Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss Lilith, the queen of hell, mother of demons, angel of prosti.tution, killer of pregnant women and infants, Adam’s first wife, and seducer of men. We’re going to start off
By looking at a couple of allusions to her in the Old Testament. Following that, we’re going to look at early influences that originated in Mesopotamia, and finally, we’re going to look at the tide of information presented in various works published throughout the Middle Ages. Let’s get into it.
Lilith barely features in scripture: she’s absent from the Quran and doesn’t appear in the New Testament; it’s only in the Old Testament that she’s included, and even then, her inclusion depends either on the translation or on the interpretation.
In the Book of Genesis, which is the first book of the Old Testament that describes the Cosmogony (the creation of the universe) and the anthropogony (the origination of humanity), the creation of women is described twice, each with different wording,
Which has led to some interesting theories and stories that endeavor to reconcile the two. The first instance reads as follows: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
One interpretation of this passage is that God created the first man and the first woman simultaneously, which, by this reckoning, places it at odds with the second instance in which the creation of the first woman is described. Here’s the passage that describes the second instance:
“And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man,
Made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.” To reconcile the two accounts, one version, such as the one given in the Alphabet of Ben Sira,
Which we’ll expand on later, explains that the woman created at the same time as Adam in the first passage is a different person than Eve, the woman created from Adam’s rib in the second passage. Moreover, this version holds that the woman created in the first passage
Is actually Lilith, making her Adam’s first wife. Again, we’ll cover this part of lilith’s story in greater detail later in the video. The other mention of Lilith in the Old Testament is given in the Book of Isaiah, though her inclusion by name depends on the language and the translation.
In the JPS parallel Hebrew and English version of the Tanakh, Isaiah 34:14 reads as follows: “And the Wild-cats shall meet with the jackals, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; yea, the night-monster shall repose there, and shall find her place of rest.”
Night monster is indistinct and ambiguous, but many other translations, either of the Tanakh or of the Old Testament, have seen various monsters and animals substituted in, including: Lilith, night specter, night creature, night hag, Lamia (a female monster of Greek origin that
Preys on children), night bird, and screech owl. This last is especially interesting because it parallels a detail of the Queen of the Night plaque, which is nearly 4,000 years old, made in ancient Babylon sometime between 1800 – 1750 BCE. It depicts a winged woman
With talons for feet standing on two lions flanked by a perched owl on either side. Who this figure is isn’t known for certain, but the list of possibilities has been whittled down to just a few candidates: Ishtar, goddess of war and sexual love,
Ereshkigal, ruler of the underworld, or the demon Lilitu, who became later known as Lilith. And this takes us into the part of the video that looks at Lilith’s origins. Lilith, a female demon infamous for preying on infants and pregnant women,
And for copulating with sleeping men, thereby birthing a plethora of demons into the world, is a central figure in Jewish demonology. You could say that Lilith, as conceptualized in Jewish lore, is but one expression of an archetype, that of the demon who targets infants and pregnant women,
That seems to rear its head across cultures and millenia, particularly in the near East. If this is tracked backwards through time, it looks as though Lilith’s origins can be connected back to ancient Mesopotamia. She briefly features in the Epic of Gilgamesh,
A Sumerian work, and she’s identified with Lilu and Lilitu, respectively, male and female spirits of ancient Babylon – both of them notorious for attacking infants and women in labour. Another figure who shares this MO is Lamashtu, either a goddess or demon, who endangered women during
Childbirth and even abducted infants as they suckled at their mother’s breast. In appearance, she was a hideous amalgamation of many animals, having the head of a lion, the talons of a bird of prey, the teeth of a donkey, a body covered in hair, blood-stained hands, and long fingers with
Long nails. Another variety of demon germane to Lilith is the Ardat-Lili, which rendered men impotent as a sort of revenge for itself not being able to copulate. Sometimes women were also targeted and rendered infertile. In appearance it looks like a wolf with a scorpion’s tail.
Much of the best known information surrounding Lilith comes from the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a work thought to have been written sometime in the Geonic period, which lasted from the late sixth to the mid-eleventh centuries CE. The third part describes Ben Sira recounting 22 stories to
Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. One of these gives an alternative anthropogeny. Rather than Eve being created from one of Adam’s ribs, it describes Lilith, not only as the first woman, but also as being created from the earth just as Adam was. Unfortunately, their relationship is
Characterized by acrimony and incessant fighting, and ultimately, Lilith refuses to submit to Adam; so she invokes God’s name and flies away. Three angels, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, are sent after her, and they eventually catch up with her; but she negotiates
Her way out of the encounter, promising to be repelled by any amulets bearing their likeness, which is why thereafter such amulets were used to ward her off, safeguarding those she preyed on: pregnant women and infants. Furthermore, she also accedes to 100 of her children perishing each day.
Here’s a quote that describes this: “He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you
Are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the
Ineffable Name and flew away into the air…. The angels left God and pursued Lilith, whom they overtook in the midst of the sea… They told her God’s word, but she did not wish to return. The angels said, ‘We shall drown you in the sea.’ “‘Leave me!’ she said. ‘I was created only to
Cause sickness to infants. If the infant is male, I have dominion over him for eight days after his birth, and if female, for twenty days.’ “When the angels heard Lilith’s words, they insisted she go back. But she swore to them by the name of the living and eternal God: ‘Whenever
I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that infant.’” In one account, after the fall of man, which resulted in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Eden, the first man and the first woman became separated for 130 years. During that time, Lilith returned to Adam and copulated with him in his sleep; supposedly the son that resulted from their coupling turned into a frog. Another account, the one given by Rabbi Eliezer in
The Book of Adam and Eve, claims that at one time Lilith was bearing Adam 100 children per day. The Zohar depicts Lilith as “a hot fiery female who at first cohabited with man”, who “flew to the cities
Of the sea coast” when Eve was created. The cabala portrays her as the demon of Friday, who appears as a naked woman with a snake’s tail for legs. Another description maintains the nude upper body, but gives her a column of fire for legs. And in Talmudic Lore, Lilith is presented as an immortal
Demon who will continue to plague mankind until God eradicates evil from the face of the earth. Eventually, a profusion of early traditions coalesced, and from them emerged two predominant activities associated with Lilith: the strangling of newly born children and the seduction of men.
Regarding the latter, it was thought that anytime a man woke up with wet undergarments, made so by the nightly discharge of seed, it was indicative of Lilith having paid them a visit and seducing them in their sleep. And in this she was thought so prolific that a virtually infinite
Number of demonic spawn were attributed to her, said to be her brood – legions upon legions sired by unwitting men as they slept. Apparently, people were so wary of her erotic powers that in some Jewish communities it was commonplace for sons not to accompany their father’s as their
Bodies were laid to rest in graveyards, sparing them the shame of bearing witness to all their demonic half-blood siblings, those conceived when Lilith seduced the father. Because of this, In the Zohar as well as other sources, Lilith is known by many colourful appellations that denigrate
For lasciviousness and wantonness. These include: the black, the wicked, the false, and the harlot. In Zoharaistic cabal, Lilith, along with Eisheth Zenunim, Naamah, and Agrat bat Mahlaht, three angels of prostitution, was one of the consorts of Samael, a figure with many identities,
Not all of them evil, depending on the version; among them were: the great serpent with 12 wings, a prince of hell, and another name for Satan, especially in Jewish lore. As conceptualised in Kabbalism, Lilith was given preeminence, becoming the principal and permanent partner of Samael –
Basically, in effect, crowned queen of hell. And that’s it for this video! If you enjoy the content please LIKE the video and SUBSCRIBE to the channel As always, leave your video suggestions down below
– Good afternoon. Good day, whichever time zone you are. And welcome everybody to the second in a series of conversations on global religious and secular dynamics. Welcome everybody, and especially welcome Hans Joas, Professor Hans Joas, who of course is a preeminent, distinguished, German sociologist and social theorist.
It is a pleasure to have you with us today, for this conversation. Before we begin our conversation, let me go over a few of the rules. This webinar is being recorded, and eventually in a few days it will be put on our website, the Berkley Center website.
If you are registered for the conversation today, you will receive an email notifying you that the webinar is already on the website. Otherwise, you can check in a few days on the Berkley Center website and you will find it there. We will have a conversation of around 50, 55 minutes,
Going over different aspects of Hans Joas’s life work, and afterward, we will have time for Q&A with the audience, about 20, 25 minutes, so please do prepare your questions. There is a question and answer at the bottom of your screen. You should open it and write your question,
Write your name, and please indicate your affiliation. We will try to answer as many questions as possible. So without further ado, I am Jose Casanova. I am a professor in the departments of sociology and religious studies at Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion,
Peace, and World Affairs, which is sponsoring this series. But also is being co-sponsored by Reset (indistinct) USA. So, welcome everybody, welcome Hans. It’s a pleasure to have you. We will cover your life work, beginning with your early work and going to your most recent work. So let’s begin with your early work.
Your first major work was the book on George Herbert Mead. Which made you famous. It became the definitive work on George Herbert Mead. The subtitle it had when it was published in English by MIT Press was: A Contemporary Reexamination of His Thought. It was the least well-known of the major pragmatists,
Along with John Dewey, William James, Silas Peirce. There had been not yet any systematic interpretation of his work; your interpretation became the definitive one. Later, you wrote a second book on pragmatism and social theory, where you expanded the analysis to other pragmatists, into your parasocial theory.
You’ve become the main interpreter of American pragmatism, and interlocutor between American pragmatism and German and European social thought. So what attracted you to American pragmatism to the point that you indicated that you fell in love with American pragmatism, so please elaborate how did you fall in love with American pragmatism?
– Well, first of all Jose, let me say what a pleasure it is to see you, and to hear all your flattering remarks, about my early writings. Yes, I mean, I said, I wrote it someplace, I’d written it someplace, that I fell in love with pragmatism, and at first,
Particularly, with the work of George Herbert Mead. I could also have said that for me, it was a kind of revelation. Now why? I think the shortest way to explain that is to refer to the German, original German title of the book on Mead, which was: Practical Intersubjectivity.
I experienced Mead as a kind of transformation of something that was of profound importance for myself, namely the Christian idea of neighborly love, or of compassion, of understanding others. Now in Mead, you find this idea transformed into something you could almost say naturalistic.
I mean, he doesn’t remain on the moral level in that sense. It would be good, too, but he studies the empirical processes in which infants, children, human beings in general, develop the ability to see the world not just through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of others,
To put it somewhat metaphorically. And I still think this is an extremely important thing on both levels, on the empirical and on the moral level, and I’m rather radical with regard to that, in the sense of we as social scientists, or maybe we as historians, really should try to understand other human beings,
And we can understand all other human beings, even those who commit the most abhorrent deeds, so to speak. So that was the starting point. Now, in an atmosphere, I would say in Germany, in which all thinking about human intersubjectivity was kind of dominated by Jurgen Habermas’s idea about rational argumentative discourse.
So for me, Mead also was a kind of alternative in that sense; I mean there is a clear similarity or parallelism here to Habermas, but it’s also a kind of alternative because Habermas has this extremely strong emphasis on the rational and linguistic dimension, whereas in Mead, human intersubjectivity is much more corporeal.
It’s not necessarily on the rational, and not on the argumentative level, and even on the linguistic level. I mean, here are other ways of expressing yourself than the rational, argumentative one, like, let’s say the poetic forms of expression. So in this first phase, I would say, I mean,
The idea was to change from an exclusive focus on rational intersubjectivity to a more practical and corporeal way of thinking. But that, of course, then led me to discover that in the works of the pragmatists, this idea of intersubjectivity is not really the absolutely crucial one.
That such a central figure like William James, you could say, didn’t have so much to say about intersubjectivity, but he’s considered, and rightly so, as one of the most important pragmatists. So I realized that Mead’s thinking about intersubjectivity is, has a more basic, underlying level also,
And for that, I used the term: creativity. It is a specific understanding of the creative dimension of human action on which the ideas of intersubjectivity are based. – So Hans, if I may connect on this point, indeed, you are not only an authoritative interpreter of American pragmatism,
But one could say you are a major pragmatist social thinker in your own right. You’ve mentioned the creativity of action. This was the title of your next major work, and obviously this work was written in critical dialog with Habermas and his theory of communicative action. But also in critical dialog with the sociologist
Talcott Parsons, and his work: The Structure of Social Action. In a way, you are trying to expand the theory of social action beyond both Habermas and Parsons. And then you wrote another major work, a major work: The Genesis of Values. That continues the very same theoretical trajectory,
Trying to understand: where do values come from? But similarly, the personal commitment to specific values. In a way, it was a way of questioning theories of value decisionism, in the Bavarian tradition, but also the Parsonian emphasis on values being embedded in social systems, through which individuals are socialized and somehow accept those values.
You put the emphasis on the contingent historicity of both. The emergence of values in a particular social-historical context, and the personal commitment to these values. So can you explain this attempt to develop a theory of social action around these two key concepts, the creativity of action and the genesis of values?
– As I said, I mean, let’s say in terms of intellectual history, the book The Creativity of Action, was indeed an attempt not to write about the American pragmatists in historical terms, so to speak, but systematically on what the relevance of their work for contemporary social theory is.
And it makes sense to compare pragmatism and my own attempt in that sense, both to Parsons and to Habermas. Now, in Parsons, one could say, and I’m mostly referring to his first book, which I personally consider his best one, namely The Structure of Social Action from 1937,
That in a certain sense, the notion of value was the crucial term for Parsons, for his critique of what he called utilitarianism, and what we today might call rational action approaches or something like that, but although value was so crucial for him as a concept, he had nothing to say
About the historical emergence of values. And now it makes sense, as you did in your question, to distinguish between the historical processes in which certain values emerge, and the processes in which a person develops his or her commitment to a value. But even in the historical processes,
When values first come into being, so to speak, such the same processes in which individuals develop their commitment are at work. I mean, if nobody ever had had the idea, where would the values ever come from? So, I realized that one has to clearly go beyond Parsons,
On this very basic level, and as I already said with regard to Habermas, I think Habermas is, so to speak, two things: a moral philosopher and political theorist, on the one hand, and particularly in the book on the theory of communicative action, a sociological theorist.
But the two goals are not identical with each other. It can be that too much interest in the normative dimension, too much interest in rationality draws your attention away from the, let’s say, from the phenomenal character of human action, so for me I try to distinguish
The two problem areas more than he did. Now, we certainly don’t have the time to develop the details of such a theory of action that focuses on creativity, but I want to say one thing about the connection between the two books you mentioned, namely The Creativity of Action and The Genesis of Values.
When you study creative processes, I think what you cannot abstract from is something like the passive dimension in creative processes. I mean, you may have a problem, so to speak, that you would like to solve, but it doesn’t help to make the decision to solve a problem. You have to have the idea
That helps you to solve the problem. And this idea, although it may come from somewhere in your own person, you experience something that is coming to you, that is given to you, as in terms like inspiration and so on, huh? You are not really the master of the creative process.
That’s true for all creative processes. Even those, let’s say, in the area of what Habermas would call: instrumental action. As an engineer who has a technical problem to solve. But that idea of passivity is also the bridge between my book on action theory and these basic ideas about the emergence of value commitments,
Because the fact is when you’re honest to yourself, that you realize for you, certain things are self-evidently good or self-evidently evil. You do not really feel the need to develop a complex rational argument in favor of that. Let’s say, an example I often use in German discussions,
That the Holocaust is evil, is not something that you have found out after long processes of reasoning, it seems self-evident to you that this is the case, and if somebody asks you for a justification for this assumption, you find this a strange person, who asks such a question.
So that’s true for all of us, I would say. All of us who have any value commitment, and there is no human being without value commitments, have come to this feeling that something is self-evidently good in processes that also have very strongly this passive dimension. I mean, the German tradition, for example,
The theologian (indistinct) used terms like: you have been captivated or seized by something. That you then articulate in quasi-rational statements or propositional statements of character. I consider this to be good, or justifiable, and so on. So that is the connection between the two, and The Genesis of Values book, of course,
Is an elaboration of this idea. Namely the attempt to offer a rich kind of analogy of human experiences, out of which such a commitment emerges. – And you expanded this argument with a historic (indistinct) over the emergence of values in history, particularly in your next major work,
On The Sacredness of the Human Person, which had the subtitle: A New Affirmative Theory of Human Rights. And this work can be viewed also as an alternative theory of negative, Nietzschean and Foucaultian genealogies of values. It makes also, or marks also, actually, the beginning of your interest on the notion of religion
As self-transcendence as an experience of being seized or captivated by something external to the self, and also we’ll get into this notion of religion and self-transcendence in a moment, but also it is the beginning of a new phase in your work, focusing on global theories of religion,
Or the global history of religion, actually, and moral universalism. So, this work, can you explain or can you give a summary of this work, the Sacredness of the Human Person? And the role it plays in your further theoretical development? – I mean, for sociologists, so to speak,
Perhaps the easiest way to start is Emile Durkheim. And of his very famous Sociology of Religion, in which I think he analyzes connective processes, in which the participants develop an emotional commitment to something that he calls the sacred. Now, we should not forget that the analysis
Of what at the time was called primitive religion, was not his only contribution, but that he was also deeply interested in contemporary types of sacralization, let’s say, in the history of modern nationalism. I mean, obviously, historical sociologists have to explain why an emotional commitment to the nation,
That may go so far that people are willing to sacrifice their lives for the national flag, for example, has not been there in human history all the time, but that it emerged at some point. And Durkheim also already had, I think, the ingenious idea that we can analyze the history
Of human rights, along this line of a growing sacralization of the individual, or as I prefer to say, of the human person. I prefer to say person, because sacralization of the individual can easily be misunderstood as the self-sacralization of individuals, eh? People who think they are the only thing that is sacred,
For them, in the world, but what we mean when we talk about human rights and ideas about universal human dignity, is something different, of course. Namely that we attribute this dignity to all human beings, whatever they have done in the sense of, you know, even, let’s say,
A murderer who has tortured his victims must not be tortured by the state, or by other people in general. So that’s the basic idea here, that we have to understand the history of human rights, as a history in which such ideas about universal human dignity have become captivating.
So we cannot write this history on the level of history of ideas, as such, but we have to write it on the level of collective processes of experience in which this becomes something that then is articulated also in theories. But the theories, so to speak, are not constitutive for what happens later.
– And this is actually what you show in your book, The Sacredness of the Human Person, which the book was actually based on the Berkley public lectures that you gave here at Georgetown. And it was publishes subsequently by Georgetown University press.
Can you elaborate a little more on the way in which you link the first proclamation of human rights around the time of the American and French Revolutions, with the anti-slavery movement, and in similar ways, the way you link the second United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the experience of the Holocaust.
So there seems to be, in your theory, a linkage between the notion of the positive affirmation of the sacredness of the human person, and the negative experience of violence and oppression. Can you elaborate on this link? – Yes, I just realized that I did not really respond
To one element of your previous question, namely, what you said about a non-Nietzschean, non-Foucaultian approach, so to speak, and maybe before I answer this question, I just add very few sentences. Namely that what I share with Nietzsche, so to speak, is the insight that such processes are contingent,
They happen, that they are not determined by old, previous history, so to speak. But, in Nietzsche and Foucault, and that’s what they call genealogical, but in Nietzsche and Foucault, the idea is that as soon as people recognize how contingent the existing values are, and how contingent their own commitment to values is,
These values somehow lose captivating force. And I dispute that, and that is why I call my own approach following some ideas from Paul (indistinct), affirmative genealogy, namely: although I see the historical contingency of these processes, remembering these processes might actually strengthen our commitment to them.
I mean, you mentioned the, and I came to this period. Last question now: you know, I’m fully aware of the fact that let’s say if the Holocaust hadn’t happened, and if I were not a German, maybe my interest in the history of human rights would not be so passionate.
But this insight that if things had been different, I would be different, doesn’t destroy the energy, so to speak, I put into this research endeavor. Now, actually it is true what you said. Although my explanation of the innovations of the late 18th century is a little bit different,
But in principle, what I have to look for, if I follow the methodology as I’ve briefly described it, is of course changes in the experiential context of people. That is why the abolitionist movement plays an important role in my argument, but not for the 18th century, but for the 19th century, yeah?
The important point for the 18th century, in my eyes, is first that we should get rid of the myth that the French Revolution invented the basic ideas of human rights. It is indeed true that the American Revolution preceded and influenced the French Revolution, and I follow 19th century thinkers
Who already had the idea that although the topic of religious freedom was not crucial in the context of the American Revolution, let’s say basic logical structure of human rights, is a result of the struggle for religious freedom, not just for yourself, but for all human beings.
So it’s easy to ask for freedom for yourself. But it’s a complex thing to act in favor of the same right for people whose religious or other convictions you do not share. – So this is, however, the link with your new interest and new focus of your work, for roughly the last 15,
20 years, on the global history of religion, and the emergence and trajectories of moral universalism. I have to admit that probably the seminar that we both co-directed, the so-called Young European and American Scholars Seminar on Religion and Globalization was a turning point also for me, because I was already given up,
To a certain extent, on my interest in secularization, thinking that nothing new would be said, everything had been said already. And it was this participation in this seminar, first in (indistinct) and then in North Carolina, with very, very bright, young scholars that awakened in me once again the interest
In the study of global religious dynamics. So, if we look at your works of the last 15 years, beginning with your work in collaboration with Robert Bellah, your work on: do we need religion? Where you explain your theory of religion, itself, in standards; your work on faith as option,
In which you put both religion and secularity as options for modern individuals. In particularly your two major, recent works. First, the work that was published first in German, in 2017, and that will appear very soon, at the end of the year, in Oxford University Press, with a title: The Power of the Sacred.
And then the work, (unintelligible muttering), which is going to be published also by Suhrkamp, a German publisher, at the end of the year, with the title: (speaking German). Or: Under the Spell of Freedom. Basically, in this later work, you revisit the relation between religion and freedom, as postulated by Hegel,
By looking at some 20th century thinkers that have written about this relationship. So it’s a lot of work, but all of it can somehow be put under the heading: dynamics of sacralization, and de-sacralization. Can you explain what you mean by these dynamics of sacralization and de-sacralization?
– Jose, I’m of course happy to hear that the seminar we taught together, where you clearly influenced me a lot, also, that I also exerted some influence on you, and on your further intellectual development. Maybe I can just go back to what I said with regard to Durkheim, namely, I said:
I think Durkheim is an important author for, let’s say, the dynamics of new sacralizations. I used nation and person as possible examples. Now, if we think that new sacralizations are possible, we should certainly get rid of historical narratives that describe world history in the sense of an ongoing weakening of sacredness.
And I mean, I would have much, much more to say about Max Weber’s narrative of disenchantment. So I’m simplifying things at the moment, but at least in the reception of Weber, one could say, for the moment, the narrative of disenchantment is interpreted in that sense. And I think that’s totally wrong.
There are always processes of de-sacralization, that is true, but there are also always processes of sacralization, and some people say of the migration of the sacred, or of the migration or the transfer of the holy, and I mean, there are different terminologies. So, unexpected processes of that kind, I mean,
Nobody really predicted the rise of German Nazism, for example, and the cult-like forms connected to it, in the history of the 20th century. Now, let’s say for normative reasons, since I consider myself a moral universalist, what interests me most is not just any process of sacralization, so to speak,
But the long history of moral universalism. And what you mentioned with regard to Robert Bellah and our work together, including you, on the Axial Age, is of course work on what one could consider the first historical emergence of moral universalism. I mean, and one can even turn Karl Jaspers’s
Controversial claim that there was such a thing as an Axial Age into a question, so to speak. I don’t need all the implications of his claim for my argument, like simultaneity between let’s say China and the Middle East or something like that, but one can turn it into the question:
Where did moral universalism come into being? When did it come into being? Why did it come into being? And so on. So that interests me a lot, and I would have a lot to say about that, but of course that is just, let’s say, the first breakthrough of the idea
That there is empirically and normatively such a thing as mankind. That when I think about the justifiability of my action, the highest criterion is not: is it good for me, my family, my tribe, my people, my nation, my religious community? But is it good for all human beings, including maybe
Future generations that have not even been born ye? And after this Axial Age, or whether you call it Axial Age or not, but after this first breakthrough, of course, you have to study the processes in which such ideas became canonized, for example. How these processes of canonization into acts
With political power, because canonization always implies some power, at least within the religious community, but maybe much farther than that, and beyond its limits, so for me, the studies about the Axial Age, the two books I’ve actually written about the history of human rights, and still unpublished lectures
I gave in Wiemar as so-called Friedrich Nietzsche Fellow, on Gandhi and others, and Martin Luther King, in the 20th century, as extremely important, and rich articulations of the ethos of moral universalism. And why did they emerge and why did they be successful, so to speak?
All this is connected in this idea of a global genealogy of moral universalism, and in this global genealogy of moral universalism that nobody can write in a sense of a complete history of that, yeah? You can only reconstruct crucial points of that. History, I think, is the alternative
To the Weberian narrative of disenchantment, and since you mentioned Hegel, and since Hegel plays an important role in my most recent book that will come out in December in German, and Hegel’s narrative according to which somehow the world history of religion leads to Christianity, and Christianity somehow, particularly in its
Protestant version, leads to modern political freedom, I think that’s a myth and perhaps nobody would defend it as this myth today, but it is still extremely influential in the minds of people and even some leading intellectual figures. – Since you’ve been referring to Max Weber,
You serve actually as the director of the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt, for several years, and now you serve as the distinguished Ernst Troeltsch Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. One could say in your later work, you have become much closer to Ernst Troeltsch and more critical of Max Weber.
And somehow this is related with your interest in historicism, and the problems for moral relativism with historicism, usually presents. Actually, the (indistinct) rift, written in your honor, at your 60th anniversary, a collection of essays to which I also contributed, had the title in German: Between Pragmatism and Historicism.
These being the two intellectual traditions within which one can say your own work is somehow related. So can you tell us more about your relation to Ernst Troeltsch, your interest, late interest in the work of Ernst Troeltsch, and also to a certain extent to answer those who argue that historicism leads,
Necessarily, to moral relativism? – It’s funny what you say, that I was the Max Weber Professor for nine years, and now I have been the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for six years. It’s funny, for those people who know that Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch lived in one and the same house
For many years, in Heidelberg, and were very close together in a certain sense- (audio distorting) Had a major conflict in 1915 and nobody knows exactly why their friendship ended then. Now for me, as for most sociologists, and I would say for most people, at least non-theologians,
For a long time, Troeltsch was just a kind of version of the Weberian thinking, and you could, in the secondary literature, you can find many descriptions that say, let’s say Max Weber was this extremely also polemical author with clear, and sharp statements. And Troeltsch was milder and in that sense more liberal,
And so on. But in principle, they seem to have said the same thing. Now, I dispute that, and for me, I would say in my life, he is the second author, after the student, or this encounter with George Herbert Mead in my student days, he’s the second author
Who I experienced as a kind of revelation. Namely, I think in very fundamental ways what he has done differs from Max Weber and differs from Max Weber in crucial respects. Now, one could elaborate all that, with regard to many topics. Maybe I just mentioned the two 1,000-page books that Troeltsch published.
One is a kind of 1,000-page history of Christianity. But certainly not written in the spirit of a history of disenchantment, secularization and so on. But with an interest in the question: how can Christianity remain vital? How can it be justified intellectually, in the present, but also what has to change,
Organizationally, to make it vital again if it is in a kind of crisis? Now, you were referring to the other main book, one could say, a book that is practically unknown in the English-speaking world, because it has never been translated into English, Historicism and Its Problems.
It is fortunate that I know the translator. He has just finished the translation, so it, and I have written the preface to the American edition, so I will come out in English, and I personally think this will change many things, so to speak, also in the perception of Max Weber.
Now, with regard to historicism, I mean, Weber is famous for making a very strict distinction you could say, between empirical study and the clarification of evaluative questions. And he does that with a lot of emphasis, so to speak, that nothing follows out of your empirical studies.
You have to reflect on your own values, so to speak, and you have to decide in favor of your own values that then have an existential meaning for you, and of course, everything you do, empirically, is somehow driven by your values. Now, in Troeltsch, I think, I personally think
He’s much more sophisticated at that point. Namely that when we reflect on the values we already feel committed to, we necessarily get into the empirical realm. I mean, I have to ask the question: where do my values come from, in an autobiographical sense, and in a historical sense?
So I cannot so clearly mark and make a distinction here between the two, but there is a connection. Now, the idea of a history of moral universalism is also the way out of the dilemma that you are alluding to when you say: how can you be a historicist, without becoming a relativist?
I mean, what Troeltsch was thinking, and what other of my main heroes, so to speak, like Paul (indistinct) certainly, also, have had in their minds is that I am, I’m acting in a present, on the basis of a past, and in anticipation of a future.
And when I see myself as such a potential actor in a present, I reconstruct history as having led to the situation in which I now find myself. And I draw from history, as I said before when I explained this term, affirmative genealogy, a certain strength for my commitment to values.
This is not an uncritical, selective attitude to history, but it is an awareness that I was not born with my values. That I cannot speak about my values without getting into the terrain of narration, so to speak. I have to explain to people why I find certain things
Deeply convincing, and as soon as I do that, they can argue with me, both about on the narrative level, let’s say they can say: the last time, you told me a different story about yourself. Or last time, you described German history in a different way and so on.
And they can argue with me on the normative level and say: no, I dispute the, what you derive from your experience, or what you derive from historical fact, but there is an intertwinement of our reasoning about history, and our reasoning about our values. – So coming now to our final question.
One of the like motifs, precisely, of your work, has been the relation between the sacred and violence. Between the positive experience of faith as self-transcendence, and what you call its perverted brother of the traumatic experience of violence. If we can bring this in relation to contemporary developments, in 1795,
On your first trip to the United States, when you were digging in American libraries in search of the key to your interpretation of the work of George Herbert Mead, on the one hand, you encountered both, the promise and achievements of American democracy, which are so crucial in understanding the philosophy
Of American pragmatism, but also its perverted manifestation in massive poverty and social inequality, racism, criminality, violence, and social decay. For over 20 years, you’ve been coming regularly, every year as a visiting professor to the department of sociology and to the committee on social thought at the University of Chicago.
How do you see, in this relation, the contemporary intertwinement of the disastrous American response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the widespread societal support for the Black Lives Matter movement? – First, my interest in violence, yes, but it has not mostly been an interest, let’s say, in individual violence, crime.
But in macro violence, eh? War, and the Holocaust. And what I found, the really challenging thing, in connection with my work about religion and experience and so on, is that perpetrators of violence sometimes enjoy the violence they commit. And so I’ve written a theory in one of my two books on war
About this fact; that’s what I call the perverted brother. Namely, that when what is characteristic for religious experience and for the experience that leads to all sorts of value commitments, including secular values, is what I call self-transcendence. Namely that you feel captivated by something that draws you beyond the boundaries of yourself,
Something similar happens in acts of violence. But similar only in the sense of that. In other respects, it is radically different, of course. While you may open yourself to the other, in let’s say, positive experiences like love, the boundaries of yourself are opened by others, using force against your will.
And that leads us to recognizing strange parallels between let’s say the need we feel when we had an ecstatic experience, namely, to articulate it and to share it with others. And our inability to talk about traumatic events in our life, and the long and slow process
That we have to go through to become able to articulate these experiences. Now, so that was the first part of your question on violence. Now, my experience of the US and particularly one could say in connection with your question of the South Side in Chicago, it is true
That when I and my wife first arrived there, in 1975, we could hardly believe what we saw. I mean, the degree of poverty. The, the, yeah, the way, the whole situation was broken, so to speak, we could hardly believe that. And I could talk for hours about the intensity
And the shocking character of this. I mean, given the fact that we came and I would call myself and my wife something like ardent defenders of the social democratic welfare state, I could hardly believe that this is true. And of course, at the time, and with a somewhat idealized
Image of American democracy in mind, I thought this is a problem that exists right now, but this is such a great country, they will certainly be able to solve that problem in the coming years. Now I must say, that this was not true. Although things constantly change, I mean,
The character of specific street changes, the University of Chicago may buy some buildings, adjacent to the campus, so to speak, in principle, not much has changed. And even under President Obama, to be honest, I’m very disappointed in this regard, not much has changed. So I certainly experienced the current Black Lives Matter
Movement as perhaps, nobody knows that yet, a crucial step forward in that regard. Although, I would also like to add that the mechanisms for the long term, let’s say suppression, of the urban poor in the United States, and of the Black urban poor, are probably more complex
Than the mere term “racism” is able to express. – So Hans, thank you so much for all these insights and ideas. We can now move to the question and answer period. We have about 25 minutes. Let me begin with a question from Professor Bill Barbary
From Catholic University of America, who says: Hi, Hans. Here is my question for you today. In light of your comments about affirmative genealogy, and your own historical and existential location, I wonder how you think your development of critical alternatives to Habermas and Weber has been saved
By the fact that in contrast to these two thinkers, you are not unmusical when it comes to religion. – Yeah, let’s say, as a religious person, in an extremely secularized environment, I mean me being Catholic, living in Berlin, to put it concretely, of course,
If you are not, let’s say, excluded from secular dominated intellectual discourse, you are constantly confronted with the question: but how? Why are you a believer? Where does your faith come from? And so on. And so I’m used to answer these questions, so to speak, on an autobiographical level.
