Fair warning everyone: this one is… bad. I mean real bad. Falconempress has just been toppled as having read the worst thing on this site. She just had to read about the rape of an idiot girl, this is the rape of human intelligence, logic and reasoning. You don’t need brain bleach, because your brain will be beaten, broken, shattered, weeping and sobbing by the time we’re through. This chapter is so bad… just posting direct quotes from it makes me guilty of a war crime. And I will too. Before I amended or tweaked the quotes slightly to streamline things and make reading the original easier. Not. This. Time. This time I’m not going to edit quotes from this chapter at all. There will be no excuse that maybe – just maybe – I’m making it worse than it is.
Also, this chapter had the most footnotes… if you curve the grade a bit. Chapter 1 has 29 footnotes. 11 of those are “Ibid” (meaning “this is taken from the previous source listed”), meaning most of those footnotes are just referencing the sources the author used (indeed, all the footnotes are just books and papers except for 1). This chapter has 24 footnotes. 9 of those are books and references. The rest are just further ramblings from the author, yeah it gets thick.
SlyShy give me strength… this almost did me in. But this is the pinnacle people! This is what we’ve been fighting against!
Vampires are typically creatures of moral darkness who turn good people into bloodthirsty, cold-blooded killers like themselves. 1
The footnote goes on to bring up the exceptions we’re all familiar with. Except Angel did do that before. Also, they don’t always turn “good” people (a frequent narrative motif is a vampire making a bad criminal even worse). We’ve just begun and we’re already seeing the confusion of capacity and action.
Consider the Count in the 1931 film Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi (Bella Swan’s namesake); such vampires seem particularly fond of mesmerizing innocent young women before feeding upon them. 2
WARNING: Do not be eating or drinking anything before you read the following footnote.
2. Bella Swan is the heroine of the Twilight series. Besides the association her name draws with horror movie star Bela Lugosi, the name more literally means “beautiful” as, for example, in the phrase a “southern belle.” We suppose one might also say that the name suggests that Bella is someone who resonates when struck by the blows of life.
0_o I have nothing to add. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone take the most circuitous route around the most obvious point. It’s like wanting to go to Alaska without entering Canada so you drive through Texas. That right there tells you all you need to know about how this is going to go.
After a bit more on vamps, we go to:
In fact, the very existence of vampires raises an ancient philosophical question: Why would God—who is supposed to be all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing—allow the existence of such despicable creatures?
Um… vampires don’t exist.
Certainly, God could annihilate every vampire in existence.
Why would He need to? Vampires don’t exist.
Or God could have prevented vampires form coming into existence in the first place by neutralizing the magic, or spiritual power, or infection, or venom, or mutation, or whatever it is upon which their existence depends. But for some reason God—if there is a God—does not rid the world of evil and, at least in fiction, of vampires.
VAMPIRES – DON’T – EXIST! Does this mean God is real and loves us? (I’ve always believed that beer and chocolate were proof that God loved us and wanted us to be happy.) Also, here’s a radical thought: authors are the god of their fictional world (in a very literal and meta sense). A better question would be, why does STEPHANIE MEYER allow vampires to exist.
Why, more generally, God does not (or cannot) eliminate evil from the world has long been a topic of sharp debate among philosophers. Technically, philosophers have, since the eighteenth century, called this issue the problem of “theodicy.” Those philosophers who wish to defend God against charges of negligence, impotence, or nonexistence have produced a variety of answers to the questions theodicy poses. Unfortunately, as we’ll see in our discussion of Twilight, these answers are unsatisfactory. But thankfully Twilight advances a distinctive answer of its own.
THIS – BOOK – IS – FICTIONAL! The answer is that “god” (Meyer) wanted to make an easy buck and didn’t know anything about vampires. You may as well ask what this book series answers about Darwinian Evolution for all the relevance it has.
The authors proceed to define what the word “twilight” means before going to:
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) played on just this ambiguity in his book Gotzen-Dammerung, translated as Twilight of the Idols (1889), a title that we like to imagine Stephanie Meyer herself plays on. 3
Yeah, Stephanie Meyer, a MORMON, really was thinking of Nietzsche when she wrote this. This article has simultaneously too much research and not enough. Oh, and the footnote? Brings up that Nietzsche’s title was drawn from Wagner. Did I mention that you should have brought some airsickness bags before reading?
