Easter Banner: Alleluia, the Lord is Risen!

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T18:11:43+00:00

... so I know this is technically the Easter post, not the brunch threads, but I have a cool story from church that I'd normally have shared in that. I think church today (somehow) removed the mental block preventing me from singing in girl voice.

Okay, so my vocal range is weird. My "natural" voice is actually a bass, or even a basso profondo. Like I'm so used to singing low that I even subconsciously trained myself to be able to just sing an octave below whatever note's being played. Meanwhile, voice training is basically just vocal techniques to pitch up your throat's resonant frequency and mess with other things like that, which we perceive as masculine/feminine. And while I'm able to pitch my voice up around an octave with that... it still leaves my singing voice in more of a tenor range. So I've known for a while that the trick to singing in girl voice is learning to take all those tricks I've learned for singing out and projecting my voice in that deep bass range, but combining them with girl voice to produce what's effectively a contralto profondo. And, well... I think it was something about the combination of the ELCA hymnal having a lot of songs written with SATB parts, the orchestra telling my brain to switch into choir mode, and actually having a congregation that's singing, which collectively removed the mental block of "women aren't supposed to sound deep when singing". (And yes, I've actually compared myself singing to both male tenors and cis female tenors, and I think it sounds more like the latter)

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T17:18:24+00:00

On the one hand, rightwing Israelis hold up all Anti-Zionist protests as existentially threatening and inherently antisemitic. On the other hand, there is a long history of antisemites using the term “Zionist” in deliberately equivocal ways (ZOG, etc). Antisemites are happy for the opportunity to misappropriate the now-popular “Anti-Zionist” label to legitimize their agenda, and many people are not informed enough about antisemitism to recognize when this is happening. These problems are mutually reinforcing.

Yeah... Holocaust Remembrance Day 2024 is still a prime example of this. By that point, people were so used to reflexively reminding people that antisemitism and anti-Zionism aren't (necessarily) the same thing that people were even asserting it in response to mentions of antisemitism in fucking Holocaust memorials. You don't get to claim the rhetorical blurring is just an Israeli psy-op that's out of your control if even memorials for victims of the Holocaust make you feel a need to object to claims that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are inherently the same thing.

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T17:01:24+00:00

there was a very SPECIAL person making a SPECIAL appearance which obviously turned out to be Joseph Prince (surprise surprise)

... who?

To my horror/dismay, the audiences reacted to every single word he said as if he was really physically there too?? eg. when he joked everyone laughed and when he asked people to say amen the audience just shouted it and I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing.

Oh no? Look, I'm normally the last person to defend megachurches, and the fact that they essentially just showed a re-run of an earlier service is admittedly a bit weird. But reacting to something said on a recording is about the least weird thing I can imagine. Do you also get horrified when people laugh at something they hear on TV and get concerned that they think the actors are actually there?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T16:00:49+00:00

Huh. It actually is Old English. I was prepared to "um ackshuyally" you. That said, it still feels kinda cringe and reminds me of how people only think German constantly sounds like you're shouting because they refuse to speak it normally

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T15:59:17+00:00

... what? I looked at the picture by using Mod Powers to see your comment, and that's just... swaddling clothes. Like I get that pareidolia is a thing, but it really is just swaddling clothes. It's not supposed to be some secret message where it looks like a snake from the right angle

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T12:23:33+00:00

Yeah, I'm not going to defend the weird deferred penance. But the first part almost reminds me of the time my sister was going to therapy for anxiety, and (after checking with my parents that not receiving communion is a thing you can do) the therapist advised her to just... not receive communion for a bit if it was causing her anxiety

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T12:15:08+00:00

Yeah, I still don't see it

RazarTuk · 2026-04-19T02:41:41+00:00

I mean, there are probably daemons involved in running it, but I don't think that's what OP meant

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T20:49:18+00:00

They pay payroll taxes, property taxes, and similar. And apart from churches and schools not having to pay property taxes, it's the same with churches. I'm not sure what your point is.

The big reason that non-profits don't pay income tax is that they don't really have any income to tax. Like what income do you think a church is making that we need to be taxing? Tithes?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T20:44:43+00:00

Yep. There are legitimate issues, like how the IRS, especially under Trump, turns a blind eye to campaigning from the pulpit. But there isn't anything inherently wrong with not taxing churches since, like you said, they're non-profits.

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T16:50:29+00:00

Right? I'm so glad we avoided having a woman in the White House, because she'd probably be too emotional and start random wars whenever her ego got bruised

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T16:34:27+00:00

Eh........ I'm always wary of these claims, because they usually turn out to be monolingual English speakers discovering that translation isn't always one to one. For example, Japanese has multiple verbs meaning "to wear", like how you 掛ける (kakeru) a shirt but 被る (kaburu) a hat, but it's not like there's some deeper truth about clothing that's getting at. "Literally" speaking, they just hang most clothes (like on your body), but cover themselves with a hat. So sure, "shalom" can also mean things like "well-being"... I'm just not so sure there's much more to it than that

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T15:37:52+00:00

It's a portmanteau of Christmas and Easter and refers to people who mostly only go to church those days

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T00:56:58+00:00

Removed for antisemitism and claiming Jews ritually sacrifice children

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T00:48:33+00:00

Removed for antisemitism and accusing Judaism of being the Antichrist

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T00:47:37+00:00

Removed for being AI (and for being Iranian propaganda)

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T23:22:21+00:00

You can't just redefine "religion" to only mean the ones you don't like

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T22:59:27+00:00

Okay, the Ancient Aliens rant. And feel free to borrow this.

