When is it alright to hate?
- Thread starter oiram
- Start date
It is the thoughts that people are responsible for, not so much the feelings. What you do when you feel things, how you choose to act on feelings, that you are also responsible for?
Not that one can control one's thoughts so easily. But every time you reconstruct your reasons for hating, that you are responsible for.
Intolerance, hatred, and artistic and commercial value
There is an underlying intolerance, but at the point that I let that intolerance damage people's lives, I think it qualifies as hatred. Like I said, it was a spiteful fantasy.
A couple of anecdotes:
Did you ever see the South Park episode "Faith Plus One"? They lampoon the Christian-pop music industry, including the point that Christian music groups have a built-in audience of millions. Generally speaking, though, that's all they have. The pop-metal band Stryper, for instance, used to get the girls a bit riled up until they found out the guys were Christian. Songs like "Calling On You", which would make great "date" songs, are closed off by the band: they're hymns to Christ. ("Calling On You" is a great example of the kind of songs parodied in the South Park episode; it really sounds like a proper love song, except it's about Jesus.)
For some reason, this idea of a built-in audience doesn't translate well into things like movies. There are plenty of good writers out there who are also at least nominally Christian. They find their best success when they keep their faith out of the work, or bury it so deeply it seems an obscure riddle within the plot. But deeply Christianized scripts don't sell well in Hollywood, or in America. Why else would it take someone like Mel Gibson to do a film like Passion of the Christ? When you stop and think about it, how many Christian blockbusters have there really been? Most people can name at least one, Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. And many of those can also recall Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. After that? Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a disaster on film, and Jesus Christ Superstar actually upsets a lot of Christians. The Last Temptation of Christ brought bomb threats against cinemas.
Another anecdote: A Wrinkle In Time, one of the most famous juvenile fantasies on the market, has long drawn Christian ire. In the late '90s, it was among the most-protested books in American libraries. The complaints against the book included anti-Christianism, witchcraft, lesbianism, and Communism. Which is really rather funny, when you stop to think about it. Anti-Christianism? It's a freakin' fantasy. Apparently by not being overtly Christian, the book was anti-Christian. Witchcraft? Jesus, it's three old hags in a nod to Shakespeare. Lesbianism? Holy shit, these ladies are corporeal forms of the spirits of stars. They have no idea what to do with their physical bodies. And they average something like billions of years old. Who the fuck is imagining these old hags munching carpet? Who the hell would want to? The two billion year-old pussy? What, does it age like wine? ("A fine vintage ... and such a striking bouquet.") Communism? Why? Because the villain's name is "IT"? Oh, gosh, she's indicting Information Technologies, isn't she? Well, except that you pronounce the name as a word, not an abbreviation. The book is starkly anti-Communist, denouncing benevolent dictators and forced material and superficial equality as dystopic. The people complaining have no clue how to read a story. All elements are subservient to (A) their faith, and (B) their thirst for conflict.
Good films involving overtly Christian themes? There are some out there, but they're not viable. Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny actually do have a history together that predates The X-Files. It's a movie called The Rapture, which addresses apocalyptic extremism, and didn't sell particularly well. It's a great film, though.
So you have a couple of choices with religious ideas in films. Either go "whole hog" and pander to the built-in audience, but they'll be the only ones seeing it. Or make a thoughtful, thematic examination of an idea in motion, and expect only a small return on the investment. Either way, it's the twenty-first century (or the 1990s, given the inception of the spiteful fantasy). Both routes lead to limited appeal, and that means limited returns. Not everyone in the built-in audience is going to see the film if you go that route, and very few people in the general audience are going buy tickets because it's a preachy propaganda film with a predictable plot: Archetypal character meets archetypal conflict; protagonist puts faith in Jesus, and the conflict is resolved. Appealing to a more general audience is possible, but it's a limited appeal. The Rapture opened in 36 theaters averaging $4,766 per screen; it maxed out at 46 theaters and grossed under $1.28 million in the United States. But it's an awesome film.
Literature and film are not devoid of good writers with Christian backgrounds. Ray Bradbury has some incredible scenes and stories about Christ and Christianity. There's "The Fire Balloons", from The Martian Chronicles; "The Man", in The Illustrated Man; "Christus Apollo" is a gorgeous poem included in I Sing the Body Electric!; and The Crazy is assigned to fix a broken script about the ascension of Jesus in Graveyard for Lunatics, which results in one of the finest ascension scenes ever conceived (and one of the funniest Unitarian jokes on record).
