459: Holy Ghost

Holy Ghost

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Title text: Okay, everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.

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Explanation

The majority of Christian sects (including Roman Catholicism) profess belief in the conception of a singular God wherein there is a mysterious unity of three distinct 'persons' who share in one another's divinity, in a concept called the Trinity. The three persons are conventionally called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — but in more archaic English usage, the third person was referred to as the Holy Ghost.

The 1984 movie Ghostbusters was based on the premise that ghosts exist and that four unemployed men had access to technology that could trap such ghosts. These men formed a business as Ghostbusters, and an important tool in their arsenal was a so-called "proton stream" powered by a wearable backpack. These streams would prod or stun ghosts, allowing them to be maneuvered into traps. Throughout the movie, the Ghostbusters reminded each other 'not to cross the streams', as this was supposed to cause a disastrous reaction, until the climax of the movie where crossing the streams was required to banish the main antagonist.

Here we see that the Ghostbusters have apparently just encountered and eliminated the Holy Ghost, and are being taken to task by the Pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. He points out that much of Christian theology is grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity and is unwilling to accept the Ghostbusters' apology.

The title text is a play on a short Catholic prayer called the Sign of the Cross (the physical motions of which involve touching the forehead, chest, and shoulders), the practice of which is colloquially called 'crossing oneself', and on the danger of the Ghostbusters' 'crossing the streams' and touching two proton streams together, which in Ghostbusters canon causes an explosive chain reaction in all nearby atoms.

Transcript

[The Pope stands behind a table.]

Pope: This is a disaster.

Ghostbuster (off-screen): Is it really that bad?

[The Pope seen from the side in white on a black background. The text is in white:]

Pope: Do you know how much scripture we'll have to revise?

Ghostbuster (off-screen): Look, we've apologized –

[Zoom out from the pope]

Pope: I mean, we can't have a trinity with just a Father and a Son!

Ghostbuster (off-screen): Again we're sorry.

[The four Cueball-like Ghostbusters with their proton packs.]

Pope (off-screen): Sorry's not enough. Guards, take their proton packs.

Ghostbuster: Hey, we were just doing our jobs!

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Discussion

Pope: Do you know how much scripture we'll have to revise? It isn't a problem. Trinitarian dogma isn't even peripheral to scripture. So the answer is: "None". I am sure that had there been cause for concern at least one comedian would have come up with it by now. I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 09:46, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

It's not the Trinity that's the issue. It's that the Bible talks a whole lot about the Holy Spirit. He is very important to the theology. If He can be trapped, it means the Bible got a lot of things wrong. Trlkly (talk) 23:50, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Uh, the Bible got everything wrong, it's fiction... -- The Cat Lady (talk) 09:00, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

No it didn't; Even if you don't believe it's the infallible word of God (it is), you still need to except it as a book with potentially unreliable historical accounts of things that actually happened 172.69.34.129 (talk) 19:13, 31 January 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

One can "except it", but it's hard to "accept it". Too many gods (or versions of gods) with their own infallible words. At the most, just one could be correct, and the chances are that every one has been miscopied/mistranslated/re-edited without necessarily having a proper meeting with the ultimate author to discuss the result. (Various of the Holy Books do have statements that command like "do not change the words of this book", for a kind of memetic stasis. But it's hard to know if this was obeyed (or even present) right from the start. It could easily have been frozen after being corrupted.)

Learning history from the Bible doesn't help, though. Anything that's not actually wrong is at least biased (and no room for updating with any newly attested understanding of, say, the socio-economic situation in Pharoah's Egypt) or unprovable (what did the leper actually say? ...and does it matter?). But given that (e.g.) Herod The Great died BC (4BC-1-BC, by best estimates) you have to decide that it was his son, or revise all the other book-inspired dating/event systems.

