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Cult Studs: Killing God, and war in/against Heaven

  
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:06 / 13.02.03
This might be a bit ambitious, but we haven't really explored the Cultural Studies remit of the Head Shop, except tangentially, and it could function as a very good place for crooss-media stuff...

So, welcome to the inauagural cult studs thread of the Head Shop; please leave your shoes at the door. Also please bear in mind that although this thread is likely to share elements of the various Spectacle topic areas as well as the Conversation, it isn't any of those. I haven't quite worked out how to moderate it yet, but I'm sure we'll all have fun working it out.

So, project the first- killing God and the War in Heaven. I'm not sure how broad or narrow the focus and purity of this should be. For example, I think that stuff in the Authority could be interesting, but I don't want it to turn into a discussion that could happen in a Spectacle Forum. Hit and move, sort of thing. I'm starting from threads on the Second Coming and His Dark Materials.

In both of these very successful (in terms of audience, and critically, AFAIK, rather than artistically) works, aimed at different audience, we see the destruction of God and the release of humanity into a different age, one without an overseeing divinity. In both of these this is presented as a liberation but at the same time a lessening, although perhaps not overtly; one of the interesting things is that soem have seen the last scene of The Second Coming as a demonstration of how dreary and banal life is without the presence of the divine, whereas others have seen it as a demonstration that the world is not immediately turned into a humanist utopia, but that people are now succeeding and failing according to their own lights (Jonny Tyler has lost weight, stopped blaming the chip shop (that is, taken responsibility) and started dressing better; he's still looking for a partner, but to my eyes this has ceased to be a mechanism he uses to bolster his self-loathing and despair, and becomes instead a sign of hope - see the "Give up!" "Never!" exhange as he and Judith part company).

Likewise, at the end of HDM, things have clearly been lost - there is no more trans-dimensional adventure, and the sort of glory that Gruman got to see and explore will never be available to travellers again. On a personal level, Will and Lyra get no more naughties. But at he same time as the dictatorial authority of the Metatron is removed, there is still a Republic of Heaven - there remain the same mechanisms and the same powers, but...can angels still travel across dimensions? What power remains to Heaven? Metaphysically, what has changed?

So, cross-media, looking at images, themes and the philosophical implications of these and other presentations of the death of divinity. I'm afraid cult. studs is not exactly my area, but hopefully wiser heads will come in...I think we should give ourselves permission to be a bit more rambling and discutant than a straight-down-the-line Head Shop topic, though.

I'd suggest starting with depictions of the death of God and move out to the war in Heaven...say, in Paradise Lost or the Prophesy...
 
 
grant
13:46 / 13.02.03
Well, what about Nietzsche? I'm wondering why it's taken around 100 years for the theme to reach literature/creative arts from his philosophical ivory tower. Or has it?

Funny that the first examples that come to mind for me are all comic books: Sandman, Preacher, and Mystery Play. In each of those, there's a certain ambiguity, and a sense that the Divine Machinery is still carrying on without anyone at the controls (maybe Mystery Play least of all, but it's chronologically the first of them, and is an allegory). Someone or something else always takes over.

In Sandman, it's angels taking over Hell (who damn themselves by rebelling against the edict that they take over), but still - that sense of Divine Order that transcends personalities - human or angelic.

I'm unfamiliar with His Dark Materials (but plan on reading them soon, so I may avoid in-depth discussion), but if it's as gnostic as I hear, it'd make sense that there's some sort of distant, higher divinity above the "lesser God" - the Demiurge who controls earthly things and (I'm assuming) gets unseated/killed.

There's also a huge tangent here, possibly, if you take the story of Christ's resurrection as having a similar theme. After all Christ = God, and is given meaning by dying on the cross. According to tradition, He dies to descend into Hell and defeat Satan, freeing mankind from sin. Sort of an inversion of the War in Heaven.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:48 / 13.02.03
I think it's easy to overestimate the importance of Uncle Friedrich, and also the importance of his "God is Dead" schtick - it crops up in Zarathustra, but not really much else. There's also a science-fiction short story in which the corpse of God is found floating in space, and a Shaky Kane short in which a gigantic body of Christ is discovered doing much the same thing, but in both cases we're talking about gags on the Zarathustrian saw rather than an act of theophonous violence.

