spitoutthedaisyhoratio:

argumate:

etirabys:

oh my goodness, one of dian fossey’s first close up observations with gorillas happened when she was trying to climb a tree to see them better, but so badly that by the time she’d gotten up the entire group had come out of hiding to look at her: “Nearly all members of the group had totally exposed themselves, forgetting about hiding coyly behind foliage screens because it was obvious to them that the observer had been distracted by tree-climbing problems, an activity they could understand.”

hello, fellow apes

The lead up to that sentence is gold:

mygendertodayis:

theangrycomet:

juicetrump2:

juicetrump2:

BOOST!

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Oh wouldn’t this be tragic if word of this spread out everywhere possible?

Oh no…my hand slipped…

swordshapedleaves:

redshiftsinger:

marisatomay:

“don’t eat honey because it exploits the bees and they can’t consent!!!” bees are literally unionized and will walk out if they don’t like being in the beekeeper’s hives

It’s true.

I worked with a beekeeper (not at beekeeping, guy had a day job as a machinist and kept bees as a side thing). One day there was a swarm in the parking lot and people were freaking out because, y'know, BEES EVERYWHERE. Beekeeper guy went to his truck. Pulled a swarm-catching box out. Put it on the ground and walked away.

Bees went in the box after a while. Guy put the box back in his truck and drove home with them.

You cannot prevent bees from leaving a hive they don’t like the conditions of, without also preventing them from being able to make honey. The latter is dependent on them being able to come and go as they please. If they don’t like their hive THEY WILL LEAVE.

Beekeeping is probably the single most non-exploitative animal agriculture in the entirety of human history. I don’t know how it’s even possible to exploit bees. They answer only to their queen.

They absolutely do not answer to the queen. If she sucks they will kill her and make a new one.

geat-26:

triplemoonascension:

sevdoesnotexist:

romcommunist:

lukewarm take but i personally do not give a shit if poor people cheat a system that was designed to fail them anyways. i also coincidentally do not enjoy the taste of boot rubber

If people need to “cheat” the system just to have enough money to eat and keep a roof over their heads, they deserved the money anyways and the system is broke.

chiribomb-deactivated20220820:

munchkinmom77:

atopfourthwall:

bogleech:

bogleech:

parfstar:

bogleech:

Hey so I still see people utterly baffled by how religious fundies (still a majority in America and moreso its senate) react on certain issues so uhhh is it actually not common knowledge what the antichrist is all about? You guys know his defining characteristic is ending war, right? That he’s foretold to unite the world under his leadership by preaching global peace and solving basically every single problem in the world? So you know when you try to talk to these people about equality and togetherness they literally believe that’s what makes you an agent of the devil right???

im sorry what.  so.  ok im assuming they think that this is all like.  to gain trust and then take over or something?  because.

Yes, he’s called the “antichrist” because he’s an imposter Jesus and the majority of the world will love him when he ends all class divides and erases all borders, creating one world government with him at the top. That’s the “new world order” they’re terrified of. But they think he’ll oppress true Christian believers who see through his ruse, which is why they’re constantly looking for signs that they’re being discriminated against and panic when they lose any control over government. This is why they fear diversity, immigration, socialized anything. The less religious right are pretty clearly still running on the same logic; they might drop some of the spiritual lore but this is where they get the idea that all progressivism leads to the “real” fascism. Some believe the antichrist isn’t a literal person either but just that entire set of beliefs, so everyone protesting against war and trying to feed the hungry is a *collective* antichrist.

So from the notes it turns out people are MUCH less familiar with all this than I suspected and that’s honestly kind of alarming, guys, you should really really pay attention to things that affect so much of this country. No these are absolutely not obscure or fringe beliefs, these are MAINSTREAM with megachurches, Trump voters, the GOP and a vast proportion of the wealthy. Alex Jones and multiple Fox News hosts openly believe word for word what I described here.

And yeah as several people pointed out it isn’t even explicitly in the bible, but something some radicals pieced together in maybe only the last century. My uncles all believe it to the letter and they all believe it’s what the Bible is “supposed” to be communicating.

A lot of people are also confused as to why they would believe the peace and unity are villainous things and what the difference even is then between the “antichrist” and actual Jesus, which brings me to another thing I realize some folks CRITICALLY overlook about American Christianity, which is that they do not believe in good or bad deeds. They believe the same deed can be right or wrong strictly according to whether or not it’s performed by a believer with God’s stamp of approval. Like, they KNOW the Satanic Church and Witch Covens do community service or donate to cancer research and they are not confused, surprised, bitter or embarrassed by that at all. It’s exactly what they expect. They believe the forces of Satan do primarily “good” things so people will think he’s just as good or better than God. If a pastor heals a sick child with a prayer then that’s good. If a “witch” heals the same sick child with “magic” then that’s a false miracle from the devil and the child was better off dying because now everyone involved is a sinner who deserves hell. They’re taught to view you as a ridiculous fool if you don’t grasp this difference.

