Game of Thrones – The Terrifying Part

There has been a lot made of the violence depicted in the hit HBO series Game of Thrones. Particularly strong outcry has followed the depictions of two brutal rape scenes. Others give voice to a more general lamentation of the overall degree of violence: beheadings, eye gouging, burnings at the stake, sword play and carnage of one sort or another. While I’m not interested in picking out which atrocity is most egregious or deserving of the greater degree of disgust and condemnation, I have recently been struck by the emergence of a more terrifying plot development

This new and more disturbing force has two manifestations: one in the guise of the chaste and impoverished society or movement called The Sparrows and the other embodied by the Red Queen and the God of Light. In two recent episodes these pernicious forces have been featured in scenes that have terrified me more than any of the myriad injustices or cruelties that have so upset others. The reason may already be obvious.

The two movements I speak of are religions in the world of Game of Thrones. They terrify me because they leave behind my capacity to reason. I have the ability, as a human being with a modicum of empathy, to understand the sickness of mind that can lead one person to harm another.  Greed, power, control of resources, dominance over others, all these impulses I recognize as decidedly human and regrettable, even disgusting. Other more deeply troubling motivations, like sadism, paranoia, and sociopathic behavior, I can also understand as diseases of the mind that may be out of the reach of remedy but are controllable and demonstrably causal. But to burn ones own child as a sacrifice to a supernatural god or to invoke a code of conduct or “law” that has been somehow transmitted from a supernatural source to a self-appointed clergy, that is when I begin to shudder.

How can this brand of corruption be addressed? How can it be reasoned with? It is not of this world, has no bearing on reality, cannot be adequately addressed from this material world because it is of the realm of faith, not of reason; of superstition not of evidence.

Cersei Lannister is about as rotten a character as you could want. Vain, power hungry, conniving, traitorous, you name it. Given all that, I was disturbed when I began feeling sorry for her. Did she not, in some poetic-justice-kind-of-way, deserve a comeuppance? But when the High Sparrow (a sort of Christ-like character in the vein of those many Christian sects embracing vows of poverty) begins to speak about some ‘justice’ or ‘law’ no one but he and his followers are privy to, and seemingly no one but he can interpret and mete out, all of my sympathies flowed to her. At the very least she is rational.

And how do we speak to a father willing to watch his daughter burn to death. The mother’s suicide tries to answer this. You should hang yourself from a tree. Yet this is so familiar to us in our Judeo-Christian-Muslim, God of Abraham heritage. Submission to God. Submission even when he calls for the slaughter of a child in sacrifice. In the bible Abraham’s hand is stayed at the last minute but Stannis Baratheon inexplicably watches to the blood-chilling end. But it’s all the same. It hardly matters if it’s carried to completion or not. What person with a shred of a rational mind would even contemplate the act.  And all to win the favor of a supernatural being? A being who somehow controls nature and can influence the outcome of a battle? A being for who’s existence there is no evidence?

Rape is terrible . War is terrible. Murder is terrible. Atrocities of all kinds are terrible. The only saving grace is that all the harm that man visits upon man can be undone. If there is a will we can collectively and individually undo future harms because we are the creators of them, so too can we become their un-doers. Stamp out war, end murders, eradicate rape. But when faith steps in—burn your child, build a caliphate, segregate the other, kill nonbelievers, serve a one true God—that is when I shudder and cry and, powerless in the face of the imaginary, reach for the remote to make it stop.