Communicating trauma through art is fine, as long as you don’t remind the Christian fundies that their beliefs and practices are a prime source of religious trauma for lots of people.
Communicating trauma through art is fine, as long as you don’t remind the Christian fundies that their beliefs and practices are a prime source of religious trauma for lots of people.
I just think it’s impressive that the church so successfully rebranded the guy kissing his best friend and having his “beloved disciple” leaning on him at dinner while feeding that best friend food as being anti-LGBTQ.
“What goes into your mouth does not defile you” indeed.
This is the same guy who extracannonically was allegedly saying things like:
A sentiment that seems to have been loosely around when Paul was writing in Galatians about how there was no male or female.
Nonbelievers cede too much of the historical Jesus to the church IMO. The canonical Jesus is a total tool, but the Jesus between the lines and in early apocrypha is pretty lit, strongly denouncing religious orthodoxy at the time and telling people not to bother praying or sacrificing and especially not giving money to the church, to just be true to themselves and not do what they hate, “everything is permissible,” etc. The church spins the whole thing with what’s clearly a significant layer of propaganda on top of what was there before with “secret explanations” and shit, and they ended up getting away with it for millennia.
Literally the Jewish version of the Jesus story from the medieval ages has Judas and Jesus fucking, the Mar Saba letter is talking about claims in the first few centuries he was gay and has a secret version of a gospel where he’s shacked up for a week in a bedroom with a dude covered by nothing but a sheet, and scholars today are like “no, that unmarried guy in his 30s kissing and feeding his best friend wasn’t gay because the Greek in the church’s propaganda is the platonic version of the word beloved.” It’s like the ultimate “and they were roommates” shit.
Yeah, looking through history with a modern lens can be dangerous but refusing to consider it can also make you miss a lot, and the fact is that this was a nonviolent resistance movement against an occupying power and the hypocrisy of the religious leadership. In this movement people were called to live in common as equals and provide whatever aid they can to anyone in need. Like, they lived in their own time and culture and all that, but I’ve met these people before, this is a punk house. In many cultures like this that I’ve seen documentation of and in my own, such movements are disproportionately queer.