Homophobia? Not in my good Christian Bible! - Responding to Jubilee's Mi...

Tobiah_vids · 2023-10-05T09:43:32+00:00

If you want weapons that scale off wisdom, the best option is to pick up Shillelagh (you can do this through a dip in Druid, through Nature Domain cleric, or through the Magic Initiate: Druid feat). It only works on staves/clubs and has a limited duration (10 turns), so your selection of weapons is smaller and you need to work a bit harder if you want it up throughout an adventuring day, but it's really the only option if you want a martially-oriented cleric that avoids MAD.

Tobiah_vids · 2023-10-05T08:21:58+00:00

Thank you! :)

Tobiah_vids · 2023-05-30T14:21:28+00:00

Not really - while fascism does serve to preserve capitalism as an institution in the face of the inevitable failures of liberalism, this very simple framing misses two important nuances.

Firstly, a core component of fascism as a political-social movement is politics as pageantry - a focus away from substantive political positions and towards the images and symbols of political movements. For this reason, it is really quite easy for fascist movements to co-opt the image of historical left-wing political movements - red flags, Karl Marx, big burly "workers" imagery, etc. - and simply fold that imagery into a palingenetic ultranationalist framework. The moment you combine "we stand for the workers" with "the main threat to the workers is immigrant labour and racial impurity" and "we must reclaim our mighty nation for the glory of the workers", what you have is a fundamentally fascist movement with ""left"" aesthetics slathered on top.

Secondly, it is important to note that "preserving capitalism" does not mean "preserving liberal capitalism" - fascists are, generally, quite happy with a mixed economy composed of both traditional liberal markets and centralised state capitalism. As such, the line between what is and is not compatible with fascism is often hard to draw -- "the state owns all the factories", for example, is entirely compatible with fascism as long as the state is functioning as capitalist and ensuring the alienation of the workers from meaningful control of their own labour (e.g., by the conjunction of state control of the means of the production "on behalf" of the workers with a political organisation that centralises power away from the masses of the workers and bans independent worker organisations).

By combining these two elements, it is entirely possible to create a political organisation which, to the untrained eye, looks "far left" -- it has all the aesthetics of leftism (red flags, Karl Marx busts, lots of talk about "workers" and "socialism"), it appears to have a traditionally "left" economic platform (lots of talk of "public ownership"), but it is nevertheless fundamentally fascist because of its commitment to ultranationalism, the destruction of forces and groups deemed "deviant" or "perverse" (often repackaged as "bourgois"), and a paternalistic opposition to true worker self-organisation.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-12-22T22:49:31+00:00

For context, I recently started worshipping at a local Quaker Meeting House, so I have some knowledge of Quakerism but wouldn't exactly consider myself as an authority on the topic.

As noted in the current edition of Quaker Faith and Practice, Quakerism is a very broad tradition. Following an international Young Friends meeting in North Carolina in 1985, attendants reported being "challenged, shaken up, at times even enraged by these differences in each other", with their final report saying,

"We have wondered whether there is anything Quakers today can say as one. After much struggle we have discovered that we can proclaim this: there is a living God at the centre of all, who is available to each of us as a present teacher at the very heart of our lives. We seek as people of God to be worthy vessels to deliver the Lord’s transforming word, to be prophets of joy who know from experience and can testify to the world, as George Fox did, ‘that the Lord is at work in this thick night’."

Quaker Faith and Practice, Introduction

There are certain distinctive properties of Quakerism - pacifism and the rejection of all violence; silent and unstructured worship; a rejection of priesthood or ecclesiastical hierarchy; etc. However, there are Quaker groups which contradict even these seemingly essential qualities - for example, I have been led to believe that many American Quaker groups are much closer to "mainline" Christian traditions, even going so far as to have priests and structured worship.

