Vampires
And This Foolishness
Christian Mythology
For most of us, the foundation of our Christian faith is not the
bible but the stories we’ve been told of what the bible says.
Most of us do not believe because of conclusions we've arrived at
based on study and prayer but rules we’ve learned from years
of mama ‘nem saying things like, “Grandma’s gone to Heaven,”
which is a lie. Nobody is in Heaven yet. Heaven is not open for
business, yet. The most heinous lie is one we ourselves pass on,
one generation to the next. The nonsense we tell our children,
“Good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell.” That’s a lie.
The bible doesn’t say that. Mama ‘nem say that. Why? Because
that’s some stuff they done heard someplace. They haven’t read,
haven't studied. They’ve heard. Somebody said that to them once, and it seems to
agree with logic, and we’ve internalized this notion of good and
bad, Heaven and Hell. But this is not doctrine, it is mythology.
It demeans an eternal truth to the plotline of a comic book.
Devil = Bad, God = Good. God locked in a desperate struggle
against the devil. Who Will Win The Epic Battle of
Armageddon?!?
It’s stupid. We need to stop doing that. The foolishness with
the vampires is the most damming evidence of the abject failure
of modern Christianity to teach. We teach nothing. We learn
nothing. We desire to learn nothing because we believe we
already know all we need to know. Jesus was a weak pacifist Who
was brutalized and murdered by big, bad, powerful, evil. Most of
the time, we give little weight or attention to the
Resurrection, dwelling instead on the dark and gloom of The
Passion. Jesus comes across as weak, the Romans as the
indefatigable boogeyman.
For the record: Grandma is not in Heaven
Grandma’s dead. [Daniel 12:2]
Presuming Grandma died knowing Jesus Christ, she has the hope of
resurrection some day, when the dead in Christ will rise, as
Christ rose, and be caught up with God. [I Thess 4:16] Good people do not go to
Heaven. Heaven is a place being prepared for sinners saved by
grace. [Ephesians 2:8] Your goodness has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do
with it. You can't earn your way in by being good. There will be
lots of perfectly good, perfectly moral people burning in Hell. Bad people do not go to Hell. Hell is a
place prepared
not for human beings but for the fallen angel Lucifer, whom we
call Satan or the Devil. Christian mythology conjures up this
vision of red, this Devil’s Night Club of people hanging out and
jazz music and so forth. The reality of Hell is it is a place
from which God has withdrawn His Holiness. The only way you end
up there is by free choice, by choosing to not be with God.
There is only one place in all of Eternity where God Is Not.
That pace is Hell.
God does not send people to Hell. We send
ourselves there when we choose to reject God, when we desire to
be where He Is Not. The rabbit hole, goes much deeper, of
course, but this is the basics of Christian Mythology: the
notion of a milquetoast good versus a thunderous and powerful
evil. It’s a crock of bull and a lie, one perpetuated generation
after generation—by us.
It is, therefore, ironic that films like Breaking Dawn earn
millions by constructing their stories off of the classic
tension of Christian mythology. A more accurate view of
Christian theology would not sustain the dramatic plotline of
this Twilight nonsense. It is, therefore, the Lie, this
Christian Myth, that is startling in its global pervasiveness. The audience has to already embrace the God vs.
Devil nonsense before the lights dim or none of these films
work. Without even mentioning God or the Devil, the film
series relies on both to forward their main conceit: the sexual
allure of evil incarnate.
It would be fringe for me to suggest the filmmakers are
Satanists or wiccan or what have you, but I would guess the key
drivers behind such films are not Christians. They may be
Christians by culture, believing their ultimate message to be
one of good triumphing over evil after a long, fierce struggle,
but even such presumably noble intentions blaspheme God and rob
the Gospel of its power. Oh, she’s in love with this undead
abomination, a corruption and violation of God’s very nature,
but she’s still a virgin. This is the con game this stuff plays
on your kids: alleging value statements while glorifying
Satan and the occult.
