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Post by hibernicus on Nov 6, 2009 18:43:34 GMT
I must add that we benefit immensely from the presence of that wonderful comic creation hazelireland on this thread, however worthless his other contributions may be. By the wonderful description of his own style of argument provided in his last post, he gives a display of the comic-grotesque in the true Halloween spirit.
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Post by hazelireland on Nov 9, 2009 8:49:44 GMT
So you choose to ignore my request to rise about insulting people instead of making points by by... insulting me and refusing to engage with my points.
Lovely. This shows more about the kind of person you are than anything I could ever say.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 9, 2009 14:27:15 GMT
Those who remember Redmond's contributions (which included advocacy of geocentrism and maintaining that the church hierarchy had been material heretics for the last 250 years, the true faith being preserved only by himself) may judge his mental state for themselves. I mentioned him because he started this thread in the first place. Since he did argue his views on the basis of internally consistent logic (it was his premises that are whacko) I will gladly describe him as eccentric rather than lunatic. Hazel is very squeamish on this theme for someone who recently suggested on another thread that anyone claiming to see a vision should be sent off to a psychiatrist.
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Post by hazelireland on Nov 9, 2009 16:24:39 GMT
Nope, still not addressing the posts, just the posters. Keep talking about me if you want, but the topic of not me. Get back on topic and address what I have said, rather than letting yourself down by getting digs at the posters.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 16, 2009 13:59:51 GMT
Until I get back to DRACULA here are some interesting discussions from Christian websites about the numerous limitations of Stephanie Meyer's TWILIGHT vampire stories aimed at teenage girls. the first is from TOUCHSTONE magazine's MERE COMMENTS discussion site, and makes the point that despite the series' efforts to promote chastity, Christians should recognise that their view of womanhood is seriously flawed and the feminist critique of them is to a considerable extent correct: merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2009/12/lessons-for-girls-from-twilight-.html#commentsLessons for Girls from Twilight Jordan Buckley over the Resurgence commented on my earlier post on the Twilight vampire series linking to this interesting article from Wired magazine about unfortunate lessons girls learn from New Moon and the rest of the Twilight books and movies. These start with: 1.) If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence. These "lessons" move on to darker, abuse-enabling themes, such as: 7.) It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you. I don't think this is unique (at all) to the Twilight series, but this is an area to which we ought to pay more attention. It's also an area where Christians and some feminists can agree, at least on diagnosing the problem. Images given to our girls and young women often mask a pagan and predatory patriarchy, one in which female worth is seen satanically in terms of sexual availability and attractiveness to men. The answer isn't just to "deconstruct" these images. The answer means providing a compelling counter-narrative about the glory of womanhood. Posted by Russell D. Moore at 04:09 PM | Permalink The second link is to an interview with John Granger, an Eastern Orthodox commentator who used to write on Harry Potter and is now discussing the Mormon subtext in the TWILIGHT series. (BTW Mormons believe marriage lasts for eternity, which is relevant to the series' depiction of a girl who falls in love with a vampire and wants to become a vampire for him.) Some of Granger's individual interpretations strike me as somewhat fanciful (though it should be noted that the view that the evil Italian-based vampire ruling clan in the series are an allegorical representation of the Catholic Church has occurred to many commentators) but he has some good points on the nature of fantasy fiction and what its readers see in it. Extract below. This point strikes me as very perceptive; anyone who has sat through a postmodernist-influenced Arts and Humanities academic course or read Roy Foster's essay collection THE STORY OF IRELAND will recognise the mindset- EXTRACT It’s the commonsense observation that, for a book to resonate with readers, it must reflect and confirm their core beliefs about the world and what it means to be human. When a book sells really well, I think it is reasonable to assume that it has provided an experience that says the way we think is the correct way. The funny thing about this idea—funny to me at least—is that it’s really not possible to entirely step outside the concerns and beliefs of your age. That is to say, everyone, highbrow and lowbrow alike, is advancing the core myth of society. Our current postmodern core myth is (ironically and with no little contradiction) that all societal myths are bad because they both make it impossible for us to see things as they really are and create a necessary division of the world into good guys with power and “others” who are marginalized. Our core evil is thus prejudice resulting from unexamined belief; our core struggle is our inability to know anything for certain, blinded as we are by our beliefs; and our core good is the freedom resulting from a self-actualized choice that transcends our prejudices. I think you will find that all of the novels on the bestseller list reflect these themes and sell well as a result. END OF EXTRACT www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo11/11granger.php
