Question about Magneto

[somatic]

Incredulousness aside, why is there a question mark beside Mr Atheist's religion? Surely a man who calls himself 'Mr Atheist' is pretty unarguably an atheist.

Oddly enough, Mr. Athiest is a Jainist.

Odder still, Wolverine is a Shintoist and Kitty's dragon, Lockheed, is a Baha'i'inist.

[somatic]

Anyways, Jewish is both a religion and ethnicity, and some things get mixed up.

No, Judaism is just a religion.

[Foeofthelance]

Actually, Wolverine being Shintoist makes sense, considering most of his memories take place in Japan, and alot of his efforts to control his berserker have been based off of Japanese warrior training.

Didn't know Lockheed was a Baha'i'inist though.

[Baloo]

My understanding of Magneto's power is that he simply generates a powerful and extremely articulate electromagnetic field. Feel free to refute this though(since I know magneto from TV/movies only)

It is believed that Magneto manipulates/channels Earth's natural magnetic field (which extends quite a bit into space), not that he generates his own. However, I believe that this is untested - to my knowledge, the only time Magneto has been significantly removed from the Earth's magnetic field was during Secret Wars, when he was teleported to an artificially created planet called Battleworld which seemingly had a magnetic field of its own.

[Flak_Razorwill]

No, Judaism is just a religion.

Whoops, didn't clarify.

Some people get the ethnicity (ashkenazi?) and the religion mixed up. Judaism and Jewish ancestry are linked via heritage, but are fundementally separate things.

[Haggis_McCrablice]

"Catholic Girl"
Let's just say my dating experiences with Catholics prompted me to think more in terms of pure and unrelenting carnality. Think Jenna Jameson meets Wonder Woman. ;D

Yes, to call Nazism a religion is akin to calling modern liberalism (essentially Marxism/Stalinism under a new guise) as such. Both are pursued with fervency by its believers and both seek to simply consume and destroy. The difference is that Nazis seem proud of their racism while liberals try to hide it behind a facade of psuedomoralistic posturing and buzzwords calculated to confuse any argument and make it seem as if conservatives are the racists.

In the nineties X-series, Wolverine seems to be angry and at odds with God. He speaks to a deformed monk named Kurt Wagner ("Nightcrawler") and seems to have a change of heart. He is even seen reading the Bible at the end of the episode. I think the comics' Wolvie may have converted to Shintoist after he became involved with a Japanese woman (did he marry her? I don't recall offhand) many years ago...so he might have been something else before that.

In X:Men Evolution, Magneto was shown to periodically undergo chemical treatments to preserve his youth in a secret underground bunker in the middle of the desert. He was shown in the midst undergoing a procedure, and looked like a wizened old man before it took. What's even creepier, he tells young Kurt that he is just like his mother, which some fans have taken to imply that Magnus (in this version) is nightcrawler's biological father (in the comics he is only said to be an unnamed German nobleman). Magnus' treatments must also affect his sexual potency, as his children are shown to be teenagers like the rest of the cast--meaning he must have chronologically been at least sixty when he became a father, and his wife a good 20 to 30 years his junior at least.

We also see a buried memory of Logan's of his days in WWII fighting alongside Captain America. The two rescued a ten-year-old boy named Erik Magnus Lensherr from a concentration camp in Poland. This would suggest Logan is also much older than he looks: if Magnus is around eighty or ninety, Logan must be over a hundred. Though longtime readers of the X-books well know this.

And in a holiday ep Kitty "Shadowcat" Pryde is seen lighting a menorah, indicating she's Jewish.

[Orion-the-G]

Bringing modern politics into a discussion is a no-no, not to mention comparing them to nazis.

[Rex_Hondo]

Re: Naziism as a religion.

I think a significant argument can be made that if it wasn't a full fledged religion, the Nazi leadership as certainly trying to establish it as such. A couple of years ago I saw a show on one of the history channels that showed old film reels of the "Ceremony of the Blood Flag" and of German schoolchildren reciting prayers to Hitler. Creepy, creepy stuff...

[redmind0]

Whoops, didn't clarify.

Some people get the ethnicity (ashkenazi?) and the religion mixed up. Judaism and Jewish ancestry are linked via heritage, but are fundementally separate things.

Judaism is a religon and a culture. Ashkenazi is culture. Ashkenazis are often white and have both german(ish) and semetic ansestory.

[Piedmon_Sama]

What? Wolverine practices zen meditational techniques as part of his training, but he's neither Shintoist nor Buddhist. He does respect and is knowledgable about those traditions from his time in Japan, but otherwise I've always seen him as a general agnostic. He's had too many encounters with various scions of the supernatural from many different cultures over the years to accept just one.

Wolverine was, at one time a Christian, but after Cyber murdered his then-fiance around the time of WWI, Wolverine became an atheist. He's come back around to having a spiritual side more recently, but I don't think he'll ever be a straight-up member of any particular denomination ever again.

Also, his fiance Yoshida Mariko has been dead for years, but had they had a wedding, it would have been a traditional Shintoist affair. The Yoshidas were a very traditional family with aristocratic origins.