Daybreakers, the vampire horror film from Peter and Michael Spierig and starring Ethan Hawke, William DeFoe, and Sam Neil, is a disappointing modernization of Charles Dickens’ beloved holiday novella A Christmas Carol. Much of the original’s political commentary has somewhat obviously and probably necessarily been replaced with more contemporary concerns: immigration, the energy crisis, the corruption of big banking, and the half-human-half-vampire bat monsters than live in the sewers. The movie, in this regard, struggles for relevance, which I can appreciate as I have really been feeling depressed lately. I don’t know… I guess it’s the winter or maybe it’s that I didn’t get a lot of Christmas presents this year. I mean, I think I only got two actual presents. And I just broke up my boyfriend a few weeks ago… and it’s not like seeing him in this movie helped. He was good in White Fang, I guess. I’m thinking of opening a deli. It doesn’t seem that hard. We used to talk about that, Ethan and I. And, interestingly enough, I think this movie would have been a little bit more dramatic if more of its scenes were set in a deli. Instead, the movie imagines a future when all humanity has been turned into vampires and their economy revolves around the diminishing supply of human blood. I’m sure this is not what Dickens had in mind! But, still, the audience is invited into an imaginative vision of the future. Blood is mixed into coffee and purchased at coffee stands in the subway. There’s something terrifyingly realistic about how quickly advertising united sex appeal and the pale skin of vampires. It’s almost as if advertising is the real vampire. But, who are we kidding… the real vampire is the movie star who thinks he can just call whenever he feels like it! And when he does, he wants an “open” relationship, whatever the fuck that means! I miss, also, the intense sexuality that is usually evident in vampire films. When I was writing Dracula, it was important to me to depict the feelings of lust that the allure of blood must offer vampire and the fear turning to submission in vampire’s victims. But, in Daybreakers, the vampires are depicted as almost boringly human. The only redeeming excitement of the movie are the occasional bodies ripped apart by mobs of vampires and the cameras relentless willingness to not look away. Fans of gore will enjoy Daybreakers to some extent; fans of Dickens will be shocked.
All posts by TheYoungAndRestless
The Psychology of Plagiarism
When I was at university, a friend of mine was taking a course which I had taken the semester before – the Bible as Literature or Ancient Judaism, I can’t exactly remember – and, because he tended to be lazy, he one day told me that he hadn’t started writing a paper that was due the next day and, consequently, would almost certainly fail the class. He showed me the assignment, a page long description of some obscure theory of interpretation which he was supposed to apply to some obscure primary text and the technical requirements for the paper itself, and I realized that the assignment was unchanged from the previous semester and that, somewhere in my files, I had a paper that would meet his assignment’s exact demands. I cannot recall if initially it was his idea or mine – nor do I suppose that it matters since ultimately my decisions and their consequences are my own – but, before long, I had committed to rewriting the paper (and perhaps getting a better grade) and allowing my friend to submit it as his own – I had decided to cheat.
The episode remains among the few knowingly wrong actions I have taken, wrong in my eyes then and now, distinguishing itself from those actions I later realized to be wrong or those actions that are only wrong in the eyes of others. And so, I return, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” into that moment, in which, despite being able to recall with unreal vividness the scents in the dormitory air, the temperature of the room, the texture of my desk, and the sounds of my keyboard, I can only say that I do not know why. Our wrong and unequalizable commerce concluded karmically; the paper received an A and was submitted by the professor for a departmental award and won and my friend was appointed a student fellow and I was left to adjust to a life lived with a humble measure of unsoftenable contrition.
YouTube’s TheoreticalBullshit
“A simple, apostolic yearning for a genuine biblical revival in our day,” Revival Conference, an event held throughout the year, around the world, and with no cost for admission, is an extension of the ministry of SermonIndex.net, both being frequent platforms for Paul Washer, the founder of and Minister of the Gospel, his actual title, at Heart Cry Missionary Society. Revival Conference, SemonIndex.net, Paul Washer, and Heart Cry Missionary Society express non-denomitionalism, but an affiliated church, the Grace Life Church of the Shoals in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, expresses, with emphasis, a devotion to the historic Baptist doctrine and references the Rev. John Newton Brown’s 1833 New Hampshire Confession, although, with doubtlessly unintended irony, it is modified slightly. And, so, while this event and these organizations and this person and, indeed, a great many more, may express non-denominationalism, they are certainly not beyond categorization and one can trace the theological and culture ideologies which inform their current iteration; non-denominationalism, however, is not a theological argument, but an ecclesiological argument.
