Be Your Own God, Because Obviously, You’re Qualified

The other day I wrote about writer/director Joss Whedon and TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). Over the last few days, I have thought some more about Whedon. I’m wondering if I overestimated his talent.

Back in the Buffy days, I got very wrapped up in Whedon’s work. I enjoyed Buffy because it was funny and clever, and because the series was about redemption. Offhand, I can think of two major characters who were redeemed.

The first character who got redemption was Angel, the vampire with a soul. Christians believe the soul is the mind and personality. Many people who are not Christians see it differently. They see the soul as a mysterious warm presence inside people that makes them good. I guess that would make empathy and conscience the soul.

In the Buffy realm, known to fans as the Buffyverse, vampires have minds but no souls. That means they’re psychopaths and narcissists. They love making other creatures suffer, and they’re very conceited. Angel lost his soul when he became a vampire, but then he bit a gypsy, and some other gypsy cursed him by sending his soul back into him. This was bad news for Angel, at least in the short term, because he suddenly found himself crushed under the weight of his extraordinary guilt. You can’t spend centuries torturing people and drinking their blood without having a few things to regret.

In the Buffyverse, Angel was a sweet guy. He was exactly what shallow women dream of: a tall, handsome, well-dressed guy who is very evil yet has a sensitive side. I always call guys like this “sensitive pirates.” You see them on the covers of romance novels. I’ve actually looked inside romance novels, because someone I knew left them lying around, and the heroes are pretty hilarious. It’s always some guy with a name like Jake or Lance, and he’s a pirate or a vampire or something. He kills lots of people and maybe steals things and commits arson, but after he captures the novel’s heroine and rapes her for a while, she finds out he’s really just a big teddy bear.

One of the big problems shallow women have is that they want alpha males with beta male hearts, or rather, they want men who are alpha to the world and beta to their wives. They want men who are cruel and mean to other people, yet warm and cuddly to their women. Of course, life does not work that way. If you’re an alpha male’s wife, you’re beta, at best. You may even be gamma or epsilon. Look at Nicole Brown Simpson. To an alpha male, the wife is an extension of himself. When some kind of schism occurs–for example, when Mr. Alpha starts seeing wrinkles and tiny hairs appear on Mrs. Alpha’s aging face–Mrs. Alpha loses her extension status and becomes other. Then she gets the same harsh treatment she used to enjoy seeing Mr. Alpha inflict on others.

In any case, Angel was your typical sensitive pirate. It was like Anne Rice had a baby with Barbara Cartland.

The other character who was redeemed was Spike. This was the character I liked. Spike was a wimp before he became a vampire. He was the king of the friend zone. Women saw him as a person who could keep them company while they waited for alphas to show up and run him off. He wrote drippy poetry.

Vampire Spike, unlike Fabio–I mean Angel–had no soul. He got great joy from cruelty, and he made all sorts of funny remarks while he was engaged in it. He really hated Buffy. Of course, he ended up falling in love with her. Somehow, in the process, he developed a soul. The writers never said he had one, but he had empathy and love. He was self-sacrificing. He went through indescribable tortures to make himself worthy of his new love. Buffy never really accepted him, but she did become attracted to him, and she eventually fell prey to his charms. They had sex, and on TV, that means true romance.

I enjoyed watching the Spike/Buffy mess evolve, and I thought it was the thing that kept the show alive. It was very unusual to see the themes of sacrifice and redemption in a TV show. I figured all the other people who watched were caught up in it, too. Then I read some message board stuff from fans, and boy, was I surprised. These little nerds hated the romantic aspect of the show. They blamed a writer named Marni Nixon. Apparently, all they want to see was Buffy stabbing demons with swords and pieces of wood. They wanted Whedon to take the reins and pour on the violence.

I was highly disappointed in the fans. You have to be seriously stunted in the emotions department to prefer choreographed vampire fights to a love story based on self-sacrifice and redemption. I guess the fans were missing some vital parts. There was something lacking in them.

It’s hard to empathize with someone that empty and juvenile.

I loved seeing the series develop. In creating episodes, the creative team reached back to prior seasons and episodes, grabbed loose threads, and wove them back into the action. It was neat. I assumed Whedon was the brains behind this, and that he was propelling the Spike story.

In retrospect, I wonder about all that. I think I probably gave Whedon too much credit.

The first Buffy movie was bad. It wasn’t just okay. It was bad. It was shallow. It wasn’t funny. It was Whedon’s baby. If Whedon is so great, why was the movie such an empty bag?

Whedon has co-written good movies, but how has he done on his own? Alien Resurrection was very bad. Serenity was good but not great, and I probably like it more than I should because I’m a fan of the TV show. He rewrote Captain America, which wasn’t very good. He rewrote Thor: the Dark World, which was bad. He wrote two pictures called The Cabin in the Woods and In Your Eyes. Since these movies barely existed at the box office, I assume the worst. He wrote Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was okay, but it’s horrible compared to any of the Iron Man movies.

Whedon didn’t write all of the Buffy episodes. He had a team. I believe I mistook their ability for his. Also, it’s possible to see yourself in other people’s work. It’s possible for a shallow work to give you deep thoughts. When that happens, you tend to credit the writer when in reality, the thoughts his work inspired in you were “happy accidents,” like extraneous trees in a Bob Ross painting.

Actors who have done very good work in Whedon projects have generally gone on to languish in D-list obscurity. Look at Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, James Marsden, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Andy Hallett. I used to think the reason they didn’t go on to bigger things was that they didn’t really have much talent. I thought Whedon made them look good, and when Whedon was removed from the mix, they faltered. Here’s what I’m thinking now: maybe Whedon’s writing team made Whedon look good. Maybe I should have extended my theory to Whedon himself.