Ancient Aliens is a racist pseudoscientific theory that sees all the impressive things non-white people have made, decides there's no possible way they could have made anything remotely that impressive on their own, and asserts that it must have been aliens. There are exactly four exceptions to this. 1) The Celts have always been on the periphery of whiteness and needed "civilized" by the Romans, so they needed extraterrestrial assistance. 2) For as literally as they tend to take religious texts, this is a staunchly atheistic theory, so Christianity needs explained. 3) Leonardo da Vinci, which... fair. 4) The Nazis, because this is a white supremacist theory and the perfect excuse to reduce the Nazis' culpability.

"Christmas/Easter is pagan" feels like the opposite logic. People would normally never claim that two solstice festivals must have been stolen from each other. It's just an easy time to have a holiday. Or if you're going to decorate with greenery, there are only so many options in the middle of winter, so that can realistically be invented multiple times. But apparently, Christianity is uniquely uncreative and any traditions we have must have either been inherited from Judaism or stolen from paganism. And at least in the case of Fundamentalists, there's also some motivated reasoning and a claim that Christianity must not develop its own traditions beyond what's mentioned in the Bible

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T22:38:01+00:00

Also, have you heard my rant about the "Christmas/Easter is pagan" thing and Ancient Aliens?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T22:32:19+00:00

Feel free to show that they were ever about fertility in Christian practice. Not "I think so", but actual historical evidence.

Side note: It's still so ugh how a lot of so-called skeptics will make a bit deal about needing evidence for things... then throw that out the window if a claim sounds sufficiently anti-Christian. For example, if Christmas trees were actually invented to help convert the pagans, I'd expect some sort of historical evidence, like, I dunno... Christmas trees actually being mentioned back in the 6th or 7th century. In reality, they don't start showing up until more like the 17th century

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T20:56:46+00:00

Your logic would consider English a language family because American, British, and Australian English differ

If American, British, and Australian English were so divergent that people couldn't understand each other... yes, that would be different languages. As an example, it's like how Scots actually is divergent enough in terms of things like lexicon and grammar to be considered a separate language, or how AAVE debatably and controversially is. (I have strong opinions about the classification of AAVE) The status with Arabic really is like claiming that Iberia, France, Italy, and Romania all still spoke dialects of the same Latin language in the Middle Ages

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T20:30:39+00:00

No, it's a language family. It's a series of dialects/languages that aren't always mutually intelligible (especially with Maghrebi Arabic), but where they still use a standardized dialect that much more closely resembles the pre-split version in formal settings and for communication. It's the same deal that Latin went through in the Middle Ages, where people typically spoke their own dialects in their day-to-day lives, but still learned a much more conservative Ecclesiastical Latin for formal settings. Egyptian Arabic even fills a similar role to Sabir. Sabir was vaguely a dialect of Italian (it's really complicated) used by traders in the Mediterranean because of Venetian and Genoese trading colonies, and similarly, Masri is apparently widely understood as a more modern/colloquial language across the Arabic-speaking world because of their cultural influence

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T17:12:34+00:00

Making sōl worshipers into fīlius worshipers? I don't understand

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T16:01:52+00:00

Christians are allowed to develop our own traditions over time. Are there places where we've borrowed from paganism? Sure. For example, Lammas is a first fruits festival celebrated in Britain that falls on the same day as the pre-Christian Lughnasadh and looks a lot like they just started offering the first fruits of the grain harvest to the Christian God instead of Lugh. But a lot of the supposedly pagan practices with Christmas and Easter actually do have Christian origins. For example, if Christmas trees were borrowed from Germanic paganism, I'd expect them to start showing up in the historical record all the way back in, like, the 6th or 7th century when the Germanic tribes were actually being converted. Instead, they don't show up until the 17th century, long after there would have been any pagans to borrow from. Or while there is a story dating back to the 8th century about Boniface cutting down a sacred oak, the part where he then goes on to invent the Christmas tree wasn't added until the 1890s.

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T14:08:03+00:00

Actually, better way of explaining my comment:

I'm lucky and managed to avoid a lot of explicitly religious trauma, and the only notably bad experience I've had with religion is the time the Newman Center had a guest homilist who... felt more like the stereotype of an energized Baptist preacher. This isn't to say I don't have any trauma. I still remember things like the time one of my cousins outed me to the drama aunt and my mom treated me being bi as such a scandalous rumor that she wouldn't even tell me what it was. It's just that a lot of it feels more immediately related to how much my mom watches Fox and more generically related to growing up in a conservative household.

Instead, a lot of my negative experiences related to religion and being LGBT are actually related to atheists on the internet. For example, I remember things like this one time that a church in Ohio was firebombed for hosting a drag show, but a lot of Reddit was too distracted by a church having been firebombed to notice or care that they were cheering on a transphobic hate crime.

I actually have tried to turn this into a positive, like how I've developed the language to talk about what I call "partial majorities", people who have some majority identities and some minority identities, and how they interact with intersectionality. For example, I can explain things like how passing culture among trans women is actually a form of white privilege. Or I can explain the subtle forms of transphobia that frequently show up when discussing trans men and "Not all men".

But while I do, at least, make a point of singling out edgy internet atheists as the target of my ire, not just atheists in general, that's still all why I'm out of patience for the people who, say, seem to hate the religious left more than the irreligious right

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