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Old 12-07-2002, 02:31 PM   #8
Estelyn Telcontar
Princess of Skwerlz
 
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Location: where the Sea is eastwards (WtR: 6060 miles)
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Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!Estelyn Telcontar has reached the Cracks of Doom and destroyed the Ring!
Silmaril

Here are the outstanding posts on the subject of religious beliefs, sexuality and the movies: <P><B>Maril</B>:<BR>Tolkien had an instinct for recognizing when his work was being appropriated by extreme views, whether they were puritanical or hedonistic. He was fairly vehement in disavowing either, whether it was Christian allegory or hippie free love. His writing was Christian by virtue of the fact he was a Catholic? Logically that makes no sense. If someone was first a Christian, then followed a New Age Guru, then converted to Islam, which would their writings reflect? All of them, because a human being is the sum total of their entire life experience. Since Tolkien converted to Catholicism, there was a time he was not Catholic. So how can his writing reflect only his Catholicism, and not the time he wasn't Catholic? <P>I find that there are stages of spiritual growth one goes through on a spiritual path, veering from extremes. <P>First you have a meeting with something profound. You're humbled. <P>After that, it's kind of like being in love. You're all fired up, you want everyone to have this great thing you've found, you want to declare it to the world. You're kinda high. Without realizing it, you get pretty puffed up. On the other hand you're really committed, and many people get a lot of good works done during this time. This, although it feels just terrific, is when you're really obnoxious to your friends, judgemental and harsh to those who don't agree with you. <P>The next thing that happens is that you mess up. You do something that's against your ethics and you can't believe it. Pride goeth before a fall. Finally you realize that it's not enough to just have this thing in your life, you have to make some major changes in yourself. It's pretty painful to find you're not so great as you thought you were. You become disillusioned with yourself. <P>But suddenly people like being around you again, and as you recover you start to discover something more stable and mature (and a lot more work). It's so relaxing to realize that you aren't special, takes a lot of pressure off. You start feeling pretty good, balanced. <P>The next is a rough patch. A disillusionment with the church, or the community. <P>It seems you've been mislead, or something or someone doesn't live up to your expectations. There's a period of cynicism or rebellion. Heh. The truth is, you need to revaluate your expectations, your false image, and discover you are responsible for your spirituality. The church has nothing to do with how your spiritual path works or doesn't work. Their faults are not responsible for your problems, and, even harder to accept, the church is not responsible for your virtues. <P>There's something freeing about proceeding without any expectations of others. There's a kind of open-handed generousity to participating even though you know the church is made of human beings. It takes a lot of work and self-examination, but at this point you find out how spirituality is really going to work in your life. It takes a lot of honesty, and your committment is really tested once it becomes clear you're on your own. <P>There are other stages after I'm sure, but this is what I know about. <P>It varies from person to person, but this pattern seems to flow for every religious tradition I've encountered. Some people seem to whip through these stages subtly, some dramatically, some fast, some slow. A lot of people drop out at the various rough patches (especially the first fall-out).<P> I don't know what got me started on this, something about puritanism. But I wanted to thank you for bringing it up as I managed in the process of writing this clarify some things for myself. I hope it's useful for you, too. <P>As far as waiting or not waiting, I think waiting till college is a good idea (why waste your first time on an inept immature highschooler?). But don't wait out of fear, or shame, or guilt. Don't wait because someone tells you to. Do so out of self-respect. I believe it should be your own choice, not pressured from peer pressure - either way. <P><B>mark12_30</B>:<BR>Maril, <BR>Your analysis of religious stages is brilliant, and resonates quite well with what I have seen. <P>I would hazard to add one more stage: the stage where God asks the disciple, "What matters to you besides me?" <P>And the disciple begins to see that what matters is God-at-work, and that all that the disciple wants to see is really the desire to see God-at-work, and so the disciple eventually realises that all that he or she wants, is to see God at work-- in self, in others, in the world. And so the answer refines and distills and simplifies down to... "...just God." <P>Even Tolkien, I think, got there via his own work. In my opinion, that's illustrated somewhat in this Tolkien Letters quote (which blows my mind): <P>Letter 183 (page 243): <BR> <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR> In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about 'freedom', though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and his sole right to divine honor. The Eldar and the Numenoreans beleived in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honor from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world. So even if in desperation 'the West' had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their Cause would have remained indefeasibly right. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><B>Kalimac</B>:<BR>Peter Jackson is a good director. Good directors understand the story that they are attempting to tell, this is something they must be especially careful of if the original creator of the story is no longer around to explain what he finds acceptable and not. If the story they are trying to tell is (as in the already-cited "Heavenly Creatures") a story of semi-crazed erotic murderous obsession, there will be a fair amount of violence and a lot of sexually charged scenes simply because the story would not BE a story without them. This is what the characters are thinking about, and what they do, and in order to understand (or even be interested in them) we must see and experience, not necessarily everything that happens to them, but everything which happens to them that THEY consider important. That is why "Heavenly Creatures" is what it is; we are seeing the world through the eyes of these two girls - not necessarily to empathize, but to comprehend.<P> In LOTR, OTOH, eroticism and suchlike are not important to the characters or the story; they're not what the story is about. This doesn't mean that nobody in ME ever slept with anyone else or that they all hold irreproachably high morals, simply that these things are *irrelevant.* Maybe Aragorn secretly harbors naughty thoughts about Arwen, maybe Legolas has a bit of a swinging reputation among the Wood-Elves back home. I'm not saying that IS the case, simply that even if it WERE it has no place in the story because it doesn't add to the story or our understanding of the character and his actions. There is no place in the entire course of the story where either of these things would be a deciding or illuminating factor as to the character's actions. So putting in extra eroticism would not just be untrue to Tolkien, it would also be the biggest possible waste of screen time. What would a long, steamy Aragorn/Arwen love scene DO? We've already established that they love each other; how would having them get cozier than Tolkien ever mentioned influence the story? It would only be worth the screen time if it made Aragorn decide maybe he shouldn't go/wonder if maybe he should elope with Arwen/father a child/think he's fathered a child; that is, if it could conceivably influence his subsequent actions. Now if any of these events had happened in the books, I don't doubt that we would have been shown some much more erotic scenes to drive home the point that this was something that was influencing Aragorn very heavily. But they weren't in the books, and if PJ changed the story that much, he'd be desecrating the books absolutely pointlessly, and he obviously loves them too much to change them for no reason (leaving aside quibbles about why Merry threw the stone in the pool as opposed to Boromir).
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'Mercy!' cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?' 'The whole history of Middle-earth...'
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