The Magic of Santa Muerte

I recently wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek post for Friendly Atheist about Gianfranco Ravasi’s objection to Santa Muerte, a Mexican cultural icon who mildly imitates the Virgin of Guadalupe and blends Catholic ritual with local culture and tradition. Needless to say, the Vatican is not very happy.

I like Santa Muerte. I like discovering other cultures, learning about their beliefs, and seeing how they present and interpret the world around them – often it’s quite beautiful. Check out these great images of Santa Muerte and the festival of Dia de los Muertos. I love how it takes the familiar Catholic iconography and makes it more colourful.

(Plus I love skulls. You should see my house at Hallowe’en.)

Image via Hell On Earth.

Image via A Capitol Blog.

Image via Tattoo Donkey.

Is it bad if I want her outfit? Image via The Observers de France.

Image via Floozees Doozees.

Image via Fox News Latino.

Image via Lora Lamm Design.

Image via <a href="http://caleyelguero.wordpress.com/"Snapshots of Mexico.

Image via Manoli Lopez.

Image via Dirty Cult.

Image via Jordan Clarke Design on Flickr.

Image via Fine Art America.

Image via Imponderabilia”.

Image via Fine Art America.

The cats are quite possibly my favourite part.

Readers should note that I lack the background knowledge to pick out what is authentically, culturally Mexican and what’s been appropriated. I just posted the images that most spoke to me, the ones that my skull-bracelet-wearing, Hot-Topic-shopping self thought were really cool.

I was, however, fascinated to learn a bit more about the cultural underpinnings from Carmelita Spats, a commenter on my Friendly Atheist post, who writes:

Santa Muerte has been giving the RCC a headache in my country for a while. The reason why she is so popular with marginalized groups is because Guadalupe “forgives” whereas Santa Muerte “kicks butt”. The guy who headed the Basilica of Guadalupe for 40 years, Msgr. Guillermo Schulemberg, publicly admitted that Guadalupe was a fraud. Honestly, I would rather superstitions go away but I “get” it. Although Catholicism and Santa Muerte are both death cults, there is a big difference. The Santa Muerte veneration is done to protect you in the “here and now” and not as a preparation for an afterlife. It is about survival and vengeance. Santa Muerte “takes” your enemy instead of “taking” you. Thus, you are left to live another day.

Very interesting. Very cool.

I’m excited to track down R. Andrew Chestnut’s book on Santa Muerte, called Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. Wish me luck in the quest!

Chick Tract Scrapbook Tuesday: The Execution

Usually it’s Chick Tract Scrapbook Sunday, but I’ve had a really busy weekend, involving a Mother’s Day visit out of town and a last-minute job interview for which I had to memorize eight pages of tour-guide facts. (It went well, I think, though I’m not yet sure whether I scored a position.) Did you know that Casa Loma has ninety-eight rooms, or that only 5% of the Royal Ontario Museum‘s holdings are on display at any given time? Well, now you do.

Now, on to this week’s Chick Tract! It’s a (slightly belated) Mother’s Day Special.

Created by Sara Lin Wilde.

I tried to find a sticker of a tattoo that said ‘Mother’, but you work with what you have.

Sunday’s Going To Be Late

Hey everyone.

So my intention was to spend Mother’s Day with my family, then come back home and write my usual Chick Tract Scrapbook Sunday post, but I’ve got to prep for a j0b interview tomorrow, so that’s not going to happen. I’ll get to your weekly dose of tract a bit later in the week, for sure by Tuesday.

How was everybody’s Mother’s Day?

Trail Mix? Why Not?

Somebody I follow on Twitter posted an image that caught my eye, and that I found it tricky to respond to in just 140 characters. It looked like this:

Image via Kriz on Twitter.

My initial thought was sympathetic; after all, an inability to reconcile teachings I liked with those I found immoral played a big role in my own departure from Christianity. I understand the sentiment from a logical-thinking perspective as well: if a book comes from God, as the Bible claims, it should be seamlessly infallible. And if you’re one of the many Christians who claim that the Bible is the perfect, inspired Word of God, you better be prepared to do everything it commands: keep women from teaching men, treat your slaves justly, whip your children, and steer clear of shellfish.

Logical inconsistencies aside, though, I think that attitude may be a bit too legalistic. It displays the very kind of thinking I find causing the most harm in the world, and the kind I most hate seeing religions trying to push on me.

