Sayid on Ten Commandments

I was watching the 2006 Ten Commandments movie last night, and I noticed something: Sayid from Lost was on it! He played Moses' Egyptian "brother," who was not the Pharaoh in this movie but was still caught in a dilemma: love for Moses, yet hatred at what Moses' God was doing to his people.

The last time I watched this movie was a year ago during the Days of Unleavened Bread, and that was before I started watching Lost. But, when I first saw Lost, I didn't recognize Sayid as the actor from the Ten Commandments. I thought Shannon looked familiar, and I learned that she was on a movie that I saw years before, Murder in Greenwich. But I didn't recognize Sayid. That may be because he looks so different on the Ten Commandments: his hair is straight, he's clean-shaven, etc. I was disappointed that my Ten Commandments DVD box didn't identify him as the actor from Lost, especially since it made a big deal about other actors whom I hadn't heard of before. I mean, Lost had two years under its belt when this movie was made! Surely Sayid was famous by then!

He looks a little more like Sayid in the interview part of the DVD, only without the beard. He offers a lot of thoughtful comments about God, Moses, and the Cecille B. Demille movie. But the comments I liked the most were from the actor who played Aaron, Linus Roache, who discussed theology and violence in the Bible.

BTW, here's a good review of the 2006 Ten Commandments movie: Ten Commandments. A commenter responds that ABC must have paid its author to write it, for it's actually somewhat positive, whereas most critics panned the movie as a dog. But I like the movie, and I agree with much of this review. Enjoy!

Bad and Good Evangelicalism

Under James McGrath's recent post, Self-Critical Faith, an evangelical commenter named Lex Fear reminded me of what irks me about evangelicalism, or at least certain prominent strands of it. I'll put parts of the quote in italics, then my response in normal print.

I have been following the little spat you have been having with Triablogue for a while now, but I'm failing to understand why they irk you so?

Here's what I see as the sub-text: "McGrath, you're obviously irked and angry about these fundamentalists on Triablogue, so that shows you're insecure about your liberal beliefs. Your anger and defensiveness prove that we're right and you're wrong!"

I've had to put up with this garbage in my own experiences with evangelicalism. You just can't win against that type of "reasoning"! You agree with the evangelical, and he concludes that you think he's right. You disagree with the evangelical, and he concludes that you think he's right but don't want to admit it. An evangelical gets angry, and that's a sign that he's zealous for God and righteously indignant. A non-believer gets angry, and that's a sign that he's insecure about his unbelief and knows deep down that the evangelical speaks the truth. How can you win against that? I'd like to think that this sort of view was limited to the evangelical small group I was in several years ago, but I've encountered it so often within evangelicalism that I've concluded it is a big part of that particular mindset.

It does occur to me now that you are far from being a Christian--and this is not from anything that Triablogue has written, though they called it first. It is from your own testimony. It occurs to me you have more in common with the gnostics, or possibly Buddhism...But the thing which finally led me to this conclusion, was the fact that in proving your own faith, you continually reference back to your early conversion experience and offer nothing else to support your belief in a god. Any Christian should be able to tell you that a relationship with God through Christ, is one which continues past the point of conversion. If asked, a Christian should be able to tell you of the latest 'experience' they have had with God, what they feel God is revealing to them. What revelation they have recently had or what new thing they have learnt from study of the bible (no matter how scholastically)...Do you have a recent testimony? A revelation recently? Do you consider the great commission important, do you consider it at all? And do you have consider yourself to be filled with the Holy Spirit, or at least consider the Holy Spirit to be dwelling within you? It's not a negative, it's not a put-down of your beliefs, but it is something that a person who considers themselves to be intellectually honest should realise.

What legalism! So a person has to have a recent "God spoke to me" experience to have assurance of salvation? Tell me something, Lex Fear: How do you even know that it's God speaking to you, and not your own thoughts or projections?

Also, since we're on the topic of signs of salvation, here's a question: How come I don't see too much of the fruit of the Spirit among certain Christians? Love. Consideration. Meekness. Maybe even an ounce of humility.

Fortunately, not all evangelicals are like this. Plenty would say that they're in no position to judge Dr. McGrath or his relationship with God, or that we know we're saved on the basis of God's grace, not from having a profound "aha" experience every week. So I guess I end this post with a positive view towards a lot of evangelicals, even though I realize there are plenty of bad mindsets within that movement!

Easter Reflections: My Resurrection

When I was at Harvard, I asked a Catholic friend of mine what the resurrection of Jesus Christ meant to him. He replied without hestitation, "My resurrection." He was referring to his spiritual rebirth as a Christian, which the apostle Paul associates with Christ's resurrection in Romans 6.