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 18, 2009 18:38:55 GMT
Leaving aside my attempt to summarise the DRACULA plot, here are a few points about its relationship with later adaptations: The version of Van Helsing I have seen which is closest to Stoker's is Peter Cushing in the 1960 Terence Fisher Hammer film. This tends to be best-remembered because it is Christopher Lee's first appearance as Dracula, but in fact Cushing has far more screen-time and carries the story, while Lee is largely peripheral. (I have not seen the later Hammer films, but I understand Lee generally overshadows Cushing in them, for reasons which I will go into later.) Cushing presents Van Helsing as a solitary, priest-like figure who is cut off from mankind by the knowledge he bears, and by the knowledge that his pursuit of Dracula is helping to bring about the deaths of his friends. Stoker's Van Helsing is somewhat more of the excitable and eccentric foreigner (the Coppola films takes this to grotesque lengths and so deprives him of virtually all moral authority), but the loneliness is emphasised in the novel - he has a wife in a madhouse and since his faith forbids divorce he must live a lonely and childless life, and his principal concern is to preserve for others the happiness he can never enjoy himself. Van Helsing is presented as a devout Catholic, whose activities have papal approval. Stoker seems to see catholicism as possessing some sort of archaic power which Protestantism lacks. This is because many Catholic rituals and devotions were much less familiar, more exotic - and for some much more sinister - to British and Irish protestants in the late nineteenth century than was subsequently the case. When a peasant woman gives jonathan Harker a crucifix en route to Dracula's castle, he is as shocked as if he had been handed a witch-doctor's fetish (Stoker presents Harker as coming from exeter - Evangelicalism was very strong in the west Country, and that would include the Protestant view of the crucifix as idolatrous.) To a considerable extent Stoker uses catholicism as a plot device in a deplorably superficial matter. The most offensive aspect of this is that Van Helsing scatters consecrated Hosts around like confetti when exorcising Dracula's lairs - though Stoker does use this point to bring home to the other characters that van Helsing really believes his vampire theory or he would not engage in such a desecration. This aspect of the plot has so far as I am aware not been replicated in most Dracula adaptations (one exception being the 1980 remake of the German silent NOSFERATU by the ex-catholic Werner Herzog) I presume for fear of antagonising Catholic audiences. next I will discusshow changing sexual attitudes underly the transformationof Stoker's zombie rapist into an aristocratic seducer, in some versions more sympathetic than his pursuers.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 5, 2010 12:28:22 GMT
Well, Dracula seems to be a lost cause, at least for the present. Here's a Catholic-traditionalist defence of Halloween from John Zmirak: www.catholicity.com/commentary/zmirak/08634.htmlEXTRACTS It's our very comfort with the queerness and creepiness of the whole soul-body mystery that marks the Catholic faith off from its closest competitors. I grew up loving The Addams Family, without knowing quite why, until one day as an adult I realized: These people are an aristocratic, trad-Catholic homeschooling family trapped in a sterile Protestant suburb! Shunning the utilitarianism and conformity that surrounds them, they face the Grim Reaper with rueful good cheer, in a Gothic home stock full of relics. Indeed, I think I might have spotted several Addamses at the indult parish in New York City… This holiday, the night before the Feast of All Saints, has always been our way of confronting the eerie, appalling fact of death – the uncertainty of our individual fates, our powerlessness before the scythe that cuts down the just and unjust alike. We want – we need – to face these fears, to play on the brink of the abyss, to shudder in "haunted" houses and whistle by the graveyard. The next day, the actual feast day, we should go to Mass and honor the saints – and maybe go to a graveyard, as they do in Catholic Louisiana, to clean up and decorate the place. But skipping the horror and jumping straight to the glory creates the same kind of empty feeling Shakespeare had, and tried to fill with Hamlet. END His suggestion that parents should dress up their children as Annibale Bugnini for Halloween is IMHO just TOO gruesome...
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 5, 2010 12:32:31 GMT
Zmirak may unwittingly have put hsi finger on why a lot of traditionalist Catholics are fans of the horror writer HP Lovecraft, even though Lovecraft was an atheist and nihilist (and a NewEngland WASP with the breed's traditional dislike of South European papist immigrants).
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 5, 2010 16:56:08 GMT
Here is an Eastern Orthodox perspective on Halloween. He argues that although originally a Christian feast it should now be seen as a secular celebration, but can legitimately be celebrated as suchif certain restrictions are observed: orthocath.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/ten-things-i-wont-do-on-halloween/BTW though in the pro-Halloween camp I think the number of revellers who dress/make up as devils (including horns) is unsettling. they may not take it seriously, but they should...
