In depth

Of Christmas Classics and Childhood Innocence.

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Who doesn’t love old Christmas Classics?

Even though I realize now that there’s a lot of things in those movies that are not explained very well, I don’t think they have to be for the movie to be good.

Actually, I think they make it better.

If you’ve ever seen Frosty Returns, you might recall that Frosty tells one kid that “Some things just can’t be explained.”

And it’s true. I mean, can anyone really explain gravity? Can anyone decide what light is?

 

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I watch Frosty the Snowman now, the nostalgia makes me want to cry.

Because I’m sad for what we have lost.

I love the innocence of these old films. They have songs in them that would never make the cut now. Like the “If you sit on my lap today” Song from Santa Claus is coming to town.

That song is innocent. Whatever might be read into it now.

I am not saying by the way, that we should write songs like that for our modern movies. The problem with losing innocence is that once it’s gone, it’s gone.

You can never un-see or un-know what you know.

It’s impossible for me to forget the threats of terrorism, and drug abuse, and sex trafficking.

And that’s why I would like to encourage any parents our would be parents reading it that innocence is actually a very wise thing to preserve in your child.

It’s going out of fashion now.  The general attitude is that children will have to face reality sooner or later, and hiding it from them is stupid.

And parents who choose to shelter their kids rarely explain why in terms that make sense to those who hold the above view of it.

When parents say they don’t allow their kids to watch or listen to certain things, they usually justify it by saying those things are inappropriate.

But what does that mean? And in the day of gender confusion and school shootings, does that idea have any merit?

I think so.

The way my parents handled the issue was never voluntarily bringing up any shocking behavior. But if I asked about it, they would explain. My dad often more than I wanted to hear. My mom usually more vaguely, because she didn’t like talking about the stuff herself.

My parents used both caution, timing, and natural curiosity to handle the problem of telling my siblings and I about the crud in the world. And that’s the key.

Now that I’m almost 20, I hope I will not be in for too many more moral shocks. (please Lord.) But I am glad that most of the ones I had came when I was over the age of 10.

I am glad I can remember a time when I did not know those things. And that I did not grow up hearing about them all the time. Or that if I did hear, I did not understand, so I cannot remember.

I am glad that I had many years of relative carefreeness.

Why? Because I had no suspicions. I still remember when I could watch a movie and not get the sexual innuendos. Wasn’t’ that great?

I mentioned in my Wonder Woman review that I had the experience later of being horrified to learn about how corrupt people can be. That’s not a fun experience, but I would urge anyone with children not to avoid it by letting their children in on everything without setting boundaries.

Obviously, adults don’t talk directly to children about this stuff (usually) but they let them watch or read things without screening them first. And it adds up.

I am glad to be horrified over sin. It does not make you weak. It is actually a good thing to be sickened by it. To a certain extent. It’s a godly quality. The Lord himself is horrified by sin.

Did you know that there are some sins God does not even imagine us doing? It’s true. It says in Jeremiah 19:5, 7:31, and 32:35 that the sin Israel was committing had not even entered his mind.

God then, is innocent.

You may ask how that’s even possible. And the reason I can think of ties back in to shielding children from corruption.

A pure mind cannot ever conceive the depths a corrupt, sick mind will stoop too. A good man cannot even imagine doing what an evil man does.

The best protection from corruption is to not know about it. Innocence in childhood can be a great foundation fro a strong moral character. Because a child is not ready to process e evil and sort it out from good. That’s why it is the parent’s job to feed them on good things.

I want to make it clear I do not mean parents should pretend evil isn’t real. Children will figure that out no matter how much you try to hie it. What I mean is, trying to give them the best you can and make sure what’s influencing their thinking is a pure as possible. Evil is always evil, and it’s always defeated.

(I recommend A Thomas Jefferson Education for more on how to ease children into knowing evils sometimes wins and preparing them for that harsh reality through their books and movies.)