Now, I will not get into that, but the abstract conclusion from that is: nobody in a highly individualized culture can answer this question by simply referring to his or her childhood background. You definitely have to say that you, in your own life, had certain experiences that either, let’s say, strengthened your original commitment,
Or that brought you to such a strong commitment. And this structure, how do we speak about the origin of our basic commitments? That is exactly that, what I defended methodologically a few minutes ago. Now I am saying: but this is not only true for religious people.
It is true for people with a strong emotional commitment to secular values as well. They cannot say: I came to my commitment to, let’s say, a secular understanding of human rights just through reasoning. They have to admit that something happened in their lives that made them so intensely committed.
And so I derive from the fact that I have a religious biography a kind of structure of possible argumentation for our value commitments, and this possible argumentation for value commitments is different from Habermasian, rational argument about cognitive, and he would say normative, validity claims. – There is a related question coming from
Sergio Gader, a Jesuit and PHD student at the Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich. And he asks: would you elaborate on the connection between transcendence and the absolute or the sacred, and the normativity of values, in the sense and the relationship you find between religion and morality
And whether there has been an evolution in your perspective on this relationship in your recent work? – Okay, that’s a complex question, or a complex of questions, I would say. Maybe first I say: please bear in mind that in my terminology that may be a little bit unfortunate,
But I will not change my terminology now, after decades, so to speak. There is a difference between self-transcendence and transcendence. Self-transcendence, for me, is a descriptive psychological term, applied to the processes in which people have the experience that something draws them beyond the boundaries of their self.
Transcendence is a kind of metaphysical term, namely a sharp distinction between the mundane and something different, called the transcendent. That is not given in the whole course of human history, but that like moral universalism and in the certain connection with moral universalism, emerged at certain points and in history,
Like in the Axial Age. Now with regard to norms, I make a rather strict distinction between values and norms; values for me, are attractive. Norms are restrictive. Now, we certainly derive restrictive norms from our values. My favorite example to illustrate that is, even if I’m purely, let’s say, attracted by somebody.
Like, in love and friendship. Something restrictive follows from this attraction. Nobody can say: I have a very close commitment to this friendship, now my friend is sick; I don’t care. But if I do care, something follows from that. I will not do certain things I might have enjoyed.
Because I will visit this friend, help this friend, or whatever. So we derive normative restrictive things from our values. But the values are not the only and exclusive source of normativity; I follow Piaget and others, Mead, for example, in also thinking that the structures of action, themselves, have normative implications,
Like the rules of fairness and so on. So, there is a very complex interplay of values and norms in our individual lives, and in history. So ideas about transcendence in the metaphysical sense, for example, probably lead to ideas about humanity in the sense of mankind and moral universalism,
But how exactly we translate these ideas about the reference point, mankind, into specific moral or legal norms, depends on many intervening processes that I cannot spell out within a second. – A related question comes from Paolo Costa, from the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy. Namely: do you see the COVID-19 pandemic
As a collective limit experience, that could lead to the genesis of new values? – Yeah, Paolo, this is a very good question. I recently said in an interview that what is so striking about this pandemic is that in one crucial respect, it differs from other societal crises.
In general, I assume that a societal crisis, let’s say a major depression, a war, collapse of a regime and so on, in a sense that brings people closer together. At least, particular groups of people. I mean, not denying that there may be very hostile relationships among different groups,
But within those groups, people come closer together. They identify with each other in such a difficult situation. Now, in this pandemic, what is lacking is exactly the opportunity to come closer together. One could put that in the literal sense, so it makes us more lonely. And not more collective.
And I really do not know, and I do not want to make unfounded predictions, what the result of a crisis is that isolates people in the corporeal sense, from each other instead of producing a kind of enthusiastic public. In that sense, I’m also less optimistic than others,
Who think that this crisis is, might be, a turning point in the direction of more solidarity. But actually, I do not know, and it is probably too early to judge. And we have to bear in mind that the societal conditions differ very much from country to country.
I mentioned before, speaking about the South Side in Chicago, that I’m an ardent defender of the welfare state. I think that the current crisis also, I mean, at least for me, strengthens the commitment to the welfare state; the crisis is much less dramatic under conditions of a welfare state than it is
If the welfare state is as weak as it is in the US. – Then we have a very broad question from Andrew Condon. Do you feel that in this time of technological, digital socialization, the notion of transculturalism faces some impact on the adoption of intersubjectivity as a theory?
– Again, I’m not totally sure that I understand the question. But I certainly think that, under present conditions, we do not live in one culture, exclusively. But that our contact with people from other cultures and the availability of elements from other cultures has become much stronger and that affects intersubjectivity,
But in the sense of a greater challenge, so to speak. I mean, it’s certainly easier to understand people, with whom you share many cultural features than people who you first experience as being very far from your own cultural background. On the other hand, that is exactly what may make these encounters more fascinating.
– So, Hans, my dear friend, I would like to thank you very, very much, for your willingness to participate in this conversation, which for me, really, really was fascinating. And I would also like to thank the entire audience, everybody who came and participated in the webinar, for their interest.
Thank you so much to everybody. And at this point, I would like to announce that the next conversation, our third conversation in our series on global religious and secular dynamics is scheduled for August 16th, again, a Thursday at the same time, at 12:30, with the Turkish French sociologist Nilufer Gole.
We will be discussing her work on Islam (indistinct) in Turkey, in France, and throughout Europe. So, I hope to welcome many of you to this webinar. Thank you so much and goodbye.
– Hail oh deathless one. Who calls me from out of the pits? – [Voiceover] You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don’t want you to know. Here are the facts. In the 1980’s and 90’s people across the united states were convinced that satan worshippers worked in secret across the country. Stealing children for dark rights. Sacrificing animals and innocents and practicing sorcery.
In what became known as, “The Satanic Panic.” Numerous people alleged that they had been ritually abused during their childhood. They claimed that hypnosis and regression therapy revealed these long suppressed memories. Yet, when authorities investigated they ultimately found no proof to back up the accusations. Today the deluge of reports is considered part of
A moral panic. Like McCarthyism or witch hunts. Many people wondered if actual theistic satan worshippers existed at all. So, are there any real devil worshippers? Here’s where it gets crazy. Yes, though perhaps not the way you’d assume. Before we find devil worshippers we have to define the devil itself.
That’s tougher than it sounds. Afterall, one religion’s god may often be another group’s satan. Consider the Yazidis ethnic group. Often called devil worshippers by the nearby Muslim majority. The Yazidis worship an angel called, “Melek Taus.” Who in their religion refused God’s command to bow to Adam.
This bears great resemblance to stories of Shatam and Muslim lore. But the Yazidis don’t consider Melek Taus an evil deity. A similar disconnect occurs between gnostics and mainstream Christians. There are generally two broad camps in the world of genuine satan worship. Symbolic and theistic. The symbolic satan worshippers
Believe in philosophical aspects of satan as a concept. Or satan as an ideology. The theistic satan worshippers believe in a supernatural entity that can interact with the mortal world. Of these theistic satanists, many follow a Lucifer erratically different from the common Christian depiction.
Not an evil force, so much as a disruptive innovative one. Are there really any theistic satanists who genuinely believe they worship an inferno evil deity? While the tales of massive satanic conspiracies don’t seem to bear any fruit. There have been isolated cases of violent criminal acts
Carried out by people claiming to worship satan. And not just any ancient past either. In 2005, Louisiana pastor Louis Lamonica turned himself into the Livingston detective, Stan Carpenter. Lamonica listed in detail, ritualized child abuse that he and other members of his congregation participated in for a number of years.
This included things like animal sacrifice, ritual masks, and dedication of a child to satan. In 2011, Moises Maraza Espinoza confessed to killing his mother as part of satanic right. And there are a number of other proving crimes involving the use of satanic symbols and purported rituals. However, these crimes are not all representative
Of the satanic community. The majority of which, is law abiding. Despite these cyclical allegations of widespread, large scale of networks of devil worshippers, there simply hasn’t been any solid universally acknowledged proof. Those who believe in the conspiracies say the powerful groups have too much control to be reported.
And they point to other supposedly buried reports of abuse. Such as the infamous Franklin Case. Instead it seems that the only individuals or groups actually doing all of those sterotypical satanic things from Hollywood horror films are isolated and quite possibly, insane. Unless of course, there’s something more to the story.
Something they don’t want you to know. – So here comes satanism. Most of us would like to write off as harmless antics by some lunatic fringe. A few years ago maybe, but not now. We have seen that satanism can be linked to child abuse and murder. It has lead seemingly normal teenagers into monstrous behavior. They preach mysticism.
Other people, however, practice evil. And that is why we brought you this report tonight.
Hi, I’m Craig, and this is Crash Course Government and Politics, and I’m excited. I’m excited because today, we start delving into Supreme Court jurisprudence, with the totally controversial topic of freedom of religion. Now, other than being fun to say, jurisprudence means all the important cases on a particular topic, but unfortunately,
I’m only going to be talking about a couple of them, because they demonstrate how the Supreme Court reasons its way through a tricky issue. Jurisprudence. Jurisprudence. [Theme Music] So the Constitution deals with religion right there in the First Amendment, which is also
The one that deals with speech and the press and assembly and petitions. Here’s what it says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It’s the first clause in the First Amendment of the Bill
Of Rights, so it’s pretty darn important. Notice it has two parts, and each one creates a separate religious liberty or freedom. The first part, “no law respecting an establishment of religion” is caused the establishment clause; can you guess what the second religious liberty
Is? If you said free exercise, you’re right. What do these two freedoms mean, though? Establishment of religion means that the US can’t create an official state church, like England has with the church of England. This means that the First Amendment ensures that the US
Does not have any state endorsed religion nor does it write its laws based on any religious edicts, and it’s also the clause in the Constitution that deals with religious monuments and school prayers and stuff like that. The free exercise clause in a way is more straightforward, it means you can’t pay for exercise.
Gym memberships are illegal. But freedom isn’t free. You’re gonna pay with pain! No pain, no gain. Actually, none of that is what we’re talking about. What it means is you can’t be prohibited from being part of a certain religion, although it doesn’t
Mean that any religious practice is okay. For example, if your religion requires human sacrifice, because you’re an Aztec, state, local, and federal law could prevent you from practicing that aspect of religion, for obvious reasons, although it couldn’t prevent you from believing that human sacrifices were necessary to make the sun rise every day.
We are gonna anger a lot of Aztecs with this video, Stan. There are a number of cases that establish this distinction between religious belief and religious practice, but my personal favorite is Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye vs. Hialeah,
Because I love saying Lukumi Babalu Aye. You probably figured out that what these two clauses mean in practice has been determined to some degree by Supreme Court decisions. There’s a bunch of them, but probably the most important one is called Lemon v. Kurtzman, from 1971.
Right off the bat, the Lemon decision is a little complicated because it combines two sets of facts, although they both involve public money and parochial schools. In one case in Rhode Island, the state was using taxpayer funds to pay teachers in parochial
Schools in an effort to educate Rhode Island children, which is generally a good goal. In the other case in Pennsylvania, the state was paying teachers in private schools to provide secular education services, but enough with the set-up, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
The Supreme Court in Lemon vs. Kurtzman devised a three prong test to see if the state law violates the First Amendment religious freedom clauses. Under the first prong, the Court looks to see whether the law in question has a secular legislative purpose. In this case,
The purpose of the law was educating children, which you remember, is one of the powers reserved to the states, and for the most part, is a secular purpose. Under the second prong, the Court examines whether or not the law’s principal or primary
Effect neither enhances nor inhibits religion. Here again, the Court found that paying private school teachers or using private school facilities did not necessarily promote religion or prevent students from worshipping as they wanted to. The third prong requires that the law under consideration does not create excessive entanglement
Between a church and the state. This is the one where both the Rhode Island and Pennsylvania laws got into trouble. In Rhode Island, the school buildings where the children were learning were full of religious imagery, and 2/3 of the teachers were nuns. The Court paid close
Attention the fact that the people involved were kids, ruling, “This process of inculcating religious doctrine is, of course, enhanced by the impressionable age of the pupils in primary schools particularly. In short, parochial schools involve substantial religious activity and purpose.” In Pennsylvania, the problem was different. The Court ruled that in order
To make sure that the teachers were NOT teaching religion, the state would have to monitor them so closely that it would be excessive entanglement and give the state way too much control. They ruled that, “The very restrictions in surveillance necessary to ensure that teachers
Play a strictly non-ideological role give rise to entanglements between church and state.” Thanks, Thought Bubble. So it’s pretty complicated, and I’m not 100% sure that I find it convincing. First of all, the Justices engaged in some slippery slope reasoning about the Pennsylvania case.
The Court argued that even if, in this situation, the secular purpose was a good one, there’s a tendency for states to take more and more power for themselves. But my bigger concern is that all three prongs in this case were given equal weight, and I’m not sure that
They always should be. I mean, you got the one round one and then the two like, you know, long ones, and you can pull that round one, it’s just for grounding. What the ruling in this case meant was that the secular purpose, educating children, was
Not gonna happen, or at least would be made more difficult. Also, you could argue that it was kind of paternalistic, assuming that kids wouldn’t be able to block out religious imagery, but since they are kids, maybe a little paternalism is okay. You spit that gum out, Junior.
So Lemon vs. Kurtzman built on an earlier case, Engel vs. Vitale, which ruled that prayer in schools violated religious freedom. You would think that, taken together, this issue would be pretty much put to bed, yet every few years, a case comes along involving prayer
In school, and now they apply the old three prong Lemon test. For example, one state adopted a statute mandating a moment of silence at the beginning of each school day. One of the purposes of this statute is to provide students with an opportunity to pray in school. Another
Purpose is to create a calming atmosphere in the classroom to better promote learning. The first purpose doesn’t look so secular, and as for the second prong, doesn’t necessarily advance or inhibit a particular religion. Students can choose not to pray at all. Is
This excessive entanglement? That’s always gonna be difficult to say, especially since ‘excessive’ is pretty subjective, but if you go on the standard of the Pennsylvania case in Lemon, almost any religious practice in school could be excessively entangling, because the state is going to have to step in and monitor it.
Some school systems have tried to get around this by having the prayers led by students, because they aren’t agents of the state. But then you have the issue of how much a student-led prayer is really led by a student, and how do you find out without more monitoring and
More state entanglement? The Lemon test is an attempt by the Court to set up a framework for analyzing future situations where religion and the state might get mixed up. It’s probably better than having what legal scholars like to call “a bright line rule” about religion
In public spaces like schools and courthouses, but it does leave a lot of wiggle room and it seems that it encourages future cases because we keep seeing them. The funny thing is, religious freedom is one of the less controversial protections found in the First Amendment, if you don’t
Believe me, wait until our next episode on free speech. Just wait. You just — you just wait. Did you guys hear what he said? See ya next time. Crash Course Government and Politics is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios. Support
For Crash Course US Government comes from Voqal. Voqal supports non-profits that use technology and media to advance social equity. Learn more about their mission and initiatives at voqal.org. Crash Course was made with the help of all these jurisprudences, am I using that word right? Thanks for watching.
The Interfaith Chapel is the center for religious and spiritual life on campus for students, faculty and staff. We’ve been doing Interfaith on this campus in this Chapel for forty years and when the Chapel was first built Interfaith was Christian and Jewish and in that forty plus years it’s now a much bigger tent
Thanit was in the beginning. So there’s a lot of diverse stuff going on in here. It’s kind of a hub of activity, religious and spiritual. We currently have ten different religious groups that are affiliated with the chapel. We’ve got Muslim and Jewish
And several Christian and Buddhist and Hindu and we have student groups that are affiliated with the Chapel and a very active one in Interfaith engagement, the Student Association for Interfaith cooperation and they’re the group that pretty much ties together all the other groups and gets them to do
Interfaith programming together. Tonight at the Interfaith Chapel, we are holding an interfaith Thanksgiving banquet with a guest speaker, Chris Stedman, from Yale University. University of Rochester’s Christian Fellowship has been around about twenty seven or twenty eight years at this point. We
Are usually the most diverse ministry on campus and I’d like to say that we have a little slice of heaven here on earth. So what we’re going to do for tonight is hold an informational session for Hajib for a day
Which is an event that’s part of our annual Islam Awareness Week in support of and in solidarity of women on campus who choose to wear the headscarf. Cru has a weekly meeting that meets once a
A week on Thursday night. We want to be a place where we can be real, honest and vulnerable about our lives because we believe a relationship with God is possible through Jesus Christ. We have the Roman Catholic Newman Community and the Protestant Chapel Community. Both of these
Communities have been here on this campus for fifty years. So, the Catholic Newman Community is the largest single denomination on campus. We serve about sixteen hundred Catholics on campus, thirty percent of the population in discovery, faith and reason together. Many people see faith as
Opposed to reason as if it’s an either or option and here on this campus we definitely take this stance that they’re very compatible. PCC is a multi-denominational group of kids from all different Protestant-Christian background, some of them from backgrounds that are not Protestant-Christian who have all come together to worship and
Be at church on campus here. Also like pretty much all faith groups, once you’ve captured the fact that we’re eating, you’ve captured the essential part of our group. We do a lot of food in the chapel. People can get free meals here several nights a
Week with one religious community or another. All religious cultures have special foods and so often they will do things with their something special to a particular tradition that’s being served and others get to sample that and enjoy it to. Having Diwali dinner,
This is a yearly event we usually do around the fall time. It changes every year based on the calendar. We do this usually in Douglas Dining Hall and we’ve been preparing for this ever since the start of school.
Actually, great people, great food. It’s just a good time to celebrate a good event. Happy Hanukah! Happy Hanukah everybody! Tonight, tonight is the first night of Hanukah so there lighting a candle. We brought the lights, the Menorah, which is symbol of freedom.
We are going to have hundreds of students pause in the middle of finals and see what is important to celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah together as a community. I love bringing people of different religious traditions and students of no
Tradition together to find the things that they have in common and the things they value together. It’s important that people, regardless of faith and belief come together and you know take the time to learn about what the other person believes in and I think U of R ‘s
Great for starting that initiative. A production of the University of Rochester. Please visit us online and subscribe to our channel for more videos.
Pop culture is filled with depictions of fallen angels, once holy beings that have succumbed to sin. But how and why did the idea of fallen angels even come about in the first place? Here’s the untold truth of fallen angels.
Fallen angels are basically angels that have given up on the good and righteous path and turned to evil, right? Well, not necessarily. It’s true that Jewish and Christian traditions believe that fallen angels were originally just as holy as any of the other angels, but fell when the most beautiful of them – Lucifer
– decided to rebel and enticed others to go with him. But in Hindu traditions, it’s a little different. They believe that the creator god, Brahma, actually made some angelic beings good and some evil from the very beginning. Why? Because it’s meant to illustrate the natural order of things, and balance in the universe.
And fallen angels don’t even exist in Islam, where traditions says that all angels are good, including the ones tasked with overseeing those whose evil souls have landed them in hell. These angels are lording over hell, yes, but they aren’t fallen, as they are still doing divine work.
There’s another explanation for Satan there, too, and it basically says he’s not an angel, he’s a jinn: a creature made from fire and free will. Put a pin in that, because there will be more about this pesky “free will” stuff later.
Historically, those who believe in fallen angels typically have believed them to be responsible for things like tempting mortals into sin. And fallen angels are tricky about it, too, sometimes masquerading as good angels as they torment and tempt. How do believers know all this?
Well, these days, most of it comes from the non-canonical Book of Enoch, which was written about 350 B.C. The text claims to be the revelations of Enoch, who was taken up to heaven and told the universe’s deepest secrets, then shown just what would happen during mankind’s ultimate judgment.
Enoch shows up in other texts as well, which claim he lived to be 365 years old, and eventually told his tales to his son, Methuselah, who lived to be an impressive 969 years old. Strangely, even though the stories of Enoch were influenced by the mythology of places
Like Babylon and, in turn, influenced Judaism and Christianity, the only place that all 100 chapters of the book survived was Ethiopia. And among those chapters was a fascinating explanation on fallen angels. One of the most widely told tales of fallen angels says it was Lucifer who rebelled against
God and brought a bunch of angels down with him, but the story told in the Book of Enoch is very, very different. It tells a story of lust. According to the Book of Enoch, long before the Great Flood, angels and humans met and mingled pretty commonly, and the inevitable happened: children.
Those sons and daughters of angels were a race of 450-foot-tall giants. The angels started teaching their giant offspring evil ways, and God not only imprisoned them, but subjected them to judgment and sent the flood to hit the reset button on his creations.
Enoch, the story says, tried to speak on behalf of the angels and their giant children, but sadly, a lot of the texts are missing. We do know that Enoch was the one God selected to act as an intermediary to the fallen angels,
Instructing him to tell them what their punishment would be for their transgressions. They were to be condemned to the ends of the earth, with an eternity of punishment to follow. Early Jewish writers considered Enoch to be a prophet, but when Christianity started to
Adopt his teachings, he largely fell out of favor with Judaism. Christian writers then took the Book of Enoch with them when they converted isolated areas of Ethiopia in the fourth and fifth centuries. Though the Book of Enoch was lost to the rest of the world, it was preserved in Ethiopia,
And was finally brought back to Europe in 1773. In the meantime, though, with the Book of Enoch to guide them, Christian scholars and writers had centuries to let their imaginations go wild, leading them to the really convoluted origin of Satan as a fallen angel. See, that’s not actually in the Bible.
But theologians turned themselves into pretzels trying to explain how Satan exists in the first place. The reasoning went like this: God created everything in the universe, and therefore, God created Satan. But the only things God creates are good things, so therefore, Satan must have been good at one point.
He also needed to have the free will to turn bad. But since he clearly wasn’t human, he must therefore have been a fallen angel. Clearly, these scholars went to the Princess Bride school of logic and reasoning. “You must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you
Would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!” Oh, and once more, there’s that free will thing. Don’t worry, it’ll come up again! According to the Book of Enoch, the first batch of fallen angels was each responsible
For teaching humanity about a specific sin. Asbeel, for example, was repsonsible for teaching humanity about sex, so thanks very much for that. Tamiel, on the other hand, taught humanity about demons and spirits. And then there’s Shernihaza, who is apparently responsible for that race of giant half-angels.
Those giants, if you remember, led to the imprisonment and punishment of the fallen, as well as the Great Flood, which was brought to cleanse Earth of their gigantic sins. Perhaps the strangest fallen angel of all, though, was Penemue, who was credited with
Giving mankind something that led to all kinds of evil: the written language. With writing came knowledge, and that, of course, is really really bad, because it might lead to…free will. The big lesson you’re apparently supposed to learn from fallen angels?
That knowledge and free will are bad and will get you killed, so the only way to remain safe is to choose ignorance and obedience. Funny how that works. Maybe the biggest diversion The Book of Enoch takes from the regular Bible is its depiction of the Garden of Eden and the fall of mankind.
Everyone knows the traditional story from the Bible: a serpent, usually associated with Satan, tempts Eve into eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (there’s that whole knowledge is bad thing again) and then, boom, goodbye, paradise!
In the Book of Enoch, though, it’s not Satan who tempts Eve, it’s a fallen angel named Gadreel. And then this jerk also went on to give humanity weapons and armor and teach us all how to kill each other. Sounds like Gadreel has a lot to answer for! Quick, describe a fallen angel!
There are probably some scowly faces, bat-like wings, maybe even some horns or cloven hooves, right? Maybe a double chin…who knows. But it wasn’t always like that. In early Christian art, fallen angels looked pretty much the same as their holier counterparts.
One of the earliest representations of the idea that there were angels and fallen angels opposing each other in an otherworldly battle is featured in an ancient mosaic in Italy. Jesus is in the middle, and on one side is an angel in red with some sheep, representing the home team.
On the other side are the bad guys, a figure thought to be Lucifer or Satan, standing with some goats. He’s wearing blue, which is the color of the damned, plus he has goats, so we know he’s the bad guy, but otherwise he doesn’t seem all that bad.
The mosaic even suggests fallen angels kept their iconic halos, which at the time were a symbol of power, not holiness. It wasn’t until the middle ages that images of fallen angels started turning more grotesque. During that time, something weird happened: Creatures from ancient Babylonian texts, called
Lilitu, began to be associated with Adam’s non-canonical first wife, Lilith. At the same time, parallels were drawn between Satan and the ancient Canaanite deity Beelzebub, and the ancient Roman half-goat, half-man god of nature, Pan. In the 14th Century, these pop culture influences led Dante to describe Satan as lording over
The depths of hell while sporting bat wings. And that in turn influenced the 17th century author John Milton to describe fallen angels in his work Paradise Lost as the sort of grody monsters we think of today. Remember those theologians who turned themselves inside out trying to explain how Satan existed?
Well, they faced the same issue with the rest of the fallen angels, and came up with some typically convoluted explanations. Until the 12th century, “pride” was the typical answer as to why fallen angels fell. But that meant God would have had to create something with a crippling, all-powerful amount
Of pride, and that didn’t fly. So scholars came up with the idea that angels had been created with a natural love that allowed them to love God, themselves, and each other. It’s the last part that scholars in the Middle Ages believe caused the fall of the angels.
After Lucifer fell because his love was a selfish love of power, the other angels who fell did so because they loved Lucifer. God was largely an absent, distant figure, after all, and Lucifer was their friend. Rather than condemning themselves to struggle for the acceptance of an unreachable father,
Perhaps they followed their brother into exile. It’s kind of heartbreaking, when you think about it, especially once you add love to free will and knowledge as things too dangerous for mortals to contemplate. According to the Mirabilia Journal, one of the most convoluted bits of theology that
Grew up around the legend of fallen angels is the way Christian writers used it to excuse and promote the persecution of the LGBTQ community. Scholars have long debated about whether fallen angels and demons are capable of love, with many believing that instead, fallen angels are consumed with lust, a desire to use others
For their own ends. Indeed, Christian writers as far back as the apostle Paul himself warned women about the danger of attracting the attention of a lusty fallen angel. But since they didn’t write anything about fallen angels having lust for members of their
Own gender, early scholars decided that meant that there was something so fundamentally wrong about the idea that even fallen angels wouldn’t do it. This kind of self-satisfied circular logic was used as an excuse for centuries of persecution, which still continues today.
Our contemporary view of fallen angels might suggest that they kind of got off easy. After all, though they might be in hell, they aren’t exactly at the mercy of the demons there, because they…kind of are those demons, right? Well, not exactly.
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the seven archangels (those are the leaders of the good angels who stayed loyal to God) count the punishing of the fallen angels among their heavenly duties. Each one of the archangels was in charge of particular facets of the otherworldly life:
Jeremiel, for example, keeps watch over the souls in the underworld, while Michael protects Israel, Gabriel is the overseer of Paradise, and Uriel leads the host. They’re the ones with direct access to God, and they’re also in charge of punishing the fallen. Punish how?
Take Azazel, who according to some sources was the one who taught mankind how to make weapons rather than Gadreel. According to the Watkins Dictionary of Angels, Azazel was punished by Raphael, who put him in chains, threw him in a pit full of sharp rocks in the middle of the desert, and brought
The darkness down on him while he waited for his condemnation after the final judgment. That doesn’t sound so great after all. And it’s a pretty steep price to pay for expressing love and free will! Better luck next time, fallen angels. Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don’t miss a single one.
We don’t have time for an intro. “Midnight Mass” is a psychological horror show on Netflix from Michael Flanagan, who is the creator of the family trauma trigger fest “Haunting of Hill House” and the second gayest thing on Netflix, second only to “Barbie and the Dolphin Magic”, “The Haunting of Bly Manor.”
He’s known for creating, like, thought-provoking, humanistic stories that explore the horrors within ourselves as much as the horrors outside of us–blah blah blah. The whole series falls under the category of religious horror, which is like a sub-genre of horror, if you will.
So, religious horror relies on presenting things like motifs and symbols from real-life religions as fact within a given universe. It exploits and subverts the familiar rituals and concepts in order to scare the holy ghost straight out of your poor little bones.
This includes everything from, like, “Carrie” to “The Exorcist” to “Rosemary’s Baby”, “Midsommar”, and, of course… [Music] “God’s not dead, he’s surely alive…” “God’s Not Dead” follows Josh Wheaton, who, after refusing to do his homework, is instead forced to teach a college-level philosophy class that he and his fellow classmates are paying for.
He has no magical powers or skills and is forced to fight the sadistic, monstrous, maniacal professor to the death using only the powers of friendship and God. It has three sequels entitled “God’s Not Dead 2”, which stars Sabrina (the teenage witch)
Refusing to let her grandfather eat bacon, “God’s Not Dead 3: A Light in the Darkness”, where Reverend Dave reads the bible to scare off a bunch of construction workers, and “God’s Not Dead 4: We the People”, where they take it all the way to the top!
We’re gonna focus mostly on the first one and the third one–the first one because it’s the big one, the third one because I actually like it, and the other ones are… The fourth one’s a trip is all I’ll say.
We’re not gonna be breaking the films apart; we’re not gonna be fact-checking them (that has been done a million times). If you’re looking for an in-depth breakdown or, like, a very long explanation of everything that these movies get wrong, there are so many.
I will link some of them, including a really good series by Big Joel, in which he abbreviates “God’s Not Dead” to GND, which we will also be doing. So…thanks. Now, you might be asking yourself, “What does the Christian grassroots kickstarter love
Actually starring The Newsboys series have to do with the eight-episode, critically acclaimed miniseries, “Midnight Mass”? Apart from the obvious answer, which is tone, we have 19th-century existentialism, Russian literature, and the Christian Bible. Also, I have seen them both. That’s the main thing they have in common. That’s what got us here.
I saw one, and I saw the other, and I was like, “Hmm, I’ve got nothing else to do for six months.” “Seriously, you’ve got to get a life.” “Yeah, tell me about it.” In September of 2021, the man behind the mass, Michael Flanagan himself, said of using the
Bible as a kind of source material, that he was shocked for the first time comprehending what a really strange book it is. He said, “There are so many ideas I’d never heard before in church, and the violence of the Old Testament God is terrifying–slaughtering babies and drowning the earth.
It really struck me that I didn’t know my faith at that point.” And I am not here to give you a cliff notes of the Bible, but he’s right. He’s not NOT right. Like, Revelations, which is technically New Testament, sits somewhere between, like, season
Three of “Game of Thrones” and “Saving Private Ryan” on the gore scale, okay? The seas are turning to blood. The rain is turning to blood. The sun is scorching the earth, and there are evil demon creatures rising up from the
Bowels of the cosmos to dump, like, literal bowls of hellfire onto a decaying planet, ravaging its way through every molecule of joy and life left on its dry, cracked surface like Elon Musk running through Silicon Valley! Full disclosure: I was kicked out of CCD before I could make my confirmation.
CCD, if you don’t know — if you grow up Catholic, but you’re too poor to go to Catholic school — is what you do, like, a couple nights a week in addition to, like, Sunday School so
You can get your communion and your confirmation and, like, be holy in the eyes of the Lord, okay? It’s a requirement. I hated it. For reasons I will not disclose, I was not allowed to complete my studies and make my
Confirmation, so I don’t know if, in those last three months of eighth grade, they teach revelations, but I was never taught Revelations. I don’t know if they teach it in Catholic school; I would ask my mom, but it’s 1 AM, so…no.
Anyway, it is absolutely terrifying, which makes it perfect for filmmakers who are looking to, like, twist some religion into their horror. “Revelation.” The 1973 cult classic “The Exorcist” takes the concept of demons and devils and possession from intangible fears to absolute fact when 12-year-old Regan becomes possessed by an
Entity claiming to be the devil itself. That possession and following exorcism result in very real physical damage for the characters and the people around them within the universe of the film. Other films, like “Midsommar”, utilize religious structures and emphasize, like, the dangers
Of groupthink, blind faith, and what can happen when a simple religious belief falls into the wrong, twisted train of thought and barrels off the track. 2014 cinematic masterpiece “Left Behind”, which arguably religious horror for religious people, with its coordinating book series, is also a decent-ish example of this.
Relative unknown Nicolas Cage stars in his breakout role as a pilot who is flying a plane (as they do) when suddenly, boom, half the people in the world are gone because it’s the rapture…and he got left behind. So, then it’s just him and Chad Michael Murray in a very weird rendition of “Speed”…?
