Yeah, bad people doing evil things and nothing makes sense and everyone dies and the world is grey and bleak and makes no sense. That’s Post-Modernism for you. Joss Whedon is among many, many folks whose stuff I can’t enjoy now that I’m practicing my faith. He joins Douglas Adams in that regard.

Well, that’s new piece of info on Whedon for me. Where did he say that?

He does get it right when he says that many aren’t willing to “discuss the reality of it”. I having a feeling, however, that his version of “reality” (in regards to abortion) differs from ours.

The culture of death loves death and hates life. There’s a reason our Holy Father said that moral relativism is the greatest danger facing the human race. He wasn’t wrong, and the popularity of films that despise people are only a meter reading on the progress of the disease.

‘According to Whedon, there’s not enough abortion in movies and television.’
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50 million in 40 years isn’t enough.  We need some casualties on TV as well!
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I’m more than willing to discuss it…the problem is, there aren’t many willing to listen.

Rebecca Taylor writes: “Our current situation began with this bit of rationalizing about “reproductive rights” not actually in the Constitution by the US Supreme Court and it continues unabated:
“If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
LOOK, LOOK, AT WHAT THE SUPREME COURT HAS SAID: “unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” OR BEGET A CHILD, OR BEGET A CHILD, OR BEGET A CHILD MEANS THAT A CHILD BEGOTTEN IS A CHILD BEGOTTEN. The child begotten is a child begotten, not a clump of cells, not the product of conception, or the contents of the womb, A CHILD BEGOTTEN, A CHILD BEGOTTEN WHEN TWO BECOME ONE, A SOVEREIGN PERSON, A HUMAN BEING COMPOSED OF IMMORTAL, RATIONAL SOUL AND A HUMAN BODY IS A CHILD BEGOTTEN.

Scrape off the clever, slick style of virtually any Joss creation and what you are left with is gratuitous sexual titilation. Nerd porn. Most Catholics, myself included, consume an awful lot of pop-culture media phenomena, but as the popular culture continues to slide into the abyss, I think we have to discern more carefully and when we are attracted to slick production that masks a false worldview, we need to not make excuses (like “We need to engage the culture!”) and simply refuse to drink the poison.

Hmm.  I used to be a big Whedon fan, like you…did not know about the abortion in the comics- I am very behind although I was enjoying them.  That will make me stop and think about whether I should buy any more of them, so thanks for the heads up. 

I was never interested in the movie because I don’t like horror movies…your review makes me think I’m not missing anything!

The irony of Joss’s Buffy revision is that Buffy as a character is actually quite pro-life. Who else would die for someone who the world would not largely see as human (monk-created sister Dawn)?

This attitude of people - by the mere act of existing - as a problem is in any number of books and movies.  Think of “The Matrix” where Neo is told that we are a ‘disease’.  It is seen in “The Uglies” series by Scott Westerfield.  And it is saturated throughout the environmentalist movement - think the ZPG’ers (zero population growth folks).
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The idea now is that we no longer look at the problems some people have created/caused and how to solve them BUT that ALL people are the problem and we should look at getting rid of as many as possible. 
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Some even espouse returning the earth to itself.  Please forgive me - but I chuckle at the irony that you never hear of any of these folks (people as weeds on the planet) actually suggesting that they themselves die but just everyone else!

I also thought Buffy was a pro-life show in many regards. Human life, no matter how wretched, was always worth protecting and defending. I don’t plan on seeing Cabin in the Woods, and I’m disturbed that it seems to have been so violent. Whedon’s television series were violent but never had violence for violence’s sake.

I could be wrong, but maybe Whedon is lamenting the fact that TV shows and movies are completely unrealistic about abortion—overly sexual, but not showing any of the consequences of the character’s moral decision-making. I know that Whedon is pro-choice, but I agree with him to the extent that I think Hollywood is depicting a certain lifestyle and promoting promiscuity without talking about one of the potential effects of casual sex—a baby!

