Well, not quite.

If you read the article, what they’re really talking about, yet again, isn’t Zombies, or a religious component to Zombiism, or even the spiritual beliefs or lack thereof of the Zombie Community. Rather, here again, it’s Zombies as a symbol. In this case, a symbol of spiritual emptiness:

Murphy, the author of “Zombies for Zombies: Advice and Etiquette for the Living Dead,” says Americans’ appetite for zombies isn’t fed just by sources such as the AMC hit series “The Walking Dead” or the countless zombie books and video games people buy.

Our zombie fascination has a religious root. Zombies are humans who have “lost track of their souls,” Murphy says.

“Our higher spirit prevents us from doing stupid and violent things like, say, eating a neighbor,” Murphy says. “When we are devoid of such spiritual ‘guidance,’ we become little more than walking bags of flesh, acting out like soccer moms on a bender.”

The idea that Zombies are akin to drunken soccer moms is a new one, I’ll give Murphy that.

On the other hand, Murphy’s assumption, here unchallenged, that a ‘higher spirit’ both exists in humans and prevents them from engaging in stupid, violent behavior seems.. childishly naive. I mean, he is aware that we as a species have been engaged in near-constant violence and depravity since the very beginnings of recorded history, right?

This ‘higher spirit’ seems pretty unreliable. Scratch that; it seems *extremely* unreliable. Hence why we need laws, systems of justice and an equitable society (which we here at the ZRC strive to obtain for Zombies and Living people alike).

CNN then talked to a philosophy professor by the name of Stephen Joel Garver who says that Zombies represent

“human desire at its more unconstrained: ravenous and relentless.”

before plaintively, if rhetorically asking if there wasn’t any higher realm of God or morality we could use to protect ourselves from ‘the darkness’.

They follow this up by talking to an English professor named Rebeccah Borah from Cincinnati who says that not only are Zombies beyond redemption but that the only appropriate course of action is genocide:

“It is you versus them, and the more of an anti-zombie zealot you are, the better for all concerned,” Borah says. “Take them out as fast as you can at all costs because – former loved ones or not – they are the damned and you don’t want to catch it from them.”

Damnation is contagious now? That’s… ok, not completely new; the theme’s come up before, whether in Salem’s Lot (with Vampires) or films like Demons and Evil Dead. Of course, the fundamental question of justice comes into play when a person can be damned purely by circumstance, whether it’s hitting a tape recorder’s play button or moving to a town in Maine. In fact, the universe starts to seem entirely capricious and cruel in those circumstances.

So, in a nutshell, CNN asked an author capitalizing on a snarky, ‘self-help’ book for the Undead (that seems from its promotional materials to perpetuate negative stereotypes about the Differently Animated), and two professors, one of English and one of Philosophy, about the spiritual implications of Zombies. You know who they might have asked?

No, I’m not going to say ‘a Zombie Rights activist’, though I could have provided some useful balance to a piece like this. How about: a Zombie!

Yes, it can be hard to find someone who’s Differently Animated and wants to talk about religion, but I could have put CNN in touch with some people. Baron Mardi in particular, being both a Zombie and a practitioner of Voodoo, would be an ideal choice to discuss Zombie Spirituality.

CNN didn’t talk to a single advocate for the Undead, or a member of their community in good standing. Why? I can only imagine it would have undermined their intended theme, which is ‘Zombies Bad, Living people good, Spirituality, Yay!’ or something along those lines.

Fairly repulsive really.

More interesting, if still unfair to Zombies, is a short piece linked from the CNN article at Religion Dispatches.org, called ‘Toward a Zombie Theology‘. While still pandering to unfair stereotypes about the Differently Animated (and using The Walking Dead as a source material, for crying out loud), the piece attempts to address the dilemma that Zombies might pose for a traditionally dualistic religiously inspired worldview:

So does this leave theology out in the cold? The dominant theological understanding for anthropology in Christianity is still dualistic, a synthesis of the physical body and an immaterial spirit or soul, but in recent years those advocating a monistic view of human nature have arisen, articulating a perspective they call “nonreductive physicalism.” This view, advocated by scholars like Fuller Seminary’s Nancey Murphy, recognizes the significance of the cognitive neurosciences that have cast doubt on philosophical and theological concepts of the soul, but argues for human significance and the divine as opposed to materialist interpretations in the field.

In other words, the crux of the problem is the same whether you adhere to the outdated notions that Zombies are inhuman eating machines or a more enlightened view such as our own: since so much of what we consider to make a person a person stems, demonstrably, from empirical sources, what implications does that have for religion? In the traditional view of Romero style Zombies, this seems to argue against the existence of a soul, since parts of a person remain after death; from our take, since the person remains whether alive or dead unless physically destroyed, it also seems that the body is the crux of the issue, and not an undetectable energy of some sort that traditionally is viewed as leaving after life expires.

Again, however, it might be nice to ask a Zombie, theologian or no, for their perspective on the matter. At least this piece poses thoughtful questions rather than inciting the reader to violence. (Cincinnati Zombies should watch out for this Professor, she seems dangerous).

Yet again we see the media failing to serve one of the most vulnerable populations in America, and yet again, as we have so frequently seen, the Academy fails the Differently Animated, both in terms of intellect and reasoning, and in terms of empathy.

So sad.

Tags: Academia, Journamalism, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.