What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[Travis B.]

Ewige Blumenkraft!

[Raphael]

Earlier today, I bought Mike Rothschild's The Storm is Upon Us, about the whole Q thing, but I'm not sure how much of it I'll manage to read, given how depressing the whole topic is. I kind of feel that I should read it, though.

[Ares Land]

some social programs will have to be cut

Aren't a number of social programs in part superceded by UBI?

Yes. Some left-wingers will be less than happy about that, though. I understand their concerns, to a point.

Ewige Blumenkraft!

fnord

Earlier today, I bought Mike Rothschild's The Storm is Upon Us, about the whole Q thing, but I'm not sure how much of it I'll manage to read, given how depressing the whole topic is. I kind of feel that I should read it, though.

Thanks for the rec anyway. I think I'll buy it.

[fusijui]

I'm finally getting around to watching Deutschland '83. Things have gotten crazy and ugly where I'm living, and I find revisiting the early eighties and imminent nuclear apocalypse of my youth is pretty comforting.

ObLang: I can still read a little German, with difficulty; but damn, I've lost what aural comprehension I ever had.

And maybe it's just me or my current head-state, but this is a hilarious show, too. Starting episode 2 now.

[Raphael]

Things have gotten crazy and ugly where I'm living, and I find revisiting the early eighties and imminent nuclear apocalypse of my youth is pretty comforting.

Yeah, with the present being as depressing as it is, I've found myself turning to 20th century history as a form of escapism sometimes, too.

[Raphael]

Earlier today, I bought Mike Rothschild's The Storm is Upon Us, about the whole Q thing, but I'm not sure how much of it I'll manage to read, given how depressing the whole topic is. I kind of feel that I should read it, though.

Ok, I've read it. Well, almost all of it - I mostly skimmed over the chapter on how to deal with people you know who are into this whole stuff. Well-researched, well-written, and I even learned some new things from it. Doesn't jump to conclusions and resists the temptation to sensationalize. Not exactly a pleasant read, but then again, it's not supposed to.

[rotting bones]

Why is the blood libel so attractive to conspiracy theorists in the West? My opinion of humanity has sunk so low that I'm starting to suspect Christianity instills in people conflicted feelings about cannibalism that they project onto imaginary enemies. I definitely don't think Christianity is cannibalism. I'm just saying that Christianity may be ambiguous between straightforwardly not being cannibalism and repressing the symbolism in its rites that are suggestive of cannibalism. Perhaps Christians should start openly saying that communion is cannibalism so that their less enlightened brethren can stop hating imaginary cannibals. Of course, that will never actually happen.

PS. I've been trying to get into board games like Abalone and Quoridor.

[alynnidalar]

You're really on a roll with religious comments today! Given that the majority of Protestants don't believe in transubstantiation, I find your theory unconvincing.

[rotting bones]

You're really on a roll with religious comments today! Given that the majority of Protestants don't believe in transubstantiation, I find your theory unconvincing.

Actually, I would expect Protestants to be more susceptible to this theory than Catholics. Catholics never believed the communion was cannibalistic in the first place. Protestants explicitly identify it as cannibalistic and try to get rid of that aspect. It's this gesture of "getting rid of cannibalism" that takes on a life of its own, leaching away to unrelated spheres of thought.

In that light, a positive piece of advice could be that Protestants should stop calling the communion cannibalistic.

Of course, the whole theory could be wrong. Bitching about religion is what I mainly did when I first joined this board. You could say I'm getting back to my roots.

[Ares Land]

The current thing is secret underground liberal pedophile rings.
If you want to check out what antisemites are currently saying (I'd avise against it; these guys are sick) you'll find out the current bit of slander is something about pedophilia in the Talmud. FWIW respectable conservatives will say similar things about the Qur'an if you tickle them a bit.

I don't think there's any depth to it, or much to psychoanalyze. If you want to slander, you just pick the worst thing you can possibly imagine. That's why these stories often if not always involve children.

[KathTheDragon]

Protestants explicitly identify it as cannibalistic
...
Protestants should stop calling the communion cannibalistic.

[citation needed]

[alynnidalar]

Protestants explicitly identify it as cannibalistic and try to get rid of that aspect.

What? No we don’t. It’s symbolic. The leftovers from my church usually end up fed to my parents’ chickens as a snack!! (the bread, that is, not the wine, although given chickens’ penchant for consuming anything, they’d probably enjoy the wine too) That’s not something we’d do if we genuinely believed, on any level, that we were literally consuming Christ.

I’m not going to get into the weeds of precise theology here—different Protestant branches have slightly differing perspectives of course; what else are Protestants for than disagreeing with one another—but regardless, no, we do not consider communion cannibalistic, and no, we do not believe the bread and wine are literally the flesh and blood of Christ. It’s a symbolic reminder of those things, but consuming a symbolic representation is not remotely the same as consuming the actual thing.

[Ares Land]

If you're interested in how Christian communion relates to sacrifice, I'd recommend Cannibals and Kings, by Marvin Harris.

[linguistcat]

If Jesus is God then wouldn't eating his body and such not count as cannibalism unless the individual doing so was also a god? It might be cannibalism adjacent, though, for humans if you DO believe you are eating the body and blood of a sentient being that took on human guise.

In a completely unrelated matter, the group I like who does youtube/twitch/etc role playing shows has expanded slightly for their third campaign, and renamed the group from Critical Role to Exandria Unlimited. I'm happy that Mathew Mercer is able to be a player for once. The characters seem to have a pretty fun dynamic. I'm looking forward to see where things go.