Any book is trail mix. You can always choose to accept the parts that you like and reject the parts you find distasteful, immoral, or just plain dumb. Let’s not encourage the belief that such basic critical thinking makes you a bad Christian.

What’s In Her Pocketses?

On his blog Pharyngula, PZ Myers just expressed profound bewilderment that women’s clothing has no pockets.

 That would be an intolerable state of affairs for me. Don’t most boys grow up like me with a bunch of pockets that they’re constantly stuffing things into? Candy bars, interesting rocks, pocket knives, frogs, earthworms…until they grow up and replace the cool stuff with boring junk like keys and loose change and wallets. [. . .] Ladies, doesn’t it warp your brain to have grown up without built in stashing places to nurture your natural acquisitiveness? I’m going to have to have a conversation with my wife about this.

Kids want to explore the world – pockets or no pockets. Image via Ask A Mum.

I’m just going to pretend I didn’t notice the part where he suggested that all women have some sort of brain warp because we didn’t grow up throwing cool stuff in our pockets. It’s irrelevant, anyway, since almost every little girl I know has some kind of starter purse, and it could probably fit more frogs and pocket knives than anything you boys were wearing.

Because maybe we are brain-warped – not by the lack of pockets for our playthings, but the gendered expectations our pocketlessness represents.

Far more brain-warping is growing up with the idea that nice girls don’t play with earthworms or get their dresses dirty or sit in an unladylike way that might give an upskirt view – even from the time we’re in diapers.

The lack of pockets in women’s garments has always been a bit of a feminist issue for me. Even where pockets are possible, women’s clothing doesn’t have them. Plenty of women’s garments have fooler pockets, little sewn-in slits that are made to look like a pocket but don’t actually open to store anything she might need in her day-to-day environment.

Sara Lin Starred It: 2013-05-06 (New Old Reader Edition)

I’m actually not starring anything anymore, because I’m no longer working with Google Reader. I’ve switched to The Old Reader, which suits me much better in pretty much every way . . . except that they don’t have a smartphone app. YET. I hope they hurry up and get one, because I miss being able to read on my phone, but honestly, I love The Old Reader.

Screencap of Sara Lin Wilde’s Old Reader page.

What I was really craving from my Google Reader replacement was the capacity to sort my RSS feeds into folders according to their content, and The Old Reader gives me that ability, which makes it worth the wait for an app. And that’s just one reason I like it better than Google Reader. The layout is intuitive and easy to grasp. It places the “like” function at the end of the article, not the beginning, so you can read it before deciding if it’s worthy of a star. And best of all, it’s not becoming defunct at the end of June.

But of course, I named this feature when I was using the Google Reader, which lets you “star” your favourite articles, while The Old Reader has you “heart” them if you want to mark particularly interesting reads. I’m probably not going to change the title, but it’s something to get used to. I say I’ve starred something, but there are no stars, only hearts.

So what’s been happening around the Internet lately, other than a lot of Twitter fights with annoying people who think I’m a godless baby-killer and/or a supporter of gross fatties? Here’s some useful and interesting stuff I learned.

• 

  Women aren’t like chewing gum. Tell your daughters. Image via Viewzone.

• Elizabeth Smart talks about how purity culture made her feel worthless after she was kidnapped and raped, because a girl who’s no longer a virgin is a used-up piece of chewing gum. And how that belief can make a girl who’s been victimized accept further abuse as her due instead of trying to find a way out. (Via Christian Science Monitor.)
• World Net Daily can prove Obama is demonically possessed, because flies. (Via Right Wing Watch.)
• Quoting Quiverfull demonstrates that actual Christians advise emotionally abused women to “turn the other cheek”. Sure, it might destroy or even end your earthly life, but you’ll have treasure in heaven while he’s getting what’s coming to him. (Via No Longer Quivering.) Related: this piece from Love, Joy, Feminism.
•  Allessia explains the all-too-common experience of abused women who learn to doubt themselves because friends and family criticize their failure to comply – “he’s got so much stress! you have to make the little sacrifices to make the marriage work! don’t make it all about you!” – in a system that had become an abusive, controlling one-way street.
• 

  Who says black girls can’t do Lolita outfits? Image via Black Girls in Lolita Fashion on Facebook.

  Whenever women try to put our accomplishments, talents, and interests front and center, we’re criticized for being ugly while we do it. But when we pay attention to our looks . . . (Via Feminist Disney.)

