Issue 142

News: The Problem of Hell.
One of the biggest problems that led me to leave Christianity is the big contradiction between the idea of the all-good and loving God and the idea that he sends people to eternal punishment in Hell. The biggest problem lies in the fact that the whole point behind hell is eternal and infinite punishment of people. However, people can only commit a finite amount of sin. Even the evils of the Holocaust and other significant genocides were finite, and were supposed to be finite, however large they were. James Joyce explained exactly the implications of infinite punishment in the sermon Father Arnall gives in Section 2 of Chapter 3 of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where he states that if one counts the grains of a seashore and counts each as a million years, not even an instant of that eternity would have passed (the protagonist Stephen Dedalus ends up leaving the church later). And this gets even more disturbing when, as a Protestant, it was explained to me that ultimately it wasn't even a matter of Good and Evil that led to God deciding who went to where, but ultimately, whether one believed in Jesus the right way. The only way this could possibly be right would be if all those who believed lived Good lives, and if all those who lived good lives ended up believing by their deaths. Of course, taking two case studies shows exactly how wrong this is: Bertrand Russell, an agnostic/atheist who was campaigning for peace and against racism since before Martin Luther King was born, or at least, was a small child; and John List (a Missourah Synod Lutheran, like I was) who killed his family and originally claimed that he did so because he wanted them to send them to heaven. You should see the problem. One particular reply to this problem by a Catholic apologist interested me, as the argument itself, as, before it went into a spiel about how great it is to have a personal God who is willing to mete out infinite punishment for finite sin, the reply boiled down to simply (to quote Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers) "Who's innocent? Are You innocent?" OF course, the Catholic view of hell has evolved since the days of Fr. Arnall. At the Catholic High school I went to, it was stated that it was believed that Hell was just a place which was ultimately just grim and joyless, and I actually once decided to ask one teacher, "so, basically, it's just like life on Earth?" And, shockingly enough, he actually noted that C.S. Lewis states as such in one of his books. The implication seemed to be that life sucked so much that God couldn't think of any worse punishment than living through it over again. That ultimately life is a negative experience can be understood in a Buddhist context, as they don't have any all-powerful and all-good beings who should be able to stop it completely. However, in a religion which prides itself on having an all-powerful and all-good being in charge, the existence of evil and certainly Hell would be inexcusable. Then one thing led to another, particularly in the department of critical thinking, and I left the church.

Band Name of the Day: Nothing this week.

Film Idea of the Day: Hrafnkel's saga. If I can somehow adapt this to be redone in modern-day America, I think it could be very well done. There's a link to this saga below in several languages (English is, fortunately one of them). A Freya-worshipping warrior ends up losing everything, including his faith, but ends up as a better person, especially after rebuilding his power base and achieving revenge.

Film Review of the Day: 27 Dresses. Once again, I break from reviewing a film I watched recently which I liked to reviewing one which I hate. When watching the trailers before the DVD for Juno, I saw one for this movie, and I thought, by the awkward dialogue, that this could possibly be a cheesy movie that I could laugh at solely for being a crappy movie (like Teen Witch or Princess Diaries or Bratz). However, I recently decided to watch it, and I found I could not even really find it good in a cheesy sense. From dialogue like that would make even Ed Wood cringe, like "Love is patient, love is kind, love is slowly going out of your mind", or "I feel like I just found out my favorite love song was written about a sandwich," to unrealistic plot developments like the protagonist humiliating her sister and making up in less than five minutes' (screen) time, a Gone With the Wind themed wedding, and getting married with 27 bridesmaids, I could only find one line which could pass for funny in this "comedy" (it is quoted below). Please avoid this movie at all costs, especially if you're sober.

Quote of the Day: "She Likes Caulk."
______________James Marsden.

Link of the Day: I have recently gotten interested in Norse Sagas. I'm not quite sure how.

Issue 141

News: Review: This Godless Communism: Chapter 2.
When going through Chick Dissection, I went over the comments and discovered this comic about Communism (and the history thereof) from an old comic that was called This Godless Communism (as opposed to some other Godless Communism?). I'm not too into the history of the USSR that dominates Chapters 3-9, or the red scare-era propaganda dominating 1 and 10. However, I feel confident about my ability to dissect Chapter 2, focusing on the life of Marx. I must note that the writer doesn't get off to a good start with the sections on his early life. For instance, while he did end up changing colleges early on in his college career, he was not expelled from the first college, and probably not for the "strange ideas" that his father mentions. Later, the comic seems to put the blame on his thought (specifically religion) on his teacher G.W.F. Hegel. Specifically, the author blames Hegel for Marx's method on his abandonment of religion. Of course, his father himself was from a family rabbi who had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, but never really took either religion seriously, leaning more towards deism. Also, Hegel, from what I could gleam from his writings, didn't seem too much like a materialist to me, and even had a large following among what we would now call "christian fundamentalists" in Germany, and the comic also fails to mention that his infatuation with Hegelianism ended fairly quickly. Surprisingly enough, after his spiritual "unawakening," he goes into a rant which is the closest thing that happens in the entire story to an explanation of what communism even is, and mentions that nobody has ever explained how eventually, under Marxist communism, the government would eventually cease to exist. Of course, perhaps it could be that when everybody is eventually happy under Marxism, there will be no need for a government because there would eventually be nothing for a government to do. Of course, it soon reverts to only talking about religious implications of Communism when they would have been talking about other aspects in real life. Finally, they talk about how he spent his final years working on "das kapital" failing to mention that he had been working on it on and off since he got the advance in 1844, and, from what I had heard, from my philosophy teacher, it was roughly 1/20th of what it was orignially planned to be by the time of his death. Well,even for a few-page-long religious tract in comic book form, it is still sort of accurate, even if it removes a lot of the things from his life which would eventually have it make any sort of sense in any sort of form, but for 1960, what do you expect?

Band Name of the Day: Well, even in the several weeks it has been since I posted, the best I can do is "THe Young Hegelians." This definitely seems like the sort of name that only works if you're a bunch of university philosophy professors uniting for a one-off gig for the university.

Film Idea of the Day: None.

Film Review of the Day: The Departed. It is quite easily one of the best movies about a non-Italian Mafia (although to be fair, it is probably one of the only movies about a non-Italian mafia I have ever seen). Even there, it is still a good movie, certainly quite deserving of all the honors and awards it had thrust upon it.

Quote of the Day: "We know God exists. We have too many proofs." (ed: and virtually all of them have been shown to be flawed in some way.)
_______________ Anonymous non-Hegelian in the comic.

Link of the Day: This Godless Communism. Read it for yourself.