The Mystery Play and Preacher are more interesting. I haven't read the Mystery Play, but in preacher God is depicted as first deserting his creation (nb. God doesn't die in the Sandman; Lucifer resigns, is all) and subsequently being killed. It's a shame that it is so tiresomely literal, and also that the implications of the death of God are basically unexplored - the murder of God is a punchline off to one side of a largely human drama.

Now, Christ...Christ is an interesting one. Obviously, he's a big dash of Pagan religion injected into a monotheistic system; a dying God who by dying and being reborn provides succour for mankind. However, Christ dying and God dying are clearly two different things - God is still alive during the three days that Christ spends dead, insofar as god can be described as "alive". For that matter, so is Christ, but in a rather different way. Conversely, in "The Second Coming", the death of Christ is also the death of God, the devil and the entire metaphysical sphere...
 
 
Ethan Hawke
15:27 / 13.02.03
(note - I've read HDM, but not had any contact with any of the other works referenced so far, so correct me if I get any generalities wrong)

The works cited thus far about the destruction of God share a peculiar feature - God as a person, a figure with corporal forms, with limits. The anti-theistic artillery brought to bear by Pullman et al. is aimed at a straw man - a variety of religious belief that is (for lack of a better word) unsophisticated. The "celestial big daddy" version of God, although prevalent among some peoples, seems to be losing ground to visions of God that have more in common with things like the Gaia theory or the so-called strong anthropic principle. Basically, the "cutting edge" of ideas of God are deeply rooted in utopian (or Panglossian) liberal humanism, instead of, I don't know, sympathetic magic or ecstatic mysticism.

What replaces the "big daddy god" in Pullman? Why, it's something akin to utopian liberal humanism. But it's utopian liberal humanism without that certain something - there's a lack, a hole, an abyss, that Pullman seems to be acknowledging. Implicitly, the hole seems to begin where childhood ends. It's a standard, as-a-race-we've-outgrown-god argument. However, the only thing it proves is that Pullman has outgrown a child's version of God, rather than any sort of sophisticated, adult attempt to wrestle with ontological questions, perhaps, in the end, yes, appealing to a figure beyond limits.

(and as another tack, isn't it ludicrous, for a work of art that's (at least partly) prosletizing for atheism to even acknowledge that's there's a God to be (metaphorically) killed? Or, how can you kill an idea that you find baseless without inadvertantly giving it some credence?)
 
 
Jack Fear
16:04 / 13.02.03
Thank you, Todd, for encapsulating much that I found unsatisfying about His Dark Materials but was unable to put my finger on...

It's been some years since I read it (so I might get some of the deatils wrong, but: James Morrow's novel Towing Jehovah is an interesting spin on some of these themes. God is dead—His miles-long corpse is floating in the sea—but the world at large does not know this. The bureaucracy of Heaven goes on, and in fact goes to pains to keep the knowledge of the Divine Demise out of general circulation: the angels contact a disgraced oil-tanker captain and charge him with the task of secretly hauling the Divine Carcass to the polar ice caps, where it may be preserved... or hidden.

When it dawns on the tanker's crew exactly what they're hauling, there is a descent into madness, into anarchy and violence: God is dead, nothing is true, everything is permitted, et cetera. Ship's chaplain and his nun friend lose their faith, fuck like bunnies, radical feminist with an ingrained loathing for the patriarchal god finds that she's pissed off that He's dead before she had a chance to tell Him off—the usual guff. Morrow's aiming at satire here, so his characterization is on the thin side: these are types, mouthpieces for particular views.

There's one interesting riff, if parenthetical to the themes—at one point the crew, running low on food, are forced to cannibalize parts of the Carcass: before they do, the priest performs the Catholic Communion rite backwards, in best Anton LeVey black-mass fashion—the aim of this diabolic anti-transubstantiation being to turn the body of God into earthly food. A blasphemy to avert a greater blasphemy, in other words.

