CREATION

Just watched the film Creation last night on Netflix instant.  A BBC biographical drama on Charles Darwin, starring Paul Bettany & Jennifer Connelly.  {Let it be known that I have been following Jennifer Connelly's acting career since The Labyrinth, so anything she does I'm probably going to love...and I have yet to see something Paul Bettany does that I don't love.}  But I really enjoyed this film. 


Here's an article in The Telegraph about the film: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6173399/Charles-Darwin-film-too-controversial-for-religious-America.html


You know how books choose when you read them? Same with some films. They just seem to hit the spot, as it were. I've been struggling...(is struggling the word?...grappling? mentally wrestling? It's all the same) with religion and ideas about faith for a long time, probably since my sophomore year of college, probably forever... In the past few years, I have slowly begun the process of shedding my own religious upbringing and have become more and more agnostic in my belief system.  As Darwin says in the film, [on battling with God]...'it's just a silent struggle against myself, extended over a thousand afternoons. The loss of religious faith is a slow and fragile process, like the raising of continents.' So true. I would add that it is also a painful process, especially when so many people around you seem so rooted in and comforted by their belief in God. 

At first I mourned my failed attempts to find peace and connection in Christianity, fearing I would grow sarcastic and pessimistic about human kind. ‘Homo homini lupus.' (Man is a wolf to man) What? We're just all out to get each other then? Survival of the fittest? But no. It has left me feeling surprisingly optimistic. I don’t know the answers, and therefore am open to a vast realm of ideas and belief systems. 'Who am I to know the heart of God?'

Forgive my referencing Freud here, but I just recently read a few things of his in my Theories of Personality class that I can relate to. He said of religion:  “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity--it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.”  He goes on to add: ‘The uneducated masses will always need the illusions of religion to cause them to restrain their passions; but educated, intelligent persons should live their lives according to scientific facts, not illusions.’  (Let it be known that Freud grew increasingly pessimistic in his later years. He became a grumpy old man and wasn't well received by his peers, professionally.)

I have many Christian friends and family, so it's very hard to write this, because you're either in one school of thought or the other. It's painful because it causes division, and yet I feel so free from the burdens of religious dogma having accepted this viewpoint. And yet some of the most intelligent people I know are devout Christians, so I cannot go with Freud's opinion on the idea that only the 'uneducated masses' need religion. For me, no matter which religion you cling to, you'll never truly know the answers anyway. And I'm okay with the mystery. Religions, to me, are just great collections of culturally relevant stories. Great parables to moral conduct and models of behavior. They aren't wrong, necessarily. I believe Jesus existed and that if he were alive today I would most certainly beg an audience with him and hear all he had to say. I believe in a Creator. There is too much symmetry, too many miracles, too much perfection in the world to believe otherwise. Look at an orchid. Look at an embryo. Look at a spider! Symmetry, beauty, perfection.

Oh my. This truly feels like I'm coming out of the religious closet. Perhaps I've opened up a can of worms I can never again close comfortably. And while your opinion is welcome here, I do not in any way, shape or form intend to stifle your beliefs with my own. What I just can't swallow is the idea that just because you're born in Cambodia, and aren't introduced to Christianity, means you're going to burn in hell for not having been 'saved.' It's exclusive, and so conveniently North-American. I just can't see a God that would look down the line of souls and say, 'You, you, you, not you, you...' And pain and suffering: 'It's God's plan' that someone should suffer while we 'good Christians' are rewarded. Or, let's 'pray into it' that God will provide for us to take a vacation this year, even though an entire village in Somalia is being destroyed, its women raped, its fathers murdered at this very moment. Yes, God cares whether or not I am able to take a vacation. Yes, he provides me with every comfort and convenience that comes my way, but the poor man who was laid off and consequently lost his home, his family and now his mind living on the streets? Yes, he is being tested. God is testing his faith. He's a modern-day Job. He struggles because he has not accepted God into his heart and prayed for his favor. Even though God is love, right? Okay, I get it now, makes total sense. ????????


I, for one believe what Abraham Lincoln said. "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion." Amen. I can believe in that.