It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's writing in which he threads together various bits of historical information to explain current events in a new light, 'The Crying of Lot 49' is a good start for anyone interested but unfamiliar with Pynchon.
I always wondered how Christians were able to square the existence of Santa with the 2nd commandment. Then again, how they can reconcile Jesus with the 2nd commandment is bit dodgy to me too so what do I know.
Of course, but sacrilege is in the eye of the beholder. It used to be sacrilege to own a Bible not written in Latin and for a layperson to read it directly, now many Christians consider any Bible other than the King James version to be sacrilegious. There's no objectivity or rational thought at work, it's essentially cultural norms and politics.
Many Conservative Christians do believe Santa Claus is an attempt by the "atheist establishment" to remove the Christian identity from the holiday, but that's due to a modern interpretation of Santa Claus as a capitalist icon, and the defensive nature of Christian conservatism. No Christian would likely have questioned the "Christianness" of Santa Claus a century ago, when the status of religion in Western society was unquestioned.
Are there any statistics on what portion of parents actually tell their children that Santa is real? I was raised in the Midwest US in the 90s, in a conservative Christian family, and as far as I can remember I never thought Santa was real. My parents confirm that they talked about Santa and wrote “from Santa” on some Christmas gifts, but they never intended us to believe Santa was real.
I also don’t remember belief in Santa to be common among my friends. I remember one friend who expressed belief in Santa as a supernatural being, and everyone poked fun at him for it.
Didn't he drop bags of money down the chimneys of poor people? According to Catholic theology, Saint Nicholas as a saint can also bestow gifts via prayer, i.e. "prayers of a righteous man availeth much." So one could argue the essentials of Santa Claus are true in Saint Nicholas, and parents are not lying when they tell their kid that Santa Claus exists.
Of course, that's disputed. I tend to believe it, however, because the sources which relate the story also add the Nicolas was put in jail for it until he apologized for letting his zeal overcome him. It's not the sort of detail that fabricated accounts would be likely to include, but it's certainly what would have happened had Nicolas gotten a little slappy with Arius.
No. But there are multiple competing, contradictory and vague interpretations of multiple translations and iterations of a "manpage", with centuries of cruft attached.
The Trinity as a concept is basically just annotated with "you are not expected to understand this," possibly because it attempts to describe a state of divine being which is beyond human comprehension, but more likely because it's actually nonsense.
The Athanasian Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon are probably the most relevant, as they deal specifically with Christological questions. The Apostles' and Nicene are valuable, but are too early to have the specifics nailed down just yet. (In historical terms, an Arian or Sabellian would be able to agree with their content without too much equivocation or mental reservation.)
In Christianity, Jesus is God. There is a concept called Trinity which you can read about. Some Christians won’t make images of Jesus and some will.
Santa Claus is a folk tale version of a Christian who lived about 1500 years ago. I suppose you could argue that letting children “believe in Santa Claus” violates the first commandment. Not sure about the second.
While this is true, it's a point of view taken up well after Christianity was established as a way to get around the various conflicts on who Jesus was and how the three different "beings" in the Bible interrelate. Even one of the first teachers of the "They are just all the same thing." was excommunicated by the Church. It took a few hundred years for things to settle into what we have today - which I feel like should cast some doubt for believers on what was actually being taught in the Bible.
Santa has damage reduction 25/+5 chaotic. He's been shot plenty of times by startled homeowners, but none of them have ever previously taken the steps of coalescing solid bullets from Limbo protoplasm and enchanting them to +5.
I never wondered this, because religions accumulate all kinds of internal inconsistencies as they age, and many of them weren't even all that consistent to begin with.
Humans are perfectly capable of holding two mutually incompatible ideas in our heads at the same time. That's how we would determine the winner of a contest between Batman and Ozymandias, or between Godzilla and Voltron, or between James Bond and Jack Ryan, or between Hit Girl and Nikita.
The most psychically significant incarnation of Santa is from the Childlike Wonder Mythosphere, and Jesus is from the Abrahamic Monotheist's Age of Legends. In order for them to even meet, they would have to pierce the boundary between worlds, and perhaps exist together in some mutually neutral dimension. But when they cross over, they have to adopt forms and behaviors compatible with that dimension, which is why they look like paper cutouts in South Park and have no bendable knees in LEGO Universe.
Thanks, great read. It really reaffirms the brilliance of Tolkien's work. Lord of the Rings isn't just a nice story, it's a world with its own mythos and history.
I realize this article is a tongue-in-cheek fan theory. However, it does make me wonder what Tarantino was up to with Pulp Fiction.
The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated. "Finder of lost children" is not an OT motif in general, and certainly not in Ezekiel. Obviously, Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?" Therefore I have to think it was an intentional move on his part, but why?