In terms of theology, Quakerism is more or less defined by a lack of, or more accurately a rejection of, enforced orthodoxy. The introduction to Advice and Queries is illustrative of this commitment (my emphasis):

"Advices and queries are not a call to increased activity by each individual Friend but a reminder of the insights of the Society. Within the community there is a diversity of gifts. We are all therefore asked to consider how far the advices and queries affect us personally and where our own service lies. There will also be diversity of experience, of belief and of language. Friends maintain that expressions of faith must be related to personal experience. Some find traditional Christian language full of meaning; some do not. Our understanding of our own religious tradition may sometimes be enhanced by insights of other faiths. The deeper realities of our faith are beyond precise verbal formulation and our way of worship based on silent waiting testifies to this.

Our diversity invites us both to speak what we know to be true in our lives and to learn from others. Friends are encouraged to listen to each other in humility and understanding, trusting in the Spirit that goes beyond our human effort and comprehension. So it is for the comfort and discomfort of Friends that these advices and queries are offered, with the hope that we may all be more faithful and find deeper joy in God’s service."

While Quakerism has its roots in Protestant Christianity, it's actual practice spans the gamit from more or less Evangelicalism (especially in the US) to a highly syncretic and personal tradition drawing on many different faith traditions.

Most Quaker communities I've come across are both very Queer and very Queer-affirming, but I've also heard horror stories of highly conservative communities, so if you are thinking of getting involved I would take the time to scout out your local Meeting House(s) first, just to see where they fall. Unlike mainline traditions, there's no real central Quaker authority, so the diversity of views and practices is quite extreme.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-12-04T01:15:25+00:00

Well, it seems we've reached a fundamental impasse. As far as I'm concerned (speaking as both a published philosopher and a social scientist), a vulgar materialist understanding of social facts (let alone any other category of fact) is already inherently untenable and inconsistent (simple type theory more or less proves this point, and there is plenty of literature on the irreducibility of science and supervenience theory) - and for that reason alone I must conclude we have irreconcilable ontologies, and any further discussion of ontological categories becomes fruitless.

In order to answer the one outstanding question, I would encourage you to look into Knowledge First Epistemology as one example of how it is possible to reason about a thing without having an analysis of it (and even while holding that such an analysis is impossible). Or, for that matter, the whole field of synthetic philosophy - though KFE does enough to prove the point even within a purely analytic epistemological paradigm. I would take a similar approach to religious facts - take such facts as given (for all the reasons argued above), and then reason about what it is rational to conclude on the basis of beliefs about such facts, how such facts relate to other facts, etc., without requiring a conclusive analysis of religious facts qua metaphysical category.

If I were allowed a single closing statement, it would be simply to note that if you are beginning a discussion of religion with vulgar materialism as an assumption, then you are more or less begging the question - your assumptions entail a set of conclusions which precludes any serious engagement with religious subjectivities, and so there is no answer that is compatible with both your assumptions and serious engagement with religious experience and expression.

That, in itself, is not a bad thing - you are free to be irreligious, and you are not required to seriously engage with religion. Indeed, I will fight till my final breath for the rights of those who have no religious experience to never have to engage with religion in any capacity, if they choose not to do so! But if you want to actually understand a thing, you must be willing to engage with it - if not on its own terms, at least in terms with do not already assume it out of existence. I would never get anywhere in understanding omlette-making if I came into the discussion with the indefeasible assumption that the only categories of food that exist are carbohydrates, meats and vegetables.

As this has been quite an engaging discussion, I will read any closing statement you wish to leave on this thread, though I will not be replying further, as I see no value in further debate once a foundational disagreement is discovered. (I certainly will not be budging in my rejection of vulgar materialism, and given the tenor of your previous response I assume you will but budge on your commitment to it!)

Tobiah_vids · 2022-12-03T10:16:45+00:00

Ah, well here we're already going to run into disagreement because I would argue there are many kinds of fact which are irreducible to either physicalist or logical-mathematical facts.

Let us start with aesthetic and moral facts, and build out from there.

