It’s a Growing World After All
It’s a Growing World After All
What Disney World is for fun and for children in their small world, the intrigue of the movie and media world is now for adults, encouraging us to believe what is most often make-believe.
I bring these thoughts regarding the deliberate overlap between imagination and reality to the beginning of our journey through the minefield of conflicting worldviews to help us find the truth about life’s greatest quest. Why is there so much of the supernatural in story lines today, and why do those assumptions so often promote a worldview that tries to make the human divine? And why is that not possible without including our fascination with evil within the human story? In a strange way, is not the marring of beauty now the force of entertainment? Is not the spiritual always irrepressible in its power to tell a story? What is it about us that we constantly seek answers? What lies beneath the physical? In country music it is always about a broken vow; in the world of stories it is invariably about a broken world. Where do we go to be mended? Has Christianity had its say and been rejected in the West? Are old answers passé?
Certainly old answers once deemed doctrinaire and dogmatic seem totally irrelevant today. Why are we always on a quest for the spiritual without categories? Why do we always find ourselves at odds on matters of the sacred? It is a terrifying indictment of our existence that, unable to solve our problems in the phenomenal world, we now dig deep into dream states and, with the aid of technology, leave audiences in a dream world of their own. The visual has, in fact, distorted the spiritual rather than clarify it. How easy it is to forget that behind these story lines are storytellers who are often themselves in knots in their own private worlds. Have we been trapped by a means that has engineered the ends? Are there now manipulators at work who have grasped the ends and means better than any preacher ever has? These stories are not just tales for the imagination; they are entire bodies of belief that are reshaping society beyond recognition, doctrines dressed up as entertainment.
How else does one explain the tragic self-destruction of actor Charlie Sheen, a news item for millions to watch and be entertained by? He himself made the incredible statement that his producers have broken their contract with him because he was living in reality like the loose-living, “anything goes” character in his very popular TV sitcom. When he translated his values from the show to reality, they broke ties with him. Is it that we think by watching his meltdown we can change the ending? How else does one watch comedians humor their way out of embarrassing and frankly immoral situations?
The message is massaged into the subconscious by media that make the undesirable attractive and the good appear boring and flat, while shattered lives look intriguing and full of the divine. Worldviews are being smuggled in by the power of the lens, far beyond what any evangelist could have done. Inception reminded me of the aphorism of the famed Chinese philosopher Lao Tse: “If, when I am sleeping, I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly, how do I know that when I am awake I am not a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”