But with a plane? Because they can’t land? Because all of the TSA workers evidently were great Christians and went up to heaven, so there’s no one to, like, coordinate a landing, and the world is falling into just sheer chaos below them.
So, they’re just driving around until they run out of fuel, and, luckily, his daughter–his godless daughter–also got left behind. And she’s, like, about to but she stops and calls her dad, and she commandeers a truck and, like, moves shit around and makes a runway so they could land the plane just in time
For the whole world to catch fire. It’s a hoot. Highly recommend watching it. Anyway, so, “Midnight Mass” does something similar, creating a very unique monster element by looking at the darker, more graphic imagery of the biblical texts like Revelation and stories like the Old Testament stories and taking it at face value.
The story is set mostly between the holy days of Ash Wednesday and Easter. It’s initially following Riley as he returns to his hometown of Crockett Island. Crockett is a strongly Catholic community, very isolated, and they become increasingly violent after a new priest rolls into town and starts performing some miracles.
So, we have these two worlds: the “God’s Not Dead” universe–a high-concept fantasy world in which the American education system functions as a tool for an oppressive regime designed specifically to smoke out and crush any and all faith in Jesus Christ as the savior per
Satan’s bidding–and we have “Midnight Mass”–an introspective horror series that takes place on a remote island where Catholicism dominates the social climate and lulls individuals into a twisted sense of righteousness and moral superiority. Two pieces of media coming from wildly different perspectives, serving wildly different agendas,
Both relying heavily on religion (specifically Christianity) as not only a theme and, like, motivator behind production but as the backbone for everything from the plot to the characters to the dialogue itself, takes notes from traditional religious structures and texts and utilizes scripture and its many interpretations.
Both “Midnight Mass” and “God’s Not Dead” offer prime examples of how religious interpretation and representation exists in our current media landscape. Also, it has vampires. Nietzsche (bless you) – Part two. There are not many things that myself and the creators of the “God’s Not Dead” franchise
See eye to eye on, but, on one front, we are united. And that is that any man who likes Ayn Rand is not to be trusted under any circumstances. I do not care who you are; I do not care if you wrote your thesis on it; I don’t want to hear it.
Ayn Rand is a red flag so bright it’s on fire. A burning red flag. Several, several burning red flags, in fact, lit up and lined up, spelling out the word “run” like an SOS on a remote island. And the “Gods Not Dead” crew absolutely knew this.
They had to know this because there is absolutely no other reason for Ayn Rand to be on this board unless they were trying to signal to the audience: “This guy = bad fucking dude.” This board solely exists to clue viewers into the kind of venomous thinkers that Professor
Rattlesnake is going to use to poison the minds of all the hopeful possible Christians out there if discount Logan Lerman does not step up his game. “Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, George Santayana, Democritus…” Stakes. We have stakes in this film. Professor Radisson, resident bad dude, waltzes into class, declares God is dead, and then
Requires all of his students sign a paper agreeing to that fact and/or fail the class. Which is bonkers, but we’re gonna let it slide because “Midnight Mass” has vampires. Honestly, that’s gonna give “God’s Not Dead”, like, a lot of leeway just for the record.
So, in this nightmarish fantasy universe where the education system is the villain and philosophy classes look like this… “I would like to bypass this senseless debate altogether and jump to the conclusion whi–jump to the conclusion whi–jump to the conclusion whi–jump to–jump–jump–jump–jump to the
Conclusion which every sophomore is already aware of: there is no god.” The infamous God’s-not-dead mantra that 19-year-old liberal arts students everywhere have tattooed on their biceps, courtesy of the late 19th-century German philosopher and existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche, rears its ugly head. And we’re not getting on me about my pronunciation of Nietzsche.
I’m gonna try, but I went to the same high school as all of you; all I ever heard was “Nietzsch-ee”. So…bleh. He’s not here to correct me, and he has yet to pay for his crimes, so…”Nietzsch-ee.” Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Germany in 1844.
He was the son of a Lutheran pastor, and he was a super influential thinker, mostly known today for being the reason that that film major you dated sophomore year of university turned into a douchebag for a whole semester.
Also, the nazis got real hype on his work, which, he was mostly senile by that point, but it wasn’t exactly a stretch. It doesn’t take a genius to make the leap from “uberman” to “eugenics”, okay? It’s…it’s not even a leap. It’s not even a step.
It’s an elevator–a very, very packed elevator where everyone walks out smelling like shit. Anyway, Nietzsche–some of Nietzsche’s other notable contributions include the idea that man must accept itself as the part of the material world, physical world, classism, and also that time that he murdered God with gay science.
“The Gay Science” was published in 1882 and is severely lacking in homosexual overtones, if I do say so myself. The Homosexual Chemistry gets the most credit for popularizing Nietzsche’s murder of God because of this, like, sick ass quote, right? It’s good. It’s a good phrase. It’s a good one.
If you really want to know more about, like, where the ideas come from and, like, why that’s an important statement–because that was not, like, the thesis, right? “God is dead” is not, like, the end; that’s not his big proclamation–I would say you should read “Thus Spake Zarathustra” or “Zarath-uh-stra”? I don’t know.
It’s basically where this man, like, achieves enlightenment and, like, comes out of a cave, and, but kind of like Cassandra, sort of struggles to get anyone to believe him. He goes off for a couple of chapters about how humanity is just, like, a bridge between
Animals and the uberman/mensch/overman/superman–it’s a translation thing–but also, like… Then it goes into a whole, like, “faith is for the weak; we should just tough it out and be smarter like me; climb the metaphorical mountain, and you can be freed from the pain of regular life and prejudices and moral values”.
Then, he shits on Christianity for a little while, goes back into the cave, and starts over. Don’t fight me on that. He was all about being the “higher people”. He compares himself to Beethoven or something at one point! Nietzsche was kind of a dick. I shouldn’t put that in there.
I can’t just call Nietzsche a dick. Eh…he’s kind of a dick. And he’s writing all of this during the Enlightenment period, so he’s got–like, all these people are really already questioning the very Christian foundations that many societies had been built on. Science is advancing. It’s the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, right?
Things have changed; the world is different, and Nietzsche believes that God does not serve us anymore. The belief in God no longer serves us. So, when Jocelyn Wheatboy’s philosophy professor comes into class that day and says that it’s a metaphor, he’s mostly right.
Nietzsche never thought God existed in the first place–which is confusing because to say God is dead clearly implies that God must have once been alive, but Nietzsche did not think that God was alive. Nietzsche thought there was no God ever; he was not into it.
And there’s this misconception, I think, with the “God’s Not Dead” films that, because they are bad, they do not understand what they are talking about. Because they are not well made and they are unrealistic to a secular audience, that they must be using concepts and terminology that they just–they just don’t get.
I do not think that that’s the case–not only because I think that that’s a weak argument, but also because Professor Ratballs does not come in and require his students to write down the phrase “Nietzsche was right.” He doesn’t ask them to write down, like, “All hail Nietzsche.”
He asks them to write down “God is dead” because Nietzsche wrote down that phrase and made that statement famous. And because that is the quote that the film is referring to, people assume that that is the version of the phrase in which the film would like to engage. Maybe? Sure? We don’t know.
If you’ve learned anything from the two videos that I have made, you should know that we’re not here to take things at face value. We are here to always go one step too far–to go down the road less traveled by until we hit a cliff.
Wherever you–when you think you’re at the end, just keep going a little bit further. I want to give these films a fair shake, so we have to read beyond the quote itself and start looking at the concept of God being dead because that, my friends, is not a Nietzsche original.
Nietzsche’s use of it in The Queer Biology is most likely a reference to the philosopher Heine, who, in his work, “Religion and Philosophy in Deutschland”, cites Immanuel Kant’s first critique as “a sacrament brought to a dying God.” Okay! Sorry!
We’ll talk more about Kant in the ethics section (because there will be an ethics section), but, for now, all you need to know is that Kant basically was the guy who was like, “We can’t know anything about God. Real (question mark) (question mark) (question mark)?” and sort of just pushed that question
Out of, like, academic philosophical thought and into religious theological thought. He was just like, “Not my circus, not my monkey,” you know what I mean? Heine dug this and called Kant the “great destroyer in the realm of thought” and, his
Work (the first critique), as “the sword with which deism was slain in Germany.” What am I doing writing? Who do I think I am? “Who do you say I am?” So, then, Nietzsche comes along, fast-forward, with his, like, metaphysics of becoming and
His new enlightenment mindset, and he was like, “Yeah, God was dying; now he’s dead. We have killed him; let’s move on.” But saying that “God’s Not Dead” wants to bring Christianity back into the godless, communist academic hellscape that the world has become is also not a complicated read. It’s the plot.
Which means that we need to go even further back to the beginning because the idea of God dying and God being killed does not come from atheists; it doesn’t come from philosophers; it doesn’t come from scientists. It comes from Christians. Part three – The Christian Redemption Cycle…
…adds an extra six minutes to your laundry cycle, costs 50 cents extra, BUT it is the only one that will get those blood stains out. For those of you unfamiliar with the origin story of Christianity… *I am not here to give you a cliff notes of the bible* …here’s the cliff notes.
Jesus: son of God, but also kind of God (it’s confusing, roll with it); sent down to earth; has some hot takes; gets killed for those takes; is dead for, like, three days; rises from the grave; pops back to earth; forgives humanity for all of its debauchery.
That is the, like, literal-ish situation as it was recorded in the best, most detailed account of JC’s life: the New Testament, which is obviously biased. That’s a hot take on its own, right? [Eerie music] If you are looking for a more historically accurate understanding, “Let’s Talk Religion”
Has a really great video as part of a collaboration series about the likelihood of Jesus being, like, a real human dude. For our purposes, though, we are discussing the crucifixion itself with the presumption that it was at least a physical event that happened to a physical person, and it served
Then as an allegory for the beliefs of his followers and became the kind of bedrock story for what we now call Christianity and it’s 7.5 billion denominations. Because, whether or not we know that it happened, the idea that it happened–the story of it–is
The one thing that they all kind of-sort of-sometimes-maybe agree on: son of God dies for our sins; we know this because he comes back, and he tells us. And he has a really important theme of sacrifice; evangelizing; spreading the truth against
The grain; sitting in the darkness with nothing but your faith beside you; the ability to balance the scales of sin in the eyes of God. All of those elements and storytelling things sort of bubble out from this event. The death of Jesus Christ becomes both a physical and a psychological event.
The crucifixion of a dude who is going around with different ideas on God has a really profound effect on the psyche of the individuals who really believed that he was the S.O.G. They live on for three days thinking that God is dead. And, like, what the fuck does that mean?
They don’t know if he’s gonna rise again; they have no idea! They’re in the olden times still, like, with that Old Testament God who is super not kind all the time. The relationship with God is so different in that time; pre-C.E. humans were evidently rather disappointing in the eyes of the Lord.
At least we had the power to be disappointing, right? To disobey commands and ideas–intentionally or not. We were less like a game of Sims and more like a studio apartment full of, like, a shit-ton of puppies and kittens–seven billion puppies and kittens just running around, shitting
On the carpet, peeing on the plants, knocking things over, and occasionally killing each other. In pre-Jesus world, it was completely possible to be abandoned by God, not just on an individual level, but all of us. To be punished by God for your behavior, right?
With things like lightning strikes and famines and pimples. So, it makes sense that, while most people were kind of like, “Okay, Dave, whatever,” when Jesus said that he was the son of God, the people that did believe him were pretty
Fucking concerned when a bunch of their fellow puppies murdered him on a goddamn cross. Because, sure, he said “son,” but he didn’t mean that God got married, settled down, and Jesus was, like, off at college on Earth.
God, like, took a part of himself, put it into this woman, made a baby, and she came out, and that’s what we got. It’s a weird–it’s very weird. It’s, yeah, like, we’re not talking about immaculate conception because that is… Jesus wasn’t the immaculate conception, by the way. It was mary.
Anyway, that’s a pretty terrifying time to exist. It’s not a fun time to be a follower of Jesus. They weren’t quite called Christians at the time. So, when we talk about modern-day Christians living perpetually on Holy Saturday, we’re talking about them living psychologically in that space between Jesus’s death on Good
Friday and his resurrection on Sunday–i.e. Saturday [Applause]–constantly waiting for the second coming; for Jesus to return and validate all of their good work and forgive all of the sins that other people–I mean “they”–have been doing. Only, Jesus cannot rise again if he is not killed in the first place, and he didn’t exactly
Die a second time on that Sunday. So, what do you do, right? What–what do you do then, right? You go back to the beginning: eternal recurrence. Start spreading the word. Only, you can’t spread the word to people who already believe, so you need to find people
Who don’t believe–people for whom (wait for it)… God is dead. If I had a mic, I’d drop it. First episode of “Midnight Mass” includes one of my three favorite scenes in the whole series. It’s so good I googled “mass times” after it.
It takes place after mass, right outside of St. Patrick’s church while everyone is introducing themselves to their hot new priest, Father Paul, because he just gave this, like, sick ass sermon. “The crockpot…” So, Riley had been dragged to church by his family but did not go up to take communion.
Which is accurate; you’re really, like, not supposed to take communion if you haven’t been to confession and you’re not, like, practicing. It’s just–it’s rude. When I go to church, I don’t take communion. And you do get some looks. People notice; it’s very obvious when you don’t go.
So, Father Paul notices this, and he’s like, “Yo, saw you didn’t take communion,” and, instead of, like, shitting on Paul’s god for five minutes, Riley just says that he’s just not, like, really in a state of grace at the moment.
He’s trying to be nice about it; he’s trying to, like, let him off the hook. He’s like, “I’m just not feeling it.” And Father Paul looks at him and just says… “Uh, turns out I’m not much use to people who are in a state of grace.”
Such a perfect moment, and it’s right off the bat in episode one. It’s one of the reasons that this show immediately comes off as palatable to religious-wary folks and non-religious folks and probably even religious and probably even Catholics.
I have not actually asked any Catholics, but I cannot imagine that they’re that mad about it. It’s not that bad! And, like, I’m half Catholic; we never shy away from drama. We put children in, like, wedding garb and princess dresses to eat some crackers for the first time.
There’s a reason that they still wear those fucking robes and drink out of these, like, massive goblets, right? Like, it’s not necessary. We just like it. Catholics get a bad rep for being boring because, like, it’s true, but, also, we all like a little bit of sparkle.
Don’t let any of them tell you they don’t. So, this scene exemplifies the pulsing undertone of the capital-C Christian redemption arc. Riley had been this devout altar boy, like, practicing Catholic (he prays when we first-first-first meet him) who has been in a terrible accident, experienced trauma, and has been left with
Just, like, grief and doubt and self-hatred; he’s lost his way; he’s living alone on Holy Saturday; feels abandoned by God. He’s in this place where God is dead, surrounded by believers–like, concerned loved ones pressuring him to do things like go to church to make communion, to find faith because they think
It will fix him or because they think that it will look better from the outside if he does all of these things. Either way, all of these people just trying to shove him into the arms of a dead God as
Soon as possible, and it’s Father Paul, the priest, who just sort of shrugs, and is like, that’s kind of the point. He’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” He’s like, “You don’t have–like, that’s why we’re here.” He’s like, “That’s the whole damn reason.”
This stranger–on his first day at a new church, being love-bombed by, like, a desperate people trying to prove their devotion like precocious middle children who don’t feel seen by their parents–gives Riley an olive branch that we didn’t know we wanted him to have. And, suddenly, things change; because, suddenly, we trust Paul.
We maybe kind of want Riley to take this journey back to God, right? Because we want all of our protagonists to be happy and achieve some kind of security and safety and overcome their traumas and their shame.
And, at this moment, like, that’s being presented to us in the form of Catholicism, of Christianity, as this pastor coming into town like Jesus himself trying to make things better. In contrast to that setup, protagonists in “God’s Not Dead” films are rarely non-believers.
And they are technically ensemble casts, but the central characters in these films are typically not seeking any kind of salvation–religious or not. Usually, they are the ones doling it out. Josh Weedleboro is not presented as having lost faith and looking to re-enter, like, communion with God.
In fact, he is presented and remains one of the most steadfast, firm-believing Christians in the whole series throughout all of the films. He’s in, like, all of them, and he just never loses that. “Do you have a Bible?” “Yeah.”
Time and time again, he insists that he has to do this for God, sacrificed be damned. He loses sleep; his grades slip; his girlfriend breaks up with him, and he might have to go to the Newsboys alone. “My mother was so right about you.” But he stays devoted.
Because the emphasis in that version of the redemption arc is not on the lost and the fallen, who exist mostly as prizes, really, like adding up one by one like points at the end of a video game at the end of every film.
The emphasis is on the stalwart belief of these Christians who exist psychologically beyond the resurrection in a world where Jesus has already returned and given salvation to his followers. They are high on that forgiveness and proof of God. [Music] “When I, in awesome wonder, consider all…”
So, we have the characters in “God’s Not Dead” functioning in, like, a Jesus-like role, and, then, we have the characters in “Midnight Mass” pretty much functioning as, like, the apostles. Even Father Paul. All of its protagonists are psychologically in the place of the apostles either pre-crucifixion or between the crucifixion and the resurrection.
They’re all, like, wandering aimlessly, sort of searching for God. This is a very good reflection of Catholicism versus Evangelical Christianity that we see in the American South and what is presented in “God’s Not Dead.” Catholicism is all about that guilt with a capital-G. It’s about repenting your way back to heaven.
We’re still making up for the sins of Eve. We’re still guilty. Your baby is born guilty; that is why you baptize that shit. It’s just the way that it is. Whereas, you know, American sort of Evangelical Christianity as we know it in these films
Is presented with its strong focus on saving–on being saved. It’s got its roots in Protestantism. And the importance of giving your life to God and, like, verbally and physically acknowledging Jesus as your savior, being given salvation through the power of that faith and that belief alone,
Is very much reflected in the way that these two pieces of media approach the redemption cycle. Either way, the death of Mr. Jesus Christ of Nazareth is a core component of Christianity at its very base–at its very, the very bottom of its soul, it’s there.
And that story of sacrifice and martyrdom and redemption and fighting for your beliefs–all of these elements in this story are still found in the modern storytelling context that we know, like the hero’s journey and things like that, right? There’s, like, “leaving home”, “call to action”, “moment of doubt”; like, all of those can
Be sort of found in this redemption cycle as well as in other biblical tales. It’s why films like “Silence” and “Noah” are able to captivate audiences both religious and non-religious alike. It’s why “Left Behind” exists; it’s why Pureflix was able to make four of these films in the first place.
There are so many ways to tell this kind of story–to talk about redemption and forgiveness and faith. And all of them start with the death of God. Part four: God death – Causes, symptoms, treatment Episode one of “Midnight Mass”, we open on a flashback.
Red and blue lights; glass on the ground; Nickelback in the background; it’s nighttime, the scene of an accident; and we pan to our first protagonist, Riley, where he sits on the side of the road, all banged up, praying the “Our Father”.
For those of you who don’t know, the “Our Father” is basically the “Party in the USA” of Catholic prayers. It is the Billboard top 100 25 weeks in a row: stone-cold classic. It’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”; it does everything you need it to do; everyone knows it; no one forgets it. It’s *french kiss*, right?
It’s just iconic. And it’s definitely the only one I remember. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us;
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.” Put a bit too much feeling in that. Sorry. So, Riley’s on this curb; he’s praying; he’s obviously horrified by the situation; scared out of his mind; not at all injured in this car accident; spends four years in prison;
Reads all the books, and comes to the conclusion that there is no God. There can’t be. And, therefore…atheist. On the other side of the void, in “God’s Not Dead”, our prominent long-time atheist, Professor Rodelson, is being a menace.
“But know this: if you truly feel the need to continue with this charade, I will make it my personal mission to destroy any hope of a law degree in your future.” “Know thyself, darling. Know thyself. Which I suggest means knowing your own limitations.”
We don’t get any kind of fun, like, flashback sequence for him. Instead, we just find out later that, long before Henry David Adam Rattlebomb was starting pissing contests with 19-year-olds instead of doing his job, he was a believer. And, as a child, he was, like, super gung-ho on God.
Then, his mom got sick, and he, like Riley, prayed to the Lord to save her. She was not saved, and, therefore, he reasons “No God”, thus…atheist. So, both of these films have come to the conclusion that a common cause of God-death for the individual
Is “Bad things happening to good people and prayers unanswered”–which is a fair conclusion given that philosophers and theologians and just general humans have been losing their minds over this forever. Fyodor Dostoevsky explores this and like 57 other concepts in his 1880 novel, “The Brothers Karamazov”.
Bet you thought I forgot that I mentioned 19th-century Russian literature, didn’t you? Nope, not even a little bit. We’re just getting started, but I didn’t want to scare you off. Because this book is way too long to summarize, but the gist of it is Mr. Karamazov was a
Shitty dad; he’s got three sons who pretty much get raised by different people. Alyosha ends up being, like, super religious. Ivan is a smart-ass philosopher; Dmitri is a soldier-turned-criminal-turned-like, kind of decent-dude. There is an inheritance; there’s some murder; a lot of asides; a lot of dialogues; and a lot of quips.
It’s really great; you don’t need to have read it in order to understand what I will be talking about when I reference it; trust me, Josh didn’t. But I love it. I love Dostoevsky; “Crime and Punishment” is one of my favorite novels. I think that his writing is just magical; it’s so good.
What you do need to know is that, during one of the many long dialogues between the brothers, godly man Alyosha is listening to diet Kierkegaard Ivan express his struggle to square the suffering of children with the existence of God. So, why should they serve as fertilizer for someone’s future harmony, right?
That is what Ivan says. In this world where suffering is often seen as a punishment by God for sin, how can innocent children who have not sinned be allowed to suffer and, on that note, why should they embrace a Lord that allows them to suffer, right?
His Euclidean ideal justice system that relies so heavily on acts of evil being punished directly (just as acts of good are rewarded directly) clashes with this idea of a benevolent, all-forgiving god who could return at any moment, empty out hell, and release all humanity from sin.
Ivan’s rejection of God differs slightly from Riley or Radisson’s in that Ivan is less concerned with the existence of God and more concerned with the value of God. He basically tells Alyosha, “If God exists–if THAT God exists that’s allowing child abusers
And monsters to walk free, and that is the world we live in? No, thank you. I politely would like to return my ticket,” right? That’s what he says. So, Ivan is really on the struggle bus here, because Alyosha is not doing him any favors because it’s Dostoyevsky.
And Dostoyevsky is a Christian whose middle name is “devil’s advocate”, and he was in, like, a shitstorm of grief when he wrote this–on top of just, like, a very long and painful life. And, so, basically, Ivan just ends up sort of exhausted by Alyosha every time they have a conversation.
“Today is critical for us, and I am finished. Complete honesty. How does it make you feel?!” So, he descends into full-blown madness over this (which I get–family triggers all of us), but, before any of that, he just kind of concedes to the argument, right?
He’s just kind of like, “Fine, it’s not God that I don’t accept; it’s the world that he created.” And that’s, like, enough to settle that chapter and move on. Now, Jasper Wedone tries to take a page out of this book and, basically, in his third
Argument with Professor Radisson, just starts, like, rattling Dostoevsky off on him and morality and quotes and just gets into a screaming match with Professor Raddison that cultivates in this moment: “It’s a very simple question, Professor. Why do you hate God?” “Because he took everything away from me!”
Plot twist: he was never really an atheist; he was just sad. And, luckily, when he gets hit by a car 14 minutes later, Reverend Dave just happens to be right there just in time for him to accept Jesus into his heart with his dying breath, thus saving him from eterminal damnation. Whew.
In a piece published by the University of Pennsylvania press, Eric Von Der Luft describes a key difference between the death of God from a Christian perspective and from a Nietzschean perspective, in that Christian’s the loss of God is something that happens by accident;
It stems out of a lack of faith; of spiritual blindness, right? The belief in God for the individual is killed by the oppressor, who simply does not know the truth. And, for Nietzsche, it is an act of defiance in the face of near-constant tragedy and turmoil.
It is not something that happens to humans but something that humans do. WE have killed him. Humans have deliberately done away with that which is no longer beneficial to our progress. Nietzsche was kind of obsessed with his own little idea of progress–not progress, like,
As we would see it in 2021, where people become more equal and understanding and respectful, but more of a spiritual evolution for himself. A metaphysics of becoming rather than being. Searching into yourself and searching for the self and understanding yourself and your connection to the world was of the utmost importance.
He wanted humans to be in a perpetual motion; constantly changing and becoming our sort of best, ideal versions of ourselves–like, the most awake, the most enlightened, the most perfect. Are you seeing why the nazis got so hype on this?
Anything that sort of hinders or interrupts that forward motion (like the idea of a perfect God who is infinitely better than man) has got to go. For Nietzsche, believing in God is like chaining your wrist to a block of cement and throwing
The key into an incinerator; a form of self-imprisonment, like a castration of the soul. Humanity has done and needs to continue to assert its free will and refuse to believe in the great man in the sky, therefore killing his presence in the collective consciousness and allowing us to become… superheroes.
And that is how Riley went about it. When confronted with the cognitive dissonance of bad things happening to good people, he reads all the books and comes to the conclusion that there is no God and just does away with that which is no longer beneficial to him.
Was he doing this with the intention of becoming the superman? No. But… Irony is gonna iron. Riley’s atheism is a choice; it is the killing of God in a deliberate and permanent fashion. He does not ever voluntarily take the sacrament throughout the show.
He does not return back into the covenant of the Lord. It is an evolutionary step in his psychology, arrived at following years of research and (not unlike Ivan) intellectual reasoning. “A lot of time to read in there, and I read it all: Torah, Quran, Talmud, Dao De Jing.
Came out of that an atheist.” Radisson’s atheism is a product of a cruel world; it is something that happened to him that caused him immense pain and suffering always and, most importantly, (like Ivan’s) is temporary. And, so, despite being set up for what could be a typical Christian redemption arc–Riley
Returning to the faith, the prodigal son both physically and spiritually—his story ends with him still outside of the covenant of the Lord–technically speaking, if we’re taking free will into account, which…we’ll get to. “Free–” “Free will. That’s the ball game, wasn’t it? That’s the whole thing.” When Riley killed God, it worked.
When Radisson killed God, he came back. And, so, there’s this, like, recurring theme in “God’s Not Dead’s” universe where, if a character refuses God, their life is… *Sobbing* …like shit with a capital-S. Bad things happen to them. They get cancer. Their moms die. They burn down churches and kill people.
Last one was an accident, but still–point still stands. These characters are consistently punished until they are either putting their faith in God or they’re just abandoned to wallow in their misery forever. *More Sobbing* The only solution to their pain and troubles…is Jesus. Part 5: [Music] “Why should I die?”
In order for Riley to stay out of jail, he has to do these weekly AA meetings; but there are only, like, four people on Crockett Island, and none of them are ready to admit their powerlessness to the blood of Christ just yet, so he is forced to go all the way to
The mainland every week so he can get his little paper signed by the dude for probation. This is a bummer because there are only two boats: one that comes to the island and one that leaves every day–that’s all you get.
So, if he misses that first boat and he misses this appointment he’s capital-F fucked, right? So, Father Paul is like, “Hey, I will start a chapter here so I can sign your paper, and you don’t have to go all the way to the mainland anymore.” And Riley’s like, “Sick!
That makes my life a lot easier. Let’s do it.” And this sets up a series of dialogues that happen between these two characters–these long, drawn-out scenes of conversations between Riley and Father Paul in this empty rec center right next to the church.
This feels a lot like the scenes that we get between various characters in “The Brothers Karamazov”, where you have two people with drastically differing opinions on a subject just playing, like, intellectual tennis just back and forth, back and forth, ripping open
Cans of worms one after another and letting them crawl all over each other like that was the point the whole time; pushing and pulling for answers and completely ignoring the nagging feeling in the back of your head that everything is meaningless and there is no truth because
We are forever trapped within our own personal perception of the world no matter how much talking we do. We’ll never truly understand if the color that I say is red and you say is red is actually the same color! Our stupid, weak little puny retinas could be interpreting entirely different sensations
In our brains, and we would have no idea because, technically, the same thing that we saw is also the same thing that we said, but it’s different and we don’t know. So, these long back-and-forths in “Midnight Mass” echo a lot of the discussions from “Brothers Karamazov”
Almost beat-for-beat, with Riley initially playing the part of Ivan or even, like, Nietzsche himself, when Father Paul says to him to say whatever he wants about Christianity. “…just not want to offend you.” “That’s tough to do. And AA is not about protecting people’s feelings, is it? It’s about recovery.”
Father Paul’s not doing this to convert Riley. Father Paul is doing this because he thinks it’s what he was sent back to Crockett Island to do, which is help people. So, when Riley makes the argument that Radisson makes and that Ivan makes, and he says,
“Bad things happening to good people…what’s up?” and Father Paul gives him the basic, like, “Who knows what the big man’s plan is; it’s got to be a good one,” Riley doesn’t hold back. He says “God works in mysterious ways” is just something people say as an excuse not to hold themselves accountable.
And Father Paul says this: “Look, there’s nothing in the scripture or in the world, for that matter, that suggests God negates personal accountability.” And, so, it’s this kind of dance around the subject of “God real (question mark)?” Because Father Paul very clearly believes in God and Riley very clearly does not, and
They’re trying to have this discussion about the structures and the way that people use religion in their lives because that’s something that they’ve both experienced. “We can all just stand by and watch Lisa Scarborough wheel herself around town. We can watch Joe Collie slowly drink himself to death.
We can watch so many people just slip into these bottomless pits of awful, and we can stand it. We can tolerate it because we can say things like, ‘God works in mysterious ways’.” So, Riley’s talking about the way that people use God, and Father Paul is kind of talking
About the way that God uses people. “God can take that pain and turn it into something good–something with purpose. Suffering can be a gift; that just depends on us.” And this is another one of those reasons that it’s so palatable, I think, to religious and
Non-religious people to watch “Midnight Mass”, because it takes these discussions very seriously. And it’s one of the reasons that Christians love Dostoyevsky and so do non-Christians, right? It’s not taking a side; it’s opening the discussion. And you get a sort of similar dynamic in the second “God’s Not Dead” movie, where Sabrina
The teenage witch is having, like, a dangerously close to flirtatious discussion with her non-religious lawyer when he asks her about why she became Christian. So, she tells this sort of vague story about her being in some kind of a bad place without
Any details and coming across a church with a sign that said “Who do you say I am?” And that scene differs greatly in depth and length because it’s an ensemble film; it’s not an eight-episode miniseries. They have a lot of story lines to get through, and, also, it’s important to remember that
Their target audience is Christians; so, the fact that there isn’t much time spent on or giving details about Grace’s pre-Christianity backstory makes a lot of sense and is very in line with Evangelical Christianity in the American South and, like, the American West. [Music] “And I was struggling with a lot of things.”
Evangelicals are born again when you accept Jesus into your soul; into your heart; when you re-baptize as an adult. Who you were before doesn’t matter. Who you are now is what’s important. You can accept God into your heart with your dying breath, and that’s enough.
Which, for the record, I do think is a very beautiful sentiment. And it works within the narrative, because Grace’s story is not about what belief in God gave her the strength to do or change; it’s the idea that simple belief was all it took.
She’s not trying to sell him on having to make all of the tough choices and do the things that she had to do after she found God; she’s trying to sell him on the feeling that believing in God gives her. “As I read it, I could hear the Lord speak to me.
So, that was the start of a journey that didn’t end until I found the answer.” But she doesn’t tell you what the answer is. “Please don’t forsake me…” When our journalist character is in remission, she finds herself in the church with Jude, where she confesses that she’s really struggling to believe.
And he actually does kind of echo the sentiment that Father Paul gives in the beginning of “Midnight Mass”, which is: that’s the point. [Music] “He delights in using us in ways we never dreamed of and giving us things that we never even knew we wanted.” The “God’s Not Dead” franchise paints this struggle to believe as not an individual struggling to achieve the state of believing but as the individual wanting so badly to believe but being bogged down by the world. It’s not that she doesn’t want to believe or she doesn’t believe, it’s that she wants
So badly to believe that the world is coming for her. “He who believes in me will live, even if he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” *Screams* “Do you believe this? Then invite him into your heart, and make him the Lord of your life.”
The carrot that GND is dangling in front of its Holy Saturday characters is liberation from anything and everything negative. The message in the first two films is “just give Jesus the wheel, and he will drive you straight to heaven without a single surcharge. Sure, bad things happen, but they’re not your fault.
They’re not your fault as long as you believe. They’re the big, bad American education system’s fault. They’re the world’s fault. They’re the government’s fault. They’re the atheists’ fault. “What makes you so sure?” “Speed of change. Viciousness of the opposition.
The message of the gospel has us standing in the way of a lot of things that powerful people want, and our resistance to change that message because it’s not ours to change has made us a lot of enemies.” Grace isn’t about to lose her job because she started preaching during geometry class.
