thingsandschemes:

Am I the only one a little turned off by the liberal sentiment, “We’re all humans; therefore we’re all equal!” line?

Sexist, racist, homophobic, and generally hateful people are not respectable in my opinion. Expressing our absolute equality creates a reality in which no one needs to change.

We need a structural shift in which bigotry is no longer tolerated. The liberal hand-holding approach locks people into their conditions, congratulates them for their humanity, and then putters out.

My first post on Medium!

thingsandschemes:

jtem:

thingsandschemes:

White privilege is condemning the entire religion of Islam because of a few extremists but defending Christianity’s child abusers as bad apples.

Not that you care (or have a clue) but nobody piddled a kid in the name of Christ.  That is the difference:  Christianity wasn’t the reason, the justification for piddling anybody’s kid, but Islam was the motive for blowing the leg off a six year old girl, murdering her eight year old brother and inflicting brain damage on their mother.

If you had any humanity I wouldn’t have had to explain this to you, you twisted psycho.

Dear JTEM,

My name is Will. I was awarded a full ride by Vanderbilt University Divinity School to pursue a Master’s degree in Christian Theological Studies. I received a 4.0 from my undergraduate alma mater where I took a degree in Religious Studies. My paper was accepted to be delivered in front of the top scholars of religion at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting this November in Baltimore. I know a little bit about this topic.

In the name of Christianity, crusades and inquisitions have been raged. Guatemala’s Civil War was largely overseen by devoutly pious men. In Africa, religious fundamentalists are responsible for measures promoting the murder of LGBT people. Jonestown was only possible because its leader was a captivatingly creative Christian man. Because of Christianity, George Tiller was gunned down in his own church.

Now, let us digress and acknowledge that such claims are inherently silly because they strip us of agency.

The way a person interprets scripture has a lot to do with their environment. But the actions a person takes following from that interpretation are grounded in choices we as humans make.

There is a lot of crazy belief out there but precious few crazy people to act on it.

Those people are called terrorists. But terrorists belong to no specific ethnic, racial, or religious group.

Terrorists come in all shapes and sizes and from all corners of this globe. And that’s the scary thing.

We are motivated to demonize Islam because we like the idea of compartmentalizing our enemies. But Islam is not our enemy. If that were true, we would be at war with countries, not an ideology or a methodology.

therhumboogie:

By Fong Qi Wei, series called Exploded Flowers, each image is created from breaking down and setting out the deconstructed fragments so that they are relative to the flowers natural bloom, fantastic stuff.