Nomad
Posts: 311
Joined: July 2007
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| Quote (J-Dog @ April 22 2008,18:29) | Here's your Cliff Notes: If there is a god, (s)he's a dick.
The Greatest Story Ever Told |
Yeah, but, see... that's just it. I want an interpretation that makes it all actually make sense. That's the tricky part. I want to somehow make this concept of a supernatural monstrosity that so many worship today actually come out as a respectable, honest character, even if it has to be framed from a different perspective.
It's been done on a lesser scale in fiction all the time. You get a character who you're made to think is bad, either just unpleasant or maybe even the ultimate bad guy of the story. But then at the end you get the plot twist that suddenly puts it all into focus and suddenly you understand.
In Job: A Comedy of Justice you get to meet Satan. He's not a bad fellow. But that's a little easier, it's not that much of a stretch to frame Satan as the underdog. The Big Guy In White, though, is tricky. Even Christian written storylines sometimes end up casting him as a deceitful A-hole, like that "the atheist" movie that I found a while ago but now can't find any original copies of, only youtube videos bashing it. In that story an atheist (horrors!) is basically run through standard psychological torture routines in order to lower his mental resistance so that he can be indoctrinated, then he is made to believe that he's just killed someone when the whole thing was just an illusion, supposedly to make some point about his lack of morality. But it's God, or in this case Jesus, that does all these things to this guy. He lies, he manipulates, and then somehow after all that we're supposed to come away believing that atheists are dishonest liars when every single negative connotation that the movie attempted to apply to atheists was also demonstrated through the actions of Jesus.
I find it an intriguing challenge to try to make God come off looking good while still staying true to the biblical narrative.
I'm not trying to make excuses for the invisible man in the sky, don't worry, this isn't the first sign that I'm going to become an apologist. It's just a creative challenge to me, the sort of thing that, were I inclined to do such things, I'd probably mull over after getting good and stoned, ya'know, along with the other stereotypical musings on the nature of reality that I've been lead to believe follow up a session with the bong in popular fiction.
I used to hang out with some genuine stoners, but we never really discussed the nature of reality.
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