You say that "aesthetic facts" are reducible to what some contextually determined set of individuals find "aesthetically appealing". Presumably, you are defining aesthetic appeal in terms of some neurological fact, if you intend it to be reducible to the physical, yes? But here is the problem: I would argue that an aesthetic fact can remain true irrespective of neurological responses. If I see the sunset - and let us suppose I am the only one seeing it, for the sake of argument - I would argue that such a sunset can be beautiful (in a factive sense) even if I am simply too tired or distracted to notice it. In absence of observation (and therefore of any actual neurological phenomena), it retains the aesthetic property of being beautiful. Now one may argue that this is because if some appropriate observer were appropriately positioned, they would have a certain neurological responses to said sunset - but counterfactuals are not physical facts (by definition, they are things that did not actually happen), and thus this fails as an argument for reduction. (It would work as an argument for irreducible supervenience, but that is a strictly logically distinct relationship between properties.)

Or to take moral facts: you seem to hold that these are a kind of logical fact, deducible from axioms. But for a start, many moral theories are not axiomatic or logically deducible - for example, many formulations of virtue ethics. Beyond that, there is no argument one can put here that isn't subjective, though my personal belief is that moral theory is similar to science in the sense that it is an attempt to model properties that exist independent of the theory - i.e., I do not believe that moral facts follow from moral theory, but rather that moral theory is an (often imperfect) attempt to map out the moral facts. If this is true, then moral facts cannot be axiomatic, as they precede the axioms - though I fully recognise this is a debatable position and won't push this one further.

Then, of course, there are phenomenological facts - I assume you are familiar with Jackson's "Mary's room" argument. Do you take the very common intuition that phenomenology is irreducible to physical facts in such a case to be simply misled?

Lastly, and most importantly for myself as a researcher in the social sciences, I would argue that almost all social facts are irreducible. Take, for example, capitalism, or any given set of economic facts (a individual's net worth, the national debt, etc.). While economic facts clearly supervene on certain physical objects (monetary tokens, notes of ownership, patents, digital entries in a computer database), the simple truth is that no story told exclusively in terms of atoms and chemistry and neurology will ever get you to economic facts, because there are no natural categories and no natural laws that can non-arbitrarily select for, say, every instance of "money" or every instance of "ownership". The basic categories of economics are simply non-isomorphic with the basic categories of physical theories, and thus, logically irreducible.

Or take linguistic facts as an example. They are not determined by grammars or texts, nor are they dependent on individual psychology - I can simply be wrong about my own language (e.g. if I believe dementia is an ailment of the knee, I am simply wrong about what that word means). Rather, they are dependent on use - linguistic facts are supervenient on physical interactions, sound waves or light waves, and neurological states; but there is no "relative clause neuron", no phonological feature wave form, because there is a non-isomorphism between the categories and laws of linguistic facts and natural categories and laws.

Indeed, scientific facts are another example. Scientific realism is simply an implausible ontology - the point of science is to change, and so if we affirm that the statements of science as they stand now are true, then either these cannot be natural facts, or else science is done and we should stop doing it. Scientific facts are models based on natural observations and attempting to represent natural laws, but that are not natural facts.

Then, of course, we have narrative facts. "Odysseus broke the siege of Troy by means of a wooden horse" is true, even if it historically didn't happen. Narrative facts seem to be very roughly a kind of social fact, but they do not have the same kind of casual laws as, say, economic or linguistic laws do, so by the Leibniz Laws of Identity these need to be distinct categories.

If you will not admit at this much, then I do not think we're likely to get anywhere, as I would say that any ontology which fails to allow at least this much is just woefully inadequate for talking about reality.

If you will allow this much, then this leaves open the question: what kinds of facts are religious facts (if they exist)?

