The Foreigner

The human urge to exact vengeance as if the resulting pain suffered by the culprit(s) were equivalent to that (or whom) is lost being restored—an equivalence that Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes as strange—is perhaps integral to human nature; the instinct may even be in our DNA and activated in the reptilian area of the human brain. Compassion to enemies flies in the face of that facet of our nature, yet it is arguably only from justice as love as universal (rather than convenient) benevolence, rather than from justice through vengeance, that full restorative satisfaction after having suffered a loss caused by another person is possible. We find this instinct to exact vengeance idealized in the film, The Foreigner (2017). Rarely is vengeance so perfectly fulfilled as it is in that fictional story. Yet the idyllic ending is deceiving, for even such fulfilment as the protagonist feels after having exacted revenge is not wholly restorative. More realistically, people tend to go overboard in refusing to delimit vengeful acts to fit the respective crimes/losses. Hence the Biblical attempt to assign vengeance to God, which is also problematic.

The phrase, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord,” comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans (12:19), where the apostle quotes  from Deuteronomy 32:35: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them” (NIV). Friedrich Nietzsche took a look at that verse and concluded that it discredits the Hebrews’ (and Paul’s) conception of God because vengeance and omnibenevolence are contradictory. To say that God is both vengeful and perfect goodness (as in universal benevolence) is untenable, so Nietzsche’s point is that internal contradiction within a concept renders it invalid; to say that God itself does not exist is another matter.

The God of love and universal benevolence found in the Gospels represents an internally-consistent conception of the divinity because love (especially agape) and benevolentia universalis do not contradict each other. In the Gospels, Jesus preaches and provides examples of mercy and forgiveness even to enemies.  In criticizing logical contradiction in holding that it is sufficient to discredit the validity of a concept by rendering it nonsensical, Nietzsche almost seems Kantian. The first formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative mandates that if a maxim for action yields an absurdity when universalized, that maxim is inherently unethical, even if applied by an individual rather than by everyone (e.g., lying, for instance).

Admittedly, assigning vengeance exclusively to a deity may have been motivated by a constructive intention—that of keeping retribution out of the hands of us mere mortals, who rarely even recognize that vengeance is best served cold rather than inflamed by passion, and thus likely to be carried to an extreme rather than circumscribed by self-discipline. The Israeli genocide in Gaza demonstrates just how flawed human judgment can be with regard to assessing when enough vengeance has been committed. In retrospect, assigning vengeance to Yahweh so the Hebrews would not carry out vengeance themselves seems not to have worked. The human instinct for retaliation—to force an aggressor to pay, even if only by mental anguish—remains remarkably powerful. Nietzsche posits in The Genealogy of Morals that the assumption of equivalence of pain and the thing (or person) lost originated in the earliest debtor-creditor relationships—an equivalence that Shakespeare made famous by the proverbial line, “a pound of flesh,” in The Merchant of Venice. Both Nietzsche and Shakespeare were skeptical regarding the efficacy of another’s pain in making up for a loss of property, money, and even a loved one. Not only that equivalence, but also the version of justice that is presumably satisfied by vengeance can be critiqued, and an alternative, now-extinct theory of justice proposed.

Unfortunately, The Foreigner presents viewers with an idealized depiction of revenge accomplished, albeit with much effort by the protagonist in satisfying his urge so well literally without overkill. Jackie Chan plays Quan Nogoc Minh, a former special-forces operative whose teenage daughter is killed in a London bombing by a rogue group called the “Authentic IRA.” Quan targets Liam Hennessy, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, correctly suspecting that Hennessy’s past IRA ties can give him access to the bombers’ identities. Quan is relentless in pressuring Hennessy, even with violence unleashed especially on Hennessy’s henchmen, so Hennessy himself would be motivated enough to find out the identities of the bombers. Quan even suffers an injury in an exchange of gun fire. The film’s message at this point is that justice by vengeance can require a lot of effort and even harm to oneself. To be sure, as a former special-ops military man, Quan is formidable against the henchmen, and Hennessy is eventually sufficiently motivated to seek out the names of the bombers from a current IRA-contact. Pretending to be a repairman, Quan gains access to the small apartment where the bombers are planning their next caper. Spraying the apartment with machine-gun fire, Quan kills all but one of the terrorists, and severely wounds the woman. Quan slips away, down the elevator and back to his residence. Even though police know that Quan is responsible for the carnage, they choose not to arrest him, and even shoot the woman themselves! The film’s message at that point is that Quan’s vengeance is fitting and justified. When he returns home, where he is a local restaurateur, he is visibly fulfilled emotionally because he has succeeded in his vengeance without falling sort or overreaching.  

Watching the film after 2023, Quan’s precisely and appropriately carried out retaliation in vengeance for the loss of his daughter can be contrasted with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, which went much beyond the number of Israelis killed and kidnapped by Hamas in October of 2023. In the film, Quan limits his quest to the actual bombers, rather than going on to kill everyone who has ever been associated with the IRA, such as Hennessey. For example, Quan makes a kind of bomb that would not kill Hennessey when it goes off in the building in which Hennessey’s office is located; Quan merely wants to motivate Hennessey so Quan can apply vengeance to the murderers of his daughter. Such an approach to vengeance differs from Israeli government statements that everyone in Gaza, even babies, were guilty and therefore should be killed. Unlike the movie, the “real-world” case shows just how warped self-serving human judgment can be concerning “pay back.”  John Locke, a political theorist, posits as a primary rationale for the existence of government the tendency of human beings to unleash excessive punishment in avenging crimes committed against themselves, their families, or their property. Without an impartial authority capable of restraining retaliatory violence, excesses such as a genocide can occur even by a government supported by such a significant percentage of voters that a nation itself can be said to be culpable in committing crimes against humanity out of sheer vengeance.

The fact that Quan stops and returns home the moment he achieves a strictly proportional vengeance can be viewed as idyllic with respect to self-imposed restraint in human nature. Vengeance in the real world is almost never as perfectly calibrated as depicted in the film, although the physical and mental stamina required of Quan even just to get the names of the bombers is hardly ideal. Vengeance is not easy even when it is held to justifiable proportionality. Even though the film brings closure to Quan’s quest and he can resume living and even grieve his daughter’s death, Locke’s point is nonetheless valid. As the case of Israel in Gaza and even the West Bank demonstrates, state actors wielding military and police raw force to enact retribution can be extremely dangerous.

Furthermore, public legal justice rarely feels as emotionally satisfying to victims as Quan’s accomplished vengeance feels to him once he is back home. Examining the film’s closure more closely, however, can lead us to conclude that Quan’s satisfaction is not complete; he is not made whole as he had been prior to the loss of his daughter by having accomplished his objective of violently killing the bombers.

Back home, Quan does not get his daughter back. Nietzsche points out that the vicarious satisfaction of creditors by the infliction of pain on non-paying debtors represents a strange equivalence because real satisfaction in terms of getting the loaned money back has not been achieved. Just because a debtor suffers from a creditor’s demand of “a pound of flesh” does not mean that the creditor’s bank account is restored with money that can be spent to feel pleasure in the future. The sadistic pleasure even in knowing that someone else is suffering (e.g., in a debtor-prison) substitutes for such pleasure. The value of money lies ultimately in pleasure, whether money is spent or the absence of money is used to cause the suffering of another person (and thus pleasure to oneself). Such an equivalence of another’s pain for money can nonetheless be questioned, as Nietzsche does, and thus the sort of justice waged by Quan in the film can be viewed as something less than restorative and thus making an aggrieved person whole once again. Because Quan’s daughter is not restored to him, he is not made whole in spite of the pleasure he feels in having made the bombers pay by suffering pain and losing their futures. Quan’s satisfaction upon returning home can therefore only be partial; vengeance cannot be perfect because that which (or who) has been lost is still gone. Even if a person believes that God will execute vengeance on our behalf, the stolen property or destroyed lives are not restored. Praying for divine vengeance turns out to be human, all too human, rather than making a person whole once again.

