Just finishing up that heavy-metal documentary here. There's talk about some bands being banned in some countries, like
Cannibal Corpse, not the least for their
hyper-violent album art.
As one of the band members points out, there's art as least as violent, and more realistic, in the Vatican.
Also, imagine
The Passion Of The Christ had not been a religious movie. It would have been banned everywhere. And imagine the protagonist had been a woman. Couldn't even have been produced!
Update: I don't want to seem like I'm attacking Christianity, I'm really not, many of my best friends are Christians. But in the West, Christianity is
very dominant, and like they say, with great power comes great responsibility (I think Goethe said that. No wait, it was Spiderman). So like any group, they need some self-awareness. And
some Christians, surely a minority, but a very vocal one, has this all-pervading belief that they are the Good Ones, and those they disagree with are the Bad Ones. (OK, we all suffer from that to some degree.) For example when they attack heavy metal for promoting violence... look at the numbers: through history, how many people have been killed in the name of heavy metal, and how many have been killed in the name of Christianity? (Witch hunts, inquisition, crusades...) I'm
not saying Christians are bad, I'm just saying maybe they are just people like everybody else, and maybe it would behoove them to not judge (lest thou be judged) quite so much and not to Throw The First Stone so often (let him who is without sin throw the first stone).
Joe quotes:
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”-Stephen Weinberg
It seems to me that religion has also had a huge civilizing influence. But it's clear something is rotten, if for nothing else then for the number of people who
hate their parents' religion with the heat of a thousand suns.
For example, while many heavy metallers use (inverted) religious imagery because it looks cool or sells records, a few of them are really sincere. Especially in Norway, it seems there's an age-old unresolved conflict between the vikings and the Christianity which was forced upon them by the state. Norway was were you had, in the nineties, those
burnings of the old wooden churches (over fifty!). They interviewed some of those who did it and others too, and they had zero regrets. They
really regard Christianity in their country as an evil blight on life. Interesting. (Of course it's really a small minority, a handful of people.)
... The wiki
page on (Norwegian) Black Metal contains a lot of fact and events which are amazingly brutal and incredible. If I'd seen them in a movie, I'd consider them grossly unrealistic. Jeeeez.
Especially since I never heard much about Norway, and I had thought that like Denmark and Sweden it would be just be full of basically laid-back and mellow people. But maybe not?
... Or maybe so, still. See
docu.
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... Aaaaaanyway, oddly enough my search for
Cannibal Corpse art also turned up this little tidbit, which I post here just to see Joe go "boing" again. (I know I did.)
(Aha. It's Maggie-Pie, not a bad photographer.)