was I wrong about religion

Came down on a lightning nine months in my mother's when I was born , a midwife screaming shout , I had fire brimstone coming out of my boat .

I am for on oh no , no , no , no , no , no , no .

I'm aware what cultural appropriation is .

I just don't care .

I believe that a white person can practice an African traditional religion .

She really collected his locks , she really collected his loss and black spiritual traditions .

They also matter .

Foreign land is now CJ V X Suban .

I'm not starting to signify B sides .

This is my new area to vent my thoughts .

This guy is gonna just , just move out and shut the fuck up and you're gonna listen to me and just believe things that I say , make sure that you subscribe to the CJ V X youtube channel if you haven't already , I'm sure that you have because my channel is like 10 times the size of this .

We interrupt this program to bring you the recovering homophobe show starring foreign , the recovering homophobe .

My be listen , we got to talk in this video .

I asked you to hold me accountable of ridding myself of homophobia in this bigotry support group .

You are my sponsor , not to be confused with today's sponsor , curiosity stream a Nebula .

Your job is to keep me on the straight and narrow path .

Actually , wait , you hold me accountable .

And I volunteered my mistakes that I could have easily kept in the drafts and avoid outrage .

But I regret to inform you that I fall off the wagon .

It was leg day and you know , I the leg god , you're imbo reporting for booty .

But unbeknownst to me , my squats would be stopped but a stressed dame needed help lifting a heavy weight , which is exactly why you come to the gym .

Why are you here ?

But like a moth to a flame or to trans people simply existing .

I've jolted to this task if I would lift weights this way regularly , my vein would have pop more than my car but here's where the bigotry begins .

I go on back and I drop my arse to the grass like I talking Megan knees right now on us .

I rewrote the ball .

I see this man in my periphery as instinctively as breathing my face suddenly suck a lime .

I look like this .

I turn around with the most attitude .

I turned around like how may I help you ?

Hey , foreign .

I clutch my nonexistent pearls of performance .

Ahem .

Man with shorts an inch from being briefed in a crop top cocoa butter to bitch was a foreigner and I wrongfully assumed that they like and I felt wretched beyond the fact that they are a foreigner and they obviously watch these videos .

But because I supposed to be better than this , I supposed to be this beacon of progressive masculinity .

But my homophobia red , it's ugly head .

So I sublimate it .

I say my bad family hard .

Go you good .

But that's when I noticed that this man been licking his lips like and dogging me with his eyes .

Like I'm in that moment .

I felt like every girl that dared to tread a station for court at four o'clock in the morning , I was being preyed upon a position that assists that black man like me is rarely in a position as foreign to me as missionary .

But I couldn't be positive as to what this was .

You know , maybe my lip was just that dry and maybe he had a lazy eye till he asked me one question that I never hear in my life .

Prepare your ass for the W L A straight man can endure .

I know the persecuted straights my boy draw a symbol on his face and ask me if I is a man my whole clench , right ?

Like Arthur roll up like fruit , roll up and my torso gone into fight or flight because man is equivalent to the f slur in every country outside of the turf kingdom .

I was shocked one that he even said the slur in the first place and two that I was given saucy Santana enough that he didn't even ask me that question in the first place .

So in a valiant attempt to defend my straightness , I tell this man to get from Ron here with the , I use my deep barat tone voice and let everybody in the gym know that my holes .

I exit only I storm out the gym because I was too upset to even finish my set .

I felt like my masculinity was under attack .

So I go home and I asked one of my queer bres them if I give off gay vibes and rightfully so he asked , why does it matter ?

I'm not question alone , sent me down a rabbit hole of rumination .

Why did it matter that this man found me attractive ?

Why did I get mad at the proposition , the mayor proposal that a man found me attractive when I was just fine with performing thor for the local Jim instead of seeing his attraction to me being a commentary on my masculinity , I should have seen it for what it was .

Two genders found me sexy that day .

But I didn't feel sexy .

I felt like a fraud because I've been preaching progressivism and performing homophobia and the stain of performing progressivism whilst bottling my inner colonial mind is painful because it resembles the dichotomy that I break down in these videos .