"Can man be saved, Mr. Heep?," Mr. Leeds asks Cleveland Heep in M. Night Shamaylan's Lady in the Water. What he meant was "Can a person ever have a new beginning?" Cleveland Heep was a surgeon who had lost his wife and children to a murderer, and he coped with his loss by hiding out in an apartment complex, doing his job as an apartment maintenance man. He hadn't moved past his pain! Could he have a fresh start, a new beginning?

Ironically, Mr. Leeds himself was probably coping with some sort of pain. The actor who plays him, Bill Irwin, says so much in an interview on the DVD. Plus, Mr. Leeds tells Cleveland, "You don't want to end up like me." "Like me" means sitting in front of the TV all day and not really interacting with anyone, as Mr. Leeds does. Mr. Leeds wanted Cleveland to have a fresh start because he recognized the negative impact of not doing so, but he did not believe that a new beginning was possible for him (Mr. Leeds). Later in the movie, Mr. Leeds doesn't manifest much faith, for he says that he wanted there to be more than this horrible world, but he realized that sooner or later he had to face reality. But he goes back on his doubt when he urges Mr. Heep to at least try to heal the water narf Story--to undertake his role as "Healer" in the drama that the apartment complex is experiencing. So the movie is not just about Cleveland Heep's new beginning, but Mr. Leeds' as well.

On Christmas, I read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I talked with my therapist about it, and I asked him how Scrooge (or anyone, for that matter) could change. Scrooge had a dream that altered his perspective of himself and life, but what would keep him from returning to his greed, selfishness, and bitterness? My therapist responded that we can easily relapse to where we were, but that's why we need to set certain things in place to keep that from happening. Change takes diligence, in short! For me, that means greeting people by name and introducing myself to at least one person at the meetings that I attend. I can easily become lazy on that, but, as I said, change requires diligence.

That may have been the point of the Easter sermon that I heard this morning. The priest referred to I Corinthians 5, which exhorts the Corinthian Christians to purge out the old leaven of malice and wickedness so they can become a new lump, celebrating the festival with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The priest remarked that being a Christian (actually, he said "Catholic") is a lot of work, which is why it is a lifelong process!

Some may say that the Christian life is not a matter of working hard, however. One of my relatives likes Jimmy Swaggart, who preaches that faith in the cross is the only path to spiritual victory. The way Swaggart tells it, trusting in Jesus will lead us to the point where we don't even want to sin, negating the need for intense struggle. I'm not sure if the Christian life is meant to be a passive process, but I think that faith in a God who loves me is important to me becoming a new person. I have to trust that life is God's way of making me better, meaning that God is on my side, not condemning me. So I have a role in my spiritual renewal, and God has a role. It's a cooperative process!

My mind wanders to a post that I wrote in response to Ken Brown: Jack, Sawyer, and Selflessness. Ken was contrasting two Lost characters: Jack and Sawyer. Jack started out as a selfless leader and became a selfish jerk. And Sawyer began as a selfish jerk and evolved into a selfless leader. For Ken, the lesson was that each one of us can have a new beginning by making selfless decisions. My point in my post, however, was that things are not always that easy, since we can fall into funks that are hard to climb out of.

But perhaps Ken has a point. Maybe I can have a new beginning each day, as I choose to make good decisions and not bad ones. I can set my mind on the bitterness of my past and present, or I can think thoughts of faith, hope, and love. I can greet people by name, or pray for people, or do something for somebody else. But, again, this takes discipline! There have been times when I have set spiritual goals, only to violate them and give up! That may be why I need some sort of hope and inspiration, which is what religion claims to provide.

Conversion

When people change their beliefs, do they become more mature? This was a discussion I was having with someone today.

There are all sorts of converts in the world. There are atheists who become fundamentalists, and there are fundamentalists who become atheists. And some people convert to Buddhism, or Islam, or Judaism, or from one brand of Christianity to another.

In many cases, conversion can lead to greater maturity. Atheists who converted from fundamentalism may look at their fundie days as times when they were dogmatic, closed-minded, naive, enslaved, afraid of life, manipulative of others in their attempts to proselytize, hateful, deluded, superstitious, and maybe even inauthentic or just plain hypocritical. Christian converts may look at their non-Christian pasts as times when they were self-centered, hedonistic, aimless, bitter, devoid of hope, and empty.

If any one religion or philosophy provided all of the answers and satisfaction to life, then why is there such a variety of conversions? Not all Christians are satisfied with Christianity, not all Jews are content with Judaism, etc. What about their previous belief system are they leaving behind, and what are they hoping to get in their new belief system?

Sometimes, people become better people when they convert from one belief system to another. At other times, they remain the same, as they carry their personal strengths and weaknesses into their new way of looking at things. And then there are times when converts become even worse than they were before (e.g., Matthew 23:15).

