Archive for: August, 2009

The Gift

Aug 12 2009 Published by under Before My Year

Tonight I watched an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. It was called The Gift and was about Santeria. Ok, I know this episode came out in 2003, but it’s new to me. :)

It was sooo bad, I just had to share. lol

One of the reasons I hate this show is how the detective in the show just happens to know information about all sort of fringe things and makes conclusions from small scraps of information. The knife used to kill a guy also had traces of animal blood — chicken, sheep, and goat — and the body of the person killed was left at the corner of three churches. Therefore, according to the detective, it must be related to Santeria…

I started writing down various things that irked me about this episode, but changed my mind. There were just too many cheesy aspects of this episode to even begin commenting on it.

This episode actually had more to do with “psychic” stuff than it did about the religion. The only times Santeria was brought up, really, was when folks wanted to intimidate the believers of it — threatening the wrath of the orisha if they didn’t do what that person wanted.

Oh, well. If I wanted accuracy, I’d watch the Discovery Channel or TLC instead of late-night cop drama :-P

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Not In Kansas Anymore

Aug 09 2009 Published by under Before My Year

A while ago, I stumbled upon a book called “Not In Kansas Anymore“. It took me a while to get around to reading it. While not specifically related to the religion, there was a quote I liked:

Some of the best reasons not to do magic are the people who have done it. The promise of power can lead to paranoia and delusions of grandeur. It can also cause people to dwell on avenging slights when they would be better off forgetting them. It can cause people to imagine that others are responsible for bad fortune or illness when in fact they are reponsible themselves or no one is responsible.

Oh, how true!

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YouTube

Aug 08 2009 Published by under Before My Year

Every now and then, I run across television shows, movies, internet video, etc. that deal with the religion. It’s always interesting to see how close or — more often — how far they stray from reality. lol.

So that’s how I ran across these videos. They are part of a series on YouTube entitled, “Freedom From Religion”. It’s an interesting concept for a documentary, but the execution seemed poorly done. It’s one thing to be biased and come up with a ‘mockumentary’ to poke fun at whatever you have issues with. But to be so blatant and build it all on stuff that only the people directly involved can sympathize with just seems a little… amateurish. Still, I thought some of you might enjoy seeing these:

Freedom From Religion:

There are a few video responses and comments to these videos. For the most part, it seems viewers who know even a smidgen of information about the religion share my reaction towards this series. The guy’s got his own bizarre angle on this and probably is just trying to get some publicity of his own, so he can make some films that people will actually watch. Can’t blame him for that, I guess. While I normally am annoyed with folks giving the religion a bad name, I think the documentary did a good job showing that both the religious and non-religious community as a whole is above a lot of this petty stuff.

The series is basically just one long rant by an annoying goofball with a camera and a cry for attention.

Was the “rogue priest” mentioned in the video a bad-guy? Who knows. In the clips shown, he seemed like an ass. But who knows what went on between the two when the camera wasn’t there. If the priest was doing sacrifices in plain view of his neighbors, yeah, that was pretty retarded. But if the film-maker guy was instigating things by making repeated calls to officials even after being told what was going on wasn’t illegal, well, that’s retarded, too.

Last but not least, how threatened could this guy be of the “curses” and “hexes” the guy placed on him if he doesn’t believe in any of that? Hmm. Oh, well. Those two seem to deserve one another. lol

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