But this ain't the end to the era of my ways because after talking to today's guests .

I may have been wrong about religion .

First off , what's your relationship with your spirituality ?

If at all , I'm conservative also , I'm uh believe in God and God is conservative too .

Turns out actually , I'll fuck with that voodoo shit .

But first I just get one notification that caused me pull over on the side of the road .

I thought that this guy was going for good , but out of nowhere she dropped a movie , they were handed an incredible challenge with adapting this series of books that at the time was considered unfilmable .

Lindsay Ellis is my big and be woman .

Them , listen , it has been a drought and it still is a drought on youtube because Lindsay Ellis's return to content creation is only available on my streaming service , Nebula and enough guess who dropped a whole damn series .

Gamergate isn't just another historical event for me .

This is something I lived through and the only way to get that new Lindsay Ellis on Anita S A is through the smartest bundle and streaming curiosity stream on Nebula .

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Not in a parental way , but you understand what they're saying .

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But they have absolutely no problem with monetizing content that makes us fight .

So for less than $15 a year , you could fight beside me , stimulate your brain in the process and not just tweet about it on Elon Musk , Twitter .

Click this link in the description to get access to the smartest bundle in streaming curiosity stream on Nebula .

Now come with me , Madison's video on New Age spirituality .

Touched me the last few years saw the rise of spirituality , Tik Tok .

But this hashtag is more than simply rubbing crystals together and doing your best .

Miss Cleo call me now for a free reading and find out that this community is a dumping ground of cultural appropriation .

The Children are a chal but dies in themselves in parodies of minority spirituality by the people .

It's like a s and get rewarded for it with thousands of views whilst drawing the ire of the respective minority communities .

But as all I just don't care because due to the lack of institutional power that these communities have , they rarely have avenues of redressing it .

Whether it's indigenous folk , watching white people talk about their spirit animal or burning white sage from Port Au Prince .

Watching a white gal go viral because she and and re enacting the scene from American horror story with a deity or there may be another form of justice or at least that's what it seemed in the case of Papale versus Caitlin Reston , the first video on my channel in my problematic Caribbean true crime era where a white woman called upon a deity in the Oba tradition .

Now , I ain't going into the specifics of voodoo or OBA because there's already a video like that actually a couple of them right up here .

But from that sentence alone , it's enough to make some practitioners of both traditions suck their teeth lights And that is due to the fact that these traditions are believed to be exclusive to black people that make matters worse .

It is alleged that Caitlin Reston called upon Papale to vex her partner , which violates a core tenant of this tradition that when you wish harm upon another person , expect it to come back 10 fold .

So when people heard of the untimely passing of Caitlin Reston , they were very quick to attribute it to our practices .

And let me tell you something .

When I was talking about that .

In another video , the comment section was full of a trio .

I'm like putting myself in the place of a spirit .

If I saw that a colonizer was trying to like summon me need to work out her relationship issues .

I might just have to kill a bitch too .

Cases such as these have only been exacerbated online where spirituality is less about healing than it is about capitalism .

MS Cleo existed long before the rest of these mediums , but this is a safe space for black women .

So I'm trying to pick on black women because you could pretty much go to any corner of the internet for us because we have plenty of other examples of capitalism , corrupting spirituality .

The spirituality community in general is so tied into wellness and it's the minute it becomes an industry is already doomed .

So I think that has more to do with anything , the capitalism of it all because we're talking about our spirits and exchanging money and products to connect to our spirits .

If it's gonna be online on tiktok or something , there's always gonna have to be a side I looked at on it because right now online is a space where people can make money and it's the wild west and it's Griff City .

So whether it be a litany of mega churches led by Skeleton Joe Biden and President .

Well , foolishness with Liberty University in instances such as these are constant reminders of how religion can be for fiscal fisting from capitalists .

Lest we forget Columbus coming to my country , praying with the indigenous folks , the Lucas .

And at the end of this prayer , they had the Bible and he had the resources .

This has been the matrix for my views on religion .

Having grown up anglican to very pious grandparents , a grandfather that played the organ and church religiously pun intended all in an effort to get to heaven after a lifetime of giving my grandmother literal hell on earth rest his soul .

