General Discussions

a long wait for a train that don't come

POSTED BY: cozen
UPDATED: Thursday, February 15, 2007 19:17
VIEWED: 6283
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ZOID

Monday, February 12, 2007 8:48 AM

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Originally posted by cozen:
I don't think that Malcolm Reynolds is given to an over-abundance of self love. To wit, "I'm a bad man".

Okay, so maybe I wasn't clear enough when I said 'self-love'. I could have said 'self-interest' or 'self-absorption'. People are disappointed in God or choose not to believe in 'Him' because God steadfastly refuses to perform at our command. We say, "Make me rich, God" and he either ignores us or -- worse yet -- grants that wish to our ultimate ruin. (Be careful what you wish for.) Lastly, Mal says, "I'm a bad man", in reference to a wicked joke he's played on Simon, and he and the crew are laughing. Now he does tell Kaylee, in all seriousness, "I'm a mean old man." Well, he's clearly not old; but she immediately tells him, "You are a nice man, Captain. You always look after us. But you got to... you got to have faith in people." Kaylee knows a good heart when she sees one. As far as Firefly is concerned, if Kaylee pronounces you 'good', then you are good, and no mistakes about it. You might be able to fool her in other ways, but not about matters of the heart.
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...Also, there is no doubt in my mind that Reynolds believes that God exists, and I assume that's likely in standard patriarchial form (no room for "Him" on my boat).
Again, I clearly missed my goal of complete understanding in my last post. People insist on attributing to God a specific sexuality or stereotypical mindset. From God springs all things, including the feminine. Did God create Adam and Eve?

...But when I relate to God, I do so as a man. When a woman relates to God, she should be able to do so as one woman relating to another Woman, from whom everything Female originates. God is all things to all people. Don't get hung up on exterior trivialities like gender, race or socialization. If you do, you never find God, only false idols...

I suspect that Reynolds was raised devoutly Christian, of some variety, by a mama who insisted he get scrubbed and into his Sunday best, three times a week and twice on Sundays. And I reckon he got his penchant for prayer from his mom, too. But when God ultimately 'let him down' in the Battle of Serenity, he took it as a personal affront, instead of, "I'm not really sure why, but God didn't want us to win."

Their cause was just, so why did the Independents fail to win, with the help of God? Surely this must be proof that God doesn't exist, or if 'He' does, that 'He' doesn't care about us. 'He' is an "absentee landlord", as you put it.

I'll answer the question with a thought experiment: How long do you suppose the Jews lamented Roman dominion over their country, before Jesus was born? How long do you think those Jews who came to follow Him lamented His death, and wondered when their salvation from Rome was coming? And yet, within a few hundred years, Rome itself was entirely absorbed by Christianity, in accordance with God's will and 'His' plan. Like I said before, humans have such a short view of things. That's what I mean when I say 'self-absorbed': What's in it for me? Everyone sees themselves as the center of the Universe, the hero of the story. Well, guess what Sunshine, we're not. One hundred years from now, you, all your friends, and all your children will be nothing more than organic material, recycling back into the biosphere. We're each only a cell in the body of Humanity that stretches back into the dawn of our species and reaches forward to our collective end. Try not to be a cancer...

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I consider Reynolds to have reached an understanding whereby he simply doesn't have the time to waste on pondering the journeys that simple folk are required to take to fulfill God's Path, which is anyway assumed as unknown to us mere humans.
Dude... Nobody's got to go looking for The Plan, whether they're "simple folk" or the kings of nations. The Plan comes to us all, whether we like it or not. The only question is, will we be part of the Plan, or part of the Problem?

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...Seems to

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SUPERFLUOUS

Monday, February 12, 2007 1:54 PM

My opinion is ‘not’ that he no longer believes in god. Nor does he even hate god. He despises the very word. My opinion about Mal is that, god for him now is like ashes in his mouth. A stale taste that leave you bitter and alone. The very concept of even hearing god makes his blood boil.

Before Serenity he likely had a life, had believed in life. Now that the war is over, life had no great meaning to him anymore. God is faith, and (in a since) faith is hope. Mal no longer has any hope, so he lost his faith in god. Something I suspect Book realized about Mal almost from the start.

If he denies God than maybe it wont hurt as much.

