The Transformative Power of Pop Culture
08/09/09 12:56
Another interesting example, this time from a blog based in Seattle:
Foundations
posted by CHARLES MUDEDE on SAT, SEP 5, 2009 at 4:21 PM
I walked by this van and...I could not stop thinking.
A little bit ago, I located Star Wars as the true source of my atheism (or Spinozism, to be more accurate):
[In 1977,] I went into Star Wars a Christian and walked out of it an atheist. Before seeing the movie, I understood the war of Good against Evil to be an entirely Christian one: God vs. Satan. The war happened on the ground, in the sky above, and the immense dark space beyond the moon. The universe was ordered by heaven and hell. So imagine the shock of seeing on the screen a whole different order, a whole different war between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; a war, furthermore, that made no mention of Jesus, or Lucifer, or the star of Bethlehem, the Romans, the beasts in “The Book of Revelations,” the Last Supper. Yet, in the absolute absence of Christian codes of goodness, I still sided with these other codes and acts of goodness taking place in a faraway galaxy.
In the bright afternoon light of that day, I realized that God was limited, and what was infinite was the Good itself, and that the Good could take on different shapes (Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, John, Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Princess Leia, Mary).
Similarly, I can attribute my (brand of) Marxism directly to the way James Cameron's Aliens opened my eyes one afternoon in a cineplex in downtown Harare:
The full post is here.
Foundations
posted by CHARLES MUDEDE on SAT, SEP 5, 2009 at 4:21 PM
I walked by this van and...I could not stop thinking.
A little bit ago, I located Star Wars as the true source of my atheism (or Spinozism, to be more accurate):
[In 1977,] I went into Star Wars a Christian and walked out of it an atheist. Before seeing the movie, I understood the war of Good against Evil to be an entirely Christian one: God vs. Satan. The war happened on the ground, in the sky above, and the immense dark space beyond the moon. The universe was ordered by heaven and hell. So imagine the shock of seeing on the screen a whole different order, a whole different war between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; a war, furthermore, that made no mention of Jesus, or Lucifer, or the star of Bethlehem, the Romans, the beasts in “The Book of Revelations,” the Last Supper. Yet, in the absolute absence of Christian codes of goodness, I still sided with these other codes and acts of goodness taking place in a faraway galaxy.
In the bright afternoon light of that day, I realized that God was limited, and what was infinite was the Good itself, and that the Good could take on different shapes (Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, John, Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Princess Leia, Mary).
Similarly, I can attribute my (brand of) Marxism directly to the way James Cameron's Aliens opened my eyes one afternoon in a cineplex in downtown Harare:
The full post is here.