[rotting bones]

Did I mess up the wording or something? This is not even about the history of Christian theology any more. I've never been Christian, and unasked-for images of a cannibalistic communion have been blasted at me from all sides. Here's the first Google result: https://ct.dio.org/item/4888-hey-father ... alism.html

I don't understand how Christians can be more sheltered about Christianity than me.

[Travis B.]

Protestants explicitly identify it as cannibalistic and try to get rid of that aspect.

What? No we don’t. It’s symbolic. The leftovers from my church usually end up fed to my parents’ chickens as a snack!! (the bread, that is, not the wine, although given chickens’ penchant for consuming anything, they’d probably enjoy the wine too) That’s not something we’d do if we genuinely believed, on any level, that we were literally consuming Christ.

I now have a picture of chickens being fed communion wine in my head.

[alynnidalar]

Did I mess up the wording or something? This is not even about the history of Christian theology any more. I've never been Christian, and unasked-for images of a cannibalistic communion have been blasted at me from all sides. Here's the first Google result: https://ct.dio.org/item/4888-hey-father ... alism.html

I don't understand how Christians can be more sheltered about Christianity than me.

If by "mess up the wording" you mean "didn't actually clarify what you were talking about", then I suppose so? I am indeed aware of the "but aren't Catholics basically arguing in favor of cannibalism" thing, but your previous posts didn't make it clear that this specifically was what you were referring to.

That being said. Protestants* don't believe they're committing cannibalism, and they don't believe Catholics** are committing cannibalism either (because... y'know... Protestants don't believe it's actually the body and blood of Christ!). The point of "but isn't that cannibalism?" is either a way to attack the morals of Catholics ("if you follow their own logic, then they must be okay with cannibalism, ergo Catholics can't be trusted/their logic can't be trusted") or as a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument ("it's absurd to think Christ would have instituted a cannibalistic ritual, therefore the bread/wine can't literally be the flesh/blood of Christ").

In either case there are no conflicted feelings about cannibalism to be had here! Protestants don't disagree with Catholics because they think they're literal cannibals, but rather because they think their perspective is wrong. So I'm still not seeing this supposed link between the Eucharist and blood libel. (and wait a minute, didn't blood libel conspiracy theories predate Protestantism anyway?)

* "Protestants" is shorthand for "Christians who don't believe in transubstantiation***"
** "Catholics" is shorthand for "Christians who do believe in transubstantiation"; I'm aware there are Protestants and Orthodox Christians who believe in it as well
*** "transubstantiation" is shorthand for--okay, you know what, we all know that these things get complicated and different groups have slight shades of meaning and interpretation and blah blah blah. The belief that, in some real manner, the bread and wine are/become the literal flesh and blood of Christ. Let's not quibble over wording here.

[rotting bones]

I don't understand my mistake, but whatever.

Obviously, Catholics would be susceptible to this interpretation too, only to a lesser degree.

Protestants really hated the Catholic interpretation, so their feelings were conflicted. But you're saying that because they didn't believe Catholics were literally cannibals, these conflicted feelings couldn't be related to the blood libel.

That would make sense if I were arguing that the QAnon people are good Christians, but I don't think it's a good argument when we're discussing conspiracy theorists. I will try to explain why. Since I'm sleep-deprived, let me know if I stop making sense.

1. It doesn't matter what theologians believed. The words that Protestants literally use say that if Catholics believe what they believe, then the communion is cannibalism. My link suggests this has happened at least once. Pathological mentation uses the outer forms of words and objects and the shallow feelings they evoke as focal points, not their deep inner meanings. If these people cared about deep inner meanings, they wouldn't imagine their neighbors are cannibals!

2. QAnon is trying to establish a narrative where good is victorious over evil in defiance of the facts. Protestants wanted to displace the Catholic narrative. Both fights are about narratives. QAnon by and large takes no action. (Here, there is an irrelevant difference from Protestants, who did much more actual fighting than QAnon.)

3. We are literally dealing with a case where people looked at a long-established rite, decided that the interpretation verged on cannibalism, and for this and other reasons, violently changed the narrative. Cannibalism of whom? Jesus for Christians, and children for the lunatics. I can't presume to speak for Christians, but I would imagine that the feelings of innocence evoked by Jesus and children, while not identical, are close enough that shallow people are likely to displace emotions originally directed at one to the other.

[Travis B.]

Blood libel is about Jews supposedly mocking the Eucharist by supposedly using real, human blood in their rites in the place of the symbolic blood embodied by the wine drunk in the Eucharist. So clearly there is an acknowledgement by Christians that the Eucharist does not involve actual blood, because of the clear contrast between it and the alleged use of human blood by Jews. And it is obviously very much common knowledge amongst all Christians that the body and the blood of Christ are indeed bread and wine, no matter how said bread and wine are transformed or are symbolic. If this were not true, then why would Christians accuse Jews of using actual blood in the place of wine?

[rotting bones]

The way repression works is that you have conflicted feelings about something, say your father. You are supposed to love him, but you hate him when he hits you. You overcompensate to make up for your negative feelings by saying you have infinite love for him.

In the case of Catholicism, you have conflicted feelings about the communion. You know it's not cannibalism, but your unconscious can't shake the accusation. You overcompensate by imagining people who celebrate a communion where real cannibalism takes place and are violent towards them to prove that you are better.