We are told nowadays that children only grow up with concepts of good and evil because we teach them too. And we are advised to throw away responsibility and treat them like case experiments. Exposing them to all things and letting them decide.

but no matter how hard you pretend it’s otherwise, children will decide based on you. Whether they reject your morality, or imitate it. You will be their guideline. You are teaching them one way, whether you like it or not.

So, why not teach them good, noble things, while it’s up to you. Before friends and school have a stronger grip on them. (Though find the best school you can by all means. And encourage healthy friendships.)

I want innocence for my children because it’s the last part of life that remains a little linked to how things were mean to be. And a child who has that experience will be able to imagine better things more easily than one who only ever saw the darkness in the world.

Irreverence.

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I watch a lot of YouTube, and a lot of movies. This often gives you a look into the worst of humanity (the part of it that’s online.)

Like Furrys, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with liking anthropomorphic animals, but do you know the sick connotations that term has?

I hope not for your sake. But I’ve picked it up streaming through videos.

Anyway, you know what I notice, there’s a growing problem that’s being almost ignored by he folks who comment on this stiff. (Like I am now, I guess.)

Maybe this is familiar to you, some one who thinks they are super funny is going on aobut something, and they throw in some remark against God. (It can even be a non christian God.)

I don’t know about Buddhists, Muslims, or Jews, but this really bugs me when it happens.

The insolent tone these folks use is kind of disturbing.

I won’t defend other gods, but I don’t really think they are something to joke aobut when someone truly believes in them.

Take an example from a movie I recently watched (it wasn’t good, by the way) the main character calls God a racist b—, with no real grounds for it that I could see, and other people in the movie think this is great. And funny. She’s applauded for her…moxie, I guess.

You know what’s celebrated in our culture? Irreverence.

We laugh at it, even applaud. Those who are out of control and insolent to everybody are praised as fearless and independent.

I wish I could say it was just unbelievers. but I’ve seen it among Christians too.

Some of you 40+ readers will remember when it was bad to use the phrase “Oh my God.” or any other cockamamie phrase that threw around God’s name.

Now I hear that all the time in church.

It’s hilarious. kid shows even nowadays will not use that phrase, or words like “heck” or “darn” because it would bother parents, but I hear it in church. Even in Sunday school.

I use darn and heck myself. Because to me, they mean nothing, or nothing important. You darn a sock. Heck isn’t even a real word exactly.

But throwing God’s name around implies that you feel the same way about that word that I do about these two words. That it means nothing to you.

And I’m convinced that for many people, it doesn’t. The idea that God would even take offense to that, if they believe in him at all, never crosses their mind.

It may seem like I’m being judgmental to mind this. But I’m really not. It’s a serious problem, your language reflects your attitude.

Now people will swear up and down that that’s not the case. We all deny stuff. It’s not a spectacular example of human failings. That’s why we shouldn’t buy it. People deny plenty of things that are harmful to themselves and others.

It’s like my cousins who use exclamations like that because their parents do, and they never stop to think what they are actually saying. And their parents learned it from their parents. And so on.

Irreverence is a huge problem because it signals a lack of ability to take anything seriously when it comes to the Spiritual side of life.

The Spiritual may not actually be ridiculous, but as C. S. Lewis pointed out, treating it like it has already been found ridiculous is both lazier than trying, and creates a general attitude of flippancy that ruins morality.

I think it is also possible to take things too seriously, but at this point, the only thing we’re in danger of taking too seriously is ourselves.

So the challenge is, do we need to look at how we talk aobut things and start watching ourselves more closely.

I’m pretty sure I do.

Those are my thoughts for now, until next time–Natasha.

Wonder Woman–2

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I am looking forward to this part more than the first.

Now I get to talk about the meaning of the movie.

(Let me preface it by saying I am not claiming this movie is christian. But I think they used Christian elements to tell the story. Maybe just because that was what they thought would work. I won’t assume more than that. And I think it’s good whether they did it on purpose or not.)

This is where I feel this movie did do something new.

And I also feel that the fans are entirely missing the point when they nitpick the plot for being like other films. The plot was never supposed to be what made this movie different.

It’s Diana herself.

I think I related to her more not because she’s a woman, but because I felt like her story was kind of like my story.

