On conscience in V

Greetings.

Jewish date:  22 ’Iyyar 5770 (Parashath BeHar-BeḤuqqothay).

Today’s holidays:  Day 37 of the ‘Omer (Judaism), Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Guiness (The Stout) (Church of the SubGenius), National Day Of Reason (Humanism), National Day of Prayer (USA).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Sign the Petition | Terror Gap” and “Samsung: Come Clean About the Hazards in Your Workplace - The Petition Site”.

Topic 1:  The latest episode of V, “Hearts and Minds”.  This episode puts Father Jack through a wringer.  Our heroes shoot down what is supposed to be a V craft without any humans aboard, and in the wreckage they find what are apparently bones—human bones.  While no one is particularly happy about this, Father Jack, being a priest, is distraught.  He is very explicit that preservation of human life is paramount, and he cannot bring himself to deliberately endanger humans.  He even tipped off Chad (who is turning into a double agent) not to be aboard any V crafts the day our heroes planned to shoot one down.  At the end of the episode Father Jack insists that even though they are at war, they must not let the Vs compromise their principles.

Also:  In his distress, Father Jack talks to his bishop without actually specifying what he feels guilty about.  The bishop, while all for confession (they are Catholics, after all) tells him that if what Father Jack feels guilty over having done is a matter of (state) law, he should make a “different kind of confession”, that is, go to the police.  Intuition suggests this is a reflection of how the real-life Roman Catholic Church should have handled cases of suspected sexual abuse by priests.  We can only hope that real Catholic clergy will act this way in the future.

Also:  Lisa seems to be developing a conscience.  She looks disturbed at a human being subjected to the V version of abduction and probing.  (Think of cliché alien abduction scenarios which make more sense in terms of paranoid fantasies rather than ways to gain knowledge of humans.)  Furthermore, her feelings for Tyler appear to be genuine, and in an effort to apparently spare him being tortured or whatever Anna have in mind for him, she breaks up with him and then tells Anna that she has failed to convince him to live aboard the V mothership.  Anna, however, climbs to the next level of being a psychopath.  Her response is to punch Lisa in the face so hard as to leave a bruise, and then she orders one of her guards to break Lisa’s legs.  The point of this is to claim that Lisa was attacked by the Fifth Column and to lure Tyler into trying to help her.  I have to admit:  the writers are definitely doing a good job of making Anna scary.

Topic 2:  The daily dose of anti-Semitism:  “BBC's Non-Response to HR Report”.  Essentially the BBC tried to bluff their way around a serious bias problem.

Topic 3:  “Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish” and “A Sampling of Chinglish”.  This article and slide show are about translation gone horribly wrong due to people relying too much on dictionaries and not enough on people who know English well.  This should be a warning to anyone underestimating the importance of good translation.  Try to envision the level of disaster when stuff like this happens to religious texts.

Topic 4:  For today’s religious humor: “Crossin’ bridge to holy grail, BRB”:

I think there may be something of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this one.

Peace.

Aaron

V is for “five”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  12 ’Iyyar 5770 (Parashath ’Emor).

Today’s holidays:  Day 27 of the ‘Omer (Judaism), Festival of Ridvan (Bahá’í Faith), Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Jethro Tull (Church of the SubGenius), Universal Ordination Day (Discordianism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Close the Gun Show Loophole - The Petition Site”.

Topic 1:  The latest episode of V, “We Can't Win”.  (Yes, I know I have to get around to reviewing these things faster.)  This is not a heavily religious episode, but there are two items of note.  The first is that Father Jack uses his position as a priest to get to talk to a person of interest on his deathbed.  (Think last rites.)  The second is that Chad metaphorically calls Anna a god, which certainly fits in the image she works to create for herself.  Anna strongly implies in a retort that if she is a god, Chad is her prophet, which works considering his position as her favored reporter.

Side note:  It has occurred to me that the name of the Visitor opposition group, “Fifth Column”, is extremely appropriate.  After all, the Roman numeral for 5 is V.

Also:  Someone prod me on faster reviewing in general.  I finished The Color of Magic (Discworld Series, book 1) by Terry Pratchett the other day, and I need to start writing up a review on it very soon before I bury what I read under thoughts of the next book in the series, The Light Fantastic.

Topic 2:  Daily dose of anti-Semitism:  “Could Hamas Be Any More Disgusting?”  I really cannot make up anything this lopsided.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor:  “devil skwerl”:


Peace.

Aaron

V is for “values”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  4 ’Iyyar 5770 (Parashath ’Aḥare Moth-Qedhoshim).

