Periodically I see one of those "if Jesus had a gun he'd still be alive" things and I'm just left shaking my head at how casually some folks will undercut the central idea of their faith and blaspheme their own God just to justify owning weapons of murder Like, if Jesus lives? There's literally no genesis for the existence of Christianity. We'd be sitting around in temples dedicated to Saturn or whatever and reading about this first century psycho who went on a killing spree murdering innocent Jews and Romans.

So I will. This is the story of Shri Vitthoba, who is also know as Vitthala or Panduranga, who is Vishnu himself present on earth. This deity is a big part of Bhakti worship in the South and West of India, centered around Maharashtra and Karnataka

https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/1360040289562370049

Vitthoba, is the lord who stands on a brick, arms on his hips, awaiting his devotee. He's an incredibly huge cultic figure and commands incredible devotion, and his praises have been sung by some of the greatest devotional saints and poets in Hinduism

in my youth, my brother and i used to love election night. we'd watch so much cspan and shit (my parents wouldn't spring for real cable) and be riveted and fixated on random city council races in tennessee and local water board elections in montana, and it was just cool and from there i started paying attention hard core to elections in other countries too. i remember i was in Singapore during the elections in 2006 or something, and i was having lengthy debates with locals about party politics there

Today's my grandmother's 95th (ish? Records from that far back are real hazy) birthday and she still went out to the polls to vote in Philly for a woman who could have been her granddaughter. There are millions of stories like this, of immigrants making their way in America. She was married way too young to a man way way older than her, who died when she was in her forties and left her with six kids to feed, and yet, all of them went through college and set up their lives here, got married, created a community.

So Navratri, the 9 day goddess festival, starts this weekend. It's a great time to reconnect with your faith heritage, if that was a thing you were interested in, and god knows this week is gonna be real testing for our mental health i was doing some reading as part of study to figure out how best to jump in, and i came across the Devi Kshama Prarthana, or the forgiveness prayer, from one of the many Durga pujas out there