I Swear, Even If You Haven't Seen FMA, I Think You Might Appreciate The Fucking Talent! 🤩

紅簾前 "Before the Red Curtain" - song from TGCF donghua Season 2 Episode 2 (lyrics translation)

This is the song played when Hua Cheng taught Xie Lian to roll dice. Some of the lyrics from this song are kind of abstruse, so there're definitely elements of my interpretation, see lyrics translation below:

如影拂輕幔 亦如夢飄轉

Like a shadow brushing against the light curtain, like a drifting and whirling dream

翩翩花雨 遊入長街盛宴

A shower of dancing flowers travels through the festivities on the long street

人聲作伴 四下皆歡 未斷

Accompanied by the noise of the crowd, the celebration is all around and unceasing

隔淺淺一線 倏然驟暖

Seperated by a thin line, the warmth grows all of a sudden

繞指間紅線 繫兩端輕纏

The red string around fingers tied around two ends gently connects them

緣起驚鴻 結作銀蝶相盼

Fate brought us together when I laid my eyes on you; longing for each other, fate connects us with the silver butterflies

盅裡玲瓏 幾番輾轉

The delicately carved dice in the cup tossed and turned

凝眸處依舊 映晨星斑斕

The one I gaze on still looks the same, with morning stars reflected in his eyes

逐世間逢故人 裁長夜銜離恨

Pursuing an old aquintance in this mortal world; the long night grows shorter, I taste the regret of seperation

一朝一夕織紅簾 相認

Day and night, weaving the red curtain so we'd recognize each other

遣游絲爭繚春 染心花舞紛紛

Send out gossamer in the air to entangle the spring, the joy in my heart blooms like dancing flowers

手心溫 擲年輪 皆遊刃

The palm is warm that tosses away years as skillfully as it wields knives

不語或忘言 咫尺卻難辨

Speechless or forgetting to speak, you're hard to recognize even close in front of me

切念浮想 猶似經久未見

How I long for you, so many thoughts of you on my mind, as if I haven't seen you in a long long time

迷雲飛幌 流螢熠熠 怎斂

Streaming curtains in misty clouds and glowing fireflies, how do I gather it

望眉宇模樣 恍若從前

Watching your face, it looks the same as it was in the old days

無止或無端 悲喜中縈牽

Without end, without cause, lingering and tangling in sorrow and joy

眇眇幽火 曾映照伴人間

The small feeble flame was once your companion, casting a light on you in the mortal world

粲然一笑 萬事隨煙

With a bright smile, the burden of everything dissipates like the smoke

天縱難垂憐 只為一至願

Even though the heavens could not pity you, yet only for this one most earnest wish

逐萬變知所向 予此間知所眷

Chase all the changes in the world to know the direction, and know who's the one dear to you in this mortal world

但見月缺覆月圓 相連

See the full moon turns into the sickle moon, and lovers together under the same moon

此身虔渡此程 等千年更繾綣

I travel through this life with great faith and devotion, love only deepens over a thousand years of waiting

寄明燈 枕遙夜 伴夢眠

Send off the bright lanterns, in a faraway place I sleep and dream

一朝一夕織紅簾

Day and night I weave the red curtain

I love, love, LOVE it when I can tell a fic author has integrated their specialized knowledge in a fic. I was reading a fic that at some point included the character going to visit an art therapist, and it's so clear that the author is an art therapist themself, and the details included are just immaculate and I love it. I've previously read about a character doing fencing for no other reason than the author clearly wanting to write a sport they understood. A character being given a hyperfixation on bugs just so the author can infodump themselves.

I eat it up every time, it brings such a smile to my face

Fic WIPs Openings

@boomchickfanfiction changed a meme that consisted of sharing the first lines of ten fics for one of sharing the first lines of ten fic WIPs, which suits me wonderfully because it's the only way many of these texts are ever going to see the light, lol. 1 to 7 are TGCF, 8 is MDZS, 9 is Hades and 10 is BotW.

"Ghost, ghost! How can you say that I'm not dead? How would I be able to see you again, if I weren't?"

Hua Cheng seemed to toss the dice casually, but the two little cubes dented the skull of the last demon standing like stones shot from a powerful slingshot, nailing it to the bloody floor. Two sixes.