The late Madeleine L'Engle was an Episcopalian, and active in her church as part of the lay clergy. Her great trilogy (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet) deals with good and evil in broad terms, relies on the joy of God's creation, and invokes what were, in 1962 (release of Wrinkle) common themes of Christian America: family unity and service to community. In an interview in 2000, L'Engle made two important points:
Her faith bleeds through. She has faith in it.
If she chose to wallow in her faith, A Wrinkle in Time would not be what it is. If Ray Bradbury wallowed in faith, his stories would not be what they are.
The deeper one gets into the religion, the less their value as a writer. Artistically, themes become limited. Commercially, potential returns diminish.
____________________
Notes:
Abernethy, Bob. "Profile: Madeleine L'Engle". Religion & Ethics #412. WNET, Newark. November 17, 2000. PBS.org. Accessed June 6, 2009. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week412/profile.html
EmmZ said:
There is an underlying intolerance, but at the point that I let that intolerance damage people's lives, I think it qualifies as hatred. Like I said, it was a spiteful fantasy.
A couple of anecdotes:
• Once upon a time I had cause to fly to New Orleans. I took a Southwest Air flight that went from Seattle to Houston, and Houston to New Orleans. On the first leg, I think it was, my seat mates were a husband and wife. He read Howard Zinn. She read Tim LaHaye. Apparently she finished the apocalyptic story before we landed because, as he put his book away to prepare for landing, he asked her how it was. It was great, she said. And suspenseful. She didn't know how it was going to end. Okay, okay, really? Because it's the freakin' Apocalypse. We know how it ends.
Seriously. Really.
• When I was in high school, a guy named Bob Larson released a novel called Dead Air. Bob Larson was on my radar because he was a Christian activist working to promote censorship of music. The problem with this, beyond the obvious call to censorship, was that he routinely lied, knowing that parents didn't actually have a clue what their kids were listening to. He ranted about Anthrax's "Misery Loves Company", about how the singer screams, "I'll kill you!" Of course, nowhere in that particular book did he discuss Anthrax's penchant for translating stories into song. "I Am the Law" is Judge Dredd. "Skeleton In the Closet" is Stephen King's "The Apt Pupil" from Different Seasons. And on their next album came "Misery Loves Company", which depicts ... Stephen King's Misery. The line, "I'll Kill You" represents Annie Wilkes, played in the film by the inimitable Kathy Bates. None of this does Larson mention. Of course, it's possible he wasn't aware. When writing a book denouncing heavy metal, why in God's name would someone actually read the liner notes for a given album? He also butchered Dio's "All the Fools Sailed Away", transforming a pied piper fable into a Satanic menace threatening to steal away the good, innocent Christian children. In order to do that, he omitted the second parts of multiple couplets. "We are the innnocent," goes the song, "we are the damned. We were caught in the middle of the madness, hunted by the Lion and the Lamb. We bring you fantasy, we bring you sin. We can give you a piece of the universe, or we can disappear never to be seen again." Larson presented the song as, "We are the damned ... hunted by the ... Lamb. We bring you sin ... we can disappear never to be seen again." Essentially, he suggested that the Satanic message was to rape Christian children.
So yes, when he switched to novels, I noticed. I have a standard that says while you can't judge a book by its cover, its first page will often be sufficient. See William Shatner's Tek novels if you want to know how that developed. Like those, Larson's Dead Air is unreadable. But the plot is easy enough to understand. Troubled late-night DJ receives a strange phone call from a young girl in trouble. Girl turns up dead. DJ is haunted by the event. Eventually, he comes to Christ and solves the mystery.
Seriously. Really.
• When I was in high school, a guy named Bob Larson released a novel called Dead Air. Bob Larson was on my radar because he was a Christian activist working to promote censorship of music. The problem with this, beyond the obvious call to censorship, was that he routinely lied, knowing that parents didn't actually have a clue what their kids were listening to. He ranted about Anthrax's "Misery Loves Company", about how the singer screams, "I'll kill you!" Of course, nowhere in that particular book did he discuss Anthrax's penchant for translating stories into song. "I Am the Law" is Judge Dredd. "Skeleton In the Closet" is Stephen King's "The Apt Pupil" from Different Seasons. And on their next album came "Misery Loves Company", which depicts ... Stephen King's Misery. The line, "I'll Kill You" represents Annie Wilkes, played in the film by the inimitable Kathy Bates. None of this does Larson mention. Of course, it's possible he wasn't aware. When writing a book denouncing heavy metal, why in God's name would someone actually read the liner notes for a given album? He also butchered Dio's "All the Fools Sailed Away", transforming a pied piper fable into a Satanic menace threatening to steal away the good, innocent Christian children. In order to do that, he omitted the second parts of multiple couplets. "We are the innnocent," goes the song, "we are the damned. We were caught in the middle of the madness, hunted by the Lion and the Lamb. We bring you fantasy, we bring you sin. We can give you a piece of the universe, or we can disappear never to be seen again." Larson presented the song as, "We are the damned ... hunted by the ... Lamb. We bring you sin ... we can disappear never to be seen again." Essentially, he suggested that the Satanic message was to rape Christian children.