I think it's a tell that there's a story-under-the-story in Pulp Fiction which lends credence to the other observations. There's obviously something supernatural going on. One of the things I love about the film is that Tarantino doesn't explain anything. He lets mystery stay mystery, as any good story should.
I don't buy the Silmarillion connection. Nor do I think that this movie is a loose retelling of any specific classical tale, ala O Brother Where Art Thou. It's more likely that he doesn't have any specific story in mind, but sprinkled the supernatural element into PF to give it an air of mystery. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
There's nothing supernatural going on, except that the film is a very obvious and self-aware pastiche of, uh, pulp fiction plots. The Ezekiel quote is borrowed from an old martial arts movie, and the characters fully admit they just say it because it sounds cool before killing someone.
I think Tarantino put mysteries into Pulp Fiction for the same reason Scott wrote this post -- the mind likes to make connections where there are none. Scott did this quite deliberately, to entertain us both on the meta-level and on the level. I suspect Tarantino added inexplicable elements so that we as the audience would be entertained by speculation. There's nothing underneath.
If you want to see what happens when the writers lose their nerve and try to explain everything, watch Lost.
Indeed. I went on a bit too long and buried my point, I'm afraid. What I wanted to draw attention to was the self-awareness of the original post: It's entertaining on both levels because although Scott puts a great deal of sincere effort into drawing out the connections, he's also well aware that there's nothing there.
There really needs to be an "engineer plot" genre where plot stays consistent to a small set of made up axioms. "The Strain" made an attempt. It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.
>It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.
Zombies, like vampires in the pre-industrial age, are meant to represent the horrors that lurk beyond the limits of human understanding and control. Although I'm sure some author has attempted to "harden" zombies like that, to me the more you try to explain them, the less effective they are as monsters. Because they don't work rationally, they're demons of the Id.
There is quite some overlap with fan fiction, because people like to "fix" non-rational fiction. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his take on Harry Potter is the prime example. I can also recommend Alexander Wales who also made original fiction.
Probably the oldest related work is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.
Another name mentioned often in this genre is Brandon Sanderson and especially his Mistborn series, but I have not read it personally.
Zombies which don’t rapidly decay and fail make no rational sense, but that kind of zombie also makes for a lousy zombie tale. Zombies represent anxieties about life, death, disease, being eaten alive, etc.
I know someone who once trapped a cockroach in a box and sealed it shut. When the box was opened, years later, the roach was still alive. It had eaten some glue on the inside of the box, and then went into a kind of torpor, simply waiting for either death by dehydration or starvation or an opportunity to escape, whichever came first.
Zombies are like that. They gorge on fatty foods, like brains, bone marrow, and body fat, then go into an induced stasis that outwardly resembles death.
The zombinism vector is undoubtedly an endoparasitic fungus related to Cordyceps. Mycelium spreads throughout the host during the infection, preferentially following existing neural pathways, and flooding the body with antibiotics, to kill native gut bacteria and other possible putrefying factors. The normal digestive functions are destroyed. The regular circulatory system is destroyed. The only elements preserved are sensory organs, muscles, skin, and bones. All other functions are replaced by the fungus. The mycelium, as it followed the existing neurons, actually grows into a replacement brain and nervous system as it destroys the host's nervous system.
The copy isn't perfect, though, and genetically hardcoded structures produce an instinctual desire to seek out and eat more fat. Destroying the head does not actually kill the fungus, but it does remove its ability to create a facsimile of a mammalian brain, by scrambling the template. It could still make the muscles twitch, but would have no means of coordinating them into coherent movements.
I would therefore expect a zombie running low on energy to have almost no fat left, and ascocarps growing out of it all over, like cactus spines. It would probably resemble a spiky mummy. Any rotting appearance would be due to colonies of microorganisms that have evolved resistance to the fungal antibiotics.
So it's not just eating brains, but also not spending as much energy as a human normally does while using the organs evolved to keep a human brain alive.
In 28 days later the zombies all starve to death after six months or so. The hard part is just surviving that long without getting infected. Most zombies in fiction are implied to be supernatural though. So a scientific explanation is unnecessary.
Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?"
This guy did a movie where a Jew kills Hitler. He has shown he has no interest in the question of "What really happened." Re-writing a small bit of the Bible is trivial compared to re-writing the most important event of the 20th Century. His focus is on being interesting and entertaining and he clearly feels that it is fine to put distance between himself and reality to achieve his goals.
> The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated.
The quote comes from a film 20 years earlier, Karate Kiba, not from the OT (despite the attribution in PF).
> The movie Pulp Fiction centers around a mysterious briefcase. We’re never told exactly what’s inside
"Tarantino has admitted that there is no official explanation behind the briefcase’s contents, and that it was simply written into the screen play as an intriguing McGuffin."