“Established Facts.”
But there are actually three established facts recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus.
– William Lane Craig
One can imagine the impact on an untutored mind of a phrase as commanding as “established facts’ or the idea that to challenge these facts is to challenge the consensus of historians; one would have to be crazy to go against the mainstream findings of an academic discipline, setting aside Creationism for a moment. Unlike many of the arguments for the existence of God, which are essentially matters of pure philosophy and therefore, while I would prefer to preserve them for the experts, we are all on some level capable to engaging them, the Argument for the Existence of God from the Historicity of the Resurrection requires some skill as an historian to refute and one must have access to substantial library. Offering the Argument for the Existence of God from the Historicity of the Resurrection, however, requires almost no skill as an historian, which is not to suggest that only the unskilled offer it; I am reminded that nonsense is the one of the few things that is harder to destroy than it is to create.
I stopped into a library to see if I could put my hands on a book about the historicity of Jesus, his life, times, death, the near effects of this death, and possibly his resurrection, ‘possibly’ because I can predict that a certain level of skepticism might reject the proposition that history is capable of establishing the existence of a miracle. Charmingly, because it feels like it’s becoming antiquated, the library utilized the Dewey Decimal Classification (it’s no longer a system, as I remember being taught in elementary school) and I made my way to the 232s, putting my finger on The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders. Libraries, I have long believed, are sacred places, mausoleums, on the one hand, and full of life, on the other; it is here, after all, that we store the longest lasting effects of our species’ best minds, and here, inevitably, where we go to better our own. This particular library pleases me: it is small, which means the librarian has to take considerably more care in selected which books which fill the shelves, and, on a personal level, I sat on the committee which hired our current librarian.
“Fundamentalism is always sporadic.”
Recently, there has been a renewed flurry of interest in the date of Jesus’ execution, and I have added an appendix on this topic. Here I wish to comment generally on the mistakes (as I perceive them to be) of the scholars who bring forth extreme proposals on such points, such as that Jesus was executed in 26 or 36. Since the evidence is diverse and hard to reconcile precisely, there is a tendency to seize on one point, to say that is determinative, and then to beat the other pieces of evidence into the necessary shape. That is, there is a danger of sporadic fundamentalism in studying ancient texts – not just the Bible. ‘Fundamentalism’ refers to the notion that some ancient text – or ancient literature in general – tells the precise and unvarnished truth. Fundamentalism, however, is always sporadic: fundamentalists believe that some people never exaggerated, made mistakes or mislaid their notes; or, at least, that some sections of some texts are perfectly reliable. Reading chronological studies on the New Testament reveals a lot of fundamentalism – usually sporadic. A scholar will maintain, for example, that John’s chronology is better than Mark’s and Matthew’s (and thus that theirs is not true.) Next, he or she will accept John on the numerous points where that gospel disagrees with the other three: there were three Passovers during Jesus’ public career rather than one, he was executed on 14 Nisan rather than 15 Nisan, and during his ministry he was in his forties (he was ‘not yet fifty’, John 8.57) rather than in his thirties, as Luke has it. Having dismissed the chronology of Matthew, Mark and Luke, some scholar then seize upon Matthew’s story of the star that stood over Jesus’ birthplace, and they try to match it with the appearance of a comet – apparently not noticing that this particular star, according to our only description of it, did not blaze across the heavens, but rather ‘stopped over the place where the child was’ (Matt. 2.9). Why take the star of Matthew’s story to be a real astral event and ignore what the author says about it? Why pay attention to Matthew’s star anyway, since he was wrong about the date of Jesus’ death (which John got perfectly right)?
“External Sources,’ The Historical Figure of Jesus, p. 55. E. P. Sanders.
Certainty.
