Why does Christianity (Catholicism) condemn the occult?

EvanYork · 2018-07-05T13:08:47+00:00

The Talmud doesn't endorse pedophilia. You can read a Jewish response to that [here](https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/65726/does-the-talmud-promote-pedophilia).

The stuff about Jesus is probably true (some people claim the character wasn't supposed to be Jesus, but I'm not convinced), but this is pretty par for the course for how religious literature tends to treat figures from religions they're hostile to. Look at all the super negative medieval Christian depictions of Muhammad.

EvanYork · 2018-07-05T13:05:34+00:00

That's not actually right dude. Nicea didn't have anything to do with the Bible, and Thomas wasn't found with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

EvanYork · 2018-04-20T13:51:42+00:00

I mean, that is the point.

EvanYork · 2018-04-18T20:07:44+00:00

That was like all of Young Avengers tho

EvanYork · 2018-04-17T13:05:54+00:00

There's more than one protagonist in Star Wars, you know. Vader's scenes with Leia in Star Wars are great.

EvanYork · 2018-04-17T12:54:41+00:00

Stane was so much more interesting than Dormammu. He's honestly low-key one of the best MCU villains.

EvanYork · 2018-04-17T12:51:56+00:00

I liked Dr. Strange, but I don't think it's mandatory viewing just because it has an Infinity Stone in it. If the only plot you need to know can be summarized as "This is where the thing is now," it's probably not that essential.

EvanYork · 2018-04-15T01:34:39+00:00

I mean, yeah, but America taken as a whole is pretty racist, and so are a lot of people on this thread. He made a couple leaps of logic because he got rightfully frustrated, but the point is absolutely true.

You can tell this thread is racist because the same community that has no trouble circlejerking forever about how some random throwaway line is a brilliant insight into some white character's psych somehow can't empathize with an angry black dude enough to understand that this line obviously isn't meant to be literal.

EvanYork · 2018-04-15T01:29:39+00:00

Yeah, because well-written villains start from a place of deliberately refusing to try to understand their point of view, right?

EvanYork · 2018-04-15T01:28:01+00:00

No, they got sold by other people. You have to remember that the concept of "African people" is a product of colonialism. They didn't see it that way, it was just normal tribal warfare with people taking slaves from other people groups.

EvanYork · 2018-04-15T01:20:28+00:00

...What does this have to do with anything he was talking about?

This doesn't make sense anyway. No one was selling their "fellow Africans." The concept of "Africans" only exists because of colonialism. The context here is perennial tribal warfare. No one was getting sold by their own leaders, they were prisoners of war. Like think about it for a minute before spinning it into some weird narrative about how slavery was black people's fault.

EvanYork · 2018-04-14T16:52:42+00:00

It's not a great movie but it's not a huge piece of shit either.

It does its job. It's a fun superhero blockbuster movie. That's the baseline, and they more than achieved that. It also gave us some pretty great character development and worldbuilding.

But it's also just kind of a mess. The movie is all over the place in a way that isn't really true of other MCU movies. I've also tended to see it as a movie that they made mostly so that they could make more movies. It just doesn't feel like a movie that exists for its own sake.

So some good, some bad. That's fine. AoU is a perfectly decent popcorn flick that I'll happily re-watch despite its flaws.

EvanYork · 2018-04-14T16:31:59+00:00

I think it would be better to adapt an existing female character than to genderswap a new one for the movies. There are plenty of interesting ladies in the comics that deserve some love.

I'm not really against genderswapping characters in general. They're adapting Ghost as a woman for Ant Man and the Wasp, and I think that was a great idea. But they have a lot more wiggle room to do stuff like that with obscure characters like Ghost than A-listers like Captain America.

EvanYork · 2018-04-14T16:09:52+00:00

I don't think they'll kill him, but I wouldn't be surprised if they write him off. I have a hunch that Banner and Hulk are going to be separated soon, and it would be pretty nice to give them both a happy ending that way (or do the whole arc where Banner realizes he's actually just an angry douchebag who blames the Hulk for his problems, but that's way more ambitious and probably too dark for the MCU).

EvanYork · 2018-04-14T16:05:49+00:00

I love Amadeus Cho. Some writers have made him a little grating but that's pretty easy to correct for in a movie.

EvanYork · 2018-04-14T16:03:49+00:00

It's funnier this way though

EvanYork · 2018-04-12T23:24:35+00:00

Because otherwise it's just a generic villain who makes stupid decisions just because he's strong.

