Some of what you say at the beginning makes sense, Marcouse. If you don’t question things you’re told, you are opening yourself up to brainwashing. It is the next step to wisdom after being willing to say “I don’t know.” However, when questioning the answers still leaves you not knowing the answers, it doesn’t always mean it’s a conspiracy to deceive you, and we need to say a “discernment” prayer, asking God to answer our most pressing questions, help us to accept what we don’t know, and the discernment to know when the latter is a deception.
Looking for allegory in film and TV is a journey that should be taken with great care because it’s too easy for our imaginations run amok, and I think that’s what’s happening here. Finding allegory and symbols in film is not hard. The film makers have to build a world of fantasy using components of the real world, and when looking for the tactics of evil in film, if the villain isn’t motivated by something we as the watchers can understand, the story itself becomes unrelatable. As such, we should maintain some self-control when drawing conclusions on the allegories and symbols we see.
A costume designer was asked to make a logo for a low budget science fiction TV show. The fact that it resembles 3/5ths of a pentagram or ½ of a Star of David does NOT mean that either was on the designer’s mind when they made the emblem. Likewise, the name “Kirk,” as in “James Tiberius Kirk” from Star Trek is also a Scottish word meaning “church.” However, these symbols are not necessarily confirmed by the franchise’s producers, so we can’t get too excited with either of these. On the other hand, the producers of the Matrix trilogy indicated that the religious hints and symbols they included in their films were NOT done by accident. When picking apart details of our favorite TV shows and movies, we have to have both wisdom and discernment to know what we can say with certainty, what we can infer, and what we simply imagine to be true.
I can’t say I much appreciate your statements about science. The field certainly has flaws and there’s good reason to question the answers it provides. However, if the universe didn’t work basically the way we understand it to work, the computers we all use to get on here would be paperweights, so obviously they’re doing some things right. Regarding the space race: When was the last time you designed and built a machine with over a million separate parts designed to use a massive controlled explosion to take people into space and return them safely? When was the last time you retired the designs, archived or destroyed the technology used to build it, had all the workers who helped you build it move on to other jobs and then 50 years later tried to bring them all back together to reproduce their success? Simply put, the fact that the technology no longer exists doesn’t mean it never existed. Rocketry is dangerous, and NO ONE would dare to simply throw a rocket together, say “3, 2, 1, liftoff,” and send it off while the machine’s development is still in “beta testing.” Science in general is painstaking and can be a dangerous venture, whether you’re engineering the next rocket or working in a chemistry lab, and the price for screwing up can be disastrous.
So you’re an expert on what things will do in space, huh? Flown a lot of flags in a vacuum and 1/6th gravity, have you? We can simulate the vacuum, but there’s nowhere on Earth to simulate the effect of 1/6th gravity on a hanging flag that’s being jostled during the setup. Have you taken a lot of pictures of a white environment on a starry night? Not sure if you noticed, but the contrast and frame rate typically means the faint light of the stars will generally get drowned out by the light from the lunar surface and the Earth if it’s in the frame, and the light saturation will typically interfere with the lens’s cross hairs.
Regarding the “flat Earth” garbage: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? He (God) sits enthroned above the circle of the earth and its people are like grasshoppers.” Isaiah 40:21-22. The word “circle” here is translated from a word that also refers to a globe or sphere. “He (God) has inscribed a circular limit (the horizon) on the face of the waters as the boundary between light and darkness.” Job 26:10, AMP. The boundary between light and darkness (terminator) can only be a circular limit if the Earth is in fact spherical. “It is He who spreads out the north over emptiness and hangs the earth on nothing.” Job 26:7. This is an apt description of the Earth as seen from space. How would cardinal directions work on a flat Earth anyway? We also know the Earth is round from looking at a lunar eclipse. The thing I find most pathetic is that in an age where we all roll our eyes at the generations that have passed on before us as unenlightened Neanderthals who still practiced slavery, scientists have to continually justify their existence and try to prove the most basic truths that were known or could be inferred from days before Christ Jesus was born. If anyone reading this is so sure the Earth is flat, why don’t they go check out the “edge” and take a picture of it and show me? I’ll wait…
Oh, and one more thing: You say you’ve spent many hours in most churches, so you’re speaking from “experience.” It’s estimated that about 30,000 churches permanently closed their doors between the years of 2006 to 2012 (Christianity Today). My guess is that more churches have closed in those years than you’ve been to in your lifetime, so I don’t think it’s very fair to pass such broad judgments upon the churches as the individual churches are far more diverse than their parent denominations. Look, I sympathize with you about your concerns about indoctrination and control. There are a number of cult-like churches out there. However, it must be understood that part of the church’s PURPOSE is to offer guidance. The laws of morality in the Bible serve to provide a CONTROL on our behavior. When we turn our lives over to Christ, we relinquish CONTROL to Him.
For everyone that takes a step in a direction, there’s someone to take those ideas and run a mile. As Christians we’re supposed to exercise a bit of self-control (part of the Fruit of the Spirit) and not get carried away with ourselves. We’re supposed to be the ones with the cool heads; the voice of reason in the chaos that the atheists think the universe is in, not running around like Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling. Why? Because we know what they don’t: God’s in control. I think this conversation has crossed that line into chaos and I’m hopping off this train before it goes any farther afield.