I can vividly recall sitting in peace to be lectured to on how to be a man by a trifling Felonious infidel priests .

I remember going to confirmation classes to learn how to be holy by the most unholy men .

I'm matriculating through a Catholic school where you fondle the balls of a rosary in the hot sun for hours .

This is a footnote in the trauma of growing up in a Christian nation .

I knew Tube's aunt as well as one of my dear friends , aunt recalls their experience growing up Muslim .

And I could hear the parallels .

I had to stop being Muslim to even be able to consider having sex outside of marriage .

It took me a while before I started eating pork and I felt like I could not be a Muslim and still live the life I wanted to live .

I started asking too many questions about the dinosaurs .

And I was like , but if the dinosaurs aren't in the Koran , then how do we know that they didn't just write this after the dinosaurs are already it ?

You laugh .

But that was a question that got me out of Islam .

I was like , wait a minute .

That was your egg moment for Islam .

The dinosaurs though these are the mainstream religions that our indigenous ones were eclipsed by to the point where people of color fear voodoo and Oba not realizing that they are actually remnants vestiges of our heritage .

Yeah .

Because it's like , been demonized so much that even I'm like , I don't want to fuck with that .

Like , exactly .

But above capitalism , above the closed nature of these religions , the most painful part about how they were appropriated is due to the context of the customs , many marginalized traditions are synonymous with some .

So when white folks adorn themselves in voodoo costumes for Halloween , they're mocking spitting stomping on the actual traditions that these were inspired by .

I think a lot of us don't even know the traditional religions that we might have had based off of our ancestors .

From way way back .

There was an attempt , an actual like true attempt in Canada and the US for indigenous folks to strip them of their culture and religion and language with residential schooling , African slaves being given new names .

The yearning for a nostalgia of something you don't even know what you see on tiktok and the actual traditions , the actual spirituality that remixes parodies travesties of what it actually was .

But the scenes from Bond and American or story now super see the actual spirituality it was influenced by and the kids come out the theater after they watch Nope by Jordan Peele singing The Man by Exuma , na na na na na na na .

And they have no idea what they talking about .

Oh , it's fully for aesthetics .

These girls on tiktok with their incense and their crystals and the witch , they didn't burn me kind of thing .

And it's like you really like to growing up .

Of course , you're going to go buy rose quartz and a little spell book and be like , I'm literally a witch and I make herb concoctions .

It's tea , it's not about salvation or guidance .

And I think that's why a lot of people get upset when white people partake in like voodoo or practices that have roots in Native American culture .

It's because all of these things like when it comes to religion , I was rooted in pain .

This was the actual thesis of this video until it got ruined .

I had all the usual beats capitalism .

BG White supremacy bag .

Did I miss a reading ?

After made this point , I knew this video wouldn't be the same we existed before whiteness came and found out about us .

Maybe there are some aspects of religion that were born or Black spirituality that's born out of pain and suffering .

But a lot of it is just out of tradition .

I've been fighting these institutions so long that I forgot the ground of which they were built upon .

It's so enticing .

It's so easy to go to the go to the male factors that we typically go to the usual suspects .

But it comes at a cost and the cost of course is writing off any other argument , any other possibility .

So sure , I can easily say that much of our spirituality is sorted to suffering , but that will be only half true .

And just like I wrote off any other permutations of truth in this argument , who's to say I didn't do it for anything else .

Who's to say , I in close conversations thinking that there was nothing to be gained there because I was already right .

The people I push away because their beliefs don't coincide with my own .

So to have them there is to support the things I feel for people on this flight , fighting the fight against binaries .

We sure do love that .

You gotta be this or that and or in between because if you in between you in favor of our force , but can two things be true at the same time ?

Can you be a progressive 90% of the day on a bigger 10% ?

And you said you were like you were like , yeah , you could , you could be racist and nice and I'm not gonna put that in the video .

I might have to at this point .

Well , yeah , well , I'm forcing you to my grandma .

My Indian grandma is like , she's racist .

Um And also , and also my grandma and I love her and also girl boss like problematic girl boss .