An alternative, by-now extinct theory of justice rooted in love and benevolence, wherein even enemies are treated with compassion rather than retaliated against, is available. Unlike the sort of justice evinced in the film, justice as love and benevolence can restore a victim to wholeness even though the lost thing or person of value is not returned.  Of compassion being due even to enemies, a person subscribing to this theory of justice could say, Gladly I give this unto you, not because you deserve it, but because God is love and to the extent that you partake in being, you are of God, which is perfect being, and thus you are owed benevolence. This line reflects Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s formulation of justice as caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis: wise love, that is, universal benevolence. Perhaps the wisdom of such love is due in part to the inherently incomplete restoration that is possible from justice as vengeance.

A story in which Quan serves the bombers by taking care of their children, even raising one or two if one of the bombers is subsequently killed, would present us with a radically different narrative—one so alien and thus unbelievable that such a film would likely never be produced. A formidable exception is the film Gandhi (1982), which arguably showcases justice as compassion for one’s adversaries, as when Gandhi, barely conscious during one of his hunger strikes meant to stop the Hindu-Muslim violence, tells Nahari, a Hindu man who has just confessed that he has killed a Muslim child in revenge for his own son’s death by a Muslim man, “I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.” Such a mission would restore Nahari to spiritual wholeness and thus enable him to live once again rather than be spiritually dead in guilt and still-unrequited resentment. For even though Nahari has killed a Muslim boy, that act cannot restore Nahari’s own son to him. Without justice as compassion to his enemies, Nahari is left only with the partial satisfaction that vengeance can give. Even though The Foreigner ends with Quan back home visibly relieved from having accomplished his objective against all probability, his satisfaction cannot be whole because he is not fully restored psychologically or spiritually. His daughter, if in heaven, would have cause to mourn him, whereas if he were to have extended compassion rather than pain to his enemies, she would have reason to rejoice.  

Contact

In the fall of 2026, Chris Graney, an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, argued that the universe of at least 2 trillion galaxies (according to a study in 2016 using the orbital Hubble Space Telescope) probably contains few, if any, planets capable of supporting intelligent life. This claim may come as a surprise, given the gargantuan number of possibly habitable exoplanets in the universe and the associated likelihood of alien life out there. The overlay of theology onto science, as if the latter’s criteria were nugatory and thus dismissible relative to religious doctrine, is problematic because the two domains are arguably distinct and even unique, even though they are related. Such a category mistake is highlighted in the film, Contact (1997), in which religious figures (who have related political roles in the White House) impose monotheist criteria in the selection of an astronaut for space travel, which is primarily a scientific enterprise.

To put Graney’s scientific claim in context, scientifically, consider the estimate that a typical galaxy contains between 100 billion and 400 billion suns. Multiplying 400 billion by 2 trillion equals 800 quintillion. Now, multiplying this number by 8—based on science’s estimate that a typical solar system has between eight and ten planets—brings us to 6.4 nonillion! To be sure, simulations had shown that a solar system can support up to six planets in the habitable zone; multiplying 800 quintillion suns by a conservative 3 habitable planets gives us 2.4 sextillion planets where intelligent life could potentially exist.

Such an astronomically large number as 2.4 sextillion could support lots of sex, of whatever fashion or stripe, though the odds of whips being involved outside of Earth (especially beyond San Francisco’s sordid Dore Alley and Folsom Days “festivals”) are probably very low. But I digress. Graney’s claim may be too circumscribed, given the probabilities going along with there being up to 2.4 sextillion possibly life-supporting exoplanets, and this number does not include the planets of suns that may be in galaxies that in 2026 remained undetected by empirical science. Graney’s scientific claim pales as arbitrary, or at least as dogmatically circumscribed. That he was working at the Vatican at the time—the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church—may explain why he made the statement: his claim aligns with the theological doctrine that, being made in God’s image, our species holds a special, singular place in Creation. Unfortunately, moving from a religious concept to a scientific conclusion is deeply problematic because religion and science are two distinct domains, each with its own criteria that ought not be supervened by the foisting of exogenous criteria from any other domain.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church opposed the heliocentric theory, which posits that the Sun rather than the Earth is at the center of our solar system. In conflating theology with science, top ecclesiastical officials considered that astronomical theory to conflict with the theological doctrine of the primacy of our species in Creation. Heliocentrism was first suggested by Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230 BCE) and later revived by Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350-370 CE), who was flayed alive by Bishop Cyril’s military guard because she was a pagan who had influence on government officials in Alexandria and would not convert to Christianity (Cyril was later canonized). Centuries later, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) ran afoul of the Roman Inquisition because his scientific work supported the heliocentric theory. 

Putting scientists to death for advancing a scientific theory as if doing so were heretical (a distinctly religious concept) conflates science and theology by hyperextending religious criteria into the scientific domain as though the latter were merely really part of the religious domain. Furthermore, for a person to foist one domain’s criteria onto another domain, which has its own native or innate criteria and principles, is not only logically fraught, but also presumptuous and thus unethical as well. Science and theology are best approached as distinct domains, with their own hegemonic criteria not to be submerged by that of the other domain. It follows that religious truth and scientific truth can be considered to be qualitatively different (i.e., different in kind rather than degree or extent). 

In fact, the word “truth” may be best reserved for the religious domain, with “facts” residing in the scientific domain. Religious meaning and empirical facts are two very different things. The qualitative difference is missed in conflating the “Big Bang” with Creation, which can be thought of as meaning that even existence itself, or being, is inherently dependent. In other words, to say that our existence is precarious scientifically, as in, for instance, an asteroid being able to hit our planet and exterminate us, is very different than saying that Creation is dependent on its Creator so we are existentially precarious in our creatureliness. Religious meaning can legitimately be supported by myth, whereas science is the stuff of theory and empirical findings. 

Psychology, history, and politics are still other domains with their own distinct criteria and thus not to be conflated. Religious myth and historical accounts, for example, are qualitatively different, and are written with intent based on the respective sets of criteria. Josephus, a historian, and Paul, an evangelist, could have passed each other on a road and wished each other well without viewing each other as colleagues even though both men wrote because they wrote for different purposes and according to different criteria.

To grasp the harmful effects of superimposing religious criteria on scientific study, watching and analyzing the film, Contact (1997), is advisable and instructive. For example, the most iconic lines of the film, which was made just before the turn of the millennium, is illustrative. S. R. Hadden (wonderfully played by John Hurt) is talking with Ellie, the scientist who has discovered the radio signals sent from Vega. “The powers that be have been very busy lately, falling over each other to position themselves for the game of the millennium. Maybe I can help deal you back in,” Hadden tells her. She responds, “I didn’t realize I was out,” to which he pauses and says, “Well, maybe not out . . . but certainly being handed your hat.” That even Ellie’s boss, David Drumlin, a scientist who serves as the White House Scientific Advisor, appeals to religious criteria to marginalize Ellie behind the other candidates, including Drumlin himself, for the space trip to meet the aliens at Vega shows just how out of place such criteria are in a scientific venture.

