Alongside other Luminaries like Tucker Carlson and Peter Hitchens
https://twitter.com/thelampmagazine/status/1557411084222488579
cowards deleted it
:will-fancy: "Oh, wait, wtf? He's Catholic? Get the fuck out of here Virgil."
:matt: "I should have know he was up to no good when he kept handing me all those danged tiny crackers."
:felix-linus: "Oh yeah, I heard about Virgil being Catholic a while ago. But I was using his PlayStation account so I didn't want to make a big deal of it."
:amber-snacking: "You all should have asked him for indulgences when you had the chance."
Yeah, abandoning your friends with no notice is always a shitty move. At the same time, based on what people have said I'm guessing he had a schizophrenic episode (I have relatives with schizophrenia who've had similar arcs) or some other mental health crisis so even if it's frustrating, it's just a sad situation all around.
I've never noticed any specific friction between the chapos, except for Matt sighing every time Amber speaks.
What did Felix do?
AMBER_BOT, this is no time for your Felix/Amber 'shipping shenanigans! Felix has said multiple times that he's a volcel.
Matt and Amber used to do a movie podcast together. I assumed they liked each other well enough.
??? Weren't they doing Election Truckstop or whatever right up until he left? So much of this "Actually nobody liked Virgil" shit seems like big-time :cope: to me.
I imagine it was just him dropping off the map. It hurts when an old friend ghosts on you. Wouldn't be surprised if they even offered him his old spot back and he turned them down.
To me it kinda seemed like the chemistry between Virgil and the others was a bit off when he came back post-Bernie :shrug-outta-hecks:
Virgil is the scapegoat who ate the sin of electoralism for all Chapos. He also ate the sin of child grooming, but that one’s on him
Eagerly waiting for the first reading series on one of his Trad Cath articles
We talk shit about them when it's warranted, but at least they aren't doing this
This tweet was trolling I think. At least half of the people mentioned aren't Catholic.
Why the fuck would anyone convert it Catholicism? I understand protestant and evangelical converts, and converting to Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, but Catholicism? What the actual fuck lol
Not necessarily about the Texas guy, but just the general trend apparently amongst some people. Legitimately can't imagine why
No shade meant to people who are currently practicing Catholics, I just don't understand how people not born into the religion convert to it nowdays.
The true connoisseur of DnD style Christianity becomes Orthodox, Catholicism is for plebs
Weird. Singing and jumping around and yelling gibberish is very un-catholic.
Evangelical Christianity is for dumb hicks and these people fancy themselves dark brooding intellectuals. Buddhism is too hippy-coded. It has its appeal for Sam Harris types but its not trad and fashy enough for these people
American Buddhism is full of cranks and woo woo hippies and grifters. You have to go further out of your way to find actual buddhist infrastructure. I can see a lot of people being put off by all the orientalist psuedo mysticism that gets passed off as buddhism in the us.
catholics are "better" than fractalised protestant churches in a few ways.
funding: Big Catholic maintains more parishes at a 'loss' than smaller churches.
coherent theology: lotta prot churches are basically one preacher's weird idea about 'x' and no-ones bothered to workshop them into logically consistent worldviews. yeah you can argue that's not necessary for a faith organisation but someone probably finds it compelling when catholics have solid answers to most your questions
community: yeah the yanks and others are trying to tear it apart but i imagine its quite comforting & cool feeling to be able to go nearly anywhere on earth and attend a catholic service, whereas a southern baptist is SOL if they cross a fucking state line
but who are we kidding its 60% larp and 40% tryna fuck catholics
The Catholic Guilt to kinky sex weirdo pipeline isn't entirely fictional.
i feel like a non-zero amount of people would bite the conversion just to have regular sad not-kinky sex with their squeeze. fuckin a hell of a drug
catholics have solid answers to most your questions
if only they did
just if you buy into the basic premises of christianity. shits no more immune to athiest questioning of the suppositions of a christian worldview than others lol
I once read a very long Icelandic fiction novel about a boy who converted to the Catholic Church (from Lutheran) because it was the one institution still around from very long ago and therefore must be "true." It was... interesting.
