The Big Picture: Nerd Gods

[teknoarcanist]

I still remember the guttural shock I experienced when I realized that comic fans arguing about what's 'canonical' or 'true to the spirit' of, say, Batman, is almost exactly the same as religious authorities arguing scripture. Really the only difference is that we've never thrown wars over it -- but of course, we don't have the compounding socio-political factors which cause that kind of thing.

Although with Hollywood now dominated by nerd-culture and fast becoming the new Leviathan of American Industry . . .




Also
On Christmas:
I know it's trendy to decry Christmas as a capitalistic orgy, but really: what's so wrong about a secular holiday devoted to good will, gift-giving, charity, and kindness towards your fellow man, divorced from any obligation or threat from a higher power to do so? Sound pretty damn good to me!

 

[omegawyrm]

The Church of Gundam

So who is the head honcho?
Katoki?
Tomino?
Char?

THE UNDEFEATED OF THE EAST!

 

[Swaki]

I love Godzilla, but how would you make a religion about him, or rather centred around him, as there are plenty religions who are against science, I'll admit there are plenty of GODzilla movies i have yet to see, but in the simplest way possible he was bullied then got strong and sought revenge, a religion based on that concept would just be allot of angry people taking enhancement drugs.

 

[Xpwn3ntial]

Yay, Church of Haruhi! All hail the allpowerful schoolgirl!

Perhaps Kyon will be some kind of demi-god...

He is our saviour. It works.

I have Haruhiism and the Cult of Cthulhu as my religions. People then ask, "What?" and go look it up.

Nice work, Bob.

The Church of Haruhi Suzumiya?? ok I'll go for that but only if the second season is recognized as false scripture.

Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody was a good episode and The Disappearance movie made up for Endless Eight. Yes, it did. Season two stays.

 

[Cheesebob]

Worship Lord Of The Rings. It has everything: Epicness, songs, very dry style of writing, slighly boring and a different way of writing!

 

[Ashoten]

I always thought it was presumptuous of humanity to try and pin down God to a few definable terms. I mean if God is all powerful and super cosmic then all of our very limited and mortal definitions are going to fall short.

I am a firm believer in cosmic truths, but what all those truths are I couldn't tell you. If you notice in the bible God tends to give commandments to people that are specific to their needs and understanding at the time.

 

[RJ Dalton]

I have no idea how serious you are about this, given the ending of this video, but said ending made watching the whole thing doubly worth the time.
Awesome.

 

[Premonition]

Santa is based off of Sinterklaas, you know.

 

[Kieve]

What, no one's mentioned Jenova's Witnesses [http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=199] yet?

...I'm surprised we don't have them running around here already.
Well, except for the bit about murder.

 

[Twilight_guy]

I know I shouldn't be, but I'm offended by this. I guess it just looks like Bob mocking religion by making it into some trivial thing. I'm sure he's not doing that but I can't fight my subconscious telling me to rage at the notion at worshiping Gundams or superheros. Everyone should be able to believe what they want but my notion of legitimacy is screaming like teething two year old.

 

[kael013]

I don't wanna think about Japan doing this. Do you have any idea how many "holy wars" would break out over the animes alone? *shivers*

Incidentally, all you Jedi out there better watch your backs 'cause the Sith just gained their first member.

EDIT: Pray to whatever deity you want to that no one starts preaching Aes Sedai philosophy. That would be one twisted New World Order.

 

[Dak_N_Jaxter]

The main problem with worshipping fictional characters is that the secular divides would be immense.

Forget Protestant/Catholic/Quaker/Mormon

Even Spiderman would be split up between people who believe there was webbing under his armpits, and those who don't.

That would be..... the Pitts and Shavers..... maybe.

 

[gains]

The whole Xmas v. Christmas thing is weird too. Monks in the dark ages on would sign letters with crosses after their name; a little tribute to the crucifixtion. That shorthand stuck around and lazy monks would scribble in an X instead of writing out Christ. Basically, we're just using shorthand. Also, it was another little practice to kiss the X's, like kissing the statues and icons, so the X's were then associated with kisses. I'm not sure when we added the hugs.

SWAK

PS- Another fun abbreviation of Christ is XP after the Greek letters. Think of that the next time you level up.

 

[darthotaku]

the best part about having anime based gods?

masturbation is ok as long as it's an oficial religious hentai fan fic.

 

[Therumancer]

I think a religion that nobody actually believes in kind of defeats the purpose. The point of religion is faith, and faith can do some impressive things.

When it comes to Christianity and a lot of other religions I think the problem a lot of Atheists and pure Agnostics have a problem with is understanding faith and belief, which is why I doubt you'll ever see a massive migration of philsophy. Something would have to occur to cause people to stop believing.