That the selection process would be political is to be expected, but that religious criteria would be primary over scientific criteria is not. The film, which was written by Carl Sagan and his wife based on one of his books, castigates the interlarding of religious criteria as artificial and contrived—basically out of place—in the selection of an astronaut to travel through worm holes in space to visit an alien species that has, as Ellie points out in defending her candidacy, sent a distinctly scientific message to Earth on how to construct the space-transit vehicle and its supporting launching infrastructure. Sagan’s attitude can be gleamed as being hostile to the unethical encroachment of religion on astronomy, and space travel in particular. The dramatic tension in the film is as much about what criteria should be used to select a human to go on the trip as about what the aliens will say about themselves and even ourselves as a species. Interestingly, the alien who speaks with Ellie once she has arrived at Vega does not ask her about the religious beliefs of humans, so the concern of religionists that the astronaut should be able to discuss God turns out to be misplaced, and thus irrelevant.

Before analyzing the film in depth, it is useful to remember that in NASA’s space programs, the religion or atheism of astronaut candidates has officially never been among the criteria used in the selection process. Beyond the risk of prejudice, the inclusion of religion would be widely considered, especially within NASA, as entirely irrelevant. Health, physical stamina, and technical ability in space travel and spacewalking have been the primary considerations. In selecting Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher, for the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle in 1986, even though the primary criterion was not aerospace expertise, the key criterion being the ability to communicate to the public what it is like being in space was relevant to the functions of teacher in space, and thus the criterion is entirely appropriate. Because this skill—conveying different or complex matters in simple terms—is important in teaching, the ability to teach was indirectly involved, along of course with physical stamina and health. Asking candidates for the teacher slot on the shuttle, however, whether the experience in orbit would affect their respective relationships with Jesus Christ (or might increase their willingness to convert to Christianity) would have been  generally flagged inside and outside of NASA as irrelevant and even invasive. Furthermore, NASA administrators would hardly be in a position to decide whom God would want to go into the heavens. Such a question would make no sense to a Buddhist, and a Hindu might ask: Which deity? An avatar of Vishnu might prefer one person, while Shiva would prefer another.

In the film, the primary religious criterion used to select the astronaut who will travel to the aliens at Vega is based on the assumption that humanity is overwhelmingly (and properly) monotheist—believing that there is just one deity. This is problematic because a candidate could be a Buddhist or Hindu. Nonetheless, a member of a selection committee claims that 95% of the world’s population believe in a supreme being—a dubious factoid because neither Buddhists nor Hindus believe in a supreme being in the monotheistic sense. 

Buddhism teaches that neither a soul nor a deity exists, though Pure Land Buddhism in Japan includes the veneration of several “Buddhas” as de facto deities. In Hinduism, Brahman, which is infinite being, is not an entity, and therefore, is not a deity; infinite being is considered to be supreme, hence even more fundamental than the gods and goddesses, which are created out of Brahman, primal, everlasting infinite being. To be sure, a passage in the Gita has Lord Krishna claiming that he created Brahman, but as that is being itself, how could Krishna exist prior to Brahman? Presumably a deity doing something must exist while doing it, so something existing that brings about infinite being would appear to be an oxymoron. So in Hinduism, Brahman, rather than any of the deities—even Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu that in the Gita is supreme over the other gods and goddesses—is fundamental, and even in the Gita, Hinduism is not represented as being monotheist, as Krishna alludes to the other gods and thus their existence. So, in Hinduism, Brahman, which is not a deity, is arguably (to Shankara at least) most fundamental. Even in the Gita, Krishna is not the only deity. So monotheism does not apply to Hinduism. In the film, therefore, the claim that the astronaut selected should be able to represent monotheism because humanity is overwhelmingly monotheist can be rejected on religious terms; that the claim would be primary in the selection of an astronaut for space travel, which is primarily scientific, is thus especially problematic.

The film’s plot, in brief, unfolds as follows: Ellie, an astrophysicist heading a remote radio-wave detection station oriented to detecting signals from beyond Earth, discovers a strong signal originating at Vega. Her superior, David Drumlin, quickly takes credit and assumes control of the program from the White House. Figures including Robert Novak, a political commentator (playing himself), and then Richard Rank (likely a surrogate for evangelical politicos such as Ralph Reed during the Reagan years), and Palmer Joss, a presidential religious advisor and a nonaffiliated minister, all insist on the crucial relevance of religion to the matter of communicating with space aliens. Both Rank and Joss want the candidate who is selected to travel to the aliens to believe in the Abrahamic deity so as to be able to convey the nature of that deity to the aliens.

Astutely political, David Drumlin tells the selection committee that the candidate selected should indeed believe in God; he is trying to exclude Ellie, who would otherwise be selected but for her Atheism. Drumlin insists even after he has been selected that he will gleefully represent his “country, planet, and God,” as if God would ever be in need of being represented by a human being, especially one such as Drumlin who has manipulated the selection committee with a clean conscience because, as he later explains to Ellie, “life isn’t fair.” There is some divine justice, I think, in him being killed indirectly by a religious zealot who, in considering science as a threat to religion (which means he commits the category mistake of conflating the two domains), sets off a body-bomb inside launching superstructure during a dress-rehearsal of the launch when Drumlin is present (playing to the cameras for publicity).

Palmer Joss, who is romantically interested in Ellie, also personifies the hypocrisy that can exist in religion. He is on the selection committee, and he votes against her ostensibly because he feels strongly that a person who believes in his God should go, but as he later admits to her, he didn’t want to risk losing her. Like Drumlin, Joss is selfish, and is hardly in a position to assess the religious suitability of the candidates. The film’s message is that religion should not have entered the picture at all.

Ellie is the runner up, and so following Drumlin’s death, she gets to go to Vega. Even though the time-travel element means that the 18-hour trip looks like a failed launch to everyone here on Earth. The 18 hours of the scrambled video inside her cube-shaped space vehicle validates her account, but this information is kept secret by the few politicos who realize the significance of the find. During a Congressional hearing, Ellie is lambasted as not being credible in her testimony that she travelled to Vega and spoke with an alien. That the aliens might be capable of time travel is utterly missed by everyone. What is not possible for us is deemed impossible. This assumption is just as flawed as the assumption, it turns out, that the aliens would ask about, or even be interested in, the religious beliefs of humans.

During Ellie’s conversation with the alien, religion does not come up. Instead, the matter of discussion, set by the alien, is about how and when aliens might make contact with our species again. Given the relatively primitive condition of humans, the alien tells Ellie that contact will be made in what could be said to be baby steps—meaning very gradually. We are not alone in the universe, and by this both Ellie and the alien know that the reference is not to a deity, but, rather, to there being more than one alien civilization. The primary criterion of the search committee, it turns out, is entirely irrelevant. This does not nullify theistic belief in religion. Instead, Ellie has pointed out to the selection committee, the message sent by the aliens is scientific rather than religious. Conflating the two types, and more specifically, superimposing the criteria innate to one type onto the other type at the expense of its own criteria, can be flagged without invalidating religious truth within the confines of its own domain. Drumlin and Joss can both be viewed as religious hypocrites (using distinctly religious criteria) and Ellie can be viewed as an excellent scientist and astronaut (using criteria of science and space travel).

The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

Robert Thorn remembers and repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist, Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable, such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s criteria.

In what follows, I subject the first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis. By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter   of Godliness and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be distinguished from opinion pieces.

The phrase, “when the Jews return to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political domain can be.  Life can give art added significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted and situated paradigmatically.

The association of the return of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.

Turning to the poem’s second phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain historical accounts.

In the film, the next phrase, “when the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U. states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition, prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children, and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women, and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient (e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude, arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond, whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.