So yes, when he switched to novels, I noticed. I have a standard that says while you can't judge a book by its cover, its first page will often be sufficient. See William Shatner's Tek novels if you want to know how that developed. Like those, Larson's Dead Air is unreadable. But the plot is easy enough to understand. Troubled late-night DJ receives a strange phone call from a young girl in trouble. Girl turns up dead. DJ is haunted by the event. Eventually, he comes to Christ and solves the mystery.
Did you ever see the South Park episode "Faith Plus One"? They lampoon the Christian-pop music industry, including the point that Christian music groups have a built-in audience of millions. Generally speaking, though, that's all they have. The pop-metal band Stryper, for instance, used to get the girls a bit riled up until they found out the guys were Christian. Songs like "Calling On You", which would make great "date" songs, are closed off by the band: they're hymns to Christ. ("Calling On You" is a great example of the kind of songs parodied in the South Park episode; it really sounds like a proper love song, except it's about Jesus.)
For some reason, this idea of a built-in audience doesn't translate well into things like movies. There are plenty of good writers out there who are also at least nominally Christian. They find their best success when they keep their faith out of the work, or bury it so deeply it seems an obscure riddle within the plot. But deeply Christianized scripts don't sell well in Hollywood, or in America. Why else would it take someone like Mel Gibson to do a film like Passion of the Christ? When you stop and think about it, how many Christian blockbusters have there really been? Most people can name at least one, Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. And many of those can also recall Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. After that? Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is a disaster on film, and Jesus Christ Superstar actually upsets a lot of Christians. The Last Temptation of Christ brought bomb threats against cinemas.
Another anecdote: A Wrinkle In Time, one of the most famous juvenile fantasies on the market, has long drawn Christian ire. In the late '90s, it was among the most-protested books in American libraries. The complaints against the book included anti-Christianism, witchcraft, lesbianism, and Communism. Which is really rather funny, when you stop to think about it. Anti-Christianism? It's a freakin' fantasy. Apparently by not being overtly Christian, the book was anti-Christian. Witchcraft? Jesus, it's three old hags in a nod to Shakespeare. Lesbianism? Holy shit, these ladies are corporeal forms of the spirits of stars. They have no idea what to do with their physical bodies. And they average something like billions of years old. Who the fuck is imagining these old hags munching carpet? Who the hell would want to? The two billion year-old pussy? What, does it age like wine? ("A fine vintage ... and such a striking bouquet.") Communism? Why? Because the villain's name is "IT"? Oh, gosh, she's indicting Information Technologies, isn't she? Well, except that you pronounce the name as a word, not an abbreviation. The book is starkly anti-Communist, denouncing benevolent dictators and forced material and superficial equality as dystopic. The people complaining have no clue how to read a story. All elements are subservient to (A) their faith, and (B) their thirst for conflict.
Good films involving overtly Christian themes? There are some out there, but they're not viable. Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny actually do have a history together that predates The X-Files. It's a movie called The Rapture, which addresses apocalyptic extremism, and didn't sell particularly well. It's a great film, though.
So you have a couple of choices with religious ideas in films. Either go "whole hog" and pander to the built-in audience, but they'll be the only ones seeing it. Or make a thoughtful, thematic examination of an idea in motion, and expect only a small return on the investment. Either way, it's the twenty-first century (or the 1990s, given the inception of the spiteful fantasy). Both routes lead to limited appeal, and that means limited returns. Not everyone in the built-in audience is going to see the film if you go that route, and very few people in the general audience are going buy tickets because it's a preachy propaganda film with a predictable plot: Archetypal character meets archetypal conflict; protagonist puts faith in Jesus, and the conflict is resolved. Appealing to a more general audience is possible, but it's a limited appeal. The Rapture opened in 36 theaters averaging $4,766 per screen; it maxed out at 46 theaters and grossed under $1.28 million in the United States. But it's an awesome film.
Literature and film are not devoid of good writers with Christian backgrounds. Ray Bradbury has some incredible scenes and stories about Christ and Christianity. There's "The Fire Balloons", from The Martian Chronicles; "The Man", in The Illustrated Man; "Christus Apollo" is a gorgeous poem included in I Sing the Body Electric!; and The Crazy is assigned to fix a broken script about the ascension of Jesus in Graveyard for Lunatics, which results in one of the finest ascension scenes ever conceived (and one of the funniest Unitarian jokes on record).
