Christopher's Nolan's Hero, Odyessus
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The worst thing about Nolan’s Odyssey hasn’t even been discussed yet. Odysseus convinces the Greeks to throw Hector’s infant son off the walls of Troy. Odysseus raids a city on his way home and kills all the men and enslaves the women. Odysseus kills an unarmed suitor who clings to his knees begging for his life. Odysseus tortures a goatherd who sided with the suitors by slicing off his ears and nose, chopping off his hands and feet, and ripping off his genitals and feeding them to dogs. Odysseus has his son brutally hang twelve of his slave girls who slept with the suitors. I remind you of all this because Nolan’s Odysseus will instead have the same moral values as the 2025 median voter
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The author's point how about how we sanitize ourselves from alien moral codes is a good one. Heroes' have to act with modern values. We don't like to acknowledge how different people actually acted in ways that would horrify modern sensibilities. The past, and barbarian cultures generally, are a vastly different world with rules we do not understand. .
If you ever read Tom Holland’s “Dominion,” in which he makes the case that the pre-Christian human mind is so alien to any mind infected by the ideas of Christ as to be wholly unintelligible, which he does by surveying the sheer depth and breadth of ideas which we take for granted and assume are just “human” which are in fact uniquely Christian, then you might come away thinking, “Well that’s a great catalogue of all the ways we now irrevocably think like Christians, but where can I find a book that illustrates how /they/ thought? The ancient pagans? I want to see the alien.”
The answer is simply to do what Holland did. Read those ancient works. Read the Greek epics. Read the Odyssey. But don’t apply your own standards to it. For instance, when the hero rapes a woman, or tortures or mutilates someone helpless and begging for mercy, or kills a small child, don’t try to figure out why it was actually justified according to your way of thinking, and don’t even think about why it needs to be condemned according to your way of thinking. Rather, just sit there and wrap your mind around the fact that no one thought it needed to be justified or condemned when it was written.
It was self-evidently, to them, a heroic act, part of what it means to be a hero.
Once you manage this, most of the modern controversies even over events like Oct 7 and the Holocaust will melt away. You will realize there isn’t any trouble in believing a man raped a girl with a nailgun until she died and then called his grandma to brag about it, nor that Germany and Russia created entire industrial systems of labor camps which had as their objective to ensure that no laborer survived the labor (and entire industrial systems to dispose of the bodies as the laborers died), or that Saladin’s biographer boasts—boasts, because it is a point of pride and honor for Saladin—about “miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden [nuns] stripped of their modesty … and free women occupied [meaning “penetrated”], and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonored and proud women deflowered … and happy ones made to weep!”
It will not be hard to imagine these things done, it will be easy to believe the stories of the holocaust and all the rest, because you will come to understand, by reading pre-Christian heroic stories, that all of this is just normal human behavior. It’s what you would do, would proudly participate in, but you happen to have been born in a Christian land in a Christian time, even if you yourself are not Christian. And where lands become un-Christian, “nature heals.” Human beings return to what they naturally are: the kind of thing that considers this behavior not horrific but heroic, and to be lauded.
Is Donald Trump a Christian? Inquiring minds want to know.
Why would that possibly matter? The point is to think of someone like Trump unconstrained by the mores of a Christian society. The fact that you hold him out as some super villain makes the point perfectly. Compare Trump to Saladin:
Raping women and keeping them sexual hostages is just another hobby outside the gates of civilization.
As you know , Trump has pandered to evangelical Christians numerous times. The dumbest ones among them think God has anointed Trump to save America from godlessness. Ironic given that Trump is either godless to the nth degree or thinks he himself is God.
You are an egghead compared to 95% of MAGA.
Exactly. He isn't promoting himself as a godless heathen who murders and/or enslaves his enemies and rapes their women. That is the historical norm. Instead, because of our norms we have built he puts on a dog and pony shows to promote himself as a god fearing Christian in order to secure/maintain power.
Trump is mentally ill. Malignant narcissism is pathological. You overlook his obvious mental illness because it serves your ideological purposes.
This has really has nothing to do with the seed. It's not even remotely connected.
Thats fine.
The seed is about the moral superiority of Christianity. That may be true , although over all of history that would be difficult to sustain. There was a time when Europeans absolutely slaughtered each other over religion (Christianity).
My question is how can one argue the superiority of Christianity in America when the person who is the pinnacle example of the power of Christianity in America, Trump, is a piece of mentally disturbed trash ?
I will leave your seed alone now.
Saladin:
biographer boasts—boasts, because it is a point of pride and honor for Saladin—about “miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden [nuns] stripped of their modesty … and free women occupied [meaning “penetrated”], and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonored and proud women deflowered … and happy ones made to weep!”
Trump:
Says mean things and cheated on his wives.
Somehow, you pretend they are the same. It's really amazing to see. When Trump takes over a city, murders its inhabitants, enslaves the survivors and is made a hero for it by his country, we can talk about it. Honestly, this discussion drives the authors points home. People cannot grasp what the world was actually like for almost it's entire history.
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The only commandment that Trump may not have broken is "honor thy father and thy mother". I have seen people say that Trump is a godly man. It is beyond ludicrous.
Saladin lived in the 12th century. Maybe we should look up what some Christians were doing in the 12th century.
Do you think Trump enjoys the same status among Americans as Saladin does among Muslims? Are Americans writing books celebrating Trump for raping and enslaving women, or are they trying to use allegations of rape to destroy him.
Can you really not see the difference between those two things? Whether you understand it or not, the fact that your friends are busy spamming the internet with fake photos and letters triyng to prove Trump raped young women (which Saladin was celebrated for ) makes the author's point. It's considered a bad thing in America. much like Kennedy kept his dalliances with teenagers in the White House secret. Unlike Saladin, he would not have been cheered for abusing young women in the White House pool.
some Christians were doing in the 12th century.
You really don't get the point.
I may not get YOUR point but I will live with that.