Reblog this or you hate kittens!

[lizbee]

One for the researchers: is the ease of reblogging on Tumblr facilitating the spreading of unfounded stories in the name of slacktivism?

I wonder, as tree_and_leaf casts doubt on the heartwarming banned books locker library story, and last week saw the return of the old "Australian government makes transgendered people go on sex offenders register to get hormone treatment" story that was debunked two years ago. 

On the other hand, the ease of reblogging on Tumblr also lets one see at a glance which of one's friends secretly think less of you for being religious*, which is convenient.

* Or at least, such is the logical conclusion to be drawn from their reblogging of tired old anti-Catholic jokes, devoid of any meaningful content beyond, "Christians! SO STUPID!"

Comments

[recessional]

On the other hand, the ease of reblogging on Tumblr also lets one see at a glance which of one's friends secretly think less of you for being religious*, which is convenient.

THAT's always fun.

As is explaining that, why yes, EVEN THOUGH I'm a thoroughgoing pagan and my faith never gets mentioned by name, the anti-religious screeds are really offensive. To me. Personally.

[lizbee]

The current trend of conflating religious practice with mental illness is really great. I'm sure you weren't actually intending to be incredibly ableist, guys, that was just a bonus.

[kerravonsen]

<sarcasm>But don't you know that talking to people who aren't there is ALWAYS a sign of insanity? And since God OBVIOUSLY isn't there, then all Theists are completely unhinged. QED.</sarcasm>

I'm reminded of the "proof" that God doesn't exist by looking at the English monarchy, who have been prayed for for centuries, and saying that because the monarchy has been full of rotters, therefore prayer doesn't work. I can't remember who it was who proposed this "proof" but claiming it was scientific is nonsense, since there is no control group to compare it with. Personally, the fact that the English monarchy still exists when so few monarchies have survived, is fairly good evidence that God does exist.

(eyeroll)

[lizbee]

Neither side of that argument really works, though. I mean, if the persistence of a monarchy was a sign that one religious tradition was superior to another, I'd be putting bets on a mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism and Shinto, since the Japanese monarchy is the oldest in the world.

[kerravonsen]

True.

And how long did the Egyptian monarchy last?

[lizbee]

Well, technically that would go for a few centuries, then Egypt would be invaded and the pharaohs would be overthrown, and then a new dynasty would arise and the cycle would continue. But roughly speaking, a good long while.

[fallingtowers]

The current trend of conflating religious practice with mental illness is really great

Well, you could always go for the obvious rebuttal of "okay, folks, I may then be a delusional, mentally ill zealot, but you're condescending, discriminatory jerkwads".

Man, nothing makes me want to defend Catholicism more quickly than that particular sort of atheists, and I am a cynical ex-Catholic for the most part...

[copracat]

Man, nothing makes me want to defend Catholicism more quickly than that particular sort of atheists, and I am a cynical ex-Catholic for the most part...

Seconded! I try not to assume all atheists are just people who had a shit religious childhood. But when one of them carries on as though all people of faith are exactly the same and that same is delusional fundamentalism, I do get a feeling in my bones and have to stop myself making a rude journal entry.

[lizbee]

Whenever Richard Dawkins annoys me (which, it has to be said, is often, especially since my fangirling of a character his wife once played leads people to think I totally care about his opinions about theology) I remind myself that Catholics have George Pell.

On the other hand, most of the Catholics I know will join in my Pell-inspired eyerolling, whereas I sometimes find myself having to defend my dislike of Dawkins to my friends.

[melengro]

My life became much better when I started mentally filtering out things that Richard Dawkins said or did (partially on your advice, actually) a couple of years ago. Now, the only time I pay any attention to him is when he goes and does things like jumping ship into A.C. Grayling's private, arguably for-profit college. Political things, because it's not worth even caring about what he has to say about a subject that he's on the record as being proud of not studying.

And then I remember that I technically belong to the same religious body as Michael Nazir-Ali and my blood pressure rises again. So it goes.

[copracat]

Did you know that all the evidence - yes, every bit of authoritative research - shows that faith/involvement in a faith community is very good for mental health and wellbeing?

[lizbee]

That makes a lot of sense to me! Although I've known a couple of congregations that had the opposite effect...

[miss_s_b]

... but I do hate kittens...

;)

[lizbee]

I'm not a big fan of puppies, myself.

[melengro]

On the other hand, the ease of reblogging on Tumblr also lets one see at a glance which of one's friends secretly think less of you for being religious*, which is convenient.

Urrrrrrgh this is always so incredibly depressing. In addition to the mental illness thing, there's also the coded white/male/Western/affluent supremacism, because POC, women, people in places that aren't North America, Western Europe, or A/NZ, and poor people tend to be more religious. A fact which I, uh...I really don't think it's coincidental to a lot of this rhetoric, honestly. Reading all the 'oh, how could some illiterate black lesbian from Mali possibly be a Muslim?! Doesn't she know she's party to her own oppression?!' crap...uh, it's not pleasant. And I've fallen out with some people I (had) really liked over things like this, which is always just gravy.

