Moral Orel and the impossibility of true religious belief

When I'd first started watching the show Moral Orel, I found it to be quite a funny show about stupid religious people being unreasonable and and doing all kinds of hypocritical things. Pretty straightforwardly exaggerated satire. Or so I thought.

Because being moral can be wrong too.

                                                        But then as the show progressed, I started noticing a serious topic that was being dealt with and that did exist albeit subtly throughout the first part of the show as well. For the first part of the show, it seems as if we as an audience are quite removed from what's going on due to how strange each narrative segment of the show usually is (what with resurrecting the dead into zombies and whatnot). But later on, as the show progresses, it becomes more serious in some parts, partly because the characters in the show no longer appear to be objects existing to be merely comedic in nature. What happens is that their human element is made more plain to see. And what we see then are simply stupid people just like the rest of us, acting out a certain way based on a belief system. These people aren't all that alien to us. In fact, if that's all they were, then there'd be little point in watching the show other than just to make fun of those "religious nuts".

 The show makes it a point to not merely criticize the people in this show. What it intends to do however is to criticize the religious belief system specifically.

The entire first season is mostly only about Orel as a character, and about how he goes about doing stuff he thinks his religion tells him to. The problem though is that Orel follows the instructions he receives to a tee. The show realizes this essential problem of religious faith today. They're convenient. The people following these religions have countless unspoken rules about how to make this religious system survive. Because without careful selection and the right kind of interpretation, these belief systems simply wouldn't survive. This is what the show is about. It's about the fact that not even the religious folks truly believe in their belief anymore. 

Nietzsche had said that Christianity's problem was that it's will to truth would sooner or later render it obsolete, because the truth is not in itself. But more than a hundred years later, we've seen that Christianity's will to survive has trumped its will to truth for now. 

However, there is an undeniable tension that is present. It's about all the ways in which the folk of Moralton have tweaked their religion to try to make it adapt to the changing world around them. This problem is further explored through Orel himself. As stated before, Orel's problem is that he follows the religion too well, which simply won't work out well because it leads to realistic outcomes as consequence to an unrealistic worldview. He has to then be indoctrinated correctly at the end of each episode by his father. 

The colorful cast of "Moral Orel"

Moralton is a town that has one central theme: repression.  It's about the repression of truth, even if truth only an entity that is merely a post- modern construct. It's about how people must fight this notion with all they've got, even if that means not believing in their beliefs anymore, so that they can pretend like things don't have to change. 

After all, change can be painful and uncomfortable, and it's something everyone tries to fight in their own way, and with a belief system of absolute truths, all we see are very non- absolute ways of interpretation. But the interpretation of the religious text is changing along with context, so that then raises an important question in the viewer's mind:

What are they really fighting against?