The ambiguity of twilight points to a response—if not a proper solution—that the Twilight narrative poses to the problem of theodicy. Twilight‘s solution might briefly be described in this way: Good and evil are ambiguous terms, not as fixed or as clear as convention portrays. Good can become evil, and evil, good; it’s largely within the power of both humans and vampires to determine the moral compasses of their own lives.
Um… yeah, that’s kind of the summary definition of free will, which I’m pretty sure Meyer subscribes to since she’s a mormon.
The story positions human beings and vampires as good in acts of self-overcoming, overcoming their nature, their social standing, and the traditional ways good and evil are configured (at least with regard to vampires).
Go pick a Pauline letter out of the Bible at random; you’ll pretty much get the above lesson much better phrased.
It’s up to young people like Bella and Edward Cullen to determine whether they are in the dawn or dusk of their lives. In other words, dawn does not break, it must be broken.
Wait… what? Why young people? Once you get past 30 you’re no longer able to make any determination about your life? And how exactly is anyone going to make dawn break (other than running east)? That doesn’t make any sense.
What does this say about God? Not much that’s terribly favorable. If God or a god does exist in the world of Twilight, it must be a diety who either is not all-powerful (and therefore cannot prevent the evil of the world) or has abandoned the world, leaving people to fend for themselves.
Twilight does have a god! It’s STEPHANIE MEYER! This is an objective fact, we can see and verify this right now. And yes, I’ll agree that you can learn a lot about her from the book series, like Bella and Edward are her chosen ones and the very rocks of the world must cry out their praise.
The good news of Twilight is that, at least in the case of Bella and Edward, young people are up to the task.
What’s this obsession with youth? Also, of course they are! Their god (Meyer) created the entire world specifically for them. The entire series is one giant catering to these two characters, that’s what being a Sue is all about! [Rargh!]
Let’s turn now to consider some of the answers philosophers have advanced to the problem of theodicy, and see how Twilight fits their models.
Since you’re not factoring in Meyer or the fact that both main characters are Sues, we can already see that this is a loaded attempt that is doomed to reach an incorrect conclusion. Garbage in – garbage out.
Evil’s Not a Problem, Because Evil Doesn’t Exist
Mary baker Eddy (1821-1910), the founder of the Christian Science movement, maintained that evil is, in a fundamental way, not real.
Yep, we’re going to reference one sect of Christianity but not the one Meyer belongs to.
What follows is a long section of Augustine and some other philosophers, the ultimate point being the belief that there is no such thing as “evil” in and of itself, but that evil only exists as a corruption of “good”. Or rather, that would be the point but since the authors don’t bother with what the idea actually means, why should we?
A corollary to this point has been picked up by various philosophers: In the case of immoral human conduct, evil indicates a lack of human being. Those who behave immorally are those who have become degraded humans, less than fully human. As people like to say, those who are evil, act like animals.
Actually, you just confused two points from two different worldviews right there. In the pagan world (especially the Greco-Roman one), it was considered nobler to be less like the beasts. However, in Judeo-Christian viewpoints, the above is NOT a corollary. Not everything animals do are considered bad (Genesis 1 even says that what they do is good in the eyes of God). If you look up what is considered the 7 deadly sins, you’ll notice that envy and greed are not something animals are capable of, as well as the one considered the most deadly of all: pride. Which makes this even funnier when you look back and see that of the philosophers the authors listed earlier as promoting this view – Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Spinoza, Leibniz – not everyone would have the above corollary in their viewpoint. Philosophical FAIL.
In Twilight, then, we should ask whether the vampires, or really anyone who is configured as evil, is depicted as subhuman or like a nonhuman animal.
That only applies under some of the philosophies listed in this chapter, not all of them! Hey, here’s a hint idiots: how often is Satan depicted as subhuman or animal like? That alone should give you a warning sign that you’re going in a very wrong direction here.
