When Your Dog Dies, You Can Bring Him Back to Life
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Last Sunday, after publishing my article on President Barack Obama’s ideological influences, my wife April and I caught a matinee of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, a traditional family film you shouldn’t miss. Today, having swallowed last night’s bitter pill, I really want to go back and watch it again. The film’s fantasy — to bring your best friend back to life — speaks to a need many of us feel today as we recognize the America of years past no longer exists. We are not a “center-right” nation any more.
The black and white, stop-motion film remakes an early Burton short of Frankenstein reinvented into ’50s suburbia. Clever references to classic horror abound from the visual style to the characters’ names and designs. Victor, Burton’s adolescent alter ego, spends his days shooting amateur monster movies in his back yard with his dog Sparky. He’s an oddball amongst the picket fences and perfect lawns but he has his loving dog and a drive to create.
Then Sparky dies and Victor’s life collapses.
He goes to school, bored and depressed until his science teacher, a Vincent Price-inspired, Martin Landau-voiced Mr. Rzykruski, shows what happens to a dead frog with a few zaps of electricity. This moves Victor to attempt the dog-version of the classic 1931 Frankenstein sequence:
i was hoping it was a real article cuz i miss my dog more than human beings
Me too.
A friend just had a dog cloned in Korea. It must have been very expensive. A Korean veterinarian acccompanied the puppy from Korea. She actually had a second dog cloned at the saame time but the 2nd cloning was not successful. The cloned dog is still alive and isn’t too happy about the clonee. She had the option of going to Korea herself to get the puppy or paying for someone to bring it to the US. Sooner or later I’ll find out the cost.
I’m actually an atheist, but have a moral grounding in the Nicomachean Ethics. I will probably be the only atheist in the entire world to say this, but in the name of liberty, we absolutely must crush atheism in this country. People have a psychological need to believe in something greater than themselves. With me, it’s liberty as more than just an idea, but as a dream. People that put that faith into something supernatural are impelled to pray and follow a moral code. People who put that faith into “society” are impelled to strengthen that “society” with sacrifice and expansion of the social power bases role and powers. Some put it into the “Earth” and they put environment before the people and sacrifice those people to “save” the Earth. Then there are people who don’t put that faith into anything; they are bitter, selfish, and care only what they can do for themselves and what everyone else can do for them.
As someone who only has faith in an idea, leading Americans to place that faith into something supernatural will cause the least harm, as those people can’t physically interact with that “being” nor “save” it from human influence. All they can do is worship and pray. That is much better than worship of the state or of one’s self.
I’m also an atheist, and I believe in:
Freedom/Liberty
The Dignity of the Individual
Free Markets & Capitalism
Both Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Religion
Culture, Customs, Mores and Civility
The Constitutional Amendment (Proposed) to preserve Girl-on-Girl Porn
Dogs are awesomely better than cats, and we should eat neither
The Genius of P.G. Wodehouse
Elvis will always be better than the Beatles
The 2nd Amendment
Freedom of Speech
Italian cuisine
Women from Brooklyn who talk like Bugs Bunny
Christina Hendricks
Mel Brooks, Groucho Marx and the guys who make South Park
People who put ice in single malt scotch should be beaten like baby seals
Sterling Archer should marry Lana Kane,
and
only a sucker pays a dime more in taxes than he is legally required to.
You try to eradicate me from the landscape and I’ll bite your elbow so bad you’ll never play tennis again.
Just sayin.’
forgot a couple:
Miles Davis
George and Mary Bailey
Greenlighting a movie about Barack Obama and General Patton trapped in a room.
Opening your presents on Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and long slow wet kisses that last for three days.
I think that’s it.
That doesn’t make you an atheist. It makes you an ethical polytheist. “I believe in” is synonymous with “I worship.” You’ve listed many gods, goddesses, intangible spirits, and pieces of God that you worship. As long as you don’t get too focused/obsessed on worshiping any one of these symbols/idols too intently you should be fine and manage to stumble onto God enough to probably become a decent person. At least that’s how you sound to me.
I do not believe in the existence of supernatural beings. That’s an atheist. All the stuff I listed is what I believe in, but I don’t worship any of it (with the exceptions being Girl-on-Girl porn and Christina Hendricks).
God is only understood as a “supernatural being” in the primitive, childlike versions of the faith that people learn as kids (and which many never grow out of). Grown up, intellectual religious people don’t think of God as a “supernatural being” sitting on a cloud granting wishes but as supra-natural, transcendent force beyond our comprehension. The Kabbalistic understanding of God is perhaps more useful: God is a Verb, a process happening, not a static Thing that exists.
And the girl-on-girl and Christina Hendricks worship is the modern day digital manifestation of temple prostitution and goddess worship. The similarity of “porn star” and “Astarte” is not a coincidence, as I’ve written about before.
Conservative and right-leaning secularists do usually believe in a Higher Power of some sort whether they realize it or not. Synonymous with God is “transcendent values.” And if you believe that there is an authority higher than your own feelings then you believe in ethical monotheism. As contradictory as it sounds, one doesn’t have to believe in a God-based theology to embrace and defend God-based values. My Objectivist friends fall into this paradigm too. I don’t agree with everything Ayn Rand wrote but she got enough right that the religion she founded still seems to work to make people better.
Oh, hogwash.
“Atheist” simply counts the number of gods in someone’s religion. Saying all atheists are the same is as silly as saying all monotheists are the same because they worship just on god.
Christians and Moslems are both monotheists. What sort of idiot thinks they are otherwise similar?
What We the People need now is a taxidermist for preservation of what’s left of America.
Chuck Testa for President!
“If God does not exist, then we are responsible to no one but ourselves.”
If God does exist we are still only responsible to ourselves. Or, at least I am responsible to myself I wouldn’t presume this type of commitment to others.
“When Your Dog Dies, You Can Bring Him Back to Life”
I wish it were so.
Yeah, keep up with this religious crap turned into laws that effect the rest of us and lose another election Republicans. I didn’t vote for Obama, but I am delighted we aren’t going to have the religious making laws for the next four years.