At least par to fit was.

She was homeschooled after all. And very, very sheltered.

So what happens when you stick that combination into the real world?

Diana’s reaction to the horrors of war really hit home with me. Her honest admission that it was horrible. And her demand that promises be kept. Her insistence that they help those who could not help themselves. And her shock when she learned that Steve, one of the good guys, was a liar, smuggler, thief, and that his people had mistreated other peoples of the world. Just as the Germans had.

Diana starts off believing that even Germans are good, truly, and that Ares is to blame for the evil they are doing, and all the evils of war. When she confronts him, she is ready to unleash justice on all their behalf. But to her astonishment, Ares, while under the rope of truth, tells her that he doesn’t make men do the evil they do. All he does is inspire certain parts of it, and manipulate them into doing more things to prolong their troubles.

I believe Ares was still mincing the truth somewhat, though not completely. He’s bound to have more resistance to the rope than a human could, and he only told part of the story.

But Are’s here is a pretty obvious representation of Satan. The tempter, the deceiver, the one who encourages man to sin. But who will say, “I didn’t make him do it.”

Well, no. Satan can’t make a person sin. As in, he can’t put a gun it their hand and make them pull the trigger. But God is pretty clear about tempters still having a major share of the guilt when someone listens to them.

But Diana and we ourselves can’t avoid the truth that man does sin, and he does it voluntarily.

I still remember when I felt the way Diana did when she saw the men still fighting, and she realized Professor Poison really was a psychopath, only getting helped by Ares, but not set on that path by him.

I remember that sick horror when I realized the evils of things like Abortion, or the holocaust, or abuse.

The look on her face was just the look I remember having. And I remember feeling the same doubt about people. In fact, I still struggle with wondering if people can change. If there is truly anything in most of us worth saving.

And by the way, Ares does not highlight anything except the evils of man and his blindness to his own folly. That’s because that’s all Ares cares about. That’s all the devil cares about. The goodness in humanity makes him look less successful.

And like Diana, I have wished I could help everyone who needs it. I don’t want you all to think I’m saintly or anything for feeling that way. If you ask me, it’s no more than decent to want to alleviate the suffering of fellow creatures.

But the truth is, even a superhero can never help them all.

And the smart thing the movie does is come to grips with that fact. It’s basically what Civil War tried and failed to do. And what every Spiderman movie has dealt with.

Diana realizes that she can’t do it all.

I loved the moment at the end when she says she can’t save the world. Though Steve told her she could, she realized the truth: A hero can’t save the world. “Only love can save the world,” she says.

Diana doesn’t mean that just being nice to everyone can save the world. She means that, though evil still rises and men still commit it willingly, the other men who give up everything to stop them and save their people are the ones who save the world.

Essentially, only the ultimate good is more powerful than the ultimate evil. And Diana means to promote that good, and if necessary, lay down her own life, until that good wins out.

And since I believe love is a Person, I know that love has saved the world, and continues to save it. And will triumph in the end. So Diana is completely right.

And Steve’s sacrifice is our example of that love in action. It’s not just a cliche that his last words were “I love you.”

One more thing:

Earlier on, Steve tells Diana that maybe saving people isn’t about what they deserve, but about what you believe. I didn’t get it and thought it was some cheesy one line moral, until Diana was in the final battle with Ares, and she chose to spare Professor Poison’s life, even though she could have justified killing her as an act of war.

But she didn’t, because int hat moment for Diana, it became aobut more than just ending the war. And she repeated what Steve said to Ares as she turned from taking revenge.

You see, what Steve meant was not that you believe in the good of humanity. That would be flimsy and the movie proves it false.

What he meant was, you save people because you believe that is the right thing to do. You believe that somehow, someway, it’s important. It means something. You believe that there’s a different solution than just eliminating them.

If that’s what you believe, and that’s who you are, then you won’t change that just because they don’t deserve it.

And wow, was that a powerful message for me.

Maybe defeating Ares isn’t about stopping war. Maybe it’s aobut winning the war inside yourself. Maybe it means throwing off your own lust for revenge, for power, for the ultimate solution.

