Serious debate - First V PTB, Good, Evil or something else?

[ciderdrinker]

There has been a lot of talk recently on here about The First and The Powers That Be, regarding their influence and actions, and I thought I'd open a general debate about how these versions of Good versus Evil are portrayed and perceived in the Buffyverse.

Do you see them as an equivalent to the christian ideas of God and Satan If so, do you believe that they are portrayed in a consistant manner to the general conceptions of God and Satan?

Do you see them as enemies fighting a battle between themselves, with the earthly dimensions just pawns within this battle?

Do you believe that they are omnipotent and are involved with every detail of our protagonists (Angel/Buffy etc) lives, or do you think they sit back and watch much more, rather than get involved?

Are their actions right/wrong/justified, and do they have a right to influence people into doing either good or evil, for their own amusement/benefit/continued existence (*delete which ever is appropriate)

This is not supposed to be a debate about religion, but rather about how they acted within the framework of the 7 seasons of Buffy and 5 seasons of Angel

These questions are just pointers to get it started, feel free to discuss anything about the First and The Powers here...

[LRae12]

I mentioned in another thread that I don't even consider TPTB to be an entity of 'good'. I always saw them as more of a cosmic balancing act. That they sent visions to stop evil acts was merely a way for them to keep evil from tipping the scales.

Someone had mentioned why Angel didn't get a vision of Fred dying in S5. My response was that I didn't believe the powers thought it a necessary act to stop in order to balance the scales. I don't think that the powers sent Cordy/Doyle a vision of every demonic act that was to occur in LA, but only the ones that they deemed necessary to stop in order to keep the balance between good & evil.

[kana]

I think of them all as beings with varying degrees of power with different agendas. Even one of our PTBs believed there were no moral absolutes.

I think the idea of the Judeo Christian God in just as elusive as in real life. Buffy herself wasn't sure on the whether God (not that she is the overriding authority in terms of such knowledge but I'm sure she would have known from Giles or Willow if such a thing was a certainty.

Other gods exist in the forms of powerful demons who are worshipped as gods and hence are not thought of as demons anymore such as Glory. There have also been mentions of the Classic deities but these could be incantation phrases and not referring to real gods as such but drawing upon energy which is representitive of such deities.

Apparently the Devil built a robot which I suppose is the reference to Satan we my recognise. I suppose this implies there is some truth in the Judeo- Christian ideology.

Buffy was in Heaven. Who or what judged her to go to heaven?

Christian symbols cause harm to vampires, however unlike some vampire mythology the person yielding such objects doesn't have to be a believer, so make of that what you will.

Joss himself is an atheist however he's open minded to idea of personal interpretation in the Verse.

My view is somewhat in the middle. There are forces in the Verse but maybe there are layers that our heroes will never fully understand.

[Ravynnia]

The first look at the PTB shows them clad in some classical sort of shifts. Even the "powers" suggests demi-divinities at work.

The whole last battle/shanshu/PTB material is just way too nebulous; since Angel doesn't have any external obligation to do what he does, they needed some sort of threat/promise to propel him, no matter what existential conclusions he came to about his own unlife & his personal purposes.

The First seems to come out of Joss' basic moral dualism -- evil has an existence independent from good, therefore you can only hope for some sort of draw, with the noble ones reaching a timeless bliss, and those who are unlucky enough to be bitten going to a demon dimension after being dusted, which, since their soul is supposedly gone through no fault of their own anyway, scarcely makes sense (why does Angel have to suffer bodily torment in a hell for Angelus' crime of waking Acathla? not for any more reason) -- though everyone, regardless of their moral fibre, could go to a Hell dimension because of someone else's spell.

The good people can't help being good, the bad can't help being bad, and the First & the PTBs have no real say in how things go, except that they're given a green light to touch down here & there if things get too far from whatever the prophecies say they're supposed to go --