I liked the soul theory better i.e. Marcelus's soul was in the briefcase and he sold it to the devil.
The briefcase held a new drug that had been in development for 10 years, ever since Huey Lewis requested it in 1984.
The request that it not spill or come in a pill required a novel delivery system, producing the high via modulated stimulation of the optic nerve, but subtracting the shorter blue wavelengths that might disrupt the circadian regulatory system and therefore keep the user up all night or make them sleep all day. Hence, the golden glow.
Every time someone opens up the case, they are taking an e-drug.
"If you all are anything like me then you had no idea what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. So, through a friend of a friend of a friend who had a two hour conversation with Quentin Tarantino himself, I now know, and I thought I would pass along the information because it makes the movie even 100 times better than it already is.
Remember the first time you were introduced to Marsellus Wallace. The first shot of him was of the back of his head, complete with band-aid. Then, remember the combination of
the lock on the briefcase was 666. Then, remember that whenever anyone opened the briefcase, it glowed, and they were in amazement at how beautiful it was; they were speechless. Now, bring in some Bible knowledge, and remember that when the devil takes your soul, he takes it from the back of your head.
Yep, you guessed it. What is the most beautiful thing about a person: his soul. Marsellus Wallace had sold his soul to the devil, and was trying to buy it back. The three kids in the beginning of the movie were the devil’s helpers. And remember that when the kid at the end came out of the bathroom with a 'hand cannon,' Jules and Vincent were not harmed by the bullets. 'God came down and stopped the bullets' because they were saving a soul. It was divine intervention."
The briefcase held the actual, original MacGuffin and the actual, original Chekhov's gun--which was never fired in the movie. The former was the treasure that had been used as a nonspecific plot device by Sophocles, Menander, and an unbroken line of storytellers, through Shakespeare, and ending with Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, and Quentin Tarantino. The latter had a more recent origin, but somehow ended up in Tarantino's possession without him knowing of its significance.
It is somewhat obvious that Tarantino lost the plot devices some time after production, as they reappeared in fused form 6 years later in "Dude, Where's My Car?"
69 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadAnd now I want to rewatch and reread everything again!
http://unsongbook.com/
tl;dr: Omniscience (of child's deeds), rewarding the good (with gifts) and punishing the bad (with coal).
Many Conservative Christians do believe Santa Claus is an attempt by the "atheist establishment" to remove the Christian identity from the holiday, but that's due to a modern interpretation of Santa Claus as a capitalist icon, and the defensive nature of Christian conservatism. No Christian would likely have questioned the "Christianness" of Santa Claus a century ago, when the status of religion in Western society was unquestioned.
I also don’t remember belief in Santa to be common among my friends. I remember one friend who expressed belief in Santa as a supernatural being, and everyone poked fun at him for it.
Second, by making him an aspect of god...
Basically put God == Jesus
Is there a man page for this stuff?
The Trinity as a concept is basically just annotated with "you are not expected to understand this," possibly because it attempts to describe a state of divine being which is beyond human comprehension, but more likely because it's actually nonsense.
but the former is more like INFO while the latter is more like `man builtins` (that is, it assumes you already know a lot about the system)
The Athanasian Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon are probably the most relevant, as they deal specifically with Christological questions. The Apostles' and Nicene are valuable, but are too early to have the specifics nailed down just yet. (In historical terms, an Arian or Sabellian would be able to agree with their content without too much equivocation or mental reservation.)
Santa Claus is a folk tale version of a Christian who lived about 1500 years ago. I suppose you could argue that letting children “believe in Santa Claus” violates the first commandment. Not sure about the second.
More concerning is their failure to square the existence of Santa with the 2nd amendment.
Humans are perfectly capable of holding two mutually incompatible ideas in our heads at the same time. That's how we would determine the winner of a contest between Batman and Ozymandias, or between Godzilla and Voltron, or between James Bond and Jack Ryan, or between Hit Girl and Nikita.
The most psychically significant incarnation of Santa is from the Childlike Wonder Mythosphere, and Jesus is from the Abrahamic Monotheist's Age of Legends. In order for them to even meet, they would have to pierce the boundary between worlds, and perhaps exist together in some mutually neutral dimension. But when they cross over, they have to adopt forms and behaviors compatible with that dimension, which is why they look like paper cutouts in South Park and have no bendable knees in LEGO Universe.
The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated. "Finder of lost children" is not an OT motif in general, and certainly not in Ezekiel. Obviously, Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?" Therefore I have to think it was an intentional move on his part, but why?
I think it's a tell that there's a story-under-the-story in Pulp Fiction which lends credence to the other observations. There's obviously something supernatural going on. One of the things I love about the film is that Tarantino doesn't explain anything. He lets mystery stay mystery, as any good story should.