Anywez, the crew-members rediscover their sense of purpose and undertake the interment of the Corpse of God as a sort of holy task in itself. In the end they learn, via the angels, that God chose to die—chose the remove Himself from human affairs—as a gift to humanity. Childhood's end and all that.

Of course, He had to assume a corporeal existence before ending that existence: the whole busines of assuming a body was simply to provide a skeptical mankind with "evidence" of His death. Which raises the question as to whether He's really dead or not...

There's a sequel, Blameless in Abbadon, but I haven't read that at all: the komedy kapers of the first didn't do much for me, frankly.
 
 
Sax
16:06 / 13.02.03
What struck me after watching The Second Coming is that the Death of God was certainly less anthropomorphosised than in His Dark Materials, the latter literally featuring a wizened old man in a far-off dimension who was close to death anyway. Stephen Baxter was a human being with the whole of creation in his head - "like opening the door on a furnace". Now, and I may need this explaining to me in short words, but just because Baxter is killed, the human host of God, as it were, why does it necessarily follow that the whole of Heaven and Hell cease to "be"? Is it because God, having accepted that humanity with full knowledge of what it is doing kills God-on-Earth and therefore is making the ultimate statement that it no longer needs any kind of divine help so God ceases to be, that mankind has killed God within its hearts so there can be no turning back, no second chance? Why, if we're assuming (as we did in The Second Coming) that Heaven and Hell are "real" places, do they not continue to be "real", even if mankind says: "right, we're killing god, we have no more use for him?"

Do old Gods really die, or do they just sit about in Heaven picking their noses?
 
 
deja_vroom
17:48 / 13.02.03
First thing I remembered on the subject of GOd's death: Rosemary Woodhouse, pregnant with the son of the Devil in Rosemary's Baby, lifting a copy of Time magazine with the headline, red letter in blak background: "Is God Dead?". In that movie, the death of God is only implied, but one is forced to conclude that it indeed happened, since there is no example of any attempt whatsoever to stop
the unnatural aby to be born. In fact, there's much a sense of desolation and loneliness permeating the film. Once God is absent, the Devil starts making his own plans with help of human agents. And his plan is carried out perfectly. By the end of the movie, people start dying from a massive heatwave (It's only talked about en passant, not shown, which makes it much more scary).

In this movie we have the death of God representing the end of an era and the beginning of another. Which of course leads to the question: The side of Good has had its time and then it vanished. So, with the
opposite side, the Evil, something similar should happen. It would have its time, but it would eventually end. Or not? What comes after?


Really interesting topic, will think more about it.
 
 
The resistable rise of Reidcourchie
17:42 / 15.02.03
Couple of questions, and I must admit I haven’t read HDM, and I missed Second Coming which I was a bit gutted about.

Originally posted by Haus (in an extraordinarily long sentence and with spelling mistakes, what the hell’s going on?)

“In both of these this is presented as a liberation but at the same time a lessening, although perhaps not overtly; one of the interesting things is that soem have seen the last scene of The Second Coming as a demonstration of how dreary and banal life is without the presence of the divine, whereas others have seen it as a demonstration that the world is not immediately turned into a humanist utopia, but that people are now succeeding and failing according to their own lights…”

I was wondering at the trade of between supernatural wonder and what Grant Morrison said about making our own gods & jailers at the end of the Invisibles (apologies for immediately bringing him up) and is described above as taking responsibility for oneself. I personally like the idea of supernatural/preternatural agencies but wonder if their existence (conceptually) is part of a kind of in built submissiveness inherent in people (the god gene?) This seems to exist to the extent that even when we have media that suggest we cast of out (entirely subjective) shackles, such as say the ending of the Matrix, we require a messianic figure (Neo) to lead us there. Are the machines God in the Matrix? But then is Neo teaching us to be god like or kill god, or both? Have I utterly missed the point?

