Book of Daniel
Posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 0:45.
Oh, by the way, James Dobson can suck it. Perhaps half the country wouldn’t hate Christians if they weren’t so afraid to have intelligent discussions instead of mindlessly believing everything they are told by self-promoting leaders. Just a thought from one Christian to another.
I saw a conversation about this show in a myspace forum when the show was first announced, and the poster was complaining about the “sinfulness” of The Book of Daniel. At one point, he said something along the lines of, “Why can’t the media put out any shows about how Christians really are?” to which someone responded, “You mean a show about gay bashing and pipe bombs?”
I could have taken offense at that remark, but instead I took it as an indication of the pitiful job we, the Church, are doing when it comes to loving one another. So whether the issue is homosexuality, “sinful” television and movies, or Rock and Roll music, I think the Church is in desperate need of shutting the hell up and loving people for who they are. And while we’re at it, we Christians need to stop expecting “pagans” to embrace Christian standards. Am I the only one who sees a problem with that?
Ok, whew, end rant. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter, J.C.
I absolutely agree.
Christian leaders force dichotomy. When Christians look at other Christians (and usually only within the same narrowed belief set) as “us” and the rest of the world as “them”, its hard not to create an exclusive club where people judge on a scale of where you stand between the holiest and hell-iest of people.
People don’t become Christians because they’re afraid of hell. Jesus didn’t preach that threat and He didn’t preach his own crucifixion. He preached loved for one another. Certainly, there is more to it than that, but the Church is fixated on promoting the faith as if hell were WMDs.
When the Church can break from a preoccupation with who is holier, it might find that there are real issues that aren’t clean. Christians have to be willing to get dirrty in issues if they want to be relevant to the culture. Getting dirty is not condemning. It’s taking a moment to understand, reanalyze, and react in a manner where judgement isn’t the motivation.
I know this is jumbled, but the Church is starting to piss me off.
The Book of Daniel had *excellent* writing and was the most creative and engaging exploration of religious faith that I’ve seen in mass media. How unfortunate that those in the faith killed one of the best tools they could have ever had in promoting their faith. They acted out of fear and in O’Reilly fashion, I call them cowards.
The following seems related to your comments, and really good to read.
The Real State Of The Union
How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
My fellow Americans, we’re not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.
Yes, we are on the brink of epic destruction involving war and sweaty religious nutballs and a mad grab for the planet’s few remaining gurgles of oil and the general appalling lousiness of the new TV season. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Destruction can be healthy. A positive force. Destruction sweeps the place bare, scrubs out the spiritual colon, cleanses the palate for what’s next. And besides, have you seen “Grey’s Anatomy”? Totally cute.
But here’s the best part: No one really knows what’s next. Oh sure, we have prognosticators and pundits and professional fearmongers from the GOP and the religious right who want to tell you that the apocalypse is nigh and God hates everything you do and if the terrorists don’t get your fresh innocent white babies, the gays or the pot smokers or the rappers will.
But the truth is, we really haven’t the slightest clue what’s going on. Hell, 20 years ago, who could have predicted the insane rise of the Internet? The success of the Toyota Prius? Five-hundred-dollar Gucci iPod cases? Polyphonic ring tones? Dark matter? The baffling success of Ashlee Simpson? Puggles? This much we know: We don’t know squat. Except, of course, that there is one hell of a lot more to know.
Yes, the Bush administration has done more to harm the economy and decimate the national spirit and rape the notion of patriotism than any administration in 100 years. It might very well be true — hell, we all know it’s true — but is that all there is?
Juicy progress has occurred, despite Dubya and his ilk. Hell, in 1942 you couldn’t buy a vibrator to save your life, much less your marriage. People were playing scratchy 78s on their steam-powered turntables and danced in heavy girdles made of bailing wire and lost hopes. Merely uttering the words “double soy mocha latte” in some states would get you shot for being some sort of Communist. Life was brutal. Thongs had yet to be invented. Radiohead didn’t exist. Telephones were made of wood and string and lots of yelling. People ate meat from a can. Power steering was science fiction.
This much we know: Progress is measured in fits and hurls and recoils and lurches. We are certainly not where we were, but in some ways, we are stuck there like a pig in quicksand. It’s a conundrum. Make that a paradox. A cosmic knock-knock joke. It is merely the way.
Here is some interesting news: Only about 74 percent of Americans call themselves Christian nowadays, down from 86 percent about 15 years ago. What’s more, it seems the numbers are dropping steadily, a little less than 1 percent a year. Which means, in about 30 years from now, Christians could be a minority in the United State. What are we to make of this? Here’s the most fascinating aspect: God is smiling about it.
Although there’s a desperate need to cling on to the old, unenlightened ways, a deep trembling fear of change and progress, a need by the PTB to force everyone into little manageable boxes of identity and function, all while absolutely refusing to allow intellect and gender and belief to be as fluid and fascinating as they so desperately want to be, the good news is, the cat is out of the bag and she’s sprinting for the border, singing Led Zep’s “Black Dog” and laughing maniacally.