FSE: Knowing

Yesterday, I saw Knowing, which starred Nicholas Cage.

Knowing is a science fiction movie. At its beginning, we're in the 1950's, and we meet an odd little girl named Lucinda, whose special idea is selected by her school. Her idea is for the school to create a time capsule, which would be opened four decades later. While the other students are putting in pictures they drew of what they think the future will be like, Lucinda puts in a page of numbers.

Four decades later, a little boy is handed Lucinda's page of numbers, and his father, an MIT professor, learns that it details a series of disasters from the 1950's until the end of life on earth, which is imminent. The professor gets in touch with Lucinda's daughter and granddaughter. His son and Lucinda's granddaughter both hear messages from strange whispering people, who give them visions of the coming destruction of earth by a solar flare. These whisperers turn out to be aliens, who are trying to get the kids off of earth. Guided by the aliens and the numbers, the two kids go to a place where a spaceship can take them away, allowing them to start life anew on another planet. We see from the other spaceships leaving the earth that these kids were not the only ones chosen to survive.

The movie puzzled me at first. Why would Lucinda need to write the numbers, if the aliens offered the kids direct guidance, making the numbers apparently superfluous? And how did the other children know the way to leave earth, since they did not have an MIT-professor father who could decode the numbers?

For the first question, I concluded that the numbers represented the aliens' attempt to involve the professor in the whole process--of getting the kids off the planet. If the kids were just relying on visions from the aliens, then the professor probably wouldn't have believed them, or he would have resented the aliens for trying to take away his son. But the numbers involved him in the process of gradually learning about the earth's imminent destruction, so he was more at peace with the aliens' agenda at the end of the movie, since it didn't come out of the clear blue sky.

For my second question, I concluded that the aliens guided other children off of the planet in different ways. The numbers were their way to help Lucinda's granddaughter and the professor's son, but they could have used other means to get the other children off of earth--in a manner that respected the kids' free will and the parents' reluctance to be separated from their children.

This reminds me of a few things. First of all, the movie makes a big deal about determinism vs. randomness. On his blog, Roger Ebert states that the movie assumes everything that happens has been determined in the past and thus cannot be changed. For Ebert, such a notion undermines human free will, which is a key component of many theistic religions. But, in my opinion, the aliens work with human free will rather than against it. None of the human characters are robots, but they have their own thoughts, feelings, and emotions as human beings. The aliens respect humanity, which is why they resort to guiding the professor and the children to the right conclusions by giving them puzzles to work out. Similarly, even Calvinists assert that God uses means to bring the elect to Christ, meaning that (for them) it's not just a matter of God pre-programming people towards the Christian religion. Those who believe in fate and predestination do not erase from the equation the human ability to make choices, to feel, to experiment, to have opinions--in short, to be human.

Second, I thought about James McGrath's recent posts on Jesus' resurrection on his blog, http://www.exploringourtmatrix.blogspot.com/. McGrath dismisses a lot of Christian apologetics for the resurrection of Jesus. Christian apologists say we know Jesus rose because of the empty tomb and the mass sightings of the risen Jesus. According to McGrath, such an argument does not coincide with the Bible. In John, when Mary sees the empty tomb, she does not conclude that Jesus rose from the dead, but rather that someone moved the body. That means that the empty tomb didn't necessarily prove the resurrection, in the mindset of the early Christians. And Matthew's Gospel states that some people doubted when they saw the risen Jesus. For McGrath, there were a variety of reasons that the early Christians concluded that Jesus rose from the dead. McGrath does not list them (as far as I know), but possibilities include seeing the risen Jesus and the prophecies of the Old Testament.

Similarly, in terms of the movie Knowing, the aliens use a variety of means to bring the children to the truth: the numbers, direct guidance, their connection with their family, etc. That may be how God interacts with Christians today. Sure, he gives us a book that contains his general will, and it fulfills a role similar to that of the numbers in the movie. But he also guides us through his Holy Spirit and other people (or so Christians claim).

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. See Knowing, even though my post just gave you a lot of spoilers!

FSE: Smoke Monster, Joan Actors

Last night, I watched Lost, Criminal Mind, and the new ABC series, The Unusuals.

1. Last night's lost was about the judgment of Ben Linus, who had some humanity within him when he refused to kill Alex Rousseau. Over the years, however, he degenerated to become much more cruel and heartless, leading to the death of Alex (whom he was raising as his own daughter). In last night's episode, he went to the temple to summon the smoke monster, who would judge him for his sins. He entered the building not knowing whether the monster would kill him or allow him to live.