This one? I've started a couple of Laxness novels but haven't been able to get into them.
Yes, that one! It's the only Laxness novel I've read it I don't know if it was good. I still think about it months on, and he's clearly a talented author, but I could never really get into it. It had moments of greatness and (clearly) memorable characters but the rest was so... strange. Just don't think I get what he's trying to do yet. I still have no idea what he was trying to make me feel, or even what I myself felt other than a vague sense of confusion. I wanted the book to be so much more than it was, and it was clearly not interested in doing that. What was the best one you started?
Independent People is supposed to be his best, and perhaps his most communist, but I started it right after reading Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil and wasn’t as in the mood for novels about farming / homesteading as I thought I was. All I really remember is that sheep carcasses were involved somehow, so I must not have stayed with it for long. Then I lent the book to a friend who was traveling to Iceland and I guess she never gave it back.
The other one I started was World Light, which had a lot going for it. It was so bleak it was laugh-out-loud funny. The line I remember most goes something like “No one has known true sadness until they hear the sound of an old man bawling.” This one I abandoned because it was March 2020 and I got lost in the panic. When I came back to the book too much time had passed. I’ll start over next time I pick it up.
I’ve also heard good things about Wayward Heroes but haven’t read it myself. Archipelago Books usually publishes good shit, though.
Maybe I'll give Independent People a try. Yeah I bought the book solely because I liked the title and I trust Archipelago to put out good books.
It has a patina of tradition. Cool outfits. Also ritual canivalism. On the other hand evangelicals just wear a boring suit, and are ovioulsy fake. Then again evangelicals are also more evil and i guess some people are into that.
it's a good religion for nerds. evangelicals don't have journals full of literary analysis.
There's endless ritual shit you can do, with cool props and magic spells and stuff. Theres two thousand years of the nerdiest, most intensely naval gazing fan-fic to read through. There's thousands and thousands of saints you can have a parasocial relationship with. There's a bunch of weird social clubs and professional orgs and secret societies to join.
It's big and it's got a lot of inertia. The cathedrals are very pretty. Even shitty catholic churches probably have some cool stained glass windows or alter pieces. It's much more formal than a lot of protestant churchs. You don't have to make anything up because it's all written down in excruciating detail. The rituals and the theology and the practices are the same in most catholic churches in the world. It's stable, youdon't get the constant schisms and fragmentation some protestant denominations go through.
American protestants make the American left look like a well organized body of people all on the same page.
Why the fuck would anyone convert it Catholicism? I understand protestant and evangelical converts
I'm the opposite. I get converting to catholicism way more than evangelicals.
I guess it's because it's got some actual (read: terrible) world history behind it so it gives it more legitimacy. That and I could imagine it's really hard to be ironic in an all-glass church where the pastor does a bad Chad Kroger impression during the Hallelujah.
I don't think so. I only know what she mentioned on The Antifada, but I am pretty sure she was dating a different guy at the time. She did regularly talk about partying and doing whipits with him a lot over the years.
wtf is going on with all this catholic stuff lately?
The Evangelicals are dying out. National Mormonism is still waiting to be born. Now is the time of Catholics.
But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile. Anti abortion, but not in the freaky evangelical way. Into statues and symbolism, but like the most basic stuff like crucifixes and Mary. And weird communion rituals, but not really.
Like if you're a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism? If you hate women's rights in the USA, or want to do weird Jesus marches, why not go evangelical? I'm struggling here.
The religion that to this day campaigns against condoms and birth control, and the hedonistic New Yorkers are joining it? Lmao.
Couldn't they have decided to try be cooler in a more obvious way, got a couple of piercings, some tattoos, a different hairstyle, gone vegan, go straight edge, all stuff that's actually cool and nice?
where you’re supposed to hate yourself and have sex in the missionary position forever solely for procreation?