Actually Neo’s quite interesting because he goes through the whole Christ death and resurrection thing and his second coming may indeed lead to the destruction of the whole metaphysical sphere (the matrix) but his death and rebirth appear to be for different reason (showing people there shackles) than Christ’s. But in following a messianic figure have we already failed and just proven our submissiveness again? The Monty Python:- “We are all individuals!” syndrome.

Originally posted by Todd

“The "celestial big daddy" version of God, although prevalent among some peoples, seems to be losing ground to visions of God that have more in common with things like the Gaia theory or the so-called strong anthropic principle. Basically, the "cutting edge" of ideas of God are deeply rooted in utopian (or Panglossian) liberal humanism, instead of, I don't know, sympathetic magic or ecstatic mysticism.”

Hmm. Okay the media I want to bring to the mix is Steve Aylett’s Shamanspace, little expensive (about 8 quid for a just over 100 page novella) it’s about rival cult’s battling for the right to kill god. There is as I recall a certain amount of anthropomorphism of God but not to the extent of the above examples. The language of the book is either very beautiful or over the top purple. Despite having read it twice and enjoyed it both times I’m still not sure how it ends however the initial premise. God created creation, ergo God created all suffering, ergo God must die, seems a little juvenile. A little:- “I’m young, I’m angry at my parents.” Etc. This however may be resolved in the climax I can’t remember.

One thing that de Jade’s post about Rosemary’s Baby made me wonder is a simplistic reading of Christianity would assign moral good to God and moral evil to the devil. Is the death of God, the death of good. Is God corrupt because of him no longer being good in HDM?

Oddly enough I’m currently writing a short story where part of the background involves the human race proving the non-existence of God with a calculator.

I would also like to point out that my taste in media is much wider than it would initially appear in the above post. I am most assuredly not Grant Morrison’s media bitch.
 
 
penitentvandal
15:10 / 16.02.03
I don't recall the title, but I once read an old sci-fi story in which God tries to wipe out the human race, but eventually the heroes - in good old fashioned american sci-fi tradition - discover a weakness and begin to fight back against God and the Heavenly host. The final page has the main character musing about how, now that the human race has god on the run, they can actually set about making the world perfect at last. It's an extremely gnostic story, and what's all the more interesting is that I read it when I was on a retreat with a bunch of fellow students from my old catholic school...

Other examples of killing god/war in heaven in popular culture: Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens - demon/angel alliance, the antichrist turning out to be a good guy, strong hints in final chapter that the real apocalyptic battle will be between angels/demons and humanity; Babylon 5 - godlike angelic beings turn out to be utter rotters who must be bounced from the universe in order that mankind may ascend to it's godly destiny; the last Marilyn Manson album, with it's talk of humanity as 'a suicide bullet aimed at the face of God', or some such gothyness. Etc.

I don't think they actually manage to kill God in Shamanspace, as it's implied that you can't wipe out God without wiping out reality. IIRC there is one faction in the novel that actually wants to do this, but their intentions are frustrated.
 
 
glassonion
16:19 / 16.02.03
the grey toothy god in shamanspace is just the universe, stripped of all human glosses and fancy, melville's 'colourless allcolour of atheism' no? come the end its just too badass, doesn't give a fuck, for any of the fashion-victim would-be god-killers to take.

this atheism is i think the ecstatic fear of lovecraft, a misanthropist and coward, whereas the fear of say a nice guy like arthur machen is that god is too alive, his terrible mysterious works too evident in the phenomenological world.

despite what he wrote early on, nietzsche's last letters [from the asylum, admittedly] were signed 'Dionysus, the dying and resurrected Christ' or words to that effect. 'god is dead' always sounded to me to be the first half of a larger aphorism, perhaps 'god is dead, long live god'. and if fred's intent was to promote atheism rather than a kind of romantic pagan gnosticism he would have said 'god was never alive'. as it is the 'god is dead' mantra i think simply exhorts one to struggle to overcome one's limitations no matter how semiotically vast they might appear. and then do it again.