Because you don’t have it. But you can be part of it.

Isn’t throwing off all that what truly ends a war anyway?

In that sense, I think Diana killing Ares was symbolic. That was her personal battle. But she recognized that is was not so for all of humanity. The battle is different for everyone.

Diana starts off the movie proud but unaware of her own power; she ends it knowing what she is capable of, but humbled.

And darn it, if that’s not an amazing character arc, then there is just no pleasing some people.

So, I recommend the movie.

–Natasha.

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Bear the pain without breaking.

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Let me return to the past post today so that you may read it in the future.

Too much?

Sorry.

Anyway, I want to write about an interesting part of the X-men movie I mentioned in my previous post.

It’s when Old Charles tells Young Charles that “It is the greatest gift we have, to bear their (humanity’s) pain without breaking.”

I got to thinking about this idea. I’ve been rereading another old favorite book of mine, Rilla of Ingleside (the final Anne of Green Gables book.) Montgomery knew how to get emotion out of her readers. This book is one exhausting trip through WWI, but worth reading.

The people in this story perhaps feel the pain of the world too much. I get that the wars were terrible and people had a lot of strain, but I find it hard to believe it was quite as constant and terrorizing as this story portrays.

Not to disrespect what they suffered, I just think humanity naturally adapts and pushes away grim realities in order not to go insane.

But anyway, this book will make you feel the terrible things of war, and the grief and endurance also.

Also it draws together all the many types of people in that world. The imaginative and the dull; the clever and the simple; the devout and the reprobate; all of them are raised to a new level of importance. And the barriers between some of them are broken down.

Shared suffering can do more to make peace between individuals than any amount of good events would. Because people are stubborn, and pain tends to be the only thing that breaks us down.

How does this tie in to X-men of all things?

I mentioned before that Magneto is selfish, whereas Charles is selfless. And I also mentioned that Magneto’s selfishness lies in his ignorance of other people’s suffering.

Somewhere along the line, Charles decided to feel other people’s pain, and Erik decided to bar himself from it.

My question is, how many of us do the same thing?

It’s not hard for me to imagine how other people feel, I can put myself in their place. What is hard is wanting to, especially when it affects me personally.

We never want to be wrong after all.

Then again, some of us would rather be constantly apologizing for no clear wrongdoing than standing up for ourselves or others.

So maybe there’s no cut and dried human way of dealing with blame. But there are pretty basic ways of dealing with pain.

There is so much suffering out there now, one really couldn’t feel all of it deeply. At least, that’s what I’ve thought.

It doesn’t do to dwell on it.

Besides I know too many people who have broken under it, or if not broken, at least bent.

Bearing pain without breaking takes more strength than I have. The only way I can handle it it to lean on God.

I know there are some who might find that a cliche, easy way out sort of answer.

Or even wimpy. Like I’m not tough enough to bear pain  like other people so I need to imagine someone out there who can help me.

My personal opinion is that nayone who thinks they can bear the wieght of the world without breaking is deluded.

To me it would be far worse to think that pain and sin are just things we have to live with, and there is no escaping it.

There had better be an escape. Otherwise, why are we living at all?

Isn’t that what Charles concludes? destruction isn’t the course humanity has to take, only the course it tends to take because of the cruel acts people do against each other.

And Magneto’s selfishness feeds those acts. While the selflessness of the X-men is what finally turns the tide.

That’s all for now,until next time–Natasha.

P. S. (my rule is no posting on Sunday’s but I’m making an exception because this was mostly written days ago and I kept getting interrupted before I published it, so here it is.)

Redeeming the time: X-men style.

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When I did my X-men review, I wanted to go more into Days of Future Past, but I ran out of time. So, here we go.

Honestly, this one was my favorite.

I’m going to jump right in by bringing up the principle theme, split into two different plot lines, of the film.

The theme is Redemption.

First off we learn that in the future mutants are hunted down (so much for the efforts of the X-men in all the previous movies) and so are any humans who side with them or who harbor some early form of the mutant x-gene.

