Avatar’s aftermath

check out this CNN article.  Seriously.  Go read it.

(CNN) — James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.

…..

“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ ”

Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality.

….

“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning,” Hill wrote on the forum. “It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.

“One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality,” Hill said.

Really what can you say? just wow. what amazing incredible emptiness surrounds us if it can be filled by a three hour cartoon (in every sense of the word).

HT to Jonah Goldberg

perfect book at the perfect time

on a secular economic and political note, Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is celebrating its two year anniversary today.

What a perfect book for today’s political climate. A fairly easy to read but still quite serious and unvarnished look at the historical antecedents for the progressives currently empowered in Washington D.C.

If you haven’t read it yet, you must do so. Available in whatever format you consume books.

hardcover
kindle
audio
paperback.

just get it and read/listen to it. you will be glad you did.

so completely true

we humans quickly accommodate to the status quo and become discontented and ungrateful in the midst of overwhelming prosperity and comfort.

the link above takes you to a Jonah Goldberg post which has a video to watch that you will then have to watch on youtube. Believe me it is worth the double click involved.

(warning for comedy use of a bleeped expletive)

Man is homo religiosus

or as I keep saying, “you don’t replace something with nothing.” the blue people movie is more evidence that in our modern culture spirituality is fine, but Christianity or other specific organized religion is off-limits. Jonah has an interesting piece up called “Avatar and the Faith Instinct.”

a bit to tease you over there to read it.

But what I find interesting about the film is how what is “pleasing to the most people” is so unapologetically religious.

Nicholas Wade’s new book, The Faith Instinct, lucidly compiles the scientific evidence that humans are hard-wired to believe in the transcendent. That transcendence can be divine or simply Kantian, a notion of something unknowable from mere experience. Either way, in the words of philosopher Will Herberg, “Man is homo religiosus, by ‘nature’ religious: as much as he needs food to eat or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living.”

Wade argues that the Darwinian evolution of man depended not only on individual natural selection but also on the natural selection of groups. And groups that subscribe to a religious worldview are more apt to survive — and hence pass on their genes. Religious rules impose moral norms that facilitate collective survival in the name of a “cause larger than yourself,” as we say today. No wonder everything from altruism to martyrdom is part of nearly every faith.

The faith instinct may be baked into our genes, but it is also profoundly malleable. Robespierre, the French revolutionary who wanted to replace Christianity with a new “age of reason,” emphatically sought to exploit what he called the “religious instinct which imprints upon our souls the idea of a sanction given to moral precepts by a power that is higher than man.”

faster please

Jonah Golberg has been the lone voice crying in the wilderness on behalf of proper funding levels for research into airborne-laser volcano lancing.

The only thing I can do at this dire moment is to add my small voice to Jonah’s and beg for more funding of this important project before it is too late. Faster please.

from New Scientist here is more on the possibly impending threat.

If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.

Every few hundred thousand years, such chambers can erupt as so-called supervolcanoes – the Yellowstone one did so about 640,000 years ago. These enormous eruptions can spew enough sunlight-blocking ash into the atmosphere to cool the climate by several degrees Celsius.

Could Mount St Helens erupt like this? “A really big, big eruption is possible if it is one of those big systems like Yellowstone,” Hill says. “I don’t think it will be tomorrow, but I couldn’t try to predict when it would happen.”

paperback version is out tomorrow

the paperback version of the book is out. No more excuses for not getting and reading one of the most important books explaining the ideological antecedents of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton.

Get it tomorrow. Read it Wednesday.

Government control

I really don’t want to be or to come across like one of those black helicopter conspiracy theory nuts, but we have been down this road of unfettered Federal government control before.

It was not pretty then and it will be less so now due to the lack of the restraining hand of a shared semi-christian culture.

Any time a group of people who are convinced that they are smarter than everybody else and that they care more than everybody else assumes reins of power (incidentally, with the white house, the house of representatives and now 60 votes in the senate, make no mistake, the power of these “do-gooders” is completely unfettered), then the rest of us will pay the price for their hubris.

Here is an excellent post summarizing some of the greatest hits of centralized American government in the past and how they are connected to now.

