Makadiwata

“Race” is such a weird thing to root your religious practices or theological views in, and I loathe that this MODERN abomination is so prevalent in many (neo)pagan communities. You’re not preserving anything, you’re making shit up that would be unrecognisable to the ancestors.

Also: diaspora “East Asians” (aka Americans) calling themselves “true” and “original” Asians is hilarious. That title historically belongs to the peoples of ancient Anatolia, and by extension of descent, the people of modern-day Türkiye.

Who celebrates the civilisations who gave us pansit and karma, or words like ‘sampalataya’ सम्प्रत्यय and ‘kuya’ 哥仔 hm? Like, it’s not the learning Spanish part that’s bad (it’s not), it’s the “Filipino would be babble without Spanish” part that’s annoying (and wrong).

I don’t hate when Filipinos celebrate whatever connection they feel to “Hispanidad”. I hate that they never celebrate anything else.

I’m so sick of ‘kapwa’ this and ‘kapwa’ that. It’s the lexical equivalent of ‘ube’ in the Filipino diaspora. You don’t need to put ube in everything.

And even from a purely aesthetic lens, this is just beautiful.

Sure, the Church sucks in many ways, but ordinary Catholics have much healthier, closer-to-nature (read: pagan) ways of dealing with loss and longing. Grief doesn’t magically disappear after a few days—not even after a year. Pieces of it stay with you, and ritual cycles help.

Protestant Australia could need a communal day for the dead. Sure, we have ANZAC and Remembrance Day—our war dead are important—but what about Uncle Jack who did absolutely nothing in life? What about Tía or Nona who just stayed home? Sorry, but the pagan papists win this one.

Atheists saying they don’t have “irrational” beliefs is like white Anglo-Protestants saying they have no “weird” customs. We all do, sillies. You’re not “special”, and thinking that you are makes you even more ordinary—because everybody thinks they’re special!

Irl Asia, whilst a Japanese nationalist and a (Han) Chinese supremacist might both view Filipinos and Indonesians as beneath them, they’re also likely to view each other as inferior to the other, and they do this independently. There is no clandestine “East Asian” cabal.

Racism between Asians in Asia is called racism, too, not just colourism (though that also exists). We just don’t perceive race in the same diasporoid way that Americans do. Members of the same “race” can look very differently from each other but still feel racially bonded — see: Han Chinese.

The recurring online beef between East Asians and the rest of us is actually funny because, irl Asia, “East Asians” don’t normally see themselves as falling under the same category — that shit only happens in America where it’s easy to lump them together because it’s other people doing the lumping.

When you confine ‘religion’ to things that only resemble the Christian one, doesn’t matter if you’re the staunchest anti-theist, you are actually furthering Christian hegemony.

You’re not angry at “gender ideology”, you’re angry it’s not YOUR gender ideology. We’ve been shoving gender ideologies on kids since the dawn of time, we just want the next generation’s gender ideology to be based on science and human dignity.

You could say it’s all Christianity’s fault, but it doesn’t even make sense in much of Christianity — the Christian God is not actually some humanoid sky daddy. The common antitheist conception of God is closer to the literalist evangelical kind than anything else.

Somebody has to KILL the “Kill the gods” trope in mainstream fiction. This (suicidal) obsession with destabilising the divine order of the cosmos is juvenile. Ants have a better chance of killing us than us killing any God.

Many of these out and proud new atheists that outright dismiss anything that sounds remotely “religious” or “theist” without thought or consideration because it doesn’t conform to their manifesto of unbelief are just Born Again Christians one deity less.

A tattoo of a NT quote in Hebrew? You’ve got to be Protestant.

Big difference between “This thing has overwhelming evidence against it being that” and “We have not studied this enough in its own right to confer with reasonable confidence that it is that”. They are not the same.

I’ve never understood the phrase “Glory to Jesus”. Does he want it? I’ve never heard him ask for that.

“POV different from yours” and it’s homophobia/transphobia and racism.

Or wrong. Indecent. Unethical. Whatever strong condemning word you want.

The second most glaring problem with racial profiling is that it’s highly subjective, inconsistent, and overall unreliable — what “looks” like racial group x may be different for the next person. Because race is made-up. The first problem, of course, is that it’s immoral.

It seems to be pre-Islamic as it’s practised in different parts of the austronesophone world beyond SEA, but also because it’s treated as a coming-of-age ritual done around puberty and not in infancy as done in the US and other Islamicised cultures.

Whether I was circumcised or not, I would’ve been the oddball in either side of my extended family. Filipino boys are expected to be cut, and Lebo Christian boys are expected to be uncut.

Internal kink-shaming in the online queer community is (usually) just internalised queerphobia because the same kinks exist in the heterosexual world, but when it’s openly kinky gay people, we all of a sudden have to think about the “children”.

She also said that her first time at a “Christian” church in Australia, she thought: WHERE ARE THE STATUES OF THE SAINTS THERE IS ONLY A CROSS IN HERE WHAT IS GOING ON?

Catholicism is so part and parcel of mainstream Filipino culture that cradle Catholics are willing to accept the evangelical assertion that Catholics are not Christian. Spoke to my Argentinian coworker, and it seems to be the same for them, too.

Adopted kids shouldn’t feel bad, and adoptive parents shouldn’t feel the need to expose their kids to the culture of their bio parents, either. It would’ve been unthinkable a few generations ago, but we live in weird times.

It’s weird to expect kids adopted from, say, Vietnam or China to know or understand or relate to a culture they weren’t raised in. Culture isn’t genetic. You don’t magically inherit feelings of cultural attachment from your bio parents — all these things are learnt.