The reason all this happened is not because of Magneto’s heinous acts against humanity, as one might expect, but because of one murder of Mystique’s. Her first ( not her last.)

Mystique was always a pretty rough and seemingly merciless and conscience-less character in the first three films, in the fourth we learn she wasn’t always that way, in the fifth they finally get around to asking “What if she could have been different?”

If they could stop her from murdering the man, Trask, they could stop the war that is killing off all of them.

What if?

There are a couple things that come to my mind when I think about the idea of traveling back in time to save people.

There’s my favorite book, Till We Have Faces, in which the main character thinks that the gods can change the past. At first thinking they do so to make us seem guilty, and later realizing they do so by changing us ourselves into different people.

Then there is that verse in the Bible that says we redeem the time because the days are evil.

That certainly fits this movie’s whole premise.

I don’t believe time travel is strictly possible. But if it were, I would think it was like any other gift, meant to be used to help and to heal, but able to be used to do damage.

There’s plenty of fiction that covers the latter, but this film interestingly enough shows how, even with the best of intentions, someone could still make the future worse than ever by going back. There’s a delicate moment when Future Charles warns the team not to wake Logan up, or there will be a worse darkness than there is now. By which he means that thanks to Erik, the mutants will have exterminated humans.

Now if Logan had not gone back and busted Erik out, that could not have happened.

Actually Erik was mostly useless in the film. He didn’t help convince Raven not to shoot the guy, he didn’t try to change the people’s minds about mutants, he almost sealed their fate.

But I guess it was better for him.

Raven was the most intriguing character to me from the beginning, since I had heard she turned good eventually, but I was constantly frustrated by her poor choices.

What I liked about this film was its disdain of the idea that Raven was meant to kill Trask, and that the War was meant to happen. Of course those terrible things weren’t meant to happen.

The movie admits, through Younger Charles, that Raven needs to have a choice, but it never leaves any doubt that there is only one right choice for her to make.

That’s the thing abut knowing the future, it’s pretty hard to argue with it.

The reason Raven refuses to listen at first seems to be pure stubbornness and resentment of Charles’es attempt to control her; but I think it’s also human nature to deny consequences to our bad choices…why else do we make them?

The theme of redeeming the time comes in strongly in another way, through Logan’s wake up call to Charles himself. We know that before Logan came back, Charles wasted a good portion of those years, and was not there for Raven or for other mutants, as Erik spitefully (and unjustly considering his many betrayals) points out.

But Charles changes that, and redeems his own time as well as Raven’s.

Raven always chose Erik before, he was more intriguing, he had a sort of magnetic personality, even Charles felt its pull though he knew better than to listen to him.

What makes Raven in the end choose Charles is a number of factors.

Partly it’s that she realizes a lot sooner that Erik is not loyal to her, and does not care about her in any recognizable way; as she had thought he did. (By the way, trying to kill someone and then flirting with them when it is too late is sick and only seems charismatic in movies.)

Partly it’s that she is told the future depends basically on her actions. (Which is one thing that does not change oddly enough. People are positioned, they don’t get to choose that, they only get to choose how they use that position.)

But the most important thing that changes her mind is Charles’es persistence, and finally his releasing of her to be who she truly is.

And who she was, he believes, was never the person Erik saw her as, Older Erik admits he set her on a dark path; who she was was not even exactly what Charles himself thought, she was more than that.

When released from those negative expectations, Raven realizes what she really wants, and she drops the gun.

That moment was every bit as epic as it was intended to be, because we know how hard they worked for it.

Raven sees an opportunity to be seen as a hero instead of a villain, and she chooses it. And I personally thought the look on her face when she turns to Charles and Hank afterwards was pure relief.

Raven actually saves her own life by doing this, though no one ever actually told her (in the cut version I saw) that she died as a result of shooting Trask.

Much like another fictional character named Raven (Ever After High), she changes the whole course of history in one moment.

And who knows when any one of us might do the same thing?

Until next time–Natasha.

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God is good.

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God is good.