Today’s holidays:  Day 19 of the ‘Omer (Judaism), Third Sunday of Easter (Roman Catholicism), Feast of St. Lady Macbeth (Church of the SubGenius).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Health Care for America NOW! | End unjust, sky-high premium increases”.

Topic 1:  The last three episodes of  V, “Welcome to the War”, “Pound of Flesh”, and “John May”.  (I know I am tardy in reporting.  I got behind due to Pesaḥ, and I hope this will be a start towards catching up.)  The resistance is taking morally questionable, desperate actions.  This is to be expected in war.

More interestingly, the V leader Anna is being filled out as a disturbing character.  She has a severe lack of empathy, and she sets out to purge the Vs of anyone who fails a test for lack of empathy, lest such people have qualms about whatever the Vs are trying to accomplish on Earth.  So lacking in compassion is Anna that she orders those to fail the test to commit suicide, even if they have never shown the least sign of rebellion.  Not to mention that after mating with a V with the intention of producing soldiers, it is strongly implied (though not actually shown) that Anna eats her mate.  Coupled with the revelation that “Bliss” is a form of emotional control, there is enough evidence to believe that is any sane, functional society of sentient beings, Anna would be locked away in a mental hospital for being a psychopath with a goddess complex.

Tangent:  Given that the Vs live under a dictatorship, they may well be in a period of technological stagnation—despite all appearances of them being advanced.  Innovation requires freedom to question.  Anna wants to be obeyed without question, and she is prepared to slaughter anyone who gives the least hint that they may ever question her.  This is not a good setting for progress.

Also brought up in the question of when it is morally acceptable to lie.  Most notably, Ryan has been lying to his girlfriend Valerie—enlisting her obstetrician to lie, too—about the baby she is carrying.  Unfortunately, the writers decided to go ahead with the original series’ bad idea of human-V hybridization (the chances of which being possible are dwarfed by the probability of successfully crossing a human and a cabbage), and Ryan initially hides the fact that the baby is not normal human and sneaks a supplement into her tea so that they fetus does not kill her.  Eventually he changes his mind about lying to her, leaves her a packet of information about what is really going on, and expects to be dumped.

Topic 2:  “A Surprising Reward for Abstaining from Lashon Hara”.  This short article deals humorously with the importance of correct translation.

Translations for those who do not know Hebrew:

• Lashon hara‘ is any needless speech which is true but which may be harmful.
• A moreh is a teacher.
• Gan is short for gan yeladhim, a literal translation of “kindergarten”.

I will not spoil the punchline here; you will have to read the article yourself.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor:  (courtesy of Mike) a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic:

(Yes, you are getting a break from LOLcats today.)  This cartoon is clearly simplified, but there is a kernel of truth in it.  Often people will think only in terms of the last link in their tradition without asking about the whole chain.  At the top of the depicted chain is Jesus.  At the bottom of the chain is someone from the much loathed Westboro Baptist Church.  Why is Jesus so unhappy in the last panel?  As best as I can remember, Jesus says nothing about homosexuality in the canonical Gospels; even if I am wrong, it is not something which Jesus put much emphasis on.  “God hates fags”, virtually a slogan among the Westboro Baptist Church, simply does not reflect anything Jesus reportedly said.  Jesus complains about competing Jewish groups, but he never attacks anyone for having the wrong sexual orientation.  Even if Jesus does not approve of homosexuality, which would be normal for an observant Jew, he is very compassionate towards sinners.  Think “Do not judge, lest you be judged” and “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone”.  The Westboro Baptist Church has failed to look back towards the top of the chain to check whether their views actually derive from that of Jesus.

Peace.

Aaron

V is for “vaccine” and “vitamin”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  9 Kislew 5770 (Parashath Wayyeṣe’).

Today’s holidays:  Thursday of the Thirty-Fourth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Day of the Covenant (Bahá’í Faith), Yaum-Arafah (Islam).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Take Action: Tell President Obama to Save Rainforests and Stop Climate Change”.

Topic 1:  V (new series), episode 4:  “It’s Only The Beginning”.  This is more of a moral/ethical episode than a theological one.