She’s not about to lose her job because she answered a question. She’s about to lose her job because the slimy, fire-breathing demon children of the leftist overlords are throwing chains around the Bill of Rights and shoving copies of “The Origins
Of Species” down the throats of hard-working American Christians and, God, why won’t anyone listen to Jordan Peterson?! And this sounds ridiculous. “I do think I have an unusually high regard for the value of evidence…” Because these scenarios are ridiculous. “You understand that I might die.” “I’m sorry about that.”
Sabrina would never have been fired or given any sort of discipline for answering a question about the story of Jesus in the Bible whilst they are talking about martyrs and influential thinkers. A philosophy professor would never force his students to sign a paper or fail.
Social workers will not shut down your homeschooling co-op because you taught your kids about Noah’s ark. These are not things that happen in the real world; but they ARE things that happen in the Bible. Jesus? Obviously literally killed for hanging out and doing miracles.
Pretty sure John the Baptist gets, like, imprisoned and then beheaded for calling out the king on his BS. Jacob ends up in prison. So many people go to jail; so many people end up in prison for believing in God. People get stoned, right? The seas run red with blood.
Like, this is the world of the bible. “Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you. You will suffer persecution for 10 days.
Be faithful–even to the point of death–and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.” *Screaming* Religious horror is about taking the more abstract elements of religion and legitimizing them as fact within a given story. When we look at the “God’s Not Dead” films as an exploration of the traditional Christian
Redemption cycle, placing its Christian characters in the place of Jesus the prophet and atheist characters as disciples on Holy Saturday, then what we have is the American education system and, later, the government serving as the infamous persecutors as stand-ins for
The devil himself, coming down with rage and fire and constant temptation that must be overcome somehow. “If we stand by and do nothing, the pressure that we’re feeling today is going to mean persecution tomorrow.” “What makes you so sure?” Imagine that you don’t read fantasy.
You don’t grow up reading “Harry Potter”; you don’t grow up reading “The Hunger Games”; you don’t get to read the Percy Jackson books or things like this; you don’t watch these kinds of films; you don’t watch a lot of TV; everything is very curated. What you do read is the Bible.
What you do do is go to Bible study three times a week, and what you grow up to do is make films. This is the kind of film you would want to see; like, this is reality. [Music] [Applause]
Belief in God is the only thing standing between suffering and not suffering in this world. Questions like, “Who will wipe the blood off us?” or “All things are lawful, then?” aren’t questions that need answers in the face of a dead God; they’re experiences of suffering.
Not knowing what is right and what is wrong, being lost and confused, is a form of suffering in these films–a product of God’s death for the individual. And, by extension, any and all moments where one does not have faith in a Christian God are experienced as moments of suffering. “You’re beautiful…” [Music]
“…I wish you didn’t have to do that.” So…so, these movies are racist. There’s no way to get around that; we’re not sugar coating it. I’m giving them a fair shake but not there. They’re racist in addition to also being specifically very, very, very anti-muslim.
Ayisha is our character who is stereotyped as being, like, forced to cover up with a hijab and is presented as like– I’m sorry, I think–so, this is the point–this is the point in the script–I just realized
This is the point in the script where I started referring to people for whom God is dead as “deadlings”…? So, just henceforth…deadlings? So, Ayisha is stereotyped as being forced to cover up with her hijab and, like, presented as a deadling.
God is dead for her, and she is experiencing all of the horrible suffering as a direct result of her not being raised in a Christian household. She is kicked out of her house, not because her father is abusive and making a bad choice,
But because he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ as the Lord and savior. Apart from the blatant misunderstanding and sheer lack of respect for Islamic culture and practices like hijab-wearing, the film also goes out of its way to make it very clear
That just believing in God is not enough; it has to be a specifically Christian God–their Christian God. “No, Papa(?), Jesus is my Lord and savior, and he died to save me from my sin.” And, now, we have a similar-ish story in “Midnight Mass” after the miracles start happening on
Crockett Island, where Sheriff Hassan’s son, Ali, wants to go to church and see what it’s all about because he’s 15 and his best friend’s girlfriend just started walking out of her wheelchair, right? Fuckin’, I would go too. And the sheriff is not stoked about it.
It’s actually really, really, really difficult for him that this is happening, because Bev Keane is so shitty, first of all, and also he has, like, a lifetime of racism and intolerance behind him. His wife had recently passed, and he had kind of converted to Islam for her, and they raised
Their son in this, in this faith. And, so, it opens up, like, a whole bunch of wounds that his son is now questioning. “If he handed Lisa Scarborough a miracle but let a child die of a brain tumor across the way on the mainland…no. No, that’s not how it works, Ali. It’s not.”
He’s not just upset that his son might be considering Catholicism. He’s upset because he feels like he’s losing his son. But, instead of kicking his son out of the house and right into the arms of Bev Keane,
It kind of opens up this dialogue where they discuss the different ways in which one can be connected to God outside of the bounds of any specific religion. The line that sticks out to me that he specifically says is–he says, “We already have him. We already have God.”
“I will not tell my son not to look for God. Son, oh. We already have him.” “Midnight Mass” also gives the opportunity for Sheriff Hassan to actually explain a bit about Islam to a room full of Christians and Catholics, and he breaks down that Muslims
Do actually believe that Jesus was a prophet–just not the last one. And, full disclosure, I didn’t know that. I had no idea–absolutely no idea. I…like I never…I spend a lot of time thinking about Christianity and thinking about Catholicism
And its split from Judaism, and I really have sort of left the other Abrahamic religion on its own, so i feel…I felt kind of shitty, but, um, but now I know. So, I’ll look into it. Also, that scene and, like, an hour and a half or so spent on Wikipedia and Google is
Kind of all that I have to go on, so please correct me if that was wrong or I did anything incorrect there. Please feel free to leave resources or any other information in, like, comments and stuff, as I would like to be corrected, and I would not like to spread misinformation.
Speaking of misinformation, “God’s Not Dead” doesn’t leave space for that kind of an explanation or any kind of education about any other religion because it simply will not do. You simply cannot be saved by Jesus if you don’t believe in Jesus, so…
That’s their logic. I do low-key think they tried to correct this in the third film. The thing about the third one is that they tried to correct a lot that they did in the first two that people really were not happy about; and one of the things was, I think
They were trying to be more tolerant; they were trying to make it seem like they were being more tolerant, but they definitely weren’t ready to give Muslims a chance, so they were, like, just having the judge be Catholic (which is a miracle on its own).
One of the two branches between Christianity and Catholicism is that Catholicism focuses really, really heavily on guilt–I mean repentance, sorry. It’s about feeling guilty, admitting you were wrong, feeling guilty, actively repenting, feeling guilty, saying ten Hail Mary’s, feeling guilty. That’s, that’s, that’s it. That’s the whole shebang, uh, to be honest.
There’s other things? There’s other things. The idea with the ten Hail Mary’s is you confess your sins to the priest through the screen, and, then, he kind of assigns you how many of what prayer you should say to make up for it.
And, technically, it’s like…repeating this prayer is for you to believe it, right? It’s the more that you say it, the more the words can sink in and the more you’ll be able to mean it. What it is, though, is spiritual capitalism. And we’re gonna get into that later.
But it relies on repenting for your sins first in order to gain forgiveness later…maybe. You’ve done wrong, so you have to make up for that; you’re constantly trying to, like, play catch-up to make sure that you are sort of in the right balance. Have you been to church enough?
Have you given enough to the collection? Have you gone to confession? How many times do you go to confession? Like, what are the good things that you’re doing? How many prayers are you saying to make up for all of these other terrible things that you’re definitely doing? Like…breathing.
We don’t breathe without the Holy Ghost. So, that’s a core foundation of Catholicism, and that comes all the way back—allll the way back–to pre-pre-split; like, Roman Catholicism pre-schism. Schism’s a big deal. I love a schism. There’s a million and five schisms, I think, exactly.
I think it’s, like, one million and five-and-a-half schisms that Christianity has had since its inception. But hot boy summer of 1054: THE Schism. The schism is, basically, when Western Roman Catholicism split from Catholicism and what we kind of now call Eastern Orthodoxy.
That’s important because that is kind of spread over to Russia; and what do we know when we’re talking about Russia? What are we talking about with Russia? Dostoyevsky and “The Brothers Karamazov”. So, that is the version of Christianity that they’re dealing with. So, now we have three (if you’re not keeping up).
We have the, like, American Evangelical Christianity that comes kind of from Protestantism, um, and has that emphasis on saving. We have Roman Catholicism or, more so, modern, like, New England Catholicism, which is, like, a bit irish, a bit all over the place–all guilt, all day.
And we have the Eastern Orthodoxy, which, that’s Dostoyevsky’s kind of wheelhouse. Same as Nietzsche, though, he’s in the enlightenment period, so things are changing; lots of political structures are changing; things are going crazy all the time everywhere. And the form of Christianity that we see in “Brothers Karamazov” is much closer to what
We get in “Midnight Mass”, in that there is a lot of that emphasis on kind of guilt and repentance, and there’s a strongly held belief in this book that one must suffer in order to repent and be forgiven, right?
We have characters who feel a tremendous amount of shame and guilt and desire to suffer as penance for God. Joe Collie is an alcoholic; he’s a loner; he’s a deadling. A few years before the events of “Midnight Mass”, he’s out in the woods drunk, shooting
What I’m assuming were dear I guess, and accidentally shoots little Lisa Scarbrough in the back, paralyzing her from the waist down. He wasn’t exactly well-liked before, but now he’s public enemy number two. Do I need to tell you who public enemy number one is? “It’s just, you’re wearing a gold chasuble today.
Shouldn’t it be green today? We’re in ordinary time; seventh sunday of ordinary time.” Joe Collie mirrors Dmitri in a lot of ways, one of them being, you know, terrible crimes in the past; a lot of it being that people have just given up on them.
In TBK, everybody just kind of assumes that Dmitri has killed his father or will kill his father. Like, they all think that he’s gonna become his father; he’s kind of seen as just, like, a lost cause. They’re like, “He’s a scoundrel; whatever,” and it really takes people kind of believing
In him and…and fighting for him to…for him to get the opportunity to grow as a person, and he does. Joe Collie is in the same boat. Everybody’s given up on him; they don’t think he’s capable of change; they hate him for
Shooting a little girl; and they don’t think that he’s worth their time or their love; and this is a struggle for Ivan in Brothers Karamazov as well. He says, “One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract or even at a distance; but, at close quarters, it’s almost impossible.”
Which is the same thing that Riley points out in one of those first AA meetings, where he says, “Yeah, everybody’s talking about how God loves everybody and we’re all God’s children, but they let Joe Collie drink himself to death; no one wants to give Joe Collie the time of day.”
Interestingly, though, Ivan really focuses on the suffering of children and the abusers of those children; and Riley really sees the Lisa Scarborough/Joe Collie situation for exactly what it is–which is just an awful, awful situation. Admittedly, um, Ivan’s not talking about, like, an individual situation; he’s talking about kind of grand scale, but still…
Neither of them can square this, right? This “God letting terrible things happen and allowing suffering”; it’s just error 404, please check your connection and try again later. It does not compute because it’s a cognitive dissonance. What is a cognitive dissonance?
A cognitive dissonance is what happens when you have two or more thoughts or experiences or beliefs or rationales rattling around in your little goldfish brain, existing in opposition to each other. The fact that you are a goldfish is not consistent with your understanding of a goldfish.
The fact that it is raining outside is not consistent with the fact that the weatherman said it would not rain. Unicorns are not real, but also… The little wires inside of our brains are desperate for consistency; normalcy. They like when things make sense.
We like watching the wine moms slot all of their cans right into spaces along the inside of their fridge, fitting perfectly across in a line. We like watching the Tetris pieces fall right where they’re supposed to. We like watching people organize things and do their…satisfying videos is an entire genre for a reason.
We like it when things come together nicely; we like it when things make sense; we like it when movies have good endings. We don’t want to be confused; we don’t want to be scared. It scatters our little brains and makes us malleable and weak like this dental guard
That I had to buy to stop myself from stress-grinding my teeth into nothingness while I lay in the dark for eight hours, every night, desperately hoping I’ll be sucked down into the wormhole of my subconscious for just a few short hours.
Cognitive dissonance fucks with your brain; it fucks with your sense of self and your sense of reality. And this is what happens when you are told that God is good always, and, then, not-so-good things are happening on God’s watch.
In order to resolve this issue, one of the incongruent thoughts must be abandoned, thrown away, spat on, and left for dead in a mysterious alleyway. My own experience and self-image does not line up with what I know to be the experience and image of a goldfish.
Then, I am either not a goldfish or I am not myself. Which, frankly… If the weatherman says it’s not raining, but it’s clearly raining outside, either the weatherman is wrong or my perception of reality is wrong; which, frankly… Either unicorns are real or this doesn’t exist.
Riley, Professor Radisson, Ivan — all presented with the same cognitive dissonance. The solution for Ivan is to return his ticket. The solution for Riley is that God is not real. The solution for “God’s Not Dead” characters is this… “God is good.” And the solution for Father Paul is, well… [Intense music]
Part six: “What do you want, Paul?” [Music] “Excuse me?” So. Here’s how it went down. Monsignor Pruitt: super fucking old; totally losing it; whole island sends him to Israel, the holy land; as, like, a make-a-wish before you die kind of thing.
On this trip, he does die (more or less), walking alone in a desert, totally off his rocker, runs into an angel who saves his life, makes him all young and hot again, sends him back to Crockett Island, takes this angel in a Trunkit, then he goes back to the Island,
Calls himself Father Paul, and starts lying to everyone constantly. One of the lies that he tells comes up during an AA meeting with Riley, right after Lisa Scarborough has begun to walk again. Riley, in an attempt to ease the cognitive dissonance of that shit, lays it all out for
Father Paul, and he’s like, “Look, scientifically, I get it. I can explain a misdiagnosis; I can explain miraculous recovery. It happens. I get how she can physically walk again. What I don’t get is how you knew she would be able to do it.”
And what this tells us is that Riley has enough faith in Father Paul as a person to know that he would never have asked Lisa to stand if he didn’t know she could do it. And the answer Father Paul gives him is that he just knew.
And he says, “I know that’s not enough for you. I envy you. I wish I could see the world scientifically and be able to reason like that,” but he just doesn’t know. And it’s out of his hands.
But, the truth is, he knows it’s not gonna be enough for Riley because he knows it’s bullshit. Father Paul knew she could walk again because he’s been spiking the communion wine with the blood of the angel that made him young again–not because of any kind of intuition.
He didn’t have some weird feeling; he didn’t walk on a ley line, okay? He’s been deliberately trying to make everybody on this island young again because he’s got dreams he wants to relive. Father Paul Monsignor Pruitt has been lying to everyone everywhere since he got here. His name’s not even Paul!
He made it up! He named himself Paul after Paul of Damascus. You know what happens to Paul in the Bible? Paul is sent through the desert to Damascus to arrest Jesus Christ and, on the way there, God steps in and is like, “Hey, please don’t arrest me, you lunatic.
Instead, go to the city, wipe your browser history, and wait for instructions.” “Lord, what do you want me to do? Then the Lord said to him, ‘Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.'” I wasn’t kidding. And I’m not shaming Father Paul for lying.
We all have to lie sometimes. He’s got this big ass secret that he does not understand, topping off a very, very long life full of secrets and lies from before any of this madness began. All of them, all of the lies, varying degrees of commandment breaking, right?
We have some sod–I’m not gonna say sodomite, he’s not. Although, by biblical definitions…he might be a sodomite. By medieval definitions, he’s certainly a sodomite. Ask Eleanor Janega. So, he gets to the island with this trunk full of angel.
How he got it through customs, what he did with the rest of his things, God only knows; but he gets there with a lot of conviction, right? He’s confident. He knows what he’s doing. He gives this whole, like, long ass confessional sequence basically to us and to himself, I
Guess, justifying his actions, explaining everything he is doing and how it is the right thing and how he’s doing capital-G, capital-W “God’s Work”, and that is the Father Paul that is sat across from Riley when he is talking about how people treat Joe Collie and the
People on the island and how they use God’s will as justification for treating people horribly. It’s that Father Paul who says absolutely fucking not. He argues against Riley’s idea that he can’t believe in a higher power and also own his mistakes.
He tells Riley straight up that there is nothing in scripture that says God negates personal accountability. We talked about this already, I think. Oh, I do this every time. And this is pretty powerful stuff, right? It means a lot. It’s impactful.
You can tell that this is coming from a man who has made mistakes and done things that he regrets; who is still making his peace with the Lord; a man who has lived a full human life already. The thing that’s so captivating about Father Paul for people is he’s this young man who
Has the wisdom of an elder because he was; because he lived for 80, 90 some years. He was on his death bed; he didn’t remember who he was. In certain lights, this is a gift from God–to have lost to yourself, and to be able to be
Young and in a position where you’re respected, and be able to share that kind of wisdom with people is such a gift. He has the knowledge and life experience and wisdom of an old man and the confidence of
Someone finally getting a do-over; a chance to go back and fix everything; to do the things he didn’t do; say the things he didn’t say. It’s the one thing that we all want and will never get, and he has all of this. And, so, when he says this to Riley, it matters.
It’s inspiring; it inspires Riley; it inspires the kind of confidence that Riley’s gonna need to have in him to say, “I don’t know how you knew she could walk.” But he’s still a dirty liar; he tells himself and us that he’s doing all of this lying to
Protect the people of Crockett so that they are prepared for when the real miracles come; for the healings; for the words from God. He doesn’t want to upset them, and he doesn’t want to scare them before he can help them.
He wants to let Lisa run again; he wants to help people get sober; he wants to make people feel young again. But old habits die hard, and the man just can’t stop lying. And I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have lied; I’m just saying that it’s this lie that
He tells to Riley about how he knew that Lisa could walk again that is the beginning of the end. This is the first turn of the screw, where the dynamic between Riley and Father Paul begins to shift. No longer is it the steadfast intellectual reasoning of Ivan and the holy man Alyosha
Discussing the suffering of innocence and the responsibility of God. It is something different now. “I really don’t have an answer that’s gonna satisfy you. Not you.” Father Paul tells Riley that it must be nice for him to be able to explain all the miracles via science.
He envies Riley’s freedom from the belief in the transcendental because his own personal belief in the transcendental, his proof, now has consequences. It’s not just big ideas and big plans in a trunk. It’s happening; and, sure, it’s fine now. People aren’t needing their glasses; their backs don’t hurt; everything’s fine.
But, as the miracles continue, and the healing becomes more, Father Paul begins to feel more and more powerful because he is, right? In the eyes of his community, he is practically a god: completely infallible. At the same time, his dependency on the angel blood that made him young in the first place
Is wildly out of control. It’s turning into a full-blown addiction. *Hacking* And, so, another cognitive dissonance rears its ugly head, and every step that Father Paul takes to relieve that dissonance–take more angel blood, pray, try and do more good–all
Of that just leads him further and further down the rabbit hole of violence and contradiction that becomes harder and harder to square with his belief in God as he knew it, before his twilight era. By the time that he is just a priest standing in front of an alcoholic, asking him to become
A vampire, he is visibly unhinged. He is like Ivan, who, if we remember, slid so far into madness that he started having conversations with the devil himself, and he still couldn’t win. He is shaking; he is sweating; he is talking to himself; he is repeating prayers over and
Over and over again, like a shark who can’t stop for fear he’ll never start again. Father Paul has worked himself into a gordian knot of anxiety, and Riley has just been chillin’. Riley, who made a calculated nietzschean decision to reject God for his own betterment, has absolutely no difficulty with this conundrum.
In the face of absolute moral insanity; bathing in the light of the promised absence of guilt and pain; in the reign of the freedom from moral dilemma that Josh Wheaton promised his philosophy class, came with blind faith, Riley is like, “Absolutely fucking not, you psycho.” Riley is having none of it.
In “God’s Not Dead”, the act of believing, of giving yourself to God, is the gift of living in a world that is black and white; free from the consequences of regular life. No longer do you have to be tolerant of others; no longer do you have to make the choice between
Right and wrong and deciding what the best move is. God does it for you. And, if you choose wrong, well, that was just his plan in the first place. You get to try again next time; and all you have to do is believe; all you have to do is believe.
And believing is not something we can see or quantify in those films, but “Midnight Mass” makes the act of believing a physical one. You have to enter the covenant of the Lord by drinking the blood of Christ in order to receive that gift.
Jesus’s actual blood and flesh were not on the menu at the last supper, okay? It was a metaphorical idea. It was an act of “choose to drink this” and “choose to believe”. “Midnight Mass”, being religious horror, makes that real. It is real blood. You have to really choose that.
The existence of God does not negate personal responsibility, nor does your belief in God negate personal responsibility. Evidently, God itself, in an act of supernatural mercy, is the only thing that can abolish any kind of moral responsibility–in a physical act of sending the blood of something transcendent down.
The characters in “God’s Not Dead” are constantly reminding themselves that God is good; God is good always, and always God is good, over and over again. He uses all things and works in mysterious ways that we can’t see the whole picture.
If we could; if only we could see the world the way that God does, then we would understand; there would be no cause for guilt or pain or suffering or confusion. And that is what the angel gives us; it gives the people of Crockett; it gives Father Paul,
Practically on a silver platter: the ability to feel and see like God. All they have to do…is drink. “God’s Not Dead” requires faith and rewards it with proof; “Midnight Mass” offers proof and rewards action. Part 7: Easter Rising “Wait ’til Easter.
If it weren’t for that and Christmas, some people would never come at all.” *Screaming* So, Jesus kicks it. He decides to let himself be crucified to save humanity, comes back, restores faith, fucks off. Time goes on, societies advance, kingdoms and empires rise and fall and scatter, and
There is no second coming in sight. Centuries passed. Christianity starts creeping its little claws all over every continent, digging its way into the laws and the royal courts and all of that jazz, and still no sign of Jesus. So, we start to get philosophers and metaphysicians working tirelessly to provide some kind of
Evidence that supports the existence of God. Neoplatonism emphasizes the transcendence of God; Descartes was like, “God is perfect, and a perfect thing can’t not exist.” That seemed to suffice for a while? But people keep thinking, and people keep thinking about other things, and people want to have other kind of conversations.
So, as long as you weren’t publishing blasphemy, and you sort of tack on a footnote about God being the perfect creator of all things, the church would, like, more or less leave you alone and let you write about all the trapezoids you want.
So, that kind of covers the general population’s belief in God, right? But what is true of the general public is not always true of the individual, and three days is a long time. When the three days are a psychological, metaphorical experience, three days can start to feel like
A lifetime; and a lifetime is just about long enough for some of that capital-D Doubt to sink in. And this remains true for forever. People’s belief in God diminishes the further and further away we get from the resurrection.
And that is because, in order for God to have any personal meaning for the individual, he must bring himself down to the individual’s level. In order to surpass that “the court says you have to believe in God, so you say you believe
In God” barrier, in order to have real meaning for a person’s life, he has to send part of himself down to earth. He has to get on our level. He sends part of himself down to earth in this human form as, like, a gift to humanity
So he can teach us some shit; but the problem is that, like, Jesus can’t just, like, move to Miami and, like, live out the rest of his life selling cars and be, like, “Alright,” and die at like 97.
Because, if he did do that, he’d just be some dude who’s going around saying that he’s God, and when was the last time that that worked out well for literally anyone involved? Which brings us back to the thesis point: he has to die.
But, if he dies, then that means that God can be killed, and that makes God a lot less godly, you know what I mean? Plus, you’ve got like a shitton of people just living their lives thinking that God has died and abandoned them. No bueno.
Not to mention that he’s got shit to do upstate, so he can’t just stay on Earth forever. He can’t just die and float on up to the heavens like every other good Christian. Also, he’s got all these apostles hanging out, trying to write a book, and what kind
Of a friend would he be if he just left them with that kind of an ending? He’s all-knowing. He knows what happens when Game of Thrones ends. He wouldn’t do that. Which brings us to the next necessary element of the Christian redemption cycle.
The death of God is the first; God has to die. Second part is that three days, those three days of waiting; he’s got to be dead for somebody somewhere or Christianity doesn’t work. And the next necessary point on the Christian redemption cycle is this: the supernatural proof. He’s got to go back.
“We have to go back, Kate.” Big man gets nailed to the cross, dies, takes a quick detour into hell, frees all the sinners (except for Solomon; fuck Solomon), comes back to Earth, takes a bow, forgives humanity for all of its sins, then zip-zap-zops back up to Daddy.
Which is some next level proof-of-the-divine shit, right? This is in line with Red Seas parting; this is bushes burning; this is angels flying down in a desert to tell you what to do. The resurrection serves as that necessary supernatural element that will sustain faith for a very long time.
The resurrection will sustain people for a long time; and Descartes will come in, and he will sustain people for a long time. But man cannot live on metaphysics alone, and that “son of God” candle only burns so bright for so long.
Eventually, say 2000 years later, in this post-Easter Sunday world where God can be killed not physically but spiritually for the individual, it’s a lot harder to believe. And it becomes increasingly difficult to carry out this redemption cycle without that supernatural element.
The “God’s Not Dead” films really struggle with this because they place their characters in the position of Jesus, but they’re not really able to fully accomplish that true, “I am God, believe in me” vibe, right? Like, no one can do it like Jesus can.
As Eric Von Der Luft says in his essay, “The bridge between infinite immortality and finite mortality must be made by the immortal making itself mortal, lowering itself to humanity’s level.” Which means… Vampires. We’re talking about vampires. Part eight: the morality of eating people.
Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt: old, wrinkly, in a desert, gets Benjamin Buttoned by Dobby on steroids, comes back to Crockett Island and starts drugging everybody with Dobby’s blood. We learned all of this, remember? I just talked about it. Father Paul gave that confession to himself because he felt really shitty about being
A damn liar, which I get because I’m also a damn liar sometimes, and it’s one of the ten commandments, but, in his defense, it is the ninth one; and anyone who’s ever read a Buzzfeed listicle knows nobody reads past number six.
He feels bad, but he does it anyway because he’s got big miracles on the horizon. Lisa walks again; the woman that he had an affair with 40 years ago and had a secret love child with: she’s young and hot again; Erin’s unborn child mysteriously disappears
From her womb completely as if it was never there. Okay, maybe they’re not all great changes. So, like, WE know that they’re not all great changes, but Father Paul does not. Father Paul thinks he is doing the Lord’s work, and he is riding that train as far as it can go.
That’s all he’s ever wanted. He’s a priest. That’s that’s that’s the gi–that’s the gig. That’s the gig. He swore to never have sex all of his life because he wanted to serve the Lord. Mmm…he failed the first time around, but this time…this time’s different. He feels like Moses.
He’s got an angel commanding him to save people, and it’s all fun and games until he gets addicted to the angel blood, and kicks it–only to come back again…full Dracula. *Screams* “Monsignor, ah, thank God.” For the record: Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt has died twice. *Laughs* *Gunshot* …comes back full Dracula, immediately murders Joe Collie.
Joe Collie, who was just there for some guidance because he’s trying to get sober, and he was gonna buy a drink, but he didn’t, and he came to Father Paul instead, and Father Paul ate his brains. Michael Flanagan morally fattened Joe Collie up like a pig for slaughter, and I will never
Forgive him for it. So, he’s eating Joe Collie’s brains out by the skull, and who should walk in but Bev Keane: top-tier Christian; Queen of God’s work. It’s all over, right? It’s only downhill from here. The number one Bible follower has just walked in on you eating someone; it’s got to be over,
Right? Wrong. Bev Keane has been waiting for this moment her entire life. “Okay…okay.” So, there’s this moment where we have these two devout religious characters who have already interacted with what they believe to be proof of the divine. Bev is already aware that Father Paul has been made young again.
They have the opportunity to take this as a command. Father Paul’s body, the body that was resurrected (a la JC himself) is demanding the blood of Joe Collie to survive. It is physically craving and calling him to, well…
At the same time, in a year far, far away (Genesis 20:22), God rolls up to Abraham and is like, “Hey, so you know that kid you have? That kid that you love so much? That miracle baby that I gave you and your wife after you were childless for so long?
You know that kid?” and Abraham’s like, “Yeah, Isaac. Super into dinosaurs; really good at darts; love him; he’s the best,” and God’s like, “Yeah, I know, he’s great. So, here’s what we’re gonna do: we’re gonna take him…and some wood…maybe a knife…we’re
Gonna take a little road trip, top of that mountain over there you’re gonna…*gestures*…burning offering for me, and we’re gonna call it a day. Right? Got it? Solid. Awesome. Seeya in three days. And Abraham does this.
Now, if you don’t know the story, God swoops in a la ram ex machina and, like, gives him a sheep to slaughter instead at the last possible moment. And, in religious context, I have been informed that this story is about faith because Abraham
Is like, “I told you, Isaac, he would never make me kill you,” and everything is just hunky-dory. And I cannot tell you how much I do not understand that read. I hate this story; I am obsessed with it; I think it is the best story in the Bible;
I think about it all the time; I am always thinking about this. I remember being in CCD in, like, second or third grade and being taught this story and just being like, “What the fuck are you guys talking about?”
It’s horrifying; it’s terrible; it is gut-wrenching; I feel sick every time I think about it. It wasn’t until two years ago (two years ago!) when someone laid it all out for me in excruciating detail over the course of like two hours that I finally began to kind of understand what
It is that apparently everyone else sees in the story, which is that the message in the story is not “You must be willing to kill your kid for God,” it is, “God would never make you kill your kid.”
It’s like, I always thought it was a reward; I always thought that God only sent that ram because Abraham was like this close to doing it, and he was like, “Solid. He would really kill his kid for me.
I’ll…I’ll let him have his kid as a prize,” not that you should have faith that God always has another plan. The thing that people say about it is, “You can never see what God is leading up the other
Side of the mountain,” like, a ram was coming up the other side of the mountain the whole time, you just didn’t know it. So, you have to have faith in God. I…I just really…I just thought it was a God-fearing story.
I swear to God, I always thought it was just the absolute wrath of God, who would make you kill your own kid, and, even knowing this now, I still don’t really see it. I get it on, like, a cognitive level, but I still read this story as about a man who
Has to spend three days with his beloved son just walking him to the slaughter; and what, in God’s name, Isaac must have been thinking; and how do you get past that? How do you…how do you look your father in the eye when that ram comes down?
How do you go to breakfast every morning after that? How do you look your kid in the eye after you were willing to murder him? Like, how do you… I feel like even understanding that story requires a level of faith that I just don’t have and couldn’t have.
Um, it’s probably why I couldn’t make my confirmation. And there are other reads of this story, I’m sure; for me, I find it more interesting from that angle, but that’s just why it’s such a good story; that’s why it’s the best one; it’s so good. In fact, everybody loves it.
Even moral philosophy professors. Bet you didn’t think that had a point, did it? Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son, Isaac, has long been a topic of debate amongst philosophers, amongst the Kierkegaards of the world. Because, like, what do you do when God commands you to do bad things?
If you couldn’t tell, this is the ethics section. “For Christians, the fixed point of morality, what constitutes right and wrong, is a straight line that leads directly back to God.” “Oh, so you’re saying that we need a god to be moral? That a moral atheist is an impossibility?”
“No, but, with no God, there’s no real reason to be moral. I mean, there’s not even a standard of what moral behavior is.” We’re in the ethics section, which means we have to lay some ground rules. For this section, we are presupposing the following two premises: 1. Killing people is bad.
2. Everyone is aware that killing people is bad. These are our assumed norms for this topic, because, just as there is a cognitive dissonance with God being all-powerful and also not stopping bad things, there is a cognitive dissonance
When you’re being commanded to do something evil by a good God, especially when we are working within a framework where most of the moral decision-making is based in Christianity. So, if we have a perfect cartesian God, then that God would not command something evil. He COULD not command something truly evil.
So, any command that is being given must, therefore, be good. Abraham killing his son cannot be truly evil. That is way out number one; justification for doing the thing. That is what Bev Keane does, and she runs with it straight off the tracks, right into the sunrise.
But, like, what if you’re not Bev Keane? Because we can’t all be Bev Keane, try as we might. And, sometimes, you really really really really really don’t want to do the thing, but God is telling you to do the thing.
If God is telling you to do the thing, then is it morally wrong not to do it? Robert Adams, in “Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics”, suggests a moral constraint on our obedience to God’s commands. And a moral constraint is essentially a rule that helps one identify what is the ethical
Choice. Kant very famously had a moral constraint against lying all the time, and it drove poor Chidi insane. That is the problem that Adams is trying to solve with his moral constraint, saying that, “If, upon reflection, a purportedly divine command seems to be evil, then one should
Not accept it as a commandment of God’s.” So, if it sounds bad–probably not God. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a goose. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true.
