1415
Crystals
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
People will shit on crystals believers in one breath and tell people to 'respect other's religion' in another or gloat about their MBTI assessment. The cognitive dissonance is unreal.
I don't believe in either but at least I'm consistent. If you're not, then you're just finding an excuse to hate on a hobby that primarily attracts women.
This is the same thing that happens to anything that women likes: pumpkin spice lattes, uggs, horoscopes, tarot cards, rose, etc. It's seen as trivial and stupid no matter how banal the average person's interest are regardless of gender.
Pro tip: the difference between faith healers and organized religions and belief systems is that, by and large, priests do not seek out people who are vulnerable, charge them three figures per psychic session, and then try to upsell crystals that do nothing on top of it. You'll never hear someone say "respect their religion" in regards to Scientology.
Also
Bro, have you seen how much people shit on sports, beer, and other stereotypically masculine interests? People shit on basic things because they're basic and some people use them as a substitute for a personality, not because women like them.
What are you talking about, every organized religion does this. If people weren't vulnerable to being deceived, there wouldn't be any religious institutions. And I'll spare you the longwinded rant about the pressure to tithe other than to say that it exists and it's extremely aggressive.
Also, you're very much proving their point unintentionally. Quote from the first sentence in the wikipedia article for the slang term 'basic' :
You're using a gendered insult to dismiss their claims of bias based on gender lines. I usually try to be more constructive than this but wow are you off the mark here.
Religion panders to the vulnerable, that I'll grant you. But no major organized religion I'm aware of, apart from scientology, actively tries to soak people. (And before you say it, the collection plate does not count.) We respect people's beliefs as long as the people who tell them to believe them aren't doing so because they know the things they're peddling are total bunk and just want vulnerable people's money.
Second of all, I wasn't even aware that "basic" was a gendered insult. What I meant was that people make fun of mainstream things because they're mainstream, and have since time immemorial, and that people who follow whatever the mainstream believes in lieu of having a personality deserve to be mocked.
We used to call them “tv preachers”. They’d be on all the time with a phone number on the screen to call and donate money. Over time they became “mainstream” that millions now follow and now they’re loosely called “Evangelicals”. They’re nominally “Christian”, functionally “Protestant” but most do not follow a particular established denomination.
Make no mistake, the “soaking” is central to that form of “Christianity”.
And I would not ask anyone to "respect the beliefs" of someone whose only religion comes in the form of televangelism. There is a big difference between a religious leader and a charlatan, and it is our duty as friends and family members to try to help get people out from under the thumb of the latter.
As an aside, the Jewish religion specifically discourages this.
Have you considered that there's more than one person on the internet? One person can say one thing and another person say the opposite and no one has been a hypocrite.
Anyway, I'd say we should respect people's right to practice what they want, but we can still make fun of it. I probably would say don't do it to their face, but that's up to you.
I don't think standing by and letting people get scammed is the right move either
Wait shiny rocks have a gender now?
In a lot of the Romance languages. ;)
Respecting others' religions and crystals - I'd only recommend not using the fact they believe in things that don't exist against them. No need to indulge them. No need to do things differently for their benefit.
MBTI - in the workplace it's pretty low value and low predictive power. Testing is unreliable. It's easy to hit whatever set of letters you think are desired in your workplace with a little practice. In groups of MBTI fans it seems more useful, but those groups try very hard to place themselves into correct categories, and it does predict useful dynamics in interactions between people of different MBTI types.
Hobbies that attract women - I don't think that's pertinent, where you see more women into crystals you see men more likely to believe in magic devices for cars.
Belief in magic is pretty even between the genders and pretty common
I was interested and looked up some studies. There is a gender gap in spiritual believe and women tend to be more spiritual, including believing in magic. So OPs statement in that regards holds.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying everything that op wrote is correct or that I agree, but the starting point they used, that women tend to belive in magical stuff more often, seems to be true.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340544674_Examining_the_roles_of_Intuition_and_Gender_in_Magical_Beliefs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8617579/