Quote:
Originally Posted by Johny Joe Hold
Marvel has issues with God (religionunplugged.com)
Quote:
|
“Thor: Love and Thunder” debuted in theaters July 8, 2022. Image via Marvel Studios. (ANALYSIS) The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a new big bad. And it’s God Himself. In the past 14 years of pop culture dominance, Marvel movies have typically gone out of their way to be secular, keeping their social commentary to the sociopolitical. But no more. Over the past year, most of the Marvel movies or shows released have had some version of God as the main villain. Since Marvel movies are arguably the most dominant pop culture franchise in the world today, exploring what they have to say about God tells us something about what our culture thinks about God and gives us the opportunity to explore and to challenge it. So what do Marvel movies say about God? God is evil The first thing about how Marvel consistently portrays God characters in their movies and shows, as I alluded to earlier, is that they are all beings that present themselves as good but are secretly awful — and usually evil. In “Loki,” the villain is He Who Remains, a supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing being whose primary goal is to keep order in time and space by making sure that all events go according to his cosmic plan and erasing anyone from existence who deviates from that plan. Then it’s exposed that he’s really a time traveler named Kang who kidnapped people and brainwashed them into joining his time cop force to enforce his preferred timeline. In “The Eternals,” The Celestials are immortal gods who created every living thing in the universe and say they created the angelic Eternals to protect the humans of Earth from demonic Deviants. In reality, they created the Eternals to help humans evolve so the humans could help the planet give birth to a new Celestial — destroying the Earth in the process. In “Moon Knight,” the prophet of the god Ammit is the main villain. Ammit wishes to return to Earth to kill everyone who will one day become evil before they have a chance to commit that evil. She’s opposed by Konshu, a god who abuses and manipulates Marc Spector/Steven Grant — two sides of a man with a split personality) into being his avatar in order to stop her. In the process, Konshu becomes nearly as brutal as Ammit until Marc and Steve stand up to him. In “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the villain is Gorr the God Butcher. He is a pious believer in his god before all his people are wiped out and his daughter dies of starvation while his god does nothing. When Gorr meets that god, the god laughs and tells him his life is meaningless. So Gorr kills him and goes on a quest to kill all the gods. When Thor tries to stop him, he tries to enlist the aid of other gods, who turn out to be self-absorbed hedonists who don’t care about stopping Gorr as long as they are safe. All of this should sound very familiar to anyone who grew up in a religious household who either walked away from the faith or knew people (or watched celebrities) walk away from the faith. There is a reason that young people are increasingly leaving religion: They were taught that God is good, loving, powerful, frowns on homosexuality, frowns on premairital sex and created them in six literal days. Then they suffered deeply, had sex, met gay people, were abused by the church, learned about evolution, learned their church’s oppressive and violent history and watched their fellow Christians behave likewise. They became convinced that the God they were taught about isn’t real or is more evil than good. This is a microcosm of how the West fell away from belief in God more generally. Generations of corruption in the church and the government gave way to the Protestant Reformation and religious wars, then increasingly disillusioned Enlightenment and existentialist thinkers tried to rebuild society on more secular grounds. In this way, the rage against god in our culture — including Marvel movies — is really a centuries-long rage against institutions that have let people down. Most Americans today are rapidly losing trust in our institutions. Plenty of Marvel movies reflect that, too, as many other villains are big businesses, the military, U.S. intelligence agencies and more societal structures. In many ways, the gods of the MCU are simply larger-than-life versions of those institutions we are all regularly disappointed and oppressed by. Kang, Zeus, Khonshu and the like are all priests, politicians, bureaucrats and father figures who rule over and lie to the people they serve about who they are in order to maintain their power. But the rage against God in these movies and our culture also goes deeper than simple rage against institutions. It becomes rage against existence itself. The Celestials of “The Eternals” don’t so much resemble institutions as they do the natural order of the world: the cycle of creation and destruction that will eventually wipe out the memory of everything that ever lived. Gorr’s rage against the gods is first a rage against his child’s suffering and eventual death. Rage against the unfairness of existence has long been a part of the human experience, but it has increased dramatically in its intensity. Carl Trueman’s “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” notes that in ancient times, people generally saw reality as good and justice as conforming one’s desires to reality; in the modern day, our desires are seen as good, and justice is to conform reality to our desires. The transgender debate is a good example. In previous ages, if your mind and body disagreed, your mind was wrong. Today, if your mind and body disagree, your body is wrong. This has dramatic implications for how Marvel — and our culture — conceives of morality. Traditionally, we see heroes who rebel against an evil authority as actually doing so in order to submit to a higher authority. Martin Luther King Jr. justified disobeying state laws by saying they were superseded by higher natural laws. For Marvel heroes, they might be disobeying their governments, but they do so in order to obey a higher principle, like the famous adage “with great power comes great responsibility.” But when all the highest authorities in the Marvel Universe are evil or amoral, where do you get your morality? Marvel answers through the law of subjective human caring and intuition. The Eternals defy the gods because they care about the humans they’ve built relationships with. Moon Knight tells the god Ammit that he won’t join him because it’s just obvious that killing babies is wrong. Thor helps Gorr realize that he doesn’t need to kill the gods because what he really wants is to love and be loved. These heroes have an internal morality that is based on their subjective values and yet that subjective and internal morality is portrayed as superior to the edicts given by the gods. What makes them heroes is when they follow that internal guide to defy their external authorities.
|
|
There were countless paragraphs after that but I think you can see where I stopped reading.
I blame the heavy metal. How often at some goth or
EMO event have we seen these creatures expressing their individuality by all looking the same? They luuuurrve Thor, and that other one whatever his name is. Clearly although God is not Thor, this alternative universe is presenting Him as such. Alternative lifestyles do not glorify God. Do they glorify Thor? Or Isis? Or Hanuman? The metal community think so and clearly something has gone wrong with their brains if, when looking at the world and seeing something different from that described by the latest guru,
they conclude that something's wrong with reality rather than with their brains. Reality has one very useful feature: reality is never wrong; for these pagan god alternative universe types, it's not a feature. It's a bug.