How Did You Become A Socialist?
♀️🫀 Feast of the Martyr 🌖 Mammoth Moon 🦣 01 December 2023 🧝🏽♂️ 061 Frimaire CCXXXII ❄️ 10,030 ⛩️
i was raised in the Episcopal Catholic Church. it was a pretty conservative community especially 20 years ago but I had access to decent translations of the Bible and I wasn't good enough at cognitive dissonance to think that the gospels spelled out anything other than erratically different economic and ethical system than the one I lived under.
i get kind of a weird feeling when people say that Yeshua of Nazareth was a Communist, because that takes him so far outside the language he and his first century contemporaries were using, but there are clear parallels between his politics, such as we have filtered through the milenia.
it's not that i was necessarily sure that the historical and supernatural claims in the religion were true. i want them to be true. i want there to be a time i can see my departed friends and family again. I've witnessed things i still feel comfortable calling miraculous, when as the skeptical hard materialist in me scoffs. i believed, and needed to believe differently, in some version of God then, and some version of God and Gods now, but it's not the same.
but i didn't need to take the miraculous claims for granted in order to feel i need to take the metaphysical and ethical and political stuff seriously. not true necessarily, but i found for example myself unable to justify eating animals or owning property or imperial wars, on the basis of my haphazard and eclectic reading of Christian metaphysics, with a fair bit of scholastic exposure to Buddhism, Judaism, and so i didn't do those things, and i adopted an attitude of scorn towards those who support the Iraq war or pride in America's colonization of these lands, eg racist family members, and, as i read more history, avid scorn for capitalists, cops, and the scorn was great cause then it gave me something to feel guilty about, on top of Guilt for Pride for being more self disciplined and Godly then the other Christians, and i was already treated as a sort of neorodivergent but possibly destined for sainthood which religiously precocious people with autism and ocd and depressed kids with a special interest in spirituality and Guilt.
so it was more learning about communism in the sense of, yes, that's what i am, rather then oh I've never thought of that before.
♀️🫀 Feast of the Martyr 🌖 Mammoth Moon 🦣 01 December 2023 🧝🏽♂️ 061 Frimaire CCXXXII ❄️ 10,030 ⛩️