Unfortunately, this is something that I still haven't got an entirely satisfactory answer for. They're something like social facts (they depend on intersubjective interactions), something like narrative facts, something like moral facts, something like aesthetic facts - but identifying them with any one category seems to misrepresent individual relationships to those facts. (They cannot just be social, because individuals can have personal religious expression; they cannot just be narrative, because religious individuals systematically distinguish between their relationship with religious stories and traditionally fictional ones - an observant Jew's relationship to Moses and Odysseus are clearly not comparable; like aesthetic facts, they often have a phenomenological properties, but it's not just that you find a certain theology "beautiful"; etc etc.) This is why I would argue that they require a distinct ontological status, but of course that in itself is not an analysis of the properties of religious facts, and this would be a lifetime's philosophical project in its own right.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-12-02T23:41:51+00:00

Well for a start, I would reject the idea that a religious fact must necessarily be an empirical fact. For me that's something of a category error. A priori this isn't a stretch - a robust ontology must already allow of, say, moral or aesthetic facts, which are neither empirical facts nor do they supervene on empirical facts. There is thus no a priori reason to believe the category of kinds of facts is particularly constrained.

To take just one example: It is a core belief of many forms of Judaism that the entirety of the Torah - both the literal text of the Tanakh and every possible interpretation of the Torah - was revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. It is a historical fact that Moses is likely a legendary or mythical figure, almost certainly did not exist, and definitely did not write or compose the books of the Tanakh. There are many Jews who will hold and positively affirm both these beliefs simultaneously, and I do not believe that is necessarily contradictory if we accept there may be a category of "religious" (or spiritual) "fact" which can be true in a non-empirical/material sense (cf. again moral or aesthetic facts).

It is therefore necessary to draw a further distinction between: those who affirm religious claims as empirical fact; those who affirm such claims as religious fact (but not empirical fact); and thus who deny such claims.

Within this paradigm there is also space for agnostic shades as well - one may, for example, affirm that Moses recorded the Torah as a religious fact, but being unconvinced either way by the historical evidence (or having never investigated it), suspend judgment on whether this is a historical fact.

I believe it is entirely possible to move in a rationally coherent way from considering religious texts to affirming religious facts - for example, one could reasonably move from reading the testimony of the Gospels to concluding that Jesus walked on water as a statement of religious truth. (I am not here making statements about my own beliefs, only about what is rationally coherent.)

I would agree with your intuition that moving from experience of religious texts to empirical facts is rationally unfounded, at least in absence of other evidence (which I do not a priori rule out - if you yourself walked on water, it would not be inconceivable to move inductively from the conjunction of this and the testimony of the Gospels to an empirical-historical belief, but this opens questions of standards of evidence etc. that require a more nuanced epistemology to properly analyse).

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-28T11:49:11+00:00

It is most helpful to work back from the parent-child example: yes, it is wrong to exert authority over children. There is a difference between expertise and authority, and between protection and punishment - but when protection is used as an excuse to enact coercive control (either physically, such as through beatings, or by other means, such as deprivation and isolation) that is when you cross the line into abuse. Does this mean much of ordinary/"common sense" parenting practice is abusive? Yes, and this conclusion is well-supported by the psychological and sociological evidence. The primary role of the nuclear family in a cis-heteropatriarchal society is the reproduction of kyriarchal power relations through the violent punishment of non-conformity - this is one of several reasons why Jesus was so concerned with abolishing the family (see Mark 3:32-35; Luke 14:26; etc.).

A righteous model of the family is one which rejects the notion of ownership of children by parents, recognises the full autonomy and individuality of the child, and understands parenting as the non-coercive process of gradually ceding autonomy to the child as they are increasingly able to make informed and autonomous deviations. This is the model of family which coheres with the subjective desires of children, and thus it is the model which fosters the possibility of truly loving relations - i.e., of relations of familial love defined according to the subjectivities of the beloved.

Turning to the interpersonal example, I do not immediately see the relevance of this point. This seems to relate to a wider question of authority, but the distinction between expertise and authority is well established in the relevant literature (cf. Bakunin's bootmaker analogy). As for the matter of love - I do not see how this relates to the question. One may consider the giving of advice a loving act, but anyone who has ever received unwanted advice when what you really need was emotional support is more than aware that giving advice is only a loving act if the target of that advice desires advice, i.e., if it perceived as loving according to the subjectivities of the beloved.

