Archive for February, 2008 Page 2 of 9
“An education that shuts down this kind of questioning and social exploration isn’t an education at all,” writes Bob Hicks at Art Scatter. “It’s wallpaper.”
There was a brief glimpse of this in the previously-linked preview, but now you can see the full season four introduction for Battlestar Galactica. Normal disclaimer: If you haven’t seen season three, don’t watch this.
[He] held that the belief of primitive man in the more or less limited survival of ghosts … had very little relation to the belief of the so-called civilized races in the immortality of the soul. The former was based upon what, to our remotest ancestors, must have seemed sound objective evidence — the evidence of shadows, of reflections, of shapes seen at night. The latter, in the jargon of psychology, is only a sort of wish neurose: it is grounded, not upon objective evidence, but upon a despairing, colicky feeling that this world we live in is hopeless, and that there must be another beyond to correct its intolerable injustices.
One may be sure that the first priest to manacle a god was not slow to see the advantages in his new situation. He became, at one stroke, infinitely more powerful than he had ever been before. Hitherto, despite the steady advances in his art, there had remained something equivocal and uncomfortable about his position: he had been, when he succeeded, almost a god himself, and when he failed, no more than a poor charlatan, laughed at by the very children. But now, with a god in his service, and then another, and then a whole hierarchy, he was securely somebody and what he had to say was attended to. When he let it be known that there were certain things, done by the people, that would gratify the gods and insure their aid, these things began to be regarded as virtuous, upright, moral. When he announced that other things were frowned upon, they straightaway became sins. The two categories were carefully marked off by the priest. The acts in the first he commanded, and those in the second he forbade. Religion ceased to be a mere trembling before unsearchable enmities, and became a way of life. The priest found himself a law-giver.
True enough, there were still failures, but they were no longer dangerous to him, His day of taking the blame had passed; he could now throw it upon the people. Did fires rage and the sky remain dry? Then it was because the faithful had forgotten their plain duties. They had done something that they ought not to have done, or left undone something that they ought to have done. They had neglected some act of obligation, bungled some formula of devotion, yielded to some sin. Above all, they had failed in their obedience to the priest. At great pains he had taught them what would please the gods, but in their days of ease they had gone gadding after false lures. Now, with calamity upon them, they were paying for it. It was not the priest’s fault. He was not only innocent; he was actually injured, for they had rewarded all his trouble with ingratitude. This ingratitude itself soon became a sin. It was just as bad, it appeared, to flout the priest as it was to flout the gods. It remains so to this day, and in the fact lies the chief dignity of the sacerdotal office. The priest, as such, cannot err, for his mandates are the mandates of the gods, and, being unable to err, he cannot really fail. When the gods blast the faithful it is not a sign that the priest’s ministrations have gone for naught; it is a sign that the people have not been worthy of them.
“In early 2006,” it says of me over on the About page here, “he founded Can’t Stop the Serenity, an unprecedented annual global event consisting of locally-organized charity screenings of the Joss Whedon film Serenity to benefit Equality Now, which to date has raised more than $170,000.”
After coordinating the first year, properly handing it off to a new global coordinator for the second year, and sitting on the steering committee advising its third year’s coordinator, I have stepped down from any further involvement in the global planning, effective immediately.
In the end, my efforts and arguments in favor of trying to maintain a discrete and specific identity for the event do not appear to reflect the general consensus of the pool of organizers. There is nothing to be gained, at this time, from belaboring my points on that issue.
I do believe, and have expressed as much, that an event cannot and should not be everything.
An individual who stays home to run on their treadmill would not be considered to be part of Race for the Cure, and a band who played on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in April of 1969 instead of August 1969 would not be considered to have played Woodstock. I believe that certain positions taken during this year’s planning (some of which had been settled already in the aftermath of last year’s events only to suddenly resurface) are the equivalent to the above untenable examples.
That said, whatever its form and features, and however much I personally might believe its core identity is being diluted, the global event of course will continue to raise significant funds for Equality Now. In the end, that is the point.
But the divergence of viewpoints on the nature and identity of the event has become too great for me to continue to participate.
I’ve changed my signature on the discussion forums for global planning to indicate my departure, and to end on a simple message, one on which I will end here as well: Carry on, good luck, and have fun.
Anyone know anything about a film called The Heretic, written and directed by Tim Robbins (”a multi-layered ensemble about three spiritual figures in today’s world, the film is an exploration of faith, spirituality and hypocrisy”), which seems to be slated for filming here in Portland sometime this Spring?
Addendum: Looks like its supposed to be shooting from the middle of March to the middle of May.
Jay-Zus, 28-35, African-American, “charismatic, charming, a good natured guy, but when circumstances change so does his persona”. Jesus: 28-38, Latin or Middle Eastern, “a patient in a mental hospital who believes he is Jesus; he leads and breaks out with his ‘disciples’ and takes to preaching on the road”. Eight Disciples, 45-55, Male & Female, Indian, African-American, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, “have some sort of ‘criminal like’ feel to them … they break Jesus out of the mental ward”.
The ancient and curious thing called religion, as it shows itself in the modern world, is often so overladen with excrescences and irrelevancies that its fundamental nature tends to be obscured. When we hear of it in everyday life, it is usually in connection with some grandiose pretension by its priests or practitioners or some unseemly row or scandal among them, religious only by courtesy. It is employed by such pretenders as a sanction for moral theories, for political and economics dogmas, for reforms (or for opposition to them) in laws and manners, for social protests and revolutions, and even for purely private enterprises, including the commercial and the amorous. … [I]t is the plaything of political charlatans, clerical and lay; … [i]t is used as a club and a cloak by both politicians and moralists, all of them lusting for power and most of them palpable frauds. Some of the most bitter religious controversies of this age of hatreds … have had little to do with religion, properly so called. But it serves so conveniently to give a high dignity and authority to this or that faction, otherwise plainly in want of a respectable case, that it is constantly lugged by the heels, to its own grave damage and discredit and the complete destruction of common sense and common decency. The fact, no doubt, accounts at least partly for the slowness with which some of the capital problems of mankind approach solution, especially in the fields of morals and government: their discussion is often so contaminated by pseudo-religious considerations that a rational and realistic dealing with them becomes impossible.