and garth ennis outlined a more coherent view of the fall from heaven in his hellblazer than in his preacher.

as for the war in heaven, my understanding from my recent readings of olde englishe miracle plays is that god's sanity and responsibility went into the humans [who are then themselves sent mad]. although its never mentioned god himself isn't around very much at all after this point and when he is, like in Job, he's a right cunt. the demons are the angels who couldn't believe He would divide his mind up like that and sided with lucifer. so half of heaven is banished underground, itself the first concrete evidence of god's malevolence. the ongoing struggle is for lucifer to 'trick' [enlighten] the humans to realise that there's no-one in charge and get rid of the angels and the disabled god. the angels go about also helping the humans, miraculously 'proving' god's continuing goodness so they stay where they are. either way its good for the humans, really, especially if they can figure out they're being played.

the most eloquent rendering of any of this is in a Phantom Stranger secret origin by alan moore and joe orlando, published eightysomething.

the underlying physiological principles of 'god' [ie supreme health, intelligence and agency] are I suspect much simpler than any notion of heavenly war, which smacks of political factions retrofitting their ideologies to avoid or promote violence, or to placate a smelly population

and the judge anderson story on mars. that's well deep that is.
 
 
Elbereth
03:58 / 17.02.03
I'm still researching this but my first thought is God is partially God and partially an idea, the way we veiw god, and not actually true. You can't kill God if he's real but you can change your idea of him thus "killing" god/gods and freeing yourself to actually know what God (or the universe reality whatevers next is, it also might tie in to killing the buddha. i just wanted to write something because I've gotten caught up in reserching it and might forget what i'm thinking.
 
 
Elbereth
11:01 / 17.02.03
First, what is God? (just looking at it from a monotheistic western perspective for now) :
An eight-year-old explains God in a school-assigned essay:
You should always go to Church on Sunday because it makes God happy, and if there's anybody you want to make happy, it's God...
It is good to know He's around you when you're scared in the dark or when you can't swim very good and you get thrown into real deep water by big kids.
But you shouldn't just always think of what God can do for you. I figure God put me here and He can take me back anytime He pleases. And that's why I believe in God."
Sorry for the sap but i figure a little kid who has just learned about God from his parents should know a little more about what God actually means to the human psyche than most people. God is someone who protects us from our fears on a fundamental level, someone to be a little bit afraid of (try to make him happy), he also explains away our ignorance and inability to control life. God is fundamentaly an idea to make us feel better, whether or not he exists. However because of the nature of God we can never prove or disprove his existence. If he is God he can hide his origins from us if he so chooses and doesn't have to give a reason, if he doesn't exist you cannot prove that because you are not omniscent, all you can have are arguments and theories on the matter.
If you were to get a hold of God and "kill" him that either destroys the universe (in which case your existence and hence this argument is moot) or it does nothing. Does this actually kill God? No. It simply proves that God is not the idea that you thought he was in the first place.
Nietzsche postulated killing God and the idea that God is dead not for metaphysical reasons (killing a metaphysical deity is fairly ridiculous to most people) but because people had stopped believing in the traditional christian beliefs of the time. He didn't think it was bad because religion in all its forms can be corrupted and misused. Religon is a crutch, a very useful crutch at times but still something to protect us from our fears and justify our superstitions.
I think that killing God would be more of a world wide realization that God may not be made in our own image, a deeper understanding of what God truly is. In a sense we would be killing ourselves and the anthropomorphological god that we have set up so that we can see whatever the real God could be. I don't think that we get to be angry with God because he's a bad person either, killing him for revenge and such, i think wanting to kill that god that we blame is just proving how much we are still like him. Being mad at the "real" God always made as much sense to me as being angry at the ocean or the space between the stars.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:45 / 17.02.03
Meanwhile - it's struck me that we're missing something here, which is video games, a very modern medium but one with an awful lot of apparent interest in divinity. Most obviously we have the "god sims", although these are in the main just resource management systems with a theistic overlay, and the divinity of the player is a structural requirement, just as you are a mayor in Sim City or a governor in Caesar.