That’s a favorite debate topic for Christian films. I guess it’s also a favorite DC topic since Lex Luthor makes that infamous statement “If God is all powerful, He cannot be all good.”

Because it’s been talked aobut so much, I’m not sure I have any new wisdom to add to the subject, but I’d like to discuss it for a minute.

I just reread “The Hiding Place,” which is a really good book, and I felt like toward the end the quesiton of God’s goodness comes up.

What ‘s funny about The ways of God is that just His power is not enough to convince us He’s right.

We’ve all apologized when we weren’t sorry or admited something we didn’t want to admit becuae we were afraid of someone in power over us. For very weak minded people, power seems to equal right, even though philosophically we would scorn hat idea.

But I notice that in the Bible, way back in the Old Testament, people often only obeyed God because of His power.

Actually, up until recently in our history, that was totally acceptable logic. We like to feel we have the moral high ground, but many of our ancestors would have thought it was just common sense to obey whatever god was most powerful. It’s led to some messed up religions.

To bring  it back to the point, everything that happens to the Ten Booms in the latter half of the book seems to be terrible. Corrie and Betsie escpecially suffer in three different prisons, one of them the hellish Ravensbruck.

Corrie speaks of wondering why such cruelty could happen, of having to trust God to carry the burden of what she saw and felt watching the atrocities that happened there.

Though we cannot all have witnessed such things firsthand, we have plenty of news examples nowadays to make us ask that same question. Why did God allow it? Is he really good.

In the movie version of the Hiding Place, one embittered prisoner mockingly tells Betsie and Corrie that God is either powerless, or He is cruel, they can’t have it both ways.

Betsie replies “When you know him, you don’t need to know why.”

This is the kind of thinking that makes skeptics believe religious people are crazy. AT least, I think if I were a skeptic I would think it was crazy.

Would you trust God if you were going through death warmed up? If you lost everything? Would you believe God was good if you were mistreated be everyone around you and all you saw was cruelty?

Perhaps, after a time, all of us would begin to falter, if we were left to ourselves/

But God didn’t leave Corrie and Betsie without some signs. The little miracles that happened. Corrie not being checked in line while she has hiding the Bible, the vitamins bottle that did not run dry, the mercy of an otherwise merciless guard or medical trustee, Betsie’s visions.

What I draw from the story is that if God truly meant for us to be miserable, He would no provide these little wonders, these signs of love.

You can’t make those fit in with the idea of a distant, cold God, unless you really stretch your imagination.

Terrible things happen to us that God does not stop, but if we know personally that HE is good to us, then logically, we know these things do not mean He is doing us an evil.

John Eldredge (author and speaker) says that we have doubs about God’s goodness, we might know how He acts in front of a lot of people, signs, wonders, etc. but what is He like when you get alone with Him?

Well, here my theology meets reality. As someone who claims to have a relationship with God, what is my experience of Him?

(Actually, it surprises me how little I talk about this. I’m not ashamed of it, but even at church the subject comes up way less than you would expect.)

In many ways, knowing God personally is a private thing, more so than even knowing your spouse; but it is also meant to be shared.

My knowledge of God is that He is caring, He is loving, He does meet the needs of His children.

Personally, I have had harsh things said to me by people, people have betrayed my trust, people have misjudged me, God has never done that.

Some might say that’s because He is not real, or He is not like I think He is, so how could He do any of those things?

But for my money, none of that matters, I know what I know.

The evil man kind does to itself is bad enough, that there should be any light at all in the sea of darkness is a flat out miracle.

Like how the studios that produced Batman vs Superman also produced Wonder Woman.

Or how the same company that gave us some of the stupidest shows on TV also gave us movies like Frozen, Cinderella, Big Hero 6, and other classics.

Jesus said that the condemnation of men is that lights has come into the world, but men loved darkness.

And to my amazement, and yet also not for I have been guilty of it too, the real reason people doubt God is good is because they themselves are not good and do not want to change.

Bitterness, hate, selfishness; we don’t like giving that up.

Anyway, I hope that made sense.

Until next time–Natasha.