Soren wrote on Mar 3^rd, 2015 at 8:43pm:


I can't, because I don't know it well enough.

Soren, what properties does the god you believe in have?

In a review Patton Dodd calls attention to a Bible that Eastwood employs in the film as a kind of visual symbol. One Sunday while his family is at church, listening to a sermon about discovering God’s plan for one’s life, young Kyle takes a Bible from the church pew. Next, we see a close-up of the Bible sitting on a table at the Kyle home. This Bible reappears during Kyle’s first tour in Iraq. We see him pull out the Bible and place it carefully inside his vest before his mission, which he does before every mission.

In a later scene, Ryan Job (Biggles) points out to Kyle that while he noticed Kyle always carrying a Bible, he never actually witnessed him opening it and reading it. Kyle shrugs this off by saying, “God, country, family, right?” implicitly implying that he already knew what his purpose was – he didn’t need to read it. Job asks Kyle if he had ever reflected on what the war was actually about and why they were there. At this point Kyle shows some frustration, and then walks away.

Patton points out that the Bible (which, no doubt, was an Eastwood invention) seems to be a symbol suggesting that Kyle’s sense of self and his sense of the world and what was expected of him was “an unopened, unexamined sense.” Patton observes that while “the Kyle of the film is a figure of American bravery; he is also a figure of how that bravery and nobility can be compromised – misguided in motivation, uninformed in duty.”

I don’t know if Eastwood intended this or not, but I, too, see

the unopened, unread Bible as a symbol of conformity, an emblem of an orientation toward the world, God, country, and life in general that was never examined, questioned, or critiqued.

Kyle embodied a simple philosophy: Americans are the good guys. Iraqis are the bad guys. His job was to kill the bad guys. (Eastwood’s portrayal of all Iraqis as evil – children and women on suicide missions, men on housetops with cell phones identifying troop locations, and families hiding weapons under trapdoors in their houses – ironically, may say something about his own unexamined prejudice.)

The social systems of family, church/religion, and the military shaped him, and he totally bought in to what he was taught. The system certainly hails Kyle as a hero because he did what the system asked him to do and he did it better than anyone else.

Kyle’s blind obedience to the version of “God, country, family” passed on to him is an example of the power of the system to tell us who we are and shape who we become

.

http://afreshperspective-chuck.blogspot.com/2015/02/american-sniper-and-power-of-sy.html

My intention was twofold: 1) To show that the real Chris Kyle was a much more complex individual than the movie portrayed; and 2) critique the movie version Chris Kyle for his unquestioning loyalty to the systems (country/military, church/religion, and family) that shaped his life, demonstrating the power of these systems to tell us who we are and shape who we become.

Chuck Queen

Frankfort

http://www.state-journal.com/opinion/2015/02/22/your-letters-published-feb-22-2015

With fire-breathing religion figuring anew in global conflicts, and political discussions at home often dominated by the nuttery of the Christian right, you might get the sense that somebody’s god is ready to mug you around every street corner. But if you’re the type who doesn’t like to hang your hat on organized religion, here’s a bit of good news: in America, your numbers are growing.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/03/americans-are-turning-away-from-organized-religion-in-record-numbers/

There are a great many lessons to be learned from the Knox Grammar School scandal, as your editorial rightly reminds us ("Knox child abuse: lessons for parents", February 28). But the greatest lesson must surely be that the moral authority of religious institutions, whose very values are predicated on the assumption that their legitimacy is somehow derived from faith in a holy and just Creator, must seriously be brought into question. These institutions have been given the benefit of the doubt by a society that is too readily willing to believe that this cloak of religious legitimacy makes them immutable to such wide-scale and systemic moral failure.

But this raises an even wider question: how can such unspeakable crimes against humanity, from the Christian Crusades of the past to the barbaric atrocities being committed in the present by the Islamic State, be given so high a degree of religious sanction by so many? For this reason, US President Barack Obama staunchly refuses to call the Christian Crusades "Christian" or the Islamic State "Islamic". Similarly, neither should Knox Grammar School be called "Presbyterian" until its staff re-commit themselves to the true values and moral teachings of Jesus Christ.

Vincent Zankin Rivett (ACT)

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-letters/too-many-turned-backs-on-knox-abuse-20150301-13ruc9.html

Raven wrote on Mar 4^th, 2015 at 4:16pm:


You're moving back and forth between an 'is' and an 'ought'. You say life is such and such, then say life ought to be such and such. It's called the fact/value distinction, and you're blurring the two.

Despite that, these powerful instincts you speak of. We can assume man did not choose to have them. They merely exist without volition, right? So who put them there then? Why are they there?

Stratos wrote on Mar 4^th, 2015 at 7:47pm:


Can you think of any phenomena without a creator? We claim human beings create things, so why can't phenomena not created by humans have a creator? We use cause and effect reasoning everyday. We use it to understand so much of the world around us and to trace things back to their primacy. Why suspend cause and effect reasoning in this instance?

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Mar 4^th, 2015 at 7:44pm:


When those who believe a god gives us a meaning of life that would be a pre-ordained meaning to life. If we were created by random chance then there is no pre-ordained meaning to our life. It is us humans that give our life meaning. Raven is the product of several million sperm racing to one egg. By pure chance one particular sperm reached the egg and created Raven.

Had another sperm reached that egg Raven would not exist. Some would say Raven is destined to be here. Another argument is that Raven is a one in a hundred million fluke. If all is pre-ordained why do we need so much sperm racing towards the goal.

As to our powerful instincts life would not exist without them. It is programed into life over billions of years of evolution, a self replicating protection matrix that through trial and error has enabled life to look after number one at all costs.

Our instincts are natures way of responding to the realities of our world