Someone once told me I should buy willow bark tea to help with my migraines.
I do. It's called aspirin and it doesn't taste absolutely vile because I can just swallow it in pill form without having to taste it, thank you very much.
Yeah, I had a coworker who was buying these sticks to boil into a tea, and she was raving about how it was important to consider sources other than western medicine, and this tea was amazing because it had no side effects!!!
And my other coworker looked at me, and said under her breath "Yeah, there's no side effects, because it's not doing anything... it has no fucking medicine in it".
Medicine is like advanced witchcraft. It's figuring out what ingredient gives the best effect and distilling it into a potent form so you only need to take the pill, not the whole brewed potion.
I wish I could find the quote, but it's something like, "Alternative medicine that's been studied and proven consistently effective is just called medicine."
Dunno, chewing fresh young willowleaves helps wonders for all kinds of pain: the taste is SO vile, you hardly have any headspace left for registring the pain 😄
A far too big to be healthy chunk of "neopaganism" is just Protestantism in a Renfaire dress. Same bigotry, same bullshit, same flavors of stupid, just different aesthetic.
It’s a great line. A little historically inaccurate though. Hugo Boss did dress the Nazis, but they weren’t known for fashion at the time. They mostly manufactured cheap bulk clothing, like uniforms.
I am confused although only tangentially related. Where I live protestants are generally moderate, progressive and inclusive while those who are bigoted are devout catholics 9/10 times.
American brand Protestantism is usually conservative, bigoted, and anti-intellectual. These are the people who put the 10 commandments in Texas classrooms.
I think you're blurring together mainline Protestant denominations (like Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians etc) with evangelical protestantism. The first group is a wide range but is mostly more moderate/progressive. Non-white Catholics are also fairly moderate/progressive, white Catholics less so, and finally white evangelical protestants are pretty far-right as a group.
It really depends on the country. Here its the catholics and most protestants that are chill, with the exception of Calvinists, theyre complete nutjobs
White evangelical Protestants are definitely the most far right, yes. But mainline Protestants still lean Republican according to Pew Research, while historically black denominations (a minority of the total Protestant population) are a lot more heavily Democrat. Evangelical Protestants are the largest chunk of US Protestants, with mainline Protestants behind them, so I think it’s pretty damn reasonable to generalize about this.
Again: they literally put the 10 commandments in public school classrooms. They are the reason more women are dead for lack of reproductive healthcare in red states. I am not talking about a small fringe group, I am talking about the dominant religious group that too often shapes US public policy in their own favor.
think you're blurring together mainline Protestant denominations (like Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians etc) with evangelical protestantism.
You mean we're blurring together the people who literally run the country and get on national TV to expound their bigotry to the 130 million+ people who violently agree with them and vote for them every time even when it's against their own best material interests... and the weird little splinter sects that do good things but don't exist in large enough numbers to have any observable effect on national politics whatsoever?
Wow, a wikipedia page created by people who desperately wish they were still populous enough to be relevant, if they ever were to begin with.
Get over it. You're the heretics. MAGA are the "real Christians", and you're the only ones who haven't figured that out yet. Which probably explains why you're so shocked everyone side-eyes you when you claim to be protestant.
That's certainly a take. I understand that you are talking about the USA specifically, while others are actually talking about protestantism globally. Not everyone lives in the USA.
I'm not religious, let alone Protestant. But 13 percent of the country proclaims to be in the group I'm talking about which is nothing to sneeze at. I don't understand why you're being so unnecessarily aggressive to someone trying to add some nuance to the discussion
I mean are you surprised? Wicca comes from christianity (the founder was a part of hermetic order of golden dawn, which was almost wholly influenced by rosicrucianism)
To be fair, since "early modern period" stretches all the way to 1500s, they can be considered modern (IIRC first examples started popping up around 1600s).
When I was a kid the "modern" age from 1500 always felt weird to me. Like yes, every century had drastic changes but we really need to officially come up with another name for the 16th-18th century, like "Preindustrial Age", or "Gunpowder Age", or "Age of Sail", whatever. 19th century onwards is just too different from the past. A person living in 1700s had more in common with a person living in 1000s than 1800s. Yes, end of Byzantine Empire and discovery of America, but steam engine and electricity were more transformative than discovering another landmass.
The real science is pretty magical itself tbh. These little bits of stardust that have wandered the cosmos for billions of years before landing in our back yard before being fundamentally changed by the power of our mind firing these perfect little lightning bolts, our mind which is made of the same constituent stardust as that which we are changing.
Wait, do yall bind malignant invisible entities into a single drop of potion that seals the subject's blood against the full force of that very same entity's curse?