A religion can't really be killed by an outside force, only from internal ones. The way religions are practiced can be however (ie the destruction of cultures). I mention this in some of my rants about the current wars in talking about how I have no real problem with Islam, but I *DO* have issues with a lot of the cultures that practice it (albiet not all of them), specifically ones in a certain geographic region. This goes well beyond the scope of this video and discussion however.

I'll also say that while there is a fine line between them, there is a differance between religion and philsophy. I'm not sure if I'd consider Buddhism a religion, though it can straddle the line rather closely. I say this because according to my limited understanding Buddhism seems to be a philsophy based around there being no god or divine being. The idea being that after death people's own beliefs and willpower will determine what happens to them. Someone who believes in a god or religion is liable to basically wind up trapped in a limbo waiting for a savior or eternal punishment that will never arrive. Simply put each person has to become their own god (so to speak) in order to move on. Buddha himself not being a god so much as a teacher, whos ascendance allows him to do some rather impressive things, and whose word and examples is supposed to help other people find the way.

 

[thublihnk]

Best episode yet, I absolutely agree.

Sign me up for Batmanology.

 

[abhoho]

Polytheistic pantheons of Gods actually developed around similar times to monotheism (Zoroastrianism)
Jedi is the same as agnostic, which was the point.

Hindiusm is way ahead of you Bob. Hinduism has no dogma or blasphemy, it is aware that its gods are just folklore tales which it uses to represent the metaphysics of its religion, and a way of communicating ethics and metaphysical understandings of the universe.

Agnosticism means: without knowledge. And so Thomas Huxley was almost right when he coined the term, but where he called it a ?method of sceptical, evidence-based inquiry? I believe that Agnosticism is the acceptance of absolute ignorance, and the dismissal of the question "Do you believe in God?" rather than just an answer to it or the passing over of it in silence. We must dismiss it, not ignore it.
I propose we dismiss the question for only a while. Philosophers have attempted to come up with a rational argument for God. But first there are number of propositions that we must fulfil first. As Wittgenstein said ?Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.?
Therefore we need:
1) The definition of God
2) The discovery of rationalism absent of science.
3) Ignore the ?burden of proof? question. The answer is "Everyone."
4) Accept that Atheism is not a scientific position, and should not dismiss the possibility of God. What it must do is continue to discredit the claims of religions. Dismissing the possibility of God needs another name.
5) Accept that we are all agnostic. And that there is no difference between us as we are all equally ignorant and all have the same objective, which is the truth. From this we must then accept Hegel and his approach to knowledge.

(Student of philosophy.)- Oh and if anyone wants an explanation for why we're all agnostics, I have an explanation if you really care.

 

[Misho-]

As soon as I hear the phrase coming of someone's mouth : "I went to Catholic school..." or "Sunday School" or whatever I can almost predict what's coming next... Even with Yathzee...
So I guess they (the catholics) made more damage to their own religion than anyone ever could...

But following your argument, probably in the future survivors of High School for Gifted Students on the weekends will schew the idea of powerful beings telling them how to behave and act in their lives. The X bearers going into war with the MiddleWestern Bat followers because of inner turmoil with the fanatical Spider people. And so on...

Bottomline: people are just dumb (Not a person tho, just people). Religion is cool if you want to have it and that's that. Just don't make your "empires" tumble over because of the weak foundations of your fan fiction of choice.

 

[pigmy wurm]

Have you looked at the work of William Blake, because that is sort of what he tried to do. He basically wanted to re-write The Bible except with different messages in places (Satin was a force of poetic freedom angels were forces of repression and tyranny) and he renamed a bunch of stuff and gave Christianity a Greek-style pantheon. He felt that these books and stories were Holy because we made them holy, but they are holy none-the-less, and he felt Jesus was holy because he was a poet and teacher whether or not he was the son of a deity.

At the time no-one paid much attention to him and thought that he was fairly insane (partially because he probably was). But that is kind of a good thing because if more people payed more attention to him he would have been executed for heresy pretty quickly.

Oh and their is a lot of evidence that many of the Greeks from the classical period didn't actually believe in the Greek pantheon in the way we would. Greek has 2 words for truth/knowledge "mythos" and "logos." Logos are basically scientific truths while mythos would be closer to wisdom. The important thing is that they saw the two as both equal and entirely separate. The Greeks were able to believe that their gods and myths were completely true in the sense of "mythos" without believing that they were "logos" true in a literal sense.

 

[Emergent System]

On Christmas:
I know it's trendy to decry Christmas as a capitalistic orgy, but really: what's so wrong about a secular holiday devoted to good will, gift-giving, charity, and kindness towards your fellow man, divorced from any obligation or threat from a higher power to do so? Sound pretty damn good to me!

It alienates everyone who isn't a christian? Can't go anywhere without hearing some crazy motherfuckers screaming "JEEESUUUS JEEESSUUSSS" our of a speaker in what passes for music during the holiday.