Hegel states that "The fixed standpoint which the all-powerful culture of our time has established for philosophy is that of a Reason affected by sensibility. In this situation philosophy cannot aim at the cognition of God, but only at what is called the cognition of man.", meaning that because man is flawed our reason is also flawed. If our reason is flawed the the dogma, or the incontrovertibly true principles, that we have designed in our practice of religion is also flawed. This comes up in the movie when it is revealed to the main character that there's a 13th apostle, god is a woman, and Jesus was black. All these things aren't mentioned in dogma because of the bias of man. It's infallible proof that our dogma is flawed.
Because of his finite nature the reason of man is instead a "cruel dissection destructive of the wholeness of man, or violent abstraction that has no truth, and particularly no practical truth." we look for answers and when we find them we don't understand them and no longer want them. A truth no one is immune to in the movie. Jesus and his last ling relative both had moments where they were told a truth they didn't want to know and both had to come to terms with the new truth. As humans, prone to mistake and bias we are set with the task of creating, writing, and believing what will be remembered as truth though they are no where near infallible.
I think we touched on this idea in documentary but for something to be memorable and relatable to anyone, it has to have its embellished parts. The whole story is true but to make it what people want and need it has the portions that are exaggerated to make the point.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting part of human religion is that it is interpreted BY humans. No matter what God may have told us there is always the fact that we are humans and humans are fallible.
ReplyDeleteIn the story where Moses wrote the commandments in stone, he came back to see that the people had already forgotten God's voice. That is less then forty days before man had already become lost again. So even if originally everything that Dogma (actual Dogma) said is correct, there is no way to know how lost the original truth has become along the way.
Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" sat well with this movie in an incredibly ironic way. If God's omnipotence is disproven, then the universe will destroy itself, and yet God's omnipotence is disproven on a daily basis, according to Mackie. I think that Kevin Smith was well aware of this concept and used it in his film almost sarcastically.
ReplyDeleteIt's been established that man is flawed and fallible. We've all seen people contort even what their own dogma dictates, which itself is written by errant humans. All of our cognition is in question, thus it hardly matters what God gives as truth if humans will just distort it anyways. However, looking through this lens at religion, you would have to look through it at itself. The lens of the untrustworthiness of human reason (and thus religion) is itself not trustworthy because humans thought of it. The human reason behind doubting a supernatural being simply because of human intervention is flawed itself. After all, who's to say that an omnipotent God couldn't control how their own words and decrees were spread? Even if intentionally through fallible humans?
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