A) There is a focus on the Vs performing medical miracles—apparently a reason a lot of people like the Vs—with the announcement of plans for them to distribute a new “vitamin shot” to boost the human immune system.  This should raise a question to anyone in the sciences:  is anyone doing proper studies to make sure V medicine actually works on humans better than human medicine or placebos?  Yes, there are “miracles”, but the unexpected sometimes happens in medicine.  For all we know, some of the “miracle cures” of the Vs are spontaneous remissions which the Vs take credit for.  Furthermore, is there any followup being done to track complications and side effects?  So far none of the characters seems to have thought about this issue, though they actually examine the “vitamin shots” and find out they contain——vitamins.  Seemingly ordinary influenza vaccine, however, may have been contaminated, and so the resistance takes a vial and destroys the rest.  It is not revealed why the Vs are tampering with influenza vaccines, but tampering with medicine certainly violates medical ethics.  (General rule in medical ethics:  never do anything to anyone without their informed consent.  But since the Vs are definitely doing naughty things in secret, this violation should be no surprise.)  Medicine is also used to try to control the reporter Chad Decker.  While reporting on V medical technology, he is scanned by a V medical scanner.  The Vs tell him that he will have a brain aneurysm in six months which human technology cannot detect.  There is a waiting list for V medical treatment, so there is an implication that he will have to do something for the Vs to save his life.

B) Questions of morality in in war are showing up, as they should.  Father Jack is asked if he is a priest or a soldier while he gives some emergency medical aid.  He has been both at the same time—he was an army chaplain and did two tours in Iraq.  Christianity has for the most part outgrown its militant past, and  it is a past that many consider a mistake.  Father Jack clearly feels awkward, even if his behavior is justified.  His problems are nothing compared to those of the Fifth Column, the Vs’ internal resistance.  One of the Fifth Column killed a V sleeper agent.  In order to spare the guilty party from Anna’s wrath, another of the Fifth Columnists took credit.  To make things really conflicted, Anna ordered the true guilty party, a medical officer, to inflict the punishment on the one who took credit:  skinning.  (Anna is not a nice humanoid lizard creature.)  The V who took credit justified himself to the true guilty party on the grounds of who was expendable and who was not and demanded that the true guilty party do as Anna ordered him.  He complied, but he was clearly forcing himself to do it.

C) Anna seems to have a messiah or goddess complex.  She does not tolerate “disharmony” among the V.  (See the above bit about skinning a rebel.)  Also, at the end of the episode, she sits naked(!) on a lit platform and apparently broadcasts good feelings which include her claiming to be wonderful (“bliss”).

This wraps up the series until March.  Things are not quite as bad as they seemed based on the pilot episode alone, but there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made.  In particular, the sudden reaction of many humans to the arrival of the Vs to start going to church still remains to be explained.  Fortunately there is hope that this series will turn out alright.

Topic 2:  Eastwick, episode 8:  “Paint and Pleasure”.  Theological progress is made by Roxanne, who has a vision of herself wearing a fancy necklace and snogging Darryl.  (And, yes, I have watched too much British TV.)  Soon afterwards Darryl presents her with the necklace and holds a party to introduce her paintings to the critical world.  The party is a success, with a critic praising Roxy’s art and noting all the paintings have been sold.  Roxy does end up snogging with Darryl, but she terminates the snogging session to go back to the party; she recognizes that the vision was of snogging, not going any further than that.  Therefore, even if fatalism rules in this world, the only thing she knows she must do is snog Darryl.  She later decides to go further with Darryl, but changes her mind once he stupidly hints that he was the one who bought her paintings.  (Good for the writers.  Darryl’s evil and sort of slimy.  He should not be getting what he wants.)  Roxy also gets a vision while looking at a painting of hers that was not at the party; she sees a dagger dripping blood.  The rest of the magic in the episode is fairly ordinary for this show.  Joanna, feeling depressed, mesmerizes a homosexual man into sleeping with her in Darryl’s bathroom.  Kat unpremeditatedly causes strong wind, strong enough to overturn a baby grand piano, when she sees her ex-husband snogging with his new girlfriend.

Topic 3:  More religious humor:  “Breaking News”.

I still have no idea why black cats are associated with evil.  Black = darkness = evil (opposite of light = good) makes enough sense, but why cats in particular?  Any enlightenment would be much appreciated.

Peace.

Aaron

V is for “validation”!

Greetings.

Jewish date:  1 Kislew 5770 (Parashath Toledhoth).

Today’s holidays:  Ro’sh Ḥodhesh (Judaism), Dedication of Churches of Peter and Paul and Saint Day of Rose Philippine Duchesne (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of Adam Weishaupt and Feast of the First Initiation of the Prophet (Thelema).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Tell Congress: Being a Woman is Not a Pre-Existing Condition - The Petition Site”, “Free Press: media reform through education, organizing and advocacy:”, “Take Action: Tell American Funds to become genocide-free | Save Darfur”, and “MoveOn.org Political Action: U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Stop Protecting Rapists”.

