Author Archives: Cecibell Lowe
Heaven’s Gate and the Social Psychology of Humiliation
In looking at the Heaven’s Gate site first and then reading the essays, I understood after the fact what everyone else did as they were reading. Even then, the first thing that caught my attention were how outrageous it all sounded, which is something Applewhite thankfully acknowledged in the video that Amy linked us to. What does validate his words is his confidence though, the conviction that what he is telling us is the Truth whether we like it or not or even believe it. That he actually says outright how the rest of society will look at them works to keep potential believers interested. Someone who knows they’re different trying to get other people to join them is much more convincing and likable than someone who tries to play off that their very different group is normal.
It’s how you get Nichelle Nichols’ brother to join your cult, after all.
Holes In the Mindset: Half-cocked Fundamentals
Strozier’s breakdown of Revelation allows for us to simply soak in the main points of John’s visions without drowning in the language and warnings for morality, making it a lot easier to understand and empathize with fundamentalists, like Colby said. However, I have to say that I find myself disagreeing with some of his analysis of Revelation and also some of what he says about some of his seals of fundamentalism, particularly what he says of the letters and what he also says on the seal of revenge.
Fundamentalist Mindset and Language
I had actually tried reading the Left Behind series a couple of years ago but never got a chance to really finish the first book. Like everyone’s mentioned, Glorious Appearing and the Fundamentalist Mindset essays go hand in hand. The Tribulation Force is trying to fight of the Antichrist, Nicholae Carpathia at the start of the novel, drenching the reader immediately in violent imagery. I think what we need to keep in mind though is that whereas the Rapture and its related events are all still hypothetical for us, the world of Glorious Appearing is a world that is undergoing the seven years of rule under the Antichrist. These characters have lost their family members to God and have been shown proof through Carpathia’s resurrection that there is more to come, which is why the language is so fundamentalist because it is happening in their concrete world. What I’m particularly interested about though is more language of the essays. We’re all using terminology that Strozier and Boyd used but I found some of their definitions lacking and, to use another of their words, ‘simple-minded’.
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Chasing “The Rapture”: Let’s Give God One More Chance
“The Rapture”, as a whole, is supposed to be the story of a woman who tries to find fulfillment in her life; first with indulging in the finer, and baser, pleasures in life before ‘finding’ salvation in a religion that she disowns by the end of the film in a bout of…selfishness. Overall, she shows no growth, condemns others to lives that didn’t make them all that happy, and tortured herself for no reason other than to have something to complain about. Normally, I would have analyzed the movie as a whole at the end of it but I ended up writing as scenes came up and then modifying my thoughts as it went on.
From the Outsider Point of View
After watching the video for ‘Duck and Cover’ and about half of the movie, I did what I figured would be the most accurate thing to fully understand the thought of a nuclear catastrophe from this older viewpoint.
I asked my mother.
Afraid of the Big Bag Whore?
For the latter half of the book, I want to draw focus on something we talked about in class, the presentation of women in Revelation. Not only that but the perception that John of Patmos has of sex and anything remotely related to it. While Kirsch’s analysis of the historical impact that Revelation has had on western civilization is interesting, I want to move beyond that and try to get into John’s head. More than that, I think it might be more important to understand John’s perspective on certain behaviors in order to get the additional, possibly hidden, messages within Revelation he was trying to convey.
