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Originally Posted by lucyrulesok
while i agree that shakespeare is more likely taking a mocking tone here, i think you can't really tell whats going on in the bard's head. and all interpretation is open to discussion, thats why people have studied shakespeare for nearly 500 years.
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i'm glad we agree on this one, I was just getting confused at the way Powers had presented it, because I'm not exactly and expert on Hamlet, but I always felt that scene was as you said, taking a mocking tone.
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Originally Posted by hevusa
So you are perpetuating the lie even when there has never been one shred of objective information about the existence of God? Interesting set of morals you got there son.
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why are you turning it this way? I brought that up in a passing reference, it is rather irrelevant to this discussion..
I didn't start this as a religious thread, or a discussion of religion in any way, rather as a poetry thread. further, I think you missed my point entirely, even IF there is no such thing as a God, a Mass can be quite the meditative and therapeutic session, and a lot of psychological baggage can be sorted out there through the influence of the poetry and songs that are the center of the service. If God exists is definitely irrelevant to the psychological benefits of self-reflective Mass service, and as such, depending upon technology for this self-reflection would have been absurd. To have been engulfed in my cell phone rather than taking a few hours to escape the world and go into my own head, alone, without people to bother my meditation, would have been to miss the point of Mass entirely. Regardless of God's existence, a Mass is supposed to be an opportunity for deep, introverted self-reflection and intuitively to leave the outside world outside.. this was very much Powers' point of his book, that our technology is smothering our lives.
Of course, I think that is EXACTLY what Shakespeare was implying with that scene in Hamlet, that the idea of having to use the new technology, the writing tablet to record a revelation (almost like typing something on the computer you could have more easily hand-written simply to
use the computer because it is there), made Hamlet miss the point of a self-reflective revelation. The Ghost could have just as easily been a figment of Hamlet's imagination, as could God have been at the Mass I attended, but what Hamlet and I both were supposed to get out of that was indeed the self-reflection, but the technology could hinder such growth in the rush to use the technology. In orienting around the technology, we can lose sight of what is real, of what the point is.