This is a thing that , that is true that people wouldn't say problem that I have with that is just that it is not real , like it's not compatible with reality because that requires you to make this split in your head where you're like , this is me in my social justice brain where I believe all these things and then I have to about 15% for when I'm hanging up with grandma and I love my grandma and I have to just put that somewhere else for a minute because grandma's racist .

But also like , I love her and she's , you know , kind of great or whatever .

That's my problem with the Christianity thing .

Most Christians have this psychological split where they have this like these Christian beliefs that are very puritanical , but then they have this split where it turns right the fuck off because they need to deal with like something else right now .

CJD X was really the one that ruined this video because there was a clear hypothesis , a clear answer before he came .

But within minutes of talking to them , that path was obfuscated .

The signs was there though because was muddy in the waters before CJD X even came on the chance that your father met your mother and they connected and they got together and then that sperm got into that egg .

The fact that that happens and the fact that you were created that you're on earth at this very time that you get to see these trees .

That is a miracle .

People get really sad about the fact that like , maybe , you know , for me , paradox , maybe we're the only people , only living things in the universe .

The universe is cold and dead and it doesn't care about us .

And I understand that that's a sad feeling .

But to me , I choose to see it as the chances of earth even being able to sustain in life .

If I don't believe in God and I can believe in that the chances of that happening , it is a miracle .

So it should be appreciated and we should have reverence for it and you don't have to have that by believing in God .

One of my favorite articles I ever encountered in my graduate studies was the correlation between religiosity and poverty , the poorer .

You are the more religious you are , which makes so much sense when I think of nanny of the maroons , the slave rebellion of the Jamaicans where they thwarted military might and advanced weaponry or the Haitian revolution where to certainly overture , employed magical problem .

But he is the freest people from the French , the Negro spirituals that got black Americans through soul crushing slavery .

Religion has been the foundation of many marginalized movements .

It has been the gun that has protect minorities from their oppressors , but it's also the very gun that put them in the subjugation in the first place .

So what does one do with that dichotomy ?

What gets you through the darkest of nights , you have power in the stuff that you believe in and this may sound how it's gonna sound .

But like after I stopped being religious , I didn't have anything .

And so I have mental health issues as well .

So it really doesn't help because it's like , well , fuck , I don't have anything to rely on sometimes .

I really wish I could believe in God because I'm like , that would at least help some things .

But I don't , I really don't .

When my aunt passed away , there were moments where I was like , I wish I believed in ghosts .

Listen , I surrender if there is some entity way of being able to see her again , just so I can say what's up .

Let that be a thing .

Like please let that be a thing .

So when my grandfather , the complicated man that gave my grandmother so much grief when he passed away , and my grandmother boil out in agony to a God that ain't answer .

You think that I was gonna tell her that God ain't real .

Where's your , your prayers ?

But let's not forget that these very churches , these churches of healing are also churches of harming God's arms are open to you .

You're always walk .

He hates you now .

But once you see the light , this dissonance of knowing that church is the home of homophobia , misogyny and having to see it also be the home of healing of helping the dissonance is me trying to hold on to that binary because reality is messy .

It's nuanced , which in my mind has always been contradictory because Christianity pushes these binaries of good and bad heaven and hell and there's nothing in between or maybe so I thought because according to CJD X , those aren't Christians at all institutional powers , your local churches that you suspect are gonna love you for doing all this stuff .

They resent it a little bit because they're not doing that .

Yeah .

Existence is a contradiction to this .

It is , it is because you're interpreting Jesus's words and you're like Jesus said to do this .

So we're literally doing this and they're like , don't you want to help with our mission ?

We're raising $4000 to renovate our lobby .

And I'm like , we don't care about your fucking lobby .

Like there's people that actually require help .

Now , it's crazy .

The renovations , the renovations there is always renovations .

I just , you're now making this video essay with me because the hypothesis that I started with , I don't think I'm there anymore , but I'm beginning to get a little bit more clear on this .

I believe that just as voodoo was co-opted .

Christianity has also been co-opted .

Speaking of yay , if you're Christian , you have Jew Jewishness is part of your religion , like by necessity .

