Also if you hate stuff that sucks.
So the “atheist scientist” is really just “angry at God?” Man, they don’t miss a single glurge cliche, do they? No one can really be an atheist because they sincerely have no belief in God. All scientists are arrogant atheists, etc.
The part where he was trying to come up with naturalistic explanations for the plagues of Exodus is bogus too but that is not the way historical Biblical criticism works. No one who has any education at all in those matters (and this charater supposed writes books “debunking religion” does he not?) would be suckered into an argument about the veracity of Bible story which already presumed its own conclusions to such an extent.
This whole thing sounds like a Chick tract in television form. The scientist is that much of a strawman.
Do you all really perceive this as “Christian” show? I didn’t think it a “Christian” show – but oddly enough I felt the same way about “Touched by an Angel.”
I can’t see this as anything more “Christian” than a fictionalized accounting of Ragnorak would be “Norse Pagan.”
Filmed better than it was written – certainly there were problems with the writing – and I expect they won’t improve but, as is generally the case with a weak first episode, continue to degenerate.
I found it interesting in a “Stigmata” Catholic-Mysticism kind of way. It is a dark fairy tale based on a “not entirely validated” prophetic vision of the second coming of Christ. What it means has less to do with “Christianity” than it does with being human.
About the organ donations – hey, different people feel differently about it. If people in fiction only behaved the way we think it is right to behave, we’d never have any stories that amounted to anything. This presented real conflict over it in the context this religious sect jumping in where the government jumped in IRL. Both jumped on the don’t pull the plug for different reasons: The Republicans did it as opportunists, the “religious” folks in the show did it because they thought it some kind of sign that they hadn’t had time to understand.
It’s true that I would expect the Hebrew God to speak in ancient Aramaic or Hebrew, which any good priest should be somewhat versed in. Why was it in Latin – I don’t know, perhaps it is really Satan and not God speaking through the girl, appearing as an angel of light, or disguised as an injured young girl.
I personally would expect Satan to look more like a young child who asks me to trust them than a raving nutcase murderer – where’s the deception in that? Satan is the Lord of Deception, like Loki or Coyote he doesn’t give straight answers or straight talk.
Well, easy as this show would be to dismiss, I’m going to watch it rather than jump on the band wagon and trash it out of the gate. Just because something presents views I don’t hold doesn’t automatically make it bad.
A random explaination as to ehy it was Latin: If God/Jesus/Satan is speaknig through this girl to the priest and nun, it would awnt to do so in a way they would understand. Priests take Latin at seminary, do they not? And I wouldalso imagine a scholarly nun who is going from place to place “interpreting signs” wouldalso be well versed in Latin. Plus, as I understand it correctly, “back in the ady” Catholic masses were given in Latin, so all the Priests quoting the Bible would be quoting Latin, and therefore it’s a mroe relevant language to Catholosism than Greek. And it she was speaking Aramaic, wel…how mny freakin’ pepole actually know Aramaic? A Priest might know a few bits and pieces, but his latin is going to be much better.
Not that I’m defending the movie, just giving a possible reason as to why.
I didn’t intend to watch it but wasted the hour and it looks like I really got whooshed. I completely didn’t try to match it up with reality so the inaccurate hospital stuff didn’t piss me off at all, I glossed it over as a plot point intended to induce a sense of urgency. Angry parent of evilly killed child and obsessed religious person characters seemed reasonable to me in a fictious good vs. evil TV show. And it never even occurred to me there was a comment on the Shiavo case – PVS isn’t exactly rare and I figured this thing was in the can months before airing. Of course if it was filmed this month then that might explain why they didn’t make it more realistic.
I didn’t want to dislodge the cat to get the remote so I just enjoyed the art direction. And Bill. Now I just can’t reconcile my intolerance of political Fundies, the Da Vinci Code and the “left behind” books with getting whooshed into enjoying this show.
Here’s the problem with Latin in the show. The doctor (or whoever) asked either the nun or the priest what the girl was saying, and the answer was that she was quoting scripture. If she was quoting scripture, Latin would be an odd language to use, since no scripture was written in Latin. If she had been quoting from passages of the Catholic mass, then Latin might have made sense. Or, if she is actually the devil…
This show may get redeemed (pun intended) in later episodes. What will the baby turn out to be: Christ or ant-Christ? How about Evil-Heart-Murderer guy? Maybe he’s not really the devil, but some sort of John the Baptist?
Which is ridiculous, when you consider that Catholicism rejects the Rapture theology. In fact, it condemns the belief-recently there was an article in the Pittsburgh Catholic about how Catholics should NOT take the ideas in those awful Left Behind books as Scripturely correct. Besides, most Rapture types think that Catholicism is the Beast.
The point was made previously that there are Nuns and Priests within the Catholic faith who reject many tenets of orthodoxy and others who hold affirmative viewpoints considered verbotem by the Vatican. Examples include priests who support women in the priesthood, marriage of the clergy and homosexuality. To an extent John Paul II changed what was long considered a central church teaching when he suggested that salvation was possible seperate from the Church and that God had seperate covenants with seperate peoples.
It is a big church and there are probably Catholic Nuns in real life who would make the one depicted in the movie actually seem somewhat mainstream…
The point is not that some nuns may differ on policy, those are not matters of essential doctrine. The point is that none of them would believe in Rapture or End Times theology. Those are utterly unCatholic - and unscriptural - American Protestant heresies (by RCC standards).
She looks to me like she munches down a handful of 'shrooms every couple of hours.
But this whole “Rapture” thing is interesting, if only because its possible something like this could be the next big media thing. Sooner or later, they have to piss off somebody. Surprised they already haven’t, astonished that somebody somewhere hasn’t called a press conference to denounce the blasphemy of whatever.
I suspect the Catholic flavor so far has to do more with the image of Catholicism in America as having more “magic” than you find amongst more or less pedestrian Methodists and Presbyterians, contemplating the miracle of Compound Interest.
“Verily, a mustard seed, at six percent compounded quarterly…”
Then, of course, theres that whole Marianist thing, about Catholics who seem to want to elbow The Boss aside for Big Mamma. As I said, my viewing was truncated, but I didn’t see any reference at all to the VM…and without the VM, how Catholic can it be?
So theres a number of intriguing possibility here. Did they deliberately decide to align things in such a way as to not offend anyone, but make enough vague references to include anyone watching (except, obvioiusly, Jews, Hindu, and the other single digit demographics…)? Or did they make a decision to skew it deliberately one way or the other (in the world of mass media, an act akin to seppuku).
Or…are they so entirely ignorant of the universe of the hyper-religious American that they don’t even know?
As Dio pointed out, NONE of those are central to Catholic teaching. There has been married clergy before, and doubtless we’ll someday see women clergy.
None of those things though, even if the church does disagree, are heresies. As far as the church is concerned, the Rapture is a heresy, and no Catholic nun would profess a belief in it. There’s a HUGE difference between how the church is run and actual Scriptural interpretation.