And what Adams is doing here is using a critical sense to assess morality under God’s transcendent goodness, saying that we should always question any human view about what God is, because humans are not transcendent; we don’t have a perfect transcendent perspective. Let me just get…
How obvious is it going to be if I have this cough drop? Probably. I’m losing my voice. So, we, as humans, should always question and be critical of any human assessment or human understanding of God and what God is or any empirical test of value that humans provide.
We have to be critical of our evaluation of morals and ethics and not just say that everything is okay because God said so. Because we have to believe that God would not command us to do evil, which means that we have to hold ourselves to a standard that we do not truly understand.
“God’s intention concerning evil is to one day destroy it.” “Well, how convenient.” We have puny little fish brains. We cannot understand what is good, because the only thing that can really understand what is good is God because God is perfect and God is only good.
So, any understanding that we have is just, like, a sad little echo put together from scraps falling off a table that we’re, like, hoping looks like good. “Every day, the more I give myself over to God, the more I hear the voice of his angel, and you will too. That’s okay. That’s good.
Know you will be moved to act, and there will be things you cannot change.” We cannot truly understand what is good; only God can. Therefore, any commandment presented by God should be followed. The moral constraint means that, in between these two steps, we take a minute and we say,
If upon further reflection, that commandment does not add up to what our understanding of good is, it should not be taken as a commandment from God. Which means it’s not God telling you; it’s the devil. We could definitely still be doing wrong by not following God’s commandment but, morally
And ethically, we are justified in not doing the thing. With the understanding that God is only good in a transcendent way that we cannot understand, even that idea that we cannot understand God’s transcendence is a human idea.
Any traits or attributes or ideas that human beings are putting onto God need to be critically assessed before they are taken as fact. So, had Abraham said, “Killing people is wrong dude; I’m not gonna do it,” he would have been equally justified in that act that he was in doing the act.
However, Risler disagrees with that in his work because, “in the case of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham does ultimately decide that he must sacrifice Isaac. In order for him to reach that conclusion via Adams’s framework, he must alter his perception
Of the meaning of evil in order to accommodate that for which he does not understand.” He argues that we shouldn’t be messing with the moral aspect of the whole thing but the psychological. Because we’re stupid. We’re stupid humans, and we’re dealing with a cognitive dissonance; our brains are cracking
Under the pressure; we cannot be left alone to decide what is morally right and what is morally wrong; that is what God does. God is supposedly so perfect that we literally cannot understand his commands. So, instead of putting the constraint on the morality of those commands, we put the constraints on ourselves.
The psychological constraint that Risler presents is, “If, upon reflection, one is certain that a command is from God, then one should obey it.” Basically, we’re gullible. We’ll believe anything’s God if it smells good enough. Adams’s idea is still intact.
If God is commanding something, then it can’t be evil, but we are definitely off the hook for deciding whether or not something he’s commanded is evil. That’s not our job anymore. Our job is just to decide if we are actually receiving a commandment from actual God.
So, they all should have just not done it, right? Or am I missing something? Hold on, am I forgetting something? Let me see… “And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son, and the ang… *Screams* Oh… Right… That…
“Given the limited nature of our epistemic abilities, and given our inclination to try and doubt that God would give a seemingly evil command, I am inclined to think that achieving certainty that God is commanding one to do something abhorrent would require direct supernatural intervention, such that, despite one’s best attempts at doubting the
Divine authorship of the command, one would simply remain certain that God has issued a particular commandment.” So, he has a point… Unfortunately, so do the people of Crockett. “Just then, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of God shone around them,
And they were sore afraid, and the angel said, ‘Fear not; fear not; be not afraid!'” Boy, oh, boy, do the people of Crockett have a reason to believe that commandment came from God. *Shouts* So, when Father Paul and Bev rope the mayor and friends into their crazy scheme, they
Have no issue following this order, because, as far as these people are concerned, that commandment came from God. Catholicism has a long-standing belief that, if your priest pulls a Lazarus on you, you should probably do what he says. He’s always been the mouth of God; you’re not gonna start doubting it now.
And, yet, you could probably argue that, like, that’s the same justification Bev Keane uses, but I think we all know that Bev Keane has been waiting for a moment to justify murder her whole life. Either way. Bev justifies cleaning up the body by quoting Deuteronomy (“…where one must obey the priest
At all times.”); but she also quotes Matthew 10, and she kind of spits out, “Think not that I come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace but a sword”; a passage that can be interpreted in a number of ways.
R.T France, a new testament scholar, argues that, in context, it means something closer to, like, the sword of social division cutting family ties and dividing individuals who choose to follow the faith or choose not to; not necessarily like a military sword.
Whether Bev Keane is convincing the mayor to sever himself from his previous beliefs about the whole murder thing or just saying that Jesus came in with guns ablazing, we’ll never really know; but, regardless, she yells at him not to cherry-pick the glories of God which is just…it’s just beautiful.
Especially when you remember that Jesus also specifically said that he did not come with a sword at one point; that’s in, like, his story; I think that’s before he, uh, before they arrest him one time. Editing note: I went to find the source for this, and he didn’t actually say that he didn’t
Come with a sword. He said to his friends to put down their swords because they who draw the sword die by the sword. But he also immediately follows it up with, “Do you think I cannot call on my father,
And he will at once put at my disposal more than 12 legions of angels?” Which is just very…it’s very, like, “my daddy’s a lawyer” vibes. Anyway… Having two contradictory thoughts and reasonings is just kind of part of the territory when you’re dealing in a cognitive dissonance.
And you start to see how Abraham’s cognitive dissonance that Father Paul and Bev and everyone is now dealing in–this, like, “murder is wrong but God is making me murder” thing–is really starting to weigh on these characters. I mean Father Paul is crumbling; Bev is higher strung than ever; everyone is nervous all
The fucking time, and more and more people are forced to face this moral conundrum of a God-given command to break a commandment. But here’s the thing: you might have justified your action in the eyes of the lord morally speaking; but that does not mean that the rest of the world agrees with you.
“Erin Greene. I’d like to finish our discussion.” So, sure, when Father Paul gets brought back to life via God, makes friends with a winged raisinet, and wants to murder people, it’s pretty easy for his, like, devout followers to justify following him in his footsteps, right?
It’s easy for them to say, “Alright, this is fine.” But what about the next person who becomes bat food? “How convenient.” Riley, on the other hand, has already given up his faith in God. He has reasoned his way to atheism.
Riley is not a Christian who’s lost faith; he is not an angry atheist; he is like Nietzsche. He’s got his own beliefs and his own ideals. And, when he gets presented with “God has commanded me to eat people, and eating people
Is abhorrently evil,” it’s not exactly a challenge for him to chalk premise one out the window like the baby in the bathwater and make the unselfish choice instead of the self-serving one. Which he does. In an act of sacrifice, Riley turns himself into dust. *Screams*
Part nine: the morality of eating people, part two The lord is burning my throat. Unlike the rest of Crockett Island, Riley was not waiting for supernatural intervention. The potential Christian redemption cycle that he was being set up and primed for in the first few episodes is long off the table.
This happened when Father Paul lied to him about how he knew Lisa could walk, remember? That was the moment that the tables started to shift. That is when the idea that Riley was just a person not in a state of grace that Jesus was surrounding himself with was taken out of the equation.
That storyline was cut off; flipped on its head (narratively). Suddenly, his difference in belief, like Sarah’s and Sheriff Hassan’s, are front and center as part of who they are and part of their arcs. The more miracles that start happening after that moment, the greater the divide becomes
Between people like Riley and Sarah and Sheriff Hassan (the people who don’t have a Christian belief system; the deadlings) and the Christians. Tensions begin to rise in a similar manner to that of the third “God’s Not Dead” film, where, the more righteous and determined Father Paul becomes to fight for this church, it
Becomes a bigger and bigger problem. In “Midnight Mass”, it ends up in a full-on war. In “God’s Not Dead”, it ends up in like a glorified pep rally. And, in GND, the only way to relieve that tension is for God to come down and personally
Speak to Reverend Dave and tell him, “Cut the crap.” Which he does. He lets it go; he lets the church go, and he decides to build a church elsewhere. I don’t know if I explained the plot to the third one at all.
If I didn’t: basically, this kid accidentally kills someone and sets a church on fire, and Reverend Dave is like, “Please, school board, fix my church,” and the school board’s like, “Maybe we should just tear it down,” and then that’s what the fight is about. He doesn’t want them to tear his church down.
But, eventually, God comes to Reverend Dave after he punches a kid and is like, “Bro, you gotta take a step back,” and Reverend Dave does it. This, by the way, is why I like this movie; I think I said that in the beginning. I do actually really like the third one.
I think it’s…I think it’s watchable. There’s a lot of interviews where the actor who plays Reverend Dave says that he wanted to show him as, like, a normal guy, like, “Pastors are regular dudes.” And the way that they do that in the first two movies is just, like, have him spill his
Coffee a lot. But, in the third movie, they really took it seriously, and they they showed him not just being like a normal person with like a family and family troubles, but being, like, someone who makes wrong choices sometimes, even in the eyes of God, and who has to, like,
Atone for them and has to change his ways. And that, I think, is a really, really great, like message. I think that’s a good way to take the story; I thought it added depth; I’m here for it; I love the third one. I’ll watch the third one if I have to.
If I ever end up quarantined again in, like, a youth group, and they want to watch “God’s Not Dead”, I’ll be like, “Put the third one on,” and I would be fine. He does literally build a new church outside of the college campus, and I’m sure that there’s
Some kind of, like…there’s probably a connection there with, like, Solomon building a church in hell and, you know, Jesus building churches and stuff, but we’re 18,000 words in. I’m…I’m done; I’m calling it. Anyway, for Riley, “God’s is dead” does not insinuate that God was ever alive at any point,
Which is what makes it so interesting that he then becomes the Jesus of this story. He goes from being the apostle to playing the role of Jesus in this story, being the one to understand the truth in the way that no one else can; making a sacrifice for the
Betterment of others; literally dying as opposed to giving up his beliefs and living the way that Father Paul was living in that moment. He gets the most Christian death of all of them. He literally gets greeted by an angel of the woman that he killed as forgiveness and is,
Like, carried up into the heavens…more or less. He gets the most Jesus-like ending without having to believe in Jesus at all, and the characters who have been waiting desperately for this return of Jesus–the ones who have been living out their redemption cycles, waiting for more proof of the divine, waiting for
The resurrection, trying to prove their worthiness in the eyes of God–when Father Paul and Bev Keane stand up there and say drink this rat poison, lay down your life in the name of God, trust that he will bring you back, a lot of them are willing to do it.
And this is exactly what Nietzsche was worried about: their belief in a transcendental, all-good, all-powerful God that is more than they could ever understand, and the, frankly, very good arguments that Father Paul and Bev are making, hinder their ability to make a moral judgment.
The supernatural proof that they have been provided hinders their ability to make a psychological assessment. They’re unable to be critical in any way. Morally speaking, the only way that they have out is the first way that we talked about; they have to change a premise. And they choose to change the second one.
They can’t argue that this isn’t coming from God; they can’t argue that it’s morally wrong; they just have to believe that their perception of what is morally right and morally wrong is wrong. They have to change the second premise, and they have to decide that eating people is, like, probably fine.
Because, if they don’t, then they can’t follow God’s commandments; and, if they’re not following God’s commandments, they are actively denying the Lord and, therefore, actively following the devil. They are now vampires, a lot of these people. A lot of these people are now experiencing not only the physical sensation of desiring
That person’s blood, the changes in the way that they’re seeing things, you know, the world looks different now. And they also are experiencing that, like, absence of guilt and shame; that release from all pain and responsibility. Of course they decide that they should be killing people. What else would they do?
“Do you have guilt in your heart for doing what you had to?” “Not at all.” “Then ask yourself why God let that cup pass you by.” It’s a euphoric feeling. There’s no pain; they’re drunk with it; they’re caught up in the power; in the fight for God.
And it’s sort of like ships passing in the night when we look at “God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness”, because Reverend Dave has also become increasingly violent and aggressive in his own fight for God.
He is wrapped up in his desire for justice; he is grieving, and he wants to believe that Jude’s death meant something. He wants to believe that his friend wasn’t just killed because some poor kid was sad that he got dumped.
He wants to believe that his best friend didn’t just die because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, if he could just get this church fixed, if he can just keep it there, then maybe it won’t hurt so much.
Everyone is telling him that he needs to stop; that maybe he’s taking this too far; and I think that part of him probably knows that, but he’s so caught up in this desire to fight for God–to live out Jesus’s story, to be the Jesus in the redemption cycle–that he just keeps pushing through.
He’s searching for the same liberation from pain and suffering that the characters in “Midnight Mass” have already received. “Murderer.” “Well, I suppose so. But here’s the thing: I had no guilt; none. And, knowing that I should feel guilt, but accepting that I did not, finding grace where the guilt should be, I…”
As the night rages on in Crockett Island, we watch a handful of characters slowly come to realize what it is they are doing. They are killing each other; they are killing their parents, their children, their friends, and they don’t even care.
The line that Jonathan Waterboy so neatly drew for us in the first “God’s Not Dead” film? Washed away. Soaked in blood. Can’t see it anymore. And they want to know why God would allow that to happen.
If the idea is that following God is following goodness, why would God allow us to live in this doxastic state where we understand that what we’re doing is wrong, but we also understand that what we’re doing is good. Why would he allow us to live with this cognitive dissonance?
Why would he allow humans to live in a world where they cannot tell what is right and what is wrong? Why did God command that Abraham murder his own son? Are they all just Abraham waiting for a ram to be brought up the other side of the mountain?
Is there any moral weight to what happens at “Midnight Mass” at all? Or were they all just going to end up in the same afterlife anyway, and nothing matters because this is the way that it was supposed to happen? Lisa’s last line indicates that the monster itself died, so his blood stopped working
To cure her. Was all of this just so that they could destroy that demon? Are they Jesus, or are they the persecutors? What is their role in this story anymore, and why would God allow them to be confused like this?
The massacre that they have carried out on Crockett Island has pushed a very simple cognitive dissonance as far as it can possibly go; and now everyone is feeling a bit abandoned by God, even the most devout. So, Mildred is Sarah’s mother, the woman that Father Paul had an affair with years ago;
And she is the reason that he is doing all of this. He wants a second chance to get it right with her, and to get it right with his kid. He’s watched Sarah grow up with another man as her father, and he hasn’t been able to say anything, and he regrets that.
That’s at the core of why he’s doing all of this, and everything else is just fodder. “That’s why I put that thing in that trunk; that’s why I bribed and lied and smuggled it back here. That was the reason; I didn’t want you to die.”
Mildred was pretty stoked when she was young and hot again, but Mildred has not been a fan of what Father Paul’s been doing since he gave a very violent sermon. And she says to him when he kind of confesses what he’s done…you know what, just play the clip.
[Music] “But that’s over now, John. We made our choices; we lived our lives. She grew up, and we faded away, and that’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s supposed to be over.” So, after Father Paul tells Sarah’s mom that he just did all this so she’d be hot again,
They walk out of the church, and they find Bev Keane and the other vampires being absolute fucking menaces, okay? I think it goes without saying that Bev Keane was not one of the characters who came to any sort of realization about what she was doing over the course of the night.
But, either way, Father Paul walks out, sees her being a cunt, and just kind of suddenly realizes that maybe he got this wrong. “It’s between them and God, isn’t it?” “No.” “I’m sorry?” “No; we got this wrong.” “Oh, don’t be ridiculous” “Oh, Beverly, please, look at them, would you? We are the wolves.”
And it’s heartbreaking; because this is the moment where you realize that he was never a villain at all. He really, truly believed that he was doing God’s work; and the realization that maybe he was wrong ,and maybe Mildred is right, and we’re not supposed to get do-overs, and
People aren’t supposed to behave like this, that realization hits like a cold bucket of water. “I was wrong. We…we…we were wrong. We are wrong, and this needs to stop.” And when he comes into the church a few moments later and sees Sarah–his daughter who doesn’t
Know that she’s his daughter, that he so desperately wanted to be with and to take care of and to start over with—is pouring gasoline all over his church, just everywhere, preparing to burn that shit to the ground so that there’s no shade for the vampires to hide in in the
Morning, he looks her in the eyes and just says, “Good.” He gets it. It took all of, like, five minutes. And, just like Reverend Dave, he sacrifices his church. Because it is the best thing for everyone involved.
Two sides of a coin: these two devout religious men choosing to sacrifice and give up a place of worship that has meant so much to both of them and has played such a pivotal role in their own personal journeys to being men of God and followers of the Lord and leaders
In the church. They both give it up. The only difference is that Reverend Dave makes this decision after he gets his supernatural proof, after God commands him to chill, and Father Paul makes this decision in SPITE of his supernatural proof. “Don’t be ridiculous.” “Oh, Beverly, please, look at them, would you?
We are the wolves.” “John?” The people of Crockett Island, except for Bev Keane, have their return to consciousness moment in spite of their supernatural proof. Whether it is a feeling of physical guilt returning, or like an intellectual understanding
They should be feeling guilt and yet they are not, they suddenly have been forced to accept both of our premises. The only way out is through. They have to accept that eating people is wrong, and God has commanded me to eat people. They’re thrown smack into the middle of another inconsistent belief system.
Instead of engaging with the psychological constraint and saying that maybe this wasn’t God that commanded them at all, or throwing out the premise that God has any moral authority in general and discarding their belief in God, instead, the people of Crockett Island
Choose guilt; they choose personal accountability; they make the choice that Riley made, and they choose personal accountability. There is a parable in “The Brothers Karamazov” about a woman who was sent to hell for being a terrible person; but she really doesn’t want to be there, so she tells God about this
One time that she gave an onion to a beggar on the street, and he’s like, “Alright, fine.” And, so, she gets the opportunity to be pulled out of hell via holding onto an onion root. While she is holding on desperately to this onion root and climbing to her freedom, all
Of the other sinners also start trying to grab her ankles and be pulled up as well, and she’s not having any of that, so she kicks them off, and suddenly the onion root disappears, and she’s stuck in hell. Getting very “Hadestown” vibes but with an onion.
It’s like the Orpheus and Eurydice country vegetable medley. The idea there is that moral redemption is always possible up until the very last second. Had she just allowed the others to come with her, that would have been enough; that would have been the good deed.
The onion didn’t matter; no one cared that she gave an onion to someone one time. You can always do the right thing, even if it’s with your dying breath–sometimes even after. And “Midnight Mass” kind of echoes this parable when, after having slaughtered and/or cannibalized
Most of the island, the remaining people of Crockett choose death; whereas “God’s Not Dead” sort of sticks more to the original understanding of the Abraham and Isaac story. Cause Abraham could have said no at any point. Up until the moment that he had his blade pressed into Isaac’s neck, he could have said,
“Ehh, maybe not.” He could have had a Father Paul moment where he said, “Maybe I got this wrong,” but he didn’t. So God sent a ram instead. Because the story of Abraham and Isaac is not about morality; it is not about moral decision-making.
It doesn’t matter if Abraham was able to decide whether or not that was a moral action; it doesn’t matter if he was on or off the hook, because that story is about faith in God; that story is about belief.
Pastor Dave could have stopped his aggressive fight for the church at any moment, but he didn’t; so God had to step in and tell him to cut the crap because, like the Abraham and Isaac story, what’s important in the “God’s Not Dead” films is not morality; it’s not action; it’s just blind faith.
Just like it doesn’t matter what Grace was doing before she gave her life to Jesus, it doesn’t matter what other choices Professor Ratball has made in his life, as long as he chooses to give his life to Jesus and accept him as a savior with his dying breath. That is all that matters.
It doesn’t matter how Abraham felt about killing his kid; none of that matters. The only thing that matters is that he trusted God, and that is why God sent the ram. In “Midnight Mass”, choices matter. Choices are important. Actions in the face of God are what’s important.
The “God’s Not Dead” movies, they use the closest thing they have to a supernatural element as a reward for faith: they cure cancer, and they give joy and happiness to people who have given faith. We don’t know if the characters in “Midnight Mass” are saved or not; we don’t know if they
Are redeemed in the afterlife; we don’t know if they’re in hell; we don’t know if they’re given an onion; we don’t know what’s going on. The only character that we do see beyond the ashes is Riley; and Riley is then escorted
By an angel with the face and image of the woman that he killed to what looks like a very, very Christian heaven. From the fact that she’s wearing all white, to the fact that she is forgiving him, to the sun coming behind her, it is so explicitly Christian.
And the reason it stands out is because Riley very much did not think that that was what was going to happen. There’s a very, very long, drawn-out dialogue between Riley and Erin where they talk about what they think happens when you die; and Riley basically is like, “I don’t know; you
Trip balls for a couple minutes, and then you’re done.” “Dream to end all dreams; one last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin; missile silos, and then…I stop.” And it’s not until the moment that he gets this Christian, bringing-you-to-the-gates-of-heaven death that you realize how important that scene was.
All of this despite his refusal to carry out what was presented to him very reasonably as God’s plan. He is rewarded with a Christian afterlife not for his Christian beliefs, but for his very Christian actions; for choosing to behave like Jesus; to act like Jesus; to live the
Way that Jesus lived; to help people; to sacrifice yourself. He is rewarded with the Christian idea of heaven, which is just forgiveness and light and freedom. The fact that we don’t see what happens to the rest of the characters only serves to
Support that thesis; to support that idea that that’s not what matters. It was impactful when we saw it with Riley because Riley didn’t want it; Riley didn’t think he was going to get that; Riley didn’t believe that; a release that we didn’t know we wanted with Riley.
The rest of the characters, we don’t need to see the afterlife presented for the rest of the characters because it doesn’t matter. What matters is their choice, and their choice in the last moments of their life is to sing, “Nearer, My God, to Thee”.
And it is Riley’s mother, actually, after sacrificing herself to get the children out and to the boat to safety, she is the first one to start to sing. She is the one who, after everyone looks around and is like, “What happened,” and the sun
Is rising, and there’s nowhere to go, she is the one who starts to sing. “Nearer, my God, to thee. Nearer to thee.” And it reminds me of the moment when Mary is given a tour of hell, and she is so horrified
By what she sees that she encourages all of the sinners to pray so that they may be freed. Mary, who is, like, mostly known for being a virgin and being Jesus’s mom also did this other incredible thing.
The islanders choice to sing and to praise God in the face of the hell that they have created, in the face of the horrors that they have just committed, directly echoes the way that the sinners listen to Mary, and they pray.
Riley’s mother plays the part of Jesus’s mother, Mary, in saving the sinners. And she does this while being a sinner, which is not something that Mary did. Mary was immaculate; Mary was free from original sin; Mary wasn’t even born with Eve’s mistakes; it was a fluke of nature.
The character Riley, who doesn’t even believe in God, gets to play the role of Jesus and gets rewarded with a Christian death for his Jesus-like actions despite his belief, and Riley’s mother, who is quite far from the idea of Mary in the fact that she is a sinner
Herself, carrying out the story of Mary, encouraging these sinners to pray. And, while the biblical tale has the sinners being released from hell, we don’t get that; we don’t get to see if the people of Crockett Island are saved because it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter; that’s not the point; it was never the point; the point is free will. “Free will.” I just said that. “I mean, you could shoot me right now; it’d just mean I’m five minutes behind–” *Gunshot* Part ten, part ten, part ten, part ten, um part ten
I’m so tired, but I’m so close to the end. “It’s supposed to be over.” Because the Christian redemption cycle is a cycle, it is cyclically cycling Solomon’s son’s sickly souls for sport. We all kind of know what the fuck is going down, right? We all know what’s gonna happen.
There’s only so much that one can change without sacrificing the integrity of the arc. Jesus dies; is dead for three days (we have a period of darkness, lack of faith, fear, and confusion amongst his followers); supernatural intervention (i.e the resurrection, redemption:
Jesus grants forgiveness to all of the sinners in hell and on Earth–except for Solomon, fuck Solomon; clean slates all around); and then you do it all again. Otherwise, what else are you doing with your time? You’re not writing 30-page, single-space essays on a series of movies and television shows
For two wildly distinct audiences just because you thought the title would be funny one time at 2 AM. Instead, you’re stuck. Because, if you know that God’s not dead, and everyone else around you knows that God is very much alive–your sunday school wine-mom brunch buddies, they’re believers; your tears-or-it-didn’t-happen
Summer youth group group chat; your homeschool co-op believes; even that group of strong conservative men that you hunt naked with in the woods twice a month while your wife thinks you’re golfing, they believe in Jesus–it’s too late; that only leaves you with one question left to ask. Well…? What would Jesus do?
Or, rather, what did Jesus do? Before he got snogged to death by Mr. Iscariot in that garden over there, what was he up to, really? How far were you from that grassy knoll, huh? Why were they so mad? What do you know about the Library of Alexandria?
Where were you on January 6, 2021, Mr. Christ? The answer is “busy,” actually. Super busy. Jesus had a packed schedule, and we know this because he had like 12 assistants keeping track of it for him. It’s all there in a checklist.
If you want to do the shit that Jesus did, just crack it open. Turning water into wine…no. Okay, not that one. Making blind men see? Skip. Walking around the Earth, spreading the word of God? That one I can do. Gain some followers? I can also do that. Help the sick; yes, totally.
Feed the hungry? Also that one. Love thy neighbor? Mmm…okay, so here’s the thing… Point is: there are a lot of things that people do to emulate Jesus’s life at that point in the cycle: to go forth and to spread his good word, to volunteer at hospitals, to do food drives, blah blah blah.
But there is one thing; there is one holy grail, elder wand, infinity stone act in all of Jesus’s canon that really just wipes everything else out of the holy water. And I get it, okay? I do; I really do.
Someone dies on a cross and comes back to life, that is probably gonna overshadow the eighth-grade clarinet solo that they had, as far as, like, “previously on” sections go. We’ve been talking about it for two hours; this is the big one; no matter how you twist
It, turn it, mangle it, this is the story of Jesus Christ, and it remains to be one of persecution and martyrdom; of hanging on to belief and truth like it’s a rope dangling from a helicopter in a windstorm of oppression; hanging on to that belief and faith like it
Is an onion root pulling you out of hell. Being willing to die in the name of God is top-tier iconic behavior. It’s not for everyone. And, perhaps, in the year of 33 AD, when sneezing too loudly could start a war, perhaps, it
Wasn’t too difficult to be killed in the name of God, right? But, now, in the year of our Lord 2022 (or 2014 for “God’s Not Dead”), in the United States of Goddamn America, not so many people running around with crosses and bags of nails, you know?
So, if you want to express your willingness to die for your faith, then you need someone to be willing to kill you over it. And, if Reverend Dave and the “God’s Not Dead” franchise have chosen the American education system as their big bad oppressor, then Beverly Keane has chosen literally everyone else.
“Sheriff, of course, I wouldn’t run you out of town; and it makes me sad that you would think that of me.” Bev Keane has decided that literally the entire world is her opposition at all times constantly.
She is a servant of God first and foremost; she is at the top of the spiritual food chain; first in line at the gates of heaven, and she does not care how many dogs she has to kill to stay there.
Whether she is calling out Father Paul for wearing the wrong color robe on his first day, baiting the sheriff into accusing her of some shit that she knows she did just to deny it, or shaming Erin for throwing out an empty bottle of Windex, Bev Keane creates
Persecution against herself for the sole purpose of appearing to overcome it. She wears blinders, and, like Josh and Grace, they walk past the damage that their actions are doing to the people around them in the name of the almighty martyrdom, the holy grail of Christian behavior.
Reverend Dave’s decision in the third GND film to sacrifice his church has the most profound effect on the deadlings in that film. It’s not just the characters who were explicitly Christian and sort of questioning or losing their faith like keaton, but the whole damn school; the whole town; the whole surrounding
Vicinity have suddenly become Christians. And they’re live streaming about it. “Call it a publicity stunt if you want, but we were there. I mean, this dude’s legit.” “There’s no doubt about it; we…we make these films, first and foremost, for the church
To encourage people in their faith, so they can stand up, and I think that’s one of the reasons why the first one was so successful.” But, in order for any of this to work, you need that villain; you need the monster that is Kevin Sorbo’s facial hair. “Nooooo!!”
But, due to the nature of the redemption arc, because Jesus was so perfect, placing your main character on the prophetic side of the redemption cycle, characters like Josh and Grace and Reverend Dave are then stripped of their agency within that cycle. Sure, they choose to fight…but that’s kind of it.
They don’t get to make a lot of other decisions throughout the course of their films. With the exception of the moment where Reverend Dave chooses to sacrifice his church (which arguably wasn’t really his choice because God told him to), all that the central Jesus-like
Characters in these films do is make the same choice over and over and over again, and so they remain stuck in that first half of the redemption cycle, the persecution, and can never really move beyond that. Because, while they may be functioning as the prophetic martyrs within the narrative,
They are not actually prophets; they cannot perform the supernatural acts required to complete that arc, not only because they’re human, but also because these films are made by Christians for Christians, and, therefore, you cannot have your characters performing actions that surpass the actions of Jesus Christ.
So they remain stagnant; they are awaiting an interruption from God that will allow them the opportunity to convince the surrounding characters that… “God’s not dead; he’s surely alive. He’s livin’…” It’s not Grace who loses her faith in the second film, it is supporting character Brooke,
Who is grieving the loss of her brother and is inspired by Grace’s steadfast belief, that finds Christianity. Keaton and Adam who, after Dave hears the voice of God, they are the ones who find God, who choose to give their life to God.
It is Radisson who chooses to believe in Jesus Christ as the savior. The deadlings are the only ones who make choices in these films because they behold their characters to these strict boxes of Jesus-role and deadling-role.
They do not get to make the choices that characters like Riley, who was a deadling then became Jesus, gets to make. They don’t make any choices because they’re locked into this cycle. One of my biggest gripes with the first GND film is that it is not Josh who finds Ratballs
In the street after he’s been hit by a car. Imagine how good that would have been! The…the emotional journey that those two have been on; the emotional payoff that that would have given us of these two characters who have been at odds with each other like
All of the brothers in “The Brothers Karamazov”, and like Riley and Father Paul who have been at odds with each other, and having these back and forths, and discussing the big things of nature; and then the one who was so adamant not to believe in God suddenly needs God,
And it is the character that he’s been bullying and treating like shit this whole movie who is the only one there with any even remote connection to the Lord; he’s the only one who can even possibly kind of take this man into his arms and say, “Do you accept Jesus
Christ?” and he’s the only one who can hear that confession and be like, “I verify; I vouch for him,” and…and give him that salvation in his dying moments. How good that would have been! It would have been so good! Because they have been fighting, they’ve been fighting this whole movie because Riddlestone
Has been treating Waterballs like garbage this whole movie; he has been tormenting him, and Josh has had to stay steadfast in his belief in God and just take it. And he finally wins that argument, and he’s like, “Thank God, I am done with this. I am done with dealing with this professor.
I get my grade, it’s over.” And, then, he’s walking to this Newsboys concert, and he sees this crowd of people in the street, and he goes to see what’s going on, and it’s Ratbomb; and it’s Rainbottom.
And he is on the floor just dying, sad; and Josh has to choose to not just do the Christian thing, which is save this this dying person, but the personal thing, and Josh gets down on his knees and looks this man in the eyes and forgives him. “I forgive you.”
But that’s not what happens. Because that would muddy the waters too much between personal forgiveness and godly forgiveness. It would mean that part of Radisson’s being saved was dependent on Josh choosing to be there and choosing to love thy enemy, which he can’t do because they’re not allowed to
Make these kind of choices. Instead, what happens is by, supernatural intervention, Pastor Dave just so happens to be walking by in that moment. Essentially, the supernatural proof element used in the first “God’s Not Dead” film is basically that God sent Dave to happen to be walking by just at the moment that Radisson
Would need him most to give him the chance to be saved at the last possible moment. “I believe it’s God’s mercy that brought me here right now.” And that is literally Dave’s job, by the way. We don’t get to see him or any of the other Christian characters make any other decisions
Or choices that change who they are in any sort of fundamental way. Like Bev, they all stay exactly the same the whole way through because Bev Keane…Bev Keane doesn’t give a shit about who she converts. In fact, she’d probably rather people stay out of the church, if she had her way.
Which is also a pretty accurate reflection of Catholicism. We’ve never been big on recruitment. We prefer to just sit and stew in our guilt until the free-market spiritual forgiveness scheme finally suffocates all of us with our last 10 Hail Mary’s. “It is almost as if he is preparing you for that.
You sit there, blessed among men, smirking when I say ‘God’s will’.” “I’m frustrated.” “I know.” Bev’s spirituality is so capitalistic that she literally cannot process the fact that she wasn’t chosen by God to become a vampire. She is practically twitching with rage throughout this entire scene that they’re trying to keep
Riley calm until the sun sets. She does not understand why, after all that she has done, after all that she has paid, she was not rewarded as she should be. Her constant pursuit of self-interest leads her to recruit workers underneath of her to
Help cover up Father Paul’s crimes: minimizing her labor, increasing her potential benefit, growing her spiritual capital. And she is just boiling over with the fact that Riley, who has not even taken the sacrament since he’s arrived on the island from prison, has just been gifted eternal life over her. She can’t deal.