After all, they think our entire existence on this Earth is an insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things. The suffering in the world isn’t a bug to them, but a feature that God set up to test everyone’s worthiness, test their faith and teach them lessons, so they genuinely do believe that there MUST always be suffering and death and that there are many circumstances in which saving lives is genuinely more “wrong” than killing them.

And speaking as a Christian here it’s why it’s so frustrating to deal with. They consequently don’t care about our OWN scripture that also contains parables and lessons about “You can claim to be pious as much as you want, but you’re fucking people over. Look at that dude over there - not part of our faith, but actually helping people. You care more about the APPEARANCE of piety than doing the right thing.”

These are the REAL problems we have within Christianity - not “wars on Christmas” or culture war nonsense or “MARXISM DESTROYING OUR ‘MURICAN VALUES AND JESUS WAS ‘MURICAN.” It’s people who believe and consequently teach that being a good person, that helping people, being charitable, that all of those things are wrong just because the magic sky man isn’t the target of their worship.

You want to know the real greatest trick of Satan? Making people believe that doing good things is wrong.

If you want to understand the evangelical view of the end times, I suggest reading one of Hal Lindsey’s books. He is a massively successful evangelical author who has written several best sellers about “end times” prophecies. His first book “The Late Great Planet Earth” was published in 1970 and was one of the best selling non-fiction books of the decade. It hugely influenced the evangelical community and its view of current events.

Evangelicals view Middle East conflict, environmental collapse, etc. are just more signs “the end is near”. They believe they will be “raptured” out of here before things get really bad, and then after it reaches a boiling point at the Battle of Armageddon, they’ll literally swoop in with Jesus who will put an end to it, send the nonbelievers to hell, and recreate the earth to start his thousand year reign of peace and love. Fun fact, my Mom had this hanging over our sofa throughout my childhood.

If you prefer to learn your theology packaged as page-turning fiction, I’d suggest the “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. It was wildly popular in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Like total “must reads” across the Christian community, even among those who were not “funny fundamentalists”. Or you can catch the movies starring ‘80s heartthrob Kirk Cameron. (Apparently there was a remake starring Nicholas Cage. Evangelicals are fantastic capitalists!)

Not necessarily about biblical prophecy, but a great glimpse into their worldview is the series on spiritual warfare by Frank Peretti “This Present Darkness”. I read it as a young teen, and honestly, it’s terrifying now that I look back on it. Mindfulness and yoga are portrayed as gateways to demonic possession. The evils of abortion also get a starring role.

The catch is that were average Americans to become more aware of these extreme views and start demanding that they not be the basis for policy decisions, the Evangelicals would immediately perceive it as persecution.

Fundamentalists are the same across all religions. They will gladly be martyrs for their beliefs. I’ve often thought Americans underestimate how easily Christian youth could be convinced to strap a bomb to their chests.

Growing up in this world, I understand it better than most, and it is frankly terrifying. I never imagined that perhaps the rapture was God’s effort to save the world from Christians rather than to save Christians from the world. The sudden disappearance of this particular extremist group might be a welcome reprieve from their single-minded rush to destroy the rest of us.

The thing is, they aren’t an extremist group. Their views may seem bizarre, but they are not extremists because they do not represent an extreme of the spectrum of American religion. This is what I keep banging on about. 70% of the US is xtian. 50% are some kind of Protestant. 25% — one in four Americans — identify themselves as evangelicals. And they are the ones with the megachurches and the televangelists and the radio pundits and the deep pockets and loud voices. They have a huge impact. Call them…fundamentalists or fanatics or something, but don’t call them extremists. They are a quarter of the population, with a big influence on the rest (and by the way, the other quarter of the population that does not identify as xtian is overwhelmingly culturally-xtian atheists and agnostics. In a 2014 Pew survey, less than 6% of the US population identified themselves as a religion other than xtian. So “cultural xtianity” is very much a real thing that dominates the country’s society and politics).

And yeah the thing about the Left Behind series is that people really do take that as biblically accurate. We watched the Kirk Cameron movie in Bible class at my fundie nondenominational school and we were told that this was more or less how it was going to go, and it was going to happen at any minute. Now, there are some variations in beliefs about the timeline of the end times; some believe there will be a millennium of peace before the antichrist, some believe the antichrist comes first, some believe that xtians get raptured and then the world goes through a period of tribulations, and some believe it’s the other way around. There are a lot of words like premillennialism and dispensationalism that describe these specific variations, but the general expectations are otherwise the same. They believe that it’s literal and that the antichrist has yet to come and it takes the shape of concrete political events. They are obsessed with Israel, for instance, but in a way that is actually deeply antisemitic (they think Jews will either convert or die at the second coming) and also extremely frustrating for Jews because it means that basic support for the idea that Israel as a country has a right to exist has become conflated with evangelical far-right politics, and that’s why it’s such a hot battlefield between evangelicals and leftist goyim with no connection to or understanding of anything actually happening in Israel. Also then they use it to deny their own antisemitism. Evangelicals believe that the modern state of Israel fulfils a prophecy that means the apocalypse is nigh.

