Johnny California

What's this about the Garden story being older?

That is interesting about the idea of a information architecture to the universe. There is some speculation that the universe is actually two-dimensional and the way it processes information gives the illusion of 3-D (like a hologram).

Some of this is speculative on the part of scholars, but the Garden of Eden story existed a few centuries prior to the collection of the Jewish mysths into one volume. In fact, it appears that of the many stories in Genesis, the Flood and Noah predates all of them. The Seven Days came about at the time when an unknown writer collected the stories together and it is speculated that that portion of Genesis was his (or her) introductory explanation of the creation from nothing (answering a question that hadn't really been posed before - what was here before God made it?).

Well said, Johnny.

 

Hanging question, to get us back toward mythology: The Judaic Creation Story as told in Genesis. Is it unique among ancient mythologies? I think it is in that it portrays the world's creator as an architect rather than a pantheon or an accident ala Sumer, Egypt or ancient Greece.

There are actually two creation stories in Genesis. First, the 7 days at the beginning...

"And then"

...God created Adam - the Garden of Eden story.

In mythological chronology, the Garden of Eden story is actually older.

It's interesting to see the universe as the "architecture" of God considering the tenets of Freemasonry that claim to date back to the architects of the Temple of Solomon.

Oddly, I'm an atheist, but I often find the arguments against the existence of God are never as complete or well thought out aas I'd like. Obviously, religion has been around for a long time and if you look into the doctrine of each one you can see why the superficial arguments against them don't hold up.

Certainly, most of them are trained against idiotic conceptions of God and Jesus as proposed by people like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. These evangelicals like to suggest that our moral actions here on earth have some sort of material consequence. As pointed out, there are plenty of sins that go unpunished and plenty of innocents who suffer and suffer far worse than even Jesus did on the cross (and they don't come back in three days, either).

However, pointing out that children suffer and bad things happen and the world is screwed up is still hardly evidence that God either doesn't exist, is impotent, insanely cruel or doesn't care. Everything dies eventually. All matter is temporary and finite, even pain and suffering doesn't last forever. There was no promise that anyone would find happiness or justice in the material living world and, in fact, it seems a prety central theme of Christianity that the odds are stacked against us in this world.

I think that's pretty much why religion focuses on the spiritual an "eternal" rather than temporal state of being. From my point of view, there really is no substantial difference between the meaningless suffering of a fifty year old dying of cancer and a newborn dying of toxic poisoning. Neither one really deserves it.

Even though I really don't believe in a diety in a real sense, I can see the religious point of view that from a supposed Supreme Being's perception, pain and suffering (a suffering God supposedly shares, btw) will be over in the blink of an eye (whether a day or a hundred years) and the spirit will be released, but without the possibility of suffering there can be no development of the spirit.

That is a much more attractive perspective, especially to people facing death (their own or of loved ones), than the idea that there is no purpose to this suffering or that it is being inflicted by a cruel and uncaring divine parent.

It seems a pretty unfair way to assign a painful and lingering death though.

 

"I created you creatures with free will. So a big corporation in a distant country that has a basic antipathy to your way of life has free will to pollute the atomosphere, and you, an innocent child living in Africa, with no sway on world opinion, breath in dioxin, get cancer, and drown in your own snot over a weeks time. But it is OK, you have the free will to suffer".

At the same time, it gives you the choice to ignore it, to blame God or to actively pursue some sort of solution. From an objective point of view, it appears that the world is meaningless and blindly brutal, but as pointed out above, the human race is just as culpable as any diety in the suffering inflicted - probably moreso since righteous behavior is always on God's side. We didn't have to poison the environment and kill innocents, but we chose to do so. Since we can't stand apart from it, there could be meaning in these apparently senseless deaths.

The Christian Scientist attitude always puts me in mind of gthe joke about the drowning Rabbi, to be honest. By their lights medical progress should be part of God's plan as well.

That's what I think, but at the same time, I can see where someone would be reticent to assume such a thing. I could see that the idea God gave you cancer so that you could go through chemotherapy and radiation treatments doesn't seem to fit any sort of divine plan.

 

However, it would be easy to see the treatment as part of the plan, naturally, and I think most religious people, even most Christian Scientists, are able to find ways to do that.

I'd certainly hope so, because the alternative is that God gave you cancer because he wants to see you die a slow, painful, humiliating death that could (in a lot if not by any means all cases) be avoided or at least delayed, and I have real problems grasping the notion that anybody would worship a deity that small minded and sadistic.

