Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

every now and then someone makes a post like "fedi culture is getting 8 boosts and 20 likes and going 'ohh this is doing numbers' lol lmao. numbers tiny" and like i get it but also if 20 people came up to me and said "i liked it when you said that, well done" and 8 of those people were like "can i get some copies of this so i can show it to all my friends?" id be stoked

@a13cui Thanks for asking!

It's a messy topic and it's late here (I'm a bit sleepy), so feel free to ask follow up questions.

The short version of it is that Judeo-Christian is almost always used in one of two harmful ways:

1) To try and give more credibility and weight to something that is purely Christian by claiming that it's part of Judaism as well when it's not (like the above example, because Judaism explicitly permits abortions)
2) To try and talk about broader groupings of related faiths while ignoring the many other Abrahamic faiths (the proper term, though that one more often hurts the lesser known groups, don't use it unless you also know it applies to groups like the Baháʼí, which I'll admit even I know next to nothing about, but it's valid here because all I'm doing is naming their religious family)

Because many (cough most cough) teach a bastardized form of Judaism through the lens of Christianity, and because that's the only exposure many get to our faith... they get skewed harmful and hurtful ideas about us.

Some highlight examples:
* We don't have an established afterlife (we don't say there isn't one, we just have zero information on it if there is)
* We don't seek "eternal reward", the reward for our faith is being a better person than we were the day before
* We have forgiveness baked into our faith, and no it doesn't require animal sacrifice (it requires you to actually ask the person you wronged...)
* We thoroughly encourage arguing any topic with anyone (right time and place of course), and that includes picking a fight with God if you think they're wrong about something (you have a 99.9% chance of being wrong... but we commend the effort and every once in a while someone wins the argument)
* We have a rule, Pikuach Nefesh, roughly meaning that life is the highest commandment. Your well being takes precedence over your faith, if it would hurt you or others to be observant than you are exempt from that requirement. It's unacceptable to hurt others for your faith, and for yourself it's frowned upon
* We actively discourage conversion, it's allowed but it's not a trivial process. We don't want people to become Jews, we just want people to be better.

Also never, ever trust anyone who presents BIPOC as threats to queer and neurodivergent people's safety. The moment they start setting up BIPOC as oppressive agents of the status quo and erasing the existence of queer and ND people of color, you know they just mean whiteness when they say queer and ND.

The hashtag pests' claim that they're doing this because the FediBlock tag facilitates abuse of queer people is belied by the fact that they're not trying to improve the use of the tag or presenting any alternatives, simply trying--and failing--to wreck even the imperfect tools we have for community safety.

This is not the behavior of people who care about queer people's safety.

It's the behavior of people who hate the existence of community tools, and really of any community that allows Black, Indigenous, and yes, queer people to set community standards that might challenge their dominance or even inconvenience them the tiniest bit with an inkling of self-awareness.

And they can keep whining about that all they like, but that's all they're good for because it's what they've chosen--whining and trying to make a nuisance of themselves, and not doing a good job of even that. They're just kind of pathetic and embarrassing, really.

all i want is a thousand year slumber, is that so much to ask