Oh, but after some proofs of how vampires (and some in particular in Twilight) behave, we get…
So at first blush it’s easy to conclude that the Twilight series conforms to this philosophical tradition, depicting evil in animal-like, nonhuman ways.
But then, on the other hand, the Cullens’ coven hardly seems evil, even though they are in certain ways animal-like. And of course we need to consider the Quileutes. The Quileute wolves are definitely related to nonhumans; they run through the forest and devour raw flesh. But they’re not depicted as evil—quite the contrary.
ARGH! Even under the philosophical traditions you brought up earlier, not everything animals do is depicted as evil! (otherwise, everyone’s evil because we – you know – breathe like animals do) Maybe the Gnostic philosophies and a few others, but not the ones you listed earlier! You started from a very broad tradition, latched onto one subset of that tradition, then just jumped right from it to a completely different tradition only tangently related to any you started out with! Dammit did you even think while writing this?
The example of Jacob Black’s people, then, as well as the virtuous Cullens, dashes the evil-as-privation-of-being model, and it doesn’t explain how things work in Twilight. Therefore, let us continue.
It doesn’t explain anything because you derailed your own essay with a non-sequitur! If you had any intro to logic classes, I hope you failed them else you had a gibbering monkey as a teacher.
Evil’s Not a Problem, Because Evil Indicates Ignorance
Let me do you a favor and just give you the 3 most important sentences out of this opening paragraph you’ll need to know later.
So for Socrates and Plato, at least, no one does evil knowingly, and all apparently evil acts are mistakes about what’s good. … That sort of ignorance affects people’s self-knowledge. Consequently, people who don’t really know goodness do not and cannot truly know themselves.
I don’t even subscribe to this philosophy and I’m already feeling sorry for what the authors are about to do to it.
Again, at first it does seem plausible that in Twilight the good are knowledgeable while the evil are ignorant.
Um, I’m pretty sure Socrates’ and Plato’s point was referencing knowledge of morality. The above phrasing makes it sound like nuclear physicists are morally better people than simple farmers, even if the former are working on a doomsday device.
And Carlisle Cullen (not to mention Edward) is repeatedly shown to be a man of great knowledge and taste. Carlisle is cultured, he is a doctor (which in Latin literally means “learned”), and by all accounts, he is good.
I repeat: moral knowledge was the point, not raw knowledge. Man this is getting stupid, can we get a brief flash of something somewhat clever?
Moreover, the apple on the cover of Twilight calls forth not only the forbidden temptations of the Garden of Eden but the path to sin and evil. 9
9. There was, of course, a second tree in the Garden of Eden, a tree of life. Could the apple on the cover also (or instead) refer to the vampire’s promise of eternal life?
I think you mean there was a second famous tree in the Garden, Genesis records that Eden was full of trees and plants. Otherwise, an actually interesting premise. Fun fact: I was talking with a Jewish associate and according to original translations and tradition; the fruit of the tree was more like a fig than an apple.
Anyway, you can probably guess what follows (James and Victoria must know stuff, but Bella’s mom and dad don’t, etc etc).
So in Twilight it’s neither the case that the good are consistently knowledgeable nor the case that the evil are consistently ignorant.
Yeah, except that wasn’t the point! You really believe Socrates and Plato were such dunder-heads that they didn’t once stop and think, “Hey, under this standard, the wickedest things in the world are babies and children”? Think maybe something was misread there?
As it is in Twilight, so it often is in our world: The good are ignorant and the evil are in the know (and vice versa). Moreover, so far as God is concerned, these theories don’t really resolve the question of theodicy.
Yep, the authors themselves just admitted that the previous section was…
ENTIRELY POINTLESS.
Evil’s Not a Problem, Because It’s the Necessary Cost of Good
Yep, now we’re getting into the section based upon a duality worldview. The idea being: Since you can’t have up without down, left without right, then you can’t have good without evil. Augustine is mentioned again [ugh] as well as a sentence that anyone who’s just stepped foot inside a church before should facepalm at:
More radically, if the existence of evil is the price of knowing goodness, wouldn’t it be better for humans never to acquire that knowledge, to remain in the same ignorant bliss that characterized Adam and Eve before they bit the fruit of moral knowledge?