Self-idolatry on a collective scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars, the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.

In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.

The Children Act

I contend that religion and science are two distinct and unique domains, and thus qualitatively different. It follows that they have their own distinctive criteria, which are rightly hegemonic in their respective domain. In other words, the criteria of religion should not be extended onto the domain of natural science, especially if in doing so the native criteria of science are eclipsed or overridden. Likewise, the criteria of science should not be superimposed into the domain of religion, especially if at the expense of the sui generis criteria of religion. The film, The Children Act (2017), demonstrates the problems entailed in imposing religious criteria onto medical science. An interesting question from having seen the film is whether any such hypertrophy of one domain’s criteria onto another domain inevitably incurs a narrowing of perspective and a corresponding warping of judgment.

The film’s narrative centers around Fiona Maye, a judge in Britain, and Adam Henry, a 17-year-old who has leukemia. From the standpoint of medical ethics and religion, the first half of the film is salient, whereas the second half centers around Adam’s infatuation for Fiona and her efforts to distance herself from him. The infatuation is likely a result of the fact that he has lost his religious grounding due to Judge Maye’s order that him be given a blood transfusion in violation of the dogma of the Jehovah Witness sect of Christianity. It is precisely that transfusion that is the legal/moral/religious issue that is presented in the film. If as I contend the medium of film is an excellent means of bringing to people matters of ethics and theology (and philosophy generally), then delving into the complex issue before the court in the film is warranted.

Adam’s parents have asked the court to stop the hospital from giving Adam a potentially life-saving blood-infusion, without which he would die (as the film’s end demonstrates). The parents’ lawyer presents the theological position of Jehovah’s Witnesses against blood transfusions. Genesis, Leviticus, and even Acts are cited as scriptural support, but no passages are cited before the court. The theological potential of the film would be strengthened were even a bit of exegesis presented to the judge (or she could be shown studying the matter at home, especially as her husband is away having an affair). The lawyer for the hospital points out in court that blood transfusions did not exist in ancient times, so we can infer that the relevant scriptural passages are at best indirect, being on blood itself as necessary for life. The hospital lawyer points out that if blood is tantamount to life itself, then the sect should be heartily in favor of blood transfusions to continue life.

Even though no reference to blood transfusion itself is in the Bible, the Jehovah Witness religious organization denounces the medical treatment as if God prohibits it. In court, Adam’s father says that he knows this, but in matters of religious, belief, and thus faith, rather than knowledge sans doubt applies. The notion that blood is or carries a person’s soul, which is implied in the sect’s position, conflates the material and spiritual, and in terms of domains, the biological and the religious. Conflating different domains can indeed lead to such astonishing claims that a person’s soul is in one’s blood. Typically, people dismiss such a claim without realizing that the underlying problem is a category mistake in terms of conflating two different domains or hyperextending one onto another.

Even were scripture to proscribe blood transfusions in particular and explicitly, rather than by an assumed inference from a passage on blood, such a prohibition would be of minor importance given the leitmotif of the gospels. In them, Jesus does not mention transfusions of blood; nor does he mention abortion or gay marriage, yet that hasn’t stopped some Christians from treating such ethical issues as foremost and as religious in nature. This is not to say that transfusions, abortions, and gay people marrying are ethical or unethical. Instead, my point is that from a religious standpoint generally and from the perspective of the New Testament, those issues are not particularly salient. Before the judge’s ruling, Adam is worried that his Church would disenfranchise him were he to get an infusion even if against his will! Even just to distance a member on the basis of an ethical issue that carries little or no distinctly religious importance, especially given the salient feature in the gospels of compassion where it is least convenient (i.e., to detractors, outsiders, and even enemies), incurs a bias in terms of perspective and judgment. Treating a minor factor as though everything hinges on it is to judge erroneously. To violate the theological principle of caritas seu benevolentia universalis (love as universal benevolence) under the rubric of Christianity and especially on a theologically minor issue incurs hypocrisy. The sick are to be cared for—this is very evident from the gospels. Magnifying some passages on blood (rather than more specifically on transfusions as if that practice were proscribed) such that the prohibition eclipses the main theological thrust of the gospels demonstrates a lack of good judgment (and common sense).

Because the transfusion would likely forestall Adam’s eventual death from the cancer means that, as Judge Maye declares from the bench, the Jehovah’s Witness organization was acting against rather than in line with Adam’s welfare. Something had gone very wrong in the governance of that organization. Adam’s welfare includes the happiness that continuing to live can make possible; a religious institution that is in favor of precluding a person’s future is likely making a category mistake underneath—in this case, extending religious criteria onto medical science at the expense of that domain’s own criteria.

As Fiona realizes when she visits Adam in hospital before her verdict, he is a lively, precious young man full of a lively spirit, which is shown in his sarcastic grin even more than in his blood. A person’s soul—isn’t it through a person’s eyes anyway? A person’s entire being is the “form” of one’s soul, as evinced especially in tone of voice and facial expressions as well as the language that one uses. The role of blood is biological, and thus of science, in human life, whereas the spiritual transcends the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion. The religious domain can thus be understood to be distinct from that of natural science.

Angels & Demons

Although a sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006) and also directed by Ron Howard and written in part by Dan Brown, Angels & Demons (2009) stands on its own as a narrative and thus as a film in its own right. Although the relationship between science and religion undergirds the film’s dramatic tension, the more fundamental leitmotif running throughout the film is the sheer ambiguity involved in whether a given character is more like an angel or a demon. An implication is that we mere mortals should not presume to judge the religiosity of other mortals; that’s God’s job, for we so lack the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

The film’s plot centers on the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious studies at Harvard. Although an avowed academic atheist, he immediately heeds the plea of the Vatican police to come to Rome to help the Church.[1] A hired assassin seemingly of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood that historically consisted of Catholic scientists including Galileo, has kidnapped four Cardinals, known as the preferati, for they are the favorites to be elected the next pope during the conclave soon to be underway. The kidnapping is only outdone in significance by assassin’s theft of a case of highly explosive anti-matter, which is somewhere in the Vatican and set to touch matter and therefore violently explode at midnight; the Vatican would be consumed in light. The irony of such evil as light is also in the film, The Ninth Gate (1999), in which bright light accompanies the presence of Satan as Dean Corso approaches the castle in which the demonic being is waiting, for Corso has figuratively and literally unlocked to door to being able to see Satan as it is, whereas Boris Balkan, an evil man, has ironically failed. Such irony and its associated ambiguity also apply to some of the principal characters in Angels & Demons, for it is not so easy for mortal viewers of the film to assess how angelic or demonic those characters actually are in the film.

To begin with a rather minor example, Vittoria Vetra, a physicist who is instrumental in the successful “creation” of a small but significant amount of anti-matter made in the CERN lab in Europe, is also seeking to discover the “God” particle, which gives mass its mass. The film was obvious made prior to the actual scientific discovery of the Higgs particle. In the film, the Caerlengo, the priest Patrick McKenna, scoffs at the scientific pursuit of something called the God particle—how audacious of humans to discover God in physics! Of course, the nomenclature itself is erroneous, for a particle that makes a bit of energy have mass can hardly be said to be God. A photon might as well be called the God particle, given that Jesus Christ is said to be the Light of the World (Phos tou kósmou) in the Gospel of John. Vittoria does not do herself any favors with respect to the Vatican when she rips off a page in a small booklet written by Galileo when she and Langdon are examining the page in the Vatican archives. Just as her scientific efforts to “create” anti-matter cannot be said to be “creation” and thus usurpation of God’s prerogative as the Creator, for the anti-matter is made rather than created in a religious sense, she rips the page from the pamphlet so she and Langdon can hurry to stop the assassin from killing the next Cardinal, for the page contains vital clues as to the location. As in all of the Dan Brown films, a veritable “treasure hunt” based on clues is in Angels & Demons. Vittoria is no demon, even though she has seriously breached Vatican rules in ripping out a page in a rare book.[2] In fact, she steadfastly stays with Langdon as both of them rush from church to church to stop the assassin from killing the kidnapped Cardinals ostensibly in retaliation for the Catholic Church having literally branded four Catholic scientists with hot-iron crosses and killing them for having violated religion by their scientific pursuits in the seventeenth century.