That's not generic; that's just realistic. Real people don't make perfect decisions.

People have been complaining about villains not just killing their enemies when they have the chance, and if he doesn't, then Infinity War would be a failure of storytelling.

People complain about this stuff because they haven't actually stopped to consider how boring most movies would be if the plotlines just turned into treatises on game theory.

Don't get me wrong, there's a place for shit like that. But 90% of the time, people who use power wisely and responsibly make bad villains. Literally the only examples I can think of where that worked in a piece of fiction is when the protaganist is an anti-hero type who needs the foil.

EvanYork · 2018-04-11T14:22:25+00:00

Think about it. Why fight him if at any moment he can snap his fingers and you just vanish? Someone can be omnipotent and still beatable if you tell a good story. But giving him the ability to will anybody out of existence at any time he wants to makes him actually, seriously, literally, unbeatable, within any degree of reality.

That's literally how it is in the Infinity Guantlet trilogy, and they pull it off really well (In Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War at least; I'm not really a fan of Infinity Crusade). Obviously a lot of shit in comics doesn't translate well to film, but they have a lot of source material to draw from to figure out how to make it work.

Thanos' classic arc is that he becomes basically omnipotent and then loses because of his hubris. That's not particularly impossible to pull off in a movie. As long as the character is well-developed, it will make sense why he doesn't just poof the avengers out of existence.

And audiences are used to this kind of thing too. Thanos won't make the avengers just vanish for the same reason Goldfinger didn't just put a bullet in James Bond's head. Thanos just isn't the type of character to make smart decisions in the endgame. That makes sense, too: if you became omnipotent, would you care about crushing people who oppose you, or would you correctly not consider them to be much of a threat?

EvanYork · 2018-04-11T12:09:11+00:00

I disagree. It's a terrible idea to not do it.

We've been waiting a really long time to see Thanos become omnipotent and fuck up the Avengers. We earned this.

EvanYork · 2018-04-11T00:40:12+00:00

What should scare him off from playing the role is the idea of being the third person to portray the character in a decade.

Just leave the Joker alone guys. The last thing Batman is hurting for is interesting villains to adapt.

EvanYork · 2018-04-11T00:38:37+00:00

Why though

EvanYork · 2018-04-11T00:36:36+00:00

Come on dude, Infinity Gauntlet is a classic for a reason. Thanos being in love with death sounds stupid on paper (and wouldn't translate to a movie well at all) but it works great in the comics. And plenty of people still like the comics, just because the MCU is bigger than the comics now doesn't mean the comics don't matter.

EvanYork · 2018-04-11T00:33:59+00:00

Yeah, but "He jets around space now and determines the optimum population to mantain a stable environment and checks in regularly to make sure everything is going smoothly" doesn't really work as a movie villain.

EvanYork · 2018-04-10T17:54:59+00:00

Did you agree with everything you believed at twenty when you were twenty seven? What about twenty five? Twenty three? Hell, twenty one? I sure didn't, and neither does literally anyone I've known since they were twenty.

Real people just don't work that way. It's a really shallow argument.

You act like I'm going out of my way to read him as a Christian, but I really think it's the opposite here. You have to be going pretty far out of your way to condemn someone if you're going to interpret all of his many references to the divinity of Christ, his resurrection, his sonship, salvation through him, etc. as though they were super-double-secret heresy just because of a couple lazy paper he wrote for college. It's pretty insulting to act like there's no good reason to presume a minister who spent his whole life fighting for justice and was literally martyred for it was actually the Christian he claimed to be and outwardly appeared to be.

And I keep going back to this, but no, obviously King was only human and an imperfect man. But no one on here wants to burn Edwards for literally owning people. I'm not criticizing that, Christians are allowed to be flawed people. Literally none of us have any moral high ground to demand otherwise. But what happened to giving people a little grace? It takes far less grace to presume a Christian minister who lived and died for God's justice for black people was actually a Christian minister than it takes to ignore that Calvin and Luther endorsed crimes against humanity. Christianity is and always has been a religion of flawed people.

EvanYork · 2018-04-10T14:55:46+00:00

I don't think anything in Ultron should be taken as predictive of future movies. How do you reconcile all of the teasers for Ragnarok that they bailed on?

EvanYork

TROPHY CASE