Topic 1:  Episode 3 of the new V, “A Bright New Day”.  Theologically the only thing new is Father Jack hearing V-related confessions and feeling very uncomfortable.  Considering he is part of the resistance, I cannot blame him.  He ends up doing grunt-work and leg-work to hunt down people who were at the ill-fated resistance meeting, feeling he needs to do something towards fighting the Vs.

On the bright side, this episode makes a start towards filling in the huge blank spots in the background (the “validation” in the post title).  It is revealed that some of those protesting the Vs are doing so because several thousand humans died in the disturbances which accompanied the arrival of the Vs.  This gives the V leader Anna a public relations disaster to deal with.

Also:  Considering all the revelations they have had already, I am shocked that they have not come out and revealed that the Vs came to Earth to eat humans. Intuition suggests either that the revelation-happy writers had not decided this far into the series what that secret purpose is or that first episode may have been a (rushed) attempt to lull us into making us make bad assumptions so we feel surprised when the assumptions are violated.  What this new secret purpose is is anything but obvious, though the promo for next week’s episode suggests it may involve medical experimentation, which would be an ill-considered ripoff of a Star Trek:  Voyager episode.

Topic 2:  “Gaddafi preaches to Rome beauties”.  This just struck me as a creative form of bait-and-switch.  As it is written:

A group of party girls got more than they bargained for when they were recruited to attend a posh do in Rome on Sunday night.

Instead of canapés and cocktails, the 200 young women found themselves being encouraged to become Muslims.

While an interesting form of attempted proselytism, it runs afoul of the generally accepted virtue of truthfulness.  I will leave it to Muslims to decide whether any rules of Islamic morality were actually violated.

Topic 3:  “Why I Murdered 13 American Soldiers at Fort Hood: Nidal Hassan Explains It All to You”.  This article explains what Nidal Hassan was thinking when he shot his comrades at Fort Hood.  A link to a presentation he gave on Islam is included, complete with references to canonical Islamic source material justifying violence.

Peace and happy new month.

Aaron

V is for “vacancies”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  24 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Ḥayye-Sarah).

Today’s holiday:  Saint Day of Martin of Tours (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “ColorOfChange.org:  Murdoch: Make a choice”.

Topic 1:  “CBC Promotes False Barrier Analogy”.  The PR jihad against Israel goes on, and this article talks about why it makes no sense to compare Israel’s anti-terrorism barrier to the Berlin Wall.  Also in jihad-related sloppy thinking, the Dry Bones cartoon “Face It” deals with the reluctance of many to acknowledge that the Fort Hood shootings were an Islamic terrorist attack, despite the evidence that it is.

Topic 2:  Given some criticism I received on my review of the pilot episode of the new V last week, I think I need to clarify my position on the series.  The plot and characters are not necessarily bad.  For all we know, the writers may have even avoided two major blunders of the original V:  the Vs eat humans, in which case their operation is much more complex than they really need it to be to accomplish this, and there is a human-V mating which produces live offspring, which in real life is almost certainly impossible.  The real problem is that there are huge gaps in the story, the “vacancies” of this post’s title.  While we have some idea what some of the main characters are thinking, we have practically no idea why most of the people in this series believe and act the way they do.  Much of the time, it is not even clear what the Vs are doing other than secretly plotting against humanity.  Without much of a background, it is very hard to appreciate the show as a whole.  If the new V survives past the four episodes planned to be shown this year, I hope they will make an episode dedicated not to moving the plot along but telling us what humans in general are thinking and what the Vs are doing on Earth which makes humans love or hate them; this could be done plausibly in the form of a documentary hosted by reporter character Chad Decker, who already has reported on the Vs.

The latest episode, “There Is No Normal Anymore”, does not introduce any new theological ideas.  It does, however, deal with the moral issue of trust.  FBI agent Erica Evans and Father Jack Landry, who were present in the last episode at a resistance meeting which was infiltrated and attacked by the Vs, are naturally unsure whom they can trust.  There is evidence that Vs have been on Earth for decades, disguised as humans, and knowing who is really human and who is a V without more physical examination than most people would casually submit to is impossible.  This leads to questions of when to hide information or lie.  What they ultimately decide they must keep doing, despite the unanswered trust and deception questions, is to get to the bottom of what the Vs are really up to.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 3:  Chapters 20-23 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  Chapter 20 deals with Mary Malone, still in the world of the melufa, turning her crude optical device to see Dust into a more proper spyglass and ascending to the tops of the wheel seedpod trees to see why they are slowly dying.  Apparently currents of Dust in the sky have changed and are no longer raining much Dust down on the wheel seedpod tree flowers to fertilize them.  Don’t ask me to explain the physics of this; it makes no sense to me.


