• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


It's been a gradual process, accelerating after the "Renaissance" and the consequent Protestant Reformation, but Christianity has pushed all sense of mystery, of fundamental unknowability and mystic paradox, out of itself. These days the typical Christian ideologue pretends to be the very incarnation of Facts and Logic: they've copied and coöpted the snide rhetorical pose of "rationalists" so completely that Christian extremists are successfully posing in public as the truest possible defenders of Science and Reason. To be a hardline Christian today is to be certain that you have all knowledge, all the answers that matter.

It is fundamentally impossible to banish uncertainty and doubt and mystery forever from a religion, especially from one that makes claims as improbable as Christianity's claims about itself. No free human being is obliged to believe in God, or a Son of God, or in one Book that pretends to tell the entire story not merely of humanity or the Earth but indeed the entire Universe—for to the most committed Christians, nothing meaningful exists outside the story told by the Bible, and thus such Christians feel free to redraw the Cosmos into different shapes, ones in which Earth is all there is and the rest of the heavens are reduced to a backdrop. Such reductive explanations for things cannot help but be dissatisfying to most human beings. In seeking to purge all mystery from the world, the Christians have instead posed us with a bigger one: how can we believe that one book of stories, partly incoherent, its exact contents a matter of constant dispute, somehow sums up all of existence?

Mysticism and esoteric spirituality isn't content with limiting our understanding of reality to a single text. Christian mysticism does exist still; it used to be a flourishing occupation in fact, but the visions and revelations of mystics tend to clash with rigid interpretation of religious texts and doctrines strictly enforced. Hence Christianity has slowly banished mysticism from itself, and made it a forbidden subject—I suggest that this is partly why Christians tend to be attracted to pseudoscientific twaddle, especially racist twaddle. Pseudoscience tends to wear a cloak of mystery, posing as the One Truth that They don't want you to know; Christians who are dead certain about God and Jesus and their formulae for salvation have therefore transferred their sense of mystery to science and other things that the rest of the world regards as certain and trustworthy. Their fundamental sense of the solidity of reality is not the same as that of outsiders. We doubt the Bible; they doubt that people who disbelieve the Bible are in fact real people.

It's a dangerous mindset. It's a frightening problem to confront: how do you communicate with people who would rather blur the lines of reality itself rather than let go of their religious formulae?

~Chara


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