My two cents.

I’m not sure you can say the Uglies series comes out pro-environmentalist. After all the society that exerts the strict environmental controls is the same society that drills holes in people’s brains to make them shallow and unthinking and tries to keep them from doing anything meaningful—and the overlords DEFEND making people dumb by saying it’s for the good of the planet….....

Just because a book places environmentalists in charge doesn’t mean that it’s saying environmentalists are good.

Also, Whedon does seem to have a very real concept of how sin is a choice… look at Dr. Horrible—even as he’s singing about how he has no choice, it’s obvious that he has a very real choice….

Sure, Whedon SAYS his favorite philosopher is Sartre, but at the same time, his work provides a really interesting jumping off point for discussions….

Also, Mal is really cool.

Virginity, sovereignty and perfect moral and legal innocence with all unalienable rights(God don’t make junk or evil) as the standard of Justice, which is giving to each what he deserves, is the newly created and begotten soul of the human being. Buffy the vampire slayer, and Angel both have rational, immortal souls. The vampire, as a mortal human being with an immortal soul, is what becomes of the evildoer, sucking the life’s blood and innocence out of another person by his scandal. Somebody tell Obama that all men have unalienable rights that he needs to respect, or Buffy is going to come for him. In Rachel W.‘s words: Love your neighbor as yourself.

@Deidre -

My comment about “The Uglies” came from the last book “The Specials” where in Tally write her letter after going out into the wilderness and she writes clearly ‘if there are ever become too many of you’...
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There is a real vibe within some factions of the environmentalist movement that the key to saving the earth is reducing - however necessary - the number of people.
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Just saying…..

I got the same feeling watching the M. Night Shamaylan movie “The Happening”. People are so bad that “the earth” strikes back, indescriminately.

An interesting note on Mr. Whedon is that he will cheerfully show imaginary horrible happenings on his programs, but never the horrors of a baby being ripped apart in the womb. He’s a sissy.

I disagree with you about Avatar. I don’t think it’s about rooting against people, I think the alien stuff in that movie is just symbolic of what the “foreign, primitive tribe” used to symbolize in movies—that we are better than the bad part of our society. By joining and ruling the primitive people in these stories, the hero shows that the best parts of our culture saves people rather than destroys them, and gives us a chance to decide we are on the side of saving rather than destroying.

That said, I think Joss Whedon is not too keen on people. I used to love Buffy and Angel before each show jumped the shark. The poignant part about Buffy was that she was destined to die young and no matter what, she thought it was worth fighting to live. Then after she died and came back to life (spoiler) the show got so bad. I used to think it was because Joss was busy with other projects and the other, less deft writers chucked all the symbolic stuff for straight monster stories that were preposterous and stupid. Now I’m not so sure. Grown-up life for Buffy became one degrading disgusting mess after the other. And finally, at the end of the series, Buffy committed suicide. She didn’t really kill herself, she got rid of being the Slayer—her identity—and gave a “little bit of the slayer” to all women in some kind of stupid feminist thing. But it made no sense in the context of the show (if it took a single, superhero person to protect the world, good luck to the world) and no symbolic sense at all. Buffy had a destiny, an identity, and she symbolically slit her wrists. And for what? Nothing. As I said, I don’t think Joss has too keen an opinion of people and of life.

Some even espouse returning the earth to itself.  Please forgive me - but I chuckle at the irony that you never hear of any of these folks (people as weeds on the planet) actually suggesting that they themselves die but just everyone else!

So do I, Rachel W.  So do I.  With grim irony, indeed.  But false compassion is always grim (if not a sick joke), isn’t it?  Then again, a lot of these same folks think that they not only own smarts, but own being compassionate as well.  It’s probably not too far off to say that this is the sort of fantasy that turns them on.  Like someone else said:  nerd porn.