Meanwhile, Lyra, Will, and two elf-like beings known as Gallivespians, following Lyra’s death, reach the shore of a river, where they meet the boatman who takes people to the land of the dead proper.  They all go, but in the process, they have to leave their dæmons behind.  This is a huge blunder on Pullman’s part.  The dæmon is supposed to be the soul, and if that is not what goes to the land of the dead, what does?  Furthermore, Lyra and company really do not act differently when they go on to the land of the dead; they just feel horrible.  In any case, the land of the dead itself is as dark and dreary as the waiting area, only it is fenced in and guarded by harpies, who do little more than be insulting.  (Notice the ancient Greek religion theme going on here.)  With the help of Will’s knife, Lyra and company get past the front gate, only to find more of the dark bleakness, inhabited by the physically insubstantial dead, who do little more than sit around quietly and get insulted by the harpies, who know all the bad things everyone has done in life.  Despite promises that the Authority will reward and punish the dead, there is only punishment by the harpies in this domain.  It is so bad that Lyra and Will plot to let the dead out into another world—and even though the result will be oblivion for the escapees, most of the dead prefer it to remaining in the land of the dead.  None of this sounds particularly like the Christian afterlife, so chalk up another demerit to Pullman.


Peace.

Aaron

V is for “vile”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  17 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Worthy cause of the day:

Topic 1:  Chapter 14 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  We are told that the Specters, barely visible creatures which haunt the world in which Lyra Silvertongue and Will Parry met and attack adults, eat Dust.  I have no clue why Pullman put such things in his trilogy, expect maybe as an obstacle to be overcome.  Furthermore, the shaman John Parry/Dr. Grumman, makes use of his powers to create a storm and destroy enemy zeppelins.  This should not be a surprise, since in this trilogy witches also have real powers.  Also like witches, John Parry’s dæmon can go much further away from him than a normal human’s can.

Topic 2:  Last night I watched the pilot episode of  V (new series)—I enjoy science-fiction, including tearing it to shreds when it stinks—and the title of this post should give you a good idea what I think of what I saw.  It came off more as the Cliff notes to a whole season rather than a pilot.  Rather than dealing with how humanity reacts to first contact with an extraterrestrial race at a slow pace, the alien ships arrived, the aliens’ leader Anna introduced herself and her people (the Visitors), promising friendship and advanced technology in exchange for water and some minerals, and then suddenly the plot skips three weeks for no apparent reason and all suspension of disbelief is shredded by psychologically unrealistic writing as too many revelations happen too fast.

What I did not expect was for this travesty to have theological and epistemological aspects, which start with 29 cities on Earth shaking due to approaching Visitor spaceships (shaking added for drama, not physical plausibility).  In a (presumably Roman Catholic) church, a priest grabs some ritual items and runs out of the way of a falling sculpture of Jesus on the Cross.  This is arguably symbolic of the crisis of faith which this priest has three weeks later; he does not understand how to harmonize the existence of the Visitors with Christianity.  Why he feels this and why a crisisless colleague disagrees are never explained.  And it should be noted that in real life the crisis should not occur at all; the Vatican sees no problem with the existence of extraterrestrials, though it is not clear on whether they necessarily suffer from original sin.  Clearly the writers did not do their homework on this issue.  Furthermore, the church is packed with worshippers right after the three week gap.  How the arrival of the Visitors inspired so many people to turn to the Church is not explained.

Bad writing extends to beyond religion.  Humans come off as either pro-Visitor or anti-Visitor, with little in the way of exceptions.  The only thing allegedly good the Visitors bring are some “miraculous” cures and “hope”.  The bad things which the Visitors do are in secret, such as telling a reporter not to say anything to make the Visitors look bad when interviewing Anna or attacking people at a resistance meeting.  Most humans in either faction have little to say about why they believe what they do.  Even outright bad reasons would be better than this.

In short, this pilot dramatically, theologically, and epistemologically sucks.  The writing is so bad that even the dreadful Matrix Trilogy looks like poetry by comparison.

Peace, and please join me in praying that the network executives come to their senses and cancel V.

Aaron