To me, it would have to depend on the person. Certainly, someone who would go through a terminal illness without treatment would have to have a much different view of pain and suffering and the relationship of the development of the spirit versus bodily health and comfort. If they truly believe in the immortality of their soul, then no amount of physical and temporary suffering should matter.

This sort of behavior was in fact a large part of the development of early Christianity when wealthy and educated Christain Romans refused to leave the cities during times of plague and instead dedicated themselves and their property to caring for the sick despite the serious risk of infection.

The Christian Scientist attitude always puts me in mind of gthe joke about the drowning Rabbi, to be honest. By their lights medical progress should be part of God's plan as well.

That's what I think, but at the same time, I can see where someone would be reticent to assume such a thing. I could see that the idea God gave you cancer so that you could go through chemotherapy and radiation treatments doesn't seem to fit any sort of divine plan.

However, it would be easy to see the treatment as part of the plan, naturally, and I think most religious people, even most Christian Scientists, are able to find ways to do that.

Jehovah's Witnesses that I have known were OK with medical technology, but they refused blood transfusions and transplants, seeing them as a form of cannibalism.

 

Honestly, I can see their point. However, I'm OK with cannibalism. :ph34r:

Fair enough, I'm misaccusing them, then.

(That said, the transfusion thing is plenty bad enough if you need major surgery or suffer from haemophillia, I'd have thought.)

I don't agree with the medical aversion of a few Christian Scientists - it seems dangerously reactionary - but I can see the essential philosophy.

If one truly believes in God and the existence of a Divine Purpose that underlies all existence, then when they develop a cancer or suffer some serious illness, to be true to their faith, it would be necessary to incorporate the disease as well as one's response to it with that spiritual view. If everything has a purpose, then the disease must have a purpose, a divine purpose no less, as well.

Interestingly, I was discussing the nature of plagues and their effect on the development of civilization and one of the members of the discussion mentioned that ancient greeks (or maybe Romans) also perceived illness and plague as being the "touch of the gods." That the sickness represented the active disapproval of some diety and one had to perform certain tasks assigned by a priest or shaman to appease the god.

As far as the "atheism" of science, I do believe that too often scientists declare that a function in nature is a "purpose" and this is what rankles many religious people. You can observe that DNA replicates itself, but it would be reductionist to say that its "sole aim" is replication just as it would be reductionist to say that a human beings sole aim is reproduction and survival. Since DNA underlies all life and its permutations (including all of human history) we simply do not have enough information to draw absolutely final conclusions about any aspect.

So, really, your original comments about Abraham being perhaps a Schizophrenic were not an attempt to prove that Abraham that was a crazy guy that other people followed because they didn't know any better, but that he actually had a communication link with God or the gods?

 

I misunderstood your original intent in this conversation.

Not really. My point there is that simply because there are physiological effects associated with religious experience that does not immediately mean we can reduce the experience to merely a symptom of physiological changes (basically a mental disorder or syndrome).

As far as Jaynes, he's not the only person to point out that the ancients appeared to perceive the world much differently than we do today. Arthur Zadjonc in his great book CATCHING THE LIGHT points out that Homer's Iliad associates color with activity not simply the wavelength of the light. There are extreme differences between the brain of a child and the same brain as an adult and there are definite and observable differences in the brain's structure involved in severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia. The idea that thought processes and conscious and unconscious behavior were very different in prehistoric and ancient times is a worthwhile theory to pursue and even though Jaynes overstates his case, his essential ideas certainly provide cogent explanations of many of the differences expressed between the worldview of ancient texts and modern perceptions.

That still leaves the question open as to the role of the collective unconscious of humanity as a role in the development of the Schizophrenic mind with pagan polytheism.

Pagan polytheism was created on the notion of seeing what is around us in nature and trying to figure out how it works and why things happen that way.

A confused mind, trying to make sense of a reality which is now foreign would naturally begin to organize events/objects in the same way as societies made sense of reality pre-scientific discovery.

Yes, at the same time, from Jaynes' point of view (a bit too reductionist or "hard-edged"), truly pagan or prehistoric (as opposed to simply pre-christian) religion and polytheism could not be accurately be called a "way of seeing things" at the time since by our common usage of the term or phrase "way" implies inherently optional. It's not as if the ancients heard thunder, then asked themselves "what caused that?" and then someone came up with the idea that it was the thunder God and everyone else agreed that that must be the answer. The experience of the divinity of nature was immediate and unquestionable since the gods spoke directly to the person. They behaved unconsciously and were entirely collectively "unconscious" as a society. For them, the gods were very present and able to provide the answers immediately.