To an outsider, the Fernald school in Waltham Massachusetts looked like any other educational institution. During the school’s hay day in the 1920’s and 30’s, few passers-by would have guessed the dark secret lurking behind the brick walls – a secret penetrating to the heart of American liberalism.

Fernald was no ordinary school. Set up in 1848 with funds from the Massachusetts State Legislature, the institution was designed for the incarceration of “feeble-minded” children. Throughout the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of low-intelligence (though not necessarily retarded) children were warehoused at Fernald in unspeakable conditions. Treated like animals and denied any affection, these “human weeds” were considered genetically inferior from the rest of society.

In his book The State Boys Rebellion, Michael D’Antonio shows that one of the purposes behind the Fernald school was to prevent these “idiots” from reproducing and diluting the gene pool. Margaret Sanger, icon of the American left and founder of Planned Parenthood, put it even more succinctly: “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”

It was not until the 1960s that the school began releasing their children to live in the outside world.

……..

Although contemporary left-wingers have tried to hush it up, it is a fact of history that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, Planned Parenthood and the pre-1960’s Democratic Party, all supported the right of the US government to engage in Eugenic selection, while thirty states adopted legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals or classes. Conservatives, orthodox Roman Catholics and radical libertarians, on the other hand, were routinely ridiculed for their opposition to such policies.

The underlining premise behind the American eugenics movement was the view that irresponsible individualism in breeding would act as a cancer on the human gene pool, harming posterity. Government held the future of the human race in its reigns and could improve the evolutionary direction of the nation – and indeed the world – through strategic intervention.

……

Nevertheless, the ideological coordinates behind these abuses remain as intact as ever within the minds of American left, although they have found a myriad of different expressions.

Consider, for example, the widespread assumption that the state has the vocation to act as a supra steward of the human race. In January, James Hansen of NASA (known as the “father” of the global warming movement), told the Guardian that Obama “has only four years to save the world.” Hansen painted a chilling picture of the apocalyptic future awaiting us if government failed to assert drastic measures like the “carbon tax.”

It is not hard to see the continuity Hansen’s remarks have with the eugenics politics of the last century. In both cases, the underlying premise is that the state holds the future of the human race in its reigns, and unless significant freedom is surrendered over to them, irresponsible individualism will destroy our chances – or our children’s chances – on this planet.

…..

The American left has not departed from this basic utilitarian criterion. Consider the justification liberals are constantly giving for using taxpayer money on embryonic stem cell research (which involves the destruction of humans at the embryonic stage). They tell us that such research is justified because it can save lives. In other words, the end justifies the means when the end is the greater good of the human race. We see this same callous utilitarianism in the other ethical debates over killing innocent human beings: whether the killing of innocent humans occurs at the embryonic stage (certain forms of stem cell research), the foetal stage (abortion) or the elderly stage (euthanasia), these practices are defended by an appeal to the greater good either of society or (in the case of euthanasia) of the individual who elects to kill himself. As with the social Darwinism of the 20th century, the casualties of this utilitarian approach are inevitably the weakest and helpless members of society.

emphasis added.

Go read the rest of the post and also get the book. I am telling you that Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, is one of the most timely and important things you can read to understand the current political moment.

Have you noticed that the treasury department is taking over banks and not letting them pay back the money that gave the treasury control? have you noticed that GM and Chrysler are being unceremoniously delivered over to ownership by the government and the United Auto Workers Union? Do these things worry you any at all? they should.

We are on a very bad path. a very bad path indeed.

hat tip to vitamin z

data points

here are two data points on the slide we are going down.

first, courtesy of Andy McCarthy, is Matthew Franck’s discussion of the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing homosexual marriage in Iowa.

here is the opening, but go read it all.

What happens when judicial arrogance becomes so habitual as to become second nature? This past Friday, April 3, the Supreme Court of Iowa provided an answer: judicial arrogance transforms into smug self-deception. This is not the question the court thought it was answering. It claimed to be addressing the question of whether “exclusion of a class of Iowans from civil marriage”—namely the “class” of “gay and lesbian people” who wish to marry others of the same sex—can be justified by the state. But the opinion for a unanimous court in Varnum v. Brien, written by Justice Mark Cady, actually says very little about matters of such justification. By contrast, it speaks volumes about the extent to which American judicial power, having burst free of all constraints, is now in the grip of a banal routinization of tyranny so complete that the tyrants do not recognize their own character as they blandly overturn many centuries of civilization in a day’s work

the phrase that I bolded says it all. and it leads right into the other data point courtesy of Jonah Goldberg.