Another irony involving the Vatican archives is that Langdon has tried six times to get the Vatican’s permission for access so he could finish his book on the historical Illuminati by examining Galileo’s third pamphlet—the very one that he and Vittoria examine to find clues as to the probably locations of the upcoming murders. In his office, Commander Richter, whom Inspector Olivetti describes as “a deeply spiritual man,” rubs the six rejections in Langdon’s face as the professor, who is there to help the Vatican, requests permission this time not for his private benefit, but, rather, in order to find clues by which he can anticipate and thwart the murders of the four kidnapped Cardinals. Richter knows that Langdon, an atheist, is trying to help the Church, but rather than having compassion for his “enemy,” he makes fun of him! How “deeply spiritual,” not to mention Christian, is that? Later, speaking to Langdon, Richter brags that his Church helps the sick and hungry. “What does your Church do? Oh, that’s right. You don’t have one.” Ouch! That Langdon is there to help in spite of no being formally or officially Christian even amidst such vitriol renders him an anonymous Christian, whereas Richter’s conduct befits the Antagonist rather than the Paraclete.

Camerlengo McKenna is an immeasurably more interesting character than Richter. Officially the antagonist of the film, McKenna is behind the plot to kidnap the Cardinals and steal the anti-matter to make it seem like the Illuminati scientists are attacking religion. The payment to the assassin from the Isle of Man is an early, subtle clue that the Irish priest is behind it all. McKenna has poisoned the pope because the latter was reaching out to science to reconcile it to the Church, whereas McKenna saw science as needing to be held back—held in check—by the Church. McKenna makes it seem to everyone that he has literally saved the night for the Vatican by flying the ani-matter canister upward in a helicopter and then parachuting down to hopefully be unanimously pronounced the next pope by the Cardinals meeting in the Conclave. Richter has secretly had his altercation with McKenna recorded—with the latter admitting his central role in the criminal plot and then setting Richter up to be shot by Inspector Olivetti—and Langdon is able to find the video and share it with Cardinal Strauss, who is running the Conclave. Called to the Conclave thinking that he would be celebrated and asked to be the next pope. McKenna is instead greeted by the Cardinals as if he were an alien from another planet. True to Jesus’s teachings, they do not disparage or attack the new-found enemy from within, and Strauss even tells the Vatican police to be gentle in pursuing the fleeing McKenna before he burns himself up at Peter’s tomb.

As sordid, even evil as the demonic priest, the Camerlengo, is, a bit of the angelic is also revealed in the man as he questions Langdon before giving him permission to access the Vatican archives. “Christianity’s most sacred codices are in that archive.,” the priest tells the professor. “Given your recent entanglement with the Church, there is a question I’d like to ask you first, here, in the office of His Holiness.” He walks slowly but with determination to Langdon. “Do you believe in God, sir?” Langdon replies, “Father, I simply believe that religion—” The priest who is also behind the murderous plot counters, “I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believe in God.” The priest’s tone of voice conveys a sincerity and the high value he puts on the living God as transcending what people have said and written about the deity. McKenna’s distinction is valid, given Augustine’s likening of revelation coming to us as though through a smoky, stain-glass rather than lucid, transparent window. Even in terms of receiving divine revelation from the Source, it behooves us mere mortals to have some humility, rather than to presume to have knowledge rather than belief. That we are weak as judges of the souls of other mortals should go without saying, but the film makes precisely this point anyway.  

Even though McKenna is severely flawed in terms of his character and values and has clearly committed a mortal sin (that of murder), a respect for holiness that transcends us and our realm is also evident in the man; he is not abjectly evil, in spite of the horrendous nature of his crimes. McKenna’s piety is also palpable when Langdon returns to request access again to the archives. Langdon is wearing a lent black suit of a priest because the professor’s original short was bloodied when he and Vittoria were desperately trying to save the life of one of the Cardinals in Vatican Square. McKenna asks, “Professor, would it surprise you that those clothes suite you?”  Langdon answers honestly, given his atheism, while almost laughing at the thought of him as a Roman Catholic priest. “It would surprise the hell out of me,” he replies with a smile. The priest’s insight into the professor’s obvious benevolentia and related compassion in endeavoring unrelentingly to help the Vatican and its four kidnapped Cardinals is shared by Cardinal Strauss in the last scene of the film in which the Cardinal, Langdon, and Vittoria are watching the newly elected pope, the Cardinal whom Langdon has physically rescued underwater in a public fountain. That pope has selected the name Luke—the first pope to be so named—to symbolize the compatibility of science and religion. “The world needs both,” Strauss explains to Langdon and Vittoria, two intellectuals. McKenna has not succeeded in placing the Church as a skeptical check on the progress of science; ethical injunctions without express divine command are firmly in the ethical domain anyway, and the Church has more than enough on its plate theologically. Wisely, Strauss shifts the conversation from science to the theological matter of whether God has sent Langdon to help the Church. Putting a hand on one of Langdon’s shoulders, the Cardinal says, “Thanks be to God for sending someone to protect his Church.” Langdon demurs. “I don’t believe he sent me, Father.” Not missing a beat, Strauss says with a smile, “Oh, my son, of course he did.”  At that point, the new pope, now fully vested in liturgical garb, nods favorably to Langdon. Were the moment of being dressed to be presented to the world as the next successor of Peter not so august and hopefully even humbling, the new pope would doubtless be effusive rather than so reserved in thanking the atheist who had immediately jumped into the fountain to save that Cardinal’s life even though none of the other bystanders did so until it was almost too late.

The deluded paid-assassin and Commander Richter are portrayed in considerably less ambiguous terms than Langdon and even McKenna, yet even they are shown to evince some piety. Richter values the compassion expressed institutionally by his Church to the poor and sick, although such compassion is less important than that which is directed to a person’s detractors and enemies given the selflessness in such compassion. As for the utterly uncompassionate, callous, and even cruel assassin, at least he is aware that God will not be happy with what he is about to do—namely, brand and kill the four Cardinals. Even though McKenna is behind the squalid plot, at least the assassin does not have the hubris with which to commit his spirit to God after having branded and murdered three men. Just before setting himself on fire, McKenna prays to God, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Good luck with that. That line doubtlessly works for Jesus in the Gospels, as his preached and demonstrated ethical compassion is rooted in theological agape, which is selfless love.

McKenna is not without piety, however, both in genuinely asking Langdon whether he believes in God and in valuing the role of the Church as a check on the hubris of Man; the priest’s delusion is in believing that his means justify this end. The reproachment of the dead pope, whom McKenna has poisoned, with scientists does not justify murdering that pope, and so it is fitting that the new pope selects the name of a physician (Luke). McKenna’s foiled plot to become the next pope in order to keep the Church as a check on, rather than an accomplice to scientific progress as if it were inherently at odds with the dignity of humanity—as if this were a religious rather than an ethical concept—is also unjustified both in religious and ethical terms (which are distinct).