Today, there is often an optional element to religious belief - you can choose to disbelieve - which places a much greater emphasis on faith, the determination or conviction to believe or accept the existence of God despite the lack of evidence. However, the ancients would not have had that choice or even understood it. The gods were right there. Also, I think there has been a great deal of neurological study lately showing the changes in the brain corresponding between mental disorders and religious experience (as with Pentecostals and Charismatics). In these denominations, astual manifestations of the Holy Spirit as well as demons occur regularly in revivals and long services, and serve to solidify belief. You felt God and you felt the Devil, you were inhabited (almost voodoo like) - I think these are attempts to regain something of the nature of mind when the divine and demonic was very present in daily life.

However, as Grant Morrison points out in THE FILTH simply because there are physiological functions involved with spiritual experience does not exculde the possibility of there actually being a spiritual or divine existence. The spirit, not being material, may simply be using the brain to speak to you since it has no physical voice OR as it communes with your spirit, the brain may simply be responding to it.

Wasn't Jaymes more concerned with Homer's account of the Trojan war than religious texts in any case?

In his book (a daunting read) Jaynes mentions all texts from ancient times, including the Book of Job, but goes into detail with Homers ILIAD and ODYSSEY because those represent the tranformation from bicameral to modern consciousness. His major point is that prior to a series of devastating natural disasters (as described in the Bible with the Tower of Babel and the Great Flood) that affected the primarily mediterranean civilizations of the time, people lived in homogenous societies and their minds functioned much differently with the right and left hemispheres actually more disconnected so that the experience of the "gods" were a person receiving information from the less mathematically right brain being passed to the more rationale left brain as speech and hallucinatory information primarily during times of stress when cultural and occupational norms were challenged or threatened.

Following the disasters however, the amount of refugees coming into contact and conflict with neighboring cultures (the "confusion of tongues") forced a faster connection between the two hemispheres. Men became conscious and the gods retreated only appearing in times of extraordinary stress (even today, people have visions of angels and god in near-death experiences) or mental illness triggering the older more primitive function. Since consciousness provided extreme advantages over bicameralism (the ability to lie, for one thing) eventually only cultures who could pass on this trait through educational systems such as myth and ritual would outlast those that could not. One of his examples compared representations of gods in the distant past where they were placed eye to eye with worshippers, but later, after consciousness, the gods were placed high above out of sight in heaven (or on Olympus) leaving the worshippers with a sense of abandonment.

Before his death, Jaynes was further refining his theory by examining the role imaginary friends play in the development of consciousness in children. In his book, he also examples an account of man who experienced long bouts with Schizophrenia and how his disorder developed a pantheon of spiritual beings around the supreme ruler of the Sun. Very similar to primitive pagan polytheism.

For the comic book fans, Moore used Jaynes' theories as the basis of Gull's (Jack the Ripper) disorder in FROM HELL.

Wasn't Ennis a big fan of Bill Hicks - the Lenny Bruce-esque smoking comedian from the 80's (who died from lung cancer, of course)?

On a related (to the original topic) note, I'm interested in the actual origins of the myths and legends underlying religions. I think that most myths probably began with an actual event and then a spiritual worldview later came up to explain the event that was passed on to the point that the actual story was modified to fit the worldview that emerged.

Take the Great Flood for instance. A lot of cultures (even Native American) have a myth about the flood, and there are at least three versions of Noah (Babylonian, Chaldean and the Hebrew). It's likely there was at least one actual flood that affected a large area of very early human civilizations and cultures. There probably was someone like Noah who survived the flood, But as far as all the elements involved, the warning by a god and the building of an ark, these probably were transformations of the actual sequence of events into a narrative supporting the religious interpretation.

Abraham could've been simply what we'd consider schizophrenic - times were tough back then, life was stressful, you'd expect as many mental disorders then as now. You can see a lot of similarity between the ritual acts disturbed people devise to deal with their illness and the rituals of religions. Julian Jaynes wrote about the similarities between modern schizophrenia and the relationships between gods and men as described in ancient sacred texts.

I'm not saying that religion is insane. I can see though that it is often a very beneficial and therapeutic way to deal with everyday stress and the everpresent knowledge of one's own mortality. I could see how a great deal of mythology arose and survived due to its effectiveness explaining the world, its actual events and real people's behavior in a way that provided a sense of contentment and peace of mind to the believer, and how it is sustained through the emotional (spiritual) needs of people rather than a rational curiosity about the nature of the world.

I didn't really care for the Establishment either.

MONARCHY's problems were numerous, but I liked a few things about it. It just kept introducing psychotic idea after idea, but no matter how good any idea might be it doesn't in itself make a story. It took all the superficial aspects of Ellis' work on The Authority and Planetary and pasted them onto the pages with no fundamental content or narrative to hold it together.