I don't have much knowledge of computer games, so I don't know many portrayals there are or what they are like - any takers? I recall that Requiem - Avenging Angel on the PC was based on the premise that the divine was assailable, and that the mission of the character played was necessary to prevent a war, and subsequent deicide, in Heaven.

The interesting thing about the computer game approach, maybe, is that in a setup like that the actual war is inevitably deferred. That is, while the action is ongoign, the character is alive and the evil plans have not come to fruition, if the character dies, the evil plans presumably *do* come to fruition, but occur outside the perceptual universe of the now-deceased player. If you see what I mean. It's a teleological structure, but the successful continuation fo the presence of the interactive focus defers and ultimately defeats the telos. Are there other treatments relevant here? Cherub? Divine Divinity? Deus Ex?
 
 
grant
16:37 / 17.02.03
I've been sucked into "Black & White" by a friend of mine - the game where you're a god, you have villagers who worship you and the more they worship, the more tricks you can do, that sort of thing.

But it plays into what Elbereth stabbed at - the conception of what a god is in the game is rather limited. There are other gods who you ally with/fight with. I'm not sure yet whether it's possible to be killed, but you're certainly not omnipotent, and you don't actually create things. Part of the game, actually, is figuring out how to get around and how to do things that make your villagers worship you. You have these little "conscience" advisors, an angel and a devil, who tell you how things work and encourage you to be either a kind and generous god or an angry, wrathful god. All about maintaining an image.
You also have this creature who you have to train, which really points up the lack of omnipotence. Villagers can't see you, they can only see this giant animal/avatar you've got. Who does all sorts of unpredictable things, just like a puppy.

Mine keeps eating my villagers, and my system appears to be too slow to process my movements when I try to punish him. Alas. The big ape.
 
 
Sax
07:31 / 18.02.03
Perhaps The Sims is the best example of a god-game. You leave your characters to be, they have a modicum of free will and will certainly perform basic motor functions such as eating, shitting, sleeping, rutting, going to work - kind of a mindless sort of free-will, really, in that they are choosing to follow their pre-programming. But you can get involved and make them stay up all night until they collapse, or stand in a corner until they wet their pants, or go and flirt with the bloke next door. In that way you as controller of The Sims are completely omnipresent, but you get involved when you want to.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:15 / 18.02.03
Except that you're not God, are you? You're a resource manager. Your resources will follow their AI if left alone or instructions if commmanded, but the scope of your command is limited to and by the laws by which the game universe functions. Since imperfection has to be built into the systems of games so that they can function as games, the idea of playing God, rather than a God, is almost unmanagable. Which brings us back to killing God and the war in Heaven - God functions best as an external circumstance in games; in a sense, one could describe the "rules" of any game (the Half-Life physics engine, for example) as God within that context, but I'm thinking rather of a God within the narrative...
 
 
Sax
09:13 / 18.02.03
True. Without concentrating too much on games, of which I know little, really, computer simulations are confined to a series of basic rules - much as human life, really - and it is impossible to break out of the programme and send a lightning bolt down to fry your Sims or unleash a plague of locusts on their houses. Perhaps those with the technical know-how to hack and re-programme games are closest to true god-sims.

Perhaps a game in which you are at risk from being killed by the characters is the next logical step... a complete plug-in experience which delivers a fatal injection or dose of electricity should your characters decide to kill God.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:37 / 18.02.03
Well, there are certainly games that attempt to blur the distinction between you the participating character and you the player. For example, whereas in Deus Ex you take over the actions (within a limited field) of JC Denton, or in Requiem of the angel Malachi, in The Nomad Soul the introductory scene is an appeal to the player to project their soul into the body of the character one begins the game portrayed as; throughout, the transmigratory "soul" is represented as the motivating force, not the physical entity portrayed on screen, so in a sense defeat might mean "killing God", in that sense...except that, again, you are God in the sense that the existence of the other characters in this particular umwelt is dependent on your presence in the game world, but not in the sense that you are omniscient, omnipresent or any of the other things that God is meant to be, because that would defeat the object. Compare the phrase "God Mode", in which a player has, say, infinite energy, infinite ammunition and the like; this might describe the conditions of a God, an Olympian being, say, but not a supreme one. The language is functionin g in a different way.
 