The late Madeleine L'Engle was an Episcopalian, and active in her church as part of the lay clergy. Her great trilogy (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet) deals with good and evil in broad terms, relies on the joy of God's creation, and invokes what were, in 1962 (release of Wrinkle) common themes of Christian America: family unity and service to community. In an interview in 2000, L'Engle made two important points:
Bob Abernethy: .... L'Engle is an Episcopal laywoman who prays and reads the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer every morning and evening. For many years, she did her writing at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where she is still librarian and writer-in-residence. So, does all that Christian practice make her a Christian writer?
Madeleine L'Engle: No. I am a writer. That's it. No adjectives. The first thing is writing. Christianity is secondary.
Abernethy: Madeleine is working now on a book about aging and an article about hate. She has written more than 50 books, of which the most famous is A WRINKLE IN TIME, published in 1961, after more than 30 rejections. The heroine is a teenager named Meg who expresses L'Engle's own deepest belief.
L'Engle: Meg finally realizes ... love is stronger than hate. Hate may seem to win for a while, but love is stronger than hate.
Madeleine L'Engle: No. I am a writer. That's it. No adjectives. The first thing is writing. Christianity is secondary.
• • •
Abernethy: Madeleine is working now on a book about aging and an article about hate. She has written more than 50 books, of which the most famous is A WRINKLE IN TIME, published in 1961, after more than 30 rejections. The heroine is a teenager named Meg who expresses L'Engle's own deepest belief.
L'Engle: Meg finally realizes ... love is stronger than hate. Hate may seem to win for a while, but love is stronger than hate.
Her faith bleeds through. She has faith in it.
If she chose to wallow in her faith, A Wrinkle in Time would not be what it is. If Ray Bradbury wallowed in faith, his stories would not be what they are.
The deeper one gets into the religion, the less their value as a writer. Artistically, themes become limited. Commercially, potential returns diminish.
____________________
Notes:
Abernethy, Bob. "Profile: Madeleine L'Engle". Religion & Ethics #412. WNET, Newark. November 17, 2000. PBS.org. Accessed June 6, 2009. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week412/profile.html
S
Sickpuppy
Guest
I think never is the best answer, hate is a sickness imo.
I believe it is relative person to person depending on the sensitivity at the subatomic level, and there ability to filter stimuli...
I believe it is relative person to person depending on the sensitivity at the subatomic level, and there ability to filter stimuli...
Challenger78
Valued Senior Member
when is hate ok?, probably never, but when is it understandable ?,
When you've got nothing else left.
When you've got nothing else left.
When you genuinely feel it in your heart.
Lots of different answers here and I think they are all very interesting.
A good point was brought regarding intolerance, and then how allowing that to manifest itself to grow then becomes hate.
I might not like or tolerate gay people but when my intolerance becomes a point where I begin to act on it like discriminate against a gay person then its hate? (That was an example as I have nothing against gay people)
Also you can hate a person’s action but not the person. For example, if you father killed an innocent person you might say “I love my father, but I hate his action of murder”.
A good point was brought regarding intolerance, and then how allowing that to manifest itself to grow then becomes hate.
I might not like or tolerate gay people but when my intolerance becomes a point where I begin to act on it like discriminate against a gay person then its hate? (That was an example as I have nothing against gay people)
Also you can hate a person’s action but not the person. For example, if you father killed an innocent person you might say “I love my father, but I hate his action of murder”.
But is it alright to act on it or let it influence you?
My wife was a big fan of the Left Behind series. I, like you, was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. But the entire series was lying around the house and I really like to read, so I ultimately gave one of them a try one day in the same way you might read the side of a cereal box. While the writing wasn't the greatest, and while the broad outlines of the story were pre-determined, it was a nine part series following the adventures of various characters against the events of the apocalypse. So it is actually true that you never really knew what would happen to a particular character in a particular book. And, once I got into it, the books were entertaining.
You don't find many churches making theatrical films. You especially don't find many churches making films starring Kirk Cameron about a firefighter in a crumbling marriage addicted to online porn.
But that's the case for Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. In fact, the film, "Fireproof," was the church's third movie.
It was also an unexpected hit. In September it debuted at No. 4 at the box office, eventually bringing in $33.5 million and spawning two books: a novelization, also called "Fireproof," which is in The New York Times' best-seller list's Top 20; and a companion journal to the movie, "The Love Dare," which has sold more than 2 million copies.
Last week "Fireproof" debuted on DVD and climbed to No. 3 on Billboard's DVD chart, beating out "The Hulk" and "Saw V," among others.