Anyone who mistook the Giant Forehead for a consistent thinker never watched Buffy. If vampires don’t have souls, why do they whine about not having souls? Body-self dualism is bad philosophy, but *soul*-self dualism is simply admitting you don’t know the meaning of the words “soul” or “self”.

Seriously, this hydrocephalic dumptruck has less understanding of people and how they really work than Kevin Smith. Take Firefly—it’s generally considered a bad idea to make an elite assassination squad that can also read its commanders’ minds, but that’s what the project River was in did. It’s also not usually a good idea to have senators with access to state secrets touring a facility with a bunch of telepaths in it…but they did that, too. And the secret they found out about? Well, let’s just say apparently the Alliance’s scientists don’t believe in laboratories; the only steps they acknowledge in chemical research are “drawing board” and “full-scale field trial”.

The worst of the Billy Quizboy Lookalike’s errors, however, has got to be the Operative, in the Firefly movie. A dude whose goal is a world without sin or conflict should not be talking like the warlords from Metal Gear Solid, and trained government assassins don’t generally regard Rube Goldberg as a martial artist on par with Bruce Lee or Yagyu Munenori (the Operative’s preferred assassination method is to paralyze someone, make a speech, then kneel down in front of them with his sword pointing up, so they pitch forward and impale themselves—presumably the rat on the wheel and the toy sailboat were cut for time).

At some point people have to ask themselves what are they a fan of? Whedon is an atheist and a humanist all of his creative contributions have been contrary to the message of Christ. He wants more abortions because that is what he believes is just. He does hate man. I mean, there is a limit (and I liked FireFly too until I became suspicious of the script and looked up Whedon) to how much you can like someones creative work when it is deliberately propagandizing against your faith. People liked Christopher Hitchens for instance but where’s the limit?  Really, what did you give up for lent guys? I know that it seems like a sacrifice to block some of this programming but we really have to do it.

If you want the scary stuff with a pro-human message read Dean Koontz instead.  His latest is 77 Shadow Street.  It is all about the nightmare that results when the human-hating environmentalists and transhumanists get their way.

@ David: I don’t feel it much of a sacrifice to give up Whedon, but then, I’m a cantankerous hard scifi guy.

But my actual problem with Whedon is *not* that he hates man, but that—apart from his silly, inconsistent prattle about abortion and the environment—how he’s still, as you said, a humanist. Or in other words, what Nietzsche called an englisch Flachkopf (an English flathead). That was Nietzsche’s term for atheists (mostly then, as now, culturally Anglo) who don’t understand that atheism necessarily entails nihilism. Whedon, like all of his kind, never offers a satisfactory answer for why Nietzsche was wrong; they just say, in an atheist version of Kierkegaard’s fideism, “Clap your hands if you believe in morality.” Or as one of Whedon’s own characters puts it, “I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it.”

But…*why*? Because they think if we all agree to practice their Liberal Protestant morals, despite having no basis for thinking they’re correct, we’ll all be *nicer* to each other? Don’t they have to demonstrate that we should want to be nice, first?

Or, another Nietzsche quote, “In England, every little liberation from theology is accompanied by demonstrations, in a veritably awe-inspiring manner, what a moral fanatic one is. It is the price they pay there.”

We should all be happy these are the best opponents anyone can level against the Faith.

I’m not sure how this makes sense. The author writes: “But ‘Cabin in the Woods’ is horrific because it doesn’t root for the humans. It cynically invites you to enjoy the destruction of people.” That is just not true: the dramatic tension the movie evokes is that you are hoping that the main characters do escape. Also, one is sickened while watching those who are laughing and belittling the deaths of the main characters. In fact, the movie is intended to be a satire, in part, of people who enjoy watching extreme violence in horror movies.

I don’t get what is going on with this this paper’s review’s: in NCR’s review of the Hunger Games I read: “Katniss is a selfless heroine who courageously risks her life to protect others”. Katniss, mind you, had no moral qualm about murdering other children out of self preservation. In Cabin in the Woods the main characters refuse to murder even though it would have saved their lives.

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