Duh, that’s kind of the point of the tragedy of the first 3 chapters of Genesis.
Wouldn’t it be possible for everyone to understand what evil is without anyone actually doing evil things?
Possible? Yes, we could all not do bad stuff right now, even though most of us know about bad stuff. Now if you mean, should it be impossible for anyone to do evil, the real question become: how could you build a world with that? How do you create a place where someone thinks, “I could pick up this rock and bash the idiots’ heads in” while making it impossible for anyone to do so? If you run the thought exercise honestly, it won’t be very long before you realize you’re in a world far more absurd and silly than Wonderland.
Following is some examples and back and forth wondering, by now you should have red alerts going off in your head as you realize that the authors are setting themselves up to take a left turn at Albuquerque. Let’s jump ahead to:
The necessity of evil for certain goods is one dimension of what Leibniz meant when he advanced the seemingly silly idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds.
Ah, there it is. Leibniz’s (and other philosopher’s) point is that this is the best of all possible worlds depending on the goal of the design. What do I mean? Say I have a sledgehammer. Is it the best possible sledgehammer there is? If my goal is to break something, then it may very well be. If, however, my goal is to take a shower and get clean, the sledgehammer’s design is useless to me. You can’t have any discussion on whether this is the “best” of possible worlds without first ascertaining what the point or goal of the possibilities are. And it takes most of the page before the authors get to it.
From a God’s-eye point of view, according to this account, considering the creation as a whole, it is a better balance to have a world with both goods, and the evils those goods require, than to have no world at all.
Or…
Defenders of God’s goodness cite free will as the principal good that requires evil. Free will is heralded by God’s defenders to be such an important capacity that it’s worth accepting all of the evil it often makes possible. And, of course, free will gets God off the hook, since it’s people who exercise their freedom badly who are to blame for evil.
Yay! A sensible point! Except that it only applies to the deity of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Not really applicable toward many pagan pantheons or Hinduism or Buddhism. And those with a modicum of common sense (obviously not the authors), would point out that theodicy seems to be an attempt to get humans off the hook. One of the seven deadly sins is “sloth”. I’m just saying.
Living in a town called Forks, which symbolizes the many forks in the road of life Bella encounters, Bella’s story is very much one of choices.
That line just made me laugh so hard. Isn’t it cute how the authors keep assuming Meyer put way more thought into her work than she did?
Anyway, we all know the story enough to fill in all the examples that follow.
But would free choice really be impossible without evil outcomes?
Um… yes!
One can find going to an ice cream shop and choosing among many good flavors extremely satisfying, even without the possibility that one of them might be poison.
But the question is, how would you prevent poisoning? Not to mention obesity, diabetes, rotten teeth and ice cream headaches that can result from the ice cream alone. Again, we must ask, how in the world could you create a ‘free’ world where nobody can get themselves sick from ice cream? Also, what does this have to do with theodicy in Twilight?
Then the authors literally propose that it would be a better world without free will.
And would it really be so awful if every choice were determined, say, by chemical processes of nervous systems? People would still experience everything they do now—including the feeling that they’re making their own choices.
Well if your goal is to create a world with true freedom, not an illusion of freedom, YES it would be awful! That’s the exact opposite of the previous supposition.
Guess what! Fyodor Dostoevsky gets mentioned next! Let’s skip over him to:
Similarly, one can’t defensibly hold that the existence of murdering, bloodsucking vampires is a good thing because it makes possible an intense romantic relationship between two teenagers.
Except that’s exactly what Meyer was going for!
It’s possible that from what Spinoza called the “view from eternity,” the whole looks “good.” But from the perspective of the individual who suffers evil (a perspective that must count if individuals are to be respected as beings of moral worth) God’s eye is irrelevant—and actually, not even all that good. 14
Evil, Transcendence, and Natural Goodness
Wait… what? You just discounted the last answer to theodicy because… you didn’t like it, not based on anything drawn from the Twilight series. You used reality to discount something in a fictional book! It’d be like trying to determine what power allows Sauron to shapeshift and saying, “well nothing in reality shapeshifts so he must be unable to.” Follow the rules of your own essay! Head… hurting…
Anyway, we all know that the Quileute Native Americans have supernatural origins but the vampires have none. The next two paragraphs mention this and a better in depth discussion on the folklore of vampires, which is far more than you’ll ever get out of the Twilight series. So there’s one good paragraph out of this whole trainwreck.