She has become a victim of spiritual capitalism, exploited for her labors. So, when she steps into the leadership role at the end of the battle, when Father Paul begins to question what they’ve done, she thinks that she is justified in this because she was a servant first. It is the American dream.
She pulled herself up by her bootstraps. She deserves to be the leader. And the leader has the most power. And the leader can, therefore, export the most good in the eyes of God; and thus gain the most profit, i.e. favor of God, fast track to heaven. “It was always going this way.
You were always…you were always going to be the last, the hardest, test of my faith…you.” She wants to go from follower to profit; she wants to make the jump from religious zealot to saint; she wants to be seen as holy; she wants to reap the benefits of her faith that
The characters in GND already do. But all that’s required of them is faith. And, in the end, it is her inability to see past herself, her blind pursuit of self-interest, that leads her to let everything burn down. Which is the ultimate cause of her own destruction.
There is a bug flying around, and we’re just gonna be friends with it, just for the record, if it’s in the shot… “The polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, idolaters, and all of the liars; their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
Let it burn.” She chooses to do what is best for herself over and over and over again. She digs herself deeper and deeper into a hole that she will never get out of. And, despite her move into spiritual leadership, she dies in exactly the same place that she
Started, literally digging herself a hole to bury her face in the sand. *Sobbing* *Singing* She does not sing with the others; she does not pray; she does not speak to the Lord; she does not apologize; she does not ask for forgiveness. She just keeps digging.
She could not make the leap that Riley does; she could not experience the growth that characters like Keaton in GND do. She never gets a chirotic moment; she doesn’t get a come to Jesus moment because she doesn’t do anything to earn it.
She does not make any alternative narrative choices outside of her initial role. She does not exercise her free will. And the way that Christianity is presented in “Midnight Mass” requires action for reward. “…because, your whole life, I think you’ve needed to hear this. You aren’t a good person.” “Well…”
So, according to Jesus’s pals, there was this one time that he was walking in the desert, and he got tempted by satan himself to turn some stones into bread; but, for whatever reason, he’s like, “No, I’m not gonna do that.”
And, so, then the devil’s like, “Okay, jump off that cliff, but the angels will save you because you’re the son of God.” And Jesus is like, “No, um, I’m not gonna do that either.” And, so, the devil’s like, “Alright, rule the fucking world then.
You’re Jesus, son of God; you should be able to do that.” And Jesus is still like, “No, I’m also not going to do that?” A couple thousand years later, Fyodor Devil’s Advocate Dostoyevsky, he’s alone and grieving; struggling with his faith and the ever-changing Russian political climate of the time; he’s
Writing TBK, and he includes this parable that is supposedly written by Ivan, and it is called “The Grand Inquisitor.” And, in this story, Ivan basically writes fanfic about the Grand Inquisitor story, and he imagines that, in the 1600s, Jesus did come back.
In Ivan’s world, he comes back and immediately gets arrested; because, remember, we have all come to terms with the fact that humans cannot be trusted to decide what is good and what is bad; what is right, is what is wrong. We cannot be left alone to our own devices.
We learn this in Genesis; we learn this in Adam and Eve. We talked about it a couple sections ago; we’re no good with the decision-making. And, because of this, the church had to step in and feed the people, and govern them, and
Bring order to a chaotic society; and, so, the inquisitor is basically grilling Jesus about the fact that he said no to everything the devil asked him to do, and he’s like, “If you can turn stones into bread, why did you not feed our hungry people?
If you can bring life back, why are you not bringing people back to life? If you could rule everyone peacefully, why are you not doing that?” He points out that Christ’s decision not to use his magic powers to turn the stones into bread led to people suffering because they were starving.
“Because you’re right. There is…there’s so much suffering in the world, so much. And, then, there’s this higher power, this higher power who could erase all that pain; just wave his hand and make it all go away but doesn’t? No.”
By not being the all-powerful God that you are, and fixing things and healing people, you are allowing your people to suffer; and, for that, you must pay. Because they punish people on Earth for their crimes, and people get punished in hell for
Their crimes; so, if Jesus is going to come back into a world that is shaped by his existence, shaped by his church, then he is gonna also be held accountable for his crimes. The existence of God does not negate personal accountability. And why does a good God allow terrible things to happen?
Ivan tells this story mostly because he’s trying to push Alyosha’s buttons, because every conversation that he has with Alyosha leaves him spiraling. But he also tells this story because it is something that he uses to justify his belief that the church should actually be in charge.
He thinks that the church should be in charge of governing people and sending people to jail and all of that; he thinks that they should make the laws. Even if they are doing satan’s work. Because he thinks that people will listen better and follow laws if they believe that
They are being given by God, because, without God… “…then everything is permissible. And, not only permissible, but pointless. If Professor Radisson is right, then all of this, all of our…” Two things we need to talk about with Josh’s use of this quote in this scene. One: it’s not real.
It is in the book; it is a concept in the book; it is a very, very important concept in the book; but no one ever phrases it like that. “As Dostoyevsky famously pointed out…” This is not a direct quote. It’s also not a direct quote from Dostoyevsky himself.
I have a strong dislike for people who quote things that characters say as if the author is saying them. I just think that you’re missing a layer there if you are saying that this is something that the person said.
If you’re gonna do it, put a comma and the title of the book that it’s from, but don’t go around saying that, like, John Green said, “Okay, okay.” Like, yes, technically, but he didn’t just say that for fun one day. It’s in a book.
So, the concept is in the book; it’s a very, very important concept in the book that gets explored really thoroughly, but, when they’re saying “God”, it is more of a reference to the immortality of the soul, which is directly and intrinsically linked to the concept of
God, but what they’re talking about is the idea that you will live forever after you die; that your actions on Earth have consequences after your death. That is what they are talking about; not about God and whether or not God will tell you that something is permissible.
They’re talking about whether or not your actions on Earth have consequences after your death; they’re making the argument that, if your soul just ceases to exist at the moment of your death, then everything that you did on Earth before that doesn’t matter.
Which is why Ivan thinks that the church is important; because he thinks that people need to be kept in line while on Earth, despite the fact that he doesn’t believe there’s an immortal soul, and he doesn’t believe there’s anything after. That is what that quote is talking about.
That is why the church needs to be making laws and controlling people on Earth: to keep them in line while they are alive. Because, if they know that they’re not going anywhere after, then they will do whatever the fuck they want.
Someone needs to be keeping people in line, and someone needs to be making laws. That is why he thinks that the church should be in charge of laws. And that brings us to the second thing. Which is the use of the word “permissible.” It gets quoted like that a lot.
I will give it to the directors and the creators of the film that it is most often quoted like that; because that sounds a lot better, doesn’t it? “All things are permissible? Then everyone is allowed?” And Dmitri actually does kind of say it like that at one point.
I think he says, “…then men can do what they like,” which is a much more, like, titillating way to say it. But the word that is used, at least in my translation and, like, two of the other translations
That I checked, I got two ebooks and I have one physical copy, and the word is mostly “lawful” or “legal” or, like, a version of that, when they quoted that section. Which I think is a much better translation for what they are talking about…which is laws.
See, I told you that he did not read the book. Anyway, so the grand inquisitor is berating Jesus with questions and accusations and shit. “Instead of taking men’s freedom from them, thou didst make it greater than ever.
Didst thou forget that man prefers peace and even death to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.
And, behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, thoust didst choose all that is exceptional, vague, and enigmatic.” Thank you, drama school. Where Nietzsche saw the death of God as an opportunity for humanity to build a new, better
Moral system, many of the characters in “The Brothers Karamazov” see it as disastrous, if not downright evil. Ivan’s proclamation that everything is permissible, lawful, without a god is both utterly horrifying and completely seductive. There is a character in “The Brothers Karamazov” called Liza or Lise; I don’t know how it’s
Pronounced, if you haven’t caught on to the fact that I’m not big on pronunciation accuracy, then here you go: I’m not big on pronunciation accuracy; at least not with things in the public conscious; pronounce people’s names correctly; don’t be a dick.
In TBK, we meet Liza as a 14-year-old girl who is paralyzed and using a wheelchair. She is wide-eyed and innocent and suffering this terrible affliction until an encounter with Alyosha’s father figure, Elder Zosima, in which he performs some religious healing, and suddenly her condition is improving.
Elder Zosima is like a monk, by the way. And, after this, throughout the course of the novel, she becomes very tempted by Ivan’s ideas. Basically, Ivan’s idea that everything is lawful without a god spreads like wildfire and causes lots of problems, and Liza is one of these people who gets infected by it.
She starts acting out; she’s deliberately cruel to the people around her; she is slamming her hands in doors, causing herself pain; she is putting herself through physical and emotional suffering as penance for these dark thoughts and doubts and fantasies that she’s having. Which we’ve all been there.
Because she’s a kid, and she’s also about to be married off to someone who is very much not a kid. She gets a little bit older; I don’t think she’s 14 when they start talking about getting married, but still. She recounts all her dark fantasies to Alyosha; slams her finger in the door.
This is very common with the characters in TBK; they all think that suffering is a way to make penance with God. But it’s interesting because our Lisa in “Midnight Mass”–already established to be a sort of holy figure; completely devout, innocent, sweet victim of a horrible crime; suffering
A physical affliction in a wheelchair–regains the ability to walk through a similar encounter with a spiritual leader, and we get a similar outburst from our Lisa when she decides to pay Joe Collie a visit. This is her first time speaking to him since he shot her in the back.
And she rips him a new one. She talks about how angry she was; she talks about how she hoped that his place was dirty and disgusting; she hoped that he was miserable and alone because of what he’s done to her with one of the best lines in the entire show.
“You reached through time, Joe Collie! You reached through time, and you stole…” Which, again, why do I write anything? And she follows up this outburst and this outpouring of anger and frustration with an act of radical forgiveness.
She literally says, “If God can forgive you, and he says he can, then so can I.” And Joe Collie falls apart, and it is like getting hit in the chest with a baseball bat every single time you watch it. “And if I can forgive you, Joe Collie, then anyone can.” *Sobbing*
It’s soo good. It’s so good. It’s a moment of such, like, strength and…and growth as a character. It’s so good! It’s not really something that we get to see a lot of from Liza in “The Brother’s Karamazov” just because we don’t really get that much of Liza in “The Brother’s Karamazov.”
Apparently, there was gonna be a sequel, but… Anyway. Lisa does this, and it gives such strength and dimension to her character, and exemplifies her faith, and puts her on this pedestal, as well, of not only someone who is a devout
Believer, not just someone like Josh who goes to church every day, not just someone who holds on to her belief no matter what, but someone who struggles sometimes and who makes the choice to choose to behave and to act in a godly manner.
And it’s this moment, not the fact that she could walk again, not when Bev Keane killed his dog, it is this moment that triggers Joe Collie into attending his first AA meeting with Riley and Father Paul. God, this show is so fucking good.
Joe Collie, who has been drinking himself into oblivion and hating himself day in and day out ever since the accident, has started to attend these AA meetings; he is trying to get his life together; and he is really starting to do it until Father Paul fucking eats him.
We have Bev with this twisted idea of protecting the town and the community in the name of God killing Joe Collie’s dog at a public event, punishing him even further and causing more stress in the community, and then we have Lisa, equally devout–a character whose choice
To live by the word of God, to be the one who forgives–that creates a ripple effect of actual good in the community and also brings people to the church. For Bev, trying to exist like the characters in “God’s Not Dead”, like Josh and like Pastor
Dave, it is counterintuitive to what she wants, which is more praise from God…I guess. Because she doesn’t live in a world where blind faith is enough; she lives in a world where action is required for the rewards that she is seeking. She needs to make choices, but she won’t make choices.
Had Jonah the whale been allowed this kind of freedom in his narrative, Lisa’s freedom, then we could have had a similar moment of reckoning; we could have had that moment on the street in the pouring rain with Josh and Ratcakes; we could have had it; but we can’t
Because Josh making that kind of a choice would have distracted from the real focus of the story, which is blind faith. Put in “watch ‘God’s Not Dead’ and find out why Adam turns himself in.” Oh, we’re not doing that.
The emphasis on the “fight persecution” and “faith from the same perspective of the prophets” in “God’s Not Dead” limits its protagonists’ actions in both scope and scale, seemingly circumscribing the very thing that the narrative is working to save, which is freedom of will.
It feels like a contradiction; it feels like a cognitive dissonance; it feels like it should be tearing apart every neuron in their little brains every time the director calls action; it feels like hypocrisy at its finest. But we know from “The Grand Inquisitor” and from the Instagram stories of the disciples
That Big Man did not use his free will to turn the stones into bread, he did not use his free will to push satan off that cliff, and he did not run off and join the army under a false name to save China.
He used his free will to do one thing and one thing only: he used it to trust in God. That’s what he did. Because man does not live on bread alone; and, if you are living in the GND universe as a godling or a deadling, then that’s it; that’s your move.
So it’s gotta be a big one; it’s gotta make noise; it’s gotta be the Taylor Swift “Reputation” stadium tour, and it’s gotta have a ripple effect so massive that it almost feels supernatural. You get one shot per movie. You can only afford to have the Newsboys on set for so long.
“I want everyone to go to their contacts and click on everybody you know and text them three simple words:’God’s Not Dead.’ And there’s 10,000 of you out there; and everyone knows about a hundred people? That’s a million messages right there.
A million times we’re gonna tell Jesus that we love him in the next three minutes.” “Midnight Mass” places the emphasis on the “sacrifice” and “forgiveness” portions of the cycle, so its characters have a full range of experiences. They can bounce back and forth between godling and deadling, faith and not faith, like me
At a party when I didn’t take my meds. You can take Riley from deadling atheist to Jesus in a rowboat and back again; you can take him, put him up against the prophet-esque Father Paul, who is exhibiting nothing but
Jesus-like kindness, and you can set that up of “Jesus and apostle”, and you can flip it upside down, turn it inside out, wring it out over the narrative like blood dripping from a rag you can’t get clean. Father Paul dies, then comes back, starts performing miracles, dies again, comes back
Again, starts fucking shit up, and he is still not the Jesus. It all comes back to that moment when Father Paul looked Riley in the eyes and lied to him about how he knew Lisa could walk again. He had free will in that moment, and that’s what he did with it.
There is so much free will in this series dripping all over the place that, divine intervention be damned, these characters will not do what they are supposed to do; they do not stay in their assigned roles. So, later, when Father Paul chooses to lie to Riley again about Joe Collie visiting his
Sister, because he doesn’t know, when he chooses to continue playing God, it is that choice that brings Riley back to the rec center when he gets eaten by Dobby. Which is the only reason that he is able to tell Erin what is happening and send these
Notes to his family, so that, later, when they all become bat food, they understand what’s going on, and they choose to fight it, and it’s the ultimate undoing for Father Paul, and it’s all because he’s a dirty liar. That was a lot. Um, none of that was in the script.
This comes from, um, right, okay. “There’s so much free will dripping all over the place that divine int…these characters will not do what they’re supposed to…they won’t stay in their assigned roles…to lie again about Joe…” It’s only because Father Paul used his freshest free will to lie that he gets taken out of
The position of Jesus Christ. Riley gets placed in it, is given the opportunity to make that sacrificial choice, and it opens up the floor for everyone else to make the same kind of sacrificial choice and save the world. Part eleven: who do you say I am? This is the last one.
Final episode of “Midnight Mass” contains the second of my three favorite moments. It’s dark; shit is on fire; most of the island have either become bat food or become the batman; and Bev Keane has appointed herself judge and jury; standing outside of Saint
Patrick’s church, deciding who shall continue to live as an eternal blood-sucking soldier journeying to the mainland to spread their glorious gifts onto the unsuspecting world; and who shall be jet fuel. She’s about two seconds from having one of her minions strip some poor dude for parts when Mildred steps in.
Remember when I said that Father Paul walked out of the church to find Bev Keane being a menace? This is…this is Bev Keane being a menace. And mildred is like, “Bev, maybe don’t,” and Father Paul tells her to bring him to the church because all are welcome. All have to be…
“All have to be welcome, or this isn’t really a god’s house!” Father Paul, who we have seen lose himself in the madness of being an immortal demon creature, has had this world-shattering experience. His faith has been challenged; shaken to its very core; run through a blender with a copy
Of the Necronomicon and the first installment of the “Maximum Rise” series, only to be dumped out onto a blood-soaked altar and set on fire. Just put that clip of you saying, “Burning offering? For me?” And, then, just go right into…
This man’s church is a war zone; his friends hate him; he has created a monster that he cannot control with the help of another monster that he cannot control; all of this under what he believes to be the instruction of a god that he has dedicated his entire life and existence to.
“That’s the thing about priesthood: it’s never supposed to be about me; it’s supposed to be about God!” By all accounts, Father Paul should be feeling so abandoned by God; so utterly betrayed by heavenly father that lucifer himself should have shown up to give him a pep talk.
The devil should have brought him on with a salary no man could match. And Christians aren’t allowed to lend money to other Christians, so God couldn’t have done shit. I mean, he probably could have hired him legally, but when was the last time a Christian organization had books that were clean? *Cheers*
Father Paul should be so lost, angry, and dejected, that, if God has not been killed for him, he should be murdering God with his bare hands as we speak. And, perhaps, maybe he is harboring a deep, Radisson-like hatred for the God that is dragging
Him by the collar down a blood-soaked road to a freshly minted hell of his own design, but we don’t know that, and we’ll never know that because he doesn’t say anything like that, and he doesn’t do anything like that.
You know what he does do when confronted with the consequences of the choices that he made? That is exactly what he sees. His choices. Not God’s; not the angel’s; not Bev’s. His decisions. Because, God or no God… “There’s nothing in the scripture, or in the world for that matter, that suggests God negates
Personal accountability.” He finally finds himself standing in Riley’s shoes, staring out from a curb at the mess that he has created, and he does not look away. He does not wander aimlessly without faith. He retreats into it.
He recommits himself to the God that saved him; the God that made him; the God that inspired that priest; the man who offers to start an AA chapter just so that one guy doesn’t have to go to the mainland twice a week; who brings daily mass to the elderly who cannot go to
Church anymore; who once scoured an island looking for a very specific-looking mouse just so he could keep one kid’s faith alive. The God that created that man who says things like, “I am of no use to people in a state of grace,”; that is the God that Father Paul commits himself to.
That is the God that he chooses not just to believe in, but to act like. And, when he walks into that church that he has just declared to be God’s house, and he sees Sarah dumping kerosene everywhere, he just says “Good.”
Because he knows; and he sees in that moment that the best way for that building to be God’s house is to burn to the ground. “He said, ‘this building is not my church’.” It is a powerful moment in both of these films when our godly hero chooses to sacrifice their
Place of worship because it is a sacrifice. And sacrifice is what makes the story of Jesus Christ different from traditional hagiography. This act of free will, of martyring oneself, is the most potent act with the most profound effect on the people around them.
So, it begs the question: does it matter that the only reason Reverend Dave sacrificed his church was because God told him to? We’ve already made the claim that Riley doesn’t need to believe that Jesus Christ himself
Walked the Earth and gave his life in order to free humanity from their sins in the eyes of an all-forgiving all-powerful god. He just needs to do the right thing. He just needs to recognize evil. It doesn’t matter why Riley recognized the evil, be it by its biblical definition or…or
By the harm that it’s causing. It matters that he put a stop to it. “I don’t think that Reverend Hill rolled over. I think that he saw people suffering, and he made a sacrifice for them. Surely, their parallels to Christianity are not lost on you.”
It doesn’t matter if Reverend Dave only put down his sword because Daddy told him to; and it doesn’t matter who was there to offer Professor Sorbo his salvation in the eyes of God. It just matters that he got it.
“The God that you don’t believe in has given you another chance; another chance to change your final answer.” To sing, recite, or teach a text is never a neutral act.” If we are looking for a traditional monomyth in the “God’s Not Dead” films, we are not going to find it.
That’s not what they’re for. They are made by Christians, for Christians. They are acts of praise. They are retellings of the Christian redemption cycle with characters fulfilling the role of Jesus, without actually being Jesus. Which makes them a lot less like protagonists and a lot more like saints.
And, if they are saints, then these films are just visual hagiography; hagiography being the retelling of the lives and achievements of saints, culminating in a chirotic moment where that saint’s badassness is officially acknowledged by God himself to the world.
The chirotic moment is the moment when the Lord comes and says, “I choose you.” Holland says, “In hagiography there is no room for interpretation of events prior to the chirotic moment, because everything leads up to that and is painted in the light of that.
There is no moment where the protagonist could have gone a different route or made a different moral choice. Time is not linear anymore; it is all the same. In narratives, before a climatic moment, everything is up to many interpretations.”
The GND movies go down one way and one way only; they ask one question (“Who do you say I am?”), and they answer it: God is good always, and always God is good. They are straightforward; they are palatable. Pureflix is the Dhar Mann of feature length video content.
Does that mean that they are harmless? No. They are offensive; they are full of stereotypes and misinformation, and I do not even want to know where their money comes from or where it goes. They are problematic in the most basic sense of the word.
There are so many well-researched and well-articulated articles and videos about that fact, and, yet, they still made four of them. They’re doing it for somebody, somewhere out there. That is why I wanted to give these films a fair shake.
“The biggest thing is that…that God has a specific purpose and a plan for your life; and, uh, and he is real, and there is hope in him.” “So, April…” What’s interesting about the film’s use of that phrase, “If there is no immortality of
The soul, then all things are lawful,” or, “If there is no God, all things are permissible,” is that they use it to support the film’s idea that the bible gives us answers. It gives us guidance that belief in Jesus Christ can give us the freedom and liberation
From pain and suffering that we all so secretly, deeply desire. But, in context, in “The Brothers Karamazov”, that statement actually brings about a lot more questions than it does answers. When Dmitri poses that specific question, “All things are lawful, then?
Men can do what they like?” he’s proposing it to a journalist right before his trial for the murder of his father, which he did not commit. And the journalist responds by saying that clever men already do what they like.
Ivan is concerned that a world where no one believes in God or is governed by a belief in God will fall into complete chaos and injustice, when it’s already happened. Dmitri is found guilty. Dmitri gets sent to jail for something that he didn’t do. A murderer walks.
It’s already happened; the death of God has already occurred in their world. You cannot unring that bell. “God is dead. We have killed him. We have free will.” That monstrous world that Ivan describes–that selfish, evil, lawless land where cannibalism
Runs amok–that is the world that “Midnight Mass” presents to us as a direct product of the belief in God as a moral authority. In “The Brothers Karamazov”, the belief in God brings nothing but questions; in “God’s Not Dead”, it gives us answers; and, in “Midnight Mass”, it gives us justification.
If Dostoyevsky was putting Eastern Orthodoxy on trial to see if it prevails, then Michael Flanagan is nailing Catholicism to the cross to see if it will rise again. They are rewarded for their actions; they are rewarded for how they choose to love.
In the final moments of “Midnight Mass”, the people of Crockett Island stand amongst their burning homes–the wreckage of their God’s work. *Singing* And they begin to sing. They liberate themselves from their belief in a transcendent God that would require such monstrous acts of them through a return to their most basic principles.
As the sun rises on Crockett Island, Ali and Sheriff Hassan begin to pray; Erin lies like Jesus on the cross beneath the angel; Father Paul and Mildred hold Sarah’s body on a bridge that she loved as a child; and Lisa and Riley’s brother are sat on a tiny rowboat in the middle
Of the water, watching everything that they have ever known and everyone that they have ever loved turn to ash. And Lisa looks at him and says… “I can’t feel my legs.” Suffering has returned; liberation is over, even for the innocent. “Weeping may last through the night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
“Midnight Mass” was never about resurrection; it was never about bringing God back from the dead; it’s about standing in your darkest possible moment, when you have become the devil, and answering the question. It’s about keeping God alive whoever you say that he is. Alright. That’s it. We’re done. We’re done. We’re done.
God save the queen. I can’t believe I’m done…I’m so happy to be done filming this. This has been the hardest thing that I’ve done in a really long time. Like, between the fact that I started the script in September and just the sheer amount
Of research that was required, and there was always something else that needed to be looked into and explored, and the script didn’t make any sense for so long; it still doesn’t; editing is gonna be a fucking nightmare, but… And, then, the tech issues…
And I film all this on my phone; I have to keep everything on a hard drive because I don’t have space on my computer to even run Final Cut. Like, this is…this has been such a monster. So, thank you for watching all of it. I appreciate it. I would like to do more.
I’m planning to do more. I hope they don’t take this long. I’m trying to get better at other social media, so I do post some stuff about this on my Instagram; but, like, my Instagram’s, like, mostly my family and my friends, so it feels really weird to post anything, like, advertisey?
So, don’t expect, like, influencer-level content if you follow there. But, if you do, I do sometimes post about like the process of these and…and how they’re coming along, so there’s that. Um, you can follow my tiktok…that’s mostly gay shit. And, um…yeah. That’s about it. I appreciate your help.
Not that you did anything, but…you know. I apologize to chairs, so… I can hear my neighbors; okay. I…it’s 2:02 AM, I can hear my neighbors talking, so I think they’re probably about to come complain about how loud I’m talking so… Bye. That’s a wrap! I keep on waking up, walking alone in the street… I keep on hearing the voices; they’re trying to scream… A child in a blanket of lead, on the river I wade through Searching reflections for all of the answers I thought I knew
I wanna burn down the farm Set fire to the wood that built me so strong For a world that I cannot Survive I want to watch it all fall Swallow the ashes I make of the stall In the hopes that they might Make me feel alive
Family of monsters can live as long as their youngest So, cut down the fountain of youth and tie it to her wrist A child in a cave, on the edge of the river I’m hiding Traded her matches for all of the time she’s spent biding
I wanna burn down the farm Set fire to the wood that built me so strong For a world that I cannot Survive I want to watch it all fall Swallow the ashes I make of the stall In the hopes that they might Make me feel alive
Call the fire department Tell them there’s been an arson Forget the village buckets There’s not a damn thing left Call the fire department Tell them there’s been an arson Forget the village buckets There’s not a damn thing left
I wanna burn down the farm Set fire to the wood that built me so strong For a world that I did not Did not survive I want to watch it all fall Swallow the ashes I make of the stall In the hopes that they might Bring me back to life
– Good afternoon, everybody. And welcome to the first in a discussion series on Global Religious and Secular Dynamics. My name is Jose Casanova and I’m a sociologist, Professor of Sociology and Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University as well as a Senior Fellow at the Berkeley Center
For Religion, Peace and World Affairs, which sponsors these series. Good afternoon here in the East Coast where both Charles Taylor and I am but I know some of you is good morning in the West Coast, for others is good evening in Europe in the Middle East
Goodnight in Asia and even past midnight in Australia. Welcome all. We are fortunate to have as the first speaker in our series, in our conversations, the great living philosopher, Canadian, Quebecker Charles Taylor. Charles, welcome to our conversation. We are going to have a conversation between both of us,
We are going to cover four topics, The Secular Age, The Crisis of Democracy, Linguistic Anthropology or Global Human Condition in a Catholic Modernity. It will be first conversation perhaps a bit superficial, but I think that it blends well key aspects of Charles Taylor’s life work. After our conversation, we’ll have a 20 minute
Period for question and answer. And so please, you have there a chat. And you can write your questions and answers. And we’ll try to give you the opportunity to for Charles Taylor to respond. Without further ado, Charles, good afternoon. Again, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us,
It will be much better if we could be physically together. But this is a still a substitute is important that we keep socially connected an intellectual conversation under those conditions of physical distance. So again, let’s begin with “A Secular Age.” This is a book that obviously made you famous beyond philosophy.
It became almost you could say an intellectual best seller. Did you expect such a response to the book “A Secular Age” when you were writing? – No, I didn’t, I thought it would be largely ignored by most people but just specialists in the field might find some interesting ideas.
You remember, when we worked it out together, I finished the draft in discussions with you and Hans Joas very intensely in Berlin. And I thought then it’s a continuation of that kind of discussion among sociologists and philosophers. And suddenly, to my surprise it– – Well, it certainly went beyond anybody’s expectation
And I’m so pleased that it happened. So now one of the concepts you develop in the book you had already begun developing, is this of the imminent frame. Explain what we what we mean by the imminent frame. And how is it connected with our secularize.
– Yes, well, I’m trying to get out there they what we all understand that we all understand. People’s understanding of what they share in their understanding of their situation. Now if you go back to the Middle Ages, Early Modern Period in Europe, there was a biblical story that everyone accepted
There was a fight between different versions of Christianity, there was a sense that we also lived in a Cosmos with moral orders that the various kingdoms and so on were based on these cosmic realities et cetera. And today, it’s really very, very different. What we all understand, that we all understand
Across all civilizations, is roughly speaking the natural science view of the natural world, the sense that our different societies have all been created by human beings at a certain time revolutions and so on. The sense that we live in in man’s timeframe, stretching back unimaginably millions of years
And in the evolution of the universe then we have different positions within that we some of us are into certain faiths. Others are against faith and so on. But everybody understands that that’s what everybody understands starting point. And that’s what I call the, if you like the frame
And I call an imminent frame because it’s elements are totally imminent and they transcend. – So okay, so this the imminent frame meaning is based on horizontal institutions, without any reference to transcendence? They all operate as if God would not exist, right? But as if there was none directly. And obviously, in Europe,
The emergence of this imminent frame, perhaps because it was there that you could be develop had very negative consequences for the survival of traditional forms of Christianity. The spectation was that is the imminent frame becomes globalized to other civilizations, the same will happen, the same process of decline of religion, and basically,
Rather, purely secular is the only option of normal life could also happen. But this has not been the case. So how can we explain that within such an imminent frame, such a diversity of possibilities of global religious and secular dynamics are possible? – Yeah, well, I think he was to turn it around
Why should that change people’s mind? It means, of course, that one’s religious faith is in a quite different context. I mean, think of religious faith 16th century world of magic, of magic forces, God is a being that could defend us against that. But it’s perfectly possible to turn it around
And say within this imminent frame, people are searching for meaning, they’re searching for a sense of what human beings can become, how they can grow and so on. And some people are gonna see that growth, that development, that journey towards something greater in terms of religious faiths,
And indeed, what we find in the imminent frame now is a tremendous growth and diversification of different ideas of what the spiritual development is. So it’s in a sense, it’s a different context it inflects all faith positions differently but it doesn’t rule out the possibility of faith quite the contrary. – Right.
And yet you in your lifetime you’ve experienced personally the rate transformation of Quebecker Society from being a uniformly Catholic, and then suddenly almost a homogeneous radically secular. So it seems that Quebec is almost a confirmation of the European notion of a self fulfilling prophecy of secular modernity.
And yet, we see the parallel to that in Latin America, you see, the transformation of the societies, their own silent revolutions, leading into all kinds of religious pluralism. So how do we explain under which conditions then one seems to, this imminent frame it seems to lead to homogeneous secularity.
And when does it open up the possibility for precisely all forms of pluralism? – Yeah. Well you see if the previous period in which there was this sole unanimous belief in this case, the Catholic Church in Quebec, if it was a period in which people really suffered is certain kinds of restriction, oppression
Being forced to do things they didn’t want to do and so on, then, the change in the global understanding of where we are at, is seen as a possibility, where we can get rid of all this, we can throw it all away. And that’s what of course,
Was lived in my society in Quebec. But if you take a society on the other end of the spectrum, like the United States, which in a sense became plural, roughly around the time of the Great Awakening or the Great Awakenings, maybe the second one in the early 19th century
Then it’s a quite different situation. And so you see these very, very different ways of responding and again, and in the Latin American case in Brazil and so on it’s something different again what’s clear in all these cases is you get plural pluralism, glorification, growth of different possibilities. And that exists here too,
Because in the generation after the one that threw the church out there are young people that are saying, “well, what are we gonna do with our lives?” Well, I mean, we’re searching for some kind of meaning for some kind of, in some cases, spiritual growth and that’s happening in all sorts of ways.