Seduction Of The Innocent: Occult-themed and aimed squarely at your kids.
What Are We Modeling?
Will Christian kids want to se this? Of course. I am less
certain black Christian kids will want to see this, but I know
many, many black Christian kids and adults who love horror
flicks, love vampire flicks. Bloody, nihilistic, demonic,
nightmare-inducing stuff. I know lots of Christians who can’t
get enough of it. Who wave dismissively at me when I admonish
them that this material exists for one purpose only: to
undermine their faith. Ingesting this stuff offends God. Make
all the excuses for it you want, it’s true. A person who truly
knows God, who truly loves God, would not find this stuff in any
way attractive. Or, if she did, she would present this mess as a
sacrifice to God. Lord, I love You. I will give this up for You.
Ironically, the "Christian" Left Behind mess is almost as bad as this
foolishness with the vampires. “Christians” getting rich off of
distorting scripture to frighten people. I can’t imagine why it
is we can’t seem to make a buck off of the light; we need to
turn toward the darkness to put butts in seats. All that dark
stuff about the Rapture and who gets left is intended, I
suppose, to scare people into turning to Jesus and entertain
those who already have. But, like this foolishness with the
vampires, it simply exploits.
No one is ever gong to make a movie about Jesus that is as
riveting as a Bourne flick. Jesus did not carry a gun or get
into car chases or rescue women from burning buildings. Mel
Gibson omitted most of Christ’s actual ministry from The Passion
of The Christ in favor of the darkness of Jesus’ great ordeal. He
gave extremely short shrift to Christ’s resurrection, leaving
hope on the cutting room floor. This resulted in an extremely
disciplined film, a very taught plot that succeeds on all
levels, but it doesn’t help much with the enduring legacy of
Christian assumption, the mythologizing of a reality more
fascinating, more intricate, and more dynamic than any silly
teen vampire movie. Gibson’s Passion made $611 million worldwide
and counting. I can’t
imagine why nobody’s tried a second swing at thrilling us by
virtue of accurate revelation rather than by playing off our
spiritual ignorance.
Vampires were great fun when I was a kid. Perhaps they still
are. The difference, however, is, when I was s a kid, vampires
were adults. They looked like they were at least 50. There was
nothing glamorous about them. They didn’t look like me, so the
films existed on this other plane of reality. The vampires were
not my friends, their lifestyle not something I’d ever consider
productive or attractive. Today’s vampires are stylish, sexy,
rich, handsome. They have power. They get the girls. Every time
I’m downtown, I see some kid wandering around dressed like Keanu
Reeves in The Matrix. The Goth thing is extremely big,
especially among white teens who actively strive for the
anemic, emaciated look. This is what’s so troubling about our
modern-day vampire, the corruption of values and seduction of
the innocent the genre promotes.
Tribalism finds its foundation in both an oral history and
emulation of patterns of behavior. Your children will model
your behavior. You will hear your voice, your values echo in
them. But this only works if you get rid of that TV, that
video console, that cell phone. Even families who spend time
together aren’t really spending time together because the kids
are tuned out, earbuds shoved in, being fed a steady stream of
filth and evil right in your very presence. You don’t study
God’s word so they don’t see you study God’s word and therefore
don’t process that behavior as reasonable or normal because it
is not being modeled for them. Christ is not being modeled for
them, this foolishness with the vampires is.
Music, literature, film—these are all about stories. They all
tell stories, feeding data directly to your children. Cell
phones grant unlimited, unrestricted and unmonitored direct
access to your child in ways unimagined before the Internet.
From the very first moment you use your TV as a babysitter, you
are handing your child over to the world, and this is the
terrible fruit of that process: successive generations of people
turning away from God, knowing only the vagueness of Christian
myth as they suit up to wait in line for this foolishness with
vampires.
Christopher J. Priest
20 November 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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