The Volturi, on the other hand, are from Italy, and that in itself connects them to the Catholic Church—a representative of old-school ideas about God, good, and evil.
…I have nothing to add.
As they enforce traditional vampire law, it makes sense to see the Volturi as representatives of tradition. But the Cullens are deviants from (and even rebels against) the old codes.
What? No they’re not! Let’s look at the vampire laws drawn from the Twilight wiki.
1) Existence of vampires must be kept a secret. –Followed by the Cullens.
2) No child vampires are to be created. –Again, followed by the Cullens. There might be some debate about Nessie but it’s not like she was deliberate.
3) Alliances or friendships with werewolves are strictly forbidden. –Followed by the Cullens until book 3. And from what I know of it, this rule was only broken in order to maintain the first and more important rule. So calling the Cullens rebels over this hardly seems appropriate.
4) No lying to the Volturi. –As far as I know, the Cullens never violated this.
5) No hunting in Volterra. –Again, followed by the Cullens.
Wow! What rebels! They… generally follow the laws of their kind. Ward Cleaver was a better rebel.
Traditional relationship of the good to the evil, the human to the vampire, and God to the world, don’t apply to them. They have spurned religion, both light and dark.
[the they and them above mean the Cullens]
The traditional relationship between good and evil is for each to try and annihilate the other. If you want to argue that the Cullens don’t do anything about wicked vampires (which they don’t until Bella’s involved), yeah I guess they don’t have a traditional relationship, I’d call them rather heartless and evil myself. And what does God have to do with any of that? Where is religion in any of this? Now you’re just pulling stuff out of your ass.
In New Moon the Cullens clash with the Volturi on the basis of Bella’s and Edward’s choices, and the fruit of those choices, because they no longer adhere to the old code. Bella, Edward, and the Cullens prevail, suggesting that the heroes of this story have transcended the traditions, the customs, and the idea of a Christian God.
WHAT? ‘Thou shall not murder’ is one of the oldest commands in the Bible. How is the Cullens following this ancient order transcending God? Doing exactly what He wants and asks is transcending Him? All this based just upon the fact that the Volturi live in Italy? But the Cullens all live in the United States (and most of them are from there), a heavily protestant country so why aren’t they representing the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism? Carlisle was from England, associating him with the Anglican Church, so maybe this is really Anglicanism triumphing over Catholicism? The premise is so shoddy, the conclusion does not follow; you could get a thousand possible conclusions from it. YOU – ARE – AN – IDIOT!
They live through the darkness of a new moon (the opposite of a fully lighted full moon) and enter a new Breaking Dawn of their own creation, not the creation of God or nature.
Almost done… almost done… must breathe…
Bella’s choice of Edward over Jacob indicates her choice of a path to happiness different from that offered by tradition, God, and nature.
I just thought I’d throw that in there to see if I could get team Jacob to go beat some sense into these authors. What makes that even funnier is how many say Bella choosing Edward was very much traditional… oh, and in accordance to her god’s will.
God is often associated with the natural order as presupposed creator of that order. So by the traditional account, to become good is to act in accordance with one’s nature and to perfect one’s nature (and in doing so, conform to God’s design). But what makes Edward and the Cullens good is that they deny their nature as vampires. 19
No, the entire point rests upon the question of what is a meyerpire and how were they created. They are not a self-existent entity like a duck or a tree or a person, they have to have humans in order to breed, and every meyerpire was once human. They are, in essence, the principle of corruption made manifest. They’re not denying their nature as vampires but “reverting” to their original nature as humans. They seem quite in line with Meyer’s design.
Footnote!
19. Along these lines, the story of Bella and Edward’s romance has been interpreted as a morality tale about sexual abstinence and restraint. But we’d like to argue that Twilight is not only about self-denial and self-restraint or even altruism; it’s also and more deeply about self-transformation.
