Percy Jackson annoyances

Note: there are some spoilers here (only sort of), but the movie has been out for awhile, so I don't feel bad.

Overall, I really like the movie. Obviously, when you have a story that takes place in modern times, but has all the greek mythological characters in it, it is quite likely that you'll have to change small bits of the story line. There were two that annoyed me to some degree, however.

The first was Medusa. She was killed in the myths, which means that it seems somewhat unlikely that she would be alive in modern times to be killed again. Not a big deal, I suppose, since she's a well known monster that they could put in there. However, I think they could have simply made the character another of her species. I guess that would lose the Hollywood name dropping of the villain. While it's fun to complain, I won't dwell on it.

The one that annoyed me more was the depiction of Hades. In most of the mythology I've read, Hades is described as the underworld, sure, but it is *not* Hell. Hell is specifically a modern, monotheistic notion. The idea of fire and brimstone, torture and pain is modern and doesn't show up in the old myths. (To be clear, there are some that are tortured, but only a handful of - mostly demigods - who have annoyed the gods.)

Hades is simply an afterworld. It is Heaven and Hell put together. It is where you go when you die, but not necessarily a bad place to be. In many depictions, it isn't played up to be a particularly fun place, either, but the movie implies it sucks for everyone.

This seems unnecessary to me. Most of the rest of the references weren't too far off, why was this one? Were the producers so steeped in Western mythology that they couldn't let go of the "underworld-as-hell" idea? Did they have a low expectation of viewers? Either was, I felt it was kind of a downer.

Origins of Life - Double Standard

Origins of Life - Double Standard

When looking at the creation/evolution debate (well, intelligent design these days is what they like to call it instead of creationism) one of the arguments that frequently comes up is what the origin of life was. To summarize: the anti-evolutionist argues that either evolution can't explain the origin of life or that even the most basic forms of life are so complex that they could not have arisen purely by chance.

At this point there are a couple of directions I could take this essay. I could mention that any time someone starts talking about "chance" they probably don't know what they are talking about with respect to evolution. That alone is a subject ripe for discussion, of course, since it amazes me how someone could be so far off base that they can't even summarize the opposing position reliably. Instead i want to talk about hippocracy... But first, the other side of the coin.

A common argument from the scientist about why an intelligent design explanation of the origin of life isn't workable is that it only explains the first step... There is always the question of who designed the designer. Of course, there is a lot more to this argument if you flesh it out. One of the major assumptions is that science won't tolerate a supernatural explanation. (I won't go into that assumption much here, but suffice to say that if something out there is allowed to break the rues, then it makes researching what the rules are somewhat difficult... Well, impossible, really.) The only reason this comes up is that many of the people in the ID movement insist that it isn't about religion and that the designer doesn't have to be god. (Ironically, in the Expelled movie, Richard Dawkins was trying to concede this exact point, which Ben Stein mocked.)

However, we're told by the ID crew that we're not allowed to ask who designed the designer. They say that this is outside the scope of intelligent design. We're told that the techniques of "design detection" can only tell us if design was employed, but cannot reveal anything of the designer. Convenient, when yiu need to hide a religious motive in a secular argument.

The hippocracy, then (and the simple complaint at the end of this lengthy steep) is: Why can't they understand that Origin of Life research is outside the scope of evolution? Attacking evolution because we're not sure how the first genes came about is tantamount to asking an ID supporter questions about the designer. Of course, in e grand scheme of human learning, we went to know how life originated... But it wasn't related to evolution, it was the precursor to it.

I think it would be fair that scientists ignore the question until all the ID suppoeters fess up to their religious motivation.

Eric