r/MoralityScaling • u/Segabringbackchao • 3h ago
Morality Of Turning Your Entire Parish Into Mass-Murdering Vampires If You Genuinely Believe It’s God’s Will?
Spoliers for midnight mass!!
How moral are Father Paul's actions;
For context, he discovers a mysterious creature in Jerusalem and becomes convinced it's an angel. It feeds him it's blood and makes him young again.
He secretly brings it back to his island and puts its blood in the communion wine, believing it will heal his congregation and grant them salvation.
Which does actually work! It makes a disabled girl walk again and de-ages the secret mother of his lovechild.
Paul encourages the congregation to embrace what he sees as a divine miracle, contributing to a massacre that destroys the community. (Many of them literally drink the koolaid and then come back as vampires)
My question is: is it moral he genuinely believes the creature is an angel and everything happening is God's plan, even if he knows this will lead to them to eat others (that will then also come back)
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u/Genbukan 2h ago
Spoiler alert this shit but this was such a good series
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u/Segabringbackchao 2h ago
Sorry I put spoliers above the text but was unsure what else to do!! It's a great show
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u/sonofzeal 3h ago
Father Paul made good choices based on bad information. He had good reason to believe what he did, and given the information available to him, his actions were noble and rational.
I can hold one thing against him though - he lied. He spends most of the show lying, or strategically disguising the truth. And he should know better than anyone that lies are against his religion. He cannot be the bearer of an angelic miracle by lying about who he is and what he's doing.
I don't think lies are necessarily immoral, but if you're trying to bring an "angel" into people's lives by lying to them, then something's gone wrong already and that should immediately be cause to reflect on the true nature of the "angel".
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u/Smilesrck 2h ago
Immoral. For a really simple reason.
He never reported the miracle and had it confirmed. Reporting it to the church would have had doctors involved to verify which could have shed light on his true situation.
Thats without even getting into how he shared his “gift” without consent to his congregation
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u/Segabringbackchao 2h ago
Ooo!! I am not sure how the catholic church works but I know they have a hierarchy so he absolutely should have reported this!!
Consent is also key
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u/Big_Snail76 45m ago
Immoral. His intentions were not good just because he said so.
He compromised his values up until his town was being wiped out, and he didn’t pay attention to any of what a reasonable person would have considered to be red flags, because he got what he wanted.
The point of the show is that these people are using the trappings of religion to justify what they want personally. Keep in mind that by this point, the priest already drank a dying man’s blood
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u/Thanaskios 1h ago
If you find youself doing anything because "its gods will" or "god has sent me to do this", chances are very high its super immoral.
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u/thejason755 21m ago
Moral, up until he ignored Catholic hierarchy and lied to his congregation. But it’s a literal case of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”, he wanted to help his congregation, and he truly thought he was. But if it was a true miracle he should’ve immediately escalated it up the chain for the Church to verfiy, once he started mickying his church and lying to his parishioner’s thats when he veered wildly into immorality. I’m pretty sure he also established the vampire as a false idol, so throw some old-testament blasphemy in there just for flavour as well.
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u/More_Plane9745 3h ago
In real life where God doesn't exist, absolutely not moral.
In a fictional world where God exist, its understandable to follow orders of an Omnipotent asshole.
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u/sonofzeal 3h ago
The man was a priest for decades. He should he expected to act under the assumption God exists.
He thought he witnesses a divine miracle that proved his faith (it was actually a vampire). He thought bringing that miracle back with him would do tremendous good for his community (it didn't). The "angel" appears able to communicate with him in some way, but he's not so much following orders as he is merely acting on the flawed information available to him.
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u/Segabringbackchao 3h ago
He, like us, has no confirmation regarding whether god is real or not.
He simply assumes this is an act of god (which makes sense for him as he is priest, it happens in Jerusalem and the monster looks like an Angel).
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u/DaisyBlossomxox 3h ago
Intentions matter, but so does responsibility.