want to present themselves as defenders of women, and marriage, and family, both claim serves as the bedrock for their ideology, and also, that they have absolutely not read. Thing is, it isn’t important to what they think, or the tradition of how they want people to go about marriage. After all, the Bible doesn’t support what they want or what they think, so pointing out that it doesn’t shouldn’t matter to them, at all. It wasn’t true before I mentioned it and it isn’t true after I mentioned it.

What’s more, if your vision of how to treat women considers them as people and finds anything I’ve described here as kind of icky, then maybe you should consider this: You are the moral superior to the identity of the minds that authored the Bible.

A large portion of this blog post comes from having watched a lot of videos and listened to a number of podcasts in which Dr Jennifer Bird, PhD, has presented her ideas from her own studies, which I understand to be better coalesced in an academic context in her book Marriage In The Bible.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

TAG, You're Shit

Maybe a little confrontational for a post title, but it is about an argument that gets acronymed to TAG and oh boy, is it actually shit.

Odds are good that you’re a grown adult who doesn’t spend much time paying attention to people whose hobby is arguing. This is good and healthy and you should continue in this vein.

There is however, a chance you do like to follow argument golf and that means you might have encountered the particularly loathsome spore cloud that is the modern iteration of Christian Presuppositional Apologetics. One of the threads of this is known as the Transcendental Argument for God, or TAG for short.

This argument dates back to Immanuel Kant, who you might also know as being responsible for such great moral stances as ‘lying to the Nazis is basically as bad as doing the genocide yourself.’ I’m doing a bit of well-poisoning here, and the proponents of TAG may well dislike that but I think it’s very important to draw a direct line between their arguments and the moral frameworks that inform its creation. It’s not some new modern philosophical perspective, some brilliant enlightenment that you haven’t heard of before now because it uses such big and fancy words, but it is old as dirt and twice as dumb.

The argument takes some principled form of:

If [some transcendental thing exists], therefore god exists

[some transcendental thing exists].

Therefore, God exists.

Now, there’s a long walk from this philosophical argument that allows for some kind of god as an excuse for transcendental things all the way to the Christian god of the Bible, who is definitely not a god of transcendental things, but this is how they like to set it up. If they can bullshit a god into existence, a god is infinitely vast and infinitely complicated and they can scaffold onto that lie a bunch of other equally stupid lies to get us to ‘this god, specifically, which is why I should vote for fascism, and am morally justified in doing so.’

Oh, what’s ‘transcendental things?’ Largely, it’s a way people in this space like to refer to things that are just, like, y’know, really complicated, man. Like, consciousness is complicated, so it might be transcendental. Or mathematics, that might be so complicated it’s transcendental? Do you believe morality is transcendental? How about that? Oh, wait, how about the laws of logic, those seem really, really complicated and they work, so surely those must be transcendental?

It’s a fun argument to watch someone propose because almost all of it is built out of trying to get an audience to some point where they’re willing to concede ‘wow, yeah, maybe THAT thing is special because I don’t have a explanation right now for why that might exist,’ and then they try to snap the trap shut on that. See, as much as it may pretend to be something else, the Transcendental Argument for God is an argument that relies on pointing at something too complicated for the pointer to explain and say ‘well, god must have done that.’

It is a philosophy textbook version of the ‘look at the trees’ argument.

Logic, math, and ethics are not things that needed to exist outside of humanity in some transcendental form for us to make sense of them. Each of them is easily understood as a communication method, something that was tested and found to work, a descriptive measure of a system that works in the real world. You don’t need a cosmic four to exist in order to deduce that adding another four gets you to a non-cosmic eight. We weren’t giving these things ontological meaning by naming them, we were labelling things that exist. Mars was already there before we called it Mars and it does not care that we call it Mars.

Language is the tool we use to catalogue the reality around us and communicate it with one another, and it’s a sloppy, messy, and untidy pile of intuitions and double-checking error testing and when you understand how inefficiently humans use their brains to handle language you quickly lose faith in the ability of language to argue a god into existence.