Neither gods nor ghosts needed to sleep. The fact that they didn’t need to, though, didn’t mean that they didn’t do it.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Hua Cheng didn’t know if that was the best of the worst day of his afterlife.

Upon waking up, the first thing Xie Lian noticed was the unusual warmth. Yawning, he pushed the blanket away and supported himself on his elbows, blinking hard in the darkness.

Despite the generalised hatred its inhabitants felt against the sun, Ghost City did have days and nights.

“Cheng’er is too old to share beds with grown-ups, you are going to spoil him.”

When the only sound coming from Wei Ying arriving to the Cloud Recesses was the clapping of Little Apple’s hooves against the stone road, Lan Zhan knew something had gone wrong.

The waters of the river Styx were warm, and their bitter flavour managed to get inside his mouth as it always did, no matter how tightly he kept his mouth shut.

The sunset made their secret lake glow with an orange hue. Link sat at the shore and splashed the water with his feet, which made Sidon smile.

Feel free to join if you want!

TGCF Revised Edition Translation

Greetings, friends! I figure it's about time for this.

For the last 6 months I've been working on a full translation of the newest 2024 revised edition of TGCF, since it has so thoroughly taken over my life and well, since nobody has done a full translation of the revised edition yet, I thought I'd start one.

Since Chinese isn't my native language, translating takes me a long time, and I have to fit it around other life commitments. But, rest assured, I do not use MTL for any of my work! As of writing this I've translated up to the end of the Ghost City arc, but most of it still needs editing, so I'm starting by uploading just the first few chapters.

I hope you guys enjoy the new added scenes as much as I have been, because damn there's so much more to love, even in just the first few arcs.

Happy reading!

天官赐福，百无禁忌！

My pieces for the fic After School Paranormal Club by sleepthief, made as part of the TGCF Minibang 2022.

Summary: 

"Hello, my name is Hua Cheng and there's a demon living in my right eye." It's his good grades, art talent and creative video pitch that got him the principal's okay to set up the After School Paranormal Club. But there really is a demon living in his right eye. And it's in love with gege!

High school AU in which the creepy goth kid is in love with the school's most popular jock. Pining ensues, as do curses, demons, hormones and midterms.

Happy Chinese New Year, the year of the dragon!

This is the mighty ghost dragon Hua Cheng, whose rain is made of blood. He turned into a dragon after accidentally swallowing the red coral pearl he stole from the prince. Since then, he's been seeking the lost god to give him his pearl and blessing back.

Some fun Surma Lavellan and Solas times feat. Rook, Lusacan and Morrigan 🌹

Sobre la traducción del título «guoshi» en la edición española de TGCF

Recientemente, leí el hilo de observaciones que Bruja del Caos hizo en Twitter sobre el segundo volumen de La Bendición del Oficial del Cielo publicada por editorial Norma. Me llamó la atención la confusión causada por la decisión de traducir 国师 (guoshi) como «cultivador del reino jefe» o «cultivador jefe», lo cual Bruja del Caos resalta en los siguientes pasajes:

Tras un par de impresiones que intercambié con Bruja del Caos sobre el tema, que pueden leer en las capturas de abajo o directamente en Twitter, se me ocurrió una posible explicación para la decisión del traductor, además de mi propia alternativa que, a lo mejor, podría ser más clara.

Para sustentar mi idea, voy a definir varias cosas de contexto que puede que muchos ya conozcan. Perdón por la repetición, es para que todos tengamos claridad. También mencionaré datos relevantes pero no tan directamente relacionados con el tema porque me gusta dar datos curiosos. Espero que les gusten.

En fin, empecemos por lo primero. Las tres novelas que MXTX ha publicado hasta ahora se mueven entre dos géneros de la literatura china fantástica: Xianxia y Wuxia.

Las historias del género Xianxia se desarrollan en el universo mitológico que nace del folclor y los tres sistemas de creencias principales chinos: el taoísmo, el budismo y el confucionismo. Van de inmortales, dioses y criaturas legendarias, tienen magia y alquimia, varias dimensiones (como el reino fantasmal o el cielo) y el destino del mundo entero está en juego. La Bendición del Oficial del Cielo/TGCF es principalmente Xianxia.