Yeah… except Bella can’t transform into a vampire on her own. So sure it’s “more deeply” about that, if you don’t even read the damn books.
In a later footnote, they even drag Blade into this. Sorry, seems my tears are threatening to short out my keyboard. The authors ramble on (and on and on and…) for awhile with their deluded theory, I won’t subject you to it, let’s just say, no mention is ever made of Meyer. Let’s close out with their final footnote (#24) which has so much hilarity, I must ask that you not eat or drink anything while reading it.
24. The Twilight saga has often been criticized as sexist. It describes the journey of, yes, a strong-willed young woman who gets what she wants.
What follows is a lot of examples, which you’re familiar with if you’ve read much here on II or seen Mark reads Twilight on the web.
It’s a fairly persuasive criticism in our view—so far as it goes. But we’d like to point out that there’s something more to Bella’s story. Her story, like Edward’s, despite its flaws, is a tale of a new generation that critically turns its back on the old ways and realizes the possibilities of self-transcendence by establishing new values through the power of their own choices.
Yep, this entire essay has more or less been one giant worship of youth. And of course, they have to ignore Carlisle, the “older” vampire who conceptualized the “new” way and who transformed Edward. Funny how, without him, everybody would have “self-transcended” jack-shit. But as we noted earlier, one thing we can be assured is that the authors did not bother reading the story.
I can say Twilight may not tell me much about God, but it does convince me there is a Satan, and he’s an asshole.
Danielle on 18 May 2010, 16:01 said:
Holy crap! If what this article says is true, I’ve just found proof that SMeyer is anti-God!
1. God exists. He created vampires, but didn’t create a way for them to stop being vampires, effectively leaving them without a path to redemption (along the lines of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross). This seems to imply that vampires are inherently evil.
2. Vampires can be evil, but they can also be good. This is related to how ignorant they are; the ignorant ones are evil while the enlightened ones are good.
3. But what is enlightenment? Is it knowing about evil without doing it? Or is it not acting like an animal (aHEM) every time you see your girlfriend? Either way, Edward is enlightened.
4. God is the supreme good, since he created good and gave humans free will.
5. Or is he? By giving us free will, did he doom us to an existence of endless choices where we inevitably choose evil by default? By that logic, God is neither good nor evil; he is simply incompetent.
6. Bella and Edward break with tradition and thus create their own happiness. Since God is, in this story, the tradition, they create their own happiness by rejecting God.
7. Ultimate happiness is achieved only by rejecting God.
Wow, SMeyer. Way to stick up for your religion there. Just goes to show she can’t even write a decent morality tale.
dragonarya on 18 May 2010, 16:49 said:
I laughed so hard there.
Then, if God is real, does that means that those fictional worlds are real too? That would make me so very happy. (Though I suppose they are real in a way. ;))
Oh, please. What social standing, what overcoming?
Err, isn’t that what gods generally do? They’re not supposed be ther holding your hand all your life. Lolz, the really cruel gods must then be the ones that create/write tragedies.
Nate Winchester & ImpishIdea: 27, Authors: 0.
The whole book is pointless! You can’t put SMeyer’s Twilight on the same page as philosophy!
More like head-bashingly irritating than cute…
There’s a wiki!? …of course there is, hell I could make my own.
AhahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh boy, that just made my day. How utterly stupid can you get?
Once again, this book seems like it’s just rambling on and on illogically with only a few mentions of Twilight itself.
A little off-topic thought: If the title of one’s book is Twilight, will it sell well? After this mania?
NeuroticPlatypus on 18 May 2010, 17:30 said:
I read that as “a MORON” the first couple of times.
So why is it that the worst, most immoral acts are committed by people then (with the possible exception of some of those animal serial killers)?
I can see how people who have only been taught to behave in an “evil” way could not understand that it’s evil… sort of, but not the “no one does evil knowingly” thing. That’s just crap. I also don’t get how “they cannot know themselves.”
So, I guess the authors, by their own beliefs, are evil, as they are ignorant.
Fixed.
But they believe in souls (and that they don’t have any), which I’m pretty sure is a religious concept.