I don't buy the Silmarillion connection. Nor do I think that this movie is a loose retelling of any specific classical tale, ala O Brother Where Art Thou. It's more likely that he doesn't have any specific story in mind, but sprinkled the supernatural element into PF to give it an air of mystery. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LYT4JC2dd4
If you want to see what happens when the writers lose their nerve and try to explain everything, watch Lost.
Which is exactly what I concluded.
There really needs to be an "engineer plot" genre where plot stays consistent to a small set of made up axioms. "The Strain" made an attempt. It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.
Zombies, like vampires in the pre-industrial age, are meant to represent the horrors that lurk beyond the limits of human understanding and control. Although I'm sure some author has attempted to "harden" zombies like that, to me the more you try to explain them, the less effective they are as monsters. Because they don't work rationally, they're demons of the Id.
(Also: Leslie Nielsen's first starring role).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot
You will enjoy the book "The Girl With All The Gifts"
Spoilers in link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts
There is quite some overlap with fan fiction, because people like to "fix" non-rational fiction. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his take on Harry Potter is the prime example. I can also recommend Alexander Wales who also made original fiction.
Probably the oldest related work is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.
Another name mentioned often in this genre is Brandon Sanderson and especially his Mistborn series, but I have not read it personally.
Text: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/1/The-Metropolitan-Man
Free audiobook: http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA
From brains. Duh. ;)
Zombies are like that. They gorge on fatty foods, like brains, bone marrow, and body fat, then go into an induced stasis that outwardly resembles death.
The zombinism vector is undoubtedly an endoparasitic fungus related to Cordyceps. Mycelium spreads throughout the host during the infection, preferentially following existing neural pathways, and flooding the body with antibiotics, to kill native gut bacteria and other possible putrefying factors. The normal digestive functions are destroyed. The regular circulatory system is destroyed. The only elements preserved are sensory organs, muscles, skin, and bones. All other functions are replaced by the fungus. The mycelium, as it followed the existing neurons, actually grows into a replacement brain and nervous system as it destroys the host's nervous system.
The copy isn't perfect, though, and genetically hardcoded structures produce an instinctual desire to seek out and eat more fat. Destroying the head does not actually kill the fungus, but it does remove its ability to create a facsimile of a mammalian brain, by scrambling the template. It could still make the muscles twitch, but would have no means of coordinating them into coherent movements.
I would therefore expect a zombie running low on energy to have almost no fat left, and ascocarps growing out of it all over, like cactus spines. It would probably resemble a spiky mummy. Any rotting appearance would be due to colonies of microorganisms that have evolved resistance to the fungal antibiotics.
So it's not just eating brains, but also not spending as much energy as a human normally does while using the organs evolved to keep a human brain alive.
Midichlorians
This guy did a movie where a Jew kills Hitler. He has shown he has no interest in the question of "What really happened." Re-writing a small bit of the Bible is trivial compared to re-writing the most important event of the 20th Century. His focus is on being interesting and entertaining and he clearly feels that it is fine to put distance between himself and reality to achieve his goals.
The quote comes from a film 20 years earlier, Karate Kiba, not from the OT (despite the attribution in PF).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Kiba#Cultural_reference...
I've read The Silmarillion, but not seen Pulp Fiction, so thbbbbbt.
"Tarantino has admitted that there is no official explanation behind the briefcase’s contents, and that it was simply written into the screen play as an intriguing McGuffin."
I liked the soul theory better i.e. Marcelus's soul was in the briefcase and he sold it to the devil.
The request that it not spill or come in a pill required a novel delivery system, producing the high via modulated stimulation of the optic nerve, but subtracting the shorter blue wavelengths that might disrupt the circadian regulatory system and therefore keep the user up all night or make them sleep all day. Hence, the golden glow.
Every time someone opens up the case, they are taking an e-drug.
Remember the first time you were introduced to Marsellus Wallace. The first shot of him was of the back of his head, complete with band-aid. Then, remember the combination of the lock on the briefcase was 666. Then, remember that whenever anyone opened the briefcase, it glowed, and they were in amazement at how beautiful it was; they were speechless. Now, bring in some Bible knowledge, and remember that when the devil takes your soul, he takes it from the back of your head.
Yep, you guessed it. What is the most beautiful thing about a person: his soul. Marsellus Wallace had sold his soul to the devil, and was trying to buy it back. The three kids in the beginning of the movie were the devil’s helpers. And remember that when the kid at the end came out of the bathroom with a 'hand cannon,' Jules and Vincent were not harmed by the bullets. 'God came down and stopped the bullets' because they were saving a soul. It was divine intervention."
https://www.snopes.com/movies/films/pulpfiction.asp
It is somewhat obvious that Tarantino lost the plot devices some time after production, as they reappeared in fused form 6 years later in "Dude, Where's My Car?"