• Indian girls learn martial arts to fight back against a culture of rape. (Via This Is Rape Culture.)
• Deconstructing someone’s angry rant about race-specific and fat-specific costume blogs, and their failure to recognize that these blogs are needed to give minority groups in a cosplay community a place to actually be visible. (Via This Is Thin Privilege.)
• After an abortion, women who are depressed or upset may be reacting to the emotions they expect to have. But what role should post-abortive emotions play in the question of whether women should have access? (Via Feminist Disney.)
• 

  The book Jill Stanek thinks will ruin your children with its pictures of body parts they have on their own bodies. Image via University of Missouri’s Parentlink.

  Jill Stanek is really freaked out about some textbooks about sex aimed at school-aged readers (containing anatomically accurate cartoon-style drawings of kids’ bodies, because they’re books for kids) which Planned Parenthood recommends as resources parents might find helpful in a discussion about sexuality with their kids. The horror. (Via Jill Stanek.)

• It’s okay to indoctrinate kids if you’ve got Jesus . . .  but Ken Ham is furious that atheists might also address kids with their godless beliefs. (Via Pharyngula.)
• Reason gave us the Holocaust! Only you know it’s not true, because Fox News said it. (Via Friendly Atheist.)
• When our bodies think they must consume our fat stores for survival, they’re not about to let us run out of fat. (Via Dances With Fat.)

Chick Tract Scrapbook Sunday: Is Allah Like You?

Last week’s tract had a lot of theology, mythology, and history thrown together in it. Don’t worry, though – this week’s tract is going to be a much lighter Jack-Chick-style blend of hurtful stereotypes and baseless sermonizing on what happens when Jesus comes into your life.

Created by Sara Lin Wilde.

I feel like perhaps this scrapbook page needs something more in that blank space, but the turquoise paper is so pretty, I’m not sure I could bear to cover it up.

Religion Without Consequences: A Once-Catholic Woman’s Perspective

Screencap by Sara Lin Wilde.

It’s hardly unusual logic. In essence, it’s Pascal’s Wager - you’re safer to live as if there is a God and be wrong than to live as if there is none and be unpleasantly surprised on Judgment Day. But the idea that believing in God entails no risk makes my blood boil. I am so angry over the above comment, over the suggestion that assenting to God’s existence and living according to the principles of the Bible would entail no risk whatsoever.

Maybe for Jesse T. Maguire, a (presumably) straight white male, that’s true. If only everyone could be that lucky.

A History Lesson: The Nazis Were Not Gay-Friendly

This was somebody’s life. A person wore this. Image via The Freedom Files.

I wouldn’t have thought I even had to say it. I really thought it was common knowledge. The Holocaust primarily targeted Jews, but there were other groups persecuted as well. Your sexual orientation could get you thrown into Auschwitz (or other, equally-unpleasant camps) as surely as your race or religion. (Or, of course, your disability or Communist leanings . . . but all that is for another post, another day.) I genuinely thought everybody knew that the Nazis were not gay-friendly.

Then I came across Stan Solomon, a right-wing talk show host, insisting (among other things) that the gays were behind Nazism:

Homosexuality is destructive of the individual, destructive of the society and every society in the history of the world that has accepted homosexuality has crashed and burned. Someone tell me where I’m wrong. Many people don’t know that the Nazi party was born out of a homosexual group; they call it the pink swastika.

Someone tell me where I’m wrong . . .

Nutritional Information Versus Calorie Counts

I am getting so tired of the whole Oatmeals sign controversy on Twitter. So bloody tired.

When I first found it, I was really excited about the idea that somebody wanted to call attention to the body-shaming way advertising (in all its forms, not just in this particular sign) reinforces food obsession and the drive to become thin as something everyone (but especially every woman) should take for granted as part of a normal, healthy thought process.

The ever-important calorie: sole arbiter of a woman’s worth. Image via Leila’s Journey to Life.

Now I’m mostly just fed up with people who are retweeting me ad nauseum with the same worn, tired message: “It’s just giving out nutritional information so people have the freedom to make informed choices. Why are you pro-censorship? Why are you against freedom?”

Clearly these are people who haven’t actually read my full-form thoughts on the matter and don’t really care about what I think; they just want to defend the right to think they’re better than somebody who weighs more. That happens when you continue to reinforce the message that a person’s goodness and worthiness correlates to a number on the scale.

And it’s easier to do when context-free calorie counts, accompanied by fat-shaming reminders about how you should hate your body, get treated like real nutritional information.