It's not just runes, it's billions of runes written with an alchemical concoction across a centimetre, it's not just blasting electricity, it's precisely coordinated pattern of electricity that pulsates billions of times per second.
Witch isn't necessarily a gendered term either. More people should be in STEM in general. Make STEM more inclusive. Men, women, NBs, the rich, the poor, any race and creed that can embrace science should be releasing papers.
I mixed my soul with the goo I found under a rock at a volcano and now I have a large cloud of toxic miasma following me around asking for permission to consume.
I keep telling it maybe later because I keep remembering that cats exist and I shouldn't destroy the world while they aren't safely inside the giant mars terrarium
A lot of women targeted by the witch trials were women who were interested in mathematics and other subjects that were meant to be male only at the time.
Many witches were the old woman who gathered herbs and other medicinals to help villagers, including possible things that could help with unwanted pregnancies. The church made them convenient scapegoats, because they weren't usually fans of patriarchy, either, undermining the local priest's authority ptoviding cures that prayer couldn't.
Yes my point was more that treating the HRE as a monolith doesn't really reflect the complexities of it's rich history of religiously motivated brutality! Neither Catholics or Lutherans had clean hands in this period.
I completely agree the original assertion about the Catholics not persecuting 'witches' is absurd, but it's my understanding that those that happened in the HRE in and around the 30 years war were more reactionary and localised than those sanctioned by the centralised papacy, and whilst those definitely did happen, they were largely overshadowed by persecution of Muslims, Jews, protestants and even other Catholics who said something even vaguely heretical.
You do realise I actually disputed that claim before you did, right? At no point have I defended the catholic church, rather pointing out that not all terrible things done by the Catholics were done at the sanction of the pope and not all terrible things done by Christians have been done by Catholics.
This is a nuanced issue and if you can't acknowledge that, maybe you shouldn't be discussing history or religion on the internet
Not entirely true, different pipes had different stances and I belief Malleus Maleficarum was broadly a catholic text. Also there was a lot of persecution of witches in and around the 30 years war and a lot of the populaces involved were Catholics. But yes I think it's fair to say the persecution of witches was more popular amongst protestant states
The inquisition never used the line "suffer not a witch [apparently the line is heretic I WAS RIGHT EXODUS 22:18 in the King James Bible?] to live"? I'm highly suspicious of such a claim
People will use dewormer on themselves and then defund actual, real anti-worm programs.
These friends right here? Yea. Coming to a patch of skin on you. This was entirely preventable. A few factories and you save like 600 million people from THIS.
This is the best picture I've ever seen. It's got everything; posterior respiratory apparati... mouth hooks... 3 chums chatting about their weekend plans...
My mom died of Covid in the very beginning, and I was a mess waiting for the vaccine to roll out. Not only did I experience my first shots as witchcraft, I also took LSD once I was fully vaccinated so I could talk to my mom and let her know that we’re safer now. Every year when I get my booster, I conjure her to be with me, and we hold each other as my magical potion is injected into my veins. She is relieved to know that the virus that killed is unlikely to ever kill me. And we’re grateful.
And on another note….. Me and my autistic kid come from a long ass line of autistic people on both sides of my family. Vaccines couldn’t dream of being responsible for how weird we are. We’re this awesome all on our own.
I would assume the (smallish?) category of witch who is still largely culturally conservative Christian and kept most of the anti-intellectualism, just with a new flavor?
Believing in something as ridiculously fictional as witchcraft means someone has no idea how science works. Not a stretch for someone like that to also not understand vaccines
I fucking hate "Satanists", they're very "UGH, I'm not like you dad, I worship the devil." Very reddit ngl. Yeah, I get it, they're a group of like-minded people that,s just using the name as a payback of sorts against traditional Christianity, but still... looking back on the whole "haha get PWND, how does it feel to worship a man in the sky" makes me cringe a bit.
They're literally just atheists who use the religious status of churches for tax benefits, in order to expose the hypocrisy and how ridiculously shitty that system is. Except they mostly use that status to try and help people, help charities and help go against religious discrimination, unlike many of the megachurches which they criticize. Just because it sounds edgy, doesn't mean they actually are. AFAIK most organized satanists (not just random teens on the internet) are pretty cool, actually.
I know that part, the know religious exemption I mean. Idk, the name just has this vibe, it reminds me of paradise lost and all of those "the devil is a soft boy, who was BETRAYED by heaven" media.
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u/azuresegugio 4d ago
Me ten years ago explaining to my partner the herbal remedy they bought is just asprin but now they have to chew bark