[sidenote: How does one get the ability to edit comments on DW?]

[lizbee]

"What these poor oppressed women of colour needs is a nice, middle class white lady to teach them about feminism!" Yes, dear, whatever you say.

[marymac]

Not to mention the time-honoured practice of entering religious orders to get your education and independence.

I know Irish nuns in their 80s who will tell you quite matter-of-factly that they entered the convent because they had a vocation for teaching and no desire to marry a farmer. And I know Nigerian girls in their teens who are making a very similar decision (with a large helping of 'Ye-es, but how about we get you through school and see how you feel then' from the Mother Superior). For a lot of people in a lot of places, religious life is the key to independence.

Hence my being educated by some frankly terrifying women who think feminism as-performed-by-academia is a bit late to the party, since they've been doing it since 1832.

[lizzieladie]

That one goes back a lot further than 1832 even - I don't know how much potential there was for women to change their class via religion in the early middle ages, but there's a fair amount of evidence that running a convent provided noble women with access to political power that they could only otherwise get by being a regent for their son or something else in that vein. See Radegund, kicking ass around 500.

I'd have to do some research to get back to the exact details of how things typically worked for lower class women coming into convents (I think that part of the problem is that there isn't a lot of evidence), but that the general picture historians are running with is that often class roles were reinforced (ie you would come into the convent from a certain class and generally be assigned in a role in the convent that reflected that class) but that there were still education and quality of life opportunities (including not having to pop out babies in medieval Europe) that you usually couldn't get outside of the convent.

[marymac]

Oh definitely, it's just that ours were Catherine McCauley's lot.
Leaving a trail of stunned fathers and over-educated women in their wake for 179 years!

[melengro]

I'm a Japanese literature major and a large part of my research focuses precisely on the phenomenon of joining religious orders as an escape condition for women who didn't want to conform to expectations such as the Three Obediences or the bullshit in the Onna daigaku (or who just wanted to get out of specific bad situations where the other option would be suicide). Really fascinating stuff. The tradition goes back a thousand years.

[marymac]

That sounds fabulously interesting, have you got reading links? Or hell, volunteering for proofreading if it's in English. *nerd*

It's something that makes me even less capable of coping with my more-aethist-than-thou friend's rants, because really, I know whereof I speak and whereof I speak is somewhere girls like me could not get a secondary education unless the nuns did it until 30 years ago.

I wish I could introduce her to those Nigerian girls and let them tear small, carefully considered, beautifully educated strips off her.

[melengro]

I'm afraid all I have right on me right now is this biographical sketch of Arii Shokyuu, because most of the rest of this sort of thing is in Japanese. Ema Saiko, though she didn't technically take Holy Orders, is another example of a woman of the same time period who cited devotion to religion and art as a reason not to take the typical roles. Earlier there was also Hojo Masako, a member of the family that ran the military junta during the Kamakura period, who is referred to as the 'Nun Shogun' (which is one of the more awesome sobriquets I've ever heard, I must say).

In a lot of these cases the women did have husbands and families at one point, but they died or left them or something else unfortunate befell them and the women didn't feel like killing themselves so this was the preferable option to solve the situation.

There is also Onibi (Demon Fire), a book by Yoshiya Nobuko--the author I'm going to be doing my thesis on--about Christian nuns in seventeenth-century Japan (hitherto these nuns I've been mentioning have all been Buddhist) that was originally pitched to me as The Power and the Floridly-Written, Ultra-Feminine Glory.

[terajk]

Not proof of anything, but in my Catholic school we read The Canterbury Tales and Dante's Inferno for English class.

Stephen King was banned in my middle school, though. (There were lots of shifty eyes and passing books under desks). And my English teacher told us out of nowhere never, ever to read Scruples. I don't know why--that book was older than we were.

Then there was the time my dad told me never, ever, EVER to watch Last House on the Left, which I'd never heard of. Guess what I rented that weekend? But the joke was on me, since either a) the video store version was so heavily edited, or b) my visual processing was so poor (possibly both) that I didn't see what was so awful about girls running in the woods. Cue reading about why that movie is infamous years later and going, "That happened?! And then THAT happened? WHY DON'T I REMEMBER THIS?!" (Fun fact about me: I have a very lax self-spoiler policy.)

[lilacsigil]

I ran a banned books library from a locker in high school, but the banned books were fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons related, not literary classics!

[lizzieladie]

On the other hand, the ease of reblogging on Tumblr also lets one see at a glance which of one's friends secretly think less of you for being religious*, which is convenient.

Well that's charming. Some of my acquaintances will just say it to your face, but usually that's actually in the context of a conversation about religion and not offhand in the form of a joke.

[phosfate]

I grew up around the sort of Christians who think it's perfectly acceptable to bully and terrify people (especially children) into their way of life. Fundies and Dawkoids? Exactly the same.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has people of faith and people who pass on it, and they somehow all manage to be decent human beings.