I grew up in that world. I went to a fundie school and before that I was homeschooled in fundie church groups. These views are so standard that I actually didn’t know they weren’t shared by all xtians until someone raised Catholic asked me what the rapture was a few weeks ago. It’s not just one church or one school or one family or whatever. It’s normal and widespread. My grandparents have a licence plate holder that says “in case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.”

“Spiritual warfare” is a HUGE thing. If you look at the books section of the Walmart website, there is a whole section just for books about spiritual warfare. If you still don’t believe us about what this looks like, go ahead and look at the books they have in that section. I was taught that there were literal (invisible) demons and demonic forces all around us at all times, and that we had to be on guard every moment not to listen to them. By that time I was doubting the whole thing, so I never fully internalised that belief, but it’s a real thing that people are taught, and it’s not unusual at all. Others will say the same thing but treat “demons” more metaphorically as “temptations of the devil” or “people misled by the devil” and so on, but the premise is always the same: there is some sentient force of pure evil that exists only to oppose xtianity, and it is actively at work all around you, and you must fight it. Americans love militaristic imagery. They talk about “putting on the armour of god” and actually see this as an ongoing war. The Quiverfull movement, for instance, is a minority group within conservative xtianity that teaches that xtians should have as many children as possible in order to keep the population xtian-dominant and to be soldiers for this spiritual war; the term “quiverfull” itself refers to children being arrows in a quiver. That is not necessarily a widespread practice, but the militaristic imagery is very popular in typical evangelical churches. You can imagine the danger these people pose in a country where guns are easy to get and seen as markers of strength and masculinity (especially in this crowd) and where the law and politicians pander to them. “Spiritual warfare” is fucking nuts. But they believe it extremely deeply and will do anything for what they perceive as their cause.

It’s funny that the person above me mentioned yoga, because I was just telling a non-American about this. Alabama has banned yoga in public schools for almost 30 years on the belief that it will make you Hindu or open to demonic possession. This “factsheet” from an xtian-right legal organisation talks about the spiritual “harms” of yoga. It was published in 2021. For the people who don’t believe this is a real problem. And for the people who want to say “well, it’s Alabama, what do you expect,” first of all, you can’t dismiss the Bible Belt just because you don’t want to believe it, and second of all, this was a serious concern amongst xtians in the California Bay Area, one of the most liberal places in the entire country. My mom’s friends would not do yoga with her for this reason. They are so paranoid about being misled by the devil that you can tell them pretty much anything and they will believe it without questioning, because questions are how the devil gets you. All it takes is one radio pundit saying yoga makes you Hindu or credit card chips are the mark of the beast and they will believe it without thinking about it because to them, the stakes are too high not to believe it.

The other thing about all xtians but these in particular is that it is a dangerous combination of fanatic beliefs, access to resources, and a religion that depends on proselytism. Proselytism is a feature of all xtianity, but “evangelical” itself specifically refers to going and spreading these beliefs. Self-described evangelicals are a quarter of the population, but their impact is much bigger, because when you have fanatics who literally think that this is about the end of the world and damnation and spiritual warfare and are easily manipulated, they will throw all of their resources at their goals. They donate huge amounts of money. The anti-choice and anti-LGBT laws and movements are led pretty much entirely by these people. Someone who is not a fanatic is not going to spend their Saturday picketing an abortion clinic and they are not going to go door-to-door preaching. We were all conditioned as young people to do this kind of thing. I forget the name of the group that we dealt with, but there was a group that sent out teams of teenagers into inner cities to preach at homeless people basically and to do things like come to our classes with life-size rubber foetus dolls to tell us how abortion is evil. They’re taught to expect persecution and mockery and that this is a sign that the devil is angry because your work is important, and also that the stakes of this work are infinitely high, so they can very easily convince people to go out and do stuff they wouldn’t normally want to do, like cold-call people or preach on the streets. I think people like to believe they have a purpose and are an important piece of the puzzle. It’s sad, but it’s extremely difficult to break that conditioning, and you can’t break it for someone else. There are megachurches that are set up basically as cash cows for charismatic pastors who become millionaires. The executives of companies like Hobby Lobby and Chik Fil A believe this very strongly and put millions of dollars and court cases into these causes. They have deep pockets and large platforms. They influence the right wing even among people who are not technically evangelicals. Politicians court them and are afraid of doing anything that will set evangelicals against them.

One of the worst things anyone can do is underestimate them.