I can't really express what I think about the smoke monster. It appears to be immoral or amoral because it has killed so many innocent people, yet I see from last night that it has the moral sensibility to confront Ben Linus about his past behavior. Maybe it's like the shooter in Phone Booth: he's immoral in the sense that he kills innocent people, yet he has enough of a God-complex to judge Colin Farrell's lifestyle.

Is the smoke monster like God? Going into the temple not knowing whether one will live or die reminds me of the Old Testament's tabernacle protocol, in which a person was not allowed to stroll into God's sanctuary unannounced, lest God would kill him. As far as I know, it really didn't matter if the person was good or bad: if he disobeyed the sanctuary protocol, then he lost his life. Consider Uzzah, whom God killed for merely trying to stabilize the tumbling ark!

At the same time, God did appear to people in some capacity, and they were usually shocked that they were alive after seeing God. They're like Benjamin Linus, who is relieved that the smoke monster has allowed him to live.

Another tension is that there are times in the Bible in which God preserves the innocent from his wrath, and then there are times when he destroys the innocent along with the guilty (punishing the group, transgenerational punishment, punishing a man's family for his sins, etc.). Similarly, the smoke monster appears to kill the innocent, yet there are also times when it regards people according to their individual moral merit. I think that God differs from the smoke monster in the sense that God doesn't go around killing people for no reason, since the innocent perish when he is carrying out an act of judgment on an immoral group.

2. I watched The Unusuals because it has Amber Tamblyn from Joan of Arcadia. She looks good, even if she was a big-time Hillary supporter (which part of me actually admires because at least she wasn't going with the Obama fad but dared to be different). But what was interesting was that I got to see another Joan of Arcadia actor: on CBS' Criminal Mind (which I ordinarily don't watch because it's on the same time as Lost, but my dad has DVR, so I got to see both last night). Criminal Mind has the guy who played Will Giradi, Joan's dad. So I got to see two Joan of Arcadia actors in the same night. How cool is that?

FSE: John 14-17

I celebrated the Lord's supper yesterday, the night before Passover. Within Armstrongite circles, there is a tradition that we read John 14-17 during the Lord's supper. I'm not an Armstrongite anymore, but I like to read these chapters every year, and I notice something new whenever I read them.

This year, the chapters offered comfort, but they also intrigued me in some cases, and they were a huge turn off in others. The comforting part was Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit to his disciples, ensuring that they would not be orphans when he was gone.

The intriguing part concerned Christ promising that God would grant the disciples whatever they requested in Jesus' name. I think of John 15:16, which states that Jesus appointed us to bear lasting fruit "so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you" (NAB). We bear spiritual fruit so that God will grant our every request, meaning we need to have the character of God before God will give us everything we want; and, of course, us thinking like God will shape our desires and requests.

Do I buy this? Part of me sees this as a cop out, since who among us will ever have the character of God? If these are the rules of the game, then God can always use our imperfections as an excuse not to answer our prayers. In addition, I think that a good person can make a fundamentally decent prayer that can remain unanswered. Does God answer every prayer for healing, even though it is made out of love and concern for another person? I believe God answers prayers, but there are better Christians than me who don't get everything they want, even when what they want is actually a good thing (e.g., healing).

The turn-off of the chapters was their Jesus-specific nature and their us vs. them mentality. I've somewhat been leaning in a John Hick pluralistic direction, which states that God works in different religions to make people moral. For me this year, the Lord's supper was to represent my faith tradition's attempt to address atonement for sin and the desire to be a better person, themes that appear in many religions. "Jesus" was to represent the selfless life that he led, an ideal that appears in numerous faith traditions.

But that's not entirely what I encounter in these chapters of John, where Jesus emphasizes believing not only in the moral values for which he stood, but in him personally. And the chapters do not have an incredible amount of sympathy for the mass of humanity. Jesus says in John 17:9 that he prays for his disciples, not for the world. In John 14-17, the world hates and persecutes Jesus and his disciples. These chapters don't coincide with a pluralistic or universalist impulse that I possess, in which everyone seeks God in his own way and has God's favor accordingly. These chapters present a choice of either Jesus or the highway.

At the same time, Jesus in these chapters believes that he is revealing himself to the world. The Holy Spirit convicts the world of Jesus, sin, and unrighteousness. The world knows the Christians are Jesus' disciples when they have love for one another, and it realizes God has sent Jesus when the Christians are one. Somehow, this small, minority sect was God's means of shining light on the entire world.

Do I buy this? It seems like so much of the world knows why Christians believe Jesus came and what they have to say about him. Plus, Christians have left their mark on the world, both positively and (when they haven't obeyed Jesus' command to love) negatively. Yet, I don't see Christianity as the only moral religion, whereas the others are godless and immoral. John 14-17 strikes me as too black-and-white.

That doesn't mean I reject those chapters, however, but rather that I'm intrigued and challenged by them.