First! Reformed. Yours, Robert Downer Jr

Jay missed a golden opportunity to wax philosophical with Cliff and Norm over their participation in the House (I & II) movies. Did they have the same casting agent? Also apparently Charles Fleischer was there? Puh-puh-puh-puh-pleaaaaaze!
“I’m gettin’ Schhhhhrraaaaaaderrrrrrred Uuuuup!”

I’m with Jay. First Reformed is the best film of 2018. And I had a much more literal reading of the ending than you guys.

‘The library’ for Hardcore? C’mon, guys. You’re working boys. Give a couple bucks to rent a nice 1080p iTunes (or similar legit service) copy.

I did when it was appearing on y’alls’ Letterboxds. Looked great.

I also have always thought the doctrine of predestination should be an incentive to laziness and hedonism — if you can’t earn your way in to heaven or screw up your slot, what’s the point of trying? Weirdly, though, the Calvinists were famously straight-and-narrow. My guess is the clergy knew the logical pitfalls of predestination, so they worked overtime convincing their flock that it was important to prove themselves worthy in the event they were chosen. The result was a real stick-up-the-ass of a religion — it’s (relatively) easy to convince people to avoid sinning if they’re convinced there’s an eternal reckoning, but to deny self-indulgence when there are zero consequences requires some off-the-charts repression. My father’s side of the family is descendant from Huguenots (French Calvinists), and they still equate indulgence with sin. Except those who’ve fallen off the path….raging alcoholics, as you’d expect.

me, too – intriguing segment! personally i started watching stuff like “back to the future” or “star wars” with my kid quite a few years later (so i wouldn’t have to explain everything).

Lori — I don’t follow from what you said what the crux of our disagreement is. I’m referring to how the Calvinist clergy was ministering to their followers, which stipulates that those followers did value religion.

Matt — could be. Logical proofs of the nature of God don’t interest me — to the extent I care about religion, I only care about how man acts, or directs others to act, in its name.

Please review Hereditary next week!

Logic does not disprove God. You have a religion that does not include God. Let’s be honest here.

The widely accepted definition of religion: “The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”
Atheism is the absence of religion. If ‘not believing in something’ is a religion then is not believing in Fairies, Big Foot and rude Canadians also a religion?

A mini-review of Thoroughbreds on a future show would be cool, watched it this week and thought it’s definitely one of the best movies of the year so far.

Man is religious by nature and so all men throughout the ages have worshiped some form of God, but modern men, being completely insane, have switched to worshiping mere men. In our day and age it’s usually some sort of government authority that is taken for God. Perhaps you stand in awe of the superheroes that people love to worship, who in the movies are usually just agents of the US government, i.e. Captain America. Or maybe you love all the alien god stuff that is becoming quite popular at the moment. Alien gods that create humans, as in Prometheus. Prometheus, being the name of a Greek god. The Scientologists worship aliens so why not you right?

As for casting aspersions on the belief in God because he is invisible, as you allude to with big foot and fairies. DNA and cellular biology is essentially invisible to the human eye. It was completely invisible a couple of centuries ago. Would it have been crazy to believe in these things then because no one could see them, Poncho? The same goes for electricity. It’s essentially invisible and was only really discovered a couple centuries ago. Before then men thought that lightning was liquid fire. The virtue in air called oxygen, that keeps us all upright, is invisible. The heart of the argument about whether climate change is an actuality or not is over the invisible elements of the air. Atoms? Invisible. Only a short time ago, no one knew any of this stuff was there because it’s invisible, Khrushchev. Is it possible that God is invisible and beyond the reach of detection by shiny human gadgetry?

Perhaps you just mean that the idea of Bigfoot and fairies in themselves are ridiculous? They’re not except in the distorted mind of scoffers such as yourself. Imagine?! An upright ape like animal living in the forest!! Who could believe such a thing as that? Will wonders never cease? As for fairies, the ancient Irish believed them to be just another class of demons who did not suffer the same guilt as those who fell into hell with Lucifer. Rude Canadians are a reality, I see them everyday.

The highly ordered universe itself and everything in it; does it not make a good claim for a creator of some sort?

Oh no, you say, the universe exploded out of the great and sacred black hole of nothingness of yore. The blessed and holy big bang explosion was set of by the god of nothingness who had become bored with the increasingly blasphemous status quo. Besides, he, Cthulhu and the other elder gods, had made a wager on whether he could do it or not.

In the scientology cult you’re in, who set off your big bang? Was it Xenu, or ET? Who did that? What is the particular dogma that you adhere to on these matters. Do you look to Fr. Einstein or Fr. Dawkins, or perhaps Fr. Nye, for that particular answer? Which particular alien was it who seeded the earth with life? It couldn’t be God because we can’t test that claim with a few beakers and test tubes. Howard the duck did it perhaps? What would the high witch doctor Sagan say on this matter?

I have no doubt that there was a dragon in Sagan’s garage, my friend. And now that Sagan has passed on from this mortal coil, I can only assume that he and the dragon have become warm associates.

Lots of questions so let me try and answer them in the order in which they’re asked.
No, because then that simply leads to the next question – who created the creator.
Don’t know / Don’t think so / Don’t know / No dogma – just happy to have the answer as ‘don’t know’ instead of ‘god did it’ / All good places to start / We don’t know how life started yet…we may never know / Unlikely it was Howard the Duck – if he was that powerful he surely would have made the movie about himself less shit / Sagan would say we don’t know a lot of these answers but it’s important to keep searching for evidence and testable theories rather than invoke the ‘god of gaps’.

You look around and you see a shit pit world. That’s a shame – it’s a pretty great place and I think you do its (and our) creator a disservice by viewing it with such disdain.
Lets leave it there. Your belief structure has obviously made you a forgiving, open minded and patently happy person so you keep doing you and I’ll do me. See you on the other side.

Would love to hear you guys draw parallels between First Reformed and Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. You’d be amazed.