Anyway, you don’t need to worry about arguing with TAG because it’s not an argument. It is a grift. At some point reasonably recently in the online monetisable scumbag space of the internet, someone worked out that this was an unmined quarry of apologetic reassurance to give people who couldn’t handle something as complicated as reading the Bible, and thus began the awful bubble of Presuppositional Apologetics Philosopher DEBATE ME types smearing their collective funk on online discourse.

TAG is an artfully constructed lie that requires the people making it to either not understand the kind of argument they’re making (in which case they’re the mark) and that tends to crumble very easily, or to exactly understand the kind of argument they’re making in which case they know it is so delicate as to collapse in the face of ‘I don’t agree with your assertion.’ It is an entire negotiated position that collapses under the way of ‘nuh uh,’ and because of that, the people who like it must maintain every edge they can to try and make their position sound reasonable and anyone arguing with them to come from a position of being unreasonable. They need you to feel bad about arguing with them, or they need an excuse for running away from your refusal to accept that the existence of math requires the existence of the Christian Trinity.

There’s a reason it falls under the heading of Christian Presuppositional Apologetics. It is a position that builds itself on the presupposition that the Bible is true and God is real. That’s a pretty neat trick in the context of arguments where, normally, you need to be able to convince someone who doesn’t believe you that the thing is true, but Christians do this stuff all the time. I lived for years in a church believing the best evidence that the Bible was true was that the Bible said it was true and that kept me fooled until I was seven years old and needed someone to explain to me how that held up if the Bible wasn’t true. Needless to say, none of the adults in my life were able to give me a satisfactory answer, because to them the excuse for seven year olds was probably good enough.

All of these things are just in the family of arguments that seem unassailably sound as long as you’re willing to accept the idea that you have to already think it’s true for it to have any bearing. It is the ultimate in declare victory, move on maneuvers, where it is impossible to prove wrong, because it’s already been asserted as true.

There is no arguing with it, there is just dismissing the dickholes who bring it up so they can run away and cry that they’re being persecuted in their own sodden little discord nooks.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Trans Ally, Paul

That’s a joke, of course. Paul, as in Biblical Paul, was by no means an ally of anyone, and based on a reading of the things we’re confident he said, if he was going to be waving any pride flags, it’d be the asexual one, and quite possibly the one that’s probably out there somewhere for ‘what if you cut off your own balls?’ Like the dude seems to think the ideal Christian is a Ken Doll that knows how to talk.

But, nonetheless, there is a part of the Bible that has a degree of legitimacy, as a ‘real’ Christian text, that Christians do reference and do ostensibly respect, and which it’s hard to look at, with an understanding of trans identities and the assumptions of Christianity being true, that doesn’t end up at being Paul Says Trans Rights.

First things first: Slavery. Yes, that thing the Bible supports entirely and never disagrees with. It’s like human sacrifice, one of those things the Christian identity is 100% obviously against now because we’ve had all this time and society to get around to fixing it, which again, obviously, we would not have done if not for Christianity providing the moral beacon and guiding principle to it. In the case of slavery, the quandrary it presents is mainly a problem for Christians who believe the Bible is a single book with a single narrative that expresses a unified value and sequence of historical events, which is a term that we summarise as univocality. The other principle that needs to be in play here is the principle of infallibility, which is that the Bible is a book that does not contradict itself and meaningfully coheres in all ways.

That is to say, the Bible has some kind of single narrative and moral framework that holds it together, and it doesn’t contradict itself. If you don’t believe these two ideas, none of this is a problem. Orthodox and Catholic Christians can point to their traditions and church fathers, the expansions on the Bible.

Okay, then. The Bible has rules for slavery, Jesus doesn’t say ‘knock it off with the slavery,’ and the Christian is, at least if they’re a sensible human in our modern day, not in favour of slavery. That means they tend to dig through the book and try to find some way in which a source bans slavery, at least going forward in the New Testament.

