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"Nothing is just one thing" -Virginia Woolfe

"Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." -Ricky Gervais

Rant Time!

I don't care if you're religious or not, this isn't about that. What this is about is how political correctness censors and bans in the name of "not offending people." Taken to extremes, political correctness practiced by the blind and the oblivious leads to the destruction of good art. Why?

Good art, at its core, is never about role models. Good art is meant to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and of everyone around us. Good art doesn't have clear cut good guys and bad guys. Good art explores what happens when people we look up to fail and falter. Good art doesn't preach at us: it's not a treatise with clearcut good guys and bad guys.

Read the Greek tragedies. Do you think that Euripides endorsed mothers killing their children? Of course not. The Hercules of Greek theater was a man who slaughtered his family in a fit of rage despite the fact that he was one of Greece's greatest heroes. Why? He was a complex and flawed character, moreso that we're lead to believe nowadays. And the Greek audience understood this-- they had the emotional capacity to face the fact that sometimes great people do bad things, and to consider that people's wrongdoings don't invalidate their accomplishments, but their accomplishments also don't pardon their wrongdoings.

So too is it in the Bible. The David of First Kings and Samuel stages dirty guerrilla campaigns. He plots murder against people who pose a threat to his rise to rule. He commits adultery by raping a woman whom he was peeping on in her bath. Yet he also helped found the Kingdom of Israel and defended its people from certain doom at the hands of the Philistines.

In the Bible, indeed, anywhere in ancient myth, there's a theme of great people doing horrible things and consequently getting punished for it. The ancients knew humanity well enough to understand this fundamental problem and were able to explore the question through genuinely good art--stories, poems, statues, mosaics.

Movies can do this nowadays, too. Is the Godfather a "sexist" movie because the men are in positions of power? Is Spielberg "problematic" because of the horrible things depicted in Schindler's List? Are we going to dismiss Hitchcock's movies because he was nasty to women in his private life?

The issue with this political correctness is that it fundamentally assumes that people are too dumb to get moral complexity. Art is meant to shock and it's been shocking people for millennia: when Michelangelo revealed the statue of David, people threw rocks at it because they though statues of naked people were evil.

You're smarter than that. We're smarter than that. Just because a piece of art has troubling themes doesn't mean its audience is going to rush out into the streets to perpetrate those themes. Likewise, the portrayal of horrible things in art doesn't imply the creator's approval of those things. That's what the politically correct crowd thinks, however, and it's disgusting. It's time we throw off political correctness and instead of shirking off art that we find troubling, use that art to address tough questions. That's the way it's been for all human history-- that's the way it needs to be again.

I'm sorry if this was incoherent. I'm just really mad about this issue.

Not that I actually think we should ban the bible, but you realize that you're not supposed to base your life around the Godfather right? Because Christians actually do advocate for basing your life on the bible.

My first impression of the petition mentioned is that it is actually intented to lampoon the prevailing trend of political correctness by taking it to its logical etxtreme.

Also, this subject seems incredible wide-ranging. What about hate speech, the use of offensive words i public discourse, etc?

You're right on that account. OT was too broad.

As for basing one's life on the Bible, the convoluted point was that just because it portrays horrible things doesn't mean it condones them. As many examples of "this is good behavior that people reward you for" there are, there are also examples of it saying "this is bad behavior and if you follow through with it, it will end badly for you." Cautionary tales and the like.

@Sir Lurkmore

Hate speech, in the form of saying horrible things about people, is a public declaration, and consequently is not art. Art can contain hate speech, like DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation idolizing the Klan. Even we rightly find that sort of thing abhorrent, it's better to expose ourselves to art that we consider abhorrent and figure out why we react that way than it is to run away, cry and try to censor things.

I agree. Indeed, if you look, the Bible actually advocates against that. I can't say the Old Testament isn't wonky (to put it lightly) – but in the New Testament it revokes the Old Testament, and the most "patriarchal" it gets there is by saying the man is the head of the women in marriage (which, lets face it, somebody has to or "ties" will show up and cause problems). Repeatedly it states that love is the ultimate rule and all other rules are based on it. As you said, people did bad things and got punished – and the concept of Heaven and Hell reinforces this. It's the difference between saying "X happens and thus it promotes X" and "X happens but when you read the story as it's meant to be read, it's shown to be really bad, and thus it doesn't promote X".

Art is art, and that's why books and music and video games and all related media are all covered under free speech in the United States. To try to censor it is the beginning of problems galore. I think part of the problem is, actually, the way people consume media. We're prone to just power through most art, only grazing the surface of what it means, what it tries to say. If you read the Bible that way, you'd definitely get a negative impression. Art isn't meant to be used this way, yet must people do it anyways. Many parenting sites advise talking to children about the "deeper meaning" of things, asking them questions about it. I think by doing this, we'd have a lot less of… gestures to the image this junk.

Of course, it's always up to them to stop being pretentious thought police. That'd help as well.

I wonder if i can tie this with the recent removal of GTAV from target and Kmart Australia because of its apparent depiction of violence against women?

On the other hand, you can't assume that the authors of these biblical passages didn't condone any of those actions you mentioned in the OP or others. The fact is that we know all but jack shit about those authors. And I would presume that if God does something in the narrative we're supposed to support it? Well, how 'bout when the prophet Elisha curses a bunch of kids for making fun of him being bald, as kids are wont to do, and the good Lord happily sends out a couple of bears to maul the fuck out of them? (In fact, the exact number was given at 42- Mr. Adams anyone?)

