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:
When the hunchbacked Edgar “E.” Gore discovers Victor’s secret of his reanimated dog, he insists they try to replicate the experiment. Soon the method of bringing back dead pets gets out and it’s not long before other monster movie favorites emerge to threaten the town, forcing Victor, Sparky, and the cute Bride of Frankenstein poodle to save the day in typical kids-movie fashion.
If only the real life bad guys could be so quickly and easily dispatched. If only the monsters off the screen looked like freaks of nature instead of smooth-talkers trying to seduce women for their “first time.”
With these election results, it’s time to acknowledge, as many on the Right already have, that last night the myth of unified America approximating the 1950s officially died. Sparky lies in the middle of the road, run over by a new Democratic majority unified in pursuit of the four horsemen of sex, race, class, and hate.
If we’re to revive the America that nurtured us all, we must understand what we’ve really lost. From the Huffington Post today:
Initial exit polls — which are expected to change through Wednesday as more results come in — showed a mix bag of support for Obama and Romney among religious voters. Among people who said they attend religious services weekly, for example, exit polls indicated Romney took a significant lead. But among voters who said they attend services “occasionally” or “never,” Obama had large leads.
Remember this story about the rise of the non-religious that came out in October?
For the first time in its history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority, according to a new study. One reason: The number of Americans with no religious affiliation is on the rise.
The percentage of Protestant adults in the U.S. has reached a low of 48 per cent, the first time that Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has reported with certainty that the number has fallen below 50 per cent. The drop has long been anticipated and comes at a time when no Protestants are on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republicans have their first presidential ticket with no Protestant nominees.
Among the reasons for the change is a spike in the number of American adults who say they have no religion. The Pew study, released Tuesday, found that about 20 per cent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an increase from 15 per cent in the last five years.
What lightning strike will resurrect this country? We need to start talking about God in America again.
And I don’t mean my God. I have no interest in converting anyone to my faith. All I want is that others embrace a religion instead of this narcissistic, “spiritual but not religious” garbage that’s so popular in the age of Obama. I’m talking about ethical monotheism in the traditional definition as Dennis Prager explains it on pages 328-335 of Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph.
James Wasserman, in his essay “Goddesses, Guns and Guts” from The Slaves Shall Serve, also argues the point:
Without a belief in a Higher Power to whom one is directly and personally responsible, it is impossible to live as a free man or woman.
…
The human race requires discipline for its survival. At the most basic and personal level, without the discipline provided by our bone structure, we would collapse into shapeless blobs. On a more complex level, without the right ordering of human desires, society will collapse into a morass of anarchy and violence so often observed in times of crisis.
If God does not exist, then we are responsible to no one but ourselves. Thus we have made ourselves our own god. And simultaneously the slaves of our passions. That’s Obama’s America.
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I've never put much stock in Tarot cards as a reliable divinatory tool. But sometimes it does seem to deliver prescient messages. I drew this card yesterday. Here's the meaning courtesy of Acletic Tarot: The Tower. It certainly signals a powerful shake-up that will bring down structures that the querent thought were stable...but really weren't. And there in lies the trick of the Tower. With that flash of lightning - the insight that illuminates a dark landscape - the truth is revealed. What seemed to be stable is not, and comes crashing down. All that is left is the bare, harsh truth on which something more stable and real can now be built. But the devastation remains. However, what about Reversed? .... The easiest opposite is that there is no shake-up. No flash of lightning, no destruction. The Tower remains standing, the lies remain in place, the truth remains hidden. The querent may breathe out a sigh of relief - he's gotten off easy. But that's not necessarily a good thing. The message of the Tower is "The Emperor has no clothes!" but the reversed Tower, in this case, indicates that the querent doesn't want to hear that, refuses to hear it, refuses to believe it. And lucky for him, no one is going to say it. So everyone maintains the lies, and the status quo goes on. .... The reversed Tower is the card a querent might get if they were trying to reveal the truth about a terrible scam or scandal, but the liars are too powerful and the lightning that should reveal all about them, that should bring them down, will be thrown at the querent instead. The truthful querent will be seen as the liar and, for the moment, they will suffer. They will not be believed and the Tower will remain standing.
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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.