Wuxia cuenta las historias y aventuras de artistas marciales en la antigua China. Estos artistas marciales normalmente son cultivadores de la inmortalidad bajo uno de los sistemas de creencias antes mencionados, y están organizados en una configuración social independiente del gobierno que se llama Jianghu (江湖). La traducción literal de esta palabra es «ríos y lagos», probablemente referencia al río Yangtsé y el lago Dongting, que son de los más importantes de China, y se refiere al mundo natural/rural que existe más allá de la ley o la estructura social, libre y salvaje. En el Jianghu predomina el que sea más fuerte, y el código moral se define a grandes rasgos bajo el concepto de honor en las artes marciales.

En el Jianghu no hay reyes ni gobiernos, pero sí hay una organización social y jerarquía basada en sectas. Las sectas son grupos que se organizan alrededor de un método/técnica de artes marciales y/o cultivación de la inmortalidad sustentada en uno de los sistemas de creencias. Algunas sectas son lideradas por una familia, que en este contexto se llaman clanes, mientras que otras son lideradas por uno o varios grandes maestros sin lazos familiares que transmiten sus conocimientos bajo un modelo de escuela. En el primer tipo, los hijos heredan el liderazgo de la secta de sus padres, mientras que en el segundo, el poder pasa al discípulo más sobresaliente cuando su maestro decide retirarse, asciende o muere.

Las sectas en El Sistema de Auto-Salvación del Villano Escoria/SVSSS, novela que tiene un buen balance de elementos Wuxia y Xianxia bajo el género sombrilla de historias de transmigración, son tipo escuela. La de los protagonistas es taoísta, pero también vemos sectas budistas y escuelas de artes marciales y magia demoniacas. Por otro lado, El Gran Maestro de la Cultivación Demoniaca/MDZS es principalmente Wuxia y sus sectas están lideradas por clanes taoístas, para los cuales las técnicas innovadoras del protagonista son inaceptables, ya que rompen varios tabús.

En MDZS se ve claramente cómo el Jianghu opera de forma independiente al gobierno: sabemos que hay un emperador porque se le menciona en un par de ocasiones, pero nunca aparece ni nadie se preocupa por saber qué opina del conflicto. A pesar de que hay miles de muertos y damnificados por la violencia, toda la guerra entre las sectas se da sin intervención el ejército imperial.

Por eso es que, aunque como dijo Bruja del Caos, pareciera lógico decir que los cultivadores que nacieron u operan en el territorio de un reino son cultivadores de dicho reino, en realidad ellos no le responden a la dinastía que rige sobre sus territorios, sino solo al Jianghu. De hecho, a veces Jianghu se traduce como «mundo de pandillas» o «bajo mundo» precisamente porque están por fuera de la ley. Para que el gobierno y el Jianghu se relacionen, debe haber algún tipo de acuerdo o negociación. Por ejemplo, en la novela Mil Otoños de Meng Xi Shi, hay varias dinastías imperiales peleando por el dominio del territorio chino. Cada una de ellas le ofrece alianzas a las sectas más fuertes de los diferentes sistemas de creencias (los confucionistas al sur, los taoístas al norte, y el centro disputado entre los budistas y los demoniacos), dándoles beneficios como recursos para construir templos o sedes, permiso para que enseñen sus credos a la población, miembros de sus familias como discípulos o cónyuges, etc. a cambio de que las sectas las protejan y les den apoyo militar y/o logístico en la disputa por el territorio.

Esto tiene un precedente histórico que podemos ver claramente en el origen del título que nos ocupa. El cargo de guoshi fue originalmente instaurado por Kublai Khan —un emperador de origen mongol que fundó la dinastía Yuan en el siglo XI de nuestro calendario— quien se lo confirió al líder de una de las cuatro grandes sectas del budismo tibetano (porque sí, las sectas del género Wuxia también tienen base histórica). Su labor consistía en administrar la región del Tíbet y manejar las relaciones entre el clero budista y la corte imperial mongola. A nivel práctico, el negocio fue darle a esa secta jurisdicción sobre la práctica budista en el imperio, y por consecuencia poder sobre las otras tres sectas que operaban en el Tíbet, a cambio de que el guoshi convenciera a la población del Tíbet de aceptar y someterse el gobierno mongol.