McKenna is likely mistaken in assuming that God will accept his spirit, but such a matter is not for us mere mortals to know. Even though we can have more confidence that the assassin correctly anticipates rejection by God for what that man is about to do, we do not know how God would treat that man’s humble acceptance of being damned. The same attitude is expressed by one of the criminals being crucified alongside Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. We deserve our fate, the man says to the other guilty man being crucified, whereas Jesus has done nothing wrong. “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” (Luke 23:41) In the film, the assassin is in the likeness of the penitent thief, whereas McKenna, a priest, is the main culprit behind the murderous plot and yet presumes that God will take his spirit. Meanwhile, Langdon is an atheist whose compassion to a religious organization is unrelenting while Commander Richter is a “deeply spiritual man” who repeatedly insults Langdon even when he is pleading to help. “Hey, fellas, you called me,” Langdon says in utter astonishment at Richter’s formidable pushback. The film, by the way, is in color rather than black and white, as is the human condition itself.

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1. My use here of the word, immediately, is no accident, kein Zufall, for I am subtly alluding to the meaning and significance of the word as used in the Gospel of Mark. Immediacy in responding to the call of Jesus bears religious significance in that Gospel. In the film, the Vatican policeman who comes to Harvard to fetch the professor at 5 a.m. tells him as he is apparently thinking over whether to go, “Let’s not pretend you have not already decided to come.” This is one of the best lines in the film. That Langdon had been in an “entanglement” with the Church and yet he responds to the plea immediately to help qualifies him as what the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), a Jesuit priest and theologian, labels an “anonymous Christian.” In contrast, the head of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard, who is said to be “deeply spiritual,” resents rather than is compassionate to Langdon, and therefore hardly resembles a disciple, at least as far as a human such as myself can assess. That’s the idea.

2. While back at Yale for a semester in my capacity as an alumnus auditing a seminar on Jonathan Edwards in the Beineke Library (rare books), I was stunned at not just the presence of so many security guards, but also their unnecessarily (and uncalled for) hostile demeanor towards even Yale professors, not to mention students and others. To be sure, the library contained some very rare old books. In the seminar, the excellent professor treated us to an original book by Newton, given to Yale by its author, a letter written by George Washington to one of Edwards’ sons, and Edwards’ own original writing of his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Nonetheless, the guards subcontracted by Yale were “over the top” in regarding Yalies and visitors alike as if we were criminals bent on ripping out pages at any moment. Were someone like Vittoria, the character in the film, to rip out a page of a pamphlet in the Beineke library, there’s no telling how savage the guards would be to her vocally and even physically, taking liberties as if they were vested with the police power to make an arrest. Yale has even been referred to by students (and even faculty) as having its own private police state, wherein even subcontracted security guards presume to act as if municipal police; the toxicity alone belies or undercuts an otherwise academic atmosphere on the campus.

Awake

Although no overtly theological or religious material is in the film Awake (2007) because greed itself is the real antagonist, idolatry (self-idolatry actually) can be imputed, and in this sin the underlying sordid  foundation of the vice can be grasped. In in his letter to the Colossians, Paul ends his list of sins with greed, “which is idolatry.”[1] The easiest way to interpret this classification of greed being a case of idolatry is to assume that the idol is money (or wealth). The idolatry of wealth is enunciated and perhaps even personified by Gordon Gekko in the film, Wall Street (1987). No amount of personal wealth is enough. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” greed being the desire for more. Gekko delivers the line during his speech to Teldar Paper stockholders. Left unsaid in his speech is the tremendous toll that greed can take not only on other people, but also oneself, for a very circumscribed, as to benefits, selfishness goes along with greed and may even be its foundation. A greedy person would presumably think nothing of betraying a friend if doing so would increase the person’s wealth, especially if no future financial benefit is likely from the friend. To be sure, greed need not be oriented to more money; a selfish person addicted to sex (i.e., in the sense of being regularly driven to have more of it) would have no problem betraying a even a spouse, and even demand of him or her that the addict’s outside sex with others, even with a romantic connection, must and even should be accepted in order to stay. Such extreme, unrepentant callousness can apply to greed for money too, and this is evinced in Awake. The vice of greed as ultimately self-idolatry has an evil connotation, given how much pain and thus harm self-idolatry can easily inflict on other people. The virtue of self-sacrifice is farther than the farthest star from such greed, and the sheer pathos of distance between self-sacrifice out of love and self-idolatry as greedy selfishness is palpable in the film, which arguably intimates and may even stimulate religious sensibilities without being explicit or preachy.

The film’s plot centers on the billionaire young adult, Clay Beresford, and his girlfriend, Samantha Lockwood. She plays him like a fiddle under the subterfuge of love. Actually, she is conspiring with Jack Harper, a heart surgeon, and two other medical personnel because she knows that Clay has a weak heart and will need a transplant. She wants Clay to choose Jack to operate because Jack would kill Clay during the transplant operation and Samantha would inherit (and pay off the other culprits). Jack has been delaying a heart for Clay until he marries Samantha so she could inherit millions. Not by coincident, Clay marries her just hours before a heart is suddenly available. Jack is ready and waiting at the hospital; he assumes Samantha would follow through in sharing her inheritance with the other culprits if he kills Clay. Although greedy himself, he does not fully grasp the true nature of greed.

Fortunately, Lilith Beresford, Clay’s very insightful mother, discovers the plot, including Samantha’s complicity in it, during the operation. Lilith calls her friend, Jonathan Neyer, a famous heart surgeon whom she had been wanting to perform the operation anyway, and the good doctor shows up just in time to find Lilith dead in the hospital waiting room and then transplant her heart into Clay, who is being kept alive in the operating room artificially. Lilith leverages the requirement that her permission is necessary for the “plug” to be pulled on her son; she intentionally refuses to give her consent to play for time to give Neyer time to arrive and take charge. He does just that, and is able to save Clay’s life. Interestingly, Clay is awake during the operation and so he discovers the plot as it is unfolding in the operating room, but he is paralyzed by the anesthesia (but he can feel the pain from his chest being cut open; his inner dialogue and screams make that scene very skippable). Even though he has an out-of-body experience, it is his mother who is in a position to report the crime. In spite of that experience, and the dialogue in an august, dark living room between him and his mother when he is on artificial life-support and she is dead, no religious implications are in the film. Whether the metaphysics of the film allow for the afterlife is an open question. The main thrust of the film lies in contrasting virtue with vice, and differing relationships with selfishness that they have.

Clay lives due to the self-sacrifice of his mother, which is antipodal to the abject greed and selfishness of the culprits, who are arrested before they can leave the hospital. In the film, a second virtue besides self-sacrifice out of love is salient. A strong need for justice is implicit in the attention given to whether the culprits get away with their attempted murder for money. In watching the film, the human instinctual urge for greed almost can be expected to kick in. It is indeed a powerful urge in the human psyche, and the film presents the value for justice as being in direct conflict with greed, another powerful urge. In contrast to both of these urges, the intention to sacrifice oneself is hardly overwhelming and in fact may take considerable will-power. Justice that is actually vengeance is especially sordid; justice desired by third-parties who are unharmed can also go along with selfishness, but is less toxic, ethically speaking, due to the pathos of distance. In the film, Lilith reports the culprits not only as vengeance, but also because she does not want her son to die, but she is hardly a distant witness reporting a crime out of a sense of justice itself. Her self-sacrificial act in dying so Clay could have her heart ranks higher than her pursuit of justice, which, like greed, is consistent with selfishness.

