Why worry about social justice when in heaven everything is fine?

In case anyone hasn't heard of "In Heaven" (The 'Lady In the Radiator' song from the David Lynch movie 'Eraserhead') you can see the original here, or you can see a rather disturbing combination of the Pixies cover with scenes from the movie here or you can listen to the Pixies cover in the fairly tame vid under the cut. Decisions decisions, eh?
( Pixies vid under the cut.. )

So anyway, I saw the following vid of Glenn Beck on cyranothe2nd 's blog (see original entry here) and unsurprisingly they haven't posted it on atheism because it's the same typical BS we'd normally expect from the guy (though someone else has decided to put it there anyway, along with an explanation of where the children singing about Obama came from). After all this is guy who said that Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" and then claimed it was an unfair attack on him to ask what he meant by 'white culture'. However, when I went through the various things that bothered me a particular line at the end reminded me why I object to the concept of a God so strongly.

Towards the end he says the following (at 3:55 in the video):

"Maybe we need to stop looking for more social justice and start looking at eternal justice."

Essentially this boils down to "let's stop worrying about making life better and instead focus on hell". And for Glenn Beck this also most likely means thinking about how much more comfortable he is than the poor while he's alive, followed by thinking about how much more comfortable he is than the damned once he's dead. As I said in the title, why bother when everything in heaven will be fine?

There's a classic section from Nietzsche where he explains this religious sentiment:

In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell: “Eternal love also created me. Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its “eternal blessedness” it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand “Eternal hate also created me”—provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of that paradise? . . . Perhaps we might have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint:

And, to quote from Aquinas' own text as it is translated today rather than giving you Nietzsche's own translation:

Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.

( More of my typical rants about Nietzsche. )

Asides from Nietzsche's philosophy, which has a big influence on me, another thing which came to mind when hearing this phrase from Glenn Beck was the beat poem "Dope" by Amiri Baraka (you can find the words of the poem here, but it's important to hear how it is read). If you are not used to beat poems you may find the beginning a little weird, but give it a couple of minutes and I think you'll find you get the hang of it:

And another thing... If Glenn Beck is upset by the "battle hymn of the republic" tune being misused, he'll be especially upset by the first song I linked the tune with: "He jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute." The version of the song I recognise has lines like "they scraped him off the runway like a lump of strawberry jam", but it looks like the following is possibly an earlier version.

( Read more... )

The Mist - Movie Review (+ "Torchwood - Children Of Earth" Review)

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(The following review includes a short summary of the endings of the four Doctor Who series, each one written by Russell T. Davies. Spoiler tags are made as clear as possible and the relevant section is placed after the main body of the review and my rating for this TV series. You have been warned. As always there will be as little in the way of spoilers for the programme I am actually reviewing as possible.)

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