pigeonburger
3d ago
I watched a movie recently, (spoilering the name because just being mentionned in this conversation kind of spoils the "twist")
That kind of neatly gets around using the known event/period people strongly associate with witches in a horror movie while still acknowledging that it's mostly known for being a moral panic that was used to murder innocents.
The problem with gun control is that it really only reliably disarms people who obey laws. It doesn’t really work on people who break the law. No gang member, spree shooter, or assassin is bothered by the illegality of their weapon or signs prohibiting guns from some venue. In fact, they very likely love seeing those no guns signs because no one else is likely to be armed. So passing more no guns in school laws or whatever other gun control laws aren’t going to work.
I agree with you here, but I have to steelman the gun control argument here so we can have a debate against something worth debating: even if the laws only directly affect lawful owners with non-criminal intentions, guns being so readily available to criminals is downstream of them being readily available for lawful citizens. Be it straw purchases, thefts, etc... A gun loving culture will have a lot of guns around and some of those will be used for crime. The point of gun control laws, while it could not be expressed overtly as such because populations in democraties tend to resist top-down attempts at changing its culture, is not so much in controlling access to guns on technical grounds, but in deliberately attacking and damaging "gun culture", making guns less cool, less attractive, more annoying to get, less popular. In the hope that there will be, as a result, less guns around for criminals to get and use in crime.
Officials pushing for gun controls cannot say it outright, and pro-gun control citizens don't have to say it because they instinctively understand its the point. They just hope that their mental model of the red tribe is accurate and that they are all actual morons who cannot figure out that this is the actual point all along and that they might actually acquiesce to "compromises" that always go in the direction of attacking "gun culture".
They could have just said it's the sweat of Christ and it would have made it work, but by reaching for something that felt more meaningful they basically broke it in a way any Catholic would notice. I wonder if anyone raised the objection during production.
Though I think people who like it don't really care because those movies seem to mostly hit for people who aren't Catholics, but like the demon/witches/exorcisms aesthetics. My wife's like that, she doesn't believe in Christianity but she really wants to believe that stuff like what the Warrens did was real. Because even to atheists, fighting primordial evil is cool, even if wasting time on being lied to in church by hypocritical clergy, being brainwashed to ignore science and hate gays is not (which is what they identify Christianity with).
Some of these religious horror movies try to make it intellectually palatable to believe in the specific Catholic evil, and the power of Catholic rites against it, without believing in the Christian God by making it more of a matter of generic, form changing evil vs a nebulous "force of belief" in general. The last and horrible The Exorcist movie is like that; white voodoo witch doctor rites are powerful against demons too, as long as the person performing it believes. And if it some cases it takes the dramatic form of Catholic demons and Catholic exorcism, then it's just a matter of it being what the character believes.
Anyway, The Nun had nice set designs that made my time watching it not wasted, but otherwise it's not the strongest in that genre by any means.
pigeonburger
6d ago
Not in Catholic teachings: despite keeping the attributes of bread and wine, the Eucharist is transsubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ in a litteral, not metaphorical way. Keeping their bread and wine attributes is probably the reason why Catholic run hospitals aren't transfusing communion wine into people, but a Catholic still has to believe that it is The Litteral Blood of Christ.
It's kind of implied by us never seeing an example otherwise, but is there a definitive word that children of two individuals gifted with magic will always result in a gifted kid? Rowling's point would be strengthened if it wasn't the case, though it would be hard to explain magical society as a hidden counterpart to normal society if either the wizarding world or normal society was filled with the ungifted scions of witches and wizards (ie: wouldn't the ungifted seek out the technological tools of muggles to not live like they're handicapped in the wizarding world? and if they were exiled to the muggle world, there would be too many of them walking around, with no particular reason not to reveal what they know).
More options
Context Copy link