Reaction: Supernatural 4.10 -Reaction, Meta, Nitpickery, Speculation and Snark

[caffienekitty]

Neither RL crap, nor power failure, nor, nor, uh, anything else will keep me from reacting to this episode. *swats everything away* Shoo!

(Contains profanity)

Comments

[caffienekitty]

Um, okay, starting to get very twitchy at the portrayal of God here. I’m part of the God=Love way of thinking, rather than the God=smiting, so an angry God who wants to kill disobedient children, that’s just so pre-Jesus.

Depictions of real-world religions and deities on TV shows always make me twitchy, because it's someone's deeply held belief system. Show hasn't done the Wiccans and Pagans any favours either.

I went and checked out my Catechism of the Catholic Church for help. (Have to go to the Catholics for this, because for them angels are an article of faith. My church can take them or leave them, and I personally think both angels and demons are metaphors.)

o.O Dude. *fangirls your researching*

It was full of informative things like: “Angels and men (sic), as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey towards their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray” (311) and “The Church teaches that Satan was first a good angel, made by God: ‘The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally by God, but they became evil by their own doing.’” (391) and “This ‘fall’ consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign” (392).

Really? Now that's interesting. So by that tradition, angels would have free will.... Hm.

I do love that Anna Milton fell through disobedience. Yay for the shoutout to Paradise Lost!

Oh, absolutely!

[charis_kalos]

So glad you appreciate my researching! I bought a copy of the Catholic Catechism for the essay I wrote for In the Hunt, never having needed it before. It's fascinating! All this stuff that I'd never come across because it's from Catholic tradition rather than being strictly biblical.

So by that tradition, angels would have free will.... Hm.

Absolutely! They must, or else the story of Lucifer's fall just wouldn't work. He must have been able to choose between good and evil, and then have chosen evil, or else he either couldn't have fallen, or the fall would have been beyond his control.

[caffienekitty]

Catholicism has a lot of nifty stuff to it. Most of the people at my office are Catholic and because they seem to think I'm the only one that knows how to use the internet, they tap me to look stuff up once in a while like lay baptisms. Loads of interesting stuff, I guess which comes from having a religion be a major world power for a long while and free to explore the text and develop rituals without fear of external persecution. I guess. :-)

Absolutely! They must, or else the story of Lucifer's fall just wouldn't work. He must have been able to choose between good and evil, and then have chosen evil, or else he either couldn't have fallen, or the fall would have been beyond his control.

That makes perfect sense. I had thought there was something about Lucifer being in the first rank of angels and subsequent ones that came about after the Fall were not allowed free will, but I'm not sure where I picked that up from. Maybe something in college.

It's funny, being a fan of this show. I took a course on Milton in college, and also did a bit of an independant study into Dante's Inferno, among other things, and I never thought that years later I'd be wishing I could find the course materials and the essays I wrote because of a TV show.