For those of you who haven’t seen the film, Bruce Willis & co go and destroy an asteroid which would otherwise destroy humanity, if not life on Earth.
So, how would major religions, particularly Christianity, react to the fact of these people literally having saved the world? Would they be demonised for having diverted the Hand of God?
And how would people reaction to religions change?
And what if, like Deep Impact and unlike Armageddon, they’d all died?
I think most major religions would treat Bruce & Co. like heroes, considering them "Guided by God/Allah/Yahwey?etc.
“Fringe” groups might consider them the Spawn of Satan for having thwarted God’s Will. Westboro Baptist Church ring a bell?
If they’d died saving the world, they’d almost be considered Saints (or equivalent).
I’m pretty sure one requirement for sainthood is the performance of a miracle.
While blowing up an asteroid is damn cool, it’s cool in a technological sense, not in a “we can’t logically explain it” sense.
People would do what they do when rescue workers save a baby from a well or a medical team saves a life after a 12 hour surgery. They would say it was a “miracle,” put hands to the sky for God, and then maybe think to give some credit to the people who actually did the work as an afterthought.
First time I’ve EVER said it, but; This.
Not being particularly religious, “Saint” may have been the wrong choice of terminology on my part.
Then again, if you watch Armageddon, it looked for a while that “all was lost, and we’re goners for sure.” But in the end, they succeeded.
Some may choose to interpret what happened “up there” as some sort of divine intervention on behalf of Bruce & Co.
Others may also choose to interpret it as a technological fix carried out under extremely difficult circumstances by some extremely ballsy mortals, and all this “God Stuff” is just hogwash.
Christianity has always praised and aided those who work to save lives.
In order to be listed as a Saint by the Roman Catholic Church, a person must either be martyred or perform two miracles. Even in those cases, though, the official decision on beatification rests with the Pope.
In a case like what Quartz is asking about, there would be no shortage of people listing Bruce Willis & co. as small-s saints.
Scene filmed to be shown after the credits, but cut.
Those who returned are invited to a ecumenical celebration service at a major church. The minister stands up, and starts praising God and Jesus for saving Earth from this catastrophe. The crew look at each other, stand up as a man, and beat the living snot out of him.
I gotta tell ya, that beats chipping golf balls at Greenpeace by a mile.
Mwahahahaaha!
No, Diogenes has it down right. Christianity, far from “praising those who save lives”, steals the credit. All the time.
We’d be inflicted with constant praise for God and Jesus, and talk of how God saved us. With barely a mention for the people who actually did.
Oh come off it. In the vast majority of Christian sects, from Catholicism through Protestantism down to most fundamentalist sects, people can still be heroes AND God can still work miracles through them.
I suppose if you want to really get technical, you could drag out the Calvinist theories where there is no “free will” but God’s will-- but then, every action is that of God’s, from placing the asteroid there to Bruce Willis blowing it up.
I don’t know this imaginary world where you live that the Christian God gets exclusive, or even most, of the credit for the good works of men and women. He’ll get a shout out, a thank you, maybe a kind word or two for angels from the most devout of the flock.
The OP question, if I may be so rude, is fantastically dumb, for the answer is obvious to anyone living here on Earth: Willis and crew would be praised as the greatest heroes in history, God or not.
Even better, they’d never again have to pay taxes ;).
You think the church’ll sit easy with somebody muscling in on their racket? HA!
Fully agreed. Kind of like how Pope John Paul II thanked our lady of Fatima instead of the EMTs, doctors, surgeons… Hey, why not Lady of Lourdes?
If anyone is interested, here’s a group of scientists who are doing what the cast in the film did. Seems legit.
It’s called “reality”. Even the people who get rescued usually give God or Jesus the credit, not the people who actually saved them. Which is outright disgusting.
I think that’s still stealing credit. It’s a denial that they did anything purely through their own merit and effort and says they had to have magical assistance.
It’s also not especially compatible with free will to say that God uses people as instruments.
Oh, and God could have just not let the crisis happen in the first place. People thank God for letting the plane land safely on the river, but they never think to wonder why he didn’t just steer the geese aside and avoid the whole thing entirely.
D, every day I watch people thank god when something goes their way, I read it in the paper. Remember the OJ trial in CA? How many people were shouting their praise to Jesus when the not guilty verdict was read? Even those who believed he WAS innocent, I really don’t remember anyone shouting, “Praise that jury! Praise that jury!”
When Christa McCaulliffe and her NASA crew exploded in the upper atmosphere, people were NEVER heard saying, “How could NASA let this happen?”
Jessica McClure gets pulled from the well, Jesus is praised, not the rescuers that stayed and worked for 59 hours. Sure, they were praised LATER, like DtC pointed out, “as an afterthought.”
If humans are ever able to move an asteroid out of harms way (which is freakin’ hard… check out the link I posted earlier) this would be the most obvious, most definite reason for any remaining believers to throw out the bible and believe in each other. There will always be people who claim that interfering with a colliding asteroid is interfering with “god’s plan”, proving once again that knowledge of our surroundings severely outweighs a belief in a being who put the fucking asteroid in harm’s way to begin with.
“God’s Will”, plain and simple.
God has bigger plans, so it was obviously his will that these people would stop it.
“…obviously his will that these people would stop it.”
Couldn’t do it himself, eh? What exactly did we learn by letting him throw the asteroid at us in the first place-- oh, that’s right, we should take care of ourselves.
“God has bigger plans…” If we didn’t stop it, all humans would perish, and not all at once
in a painless type of death. So, his bigger plans include the eradication of humans.
All those years leading Moses around the desert, he was really just playing with a giant ant farm I suppose.
Look -
Every successful act of heroism always includes a bucket load of good luck. Do you think that luck wasn’t a factor with the pilot who landed in the Hudson a couple of months ago? Sure, he was brave and smart and capable, but there were also other factors involved - what if the engines had failed a minute earlier? What if the winds had been different? What if there had been a big boat right in the middle of the river? Hell, what if some other pilot had been in the cockpit?
Heroism implies risk, and risk implies randomness; after all, if the end result were certain, it wouldn’t be very heroic, would it? That randomness is what some people call luck and other people call God, or fate, of karma. The guys from Armageddon would be the first to admit that luck played a part in their triumph - and I doubt they’d mind if some people liked to pay tribute to it as well as to them.