Towards a developed sense of discernment:
Reviewing movies
A parable is an attempt to subvert other definitions of the world in favor of the world that you are creating with your story. Every movie is a parable. It is an attempt to remake the world into the world that you want it to be. It cannot be any other way. I am not imputing ill motives onto Hollywood, this is just the way that the world is because God spoke the world into existence. Story telling is warfare and we must have our rhetoric goggles on whenever we are watching a movie. With this said, there are two ways of deciding on a movie’s worth. The first is to go in open-minded with no preconceived ideas, let the movie wash over you for awhile and then examine the movie for 10 min or 10 days and try and decide if the dirt will ever wash off. The other way is to go in skeptical and prepared. I am in favor of the first method, (a joke). Of course as Christians we want to be wise in our movie and entertainment standards, not just because we don’t want our children to grow up and do drugs, but because we want our homes to be filled with wisdom and maturity and stories (which are to be entertaining and useful). Stories are the foundation stones of our worldview and our living. The Bible is filled with stories, the world is filled with stories, and our heads are filled with stories, (and, like Eustace Scrubb, usually all the wrong stories). Our story hearing should be directed toward being changed by the stories into wise Christians.
Wisdom is skill in living in the world that God made. The primary building blocks of wisdom are the fear of the Lord and a true understanding of the world. Believing true stories and rejecting false stories then is the mark of wisdom. And that is what these movie reviews are going to shoot at; teaching how to understand, interpret, and classify stories as they are presented to us in Movies.
There are six category questions that I ask while watching and when reviewing a movie. These are helpful revealers of rhetoric. This is how I discern what a movie is arguing for and what kind of world the movie makers believe God (or their idol) has made.
Sin and Salvation – Who needs to be saved and from what? What would prevent salvation? Who does the saving and how? Is there a hero or an antihero?
Justification – Who is shown to be vindicated by the end of the Story. Who are the good guys (those whose actions are justified) and who are the bad guys? From what source does their justification come?
Eschatology – In which direction is the flow of the story? What is the purpose of history? How effectual are love and righteousness? Do the wicked or the righteous come to a bad end? Is History random, fated, controlled, or willed?
Beauty – Is the story told well? Is the story beautifully portrayed? Is the definition of beauty creationally consistent, or is it opposed to God? Is beauty married to goodness and truth or at odds with them? Is this movies world full of glory, mystery, and things unseen, or dull, boring, and quantified?
Glory – Who is glorified and why? What actions lead to glory? What constitutes glory? Does glory follow humility and death or force of power? Does Glory flow to those who think of themselves or to those that think of others?
sins (with a small s) – what sins are portrayed, implied, condoned, or displayed and does this affect the age appropriateness of the movie? Are there scenes that make the movie unrecommendable by there presence? Are there scenes that you out to have gone without? Was the skin level out of hand (even if it is condemned by the story)?
Thursday, July 14, 2005
More confessions of an ex-atheist - naturalism
Naturalism (or materialism) teaches that there is nothing but nature and human beings are little more than a complex venus fly trap. A fly lands on the trip wire and SNAP, the fly begins struggle against being digested alive. A Homo Sapien has more and more complex trip wires, but essentially, we are the same. Ther are two divergent views within the naturalistic camp that, in the Spirit of fairness, we will deal with separately. The first being the particular brand to which I held, the second being a little more complex and a little less inteligable.
The particular brand of Naturalism to which I clung was the kind which teaches that a human, being no more or less than a bundle of localized actions and reactions was solely a creature of nature, and as such, whatever a person did was natural. In fact, there was no such thing as unnatural. If there is only nature, then there can be nothing un-nature-ish. This of course meant that there was no right or wrong, no heaven and hell, no judgement and no freedom. Now, at first this seemed to be clipping along at a right old speed down the road to do-whatever-I-want-ville (of course my desires because illusory, but no freedom never really bothered me as long as I got to do what I wanted). This meant that I needn’t feel all of those guilty feelings about the lies that I told, or the cheating that I occasionally did on my homework. You shouldn’t feel guilt for what was only natural. But of course, ?Idid begin running into problems, Others needn’t feel guilty about lying to me and suddenly, the guilt that I thought to alleviate suddenly became a natural thing, and not being something that needed to go away. Guilt was a natural as a sunflower’s stretch for the sun orthe clubbing of baby seals.
But here’s the clincher, there was no hell for me, that seemed fine (though I wasn’t exactly convinced I would go there if there was one, having had an unnaturally inflated view of myself), but there was no hell for the people that I thought deserved it. There were people that I hoped would get more justice than could be allotted to them on earth. Even though I would have to say that the raping and killing of children was just natural, the death penalty just did not seem to be enough. The spilt blood and suffering of children seemed to cry out for more.
And to finish of the liturgy of the Irish boxer, I must kick naturalism while it is down. The particular fly that I had bitten was naturalism, and that was only natural, but someone else’s natural response was to insist that naturalism is not true. Why should I trust my natural response, if I am just a bundle of responses. If I am right than I can’t be trusted. If I can’t be trusted, then I certainly ought not to be trusted to declare my own untrustworthyness.
The particular brand of Naturalism to which I clung was the kind which teaches that a human, being no more or less than a bundle of localized actions and reactions was solely a creature of nature, and as such, whatever a person did was natural. In fact, there was no such thing as unnatural. If there is only nature, then there can be nothing un-nature-ish. This of course meant that there was no right or wrong, no heaven and hell, no judgement and no freedom. Now, at first this seemed to be clipping along at a right old speed down the road to do-whatever-I-want-ville (of course my desires because illusory, but no freedom never really bothered me as long as I got to do what I wanted). This meant that I needn’t feel all of those guilty feelings about the lies that I told, or the cheating that I occasionally did on my homework. You shouldn’t feel guilt for what was only natural. But of course, ?Idid begin running into problems, Others needn’t feel guilty about lying to me and suddenly, the guilt that I thought to alleviate suddenly became a natural thing, and not being something that needed to go away. Guilt was a natural as a sunflower’s stretch for the sun orthe clubbing of baby seals.
But here’s the clincher, there was no hell for me, that seemed fine (though I wasn’t exactly convinced I would go there if there was one, having had an unnaturally inflated view of myself), but there was no hell for the people that I thought deserved it. There were people that I hoped would get more justice than could be allotted to them on earth. Even though I would have to say that the raping and killing of children was just natural, the death penalty just did not seem to be enough. The spilt blood and suffering of children seemed to cry out for more.
And to finish of the liturgy of the Irish boxer, I must kick naturalism while it is down. The particular fly that I had bitten was naturalism, and that was only natural, but someone else’s natural response was to insist that naturalism is not true. Why should I trust my natural response, if I am just a bundle of responses. If I am right than I can’t be trusted. If I can’t be trusted, then I certainly ought not to be trusted to declare my own untrustworthyness.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)