I have no problem with the Bible (and most other equivalents) suggesting that we all follow the line of "be good to each other". One should not mind which God/gods/elemental-philosophies people subscribe to if they do that. (c.f. that done to Aslan, in C.S. Lewis's "The Last Battle", and that is almost directly a theologically-inspired Jesus avatar anyway.) Not that everyone does that, with or without the Bible as their go-to. 172.69.195.170 21:54, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Sigh, The Jewish people were remarkable historans, memorizing thousands of pages of history each, and it was punishable by death to change them. Contrary to popular belief, the new testament is a actual historical book that got turned into a holy book because of its contents. Almost all of the books are letters written less than 40 years after Jesus' death, from one person to another, not as a lot of people belive, a tale about a long long ago similar to greek myths. Not only that, the Gospel books were all writen by eyewitnesses or by eyewtness testimony. That is all agreed with by everyone (all actual historans that is). Jesus was an actual person who actually clamed to be God and actally got crucified. This is all fact, in fact this is really remarkably recorded, its very rare to have ancent history recorded by eye witnesses. After Jesus got crucified, 50-500 some people all clamed to see him resurrected, somthing the Jews didn't belive in, and if they were lying about that, they just forfeted their place in heaven. After that, thousands of people (a lot of them were people who watched Jesus die and cheered) turned away from thousands of years tradition and belief, got tortured and killed for somthing that they themselves would have claimed impossible just a 3 years earlier. This is in handwritten letters, this is all historical fact, nobody can claim this didn't happen. It is ridiculous to argue about any of the above, you can follow the paper trail. What is worth argueing about is weither or not the Jews were fooled into their new religon or was it actally divine. But saying that "everything int he bible is made up or that its been mistranlated" is dumb (look up the redsea scrolls).

I don't like getting in "religous arguments" because nobody's mind is actally changed and everyone just gets mad at each other. But PLEASE do some research on the people and their writings your discussing, BEFORE drawing conclusions and squabbling with each other Apollo11 (talk) 16:03, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

There certainly is scholarly dispute about whether some of the books (or segments of books) were written within living memory (or living memory of living memory) of the depicted events. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the accounts, but neither would it validate them. It's clear that some events (e.g. the Nativity) are told in separate non-identicle accounts, which might be considered a "narrative choice" by the respective source authors (or those that compiled the sources), to exemplify a particular aspect of what was known. Or created as an allegory that conveyed that moment's intended spirit of the teachings.

Much as Genesis tells two separate and different versions about the act of Creation, indicating a deep-down compromise having already been made. And even admonishments to never change the contents (on pain of death) cannot guarantee the occasional accident of transmission (or even officially sanctioned reframing, by those who had the authority to impose/withhold such punishment as they saw fit) that henceforth was 'protected' by the very same demand that nothing of the changed version should be changed... Good luck with that. Between general linguistic(/translational) drift, the intrinsically malleable nature of oral histories, the chance discovery of 'closer to the root' documents and the very real process of men in power being 'selective' about what is passed on (c.f. The Apocrypha and other acts of inclusion/exclusion that occured across history).

It's all easy enough to have the belief that any particular words were god-inspired (and god-protected), but it often relies upon the circular premise that the god involved is indeed there to do this. To anyone who does not start with that premise (having another god, with other texts, in mind; or none at all) it is trivial to dismiss it as (at best) a folk-story with perhaps a significant amount of historical basis (within the bounds of regular human falibility, bias and reinterpretations) but of no practical significance compared to another source (whether that be something like the Mahabharata or a modern critical analysis of all known relevent archeological and documentary evidence).

This is not to decry anybody's actual belief, merely to point out that one person's Belief might be considered unsubstatiatable by someone with an equally firm Belief, and vice-versa, and the flaws that either party claims in their opposite number's argument might be equally agreed as flaws by yet another. And all those involved may well have tried to base their arguments upon genuine research, as well as taken it as an act of faith (or at least a viable core hypothesis) that their baseline position is acred line that they can never cross. I would personally hope that there's no need to argue any of it (be true to your own belief, so long as that lets you mutually tolerate those of any another, or none), and hope that this prevents harmful discourse/etc. But it depends upon the adamance of the other adherant(s). If only everyone could make allowances, we'd have a better world. 172.69.195.181 17:43, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Woah Nk22 (talk) 11:18, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Why is the 2nd frame inverted? 108.162.215.216 (talk) 09:33, 18 May 2020 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

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