Oh my God , Christian anti Semites , unbelievable .

The Jews are an oppressed class under the Romans and they're looking towards their messiah and they're hoping that their messiah is gonna be this violent revolution that's going to put them back in power .

On one hand , the people on his team that want him to be this like violent hero of retribution .

And then on the other hand , the who are the religiously of the time his followers want , want this guy to like to , to explode and overturn society like through force and make the underclass the powerful and then you have the religious institution that is furious at the fact that this person is flagrantly disrespecting like the institution .

No , like legalistic religious law .

Jesus is a heretic .

He's hanging out with like all the people you're not supposed to , the prostitutes and the sinners and he's going to parties where everyone's fucking wasted .

And Mary Magdalene has like a titty out or whatever .

It's just like the religious leaders like get their way by uh killing him and that like also completely deprives like his number one fans of their fantasy of like this is gonna be like our salvation .

We're gonna get swords and money and shit .

And he's like , no , that was never the story actually .

Like I was here to die like I was here to , it was a different kind of revolution , a radical rejection of institutional power and morality and a rebuking of the fantasy of like , what does this look like ?

It looks like we win , looking at Jesus , get like co-opted and version to just like , of course , it's just the same shit where it's like people that are invoking this name as like an authoritarian power as like this is what's right and we need to defeat our enemies and people invoking this name and perverting it and turning it into law and like this oppressive um set of uh like legal legalistic nonsense that you can get people in technicalities and enforce your purity by how well you um adapt to these laws .

And it's becomes this money making institution thing .

It's not even new to have people do atrocities .

And it's not even like , I can't even be like , oh , this is Western perversion because we have all these issues with the industrial revolution .

No , no , no .

People started like so quickly being like , yeah , Jesus also let's murder people and burn people because of Jesus .

So it's like immediately it's been a perverse application .

Am I just misinterpreting it ?

Am I just like as this progressive person just applying my own morality to the thing ?

And it's really the truth of it is how it's been used .

Like the more true thing is like we'll actually trust those monsters because they're by far outnumbering you .

And then the maybe dark other thought that it's like dark but maybe even redemptive is like , I don't know , maybe that's how it's supposed to be in some ways though is like , what's more Christ like than being misinterpreted and used for uh horrible people to do their shit and what's more Christ like than for Christians to be required to be different from the rest of society .

Normally , I have this very well articulated answer with perspicuity and clarity and I feel bad because I have that few today but I think that's the point .

I think that these traditions , these religions are supposed to reflect reality and reality is messy .

Reality doesn't have perspicuity .

It's not clear .

It's often obfuscated and muddied , undulating shades of gray because we don't live in day .

We live in the city of man .

ST Augustine doesn't recognize gender , nonconformity .

I'm sorry .

The very polis that I studied is marked by the unknown by unpredictable bounds of opportunity .

And the agent that acts in the Polis is the person that sees his fortune .

The person that is not bogged down by the unknown , but instead embraces it .

Therefore , I need to submit to not knowing and me submitting to that concept is like submission to God , submission to Leviathan , someone that takes away some of your liberty , some of your autonomy and hopefully protects you .

Hopefully doesn't take advantage of you .

The idea that I must submit to something more powerful than myself , which is the Polis , which is the unknown , the fact that I could go outside and something could happen to me and it will irrevocably change my life .

That's real .

And that is in a way the very concept of God realizing that there are things beyond my control that I am at the behest of as common as rain or as rare as rapture that is God .

And wouldn't it be progressive to be open to that to be closed off to that ?

Due to the fact that it may threaten my reality in the way that I know the world sounds rather conservative as , as conservative as being closed off to a compliment in the form of a man making a move on you because you want to reaffirm your straightness and you think that embracing that compliment means that you're losing , that you're losing your masculinity .

You're losing the safety of what , you know , just as conservative as it is to write off Christianity because you think it's full of conservative crazy people .

So I gotta say , I'm sorry , I'm sorry about a lot .

What are you sorry about ?

Are you sorry about not seeing these videos yet as well as getting access to the smartest bundle and streaming ?

Because you should be click on that .

I can see it here you are now watching the Nebula Cut .