"You don't often see movies made by churches do big numbers," said Billboard's Anthony Colombo. "Having [distributor] Sony behind it helps. Having Kirk Cameron helps, but for it to come out and do 136,000 pieces [DVDs] in its first week is pretty impressive."
Although many critics panned "Fireproof" -- "as sincere, uncynical and subtlety-free as a Sunday school lecture," said Variety -- audiences embraced it. "There's a huge market out there that's underserved. That market is there and a lot of people don't want to go there but there is a huge untapped market," Cameron said.
Paul Dergarabedian, a box office analyst for Hollywood.com, said he was shocked when the movie debuted in the top five its opening weekend.
"With 'Fireproof,' they really cracked the code with the major success with the film and have this appeal across the board," he said. "They didn't follow traditional marketing methods but they didn't need them for this film. ... Maybe that's why it worked out so well."
He added, "You're talking about a very successful property. ... The powers that be that put this together are really on to something."
Churches are using "Love Dare" and its companion curriculum as a teaching tool, says publisher B&H Publishing's Andrea Dennis, who calls "Fireproof" "a marriage movement." For Valentine's Day more than 9,000 churches are scheduled to show the film, many displaying the admonition "Fireproof Your Marriage" on their signs. B&H believes "Love Dare" could hang around on the best-seller list -- where it's already been for 19 weeks -- along the lines of Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life."http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/13/fireproof.success/index.html
Funny episode.
Have you heard of Fireproof?
You don't find many churches making theatrical films. You especially don't find many churches making films starring Kirk Cameron about a firefighter in a crumbling marriage addicted to online porn.
But that's the case for Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. In fact, the film, "Fireproof," was the church's third movie.
It was also an unexpected hit. In September it debuted at No. 4 at the box office, eventually bringing in $33.5 million and spawning two books: a novelization, also called "Fireproof," which is in The New York Times' best-seller list's Top 20; and a companion journal to the movie, "The Love Dare," which has sold more than 2 million copies.
Last week "Fireproof" debuted on DVD and climbed to No. 3 on Billboard's DVD chart, beating out "The Hulk" and "Saw V," among others.
"You don't often see movies made by churches do big numbers," said Billboard's Anthony Colombo. "Having [distributor] Sony behind it helps. Having Kirk Cameron helps, but for it to come out and do 136,000 pieces [DVDs] in its first week is pretty impressive."
Although many critics panned "Fireproof" -- "as sincere, uncynical and subtlety-free as a Sunday school lecture," said Variety -- audiences embraced it. "There's a huge market out there that's underserved. That market is there and a lot of people don't want to go there but there is a huge untapped market," Cameron said.
Paul Dergarabedian, a box office analyst for Hollywood.com, said he was shocked when the movie debuted in the top five its opening weekend.
"With 'Fireproof,' they really cracked the code with the major success with the film and have this appeal across the board," he said. "They didn't follow traditional marketing methods but they didn't need them for this film. ... Maybe that's why it worked out so well."
He added, "You're talking about a very successful property. ... The powers that be that put this together are really on to something."
Churches are using "Love Dare" and its companion curriculum as a teaching tool, says publisher B&H Publishing's Andrea Dennis, who calls "Fireproof" "a marriage movement." For Valentine's Day more than 9,000 churches are scheduled to show the film, many displaying the admonition "Fireproof Your Marriage" on their signs. B&H believes "Love Dare" could hang around on the best-seller list -- where it's already been for 19 weeks -- along the lines of Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life."
While there's some truth to what you say, it's not always true. Consider the extremely profitable movie I mentioned above. Also, a truly gifted person can make a movie about anything seem great. Consider Leni Riefenstahl and her masterpiece, Triumph of the Will. She actually managed to make Hitler look good.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Of course not. But what if those were the only decent jobs available? Forty years ago Afro-Americans were content to take their chances renting from Euro-Americans who hated them, because it got them out of the ghettos full of crime and trash and got their kids out of the ghetto schools full of crime and trash.
Did you see the episode of "King of the Hill" when a frustrated Hank asked, "What kind of country is this, when I can only hate a man if he's white?"
but these are things that those people have no control over, and thus the reason why it’s wrong to hate them for these things.
Yeah well fuck those places. I'm talking about civilization.
I can easily imagine more civilized aliens saying that about the USA and/or Earth.
Ah, yes. Civilisation.Yeah well fuck those places. I'm talking about civilization.
That's the thing that enables the trampling of individual will by means of the opinion of the majority at that point in time.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
hate becommes ok when someone will make your life a living hell and wont leave you alone