So it depends if the experience prior to pluralism was very negative, then it’s reached to this rejection of religion. – Right. So it seems that it’s also, as you point out a radical transformation. Pluralism was viewed as a negative fact these what explains the Wars of Religion. Nobody could imagine the possibility of
Different religious beliefs in the same society. There had to be homogeneity, thus the Westphalian model. While we’ve moved from this model, it was for plurality of beliefs, which are heresies, or false doctrines to a positive recognition of plurality is a positive development into pluralism to which extent this is one of the factors
Of our global condition recognition of a kind of hereditament plurality, especially in the field of the world system of religions. – Yes, well, I think that this has causes its reactions and we have various parts of the world in which is still thought to be a disaster
So now it’s thought as something that has to be stamped out and really, you know, very, very tight discipline. If you look at the evolution of a society like Pakistan, It’s really very, very worrying. But it’s very much a lesson of that, Pakistan was started with the idea of
An Islamic state that was Islamic State culturally that was connected to the culture of the moguls and so on. And it’s slowly evolved towards a state that is permitting people, Islamic in the narrowest possible sense of Wahhabi time discipline around, they’re a very narrow notion of the Sharia.
So you get people who are on death row, now for being accused of blasphemy and so on. So there are reactions to this kind of pluralism in various parts of the world. And they become in a certain sense, even more viciously narrow (laughs) than the original, raw, the conformist societies that–
– But of course, paradox here is that we know the Jinnah the founder of the idea of Pakistan himself was really an atheist. He didn’t take Islamic religion seriously. Muslim identity yes but not Islamic beliefs. – Even worse than that, he was a member of a sect
That would be probably victims of drive by killings of Ultra Shia sect, and yet he’s still revered. There’s a kind of tremendous cognitive distance in Pakistan so he was both not really a believer but he was connected to a sect which is considered not really Islamic anymore, by most, anyway, lots of Pakistanis.
– These resets to the next topic of The Crush of Democracy and to a large extent it has also to do with attempts to impose the kind of religious or ethno-religious homogeneity, that of course, was also the mother of Westphalia this is what happened in Europe
And to to a large extent, there has been a tragic repetition of this model of ethno-religious uniformity for the sake of the nation or state and of religious nationalism, this is one of the crisis of democracy. But there are many others which have to do with even populist rejections of liberal democracy
In the West, you’ve been working with your friends with Craig with Philip on a new book, precisely analyzing this crisis of democracy and how we can somehow respond to it. You’ve been involved in democracy both as a political thinker but also as an activist, you’re one of the founding members
Of the New Democratic Party of Canada, you have been a social democrat before Bernie Sanders was a social democrat. And to a certain extent, you’ve been always very much involved both intellectually but also politically involved in democracy. So how do you see our contemporary moment and what is the fundamental for you the most fundamental crisis of democracy today? – Well, I think the faith of Western democracy
The crisis is the rise of what we call not really very apathetic populism, And that is, there is a sense among the idea that one has to mobilize the people defined as ordinary people who are not part of the elites but the mobilization is around extremely
As you say, extremely narrow, and notions of identity and that exclude others that exclude people with varieties of ways of approaching. And I think that this has different sources. One of the sources in our Western societies has been that a lot of ordinary people were neglected in the era you might see
A new liberalism where there was globalization carried through without a concern for whether they were victims losers as well as gainers from this without any attempt to inflect the gains so that makes sure that everybody was on board and I think the United States is a key example
Of that kind of cause where the society moved more and more towards galloping inequality and tremendous deprivation and that’s one of the things that could easily turn into populism. Then if you go to the other end of the Western world and you look at a country like Poland, it’s somewhat different,
Is that they have this experience of their nationalism, which is very much linked with the Catholic church or older now, ideally the Catholic Church, suppressed for years for decades under communist regime. And so when the liberation comes back, it’s easier to argue by people who have this kind of view that
That’s really what Poland is all about and that it’s not about being open, liberal, plural and so on. So there are different kinds of origin of this thing but it happens that we are in a, I don’t know why, in a constellation in the world in which these bad movements are winning
And even India is not connected to the Western world at all. Indian democracy is moving in a very worrying direction with Modi with a kind of very narrow notion of Hindu persecuting the largest minority, the second largest Muslim society in the world in terms of population has just
Had a law passed where doesn’t recognize Muslims as Indian citizens. So, we have this– – You mentioned Poland, what is to me evident in these contemporary regime in Poland is a very clear critique of rule of law, of justice former justice by experts but also of liberalism, for in the name
Of majoritarian democracy. So you get a affirmation of the rule of the majority but without concern for minority rights and without concern really for a fundamental constitutional order that protects everybody. To me, it’s a dissociation of three elements of democracy that were also separate in the 19th century. Liberals used to be anti-democrats,
Democrats used to be anti-liberals. And you will have a rule of law in Prussia that was neither liberal nor democrat. So part of the problem and we see it in Trump is very majoritarian rule without any also concern for institutions, legal institutions rule of law, and also a certain totally dis-concern
For the rights of minorities. So to which extent is a fundamental problem today how to bring together because one understands a critique of liberal elites, but in the critiques of basically pure expertise, legal formalist but when it goes to undermining the fundamental legal constitutional structures and minorities, professional minorities rights
Then there is a fundamental problem. So to which extent this is a fundamental issue today? – I think it’s absolutely fundamental but how to defeat it is the big question. What powers it, is a sense of the national identity, which is very much this in a narrow sense
It anchored in mostly in the past, and a tremendous fear. So the fear around losing that is what makes all these illiberal regimes try to make their power irreversible. So what you see in all of them in Hungary, they succeeded in doing that. In Poland, the fight now is that they,
You know, the reigning party is trying to change the judicial system, fire judges and so on. The idea is to make it irreversible what you see in the Trump regime with the Republicans in the United States Well, Republicans in general have been trying to have this kind of irreversibility
By both suppressing and so on. And in the case of Trump who go to any length to make sure that he doesn’t get turned out, there’s completely abandon the idea of as a democratic society, which well, we rule for a while, and then you take over
And you rule for a while but you open the possibility of it continuing. So how you undermine that immense fear around a certain identity which makes it just inconceivable or horrible to think that one could ever change. That is the big challenge today. – And of course, too, as you point out
The growing, global problem of growing economic inequality and social inequality to these we are the global pandemic and it is also precisely made clear manifest the consequence of these inequalities but then in has produce a retrenching towards presenting national autarkic you know almost Americantlism right even the European Union,
Closing its inner borders once again abandoning the Schengen model and retracting to a purely national a unit Black Lives Matter protest that under those conditions despite the fear of well contagion, you have people risking their health for the sake of an idea, is not any more simply Blacks,
African Americans, but now you see a very wide spread other populations supporting the both participating but also majority of the American population supporting the demonstration. So do you see here a point of influx or revitalization of democracy? – Yes, I think I do. And, you know, there was one good thing
That came from the COVID crisis, one good thing, which was in many, many societies an immense wave of solidarity which precisely bridged the divisions in many cases that existed before. And I think that that sense of solidarity greater solidarity you know, we’re faced with the same crisis,
With the same danger, with the same enemy, as it were. People said, the beginning is like a wartime and I think that’s very true. It’s like the, you know, declaration of wartime, which I was old enough to remember in the Second World War, when a lot of lines of division were closed
Because people thought we have a common enemy and we have to get together and fight them. And I think that that stronger sense of solidarity is partly explaining the wonderful reaction to the killing of George Floyd I mean, it’s partly the horrible scene in which he was killed.
But I think it’s also because there’s a sense that we have to hang together now we have to create a kind of unity and that’s why, not just in the United States but worldwide in Canada and elsewhere there is this very strong feeling, no we can’t carry on like this
With these kinds of hierarchical views of who really matters. And we have to do something about it. I think that comes from the very context of the COVID crisis in which it arose. – Right, especially the realization to the extent to which discriminated racial minorities have been disproportionately impacted
By this inequality, by the crisis when this is big. This is a very positive aspect. For me the fundamental question remains however, that the answers have been purely national so far and we know that these crises are global crises that required also transnational solidarity, also in their response.
And so part of the problem I see today is that we can innovate transnational international structure partly because of the United States that was the leader abandoned it, and partly because of the growth of authoritarian regimes in China, in Russia, in India, et cetera that are not interested in creating these transnational structures.
So the point is, to which extent we need to go beyond internal democracy precisely towards developing a structures of transnational solidarity because it’s not only the global pandemic, it’s of course, the global ecological crisis, is a crisis of global refugees, is the crisis of base, equally global inequality.
None of these problems can be solved in one single country. If you associate democracy in one country is not possible today, for economic reasons for many reasons. So how can we go both reinforce national democracies to make them lively and that responsive to people,
But at the same time be able to transcend them? So how can we do that? – Well, I think we have some of the basis for doing that in the way we’ve responded to the the Coronavirus crisis, because the idea is we want, first of all the solidarity within the society.
But secondly, the idea that here’s something really overriding our normal concerns for my own prosperity or my own job and so on. It’s something that goes beyond that. And that can only be fought on an international level. So you could imagine we could emerge from this
With a sense that yeah, we have to pull together not only within societies, but between societies. And we could start a new kind of movement, which would mean that we would have a more effective fight against global climate change as well. Then what tells against that
Is that we’ve spent a tremendous amount of money, rightly keeping people afloat, who’ve lost their jobs or businesses that couldn’t function and so on. And I know there’ll be people who will be saying at the end of all this, if ever there is an end to all this
“look, we’re so much in debt, “we can’t possibly afford a program “of really fighting for global, “against global climate change, and so on.” And I think Left and Right are gonna line up as we leave this crisis around that issue. Does this I mean, one thing is to say
What it showed us that we were terribly unprepared to face this kind of thing ’cause we ran down our health systems or old folks homes and so on, let’s never do that again. And the other response would be well, Oh be spend so much money, we’re so much in debt.
We can’t afford it. So let’s run the beam further down in order to get back to our level of production before the crisis. And I think we, you know, I don’t know exactly who is gonna win this battle. (laughs) I know it’s not long but we have a real chance
We have a real chance because of what’s the mindset created in the crisis of doing the right thing or once. (laughs) – But there was a time, obviously, where you talk over international social democracy in Europe, it gave a new light to European Union beyond what had originally been at least
A democratic project. But now really, really social democracy transnational is in serious crisis throughout Europe we see it. And so, how can we somehow recover this tradition and how can we revitalize it for our contemporary global condition? I’m not sure but obviously, you’ve been at this fight for a long time.
So do we have any idea of how– – We need new kinds of alliances in a way. there were moments in our history, like the New Deal, the first New Deal of the United States was a recreation of a new kind of alliance to fight a crisis that hadn’t existed before.
And people are talking now in the United States about our Green New Deal (laughs) that’s the same idea. But in countries of Europe, we have to have a new alignment. I mean, for instance, in Germany, it has to be an alignment of various Left parties and the Greens.
You know, the Greens are a very important possible vehicle. This when you think of the election of Bavaria last year that a lot of the votes lost by the Right wing went to the Greens. So it won’t be simply a social democratic or in France, a Socialist Party has virtually disappeared.
But it could be a realignment which produces a new situation, a new political course and I think the possibility is there the were a lot of young people are at in all our societies at this point, politically is they’re ready to move in that direction
But we have to be creative in bringing about the new kinds of alignments. – And if we can move now to your life work, you’ve basically been a consistent critique of what could be called any form of naturalism. Naturalism, your first critique in your book, “The Explanation of Behavior” in 1963, 64,
Against precisely the model of the natural sciences to understand human societies from the social science, human sciences. You develop a critique of communitarian critique of liberalism, which has also some of these elements a critique of purely formalist epistemologies and now in your new book, “The Language Animal,”
A book which I do recommend everybody to read this the book that at the base of which you receive one of the last big prizes, right? You got the Templeton Prize and the Kyoto Prize, the Kluge Prize together with Jürgen Habermas from the Library of Congress and then the Berggruen Prize
Now this is a book in which you tried to it’s called “The Language Animal” very clearly we are could be called “The Language Mammal” we are an animal species, and the attempt to any type of epistemology any type of understanding of reason, which is disembodied and dis-embedded from social context will not work.
The subtitle is the “Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity” and you develop as a critique of you put two different types of linguistic anthropology one right HLC, Hobbes Locke Condillac and then the three aids of German romanticism, Harmond Humbolt Hargen. What do you mean by this critique of a purely,
Designative theory of language that only is an utensil is again, useful, but really is not considerative of fascist humans. Can you explain? – You see the Hobbes, Locke, Condillac all those three thinkers, what they were interested in language for was language enables us to formulate information,
You know, record it and communicate it to others. They were thinking always of how does it help us build a science of the world right, and their followers in the modern analytic philosophy, theories of language with a certain number of very important changes really introduced by Fregean
Are really focusing on the same thing. But if you look at human beings in language, just obvious that it’s doing other things for us. It’s I mean, if you look at art, if you look at literature, if you look at the role of metaphor, incidentally, metaphor is the enemy for Hobbes
And Locke and Condillac their customs say, you know, this is their confusing science if you use this word for that. See, but metaphor, we live by metaphors but also what language does, is it relates us to each other. So we thinking of linguistic anthropologists like Michael Silverstein in Chicago
Who really shown that language creates a communication between people and therefore sets up all kinds of relations of people including hierarchical relations between people and so you know, a when I was a kid in Quebec everybody, we used to speak to our parents with the familiar with French tu.
And they would speak to us with vous. And between classes, it was also like that, right? And we’ve had a revolution in the modern world in which people have struggled against that. And in places like Sweden, I understand everyone calls her What else tu or do now, right?
So what is language doing here? Language is framing how people relate to each other. And it does all sorts of things of this kind all sorts of functions in human life other than simply collecting information, building sciences, which is not to say that that’s not important is tremendously important.
But you have to see this capacity, scientific capacity as it were placed within a much broader range. That’s why I use that, you know, subtitle “The Full Range of the Human Linguistic Capacity.” I wanted to bury that kind of theory once and for all. – So let’s talk about the global pandemic
And how these reinforces these issues on the one hand, our embeddedness in the live world of nature and the violence we are part of the live world and so on, right? Then the other the lack of communication or the physical separation but then the connectivity through media but one of the strengths
Of the new media is of course, the focus on artificial intelligence and big data the kind of thing that precisely reinforces the other notion of reduced linguistic capability. So, to which extent what we are doing now, despite doing it through media, it still is able to reinforce this notion
Of a linguistic capacity goes beyond precisely gathering information, big Data, are purely a kind of mechanistic artificial intelligence that machines are more rational than we are and therefore they are better than we are. So what are the lessons of the pandemic in this respects? – Well, I think that, you know,
They, there’s a perpetual temptation it’s a great technological temptation to be able to reduce everything to machine intelligence and so on. And I think we’re gonna find with the pandemic, it’s gonna work in both directions for exactly the usual reasons that there’s a certain kind of mindset,
Which is gonna say, “well, let’s you know, “let’s have a systems of control “working out what people should be allowed to do “or not do, by machine intelligence.” And then they’re going to be other people who are saying, “well, these are never going to work “because human beings have to be
“brought to motivated towards have to “in virtue of the certain notions of “what they owe to other people in their society,” like the sense of solidarity we have today that’s an important part of it. And you can’t talk about a machine intelligence which is feels Solidarity.
I mean, you can’t talk about a machine that feels anything That’s why there’s a perpetual fall back falling short of these claims that are made for artificial intelligence. Now, there are certain needs that it really can very well do it can, you know, like, can calculate, calculate in a much more quickly than ordinary human beings. But there are certain functions
That it just can’t take over. So what we get is, in my long life, I’ve seen there are booms and busts. There was a theory of psychology which was a behaviorist when I was younger and I wrote a book saying it was no good. And it collapsed.
And I thought for a moment I did it, but I didn’t do it. It collapse of its own weight. But then people who have a mechanistic mindset needed something so they found the computer. Oh, the computer that’s it, nothing, simply looking at behavior but looking at the computers
And there’s a whole wave of that and then that collapsed. And then you see there is this motivation always to find a certain mindset. It’s the kind of Cartesian being masters and possessors of nature mindset that pushes people and we’re going to have this series of booms and busts,
Booms and busts, booms and busts. But there’s always going to be a version Of the mechanistic outlook, which is riding high. – Let’s move then onto the question of different narratives. Precisely, it’s not only that we need feelings and machines, but also narratives are parts of what is constitute of ourselves in group identities, and as you point out in your big, big narrative
Of a secular aids, the question is not to get rid of narratives, but simply you have to come up with better, more compelling more basically hermeneutically full narratives. One of them is you develop a text is not well known “A Catholic Modernity.” What did you mean with this narrative of a Catholic modernity.
What were you after? – I was after trying to find ways of being Catholic that made sense in the world we’re now in, right? And I felt that the ways of being Catholic that we were offered by the established churches remember that I was brought up in Quebec
Before the revolution before this make up. (laughs) We’re just designed to repel people particularly young people and send them out elsewhere. So I was trying to struggle through to the idea of modes of being Catholic that would make sense today and of course, that led me to the surrounding idea
That what it means to be a Catholic has been very different in different ages it’s evolved and has changed and so on. And in that I was partly inspired by the theology that underlay Vatican Two the theology of people like Judy Burke and Econ Gollins.
Their idea was let’s go back to the Fathers of the Church and see what was going on then. And then we’ll have a point of view outside our present situation in which to ask if our ways of operating now and as against the anti-modernism, which was really itself very recent.
It was based on the Tridentine mindset. They had a way of understanding that we were gonna have different ways of being Catholic, but let’s find the one that makes sense for us. That’s really what got me going and eventually led to my making this lecture and then from there (laughs) the discussion —
– If we can continue in this vein obviously you’ve always insisted that Medieval Catholicism was much more openly pluralist than even later Catholicism right? Although we see there’s the Golden Age of Catholicism it was much more precisely pluralist that the one that comes out of the Tridentine
And then of course of Vatican One. You refer to Vatican Two, for me always, what is obvious from reading Vatican Two is the associated fathers who are from all over the world, suddenly, are aware of these global condition, the sign of the times that globalization they don’t use the name yet
But whether it is Nostra Aetate whether it is Dignitatis Humanae whether it is Gagument Space. This idea of the science of the times of a new global age is very, very powerful. Now in these lecture, you refer to Matteo Ricci as a possibility of an alternative form of Catholicism.
Indeed, for me, as you know, I’ve been working on Jesuit and globalization looking for an alternative form of competing models of Catholic organization that of inspired by the Catholic Kings, right, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, or by Rome that will come with propaganda fitted. Here you have this model of
Based on open communication, accommodation to other cultures partly the same way that is, you say the Daniel Lou and Congarme have gone to the patristic. They went to San Paul and the Gentiles. And they realize that if early Christianity could be Latin and Greek to radically different forms of Christianity,
It could also be Chinese, it could also be Indian Hindu, and therefore the idea is that of multiple Catholicisms. So, the Christian story itself is universal but it is embedded in very particular cultures and understandings and contexts. And so Christian universalism cannot be the globalization of Roman centralism.
But it will have to be some form of understanding of the multiplicities of Catholicism through history and today now in the globe. So, we know that part of the project of this Pope Francis, precisely the acceptance of these multiple local churches. How do you think that this is something
Which still can be brought back by the very stronger systems of Catholic uniformity? – Well, I think it’s what’s gonna make it irreversible is the fact that the majority of Catholics are rapidly if they aren’t already the case outside of Europe, outside of Europe and North America outside of the Old West.
And what we’re also looking at is the effect of the decline of the Imperial West. Right? When, you know, the history, modern history of the West is more complex than people think. In the 18th century and the 17th century, there wasn’t necessarily this certainty
That Europe is absolutely the be all and end all right? There was a, on the contrary, you get the end of the 18th century, people like Burke who are horrified at the way the British Imperialist are creating the Indian Empire and so on because they’re destroying another culture.
You go through the 19th century and you get this total belief that Europe has the answers to everything. Right and Left Marks and John Stuart Mill both agreed that is a good thing that the Indians are under British rule because they’ll get shaped up properly so that they can be modern men.
And I think the disappearance of that and it’s reflected in the Catholic Church by the fact that the majority of, close to the majority of Catholics are outside this original imperial core means that the idea of imposing the European model, I think he’s utterly, there’s no chance at all
It’s it can’t possibly succeed. I know, I know that there are holdouts in the Vatican still and there are holdouts in certain parts of the European and North American Catholicism, but the movement of history is just not gonna make this possible. – Okay you know, I’m sure that the audience
Has been very much quiet listening to us. I think it’s time to end our conversation between both of us our dialog and to open up to some of the panelists. I already see some questions coming from some close friends, common friends. Let’s see, I see a question from Paolo Costa,
Who is the translator of “A Secular Age” into Italian. And he has the question, has the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and of how the various religions handle the health emergency affected in some ways your understanding of secularization? – Well, no, I don’t think it has really
I think that what I found interesting and encouraging in the COVID crisis, as I said earlier, is a creation of a new kind of solidarity in societies, but I don’t think that it’s had any effect at all on the really big evolution that I was talking about,
Which is the evolution towards the world of and which is an immense number of spiritual people on the spiritual search on a spiritual journey. The number of these people are growing, but the number of possible journeys is also growing. And I think that the whole COVID crisis could only accentuate this further, right?
People are very often in the face of all this people are turning to issues of what was my life really mean? What is my life based on? What is my whole moral view based on? And I think that that will just accentuate the spread of this kind of this kind of searching.
– Okay, there is another question from Bill Barbieri again a common friend who recently brought you and Michael Walzer together to American Catholic University to discuss the “Crisis of Democracy.” And Bill asked Charles, I’d be interested in any thoughts you might have in this moment
About race and racism, and how they are implicated in first, the dynamics of secular modernity second, our pressing democratic crisis and third, our linguistic anthropology and how deep racial categories help restructure modern thought. – I think it’s very, very interesting, but very, very hidden. I think what you have in a great number
Of Western countries, including ours, is a kind of unspoken, unstressed sense of hierarchy. Who comes first, who comes second, right? There is not the old racism of you know, we don’t want these people all around us. But the new kind of racism that, well,
This kind of person counts, people who came first count more than people who came later or the people of this race count more than the people race, you know, and we have certain amount of racism in Canada but we also have this in relation to Aboriginals in Canada, a lot of mainstream Canadians
Coming from elsewhere, originally had that have that sense. And it doesn’t emerge until the people who are thus disadvantaged protest, and then you get a lot of very harsh reactions, but not an awful lot of theorization because you can’t say these things. I mean, there are white supremacists who do say things
But there are a small minority of those who share these responses. So the big question, the big challenge for us is how to overcome these largely unspoken attitudes, which even the people who have them don’t quite recognize that they have them. They don’t quite recognize they’re being racist.
They just think it’s kind of normal. So when you know Black Lives Matter movement start a lot of people, a lot of whites are tremendously indignant of this so they’ve rationalized that you know, like Trump or against disorder or against looting and so on. But actually what it comes from
Is a sense that why are these people objecting? They’re in their proper place of getting their due desserts. And that I think, is that the insidious kind of racism is something we have to defeat. Now there’s this whole other things we can do about that. But I think that’s the that’s a fact
We have to see in our societies. – Okay, there is a question from Aristotle Papa Nicolau, from the Public Orthodoxy Center at Fordham University, and they are related to again Orthodoxy but the most broader question of “The Secular Race” how do you respond to the critique that culture of secular is Western,
In the sense constructed in use for colonial interests? And then how can you speak to how secularization is taking shape in pos-communist countries and in particular, Orthodox countries? – Yes. Well, I think that’s something that I didn’t tackle in the book. And I deliberately didn’t tackle it
Because I think that processes that we can call secularization are very different, in very different parts of the world. And it’s even not the same thing in, for instance, Latin America, as it is, so I was claiming, they were talking about the civilization that emerges from Latin Christendom,
And even a big part of that in Latin America I couldn’t really touch on. And ’cause I realized, I think I could explain I could justify myself by saying that I for a long time in political science department, people talked about secularization as a world movement, which happens in certain countries
Like our countries first and other countries afterwards. And it’s always seemed to me to be absurdly Western-centric, that this whole situation in China the whole situation in the Muslim world is something very, very different. And there are analogs, but we have to understand them in their own terms.
So now that includes I didn’t really talk about it the Eastern Orthodox Christian world. And in a certain sense, I’ve lacked more sense because I’ve had the kind of conversations that I hope the book as it would spark, where an Indian friend of mine said “it’s very interesting book you wrote on Europe.
“But that didn’t happen here.” And I said, “good lets have a talk “and discuss what did happen there.” And I think that that’s the talk that I still have to have with friends and colleagues in the in the world of Eastern Greek and Eastern Orthodox. – There is a question similar questions
On Catholic modernity. Into which extent the Agg is precisely something that is very much linked to this notion of the Catholic modernity. And the other question about aspiring Catholic theologian who has studied the history of Western philosophy and post-modernism, increasing the strength within the church. I have found it ought to be wanting
It is safe to say that the Catholic modernity will be an authentic response to the call for aggiornaménto from Pope John 23rd. What I mean is a comparison or metanoia, where we returned to the sources in such a way that there’s not prima facie reject the modern world
Nor blindly accepts past views of reality. – I subscribe to that, that’s very convincing. I mean, I think that what goes along with the aggiornaménto is another attitude towards the past, where it doesn’t become simply normative but where are you see in the past an immense possible repository of spiritualty
That we can can nourish us today if we connect up to them in our own way, and I think that’s going on all the time that people are, you know, rediscovering the importance of (speaking in a foreign language) rediscovering the importance of the Desert Fathers and so on.
And seeing that is very much related to their particular path as growing in the Christian faith. So it’s not a matter of we either follow slavishly the past, or we totally reject it. On the contrary, we have to hold aggiornaménto of the Vatican Two
Was we have to think of what’s appropriate in our time. But in working out what’s appropriate in our time, we can find resources, right to the whole history of the church and right across across the whole geography of the church and then think of how someone like myself have been tremendously helped
And fed by a certain dimension of lets go again to talk about Eastern Orthodox theology that crept through to me and had been very meaningful to me even though they’re not part of my immediate background as a Catholic. – And then we have a question from David Lemon, Prominent Sociologists of Religion
From Cambridge University work in Latin America and Israel his question is, we are the finding that the authority of experts, judges bureaucracy is quite fragile. Is this because religion is not providing the glue, if it ever did but rather has in many places become a force for polarization
Precisely at a time when political participation has been spreading and intensifying as advocated by Citizenship Theory? – Well, I think that religion is not a single thing it’s split. I think we are virtually all confessions are split between very often as this is the kind of split between people who really want
To return to a past of much greater conformity and greater unanimity around church, mosque, whatever Oma et cetera. And people who find this new world in which there’s a plurality of searchers in which the searchers are interested in a kind of a e-communism of exchange with each other right?
So there’s an opening their horizons, I think we find these two reactions, and they’re, they break rather hostile to each other. So there isn’t a single phenomenon called religion operative here, there is a different kinds of faith different kinds of ways of entering into faith, which have tremendously different consequences.
I would say that the one that I was writing about, but the one that I also feel I belong to the world of searchers is, of course, much more open and much more favorable to the idea of a re-diverse society of mutual respect. Whereas we find that in many cases,
The more reactive kind of circling the wagons religiosity is supporting the reason why they turn back to various kinds of populism, even to certain Catholics in the states voting for Donald Trump (laughs) on that basis. – There’s a question for Salma Rodriguez, who is a PhD candidate at Columbia University
And she writes deeply diverse democracies like India have negotiated the dilemmas with an Indian form of secularism. But in the process, Islamic justifications for post-colonial democracy, or other similar minority justificatory discourses have had to constantly encounter Hindutva majoritarianism. Can rejecting mythological nationalism be one way of dealing with this dilemmas?
– Well, no, I think again, we’re dealing with one of these fights between different notions of the national identity. And there was a few like Gandhi narrow idea of the Indian national identity, which we meant to include all the different faiths and for a long time it was dominant.
I mean, what is really worrying is that you go back to the 1960s, the kind of thing represented by the present ruling party, the BJP was represented by the Hindu Maha Sabha which was a tiny group, it was a virtually no members of parliament. And it’s since grown.
So the issue is always in all these cases, not nationalists, like not national identity, but to the two very different versions of the national identity, fighting it out. And what I find very worrying and I don’t have the explanation to it is why in the present constellation,
What I consider the bad side of national identity is winning out everywhere. See, I mean, there are individual explanations in all these countries, but why is it all happening now? Is there any kind of common cause or common factor here? – We have a question from Iban Garthone
From let me look for the question. From Colombia, who is asking, what do you think of the fact that during the COVID-19 pandemic, in many Western countries, people can go to a church to pray even alone? Is this some kind of secularism imposed by public authorities and the protest of public health?
As you know, this has been a controversial issue about maintaining churches open or not gathering churches. So what do you think of his controversies? What is valid of the critique? What is not valid? – Well, I don’t think it’s a valid critique that for instance, you know,
There are no more Friday mosque prayers and the no more people getting together for mass. It’s is something that is obviously very dangerous for you if spreading could be a dangerous locus of spreading the the virus opening churches where people can go as individuals to pray is another matter and that’s happening
In a lot of countries, right? Provided people keep social social distance from each other. But I think that it’s not in any way I got a secularist blog or a secular ploy to close churches and it’s something that a great many churches and religious communities have quite freely accepted as being something necessary.
– Then we have two questions which are similar political theory. One comes from me, name Blaisdon, Jason Blakely, a Professor of Political Theory at Pepperdine. And he writes, you seem to affirm aspects of the liberal tradition, especially pluralism. Yet many of the new socialist millennials in the USA think of themselves as post-liberals.
How do you conceive of the relationship between your social democratic commitments and liberalism? In what sense are you a liberal? Should we be liberals or post-liberals? – Well, I think that liberal is one of these words that has so many different meanings, that you can’t take a stance towards liberalism without specifying it.
So let me specify, I think there is a kind of liberalism could be called that which I’m calling pluralism, the acceptance of difference and the belief that a difference enriches us and not impoverishes us and that we should be open, and we should exchange.
And then there’s a kind of thing that which you can call maybe neoliberalism, which is a quite unjustified faith in markets, not only to maximize production but also to make sure that everybody benefits from the results of production benefits from well. That has been an immense illusion, which somehow,
People I hire can force it on the world, together with the political movements on Reagan and Thatcher and so on. And I think we see the utter refutation of that in the present crisis that we just have not prepared ourselves. We starved various public services, we have increased radically increased inequality,
We have increased the plight of deprivation, which we thought we had no obligation to relieve. And this is more the case in the United States than anywhere else in the Western world. And so if that is if neoliberalism is liberalism, I’m totally against it, and I think this is what the young millennials are saying in the United States today, who are part of the, you know, the big Democratic victory in the Midterms and I hope will be part of the Democratic victory in next November. But they’re thinking of that as liberalism
But it’s a terrible confusion to think that all these different things openness, willingness to exchange sense of enrichment by difference. And Reagan Thatcher or US Republicans are part of the same world, the same idea. It’s just the single word which unites those different views. – Then we asked a question from a student
Of political theory is a Ukrainian doing his PhD at Leuven University, Victor Poletco who writes, “in your work some political secularism, “you often expressed an optimistic attitude “as to the prospects of reaching an overlapping consensus “and a set of central liberal notions “in the sense that they get support “from diverse intellectual traditions
” despite some opposing metaphysical claims “of those intellectual traditions. “Do you remain optimistic on that?” – Yes, I am. I mean, I do because I realized is a danger because as we see, various people turn their version of the national identity into something which is seen to be absolutely essential
To living that national identity and they then not only wanna win out but they wanna make their gains irreversible. So they end up destroying democracy, but there can be this kind of unity of citizens across difference. So I would say my notion of democracy and liberalism
Can be summed up by going back to the original French Republican Trinity. Liberty, Equality, I would replace fraternity with a gender neutral term of solidarity, I think if your notion of democracy doesn’t include a very powerful sense of solidarity between all citizens, then you have a very inadequate democracy, which is heading for one of these terrible populists deviations.
So I think that if we include solidarity in our picture of what democracy requires, then we have a really adequate view. And we can we can be in solidarity with people that are not exactly carbon copies of our outlook. We’re asked to the every time we open our frontiers to refugees from very,
Very different cultures, and we’re asked to do that whenever we unite together with citizens of very different cultures, different origins, and share with them in order to make sure that everybody has a decent life. – Very good. And then Gloria Moran is scholar of Canon Law,
Would like to ask you about the role of mediation, in particular religious mediation in the narratives of consensus and democracy. – Oh, well, I think yeah, mediation I can see I think I can see what the question is getting at. Mediation is very important
Because one of the things we find one of the real, you know, diseases we find in our society is that people are seem to be more and more convinced that they understand what other people are about. And this is what gets intensified in one of these populace situations because they,
Populace appeals demonize the elite so it’s clear that they are simply interested in themselves and not sense of the good of the people in heart and on the other side, you get these same elites who are dismissing populace voters as ignoramuses, as deplorables and so on.