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Post by assisi on Nov 5, 2010 21:54:23 GMT
HalloweenI don't consider Halloween glorifies violence. Particularly now, young children are just as likely to dress up as Spiderman, Buzz Lightyear or the Gingerbread man as opposed to something evil. But Halloween in Derry for example draws in up to 20,000 people on the night and this is because the local Council saw the event as a moneyspinner and marketed it as such in the 90's - prior to that celebration of Halloween in Derry was minimal. Now the talk is of full hotels, paying to get into pubs, nightclubs full etc......unfortunately it was often marred by lots of teenagers ending up in hospital after drinking sprees and violence (although it has improved in the last few years). If we are going to get worried about anything it should be those activities that specifically state they are anti-Catholic (or anti-Christian) or try to twist the Catholic message, for example Philip Pullman's novels or Dan Brown's Da Vinci code. DraculaStoker's mother immersed him in Irish folklore as a child which might give some creedence to the story that Dracula was loosely based on an Irish legend from a townland in Co. Derry: www.ocathain.com/abhartach.html
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 8, 2010 11:41:02 GMT
This thread got started because Remond (who has now left us) denounced Halloween as glorifying evil. I think he picked up this idea from American evangelicals whose anti-Halloween hostility has influenced some American trads - just as I have heard of ill-catechised Trads who have taken up the premillennialist interpretation of the Apocalypse found in stuff like the LEFT BEHIND novels, even though this form of end-times belief is distinctly anti-Catholic, was developed by Evangelicals Protestants such as John Nelson darby who specifically rejected the concept of a visible Church, and has actually been condemned by Rome as heretical. I defended Halloween against redmond, so now I will enter a few caveats to Assisi's more optimistic view. Despite Halloween's religious significance, the way it is actually celebrated nowadays often involves aggressive hedonism, often based on the idea that the devil is the one who has the best time and you ought to be like him - if you haven't seen young adults (often with drink taken) wandering around areas like Temple Bar in Dublin in the evenings before Halloween wearing devil horns (or full devil costumes) and, in the case of the females, wearing "sexy witch" or "Vampirella" costumes then you haven't been paying too much attention. Of course these people do not really believe in the devil or evil as more than a joke (except insofar as some of their celebrations break the Ten Commandments and they take this as a joke) but if you call the devil he may come whether you take him seriously or not. Similarly, there is a camp "dressing-up" element with unpleasant undertones in some of these celebrations. This development I think parallels the way the image of the vampire on cinema and literature has changed. Bram Stoker's original Dracula is about as sexy as the sort of creep who hangs around bars late at night slipping Rohypnol into a girl's drink, and is more like a zombie than what we now think of as a vampire; the image of the vampire as demon-lover seducer derived from the image of Lord Byron (who was portrayed as a vampire by some of his contemporaries). The demon-lover or Don Juan image still implies that to succumb to him is to be destroyed; but after the sexual revolution (by which I mean the formal repiudiation by society over the last five decades that the Christian ideal of abstinence before marriage and fidelity afterwards ought to be the social norm even if widely disregarded in practice) the vampire-seducer increasingly comes to be portrayed as a sexual liberator and the vampire-hunters with their Christian emblems are portrayed as cranks at best, or repressive fascists at worst. (The current TV and novel series TRUE BLOOD, which I haven't seen and have no particular desire to see, apparently portrays the vampires as an oppressed - and ultra-sexy - sexual minority - while their Christian fundamentalist opponents are portrayed as bigoted persecutors given to becoming suicide bombers or sleeping with their own sisters. Oddly enough, while the principal scriptwriters for the TV series are homosexuals, the perpetrator of the original novels is I believe a churchgoer; never was the saying that certain types of American popular religiosity are closer to pornography than one might think more truly illustrated.)
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 8, 2010 11:55:17 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Nov 10, 2010 11:35:10 GMT
This is an easy discussion to miss the point on, but I see the last few posts as leading back to Hibernicus' previous narrative on Dracula and the transition of Stoker's zombie to the more Byronic vampire.
However, I think we are all agreed Hallowe'en is in itself an indifferent thing, but we can be troubled about some of the newer developments. I will not blame commercialisation and Americanisation for everything: it has been the fire service's busiest night for a long time.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Nov 19, 2010 10:32:14 GMT
I think the case can be reasonably made that Hallowe'en glorifies evil, but that it is seriously overstated by many parties.
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Post by flynncreek on Apr 26, 2011 3:11:11 GMT
Does Halloween glorify evil?
It's really a simple explanation. It depends on how you celebrate it.
1. If you like to dress up, go to people's houses and get candy, go to Halloween parties, eat a bunch of candy corn etc..how are you glorifying evil? You're just having fun!
2. If you go to graveyards, try to wake up the dead, light candles, call on the power of the north south east and west, sacrifice blood, read spells etc...then yes you are glorifying evil!
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