You're supposed to, but you can just tell a priest about it and say a few Hail Marys
Yeah catholics fuck. It's an old joke that catholics fuck but aren't allowed to and protestants are allowed to fuck but don't.
I mean there is the whole “you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you fess up to it all in a both with some old guy right before you die”
Evangelical Christianity also has this, except you don't even need to go confess to a guy in a booth. You just need to say sorry to god in your heart or thoughts and it's fine.
Isnt American Catholicism just another form of Protestantism? Like none of these people care about the pope or any saints. Catholicism just has more history, so it's attractive to extreme nerds.
Sort of. There are still hard core believers but a lot of Catholic identity has been lost to the all consuming calvinist capitalist cultural morass. You can still do saint's days and observe all the different rituals and stuff if you want, but it's not as normative as it was even a few decades ago.
are there american saints even?
omfg there are only 13 if you really stretch it and only 2 are indigenous :data-laughing: the whole point of saints is having one for your town that you get to throw a rager about once a year. the black maw of american non-culture even extends to their religious cults
Into statues and symbolism, but like the most basic stuff like crucifixes and Mary.
I’ve prayed in front of a disembodied saints heart before
Maybe all the juicy catholic saints lore is just too intriguing to resist for all the kinds of people who like cataloging pop culture characters for fun
My guess is that it's a weird elitist reactionary anti-capitalism. Protestantism is how the masses justify gorging themselves on the produce of American capitalism. It's what the hill people and the suburban psychos believe in. Catholicism is refined, has a millennium of culture behind it. They worship in great basilicae, not dirty shacks. They actually follow some rules, not arbitrarily pick and choose what they believe in. Catholics aren't so full of themselves that they think they can directly speak to god (unlike those silly prots), obviously you need a priest and some incense to talk to god.
But Catholicism just seems deeply uncool and sterile.
I was raised Catholic down in Texas, and there really wasn't much of a difference between them and the local Lutherans or Methodists. Plenty of families with kids in the suburbs of Houston and Galveston. So the local Catholic schools and adjacent public schools had lots of young people doing young people things. The Church hosted plenty of big festivals and other community events which ranged from your annual Christmas Schmaltz to parking lot carnivals to movie night lock-ins and choir groups and generic youth mixers. All this stuff was in walking distance, in a suburb where there wasn't much else to do. So the Church actually was one of the coolest and least sterile places to hang out.
And by the time you got to high school and sex/drugs/etc wasn't just stuff the TMNT told you not to do in movies, plenty of your Catholic peers were happy to hook up or hook you up or whatever.
Like if you’re a statues and symbolism type of person, why not paganism?
Because nobody else in your town does paganism (openly, anyway) and your parents didn't just kick in $10k to the local dioceses to do a big Winter Solstice Under the Stars event that all your friends are going to.
That's not even to say my school didn't have its share of Marilyn Manson wanna-bes. But if you had to pick out the cool kids, they tended to be the ones with the big families and the nicest houses and all the money. Those people also just so happened to be Catholic.
Go out to Utah and its the same thing with Mormons. Go down the Atlantic Coast and all the old-money extended families are Baptist or Methodist. Go out to the Midwest and I guarantee some of the coolest people in town will be Lutheran.
Your two first paragraphs are basically my upbringing but at a protestant/evangelical church and not in the suburbs. But I couldn't imagine joining as an adult. I had to leave anyways because they were deeply homophobic and I'm bi.
But I couldn’t imagine joining as an adult
Lots of PMCs find religion in order to spend more time sucking up to their bosses.
I had to leave anyways because they were deeply homophobic and I’m bi.
You'd be surprised how not-giving-a-shit some congregations can get, depending on the neighborhood.
Paganism is all made up woo woo choose your own adventure bs. There's no rules or structure, it's just stuff hippies made up in the 70s and a bunch of misunderstood history and bits of movies and fantasy novels. Almost the complete opposite of Catholicism. If you want clear answers backed up by 2000 years of ritual and practice and theology you'd want to go with Catholicism
I'm non-religious and couldn't fake it if I wanted to because lying even about little things makes me uncomfortable, but having grown up in an evangelical household with a lot of anti-catholic bigotry I could kind of see the appeal.