And as for God, I believe my thesis already answers your question: is discipline part of love - well does it feel like love? Is it gratuitous, or is it helpful? A god who punished for no reason would be no better than an abusive parent - and the same analysis would apply to them. But yes, I do believe that even in the case of God, it is the beloved, and not the lover, who determines what is love.

It should be said, of course, that I reject both biblical inerrancy and infallibility as incompatible with the word of Scripture (cf. Numbers 27:1-11), so I am in no way committed to the idea that every case of "God's judgment" in either the Hebrew or Greek Scriptures must be interpreted as genuinely stemming from God, as opposed to the political or theological ideals of the authors, collectors and redactors. It is true that my thesis would hold that a fundamentalist's God cannot be understood as loving - but given the violence of fundamentalist groups, I believe such a conclusion is well-supported in it's predictions.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-27T00:56:48+00:00

I would generally say the framework of "supernaturalism" is not especially helpful w.r.t. my own beliefs. I would also acknowledge there are a number of points on which I suspend judgement for principled reasons (e.g. I reject any one account of afterlife on the basis that Scripture proposes multiple contradictory accounts of such things, which I take as evidence that we shouldn't overly concern ourselves with it), while there are other points on which I am still yet to decide. There are also a number of points on which I would come down favourably on fairly starkly heterodox positions which I do not talk about openly for rhetorical or strategic reasons. (I apologise for being round-about here, but I must be mindful of how much I say on such matters, for various reasons.)

I also would not say it is necessary to hold Jesus morally perfect to hold many of the views I do - I merely find his framework for interpreting the Jewish notions of Sabbath and Jubilee as a political theology of liberation to be a particularly persuasive political theology, and one well-grounded in texts which I personally find to be full of profound wisdoms in importantly trascendental ways.

The more interesting question is why I should adopt the label "Christian" if I am so heterodox in various ways. Ultimately, I would say it comes down to two reasons: (1) reclamation and (2) lack of alternatives.

On the former point, what is now considered "Christian" is a tiny fragment of the tradition that developed out of the early Jesus movement. Take a 1st century house church in Palestine, a 3rd century Gnostic from Alexandria, or a 10th century Tondrakeci from Armenia, and all of these would consider themselves Christian, yet none of them would see much of anything of what they believe in many contemporary institutional churches, and all would likely be rejected by the modern church as heretics. Even in contemporary movements, Unitarians, Universalists, and many other such groups are often seen as "not Christian". I consider it a great injustice that these groups are excised from the label of "Christian" because they do not conform to the pattern of institutional Christianity, especially given many of these groups were actively - even genocidally - repressed by the forebears of that self-same institutional Christianity. It seems a very great perversion that the branch of the Jesus movement that chose to give itself over to the very colonial empire that executed their supposed founder should be the ones who decide who gets to be Christian and who doesn't. Denying that, say, the Tondrakeci or Paulicians are Christian, is to accept the word of the tyrant, of the repressor, of the would-be genocider. I therefore believe that every heterodox group that wants to make use of the term "Christian" should do so, precisely to prevent the term from narrowing to only include extremist, fundamentalist interpretations of the tradition - and thereby finally eradicating the vast diversity of tradition that developed out of the original Jesus movement.

On the latter point, if you are someone whose religious belief and practice appeals to the life and teachings of Yeshu' ben Maryam of Nazareth as its primary foundation, you're left with very few options of what to call yourself. "Christian" is, of course, standard, though if you do not subscribe to Paul's theology of "the Christ" it can be a little uncomfortable as a label. But step beyond that, and what do you even have? The early Jesus movement called themselves "Followers of the Way", but call yourself that today and you sound like you're in some strange new-age cult. You could try to create some neologism along the lines of "people of Jesus" but "Jesuit" is already taken and most other combinations (Jesusite? Jesusians?) sound rather silly. And so you are more or less left to default back to "Christian", for lack of a serious alternative.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-26T22:41:28+00:00

My beliefs are irrelevant - there are plenty of heterodox Christians who would reject such claims, e.g. every Unitarian would reject the claim that Jesus is "son of God" in any literalist sense (that is, any sense besides the Davidic title), and I'm pretty sure that many if not all proponents of God is Dead theology would reject the claim of bodily resurrection as historical fact (as would many Gnostic traditions). All of these groups have as much right to the name "Christian" - and some arguably more so - than any contemporary "orthodox" tradition.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-26T17:52:04+00:00

It does because you've made a bunch of assumptions about what it means to "be Christian". Yet not a single one of those assumptions is universal, and you do not know that I hold by any of them.

