However, personally, I have an entirely different approach; and so far, I think it fits very elegantly and successfully.
However, 90% of the population would spit on it as blasphemous and see it as nothing but an attempt to undermine the power of divine authority.
It’s a really long conversation, but let me just place it that that there is true validity and need for what religion offers, and there really is something to what is going on there…just that it’s more carnal than we might have assumed critically.
Where most would dismiss religious holdings as needed psychologically for one thing or another, or just simply old dying systems of man that have since been surpassed, I am finding more and more that it’s actually possibly caused by a part of a basic function of our sensory system that we don’t really seem to grasp tangibly well and instead finds it’s expression in spiritual and religious forms.
This, of course, I am saying from my vantage as I see things.
But what I keep pondering and linking together seems to coincide in part with your typical standing; that once the sensation is laid out in expression for decree or mass communication in wrote, that it seems to reduce it’s authentic resolve as it once did.
But that instead of naturally being linked to corruption, that it is rooted instead in just the same problem one has trying to grab and define a dream that you just barely remember to begin with; that as soon as you attempt to attach labels, some of the concepts of what was perceived are altered by extension of the attached labels so that the recall of the subject matter changes, and so that conveying this to another person under the labels instantly lacks consistency to the original impulse, and is even less consistent now in the related to mind.
But, the essential impulse seems to be capable of persisting in conceptual translation…if you look at it just right.
And to this, I’m experimenting with the idea of a communication structure for conveying spiritual sensation between two people in a method that, hopefully, would translate the concepts more successfully by reducing actual labels and common language architecture.
However…this is painfully slow and very uncertain so far.
As I said, I don’t know what’s going on–conspiracy, short term statement of an individual or small group, or just an ungoverned shot in the dark. It remains to be seen if this is a trend, or not, or a trial baloon.
What about Avatar? You’ve got a hero who is both fully “Sky People” and fully “Na’vi”. He lives amongst the Na’vi, adapts to their ways and through self-sacrifice prevents the Sky People from killing all the Na’vi and everything that the Na’vi have been and will be for all time. That sounds an awful lot like Protestant Christianity to me! You’ve even got a scene near the end featuring an “empty coffin”!
Science fiction is filled with this sort of thing. Which makes a certain amount of sense . . .
Sure, normally Science Fiction subverts the dominant religious method, normally Christianity. But given that the person presenting the OP is themselves a heretic quite substantially divorced from Orthodoxy, I think the comparison is apt.
Right?
I can interpret Christianity in a variety of ways. I can create narratives of oppression based off of each them.
But unless I am very close to orthodoxy (however the culture conceives it – in America that almost certainly means Protestant but awkwardly includes Catholics and as a distant third Orthodox because, well, they are better than the Pagan alternative. As you well know, and the Romney Campaign demonstrated, LDSs, as a substantial heretical sect, rank somewhere between awkwardly accepted Christian sects [be they snake handlers or Maronites] and New Agers who accept Jesus but also overtly accept other, Pagan gods.) the narrative I create is bound to be entwined with my own heretical vision.
Except that I can’t have a heretical vision because I’m not Christian. TPT, on the other hand, can be a heretic. And I’m calling him out on that… If he gets to accept a heretical vision, why can’t Hollywood?
I can re-write Christ as a Bodhisattva. It is very easy. A proper Christian should find that notion offensive. A syncretic Christian can go crazy, but they risk denying Jesus as their exclusive savior. A truly heretical Christian can do a billion different things! But all of them involve denying tenets that are rather central to what it is to be Christian!
I’m fine with Christian heresy. After all, I think Christianity is wrong so it follows that if the truth is real there will be Christian heretics. What gets in my craw is them somehow presenting themselves as Christian!
The motivation for making the movie. They didn’t risk all that money on a piece of propaganda like this without a reason. Hollywood is becoming less and less timid about politics, and people are coming to expect it. They want to see the guns fired for something more than just seeing the flash and hearing the bang. But it remains to be seen if Hollywood can lead people to pull for the tyrants or not. I think not, but nothing’s guaranteed. Eli is not a fluke, it’s a change in strategy.
Just another poverty exploiting revealed religion, like socialism.
The honest answer is that I have absolutely no idea.
The theological answer deals with explaining it similar to the dictionary.
The comprehensible answer is that Christianity is the primary method of expressing how living in the universe as a human on Earth feels to the American majority.
(speaking of comprehensible; meaning the part of Christianity that I get to see and witness directly.)
No, it’s not a secret. They’ve been open about it and this just opens the closet door even further. There have been some right wing movies as well, its just that they’re in the minority and few have been as blunt or open as Avatar.
Really? I thought most Hollywood movies were pro-corporation and pro-technology. Pro-sex, pro-violence. Anti-imperialism unless it has some at least vaguely humanitarian justification. Hollywood seems pretty centrist really - which make sense, as after all Hollywood is about making money - which you do by entertaining paying viewers.
Pro-semi-explicit sex and violence, yes. Hard core sex and violence rarely get that far, even when they’re part of a quality production which very rarely happens. Eyes Wide Shut and Shindler’s List are a couple of exceptions, respectively, and even then EWS is not what I’d call erotic. When is someone going to have the balls (haw) to produce a quality film that depicts non-porn stars in explicit, erotic sex? It might not do that well at the box office, but dvd sales would probably go through the roof. (Hmmm, I may have too much time on my hands.)…
What anti-imperialist movie ever featured anything besides US style capitalism or NAZIs as the evil imperialists. Star Wars and Star Trek, maybe, but then those didn’t imply Earthbound political analogies.
Yes, most movies are apolitical. But when it does appear, it has tended much to the Left. And while the vast majority of stars who are outspoken or even activists for the Left, they may not always be so in reality. Jodi Foster said following her movie The Brave One, “I don’t believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being.” But yet she did the movie about a character who is unable to defend herself except with a gun that she had to buy illegally, and she was unable to explain the title. Add to that the excellent monologues she delivered in the movie on fear and self-defense, and I can’t help but wonder if her public stance on the subject is the same as her private one.
And her statement is so pathetically simplistic, it belies the intelligence I believe she possesses. On top of the fact that, technically, that would include the police, if a “thinking, feeling, breathing human being” gets a gun and has evil intent, what do we do, resign ourselves to the whims of a criminal on whether we’ll be the ones violated in one way or many?