Ahora bien, los cultivadores que se vuelven guoshis en TGCF (Mei Nianqing, Ban Yue y Xie Lian) no son parte de sectas por las que tengan que o quieran buscar beneficio político, sino que son individuos cuyo poder marcial o nivel de cultivación es tan alto, que los reinos con los que interactúan deciden ponerlos de su lado. A cambio, ellos reciben aceptación social, seguridad económica, y aunque el tema en realidad no se toca en la novela, la posibilidad de presidir sobre las prácticas religiosas y/o la interpretación del conocimiento del sistema de creencias que tienen. Por ejemplo, Mei Nianqing mal que bien impone su método de cultivación taoísta en Xianle, que sabemos que es uno de muchos porque requiere celibato, el cual —como se dilucida en la novela y como MXTX explicó directamente en una nota de autor que dudo muchísimo que hayan incluido en la edición impresa— no es obligatorio en otros métodos taoístas de cultivación.

Todo esto para decir que llamar a cualquiera de esos tres personajes «el cultivador del reino (jefe)» tiene sentido porque cada uno es o el único cultivador oficial/formalmente parte del gobierno del que es guoshi (Ban Yue, Xie Lian), o el líder de una secta de tamaño e influencia indeterminados (Mei Nianqing). Soportando esta idea está el hecho de que más adelante en la historia conocemos a algunos cultivadores que son parte del Jianghu y no tienen relación con el emperador mortal del tiempo presente, por lo que no son cultivadores del reino en el que viven.

Adicionalmente, puede que se haya descartado la opción de traducir guoshi como "tutor/preceptor imperial" porque aunque Mei Nianqing y Xie Lian enseñan, Ban Yue no lo hace, y el título histórico de guoshi en sí no tenía un componente de tutorado o enseñanza tampoco. Debido a que 师 (shi) significa «maestro», resulta intuitivo traducirlo con la connotación de «persona que enseña» y usar sinónimos como «tutor» o «preceptor», pero recordemos que la palabra tiene otras connotaciones, como por ejemplo «dicho de una persona o cosa: principal entre las de su clase», de la que creo que salió lo de «jefe», definido como el que manda, el que domina, el que está arriba.

De esa manera, «cultivador del reino jefe» funciona como traducción de guoshi en la medida en que con ese título se denomina al cultivador más poderoso que está al servicio del gobierno y no del Jianghu. El problema, por supuesto, es que no se entiende de dónde sale sin este kilométrico contexto, e incluso dado el contexto, no suena como un título, sino como un vago descriptor.

Personalmente, si no tuviese la opción de dejar guoshi en pinyin y explicar de dónde sale el término en una nota al pie o en el glosario, yo consideraría «maestro cultivador (imperial/real/de la corte)» como opción. Como mínimo, cambiaría «jefe» por «líder» para que sonara un poco más formal, o si no hay manera, «cultivador en jefe», porque mejor que suene militar a que suene... como suena.

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it’s plug-and-play: you don’t have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don’t have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian–to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is… everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that’s taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We’re going to come back to how Christianity isn’t actually modular, but for the moment, let’s talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don’t have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that’s modular. It’s deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can’t just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture’s indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of “religion” full stop, it’s actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn’t actually succeeded in that–the US is a thoroughly Christian culture–but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are “religious” versus which are “secular”. That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can’t separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label “religious.” But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn’t one or the other, or neither, or both. It’s that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn’t actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It’s easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures’ colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place–the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic–and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It’s more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn’t come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn’t just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized–they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It’s the “natural order” to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you’re basically telling the person you’re proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of “that’s how everyone is, though.”

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to “fix” them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it’s definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It’s all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It’s all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they’ve accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn’t something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as “religious” and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as “neutral” or “normal” actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they’d look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN’T neutral. So the idea that that’s what “secular society” should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, “enlightened” life that most Christian atheists envision is one that’s still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don’t see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It’s obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn’t truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they’re not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it’s actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it’s invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it’s definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It’s basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from “primitive” animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that’s the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is “normal” religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren’t white and European-derived, the tacit demand is “okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem ‘religious.’”

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren’t to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity–a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture–to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just …swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s… not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism–it’s fine to just… be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence.