Atheist utilitarian technology professional here. I read tarot. Not because I believe anything mystical is coming through the cards. They just happen to be a very rich and rounded set of symbology to lay out and use to talk through a topic. I have never had anyone walk away from one of my readings without saying “that was more interesting than I thought it was going to be.” Of course my style is very interactive and I involve them a lot as we go. Of course others out there take an oracular approach that’s utter horseshit.
"I play therapist by telling my clients they are the decrepit goblin that stumbled into the stinky swamp and ask them if they want to try to get out of it by using the enchanted axe or call upon the great dragon to lift them up."
Indeed. Sometimes it's helpful to filter your thoughts through a different lense, and tarot can spark ideas or aspects you hadn't considered as you try to fit things within the context of the cards you're seeing.
I don't know about a lot of religions, but have so far only heard about Mormons banning coffee. Everything else seems to apply to multiple (that I know of) except that. But might hear of another today, I'll be one of the lucky 10,000.
I've been on the world since before I can remember. It used to be pretty fun, honestly, but I can tell it's just eating my soul away bit by bit. Unless something changes soon there won't be anything left.
Tap for /s
Just kidding, I hate this place. I really am happy for you though. It's not easy.
There's nothing wrong with tarot as a concept. It's a wonderful self reflection and guided meditation tool. Just don't ascribe magical precognitive powers to it and you're fine.
The card that portends doom is the Tower, usually. There are as many interpretations of Tarot as there are folks that read it, but Death usually means “change.”
Tarot is largely harmless; it’s odd how upset folks on Lemmy get over it. It’s mostly middle aged women and queer men who do it for fun. I use it as a way of organizing my thoughts sometimes - I own a few decks which I enjoy as art pieces and brainstorming tools. I’ll read for friends sometimes and I’m pretty open about the fact that I’m mostly leaning on what the cards do in the Binding of Isaac.
"You drew a royal flush, congratulations. That means the local mayor will give you an enema. Since it's in the suit of clubs, that means it'll happen on Tuesday afternoon. That'll be $30, thanks. Go get flushed, retard."
There's a bunch of card games you can play with tarot decks. People should mention this more so that they become more popular again. The people using them for non game reasons is the same as if they were using a Yu-Gi-Oh deck for it.
PS: the standard 52 deck is also a kind of tarot deck.
No, we use it as a reframing device. You basically point a random story generator at currently relevant facets of your life. This helps you to see them from a new perspective, which can get you unstuck when you have reasoned yourself into a corner.
There's absolutely no belief in magic necessary to use it.
Yeah, that one's a Mormon thing. The rule only covers coffee and tea if you want to be pedantic about it, though there are many 'spirit of the law' type people who avoid caffeine entirely.
Unless you're into that. (I assure you, it's way more exciting if you let me occasionally kill a character. I promise it won't happen too often, and it'll be in the oneshots... which i tune to be challenging.)
but if you play with a carebear DM... you'll get fluff campaigns.
Killer DMs are fine, so long as they show up with a stack of character sheets and you know what you're getting into. There's a D&D variant called "Kobolds Ate My Baby" where you immediately respawn the turn after you die as a new Kobold and charge right back into the mix.
if you play with a carebear DM… you’ll get fluff campaigns
Story heavy campaigns with generous rules for resurrection and a focus on social interaction over combat give you more time to engage in high drama. When you're not worried about a bad die roll ending a character arc, you don't feel the urge to minmax in order to have fun and can play up the fluffier aspects of the game.
Perma-Death also tends to mean more when it happens less often. Having an "In Memoriam" game for a beloved character means a bit more than throwing half a dozen alts into a ditch.
Yoga originated as meditative practice in Hinduism with some spiritual goals that are a bit more than just the more generic “mindfulness” you might find in your typical modern fitness class.
(It’s also found in Buddhism and Jainism,)
The physical stretches and poses are great for healthy, low intensity exercise; and meditation is a thing that exists basically in every religious flavor you’d like; so it’s certainly possible to make even a “fundie-approved” version, but eh. Good luck with that.
Ultimately it could have been lumped into “other beliefs”,
It's legitimately a religion, the other organized religions don't like these ancient forms of religion that don't require payments to participate in, and can be learned for free. It really cuts into their business model.
Don't try to understand the mind of a fundie christian.
I've heard sermons that claimed "psychology" was a religion. Their problem with yoga is similar. (It has connections to hinduism. At least that's part of it.)
A lot of megachurches have classes/programs that are almost exactly yoga, but by a different name. The name they give it escapes me.
Hell. There are shops on Amazon that sell yoga stuff (mats, balls, shorts, whatever) without calling it "yoga" balls or "yoga" mats so christians don't feel sinful buying it.
And yes, they're just retailers buying yoga gear wholesale (or drop-ship or whatever) and listing it without using the word "yoga."
Edit: Googling to find if there's a common name for the christian version of yoga, I found this god-awful thing.
''Don't get sucked into this horrible devil religion that Yoga is! Instead, Take My copywriten and trade marked program instead. good news, for a fee we can train YOU to be a certified bottom of the pyramid scheme block so you can teach ''downward facing GOD IS LOVE'' to your local collection of suckers, saps, rubes, and marks!!''
The term “yoga” in Hindu practice refers to a lot more than just the physical exercises. The idea that one just goes to a yoga studio for workouts doesn’t mesh with traditional practice at all. There’s a lot of spiritual components that get left out by the upper middle class white women who run studios.
My ex-mother outlaw wouldn't do yoga because she thought it was a religion or witchcraft or something (ETA: and thus thought it imperiled her eternal soul because she might pick up some beliefs) and she was a mainline Baptist so yeah, yoga.
It is technically part of a repressive religion itself so the placement in the list does seem a bit odd to me, but the nuance is that nonpractitioners can use it to stretch and exercise without any spiritualism.
It absolutely started as a religious practice. There are various forms of yoga that are used as mediation practices in Hinduism.
That said, Westerners almost never practice yoga that way. They'll sprinkle in a generous helping of, "namaste" but they're basically doing it as a form of light exercise.
It's like if a bunch of Indians saw a Catholic ceremony and said, "That's a pretty good workout. Stand up, sit down, kneel, sit, kneel, stand. It's not a religious thing, I just go to mass for leg day."
The church I grew up in offered "yoga style stretching class" that did not have any heathen influences like gongs or deep breathing or Sanskrit names for stuff, was separated by gender, did not allow yoga pants or bare midriffs and avoided any postures that flaunted the privates. You know.. to avoid giving Satan(TM) a foothold in your nether bits.
My mother is pretty liberal by my country's standards, but she is nonetheless religious and I knew deep down all her restrictions "just because" was due to religion. She think I "might get ideas". It occurred to me that religious people are prurient, or ironically dirty minded. Most kids and people don't give dirty meanings to things unless you taught them specifically.
Yeah my partner grew up in that sort of household. Same for Scooby Doo. Kinda blew my mind.
I think my parents only made me go to church twice as a kid and I watched those cartoons all the time, understanding full well that they were just cartoons.
I mean I'm kind of afraid of the world. This planet has earthquakes and volcanoes and pandemics and tsunamis and prions and cancer and war and landmines and maybe a big asteroid every billion years.
No reason not to enjoy everything we've got, of course. It's still the best home.
I can see things like LGTBQ+, your own body/sexuality, and alcohol depending on who you ask, but why yoga, the world, or coffee? Yes these things can be scary to some people, but certainly aren't things to be taught to be feared unless you are trying to create something similar to brainwashed slaves.
Some religions, for example Mormonism, picked up a taboo of coffee and tea alongside other abolitionist sentiments popular at the time, with similar reasoning to alcohol - caffeine is a psychoactive drug, so it's not "pure." Mormonism was founded when early puritanical and evangelical Christian movements grew rapidly in the US, and you'll see a similar taboo among other Christian sects originating in this time period.
Yoga probably has the same taboo in American Christianity as Dungeons and Dragons once did during the satanic scare era, and that taboo is likely only due to the link to spiritualist practices in yoga. To the brainwashed evangelical, since it's not Christianity, it's Satan.
You're supposed to "be IN the world, not OF the world."
It means that while you technically live here, among other people, you're supposed to hold yourself apart from whatever those people are doing. It leads to a whole "that's not meant for me" mindset where you avoid learning new things because that might make you too knowledgeable and worldly. Like, you could befriend non-Mormons, but it really should be for the purposes of converting them, not to get to know them or have a diverse social circle. You shouldn't let any of THEM influence YOU in any way. Mormons are weird.