Mercy can be interpreted as a higher, unselfish form of justice. How many husbands would urge a jury to be merciful to a rapist of one’s wife or daughter? In the film, were Neyer to be able to use the original transplant heart even after Sam (whose true identity is a nurse at that hospital) gave it a fatal shot, such that Lilith would not commit suicide, would Lilith be inclined to appeal for mercy for the culprits after having reported them? Perhaps mercy should replace justice in Aristotle’s four virtues, or at least be a fifth, which trumps justice. Under no circumstance should greed and vengeance be added.

Regarding the culprits in the film, Jack Harper is the least culpable because his conscience has considerable sway because he has gotten to like Clay even though the “friendship” was for Clay a means to convince Clay to choose Jack rather than another surgeon to perform the transplant operation. Even so, Jack took a liking for Clay, and so Jack came close to refusing to kill Clay on the operating table. Samantha, who is actually a nurse at that hospital, convinces Jack to go along; she grabs the needle and ruins the heart for Clay. After the operation, while police are searching through the hospital to arrest Jack, his assisting surgeon Puttnam, and nurse Carver, Samantha refuses to go with Jack. His reaction may suggest that he intends to marry her, and he exacts vengeance (not justice!) by showing her that he has kept the needle with her fingerprints on it. The police are then shown arresting her. Jack’s vengeance has been satisfied and we may even feel that she deserves it, for in her selfish greed, she has betrayed Jack romantically, and would almost certainly do so again by refusing to share her inheritance were he able to evade the police pursuing him. She severs ties with all of the other culprits as soon as she discovers that the police want to arrest them. To the extent that a greedy person can be trusted only by people who can still be used for more money, the close link between greed and selfishness is established. Samantha illustrates this link in how it can play out in promises being broken all too easily. How very distant her mentality is from that of Lilith’s self-sacrifice. 

To be sure, Lilith doubtlessly does not want to live in grief of her dead only son, but she gives her life, and this runs against the selfish urge of self-preservation, which Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan is fundamental to human beings. In fact, Christians may legitimately infer the leitmotif of the Gospels as being highlighted the film’s highest virtue of voluntarily laying down one’s life for another out of love, so indirectly, not just Clay’s out of body experience and the dialogue “somewhere” with his mother when he is unconscious and she is dead hint at a religious dimension in the film’s story-world. Subtilty can be more revealing than being preached at.

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[1] Col. 3:5 (NIV)

A Ghost Story

As if the macabre specter of a ghost, albeit in a white sheet with two black eye-holes, were not enough for a spooky film, David Lowery endeavored to shoot and edit his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, using a relatively fast 33 frames per second in shooting the ghost moving, and editing without music so the story-world’s supernatural element would be subtly apparent. Although a prognosticator delivers a long philosophical monologue at a party somewhere in the middle of the film, Lowery does not characterize the meaning of the film in terms of that monologue’s point that the universe will eventually end so a person should live each day as if it were the last day of one’s life. Of course, none of us need worry about the universe burning up any time soon, so from that standpoint we can expect to live full lives without being nihilist on a daily basis. Fortunately, the meaning of the film, Lowery states in an interview, is not to live each day as if it is your last day. A more interesting question is whether the film is an exponent of nihilism as the real, ontological state of existence, or whether human fulfillment can fill human hollowness with the fullness of experienced life. Moreover, does a supernatural dimension, such as a heaven, exist such that human souls can depart from the human condition and even loved ones while still existing (after death). In other words, does holiness transcend hollowness? The latter may pertain more to the phenomenal realm of lived human existence than to the noumenal realm of things as they are in themselves, and thus what each of us really is.

The film’s plot centers around a young married couple, unnamed, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. The husband dies early on in the film in a car-crash in front of the couple’s house in the country.  He bypasses going to heaven and instead returns to their house as a ghost. His widow does not lose time in moving out, however, and it is clear from his anger (as a ghost!) that he is not at all happy about her leaving. Eventually, he gets the message, literally and figuratively, that she will never return. Not showing the crash—only smoke from his car leading the camera-shot slowly to his head resting on the steering wheel—or the funeral singles Lowery out as a film-maker who thinks outside the box in movie-making rather doing things the usual, formulaic way; there have certainly been too many of those movies. Relatedly, the philosophical dimension that he brought to the film goes beyond even what he consciously intended, and is in sync with his efforts to subtly convey the atmosphere of the film.

For example, in subtly elongating camera shots at the end of a few scenes and thus holding the viewers to a fixed picture within which nothing is happening, Lowery makes us uncomfortable because he breaks the “rule” on camera-shot length, which on average had been getting shorter perhaps to appease the proclivity of audiences from the mid-1970s for titillating, quick-action disaster flicks as if they were displays of fireworks in constant finale. Lowery challenges audiences to “sit still,” which, if it triggers psychological discomfort, is the fault of the viewers rather than the filmmaker. This was not Lowery’s intent, however. Rather, holding a camera-shot at the end of a scene long enough for the holding itself to become transparent to viewers allows them to feel the emptiness and lonely isolation of Rooney Mara’s character in the house. Perhaps that her husband, while alive, is emotionally stunted or unavailable contributes to her day-to-day dreariness. The stationary shots also point a spotlight on time itself, not only as it is perceived by the bored wife, but also that time is different for a ghost than for us. Both the young wife’s loneliness and the ghost’s expansive sense of time can be thought of as nihilist. Her boredom itself can be expected to feel like emptiness. Regarding the ghost, from our standpoint, the length of time that the ghost stays in the house, even far into the future and going into the past, would be intolerable. Although the ghost may experience the long expanse of time spent in the house, especially when it is empty, as fleeting, from our standpoint so much time without any action would be intolerable. Likewise, movie-viewers looking at a very long, non-moving camera shot of a scene in which nothing is moving may feel a sense of suspended animation, as if becoming were necessary for being and so just being without becoming is merely nihilist nothingness. A narrative must have a strong sense of becoming or people will lose interest in following the story and move on to do something else. We are doers even if our very being is not based in functionalism.

To the ghosts in the film, time not only is perceived differently, but also is fundamentally different in that time-travel is possible. Even in filming the husband-ghost at a different film-speed so to show a supernatural quality to what otherwise looks like a child’s Halloween ghost-costume, Lowerly didn’t fully grasp the implication that time itself is different to a ghost. This idea, Lowery said, “plays into the thematic parts of the movie so thoroughly, I should have realized that on set. I’m always surprised at how many of these things are just completely—there are amazing details in every movie that you would expect to be conscious decision, but are purely happy accidents and unconscious inspiration.”[1] Such inspiration applies here to a director’s own thinking on philosophy—in the case, of time—applied to his film. Philosophically, a different metaphysic has implications for time itself as well as how it is perceived. Accordingly, a philosophical analysis of a film can and should go beyond a filmmaker’s own intentions and even thinking on philosophy as it bears on the film. Because the story-world of a film, whether in a director’s head or on the screen, is wholistic in supporting a narrative, everything that contributes to philosophy in a film may not be consciously thought out by a film’s filmmakers and yet be valid.

By philosophy, I do not have in mind mere (i.e., unphilosophical) psychology, such as applies to characters in a film. For example, the husband-ghost in the film is only rarely a doer; he periodically “plays” with the lights, pounds on a piano when he goes back in time by falling off a skyscraper in the future, and throws dishes on the floor of the kitchen to scare off the new family that moves in after his widow moves out. Even though he is in a supernatural dimension that is separate from our mundane dimension, the ghost can have physical, or empirical impact in terms of physics. We can thus go beyond the fact that ghosts can apparently feel emotion in the film to grasp the metaphysical relationship between the realm of ghosts and of living people.

