Origen says you will be an orb
Also, if Elon Musk kills Twitter, what happens to Relics?
Thanks for bearing with me last week, and thank you to everyone who sent me more posts — I will try and include as many as possible in the coming weeks! Keep them coming, please!
Next week I’m going on annual leave from Maundy Thursday and visiting my parents in Brisbane. Then I’m going to visit my home town of Darwin for the first time since 2007. Not sure how that will affect this newsletter, but I’ll do my best to post something.
No gender, no worries, only orb
I’ve wanted to write about this for ages. One of my favourite jokes from Weird Christian Twitter is that the early Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria was right — at the end of the world we will all be resurrected as orbs.
The reasoning? The sphere is the perfect shape, and post-resurrection we will be made perfect, including our bodies. Therefore: orb.
Origen was a controversial figure in his time, and not all of his teachings (like the pre-existance of souls) were accepted as orthodox by the church. Also his contemporaries liked to spread rumours about him, including that he had castrated himself as a young man in the mistaken belief the Bible told him to do so. Still, he remains one of the most influential Christian theologians and most prolific writers in all of antiquity.
It’s possible the orb thing is a mistranslation or a deliberate misunderstanding of what Origen taught, but I’m not here to do theology I’m here to talk about shitposts! The idea that one of Christianity’s most notable theologians said at the end of time we’d all be rolling around in our perfectly spherical bodies is incredibly funny to me. I can’t wait to have my Violet Beauregarde moment.
Origen became a big deal on Christian Twitter in 2019 when theologian David Bentley Hart used Origen’s work to argue for universal salvation in his book That All Shall Be Saved. Think about it, if he is right, even people who aren’t Christians will become orbs. There is no escape! You too, will be an orb!
Bentley Hart’s book stirred a lot of controversy and it was around this time that the orb jokes really took off, and they’ve never really stopped. Now whenever I find myself at odds with my body or think about how apocalyptic the world is, I think: “Orb :)”
SpongeBob is a Muslim this is canon
I am obsessed with official cartoon Twitter pages marking significant religious holidays.
Imagine getting halfway through a surah and your prayer mat runs out of battery
Islamophobic cat
What if Elon kills Twitter?
Elon Musk’s acquisition of 9.2 per cent of Twitter this week sparked a scary little thought for me: What happens if the company goes under and I lose my main source of content for this newsletter? Facebook is already a graveyard and garbage dump – what if Twitter is not far behind?
Of course, religion online will continue, but likely in what Ryan Broderick describes as “dark social” spaces like group chats, DMs and Discord servers. These facilitate community well, but don’t show up in search results, so these interactions are hidden from the average internet user.
This would make running Modern Relics as a hobby much harder, because it would take more work to unearth what’s happening with religion online. But then there’s no way to compare my corner of religious dark social media to religion on social media generally, because it’s not searchable. (Actually this is already a problem, but unindexed socials would make it even worse).
I’ve felt that I should be diversifying the source of my content for a long time, which is why I got TikTok and am dabbling in Reddit again, but if there are other places I should be looking, let me know.
Reusing sacred flowers
I never considered the concept of “temple waste”, or what remains after leaving an offering at an alter. Turns out there are tons of sacred flowers that get washed down the Ganges becasue they aren’t allowed to be reused for a secular purpose. An Indian startup has found a way around the restriction by recycling them into incense.
A fully Sikh pun
One more orb post
Context, for those who need it.
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