This is coming from an atheist point-of-view BTW, so I may be looking at this completely wrong. But from watching the show, Mal is a man of god. He just no longer has faith in it. He believes in nothing but making it through the next day…

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ZOID

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 11:40 PM

Superfluous:

Don't know that I agree with every word you wrote -- I think Mal still believes and has hope in many important things -- but, for the most part I'd agree that he lost faith in "god", and that it is because he lost Hope, first.

It's interesting that you're an atheist. Joss is, too, from what I understand.

The point is, though -- as you noted -- that Mal is a man of God, not truly an atheist, per se. He's an apostate. It's an interesting juxtaposition, one of many in the show.

To Joss' great credit, he really draws the inside of a believer's braincase, without making them seem like a caricature in the process. I don't know that I could do so well with the mindset of an atheist. To me, it'd be totally foreign not to feel and see God all around me, and in deepest certainty at the very core of my being...

Respectfully,

zoid

P.S.
My wife is a self-described 'agnostic'. She's not really sure what she believes about the concept of God. She definitely doesn't believe in churches. She definitely does believe in spirits and the afterlife. It's very entertaining when she tries to reconcile these conflicting beliefs...
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"I aim to misbehave." -Capt. Mal Reynolds, Serenity, a.k.a. 'the BDBOF'

COZEN

Thursday, February 15, 2007 7:17 PM

{preamble}

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Originally posted by zoid:
[ Kaylee ] tells him, "Your are a nice man, Captain."

Well, Kaylee prounounces the Cap'n good, River riffs on the Latin definition of "mal". So, he's both good and bad. A complex character (thus not long for FOX's preferred form of ADD television.. but that's been done to death around these parts). A character who is curious enough to venture apparently naive questions from me that warrants an extended, if gently mocking ("Dude", Sunshine", "... you do take figurative things literally") discourse about personal belief. Which, what I perceive as mockery, is water off of this duck's back, as I'm not given to venturing into anything that arouses my interest just because I've no idea or ability as to the how or why of it. Ideas and abilities can be enhanced through practice, which is all I'm doing here. Relax, I take no offense.

(Causal: "philosophical or vernacular sense?" Yer killin' me!

)

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People insist on attributing to God a specific sexuality or stereotypical mindset.

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Try not to be a cancer...

Uh, no, not me. I claimed no such thing. I merely mentioned that Malcolm Reynolds perceived God in such a manner. I'm agnostic lite, in the sense that I don't think that it's impossible to prove the existence of God, although it is true that I'm in that camp that understands any and all gods are inventions of people. Intuitively, that just makes more sense to me. So, given that I'm not convinced in the first place that there is a God, I don't attribute a gender to God, or that he/she/it is or was a landlord (scrolling... scrolling... ah! actually suggested by TDBrown), nor a form that I can comprehend in this lifetime. And I don't think that makes me a bad person, the moral value of which I measure by what I've done with my life and for my offspring. Also, in my tiny life, I have felt incredible levels of awe at the wonders of nature and cosmic incomprehesibiliy, as well as tragic griefs, all without a spiritual grounding. Does that necessarily suggest I'm a "cancer"? I think not. In short, I neither attribute to, nor blame God for my life's travails. {/preamble}

However, given that my meager windows of opportunity to surf this site these past few days have been trumped by traffic gridlocks to FFFn's beach, I've spent some of the resultant free time to ponder various explanations of "God", the most intriguing, to me, of which has been Konrad Zuse's supposition that the entire universe is being, "computed on a computer, possibly a cellular automaton" ( http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html). Which blows my wee mind, the possibility, however remote, that some construct or other, orbiting a starsystem somewhere, is inputting data and outputting instructions on a cosmic scale. Not that I accept that as a better explanation, but as an alternative worth thinking about.

As for the subset of the Jewish nation whose religion transmogrified into Christianity during Roman occupation: it's plausibly an alternative meme, later to become an effective tool of various Nation States, with powerful pshychological tools that offered a balm against oppression in the form of a promised heavenly afterlife? Which eventually became the Roman Catholic Church, and various other institutions of organized religions, which in turn became confusing and hideous tools of oppression? {An irrelevant aside: my personal respect for those who abide by the Jewish faith is that, at the very least, they, in particular, do not seek to convert others to their faith}. We're surely not going to get into the horrid consequences of organized religions, are we?

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The fact that he's named his ship after the 'verse's equivalent of the Battle of the Alamo doesn't mean that he's found his 'serenity', any more than the Texas mission was actually an alamo (a cottonwood tree).

Poor elucidation on my part. Poor conceptualization, even. I mean