Still Waiting...

Just over 2 years ago I challenged folk to prove God is more likely to exist than fairies and goblins.

Why do we still have to tiptoe around people who believe in Christian or Islamic fairies and lock away people who believe in tiny, early 1900s fairies living at the bottom of their garden?

Since working at the movie house, one thing I've noticed - Hollywood is still flogging the 'just believe and don't trust the scientific meddlers' theme.

Polar Express - the whole theme is about belief. The young boy at the centre of the movie is - horror of horrors - questioning things! He's actually doing research into Santa and finding out the truth. The idiot - doesn't he know ignorance is bliss? A secondary character is an irritating know-it-all who Santa eventually puts in his place (in a very God-like way). They basically made Santa a Christian god in this movie - no suggestion of him being any kind of mysterious Pagan figure. In the end, the hero learns not to question and 'just believe'.

We've had two films which I think are basically the same story - I Am Legend and The Spiderwick Chronicles. In both movies the problem is created by the clever scientist who meddles with things beyond his/her capabilities (I'm not against that as a story idea). Both feature a Hollywood favourite - the reunification of the family unit theme. Both have a house beseiged by evil creatures in which the scientist struggles to develop a solution to the problem they (science) has created.

In I Am Legend the solution has very religious overtones. Although it's the science which creates a serum to kill the virus and save humanity, again it's the hero's scepticism which is shown as his major character flaw and the girl's unwavering belief (in a surviving community of people somewhere) in the face of his torrent of factual evidence against which wins in the end. Will Smith takes one last look at the photo of his wife and child (who have since died) just before he sacrifices himself to save humanity (subtext: he will be reunified with them in the afterlife).

So the girl takes the blood and finds the community - her blind faith is rewarded. And what's the first thing she sees as the gates to the walled village swing open - a church.

Eternal Life

To be immortal, physically, is impossible. But the feeling of immortality is what we all crave.

At the cinema I'm working at we have been recently showing the Scorsese directed documentary on the Rolling Stones called Shine A Light (aka Dinosaurs 2D). If 60s hippies handed out sainthoods, Keith Richards would surely get one simply for the miracle of his continuing existence. As he himself declares to the audience packed into the theatre in New York, "It's nice to see you! It's nice to see anybody!"

People seek the feeling of immortality in different ways. Some of us have kids. Some of us want to be famous. And watching the Stones still giving it everything on stage and losing themselves in the music, you get the feeling this is another way of feeling immortal - for that brief moment, all that exists is 'now'. Living in the moment is a way of feeling immortal, because the shadow of death is lit up by the burning reality of the now.

Humanity instinctively looks for ways to live in the moment, free from the burden of mortality. Sex, rock and roll, a movie, a show, a video game, a pub crawl, a nightclub - when you live in the moment, it feels like forever.

The other way of feeling immortal is religion. Is religion perhaps a way to allow humanity to step out of the moment without fear; to give humanity the courage to think in the long term?

Imagine two prehistoric tribes. One tribe is craving sex and drugs and rock and roll because death is just around the corner and its scaring the shit out of everyone. 'Live for the moment and get it on!' is their moto. That protective wall isn't going to get built and those crops aren't going to get sown.

Then over the hill you have the second tribe. This tribe is just getting into putting large stones into circles and looking at the stars cos they've had this idea their consciousness bit is some kind of spirit that keeps living on after the body dies.

Ancient historians ask, "Why the hell did they put so much time and energy and resources to building Stonehenge?" Because you'd think they would have all their time taken up by avoiding starvation and man eating creatures. Is this not evidence that the beginnings of civilisation came from the freedom that religion gave us to think in the long term?

The tribe with long-term planning strategies will have the edge in survival terms. The crops will get sown and the defensive wall will get built. Not only that, the warriors will fight without fear, knowing their death is not the end of their journey.

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." Wittgenstein.