Love, Villains & Sacrifice: The Greatest Story Ever Told In Our Storytelling (Click here to listen)
Hey… dudes… Here’s the www.apologetics.com radio review of Batman: The Dark Knight and some other movies that we’ve been promising to review.
All the best,
Christopher Neiswonger
Batman: The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy, Hancock; The summer’s pop culture produce is a fest of almost exclusively Superhero characters in classic Good-vs-Evil stories that seem out of touch with the popular perception of where our culture is headed. Why so great a desire to see evil vanquished by masked vigilantes, strange coloured protectors, and billionaire playboys with an inner compulsion for justice? Is there something about all of this that is deeper than mere entertainment? We think these worlds of fiction actually say something about us that is a little deeper than “Hulk Smash!”.
The real yearning for justice and for good to prevail over evil is something that fits neatly into a theistic worldview, but not really any other. If there were no God we would all understand that good and evil would really just be comfort and discomfort. Murder, rape, theft, and corruption would be things that we might not enjoy but to say that they were really wrong in an objective sense would go to far. Nothing can be wrong when nothing really matters. Perhaps in these stories we find ourselves living vicariously through tales of self sacrifice and suffering for the good of others because they tell us something about what we really want, and what we want about what we really need, and what we need because it is the way things really are, no matter how forcefully we fight with the truth. So come and Superhero with the Apologetics.com crew. Christopher Neiswonger and Lindsay Brooks: Special Guests Sarah Martin and Joshua Stam.
Love, Villains & Sacrifice: The Greatest Story Ever Told In Our Storytelling Click Me.
Neiswonger
Doug
Josh Hicks
Clay
I love these observations. It’s interesting how movies with a hack-and-slash exterior really reveal God in our world. The difference you point out between disliking things in society and understanding them as right and wrong is a key difference that defines our humanity and highlights the influence of the divine.
Comment by Ian — July 28, 2008 @ 5:55 pm |
Nice Review!
Comment by Jeff Lloyd — July 28, 2008 @ 5:58 pm |
I disagree that good and justice prevailing over evil and injustice is simply desire that only fits a theistic worldview. Religion doesn’t have a corner on good and evil, right and wrong.
The desire for good and justice is simply human, and comes out of our basic understanding that living in community where good and justice prevail are in our best interest.
What religions for the most fail to recognize is that while we all desire good and justice, there is a balance of forces in the universe. That is not to say one should desire evil or injustice, but one must recognize that it is impossible to entirely stamp out evil, injustice, “the devil.” If you did, how would you measure your good and your justice?
Flyingtomato
Comment by Flyingtomato — July 28, 2008 @ 6:01 pm |
Flyingtomato,
I don’t think that holds up. If there is no ultimate right or wrong good or evil, then there is no justice. There is no getting around this.
More, religion is the only possible basis for good and evil because a transcendent norm is something that is irreconcilable with a non-theistic view of ethics.
As you implied, without God, good and evil are really just self protection misinterpreted as actual states of being. There is nothing really “good”, there are only things that we like and things that we don’t. One out of every two participants don’t like rape. How could it be good or evil when one of them enjoys it as the expression of their self interest in pleasure? What you are talking about isn’t good or evil, or justice at all. It is simply how a society might artificially regulate pleasure and pain though in an atheistic worldview neither have any significance.
Good and evil, require a way of looking at the world that transcends anything that even remotely looks like atheism or materialism, and we can’t not look at the world that way, which implies something greater about what we are than can fit into the narrow confines of a non-theistic frame.
All the best,
Neiswonger
Comment by Neiswonger — July 28, 2008 @ 6:02 pm |
As the king of an amoral universe, as a purveyor of unrestricted evil for fun, Ledger’s dastardly villain, attired as sort of a rotting Clarabell, has chosen his own damnation. He’s jumped into an abyss he has dug himself, and he wants to pull us along.
Devide
Comment by Devide — July 28, 2008 @ 6:16 pm |
The good and bad discussion again?
All things in life have reasons and those reasons are found in God.
Good comes only from God. For He is Good Himself. God gave us a conscience, so we can make desicions. But we dont know what is good and bad. The Lord has written good in our hearts so that He might expect that we should do the right things. But because of our free will and sinful nature, we can choose ourselves what to do.
God is real and lives in us christians. We produce only good fruits for Him and His goodness is seen in us. Jesus Changes our lives from wrong to right. There is plenty of evidence of this. When you receive the Holy Spirit, you will know the sharp line between good and evil. But most important is our eternal salvation in Christ, cause He has overcome death, fear and evil. God is good. God is righteous. God is Love. Seek Him with all your Heart and live the righteous life. Remember: The only real superhero is and always will be Jesus!
GodBless,
Aikuza
Comment by Aikuza — July 29, 2008 @ 10:58 pm |