Rod Dreher talks about the cultural shift that has occurred which makes possible the “banal routinization of tyranny so complete that the tyrants do not recognize their own character” as tyrants.

an excerpt:

But the Linkers have one great rhetorical advantage: In our culture, the framework for these arguments favors secular liberalism.

As James Kalb explains in his important new book, The Tyranny of Liberalism -which, despite the red-meat title, is an intellectually invigorating read – liberalism “has become an immensely powerful social reality,” one so dominant “that it has become invisible.”

“To oppose it in any basic way is to act incomprehensibly, in a way explicable, it is thought, only by reference to irrationality, ignorance or evil,” Kalb writes. “The whole of the nonliberal past is comprehensively blackened. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of unquestionable goods liberalism favors.”

Chief among those goods is the defining idea of modern liberalism, which Kalb calls “equal freedom.” That is, liberalism’s social goal is to maximize both equality and freedom. How does it propose to do that in a world that is to some degree both unequal and unfree? Through social engineering.

Go read both articles above. Then ponder how they are related to the Newsweek story on the Decline of Christian America that I linked to below.

The cultural conversation has shifted in such a way that to say the truths of scripture out loud is to negate the “unquestionable goods that liberalism favors.” Any conversation that begins with “truth” as an absolute value instead of a subjective one is already outside of acceptable discourse. The subjectivity of everything that surrounds us is overwhelming.

Again, just data points. the question remains. what do we do? what do we say? how do we conduct ourselves in the midst of the flood?

here is the conclusion from Matthew Franck that is probably the most depressing part of the article.

All of this escapes the Iowa justices, whose view seems to be that if a moral argument finds support in any religious commitment, then the promulgation of that argument in law is a violation of the principle of religious disestablishment. This is logically fallacious, historically illiterate, and politically brutish. Recall that juxtaposed with this unremitting hostility to religiously-supported morality is an embrace of the morality of desire. Yet in the Iowa court’s view, religion is itself reduced to mere “feeling,” and so the justices wind up incoherently privileging one kind of feeling over another. Those who desire to marry win out over those who desire to “exclude” them from marrying, and that’s that.

Lost from view is the true ground of our common public morality: reasoned judgment about the natures of things and the good of human persons, families, and communities. About such matters, religion can be instructive (to say the least), while a mere desire to “affirm” our “relationships” cannot be. And so, in both its reductive approach to religion and its empty invocations of feelings, the Iowa Supreme Court has done an injustice to religion, to the possibility of lawful public morality, and—yes—to our relationships themselves.

emphasis added.

“and that’s that.” indeed.

cool stuff

ok, this is seriously cool. behold the work of some very creative shepherds with too much time on their hands and a video camera.

hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.

you don’t replace something with nothing

I posted this briefly last night, then I took it down. I was torn because I don’t want to be heard to be saying that being a follower of Christ necessarily means being a political conservative.

Nonetheless, I do think the following post is a good example of the fact that people have a built in religious impulse that will be indulged. This anthropologist, Jonathan Haidt, expressly desires that the Democratic political party actively co-opt this religious impulse in service of its ideals.

So here is the post again. If anybody has an issue with it, let me know in the comments. Love the opportunity to dialogue.

yet another installment in an ongoing observation that post-christian society does not replace worship of God with secular atheism. You don’t replace something with nothing.

Jonathan Haidt has come to the same conclusion. In this attempt to explain why poor folks vote republican he says the following:

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
……
The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words “God” and “faith.” But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights–but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum (“from many, one”). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.

A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights?

emphasis added.

Go read the rest of his piece this weekend. Very interesting view from someone who understands that christian conservatives might have a point of view rather than simply dismissing them out of hand.

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg. jonah wrote a book that is also a very interesting look at fascism’s attempt to replace worship of God with worship of the state. It is a simply excellent book, and I highly recommend it.