 
Sax
09:57 / 18.02.03
Leaping back to The Second Coming for a sec, because I was thinking about it last night... was this basically God-suicide rather than mankind killing God? The Third Testament Baxter asked the human race to come up with was that God must be killed for humanity to prosper, wasn't it? Judith fulfilled the prophecy by recognising this and carrying out the actions. Had this not happened, perhaps the vague Judgement Day would have occurred and humanity would have been destroyed... or was this in fact Judgement Day for humanity and God together? Was there any other way that it could go, given that it was predestined by God, and therefore the only way to break the hold God had on human destiny and give them true free will?
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
12:55 / 18.02.03
Sax. It was emphasised a couple of times that the Third Testament was both a Testament and a Judgement in one. Though from what I remember, Stephen only interpreted the blank space in his vision of the future as the result of Judgement day. All through the story he made it clear that he didn't know what was happening or was going to happening, that he was being shown his path only when he needed to take the next step.

The alternate endings are interesting though. Certainly the demons seemed to be working towards something. Then again, they gave Judith enough time to stop the suicide (spiked lemonade, which cult was that again?), which in turn gave her the idea of killing god in the first place. Will think more.

Actually, it's a bit hazy on whether it was deicide or suicide. Either the human component of Stephen accepted the judgement voluntarily, with God's opinion on the matter unrecorded, or God agreed with the Judgement and commmited suicide. Or packed up heaven and hell and moved on, no way to tell.

Can we tie "Midnight Nation" to this? No killing of God as such, at least not in the bit I've read, but it equates God with hope, the hope that there is a point to life and suffering, that the good guys are in charge, that kind of thing. This seems to run through most faiths, that there is someone, or something, that can Make It Better, if only by explaining Why.

Ugh, rambling again.
 
 
rizla mission
15:12 / 18.02.03
semi-coherent, poorly expressed thoughts:

The first thing that comes to mind on this topic is the Birthday Party song "Mutiny in Heaven". Well, it's more of a big musical ramble with Nick Cave doing his nut over the top than a song, so worry not, I'm not gonna go analysing it or anything.. it's just that the BP's evident punk rock glee at he prospect of filling Heaven with chaos and carnage got me thinking about the seemingly endless appeal of the idea of *literally* overthrowing the Xtian hierarchy (or at least subverting / taking the piss out of it) in 20th C. culture, and whether any vague connection can be drawn between this and the similar development of terrestrial revolutionary notions in the last hundred years or so - can the ever-present notion of bringing down the establishment just on general principle which we encounter these days be connected with the delight taken by artists/writers in bringing down the ancient celestial establishment, which has traditionally been in cahoots with the earthly one? Killing God as a metaphor for, or continuation from, Smashing the State?
I guess then that leads on to notions about the Socialist/Anarchist distrust of religion, an automatic connection between religion and authority, blah blah blah..

Not sure exactly where I'm heading with that or whether it's relevant to anything.

Personally I'm fucking sick of fiction that thinks it's clever for pointing out the possibilities and inconsistencies of Christian mythology in an entirely literal manner - surely it's been done to death from Paradise Lost onwards? I'd rather shoot myself in the foot than witness another hackneyed film/book/TV show where the Devil comes to earth in the guise of a character actor with amusing mannerisms and makes scattershot satirical observations about modern society (Old Harry's Game excepted because it was good). The whole scenario is so hackneyed that the possibility for good gags / interesting stories has been mostly exhausted, and all that's usually left is yet another outing for what's basically just a really dumb conception of religion left over from the middle ages..
of far greater interest to me is the o.t.t. romantic imagery raised by the idea of a war in heaven, in a Death Metal kind of way, "Raise your armies for assault on the Pearly Gates!" and all that. Not that I feel there's much depth to that kind of thing.