Most scholars who write about the ancient world feel obliged to warn their readers that our knowledge can be at best partial and that certainty is seldom attained. A book about a first-century Jew who lived in a rather unimportant part of the Roman empire must be prefaced by such a warning. We know about Jesus from books written a few decades after his death, probably by people who were not among his followers during his lifetime. They quote him in Greek, which was not his primary language, and in any case the differences among our sources show that his words and deeds were not perfectly preserved. We have very little information about him apart from the works written to glorify him. Today, we do not have good documentation for such out-of-the-way places as Palestine; nor did the authors of our sources. They had no archives and no official records of any kind. They did not even have access to good maps. These limitations, which were common in the ancient world, result in a good deal of uncertainty.
“Preface,’ The Historical Figure of Jesus. E. P. Sanders.
A Friend of Mine Beaten and Jailed in Azerbaijan
A few articles I’d like to share.
Here’s one. And here’s another.
I was born in the second world so maybe it’s a little easier for me to understand how frequently governments will attack young agitators. My freind Adnan as handsome, charasmatic, and passionate about his homeland and his people, as am I (although, I’m better looking.)
I wish him well and will update on my Twitter as I here.
Christian Apologetics – 1 Peter 3:15
In a recent video on the subject of Christian Apologetics, young master Noah (AKA Veritas48) commented that, “as an apologist, we like to quote 1 Peter 3:15.”
It’s worth noting what 1 Peter 3:15 actually says:
- But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. (King James Version.)
- But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. (New International Version.)
- But sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord: being ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, yet with meekness and fear. (American Standard Version.)
- And so on.
It’s interesting that the attributes of how Christians are supposed to comport themselves changes. Fear vs. respect… big difference, but what doens’t change is “be ready,” and “be prepared.”
This is about having the information and being ready to respond with it if someone asks. “I just thought I’d share something with you,” is not covered by 1 Peter 3:15. “Athiests, come debate me,” is not covered by 1 Peter 3:15.
Christians shouldn’t start fights, even intellectuals. And unless someone is overtly standing in front of you, asking you explicitly for an explanation… you should remain silent.
A further crique of apologetics. They are antagonists.
Christian Apologetics
Normal people are annoyed by Christian apologetics, a fact which in having never been acknowledged by Christian apologetics, more or less proves the point.
I wonder why.
- Is it that Christian apologists don’t realize that saying something differently is not different from saying something twice?
- Is it that Christian apologetics is apparently one of the few fields in which excellence is in no way correlated to competence?
- Is it that Christian apologetics seems entrepreneurial?
- Is it that Christian apologists are soporific on their best days?
- Is it that Christian apologetics seems more about theatrical competitiveness?
- Is it that Christian apologists demonize what they don’t understand?
- Is it that Christian apologetics seems to cavalierly borrow definitions from every important field of scholarship and then redefine them into uselessness?
- Is it that Christian apologists seem transparently unpleasantly solicitous?
- Is it that Christian apologetics seems to attract repugnant human beings with bizarre attitudes towards taxation?
- Or is is that Christian apologists in an effort to make Christianity seem simple make it look simpleminded?
The answer is, of course, yes.
But, I think that the essential frustration that is Christian apologetics is a foolish and impatient insistence on the primacy of belief in the existence of God, the historicity of the Resurrection, and the belief in Biblical literalism, a triptych which only Christian apologists accept wholesale and even most Christians have difficulty swallowing entirely.
I will concede, of course, Christians should ultimately take comfort from the Resurrection, or, at least, a sense that the overcoming of death affords the life everlasting, and Christians should look to the Good Book as the written back bone of the religion and belief that that book is special among other books, although I doubt that that is literalism.
And I can accept that behind most Christian beliefs, God is a necessary prior condition and that belief in God is, in this sense, theologically proper, but “belief,” as most people use it, is different from the charismatic, Earth-shaking, life-altering, problem-solving “belief” that Christian apologists will pity you for not having.
God, the Resurrection, and the Bible form a sort of self-reinforcing argument around the proper Christian, with historical method, extra-Biblical research, and philosophy floating off in the distance, to be tapped if necessary.
With God, the Resurrection, and the Bible firmly believed, a sort of trickle down effect occurs and things like charity and forgiveness come on-line. Church attendance, a prayer life, family life, and vocation follow.
I criticize this because, from everything that I can tell about God and how Christians, as his children, should in themselves be, belief or faith in God is only properly meaningful when adjoined to other otherwise good activities of mind or body and sometimes is even subordinated.