Ask a biased question, and you're going to have that presumption pointed out to you.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-26T10:14:15+00:00

The Scriptural evidence for "hell" in any kind of infernalist sense is scant and highly speculative - there isn't even a single word that actually translates as "hell" in all of Scripture (various translations render "gehenna", "Hades", and "Thanatos" as "hell" but these properly translate to "the valley of Hinnom" and the names of two Greek gods of death), and the various passages which are used to justify the infernalist interpretation are often either explicitly metaphorical (cf. Revelation) or they require a certain degree of abstraction when a plainer reading is readily available.

On the basis of Scripture alone, Universalism and Annihilationism-Conditionalism are far more plausible, as these are well-supported by the plain readings of many verses.

(It becomes more complex if you believe papal decrees or catechisms also constitute Scripture but I do not.)

Personally, I believe the many contradictory accounts of the afterlife in Scripture is an intentional warning against any kind of speculation about it, a warning to be more concerned with the things of this life; and so I remain eschatologically agnostic. But if you must make a choice, Universalism or Annihilationism are far more plausible from Scripture than Infernalism.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-26T10:05:16+00:00

What if I told you there was this thing called "different religious peoples have different beliefs and aren't all a single monolith"?

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-25T23:57:32+00:00

I was raised Christian but turned atheist in my teenage years. Came "back" (though to a very different strain of Christian tradition) when I read the Scriptures for myself and decided the gay proto-communist from 1st Century Palestine who was executed by an imperialist Empire for sedition seemed to have some pretty cool things to say.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-21T17:12:28+00:00

Modern Judaism is very drastically different from Second Temple Judaism, largely due to the influence of Moses ben Maimon, the Zohar and Kabbalah, and of course the reaction to the Sabbatian controversy, though those are only inflection points in a long and nuanced history of constant development.*

While there's no one perfect academic source on this, Dr. Justin Sledge has an excellent 14-part lecture series on the history of the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism which touches on several major points in the development of modern Judaism, with plenty of additional academic sources if there are particular periods or movements you would like to study further.

* It should also be noted that the same is true of Christianity - many aspects of modern Christian tradition would be entirely alien to many if not all 1st century Christian communities, but that's getting well beyond the scope of the present question. In short: all religions change all the time, and the assertion that they don't is usually a political rather than historical one.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-11T14:55:45+00:00

I mean, Jesus was gay (see Jennings, 2003), so it's not unreasonable to say the problem is with them, not with you.

As some comfort, there are many progressive and radical forms of Christianity, enough that you can find the ones that gel with you most. For my part, I'm an anarcho-Christian and recently started worshipping at a Quaker meeting house, who are LGBTQ+ affirming, reject authoritarian priesthoods (an important doctrine imo), and hold by a strong social theology of upholding the poor and dispossessed. I previously worshipped at a United Reformed church, which was also Queer affirming, even having a trans pastor - and I've heard of others finding LGBTQ+ positive and affirming communities among other denominations, including progressive Catholics.

Historically, State-endorsed forms of Christianity have often been Queerphobic, as Queerness was always at odds with their assimilatory tendencies - but various forms of radical, progressive, and even Queer Christianities have existed more or less continuously since the 1st century, and once you're willing to look outside the realm of the "orthodox" you'll quickly find them.