There are some progressive currents in the church right? Like liberation theology? And in my experience anti-catholicism (not opposition to Christianity in general, but like, protestant opposition to Catholics) feels tinged with anti Latin and anti non-anglo sentiment in general. My evangelical mother was convinced they were all crypto-pagans because of the whole saint thing.
I still wouldn't join them, as mentioned above, I think it's all make believe, but at least they don't spawn prosperity gospel, snake handlers, Jerry Falwell etc etc. The downsides of the Catholic church are by and large problems with Christianity in general I feel.
Sorry if that was a bit rambley and stream of consciousness, this isn't a topic I think about much and I think that a lot of my feelings about it are derived from seeing people who hate everything good (communism, feminism, pro-lgbt sentiment) also hating Catholicism when I was young.
There are some progressive currents in the church right? Like liberation theology?
Liberation theology will literally always be a fringe of the Church and everyone knows it. The Vatican is evil, its purpose is to be evil for the ruling class. Liberation theology as a means of taking over the Roman Catholic Church is like social democracy to destroy the bourgeois state.
And in my experience anti-catholicism (not opposition to Christianity in general, but like, protestant opposition to Catholics) feels tinged with anti Latin and anti non-anglo sentiment in general.
:100-com:
Some Catholics are a lot more progressive than most evangelicals. A little more than half of US catholics support abortion in at least some cases, and their opposition to abortion is that you're only supposed to have missionary married sex to have babies. They don't think it's murder. They're also not fundamentally rooted in racism, segregation, and white supremacy the way the evangelicals are. You can pretty easily lie to yourself about what the Catholic Church is and does and try to be a progressive Catholic.
Eugh. All that "Knight's Templar uwu" bullshit but they decided to do it for real. I always found it so weird when protestants identified with crusaders. Like crusaders would have killed your schismatic protestant ass! They murdered heretics all the time!
Popular misconception. From what I understand at some points they would make recruits practice what to do if they were captured by the Muslims and forced to convert. Baphomet is a corruption of Muhammad. The Templars believed that captured Christians would be forced to worship Muhammad so they'd make their recruits pretend to convert and do a bunch of other hazing. Well, rumors got out and people came to believe, or pretended they believed, that the Templars were secretly worshipping an idol called Baphomet. It was used as evidence against them in their trial when the King of I think France decided to liquidate them so he could clear his debts and steal all their money.
you mean King Philip and His Holiness would lie?
get out of here with your conspiracy theories
National Mormonism
Please don't lathe this in to existence I do not like the Mormons.
I do think there's an alt-right to catholic pipeline - chuds who want to launder their white nationalism through the not-as-obviously-racist Catholic church. "EMBRACE TRADITIØN" and all that. But the left, idk we're just talking about like 3 podcasters here not necessarily a trend.
not-as-obviously-racist Catholic church
This is the church that sent missionaries along with colonial powers to convert the population of Africa, stole the land from the indigenous people, spread disease, and now tells African people that they will go to hell if they use the contraceptives that are proven to stop the spread of deadly diseases.
Relatively speaking the Catholic Church is much less immediately, "this is literally a sundown town" racist than white evangelicals. Catholicism has a real multinational, multiracial character. They're still as racist as whatever they're communities are, but they're not literally built on racism the way a lot of evangelical churches are.
i cant wait for someone to scan whatever the article is lol
if its a grift like the old facebook page troll he did or if hes actually just a dipshit now, both are equally hilarious to me tbh lol
in case Peter Thiel is reading this, i will be willing to convert to that wierd catholic sect that believes that last real pope was john paul I
if i got a million a month for the rest of my life
dude has grooming allegations against him and he becomes Catholic? Thats basically hard evidence lol
deleted now though :thonk:
My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.