I sorta liked the faux ending to Constantine's story in Ellis' PLANETARY - he fakes his death and becomes Spider Jerusalem, gonzo journalist for the next century.

I would like it done with an experienced director who has an affection for the character and the original source material, who wants to be as faithful to the comic as is directorially possible, and who believes that producing a HELLBLAZER film which is true to its original fans will still have an appeal to the movie-going masses.

 

In this case, it wouldnt be a sequel to Constanteen any more than Batman Begins was a sequel to Batman and Robin.

If the movie had been completely independent of the Comic - if it had just been its own thing about an Occult LA "private eye" caught in a gang war between the angels and the underworld - and had nothing to do with HELLBLAZER in any way - it probably would've had a better story and even more Hellblazer fans would've liked it. Really, all they had to do was change Reeves' character's name and it would have had absolutely no connection to the comic book.

A smart scientist would. An arrogant scientist might assume the latter.

 

Correction: A good scientist would. A bad scientist wouldn't. And all but the most terrible scientists would, in the face of new evidence (the turning on of the light to reveal Christian holding the box), alter their "there is no box" hypothesis, rather than trying to find ways to prove that Christian wasn't holding the box after all, to bring observable reality into line with their predictions.

And besides, obviously if the Great Spaghetti Monster actually exists, It definitely must be dedicated to promoting the idea that It doesn't exist so those nefarious scientists are just following Its master plan.

I think that a film version, unlike Ellis' massively-delayed-but-still-rushed Ultimate Galactus, would still need some sort of central personification.

 

Just imagine the DARKSEID IS posters on buses everywhere.

That's sort of what I liked about Morrison's 7S MISTER MIRACLE. Darkseid was "marketing" the "anti-lifestyle" rather than promoting it as a philosophy akin to the fascist movement. Morrison also once made the point that nazism was developed by failed mystics, artists and poets. Really, that would be a very personal and in depth presentation of the character, Darkseid as a being who could have been God if he only had the talent - since he doesn't he would rather destroy life rather than face his own failures creating it.

On a side note, in a Darren Aronofsky interview, he mentions meeting David Bowie to see if the glam-god rock star could do a new version of Space Oddity for THE FOUNTAIN. The first thing Bowie asked him was if he was directing a film version of THE WATCHMEN. It turned out Bowie was in the process of adapting it into a Rock Opera.

Aronofsky said he was glad he dropped (or got fired off of) WATCHMEN to do THE FOUNTAIN, because if he had made a bad movie, then he would've pissed off Bowie.

God is a little ill-defined. I don't believe in a god that is like a really big and powerful parent or individual entity who or that resembles a living being in any way. Even though there may exist (or have existed) extremely powerful entities out there who resemble gods or who may have given birth to the legends of the gods in myth.

Nor would I necessarily equate or connect the existence of a god with the existence of an afterlife. The two are often welded together, but I can't see why other than the psychological comfort the idea of an eternal childhood beside an eternal parent brings.

True. Darkseid is a character that maybe Morrison lately has put to good use, but otherwise he's become something of a lukewarm rip-off of Thanos (which was somewhat of a rip-off of Darkseid at the time).

Personally, I thought Ellis' ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE Gah Lak Tus (stupid stupid reimagining of the name, btw) was more like an updated sci-fi Darkseid than a version of Galactus. It was governed by the ultimate "anti-life" principle.

Granted. But remember that for instance the Goths liked boiling their captives alive. I'm not defending the Roman brutality at all, just saying they weren't in any way unique at that time.

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And things didn't really get any better after the Roman Empire fell. Thus, sayings like "I'm gonna get medieval on your ass" resonate with the public consciousness.

BTW, a lot of the claims for Goth and Celtic brutality were actually propaganda spread by the Romans, so it is hard to say if they actually did any of these things.

Travis Bickle.

ACX-I like the idea about John as a wandering ghost. Some great Existential stories inherent in that idea!

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I like the idea of Constantine dying and that is f-ing it! Even when Death shows up, she looks around, sees John's not there, shrugs and then leaves.

Those pre-Renaissance artists had a terrific sense of humor.

Just put the caption "Last one out is damned to Hell!" under it.

However, I was under the impression that no one went to Heaven or Hell until after Judgement.

I once worked in the design office for a touring show about the making of the movie. After it was done, we tallied the amount of times we watched the movie and the average for each person was around 50. The top designer was over 300 times.

Are you sure Hellboy's getting a sequel ?

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It's been announced and Del Toro's working on it. I don't think filming has started.