A Christian who cannot argue that love is good without mentioning God cannot argue that love is good.
It is an irony of theology that Jesus, who preferred to teach in the non-literal, would be followed by the literal and unimaginative.
And the Resurrection, I think, reveals its own series of problems of historicity, which, while are lessened by faith, are not alleviated entirely by faith and we are left with something that is as meaningful as an historical fact as it is meaningful as a metaphor.
I propose, therefore, an inversion of the Christian apologetic method, one that reflects the difficulty people have in accepting those three crowns of theology and, I think, even anticipates that while most Christians disagree about the method of Biblical interpretation, for example, few Christians argue over the importance of love.
God, I think, would be happy if we practiced the Fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
There is no law against them and surely no God would be pleased by a systemic apologetic that includes them as a mere footnote. And the lessons of the Sermon on the Plain are themselves challenges and we need apologists to help us make sense of them and guide us through them and not ignore them.
As I write this, I wonder what God thought when David danced before Him with all his might? Was He pleased by the dance? Or the might?
Thomas Merton said: “The fact that I think that I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please You.”
And surely even if one does not believe in God, the fact that one desires to pleases God. And, then, even if one doesn’t have that explicit desire, the fact that one desires truth and goodness, must also please God.
God asks for belief without seeing (John 20:29). Surely God is not the lesser when the faithless sing, in their way, hallelujah.
Introducing Theo Warner
First off, I want to take this opportunity to say how deeply inconvenienced I am to be blogging here on the website of the League of Reason, a league which, as many of you know, is surpassed in importance only by the Canadian military. I came to this website in the late twelfth century. It’s a funny story: a Papal schism was underway, a civil war in England, Lincoln had just been assassinated, hip hop culture was on the rise, and I was working in Texarkana with Sitting Bull as an itinerate holy man. I specialized in throwing feathers at sick people, speaking to the spirits of woodland animals, and combinatorial number theory. We would sit outside liquor stores, casting spells on people, and about one in twenty would gives some money — some pretty dark magic! After a few hours, we would have enough money to buy some food, which we would sell for money to buy alcohol. The alcohol, of course, was for medicinal purposes and before long, we would be cured of lucidity. It was somewhere precisely between early March, 1154 and June, 1159 that I found God. He touched me deeply and drove a used Jetta that he stole from an orphanage. And sometimes God would touch me deeply on a credenza that he built out of a door and some cinder blocks. And that’s when I found the League of Reason.
At the time, the League of Reason was living in Port Author. We dated for a few months. The League of Reason was kinky, to say the least, but it makes for good stories while sipping Chablis on a hot Louisiana morning with the guys. In the end, we broke up. I got the house in Marblehead and the League of Reason got this website, which is why it’s so surprising to be so graciously invited back. The League of Reason and I had dinner a few nights ago. We split a Caesar salad and talked about the old times. The League of Reason still looks young and I was tempted to make a move, but I’ve decided to keep it professional… for now.
For the record, my name is Theo Warner — that is actually my name and it wasn’t until someone pointed out that it almost sounds like an admonition against God that I’ve felt the need to say: “that is actually my name.” But, it is. I am professionally employed as a Special Education teacher and my degree and certification qualifies me to speak competently as an expert in a variety of fields, none of which are of any interest to anyone who isn’t the parent of a child with a disability. Prior to this and after college, I worked in advertising and publishing while I worked out my life and my career ambitions. And now, for the most part, my free time in consumed with creative writing (poetry, short stories, and novels… which I should take more seriously, I feel) and general thinking about the world (philosophy, religion, theology, literature, linguistics, cultural studies, modern cultural theory, gender theory, education theory, psychology, and so on.) I like books, too. I want to sleep in a bookstore, just to see if it feels good.
Most of you are probably aware of my YouTube channel. It’s pretty big stuff and I’m kind of a big deal. I mean, basically, people cower of the mere mention of my name. I routinely point out how deplorable some of the more legendary YouTubers are… JezuzFreek777 comes to mind. VenomFangX is another. There are others. In the war between us and our worser demons, YouTube is just another battle ground. We didn’t seek it out, but it comes under threat and I’m glad to be there on the front lines. I look about this blog as an extension of that effort. I hope that I can use these posts as a way to solidify my thoughts and have a little fun.
Your servant,
Theo