30 - Whit Fucking Dies (feat. Lev Novak) [Whit's Endless Summer #12]

Is the Holy Spirit named Archimedes? Is TF2 Heavy actually Jesus!?

Shoutout!!! I also thought 9/11 happened in Minnesota at first >_<

Fuck you AJ for reminding me about the Warcraft movie.

So when I was a kid, I missed the Mortal Coil episode in my jumbled collection of Odyssey tapes, but I DID have a later episode where Eugene is talking to Bernard about the experience, and he's trying to grapple and ration with it and I remember thinking "wait, Eugene is such a kind, helpful, goofy guy. Why the fuck is he going to hell!?!?" Raised the sorta church I was, hell wasn't featured in a big way in my upbringing but I always knew it was there for bad people. But learning that every single "good christian" in Odyssey secretly believed that every non-christian was doomed to hell when they died? Eugene was their friend and the whole time they thought he deserved this?!?! I remember being very angry as a kid at this belief, and eventually, after a lotta years and other similar thought experiments, I turned entirely away from the church.

I'm at 18:00 and is this a bit? Is this some kind of long con? Or did you genuinely listen to an episode titled The Star, then just happen to go off on a tangent riffing on how that star might have been made to appear in the sky for only long enough to guide these men to Bethlehem? Because if it's the latter I am BEGGING you to go read The Star, a short story by Arthur C Clarke. Please. It's so good.

I’m back for my 10th relisten of this episode. Lev is my absolute favorite guest you’ve had on. I’ll be honest, I keep coming back because the way he describes his vision makes me feel nostalgic for when I was a kid and the nuances of religion were lost on me, when god was just a comforting presence that I didn’t have to worry about panopticon-ing me. Makes me tear up, ngl. And I always enjoy the Jewish perspective of these stories, since my childhood’s version was very clearly skewed a specific way. Can’t wait for the book.

I've been re-listening to the Whit's Endless Summer episodes, because as someone who grew up with these, I apparently enjoy traumatizing myself again and again. RE: Eugene's hell and the fact that Whit either willfully or algorithmically created it, I think this is the part that actually scared me to death as a child. As a fairly analytical, doubtful young person, I could not be tuned to Christianity without the threat of horror. As an adult, it could be why I turned around on it and why I love horror so much, but as a kid, the effectiveness of God's rules and reality could only be cemented through cruel tableaus like this one. It wasn't necessarily the "loneliness" or "burning blackness" that scared me but the information that my non-conformity could doom me to an eternity without anyone, because I didn't follow God's absolutism.

The economy of Odyssey could be greatly improved and Whit’s End could actually make a profit if they simply started charging for the use of the Imagination Station

So for non-Christians the Imagination Station is a stolen Gitmo interrogation device?

Is this a “Im thinking of ending things” reference in the thumbnail?

The Star and Back to Bethlehem really makes you wonder why so many characters (who have been programmed by whit) all want to fuck Connie. Sure she’s a cute kid whatever, but how many times have these grown men asked for her hand in marriage? Kinda sus ngl

Maybe it's just because I've had The Mortal Coil talked up to me for a long time - I knew about the episode as a child but never actually heard it - but I was surprised by how underwhelmed I was by the vision of hell. Will Ryan sells it and it would definitely have traumatized young me like it did yourselves, but hearing it as an adult I'm struck by how empty that conception of hell feels. It seems significant to me that other works (like "No Exit") have grappled with hell and turned up the exact opposite concept. Narratively, hell as a place of total loneliness doesn't tell us anything interesting about Eugene as a character, why that would be hell for him; even ideologically, it only tells us things about American fundamentalism in the broadest strokes. I don't think the episode would be better if Eugene were suspended over a tar pit and prodded by giggling devils, but by the same token it feels like the Mortal Coil's vision of hell exists primarily to *not* be that, to be as "tasteful" as possible. It scans to me as "highbrow" posturing, an extension of the continuous C.S. Lewis jerkoff you mentioned earlier in the ep