Going further, perhaps the rareness of the ghost’s functionality empirically is related to why time is different for the ghost. Doing, or function, hardly captures what it is for a ghost in the film to exist. Functionalism falls short in capturing existentialism. The very human notion of living so to work rather than working so to live is refuted, or simply does not apply to ghosts in this film because they spend so much time “standing” around even if the passage of so much time eludes their notice because time passes differently for ghosts. Time may pass quickly when we are having fun (or are busy at work), but for ghosts in the film, the speed of time may be different, as well as the ability to change time-frames (i.e., jump far into the future instantly and then go back in the past). That we easily get bored, even when a camera-shot is held longer than usually to end a scene, does not necessarily mean that the husband-ghost was bored in the empty house because of the sheer amount of time involved. Yet from our standpoint, we posit boredom onto the ghost because it is difficult for us to get beyond our vantage point to grasp the otherness of another. Feeling like life is empty—that it is really nothingness—may be partly why the wife/widow perceives days going by so slowly; such a sense of nihilism may even result in suicide, which, absent any heaven or hell, can be thought of as a fast track to nihilism sans even one’s own being, or existence. Suicide obviously does not apply to ghosts as they are already dead (yet they seem to feel emotions, have intentions, and can even throw dishes!). Existence after death may be an oxymoron.

In addition to existentialism (ontology), however, philosophy of religion and even a bit of theology makes its way into the film, for we (and the ghost) get a glimpse of heaven, or at least its gateway. This has major implications for the nihilist, dank atmosphere that runs throughout the film and thus seems absolute but is actually not foundational to human existence. A few minutes after getting up from the physical body in the hospital’s morgue, the ghost walks down a hall and pauses upon seeing a brief opening to heaven, a portal that is represented as a very bright, home-film-screen-sized square of light that opens momentarily on a wall. The ghost passes on heaven, and instead heads to the house, presumably to be with his widow. Although not explicitly or even implicitly linked, that heaven exists relativizes the isolation of the wife/widow, whose nihilism may not have the last word in her existence. That the portal opens as if “on cue” suggests furthermore that some “intelligence” or being having intention and thus a will exists as a common denominator with respect to the realms of ghosts and living persons. Already in the film, the widow, whose desire to move is clear at the film’s beginning, hires movers, packs up, and drives away, with her satisfied facial expression being shown in the translucent sunlight. She is headed to a brighter future and will not miss that house, and maybe not even her dead husband for long as he had evinced the emotional absence of a ghost even during the marriage. The husband’s ghost is not happy about her decision to move away, but it is only when he finally opens a note that she has sealed in wood paneling in the house that he “gives up the ghost,” and the sheet collapses. The ghost next door had just done the same thing when that ghost finally realized that the person being waiting for would never return, for the house had just been torn down. Therefore, the note left by the widow was probably one of closure—of saying farewell to the house, and thus to the ghost in it. Indeed, she would never be back; we know this because the ghost remains in the house far into the future, beyond even the time when the house is torn down and is replaced by a skyrise office building. We can conclude that the continued existence of ghosts here among the living, rather than being in heaven, is predicated on the hope of continuing on with a loved one. But lest it be forgotten, wedding vows include the words, till death do us part. The husband-ghost is suddenly faced with having to accept the finality of the end of a relationship, and thus he “gives up the ghost” and presumably takes heaven up on its offer. In reading the note, he lets go of the hope he has had in seeing her again, but the resulting nihilism may be replaced with the fullness of heaven. The ghost presumably finds peace in finally accepting the finality of the end of his relationship with his wife (now widow). If so, then nihilism does not have the last word not only for his widow, who may remarry but has at least moved on from the emotional isolation that she has known in that old house with her husband, but also for the ghost, who has finally given up the ghost by accepting the finality of a relationship that wasn’t very intimate anyway.

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1. Tasha Robinson, “A Ghost Story Director David Lowery on How Technology Fixed His Lonely Ghost,” The Verge (theverge.com), July 14, 2017 (accessed July 22, 2026).

Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

Lest it be concluded that God is against political dictatorship itself, and thus divine favor rests instead with democracy, efforts to apply religion to politics evaluatively come rife with pitfalls because the two domains are distinct; I would even say that the religious domain is unique, given the nature of distinctly religious transcendence. In reference to democracies, lest they be supposed to represent the Kingdom of God on Earth, it is notable that the U.S. dropped the first two atomic bombs on inhabited cities, and Israel committed a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and in 2026 its sitting prime minister even announced that he would run for re-election! The human condition is indeed far removed from the gods and their Valkyrie.

In the scene in which Stauffenberg presents his revised Valkyrie plan to Hitler for his signature at Hitler’s mountain retreat, Hitler asks him, “You know your Wagner, Colonel? The Valkyrie: handmaidens of the gods, choosing who will live and who will die, sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand National Socialism without knowing Wagner.” Perhaps the implication is that the Valkyrie save Nazi heroes on the battlefield from agonizing deaths, and, moreover, that the Nazi Party is geared to esteeming heroes as they were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as strong, courageous conquerors, and, perhaps also by implication, riding society of the weak, whose very existence brings down the strong, if the statements by Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at the dinner table in the bunker in the film, Downfall (2004), accurately reflect Nazi ideology concerning strength and weakness: most notably, the eradication of the weak is necessary for the strong to be strong. Although seemingly drawing on Nietzsche, his philosophy merely counsels that a pathos of distance be maintained between the self-confident strong and the resentful weak who seek to beguile the strong. Nietzsche does not advocate that the weak be eradicated. Furthermore, unlike Hitler in Valkyrie, Nietzsche does not posit divine help via handmaidens for the strong; neither does Nietzsche claim that divine wrath is directed against the resentful weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. As for Hitler’s reference to heroes, it is not clear that Wagner’s Valkyrie would help Nazi “heroes” escape agonizing deaths because such a claim assumes that those heroes really were heroes rather than villains. The appropriation of religion is thus fraught with difficulties, given self-interest, ideology, and the limits of our ability to know the wills of the gods, especially as pertaining to political events. It is best to leave the gods out of our human internecine conflicts rather than conveniently assume that the Valkyrie favor one side or the other.

Given the horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, the Christian motif of redemption is more difficult to avoid even in the political context. Speaking in a bathroom to General Erich Fellgiebel to enlist his help in the plot, Staffenberg reminds his compatriot, “You were involved in a crime against your country long before you met me. There may still be time to redeem yourself. Only God can judge us now.” Redemption would come by helping rid Germany of Hitler’s rule. Although redemption by killing Hitler seems obvious enough, is religious redemption—and the ensuing sentence regarding God as judge means that the redemption being referred to here is indeed religious in nature—really fitting with respect to a person having been unpatriotic? What about the unpatriotic protests in America when the U.S. was bombing Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s through 1974? Because that conflict was premised on a lie involving the Gulf of Tonkin, unblinking patriotism may have been cause for redemption. In actuality, God may think little or nothing either way of our notions of patriotism and our political protests. Again, God may be quite distant from our notions of political good and bad, even if the Nazi and Israeli atrocities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, seem pretty cut and dry as state-sponsored evil against people conveniently deemed “subhuman.” Perhaps from God’s perspective, we are all subhuman, or, in Nietzsche’s phraseology, human, all too human. Hence the political domain can be distanced from that of religion, in that the former reeks of human pride and thus presumptuousness, whereas the latter goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion and is thus not centered on us.