David Bentley Hart: preference

Transcript context

…Well, I don’t think we know, but I think in the AMC remake, the implication is that it’s easy to pick the right side. I just got the impression that it chose the therapeutic over the gnostic. That is, that in the original program, it was consciously at times a gnostic allegory. In fact, there was one episode called “The Dance of the Dead” that just explicitly invokes a gnostic language, that somehow we’re imprisoned in a false reality, and that we should long for the really real at whatever cost and should seek to escape from delusion. Whereas the new version simply says that, in a sense, maybe there is no truth at all. There is no right side or wrong side. There’s just the need for therapy to help us deal with the sense of alienation or discontent. Of those two options, I prefer the former. Maybe at times, gnosticism is too pessimistic for Hollywood TV and too inegalitarian for modern progressivism, so you have to jettison it. What do you replace it with? A happy ending.…

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