They do find it, mind you. It’s in the book of Galatians, one of the Pauline epistles that is generally agreed upon as actually being written by Paul. Which again, that’s, that’s one of those things that only matters if you read the book as a book and not as a magic lore tome penned by Jesus across time and space, my bad. Point is, Galatians is largely considered to be actually work from actual Paul which in this case is just colour commentary.

The verse in question:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28 New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised

The argument this verse tends to entail is the idea that here, because we are all one in Christ Jesus, then therefore, we can’t go about enslaving one another. After all, there is no slave, so therefore, slavery is over. It’s a bit of a reach, and anyone who’s made this argument to me can’t explain the text in the original Greek, but that’s okay because this is about Christians, and Christians only involve the original text when they’re trying really hard to ignore something obviously heinous in the translation.

This also tends to work as a twofer; there’s no Jew or Greek, which is usually used as the foundation for an argument as to why Christians don’t need to hold to Levitic law, the food restrictions and sacrifice and all that stuff. This is good, because ignoring the hard parts of the religion was really useful for helping it spread, and it also lets Christians take an alacarte attitude towards all the things in the law, meaning that Christians tend to be pretty free about the coveting business.

Thing is, if that’s what this verse tells us, then there’s that third category there, male or female, which seems to be pretty hard to discuss abolishing, right? Like, if Jew and Greek are now non-categories, so Greeks don’t need to hold to Jewish law, and Slave and Free, are now non-categories so there are no more Slaves, then surely the abolition of Male and Female means that there’s now nothing for that category to do any more. At the very least it preaches a kind of omnipresent ungendering, and at the very least suggests that someone who wants to move from one to the other or out of the system entirely, there’s no system in place to keep them. After all, there is no longer male and female.

Checkmade, not-atheists.

None of this matters of course.

This verse is something akin to nineteen hundred years old. Christians have had this verse for all of that time, and despite that, slavery was not removed from the common acceptable Christian canon until somewhere around the 1870s – basically when a military power lost a war over it. Today, there are Christians that point to this verse and claim that this verse represents what Christians ‘really’ mean about slavery, and therefore, there’s no black mark on Jesus’ record about loving slavery to bits. If that’s the case, if this verse shows that slavery should be abolished, and the Jewish laws (that are inconvenient) should be abolished, then it seems to follow that gender should be abolished in the same way, right?

But…

No.

No, because Shoulds don’t matter.

I want to be clear. If you’re reading this, as a Christian, and your takeaway is that this verse serves as a meaningful and obvious evidence that you should be trans inclusive, then you’re wrong. The thing you should be taking from this lesson is that Christianity is made up ad-hoc bullshit, and you should be getting rid of it entirely. But if all you can carry out of here is that Paul said you should support trans people, then I supose that’ll have to do.

Because you’re weak.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Oh My God You're Seriously Talking About The Shroud Of Turin I Swear To God What Am I Going To Do With You People

Okay.

So.

Hey, you might know this blog as a place where I, a godless athiest and even mysotheist (nae gods nae masters), rip shit on the fundamentalist evangelical christians that ruined my childhood and also are now in the process of trying to commit genocides in America, not an exaggeration, but today, today, I want to offer some sincere if admittedly not-politely delivered information for Actual Christians who have a sincere belief in their faith structure that have for some reason bought into the recent resurrection (hah) on TikTok and the Joe Rogan podcast of the medieval Christian hoax, the Shroud of Turin.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Shroud of Turin is a medieval fake relic that was first documented in the 1390s in a letter from a Bishop to the Pope that stated that it was a forgery, and that he had the confession of a local artist. I know it’s easy to ignore these things, I know it’s easy to hang onto the story of a thing that exists, but it’s really important for you to know, ahead of time, that The Shroud of Turin’s first historical appearance is a letter to the Pope saying ‘this is definitely fake, and we know because we have the guy who did it.’