Which again is largely irrelevant.

Good idea for a thread, though. I look forward to more along similar lines.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:28 / 20.02.03
it's just that the BP's evident punk rock glee at he prospect of filling Heaven with chaos and carnage got me thinking about the seemingly endless appeal of the idea of *literally* overthrowing the Xtian hierarchy (or at least subverting / taking the piss out of it) in 20th C. culture, and whether any vague connection can be drawn between this and the similar development of terrestrial revolutionary notions in the last hundred years or so - can the ever-present notion of bringing down the establishment just on general principle which we encounter these days be connected with the delight taken by artists/writers in bringing down the ancient celestial establishment, which has traditionally been in cahoots with the earthly one? Killing God as a metaphor for, or continuation from, Smashing the State?

Yeah - there's the whole William Blake books of Urizen thing, in which God is bureaucratic and law-enforcing, and the Christ figure represents art and creative freedom. That can be associated with Blake's political radicalism - his belief that it was mankind's destiny and duty to build the city of Heaven on Earth.

Another interesting thing is that wars in Heaven always take place either at the beginning or end of history - that is, they mark the beginning or the end of "society". Compare, say, Paradise Lost, in which the war in Heaven has recen tly finished at the beginning of the action, and functions to set up all the power relationships for the action, and "Canon Fodder" (2000AD, John Smith, I think), where Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, having risen from the dead on Judgement Day, seek to do away with the old order of divinity, which has resulted in chaos, by storming heaven....
 
 
deja_vroom
17:44 / 20.02.03
There was this comic book series, called RUÍNAS in Portuguese (don't know its original title). It came from Marvel and was about a Marvel universe all gone wrong - Peter Parker dies from a strange disease caught when he was bit by a spider, the Hulk is locked up in a subterranean bunker because he's nothing but a cancerous mess, Magneto dies when his powers drag a 747 and throw it on his head etc etc. It's really bleak and pessimistic, and in a panel showing a Times Magazine (memory isn't helping. This might not be as accurate as I wanted it to be) we see the headline: GOD FOUND DEAD. God's body found floating in space. Then there's this picture of Galactus.

Again, you have a whole reality pattern that got somehow corrupted after God's departure. Even if we're not meant to take that magazine cover seriously (we know Galactus is not a God, even though he comes close to a deity status), the symbolism is pretty strong. We see a multitude of super-beings stumbling towards their destruction in a world devoid of sense. Disintegrating.

As a side note, notice how, if Galactus is God, then the Silver Surfer would be the Devil, cast away and imprisoned within the limits of Earth till the end of times etc. Only that SS is an enlightened spirit, (Lucifer = light-carrier) a noble soul, who will confront Galactus many more times in the future. And Galactus/God isn't good, but is not evil either.

Galactus/God is the avatar of the current status quo and represents the state of "orderly chaos" that permeates the Universe (i.e. it is chaotic... until you step back a billion light-years and see the whole intricate machinery/organism). Some religions envision the Deity as the Universe itself (see Tetsuo in the end of Akira); Thus, in this case, Galactus/God would be a smaller representation of its intricacies and ways of working - not being "good" or "evil", both terms being human contructos, but Being What It Is (I Am What I Am). Reed Richards, who was his defense attornay a long time ago, claimed that Galactus' role was paramount to the maintenance of a healthy Universe.

So here in this comic book you have a slice of theology that is much more complex and filled with subtleties than our standard Judeo/Christian pantheon, with its dychotomies and inconsistencies, an all fire and brimstone God in The Old Testament vs. an All loving hippie scum in the New Testament...

What about the scenarios where the creation cannot survive without the Creator?
 
 
Jack Fear
02:04 / 22.02.03
The English title of the comic Jade mentions is RUINS: conceived as a sort of reply to Kurt Busiek's treacly MARVELS, it was written by none other than Warren Ellis, notorious atheist that he is.
 
  
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