Interesting question.

I read some very depressing stuff about Whedon. Someone asked him if there was a God, and he said, “Absolutely not. That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.” That’s a seriously typical bit of Whedon shtick. Say something to put people on edge, and then double down for shock value. Unfortunately, if you keep shooting for shock long enough, it stops being shocking and turns into exactly the kind of boring work you thought you had transcended.

Whedon denies having anything against Christians, but in another interview, he adapted a term from writer Tim Minear and referred to God as “The Sky Bully.” Does that sound hostile to you? It does to me. Whedon feels hostility toward the God he does not believe in, so how can he not be hostile to people who praise God and Christianity, especially when we tend to be part of the political faction he hates with burning, irrational, hysterical fervor?

Atheists say they don’t believe in God, but in my experience, they have generally turned out to be people who think God might exist, yet who punish him with rejection because they disapprove of him. “God says I can’t be gay? God does not exist.” “God says I can’t have an abortion? God does not exist.” “God says Uncle Fred is in hell because he rejected Jesus? God does not exist.” Every so often, you meet an atheist who isn’t angry at some sort of straw God, but it’s rare.

It’s disturbing that Whedon says it’s important and necessary to learn that God doesn’t exist. It shows he thinks belief in God is evil. People who hate God aren’t just trying to do bad things, like murder and stealing. They’re trying to create an alternative righteousness, and in the scheme of alternative righteousness, God’s righteousness is the lowest evil there is.

A lot of people (Christians included) believe that as long as a person is nice, that person goes to heaven or something like it. Many Christians have turned Christianity into a game. You score enough “nice” points, and God takes you to heaven when you die, and you get a McMansion. This idea has infected Christianity, and anti-Christians, eager to come up with anything that serves as a replacement for devotion to God, have taken it up as a cause. They are constantly deriding Christians for not being nice, and they praise anti-Christians who ooze warmth and approval.

There are a lot of problems with this philosophy. For one thing, God is not that nice. Since I sat down to type this, he has put a number of people in hell, a place he himself created. The Bible says the damned experience the wrath of God. Satan isn’t the one who installed the heating system. God burned the Sodomites alive. God killed Pharaoh’s baby son. When God is nice, no one can be nicer, but when he’s not nice, he is still righteous.

If you look at the left these days, you’ll see a lot of people accusing Christians of hate, and they apply the word “love” to themselves over and over. When they show up to beat unarmed Trump supporters at rallies, they say, “Love trumps hate.” They have a very funny definition of love. If you comply, you get hugs and kisses. If you disagree, you get a bottle in the face, or they close down your bakery.

It’s funny; they hate God because he’s nice when you obey and harsh when you don’t, but look at them: they’re the same way. Look how they treat people who doubt the global warming religion. Not much love there. They want to get them fired and put them in jail.

Jewish legend says that when Satan and his pals came to the earth and had sex with women, screwing up creation, they went to God first, asking permission. They wanted to come down and help us behave better and please God more. God supposedly told them they would be even worse than humanity. If the story is true, you can see that God was right. It would certainly be consistent with similar stories in the Bible. Many of the worst crimes against God were committed in the name of alternative righteousness.

Aaron’s sons got in trouble for serving God incorrectly; they brought strange fire to the altar. Saul got in trouble for serving God incorrectly; he performed sacrifices even though he wasn’t a priest. The people who sacrificed their children to Moloch were just trying to get protection and success for themselves and their families. Peter thought he was serving God when he opposed God’s plan to send Jesus to the cross. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit because they wanted to be wise, not because they wanted to do mean or dishonest things. Alternative righteousness shines like fool’s gold, but it isn’t righteousness at all. It’s just gilded evil.

Now people like Joss Whedon are continuing the tradition of correcting God. That’s not going to end well. It’s why persecution is increasing. In the end, the people who murder us in the streets will be sure they’re doing it out of love for humanity, just as the Nazis sincerely believed they were improving the world by murdering Jews.

Everyone thinks they can improve on God’s plan. I’ve tried it myself too many times to count. It’s the worst kind of pride. A human being is about 50% better than a monkey, and we think we can correct the being that created the universe.

God is not a sky bully. A person who discourages you from doing stupid things is not a bully. If you see him that way, you have self-destructive authority issues. My sister used to think my dad was a bully because he spanked her, and she never got past that. She ended up in the gutter because of that attitude. Unfortunately for many Hollywood celebrities, they’re not in the gutter. The devil pampers them and tells them they’re wonderful. He says they’re exceptional, and that their superiority is the root of their crazy success. They believe it, because believing it feels good. A junkie in the street is better off than a deluded film star or director who believes life is a meritocracy with him or herself at the apex.

It’s strange that people who play make-believe for a living can think highly of themselves. What a perverse world this is. Performers and fans get confused, and they start thinking entertainers are what they pretend to me when they amuse us. They’re not higher beings. Superman ended up in a wheelchair, and Elvis died on the floor next to a toilet.

All over America, there are Joss Whedons, Madonnas, George Clooneys, and Angelina Jolies working at Dairy Queens and Home Depots. Maybe one in 10,000 gets the nod from Satan and becomes famous. The rest live in frustration and obscurity. Many never quit, because they think perseverance is the key. They keep putting nickels in a slot machine that will never pay off. Satan runs a pyramid scheme, and pyramids are narrow at the top. God, on the other hand, is willing to give his best to anyone. We’re just not excited about seeking it. It’s not shiny enough to be interesting until you get very close to it.

Alternative righteousness is coming to get us. We should see it for what it is and refuse to become part of it. To accept it is to deny God.