I don't want to turn this into a discussion about Biblical Truth, because I wanted to talk about banning things instead. For the record, I'm just as ardently against the conservative "banners" too. Just because art offends someone's religious morals doesn't mean it should be forbidden. If your faith is weak enough that any challenge of your principles sends you over the edge, you were never really faithful to begin with and just because your individual constitution can't handle challenge doesn't mean that it should be deprived from everyone else. Furthermore, a society like the USA, where the government shouldn't adhere only to one creed, it's wrong to ban things that some of its constituent populations don't find offensive.

But to address the Biblical point very briefly, the Christian reading of the OT suggests that a lot of it was wrong and Jesus needed to come and "fix" people's understanding of God. Christians believe in Divine Inspiration for the authors of the Bible, but Jews don't. Reformed Jewish scholars also tend to agree that the OT was written by many people, thus different tone/vocab in different books. Second Kings, where Elisha factors into the OT, was one of the goriest books of the Bible. It also came from a more violent, primitive time in history.

Are you sure this isn't just some parody on the GTA V Target Ban that people are taking way too serious because that's the internet for ya?

I mean, just look at the titles, they're completely identical.

well, it's either they're too weak or they're extremely fanatical about it. The latter really hits home.

The sad truth is that the people who are the most fanatic about their religion generally have the weakest understanding it.

Whether this is a parody or not, people who want everything to be PC do insult other people's intellect, whether they mean to or not.
Not only is it often clear in media what's supposed to be bad behavior, it's also completely idiotic to assume people will copy anything they see.

Now, I think needlessly smutty things some western AAA games have in them (Not trying to generalize here, but you know what I mean with that kind of game) are tastleless and have no place in games, but if people wanna games that have stuff into them others might object to, that's their right.

It's ridiculous something can be banned on account of encouraging bad behavior, without there being any proof.

And offensive is never a reason to ban anything, unless it's downright spreading hate.

People have become such a bunch of pussies, though.

That’s the way it’s been for all human history--

Most of human history was shit for anyone who wasn't a rich, able-bodied, cisgender and heterosexual man of the local dominant ethnic and religious group. Nowadays things are getting better (though still by no means perfect), and that's in part due to the fact people now have to be a bit more sensitive to those who are different from them and/or are at a disadvantage.

While I don't think art should be censored, that doesn't mean it can't be criticised either. In my experience, generally the sort of thing people bemoan as "political correctness" is more a request/expectation that people consider how what they say and do may affect other people, particularly those who are less powerful than them.

The artist, particularly one with a lot of influence, has power. Not only can they challenge people's perceptions, they can also reinforce them. An artist also isn't omniscient, and what effect they intend to create with their work isn't necessarily the effect it will have in reality. Sometimes they can reinforce negative perceptions in ways they didn't expect. Sometimes they may carry negative perceptions without realizing it, and that is reinforced through their work – people reflect the culture they are raised in, so their work is obviously going to carry forth at least some of the attitudes associated with it, good or bad.

And at the end of the day, the work stands as itself – what the person behind it wanted to condone or not is secondary to how it's received. If it's reinforcing negative attitudes about people then that's happening regardless of what they intend, and yes that doesn't mean its audience is going to rush out into the streets to perpetrate those themes, but few people are taking that extreme. Media influences people in subtle ways, but if you accept that art can change the world positively you must also accept that it can do so negatively (perhaps at the same time in different ways – something can excel in one aspect while being very problematic in another).

tl;dr If you're using the power of art you should also consider the responsibility. My two pence!

Then we immediately get into a discussion about what constitutes art. Assigning privilege to messages communicated through art becomes an easy way to get away with saying things one could not normally say, and without a proper method of defining what is art, this is bound to be abused.

I'm not neccesarily advocating censorship, but it's more complicated than simply giving a free pass to art.

I honestly think that even offensive and wrong pieces of art have their place. Heck one thing for example is that I think that students should read "mein kampf" not so they can follow these ideas, but instead so they can know what these ideas look like, and so they can recognize them and not be fooled by the kind of people that would otherwise conquer the hearth of a country with such bullshit.

I thought that was a satire petition?

0.9999…=1 said:

Well, how ’bout when the prophet Elisha curses a bunch of kids for making fun of him being bald, as kids are wont to do, and the good Lord happily sends out a couple of bears to maul the fuck out of them?

>implying they were children
>implying nearim ketannim doesn't also mean "young men" (20-30s)
>implying they weren't a bunch of bandits lying in wait on the highway outside Bethal
>implying " Go up, thou bald head" wasn't a threat he'd soon be joining Elijah
Those implications.

I will sign the petition m'lady! Only religious fanatics believing in fairy tales could advocate violence against the fairer sex. *tips*

Not getting the joke: The thread

Anyway regarding the conversation, while I believe that for the most part art is not something that should be censored, the cases with the Bible and other religious books is that the Bible was not made as art, but as a way of explaining things thousands of years ago, when science was nowhere near where it is today. People today still use it as some kind of guidebook on how you live your entire life. Even as a set of morals, people have to pick and choose because some say you have to stone homosexuals.

Also you forgot one type of art there is. Propaganda (I'm not saying the Bible is) is used to get people to think in certain ways and it has the majority of the time been negative. Sure you can appreciate the art and understand it but in the end it is trying to convince you to think or do things someone else wants you to do. It could have made peoples lives hell because of the propaganda, you can understand why people get touchy.

that was a joke you baka!

Thumbs up for sarcasm.