What we really need much more in our societies is a attempt to understand what is motivating people, including what’s motivating people to do things that we totally disapprove of. I mean, this is something that I’ve been very engaged in in Quebec because we’ve had a fight about certain legislations
Which have been discriminatory against Muslims for instance. But if you dig into the reasons for this, you find a very complex set of reasons not all of which are bad. And one has to have that kind of attempt to understand what makes the opponent tick. What the deeper motivations are,
’cause a lot of them are perfectly good, perfectly acceptable and it’s that which is missing in our societies and unfortunately, not just missing it’s being driven to the margins. The kind of polarizations we now live in, encourage people to caricature and misunderstand their opponents to the point where
The possibility of finding some kind of common ground, I would say the possibility in very many cases of converting the other side to one’s own side, disappear completely. – In the same vein, Marco Ferrario ask, the need of recognition how is it connected with the crush of democracy you mentioned?
Would you like to add something about the need for recognition in the importance of this concept? – Yeah, well, I think that the Yeah, I think the recognition is precisely the opposite of this kind of alienation I’m talking about where we have a completely caricatural view of the other so that the sense that the other has, he or she has is that when faced with us, they’re faced with some kind of stereotype
Being plucked on them and what they really are like, is totally unrecognized. The kinds of mediation I was talking about can lead to this sense of mutual recognition, a sense of yeah, I get you I don’t fully agree with what you’re driving at
But I sort of get where you’re at as a human being. And it’s that kind of mutual understanding that can help to dissolve some of these deep, deep divisions. So I think that recognition is still absolutely one of the really important issues in our society.
– I will ask you for a brief personal question asked by Brooke Valve in a Duke. Take it into the final reflections in any direction you want. So she asks, what inspired you to study religion? – Very big question. Well, I mean– – You have four minutes to answer it. – Ill be faster than that. I break the question down into two, what inspired me to begin to think about the Christian Catholic faith. And that’s really very simple, that I was brought up in this extremely narrow authoritarian in church. And I couldn’t, I just couldn’t see the point in any of this and I, but I had several questions and so I wanted to ask myself, how to articulate it. And then the next part of the question is how I got interested in something beyond my faith.
And that’s because I had the great luck to have a magnificent teacher as an undergraduate Wilfred Cantwell Smith who later became famous as a student of Islam set up the Islamic Institute. And he gave a course on comparative religion, which is absolutely riveting in which he made these different faiths comprehensible to us
Young undergraduates in the 1950s, 40s and 50s, in Montreal, and I was carried away by that. I’ve never come back from that kind of interest in economism and understanding the other. – Well, on this great note, I want to thank you, Charles, very much for your openness
To have this conversation with all of us. I would like to again, thank you all of you for participating and for your interest. As I mentioned, this is the first in our series we already can confirm it will appear it will be eventually appear in our website,
But we know that the next conversation is going to be on July 9th. Is it July 9 Thursday? I believe so, let me make sure that they got it right. Yes and July 9th, the prominent sociologist German sociologist Hans Joas will be the next conversationalist.
Hans Joas is actually the one who brought us together as three together, Charles Taylor, me and him to be together for one year at the Brandenburgische in Berlin. And this is where basically Charles Taylor wrote his manuscript, A Secular Race conversation with many of us. There was a larger group and since then,
Hans Joas really, really written very significant works on the sociology of religion. Two new books are coming out. “The Power of the Sacred” and the new book is writing on religion freedom. And we’ll be discussing those issues. I can say it’s an anecdote the three of us
Three Catholics in a very secular Protestant city Berlin a few times we appear together in forum discussions, and we began to be known as the Three Catholic Tenors. Charles, would you like to add something to that? – No, I didn’t know that. (laughs) – You didn’t know that?
– Or I forgot my memory suppressed me. (laughs) (mumbles) no, not a base or something like that. – Well, and these note again, thank you very much to everybody. Thank you, especially Charles, stay safe and we are looking forward in a few years to celebrate your 90 years anniversary.
I still remember the big celebration we’re in Montreal the fantastic conference and your work, both as a philosopher as an intellectual as a politician in Canada, and we are looking forward to again, celebrate your 90th anniversary in a few years. So keep safe, stay healthy, and keep us
Illuminating us on the complexity of the human condition as you’ve done through many decades. We are still looking for many important books from you as they are coming in your mature age. Thank you so much.
With 1 out of every 3 people on Earth identifying as Christian, it’s the single most important event in human history. But was Jesus of Nazareth really resurrected from the dead, and is there any evidence for it? To examine the question first we have to establish the historicity of Jesus himself.
While some doubt that he ever lived, no critical historian alive today doubts that Jesus of Nazareth was a real man who lived and died in the time attributed to him in the Gospels. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions Jesus twice in his histories.
The first mention is widely regarded- even amongst Christian scholars- as having been doctored by a later Christian scribe to be more flattering, but still mentions Jesus as having been condemned and crucified by Roman authorities. The second mention of Jesus by Josephus is when he references the death of Jesus’s brother,
James, who was stoned to death for his belief in Jesus as the Christ. Jesus is also mentioned by the Roman historian Tacitus approximately 86 years after his crucifixion, and affirms that he was in fact crucified by Roman authorities and that a sizable contingent
Of his believers were present in Rome at the time of his writing, which further strengthens the biblical account of Saint Paul. Next, we have to establish the reliability of the evidence used to argue that the resurrection was a real event- namely Paul’s letters and the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Today that material is together, along with other books, known as the New Testament, and a critic would be right in arguing that one cannot use one’s own source material to argue for the validity of his or her argument. Except that is a serious misunderstanding of what the New Testament actually is- or
What it originally was. Today the New Testament is considered to be the second half of Christianity’s ‘holy book’, the Bible. Yet before it was largely codified around 200 A.D., the New Testament was a collection of apocalyptic revelations, letters to various churches, and the formal writing down of oral
Tradition in the form of the gospels. Specifically, Paul’s letters and the synoptic gospels are considered to be valid historical documents, that due to their content were later turned into a ‘holy book’. In the words of historian and New Testament scholar Dr. Gary Habermas, if you don’t use
The historically accepted books of the New Testament to argue for the historicity of Jesus, then critics will use them for you. But have the gospels reliably preserved historical details through the ages, and are Pauls’ letters still in their original form and untampered with for the purpose of empowering a Christian agenda?
Historian, New Testament scholar, and textual critic Bart Ehrman- himself an agnostic leaning towards atheism- points out that we don’t have the original autographs by which to authenticate the modern gospels and Paul’s letters. At best we have copies of copies of copies of copies, with the earliest recovered fragments
Dated back to around halfway through the second century. Furthermore, there is clear evidence of tampering with the gospels, with some passages in modern texts today widely known to have been introduced into the text well after the originals. Perhaps the most iconic of these fabricated bible passages is John 7:53-8:11, the story
Of Jesus and the adulterous woman. This story tells of how Jesus came across a woman about to be stoned to death for the sin of adultery by the Pharisee authorities. Jesus however interrupts the process and simply asks that the first man without sin cast the
First stone, resulting in the accusers dropping their rocks and going home. Finally, Jesus comforts the woman and tells her that he does not condemn her, then encourages her to go forth and sin no more. It’s a wonderful anecdote and example of Jesus as what 20th century Atheist philosopher Antony
Flew called, “a first-rate ethicist”. Except it never happened, the story was fabricated and inserted by an unknown scribe into the text, and is only one example of several. In further questioning the historical reliability of the gospels, Ehrman also points out that
Between various surviving ancient copies of the biblical texts are thousands of errors, and that the first written versions of the gospels and Paul’s letters weren’t created until decades after Jesus’ death- leaving plenty of room for details to be omitted, forgotten, or outright fabricated.
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church wasn’t written until 55 A.D., with the gospel of Mark being written in 70 AD, Matthew in 80 AD, and John in 95 AD. That’s a spread of 25 to 65 years after the death of Jesus.
So with made-up stories, thousands of textual errors in the earliest available copies, and such a massive time gap between Jesus’s death and his history being recorded, is there any reason to think the New Testament is historically reliable? It’s well established that teachings about Jesus spread far and wide very quickly after
His death- in fact within as little as two or three years after the crucifixion, Jewish authorities were already persecuting Christians across the near-East in a bid to exterminate what they viewed as a heretical cult. This wide geographic dissemination of the core Christian knowledge about Jesus and his
Life events makes it incredibly unlikely that major revisions could have taken place without them being discovered- if for example Christian leaders in Rome wished to greatly change a core fact of the life, death, or teachings of Jesus, believers in Africa- which has one
Of the world’s oldest Christian communities- would have immediately identified the manipulation. The simple fact that we today are able to know that the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman was a fabrication is testament to how difficult it can be to make even minor changes
To the text without them being discovered thanks to the wide geographic distribution of the original material. Further, while Bart Ehrman is correct in pointing out the thousands of errors and discrepancies across various ancient manuscripts, the fact is that the overwhelming amount of these errors are insignificant to the core theology.
These errors are overwhelmingly misspellings and other textual errors, or errors so insignificant as to not affect the intended message of the scripture. While some may argue that over time errors can pile up, as in a game of telephone, the
Discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls proves the great diligence with which holy texts were copied and preserved by Jews. A medieval copy of the Old Testament compared with a copy discovered with the Dead Sea scrolls dating back to between the third century BC and first century AD showed that there were
Astonishingly few differences in the text- and once again, mostly copyist errors. The early Christians, being former devout Jews themselves, would have treated their religious texts with the same reverence and exacting care for precision. Further, while we don’t have the original autographs, we do have many preserved copies
Of some of the earliest church fathers’ writing on the gospels themselves. From their musings on these earliest versions of the gospels we can be confident that we do in fact, have an incredibly well preserved collection that if not perfectly, extremely accurately reflects the content and message of the autographs.
Professor Ehrman correctly points out to discrepancies in the gospel accounts themselves as proof that they are not reliable. On just the discovery of the empty tomb, the gospels vary in the telling. Matthew states that Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” went to the tomb.
There they found an angel, who told them that Jesus was risen and that they should tell the disciples and that they should go to Galilee to meet up with Jesus. Mark states that both Maries, and a third woman- Salome- went to the tomb and found
A young man inside who told them to tell the disciples to go meet the risen Jesus in Galilee. Luke states that “the women” went to the tomb, and entering the empty tomb they could not find Jesus when suddenly two men in bright clothes appeared before them.
They are not told to tell the disciples about the tomb nor to go anywhere. John states that Mary Magadalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance, so she went rushing back to Peter and one of the other disciples and
Claimed that the Jewish authorities or the Romans had removed Jesus’s body. Peter and the other disciple returned to the tomb to find Jesus’s burial clothing, while Mary somewhere outside the tomb and crying, sees two angels and Jesus- though is not allowed to immediately recognize Jesus.
So how can the various gospels be reconcilable if they differ so much in their re-telling of the empty tomb? It’s important to note that only one of the gospel acounts- John’s- actually differs in any significant way. Matthew, Mark, and Luke were not written side-by-side, but rather individually by different people,
Thus it’s unsurprising that they would slightly differ in their historical retelling. Neither of those three gospels contradicts the other, they merely mention details important to them. While Luke seems to state that a group of women went to the tomb, Matthew and Mark don’t
Omit the possibility- they simply focus on two of the women in that group important to the writer. Luke also does not say that the women are instructed to tell the disciples, or to tell them to go to Galilee to meet Jesus there, but the omission of this detail does not mean
It didn’t happen- the writer of Luke could have very correctly assumed that this part of the history was so well known, it was unnecessary to add it to his account. The presence of the angels is likewise complimentary, as Matthew and Mark may have simply chosen
To focus on the important angel- the one speaking. John is the only gospel that differs significantly, and is thus not considered a synoptic gospel- yet that is consistent with the overall theme of John which explores who Jesus was, not what Jesus historically did.
Most historians accept this fact and don’t consider John a purely historical document anyways, and neither should we. As we can see then, the differences in the gospel accounts are a) insignificant to the core facts, and b) largely an issue of focus, rather than irreconcilable discrepancies.
For comparison consider the accounts of the Titanic’s survivors- many of them swore that the ship sunk without breaking in two, while the rest swore that they saw the ship physically break in two. Nobody however doubted that the ship had sunk, or any of the events immediately after the sinking.
Further, if the gospel accounts had been perfectly accurate to each other, they would’ve almost certainly been collaborated, seriously damaging their value as historical documents. Lastly, while no serious historian objects to the time gap between the gospels and Jesus’s death as being cause for concern over inaccuracy, many non-historian critics do.
After all, how accurate can a historical account be if it’s written decades after the subject’s death? First, this is ignoring the strong oral tradition of ancient Jews. In the first century, very few people knew how to read or write, and thus most people
Would rely on oral retelling of history- and specially of their religious texts, with a very strong emphasis on accuracy. To a devout Jew, the thought of mangling holy scripture by poorly recollecting it was an unthinkable heresy. This strong oral tradition would have been present in the early Christians as well, themselves
Recently converted Jews. Next, while the earliest writings on Jesus date to 25 years after his death, the fact that we have at least 11 historical sources for Jesus within a century of his death makes Jesus of Nazareth the gold standard for ancient historians.
Take for example Alexander the Great, of whom there’s not a single history class in the world that doesn’t tell of his deeds. Yet the earliest available sources for Alexander date to over 300 years after his death. How about Tiberius Caesar then, the emperor of the Roman empire during the life and death
Of Jesus? Surely if anyone was to be well-attested to it would be the leader of the most powerful empire at the time. Yet while one contemporary source exists, it’s highly unreliable for historians as it speaks on an all-too personal note.
The best, and earliest, source for the life and times of Rome’s emperor when Jesus died is Publius Cornelius Tacitus, writing a full eighty years after Tiberius’s death. The next after that is Suetonius, 85 years after his death, and Cassius Dio almost two centuries later.
Simply put, to doubt the veracity of the historical account of the scriptures is to put into doubt every single event of ancient history, as the life, death, and teachings of Jesus are the best sourced histories in the ancient world. With the gospels and letters of Saint Paul accepted as valid historical documents, is
There then any evidence for the resurrection as a historical event? We can begin our investigation with the empty tomb. In the gospel accounts, the tomb is discovered empty by Mary Magdalene. Jesus’s burial clothes are there, but not the body. Critics have argued that the empty tomb was an early Christian fabrication, and presented
Various theories as to what really happened. The first is that the entire empty tomb narrative was a fabrication, yet this has been widely rejected by critical historians as the scriptures themselves record the Jewish authorities reacting to the empty tomb by claiming that the disciples had stolen the body, along with their own
Refutation to this claim. An obvious back-and-forth dialogue is preserved, showing that whatever the cause, the tomb of Jesus was in fact discovered empty. Next is the claim that the Jewish Sanhedrin was right, and the disciples did steal the body. This is frankly, an absurd proposition, as guards had been posted to the tomb.
In all likelihood these were actually Jewish temple guards, as it’s incredibly unlikely that Pilate would have bothered to involve Roman guards in what he saw as a purely Jewish religious dispute, and instead simply told the Sanhedrin to use the guards they already possessed themselves.
The idea of the disciples bribing Jewish temple guards successfully so as to perpetuate their heretical belief in a resurrected Messiah is incredulous to the point of sheer absurdity, let alone bribing Roman guards who would themselves face death for such a massive dereliction of duty when the tomb was found empty.
The next theory is the ‘apparent death’ theory. This theory states that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, and instead survived his crucifixion, somehow slipped past his tomb guards, and returned to the disciples who celebrated him as the resurrected Son of God.
Once more, it is completely absurd to believe that a severely injured Jesus, who had just survived a scourging, then being crucified, and in need of critical medical care, could possibly return to his disciples and convince them that despite his utterly broken body, he had in fact defeated death, quote, “in glory”.
Secondly, crucifixion was simply not a survivable event unless the person was immediately rescued. The way that a person was crucified would lead to a slow but sure asphyxiation as the downward pull of gravity forced an individual to physically push against the nails embedded
In his feet in order to lift their chest up and relieve the pressure, allowing them to gasp for breath. This would have been not only an excruciatingly painful experience, but an exhausting one, compounded by the effects of blood loss and exposure. Additionally, Roman guards were quite used to crucifying Jewish would-be Messiahs and
Rebels by this time, and were under pains of their own death to ensure that their prisoner could not be rescued and did indeed die on their cross. Lastly, in the account of the crucifixion in John 19, we have a Roman centurion ensuring
That Jesus is truly dead by piercing his side with a spear, stabbing upwards and into the heart to deliver a killing blow. The scripture states that “blood and water” came out of the wound, which perfectly mirrors exactly what modern medical science would expect from such a wound on a person who died
After being crucified. Before death, fluid would have collected in the membrane around the heart and lungs due to heart failure- this is known as a pericardial and pleural effusion. Upon Jesus’s body being pierced by the spear, this fluid would have leaked out of the wound,
Followed by blood, exactly as reported in John 19, strongly hinting that whoever wrote the John account either was physically present at the crucifixion or had testimony from a witness who was. So is the empty tomb narrative accurate? There is no realistic reason to believe that Jesus’s body was stolen, or that Jesus survived
His crucifixion. Without an empty tomb, there could be no Christian narrative of a resurrection. As a well-known figure due to his perceived blasphemy and heresy, the site of Jesus’s burial would have been known to anyone looking to debunk the disciple’s earliest claims of
Resurrection, and all the Jewish authorities would have had to do to shut the entire Christian movement down as soon as it arouse was to simply unseal the tomb and show that Jesus still lay there, dead, and that the disciples were liars. It’s important to note who discovered the empty tomb as well- women.
In the very patriarchal society of the ancient Jews, women were not regarded as credible witnesses in court. Both Jewish historian Josephus and Jewish philosopher Maimonides made it clear that women were not competent to testify in court. As Josephus pointed out, testimony of a deaf, mentally incompetent, or young person, as
Well as women, was excluded in most cases. Despite women being ineligible to serve as witnesses in most Jewish courts, the early Christians publicly proclaimed women- the least trustworthy members of society- as the discoverers of the empty tomb. This would not just have been an incredulous, but hugely embarrassing detail for the early
Disciples, and the fact that the detail remains is strong evidence that the disciples were simply accurately relaying the discovery of the empty tomb- no matter how embarrassing it was for them personally. Next in our investigation of the resurrection is the appearances of Jesus after his death.
The majority of new testament historians affirm that Jesus appeared to his disciples after his death. In the words of Ed Sanders, New Testament scholar and former professor at Duke University, “The following is an historical fact: the earliest disciples saw the risen Jesus.
I don’t know how exactly they saw him, but they saw him.” Most critics, including 20th century atheist philosopher Antony Flew ascribe to the hallucination theory to explain the postmortem appearances of Jesus. This theory posits that the disciples were stricken with grief-inspired hallucinations,
And confused them as the real, bodily appearance of a risen Jesus. There are, however, serious problems with this theory. First, any belief in Jesus’s resurrection due to a hallucination could have easily been dispelled by Jewish authorities by simply checking the tomb and finding the body still resting there.
Second, as is established by medical science, hallucinations cannot create new ideas- they simply work within the preexisting mental framework. As devout Jews, the disciples had no belief, let alone an ‘idea’ of a bodily resurrection that predated the end of days.
In the Jewish faith, resurrection only occurred on the last day, as God cast his judgment and called the faithful to live in paradise- before this event there could be no resurrection of the dead. Revivification of the recently dead, much like happens in our modern hospitals every
Day, was certainly possible, but not a resurrection to a “glorified body” as described by the disciples of Jesus. Therefore a hallucination could not have convinced a devout Jew that an event for which he had no basis for believing in, had occurred.
Secondly, the odds of all of the disciples- or at least enough to jump-start the Christian church- all suffering from grief hallucinations are astronomical to the point of, once more, absurdity. There is not a single other recorded case like it in verified medical history.
Further, it’s well recorded that Jesus appeared to groups of the disciples at the same time, and hallucinations cannot be shared between individuals. One individual cannot see what another is hallucinating, and vice-versa. Lastly, there’s the case of Saint Paul. Paul was in effect, a religious terrorist.
As the early Christian church spread rapidly, Paul was tasked with finding Christians and imprisoning or killing them on behalf of the Jewish authorities. Yet two to three years after the crucifixion, Paul- by his own account- encountered Jesus.
At the time he was on the way to the synagogues in Damascus to request their aid in arresting Christians and bringing them back to Jerusalem to undergo trial and possible execution. While on the road, Paul encounters Jesus and is blinded, and remains so until one of the
Very Christians he was sent to arrest or kill finds him and heals him. In ‘The Psychological Origins of the Resurrection Myth’, Jack Kent argues that Paul suffered from conversion disorder, a very real psychological disorder that commonly affects soldiers, police officers, and prison guards.
Commonly, sufferers will experience physical maladies with no apparent cause while under severe psychological stress- thus Paul’s blindness is believed to be a psychosomatic syndrome of his conversion disorder, itself caused by his internal conflict in killing and imprisoning innocent Christians. However, there are as usual problems with this theory.
Conversion disorder is short-lived, and thus would not explain Paul’s dramatic and lifelong change from devout Jew and persecutor of Christians, to a champion of the early Christian faith. It’s also incredibly implausible that Paul experienced conversion disorder along with visual and auditory hallucinations which led him to believe that Jesus was talking to him
Personally- not to mention the Messiah complex that would arise as Paul took on the mission of spreading the Christian faith far and wide. In short, Paul would have had to have been one of the most mentally ill individuals in history to suffer from all four mental disorders simultaneously at exactly this stretch of
Road on the way to Damascus. Hallucination theory simply can’t explain why a sworn enemy of the Christian church would experience the same hallucination as Jesus’s own disciples, years after Jesus’s death. It also cannot explain the postmortem appearances to entire groups of people as recorded by the disciples, as hallucinations are a personal experience.
Finally, a hallucination could not have led the disciples to believe in something they had no concept of before the event- namely, the preapocalyptic resurrection of their former teacher. Next is the marked change in the disciple’s lives as a result of their postmortem encounters with Jesus.
As stated about Paul, hallucinations simply do not lead to lifelong ideological changes, and the disciples clearly underwent dramatic and unprecedented ideological and theological changes practically overnight as a result of their experiences after the crucifixion. Immediately after Jesus’s death, the disciples went into hiding, fearful that the Jewish authorities would crucify them next.
It can’t be understated how devastating the crucifixion was for the disciples- not only had they lost their teacher, but he had suffered a criminal’s death, one so abhorrent to Jewish society that it was believed those who were crucified would not experience resurrection on the final day.
In the eyes of the disciples, Jesus had proven himself to be no different than the dozens of other self-proclaimed Jewish messiahs that came before, and after, his death. Yet we know that within months of the resurrection, possibly even weeks, the disciples were boldly proclaiming Jesus’s resurrection.
This is evidenced by two facts: the first is that the Christian church had spread so quickly that Paul was on his way to root it out in Damascus just two to three years after Jesus’s death. The second is what is known as the ‘Corinthian creed’, written down by Paul in 1 Corinthians
15, which reads: …that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. This creedial statement in Paul’s letter is authenticated as an early Christian creed
By the format it is written in the original Greek, which differs from the way the rest of Paul’s letter is written. In the ancient world, when you wanted to help someone who couldn’t read or write remember
Something, you put it in the form of a creed, and as Bart Ehrman himself attests, the Corinthian creed can be dated back to within one or two years of the crucifixion, with some historians dating it as early as mere months after Jesus’s death.
This means that within months after the crucifixion, the earliest Christians were already teaching Jesus’s resurrection- a concept that they had no ideological basis for prior to the crucifixion. And not only were the demoralized and terrified disciples coming to believe Jesus had risen
From the dead, but they were almost immediately spreading their belief to thousands of other Jews. Belief in the resurrection was far from the only heretical belief of the disciples however, as almost immediately after the crucifixion the young Christian church changed their celebration of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.
This move was motivated by the day of Jesus’s alleged resurrection and discovery of the empty tomb, and to first century Jews, would have been the height of heresy. Handed down to them by God himself, and honored for two thousand years, the sabbath and God’s
Commands to keep it holy were of paramount importance to the Jews, and suffused nearly every aspect of their culture. For the early Christians to be convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead, and thus shift their sabbath celebration from Saturday to Sunday, defying almost two thousand years
Of tradition, would have required an incredible burden of proof. As observed across history, religious schisms simply don’t spring up overnight, and yet one of the immediate defining characteristics of the early Christian church was its adoption of Sunday as the new sabbath.
Belief in Jesus as the messiah also completely defied all Jewish messianic expectations. To first century Jews, living under the Roman yoke and having experienced no independence for hundreds of years, the messiah was supposed to triumph over Israel’s enemies and drive them out of the land.
The messiah was not supposed to be tried by his enemies and then sentenced to a humiliating death on a cross- let alone be resurrected three days later only to leave Israel’s enemies in power. For the early Jews, the messiah was a triumphant figure, leading them to victory- not an atoning
Sacrifice for the sins of the world. Explaining how so many 1st century Jews could come to believe in this radically different version of a messiah is difficult, unless the disciples had proof in the postmortem encounters with Jesus, and the instructions they received during those visitations.
Critics argue that the entire narrative was fabricated by the early church, yet fail to account for how truly difficult it would be to come to believe in Jesus as messiah when he defied centuries of messianic expectations within a deeply religious society by dying as a criminal and not driving out Israel’s enemies.
Lastly, we have the faith of the disciples themselves. Christian claims that all or most of the original disciples were martyred cannot be substantiated, but there are good sources for several of the disciples. Peter’s martyrdom is attested to by Clement of Rome, an early church leader elected from
Amongst individuals who personally knew the disciples. He was crucified upside down, not believing himself worthy to die the same way as Jesus. The apostle James, not to be confused with Jesus’s brother, was killed by King Herod in about AD 44.
The martyrdom is attested to in the book of Acts, but also recorded by Clement of Alexandria who was born 100 years after James died. Paul, the famous persecutor of Christians, is widely attested to by the earliest church leadership as having been beheaded by emperor Nero sometime before 68 AD.
James, brother of Jesus, is written about by Jewish historian Josephus, who writes that James was executed by stoning in 62 AD. James’ murder, according to Josephus, offended many of the citizens as it had been carried out by a hastily organized Jewish court during a lapse in imperial oversight of the region.
James’ martyrdom is particularly striking because as the gospels state, he believed Jesus was crazy while alive, and yet would later die for his faith that his own brother was indeed the messiah. While the rest of the disciples cannot be confirmed as having been martyred, the ones
Which can be confirmed paint a telling picture of a group of men who refused to give up their belief in Jesus as messiah despite the threat of death. Often painted as con artists by critics, there is no possible reason to believe that if the
Disciples were truly con men, they would have stuck to the con all the way up to their own execution- and yet history records no mention of their recanting of their beliefs. Simply put, men don’t die for false beliefs. The final argument for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical event argues
That the crucifixion and resurrection account simply lacks legendary embellishments, as is present in nearly every other religion. This however is only mostly true, as there are clear signs of legendary-ism that creep into scripture. For example, when Jesus dies the gospels speak of a period of darkness, or of many of the
Dead returning to life briefly, or of the veil in the temple separating the holy of holies from the public tearing in two. While there is some evidence that an eclipse may have occurred on the day Jesus died, there is no evidence that the dead walked briefly through the streets of Jerusalem, or that
The earth shook and the temple was damaged in any way. These are almost certainly, simply legendary embellishments. However, when compared with other religious texts what immediately stands out about the New Testament is the starkness of the text. In fact, the entire account of the life, death, and postmortem appearances of Jesus is quite
Embarrassing to the early church. Even before Jesus dies, the scriptures attest to bickering, whining, and complaining from his own disciples. Jesus frequently rebuffs them for their lack of faith or foolishness, and even outright chastises Peter- the man on whom the church would be built- as having an ungodly way of thinking about things.
One of Jesus’s closest disciples is a tax collector for the Romans- men who were seen as traitors and were so reviled by Jewish society that they were not allowed to worship at the temple and were considered unclean along with various animals.
Jesus’s own family was no better, with the gospels recording that they believed he was crazy- this would be most telling for James, his brother, who would shortly after the crucifixion come to believe in Jesus as messiah and even die for that belief.
When Jesus is arrested, Peter- again, the most important of the disciples- denies Jesus three times, then flees along with the rest of the disciples to hide in fear and shame. When Jesus is crucified, most of the gospel accounts state that at best, only a few of the disciples watched from a great distance.
Only the gospel of John, least reliable in this matter, mentions that a single disciple was even near the cross- though what’s clear is that the disciples didn’t dare come close for fear of their own arrest. After Jesus’s death, none of the disciples believe in his promise to return after three days.
They are so demoralized by the crucifixion that they are hiding from the Jewish authorities, and even when Mary Magdalene brings them news of the empty tomb, they refuse to believe. It’s only when Jesus appears bodily to them that they believe, and even then at least
One of them, Thomas, refuses to believe Jesus isn’t a ghost until Jesus offers that he physically touch him. The picture painted by the gospels of the original disciples is that of scared, doubting, at times unfaithful men- exactly the opposite of what you would expect if the entire narrative
Had simply been created for the purposes of legitimizing a belief in Jesus. Rather than painting them as great patriarchs of wisdom and faith as would be expected, the New Testament is downright frequently embarrassing in its portrayal of the disciples- evidence that the scribes who penned the original gospels were more interested in recording
Truth than fictionalizing accounts and infusing them with legendary attributes. From a radical and sudden shift in deeply held religious beliefs, to the independently attested accounts of bodily postmortem appearances of Jesus, to the inexplicable explosion in growth of the early church, the question of if Jesus rose from the dead or not remains
Without a plausible naturalistic answer. While a naturalistic theory can be posited that answers one or more of the facts behind the early church, no one theory can explain all of them together. The truth is something significant happened in Jerusalem in the early 30s AD, an event
So incredible that it immediately split the Jewish faith in two and led to an explosion in belief in Jesus of Nazareth, executed as a blasphemer and criminal, as the risen Messiah. Now go watch most weird passages in the bible, or click this other video instead!
– I think gods in Buddhist fart. – I’m Sara, and I am 10 years old. – I’m four and I’m Tobie. – By law, I am Jewish, but I don’t know if I necessarily believe in it. – I believe in Buddhism. – I believe in God.
– For me, it’s a really big maybe. Part of me believes in God a lot, and part of me definitely doesn’t. Because maybe there is someone upstairs, making great things happen and sprinkling magic on the world. And then you see such bad stuff happen and you see kids get cancer,
You doubt or you question God. – We have this thing called Guanyin, it’s kind of like God, but it’s like Chinese. – In my religion, we call him Allah. – He helps people. – God is love. – I think God has a sweet, soft voice.
– I think he would sound like, “Hi” (laughs). – I think since he’s lived so long, it’s kind of washed out, “I should make “good things happen to the world.” This sounds so creepy, like a horror movie. – I think it sounds loud. He sounds like really kind, I think. “Well hello” (laughs).
– You can see him on the ground on his legs and on his feet. – I think God is in the sky. – I pray to the Guanyin to bring us good luck and support my family. – Usually what I wish for, I’d like to spend time with my mom all day.
– I wanna have confidence in God, if they control all of us, I wanna have confidence that I don’t need to pray and tell them to do it. I think they should make great things happen and really prevent the really bad, terrible things.
– One time I went outside and I prayed to God so I could have flowers. – If there is a God, what is it? What do they look like? – God looks like a person. – Maybe God’s a woman or maybe God doesn’t identify as a gender. – They’re usually gold or white.
– I think God will have green eyes. – Why do we always think of him wearing a hoodie? – I’m drawing him clothes, I don’t really know if he has clothes because I can’t draw him naked. – He’s wearing his masculine God t-shirt. Gotta put that God on there.
– Put some jewelry on his head. – He’s in his hoodie so we’re not gonna be able to see his hair, guys. I don’t think he has hair, I think it’s hard to keep having hair if you’ve been alive for this many millions of years. He’s kinda self-conscious about not having hair.
– This one’s shaped like a monkey. – I just would hope that he would look like a regular person. – God is a big head on legs (laughs). – His hands are very long and big. – I now how to make hands, really. Like this circle, because my hands are circles, see?
– I don’t think he looks like anyone I know. – I think he wears those swag green pants, very cool green pants, make him a little more colorful. He’s got those sick Nikes on. – He has a beard. – He has orange hair and green eyes (laughs).
– He’s big and he always sits down. – He looks kinda funny. – He has a blue shirt and blue pants, and very hairy arms. – I just would like you to think of God, a man or a woman or whatever you want to think of God as, happiness.
You should have big smile when you think of God. And wearing those, those sick Nikes, you know. – Thank you for letting me be in this world. – The world goes around because all these different people have different beliefs in God, and I love that, but I don’t think
That their beliefs should cause wars. This could be somewhat fiction. This could be somewhat man-made. I love that everyone has a different view of God and different beliefs in God, but I don’t think it should cause so much commodity or war, I really don’t.
– Hey, Unsolved is on a new channel, and now your part. – [Together] Subscribe here. – That was my part.