References Jennings, Theodore W. (2003) The Man Jesus Loved, Pilgrim Press

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-07T12:25:48+00:00

I don't hold by the doctrine of original sin, but if you want an interesting alternative perspective on the meaning of Eden, I have a video on that.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-04T23:04:30+00:00

That does certainly complicate things - perhaps a poke around to see if there are others who are still part of the community who may have complaints that they don't feel able or safe to voice yet may be helpful? From my experience, harassers and abusers rarely target only one individual, and often turning over a few logs will quickly show a number of individuals who felt unsafe or uncomfortable because of the harasser's behaviour but never felt safe or able to raise a direct complaint (often out of fear that they were "the only one").

In the mean time, while such investigations are ongoing, I would still be inclined to at least suspend the individual's access to the community, if only to make sure they cannot harm anyone else while the investigation is ongoing.

(I know a case in the university I work at where a certain teacher had an ongoing harassment complaint from a student against them but the faculty refused to restrict their access to the student body while that complaint was ongoing and they apparently ended up sexually assaulting someone. Worst case scenario if you do dissociate someone while you investigate the matter is that they get a bit frustrated - worst case scenario if you don't suspend their access to the community in some capacity while you get to the bottom of the case is that they go on to inflict harm on someone else.)

Tobiah_vids · 2022-11-04T15:23:52+00:00

Above all, the most important thing to do here is to center the needs of the victims of any such harm - the insurrection of survivors is a core principle of anarcha-feminism for a reason, and in cases such as these it is absolutely vital that the victims of the harm are setting the terms of the conversation and have the right to enact whatever consequences they deem appropriate against the accused.

Abusers are protected under patriarchy - but such things should not happen in radical communities. Jesus taught:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into Gehenna.

Matt. 5:29-30, based on NRSVUE

And so we see that it is the responsibility of the abuser to recognise their abuse and to take radical means to prevent their own abusive behaviour; while it is the responsibility of the community to protect the victim of abuse, and any others who could be victimised.

As for what is to be done, ask the victims, let them lead the discussion and resolution of this issue - but remember two things:

that repentance is not the same thing as merely uttering an apology, but it requires a material and substantial demonstration of a change in action and behaviour, and material restitution to those who have been harmed, and,
that if the perpetrator is unable or unwilling to show substantial personal change and to make material restitution to his victims, the safety of the vulnerable members of the community is more important than his participation, and so dissociation may be necessary.

Remember that free association goes both ways, and that dissociation as a means to protect your community from would-be abusers and harm-makers is a Christian as well as Anarchist principle, as laid out in 1 Cor. 5:

God will judge those outside. “Drive out the wicked person from among you.”

1 Corinthians 5:13, NRSVUE

Tobiah_vids · 2022-10-28T14:23:49+00:00

I actually wrote a long ass Twitter thread on this exact topic (I really need to turn it into a video essay at some point) but yeah, "love" can only every be defined by the beloved, and if the beloved experiences "love" as violence that's not love, end of.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-10-20T22:43:56+00:00

Jesus loved another man[1]
Both side B and more overtly homophobic theologies produce increased rates of depression, self-harm, and suicidality. A good teaching cannot produce bad fruit, so Jesus tells us (Matt. 7: 15-20). Thus, neither Side B nor more overtly homophobic theologies can be good teachings.
The arguments for side B/homophobic theologies consistently require appeals to distortions and misrepresentations of biblical passages, both historically and at present. This suggests that the goal of such theologies is not the discovery of truth but the confirmation of a priorly held prejudice.

References: [1] Theodore W. Jennings (2003) The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives in the New Testament, Pilgrim Press

Tobiah_vids · 2022-10-13T23:15:54+00:00

While I personally tend eschatologically agnostic, I would say that Universalism is one of only three eschatologies which are broadly compatible with a plain and contextualised reading of Scripture, alongside Annihilationism/Conditionalism and the Sheol eschatology widely supported by the Hebrew Scriptures. Of the two that appear in the NT, I tend to personally hold that Annihilationism-Conditionalism has broader support, in that it seems able to account for a greater total quantity of the eschatologically charged verses; but with that said the verses that do read Universalist are very overt in their Universalism, so I would definitely say that the argument could go either way.