This calls for another “Meyer is Mormon.” Her message (if there is one) wouldn’t be that the heroes are above Christianity and God.
Einstein understands opposites! Yay!
Nate, I’m sorry you must trudge through this garbage
Nate Winchester on 18 May 2010, 18:38 said:
I see a few misconceptions in the comments but I have no intention on correcting them, just going to let them stand as testament to how bad this is.
NeuroticPlatypus on 19 May 2010, 00:52 said:
Good for you! Though now I’m curious as to what they are.
Hehe, I just read Danielle’s comment. It amuses me.
fffan on 19 May 2010, 07:18 said:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…
falconempress on 19 May 2010, 09:18 said:
….
O_o
Oh
my
god.
That was…wow. Just wow. I have no words. This round goes to you, fair and square.
Plus, I am now having Tobias Druitt flashbacks (maybe I should spork that next:P)
Hmm, maybe by questioning why God allows vampires to exist in Twiverse, could the author be questioning how could God allow the existence of something so vile, so despicable as Twilight itself in the first place?
Holy crap, but that means I am thinking about this.
Maybe the greatest gift God could us is alcohol. Because if one drinks enough of it, they could happily forget this has ever existed. Cheers, my friend! You truly are stronger than me.
Nate Winchester on 19 May 2010, 11:00 said:
I would say, “figure it out” but that would mean you’d have to read this multiple times and if I could barely do it, why should you? (seriously, I had a real, physical headache after reading it, no hyperbole)
Yes, if the authors didn’t bother to, why should you?
Danielle on 19 May 2010, 11:32 said:
While I strongly suspect my comment was one of the ones Nate is talking about, I would like to point out that this stuff is so bad it lends itself to these misconceptions.
My brain hurts….
Nate Winchester on 19 May 2010, 12:03 said:
Quite correct on many accounts (though you weren’t the only one).
[group hug] there there Dani, at least you didn’t have to endure the pure essay.
dragonarya, that was a common talking point of CS Lewis. He liked to say that we are as real to God as (for example) Harry Potter is to Rowling. The mystery and majesty of Christianity was that not only did the author enter the story in a very unusual way (far more than just an Author Avatar), but He even promises us that if we accept His gift, we might one day be real. As if tomorrow we could see Harry Potter and Ron and even Siruis and the others who have died already actually gain form and reality in our world.
At least, that’s how Lewis read the Bible. ;-)
Danielle on 19 May 2010, 13:03 said:
Yeah….I do feel fortunate in that regard.
How’s about we inject a little Eschatology into this discussion of God and vampires? According to Revelation, God will eventually end the world in a seven-year event involving disease, famine, war, and (if my memory serves; I haven’t read Revelation in a while) lots and lots of fire. Since Edward and Bella, the sparkly vampires that rejected God, will still be “alive,” they’ll get to stick around for the apocalypse!
And that is my alternate ending for the day.
Nate Winchester on 19 May 2010, 13:04 said:
Uh oh! Dani’s just earned herself some High Praise!
Asahel on 19 May 2010, 18:23 said:
Additional Fun Fact: The medieval Christian interpretation viewed it as a pear (not because they thought the pear was the actual forbidden fruit, but because of the symbolism).
You need to read the Inkheart trilogy if you haven’t already.
drkeiscool on 19 May 2010, 20:37 said:
I might of missed it somehow, but did the chapter even have anything in it about free will? Besides small little blurbs.
dragonarya on 20 May 2010, 08:05 said:
I think I did, a long time ago. I can’t really remember well…
LucyWannabe on 22 May 2010, 18:53 said:
Y’know, I’d say this book is actually helping the cause of anti-twilighters. Really.
Kyllorac on 26 May 2010, 17:16 said:
Oh. Em. Gee. My head. And this is the filtered version? Now I have this insane urge to hunt down a copy of this book and see just how much worse it got…
Nate Winchester on 26 May 2010, 17:23 said:
Don’t worry Kyllorac, you can borrow mine sometime…
VikingBoyBilly on 28 April 2011, 16:28 said:
I didn’t just facepalm. I slapped my forehead. Multiple times.