I know that being a Christian involves accepting a lot of ideologically comforting conspiracy thinking. It is a faith that is made out of incomplete and unreliable stories that are held together with a lot of fanfiction. That means that despite the fact that the Shroud of Turin was known to be fake since it was first discovered historically, there is nonetheless, an excuse. After all, you might be an American Protestant and therefore, firmly of the opinion that anything to do with the Pope is a lie, and evil. I’m halfway there with you, but that’s because I think all Popes are bad, not because I think there’s something special about the Shroud of Turin’s reliability.

It seems that plenty of people think like you do too, because the Shroud of Turin has been subject to further research despite this pretty matter of fact slam dunk. The Shroud of Turin has been examined pretty much constantly, and even been examined just in the past few years for the endless, desperate, grasping-at-straws pursuit of Christians who really, really want their faith practice to be able to claim some kind of scientific truth. It was carbon dated in the 1980s to around 1390 CE, which is coincidentally, around the same time the thing was discovered and the artist admitted to forging it. But again, maybe the 1980s researcher is also lying.

There’s the way the art is not really very realistic, and doesn’t look like a Jewish guy from around 30 CE. What it does look like is Byzantine Art of Jesus, which would date the artwork to around the 1390s, which again, is a bit of a coincidence but maybe art scholars are also all liars.

Now, I’m still with you here, my Christian friend. The pope, probably a liar. The bishop talking to the pope? friends with a liar, probably a liar. 1988 carbon dating? Probably liars. The artistic scholarship? Probably all liars.

How about the Bible?

Then they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in strips of linen with the spices, as the custom of the Jews is to bury

John 19:40, NKJV

And

6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; and he saw the linen cloths lying there, 7 and the [a]handkerchief that had been around His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded together in a place by itself.

John 20:6-7, NKJV

The Bible itself describes the fabric Jesus was buried in. It was not a single, whole piece. It was strips of spiced linen fabric. The face of the burial fabric was covered with a separated piece of cloth.

Is the Bible lying?

Is the Bible part of the conspiracy to hide a single artifact that wouldn’t be discovered for 1300 years, and then, mysteriously, show up in the hands of a guy claiming to be an artist who confessed to manufacturing the fake?

Every Christian who tells you about the Shroud of Turin is a Christian telling you that their reading of the Bible is bad. The Shroud of Turin is meaningfulness antimatter for Christians, because if it’s a real thing, then the Bible isn’t factually true, and suddenly you have to deal with the more weird and impressive miracle, that a fabric dated to 1390 has the image of some dude on it. You’ve thrown out history, and science, and even the Bible proper to get there. And what you have for it is now an artifact unmoored from all the things the Bible wants to prove to be true. After all, the Bible doesn’t support the Shroud of Turin, so the Shroud of Turin just tells you that a mysterious image appeared on a fabric and you have to explain why the Bible describing the burial wrappings are fake, but the rest of the stuff isn’t fake.

Look, Christian friend who is still inexplicably reading this, and I really am sorry for the cruel tone I have taken here. I know that a lot of you can be really nice people, and the issues I have around that are not important to this. The Shroud of Turin is a lie you are being told, and everyone who is trying to sell it to you is either a liar or incompetent. Don’t get me wrong, they can be both! Ron Wyatt and the scions of Arkaeology were at the headwaters of an extensive industry of lying to you.

I think that the best defense against this stuff is to read your Bible. I mean like, actually read it. Don’t treat these kinds of details – where the shroud is a single whole object and the Bible says he was wrapped in strips – as if they’re all glossed together. Don’t yadayada the book, since you probably think it was divinely inspired.

If this is the most important book in the world, if this is the word of literal god, then ask yourself why you haven’t read it that much, and then, to that, ask how you missed this kind of lie? How much more of the stuff you’re pretty sure is in the Bible is only in your head?

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!