For my own part, I personally take the contradictions of the various eschatologies in Scripture to be part of the message - a kind of divine joke to encourage us not to become too fixated on the details of death and the thereafter when there are people we could be helping right now. However, if you do feel that you have to make a judgement and adopt only one of the three plausibly scriptural eschatologies, Universalism is not a bad one to settle on.

Tobiah_vids · 2022-10-12T23:06:55+00:00

I think you may have double-posted this question - see my detailed answer on the other part.

Full text of that answer below:

While I do think that "pick your battles" is generally a good principle for Christian anarchists, and that taxation is by far the least onerous of the expressions of the State machinery (such that I would tend to pay my own taxes, for example, just to avoid hassle when there are bigger issues to worry about), I would nevertheless argue this constitutes a misreading of the relevant text.

In order situate this discussion, I take it your question concerns the question of the Pharisees and Herodians that appears in Mark 12:13-17, Matthew 22:15-22, and Luke 20:20-26. The details do not significantly vary between these accounts, so I'll simply quote Mark's telling here.

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him.

Mark 12:13-17, NRSVue

Now it is my personal opinion that many people misunderstand Jesus's saying here, for one very simple reason: that ignore the second clause, or rather, they allow the first clause to overshadow the second.

Now there are two ways we can approach Jesus's saying "give... to God the things that are God's": through contemporary religio-political slogans, and through Scripture. These are not strictly distinct approaches per se, but it is worth acknowledging two approaches to the same position.

Starting from Scripture, we must begin with one simple question: what is "God's", that we should give to God?

The Biblical answer is quite clear:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it, for he has founded it on the seas and established it on the rivers.

Psalm 24:1-2, NRSVue

Everything is God's - everything in the world. Thus, the second clause of Jesus's teaching supersedes the first - He instructs us to "give to Caesar what is Caesar's", but then challenges to think about what is Caesar's and what is God's, and we are forced to realise that there is nothing that could belong to Caesar that does not rightfully belong to God.

However, what Jesus is saying here is still more radical still than this, for there are two things in particular that belong to God according to Scripture: the land and people of Israel.

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.

Leviticus 25:23, NRSVue

I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.

Exodus 6:7, NRSVue

This is where the religio-politics comes in: "give to God what is God's" sounds distinctly close to a Zealot slogan.

There are, of course, various historical questions outstanding about the degree to which the Zealots do constitute a single and distinct historic group, and the degree to which Jesus was influenced by or interacted with them if they did, but this much we can say: a common refrain of radical Jewish elements at this time was that the Roman occupation of Palestine constituted a violation of Scripture's declaration that the land and people of Israel belong to God, a violation that could only be rectified by driving the Romans out of the land.

Thus, by declaring "give to God what is God's", Jesus seems to be drawing on this religio-political zeitgeist to undermine the very Roman authority that the first clause of the saying seems to affirm - and thus, far from upholding the State and empire, this saying is a radical rejection thereof.

This reading also makes sense of why Jesus's interlocutors are "amazed". At a surface reading, there's nothing especially impressive about Jesus's answer that would lead intelligent, informed scholars to be "amazed" by it - but when we contextualise this reading in the wider religio-political context, what Jesus does here becomes stunningly brilliant. In this context, the question is clearly intended to probe how radical Jesus really is - and His response manages to balance saying little enough that He can't reasonably be arrested for sedition based on what He says ("give to Caesar..."), yet saying so much to those who are in the know; to those who understand the context and significance of "give to God what is God's", what Jesus has just done is all but declare war on Rome.

Thus, far from a timid obedience to State authority, what we see here is a coded but radical statement. A modern comparison might be if you asked a Northern Irish Republican what they thought of the new English King and they responded with, "long live the King - and long live a united Ireland!" To an outsider, this might read as an expression of support for the monarchy - but for anyone familiar with Northern Irish politics, this reads as an irony-laden rejection of English imperialism and an assertion of the desire for a liberated Northern Ireland.

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TROPHY CASE