Art will not die. Gay rights marches awkwardly on. Wicca is the fastest-growing religion in America. Sex keeps us more giddy than ever. New galaxies get discovered. Women laugh. Communication evolves. Vibrator quality improves. Wars end. All this pseudo-Christian panic is merely the last spasm of a dying dogma. Which is to say, conservatives may wail and religions may pule, but love winks and shrugs and evolves anyway, despite them both.
You see, magic abounds. Change can blink clumsily to life even in the dankest of corners. Take health care. You will hear much about health care this year. Health care is a nasty, bloated mess, a massive crisis, bigger than any other fiscal issue facing the nation, could very well bankrupt the U.S. government. One reason costs are so high and HMOs are so abusive is because the health industry has powerful lobbyists and the industry CEOs are cronies of the president. What are we to do about this?
Maybe not as much as you might think. Because now a funny thing is happening: Ironically, the powerful crony CEOs of all the other major American corporations, like GM and Wal-Mart and even Starbucks, have become royally furious about how much of their overhead is going to pay for employee health care and are letting Congress feel their wrath, forcing a change. It is the battle of the BushCo cronies!
See, sometimes positive change can happen, even when it’s not borne of decent or humanitarian purposes. Of course your current gummint doesn’t care a whit about you or your health or well-being. They care about power and money and control. But sometimes even that works out sort of OK. Weird.
A sort of chaotic, forward-lurching equilibrium prevails. Even powerful, seemingly ironclad secrets cannot hold. The Bush administration is the cagiest and most morally abusive in decades, and we’ve worked like paranoid ferrets to narrow the extent and application of America’s landmark laws regarding open government, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Presidential Records Act. In other words, they don’t want you to know crap about how deep their lies go.
But look. In one short year, the sneering, all-consuming GOP has gone from master of all domains, from owning every aspect of the federal government and launching multiple failed wars and abusing all laws and spying and wiretapping and torturing and lying, to one of the least stable parties in ages. Scandals, indictments, arrests, Abramoff, Enron, DeLay, thousands of dead U.S. soldiers and nothing to show for it but more enraged terrorists, an economy running on fumes. Regimes built on lies and religious fearmongering never last. It’s like a genital rash — it just seems to take forever to heal.
Are you not reassured? Because this is the amazing thing. There are languages left to learn. Countries you have still not visited. Musical drumbeats you have not felt deep in your tailbone. There are sexual positions and tongue-related sensations and deep longing stares you have yet to hold in your body the way an open palm holds a small bird. It might take another lifetime or three. This is just fine. We have time. Lots of it.
Did you know every religion in the world has some variant of a belief in past lives, in reincarnation? It’s true. Most believe that this earthly plane is merely an intense cosmic schoolroom for our spirits, albeit one of the harshest and meatiest and most spasmodically radiant in the galaxies. And yet we keep coming back here, over and over, millions of times, to learn all the aspects, dark and light and murderous and blissful, so we can move to the next level, help the universe hum that much brighter.
My fellow Americans, I am here to tell you I have no freaking idea why it’s set up this way. But I can tell you one thing: It sure makes for one hell of a ride.
Thank you and God bless America.
You give James Dobson and his crowd too much power when you say that “that those in the faith killed” this show. What killed this show was a lack of viewers. James Dobson, the Southern Baptists and others have shown that they are unable to kill anything that Americans actually want to watch (e.g. Will and Grace or Joan of Arcadia).
They boycotted Disney because of its family friendly (true families including gay and lesbian ones) and non-discrimination policies and had no effect, eventually dropping their boycott because it was so ineffective.
I never got around to adding “The Book of Daniel” to my TiVo and as such never had a chance to watch it. I may or may not have liked it (a gay republican would have been an interesting character if done well), but it clearly did not draw me enough to actually watch it.
If I am square in its expected demographic and I was not motivated enough, it is easy to see why it failed (not intended as a criticism of it, just an explanation).
Even 1 million letters of complaint will not cause a network to drop a show that is popular, just as 1 million letters of support will not keep an unpopular show on air.
Finally, you talk about “The Church” as if there were one church. While as a Jew, I cannot speak completely authoritatively on this topic, it certainly seems to me from my studies of your religion, that there is no single Christian church, but a vast range of opinion from Catholics to the MCC.
My only response is that Book of Daniel got dropped from four markets causing advertisers to flee.
No other new show has ever been dropped from four markets, including the major market of Nashville, by affiliates. This is unprecedented.
The affiliates dropped because of Dobson’s influence. This caused national advertisers to flee because they didn’t want to advertise on a show not airing in four major markets.
This caused NBC to drop it altogether. So yes, Dobson is responsible and his campaign was effective.
When a network talks about “major markets”, it is referring to the top 25 Nielsen DMAs, that cover 50 percent of our population. No major market refused to air this show. Nashville, the largest market that chose to pull it, is number 30 (population 927,500, 0.842% of the United States population), the others were Beaumont, Tx, number 140 (population 167,430, 0.152%), Terre Haute, IN number 150 (population 145,630, 0.132%) and Meridan, MS number 184 (population 71,210, 0.065%).
Advertisers pay for viewers. There is never a shortage of advertisers for popular but controversial shows. Had this show been popular, it would still be on NBC as new advertisers would have stepped up to pay for it. Advertisers left because it was not delivering them eyeballs.