"There is no god, that's why I stepped in"

 


HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD FOR GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3!!!


Really, do NOT read this unless you have already seen the movie.


Okay, you can't say you weren't warned...


"There is no god, that's why I stepped in!"

This line is spit-screamed in a scenery-chewing moment by the High Evolutionary, the villain of the movie.


And the thing is, he's both right and wrong when he says that.


The first reason he's wrong is mostly a pedantic one, but if you didn't want pedantic you wouldn't be reading a nerd's hot take on a Marvel movie. He's objectively wrong because the Marvel universe has HUNDREDS of gods. Peter Quill is the literal son of a god. Two of his teammates were raised by a Titan. They've fought alongside Thor Odinson. The High Evolutionary could go challenge Zeus to a fistfight if he likes, and he might even win. A character in a Marvel movie saying there is no god would be like a character in a Western saying there is no sheriff.

But that's a pedantic correction because when he says it, he's not referring to gods with a small "g", he means what most of the audience means when they use the word - a single, all-powerful, uncreated creator of all life and all worlds - and he's saying that if there had been an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being making the universe it would be better made. So he's right about that.


And he's also right when he says he stepped into the role of the god most monotheists believe in, but he's wrong about HOW. What he thinks he means is that he's stepped into the role of a perfect creator making perfect creations. But what he's actually done is stepped into the role of the god that is portrayed in the Old Testament:

- Claims to be benevolent, but is in reality vengeful, cruel, and petty

-  Kills any who displease or disobey him and feels no remorse about it

- Creates imperfect beings, then blames and punishes them for their imperfections, often via genocide

- Claims to be perfect and to demand perfection from his creations, but is in fact morally INFERIOR to his creations, regularly committing acts of apocalyptic horror that no human but a sociopath would even CONSIDER

- Pretends to use his limitless power to nurture and support the growth of his creations, but in fact uses it to intimidate and destroy them for the flaws which, I cannot stress enough, they have because HE DIDN'T MAKE THEM WELL ENOUGH TO MEET HIS OWN STANDARD.


Slap a big white beard on him, sit him on a golden throne, and he's EXACTLY the god of Abraham.


But he's also wrong, because he does NOT take on the role of what a god, if one existed, SHOULD be. 

- He doesn't offer up his own life to save the lives of others

- He doesn't offer redemption and forgiveness to those who have done wrong out of necessity rather than malice

- He doesn't heal the sick and raise the dead

- He doesn't use his power to help and defend the powerless

- He doesn't defeat evil

- He doesn't set captives free


The mortal, finite protagonists do all that. The beings who don't in fact have the power to do any of those things damn well FIND a way to do them, because they need to damn well be DONE and there's no one else to do it.


There is no god. That's why they stepped in.


Go thou and do likewise.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Baby in the bathwater?

Image
A Christian minister asked a Christian president, who was elected by Christians for Christian reasons, to behave in accordance with Christian principles. And yet, the majority of the country's Christians are mad about it. And despite that, the rest of the nation's Christians continue to insist that there's a "real" Christianity that somehow the majority of Christians are failing to practice despite the fact that those Christians make their whole personality about how Christian they are. The decent humans that still adhere to Christianity - who are very much the minority of Christians - continue to believe that Christianity has an actual moral core and a message that can make its adherents behave in a more moral way. They continue to tell me that there's a baby I've thrown out with the bathwater by rejecting Christianity in its entirety.  And I get it. I used to think the same, for decades. I would "no true Scotsman" every Christian who behaved im...
Read more

On Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Evangelical Republicans, and Judas Iscariot

Earlier today, I posted this on Facebook: "Tonight, for Maundy Thursday, Christians all over the world will commemorate a time when an innocent man who had done nothing more than criticize people in power was imprisoned and ultimately executed without due process, due in large part to a mob of religious people demanding his destruction and claiming he was a danger to the rule of the emperor. And 80 percent of American Evangelicals will never, EVER realize that they are the Judas in this story." But on further reflection, I realized that this was unnecessarily harsh and insulting. ... ...to Judas. After all, Judas realized almost immediately that he had done something monstrous, something unforgiveable, and felt such remorse at the enormity of his betrayal that he could no longer live with himself. But Evangelical Republicans lack the moral clarity of JUDAS FUCKING ISCARIOT. No, they're something far worse. They're the crowd chanting "Crucify him!" and "...
Read more

A matter of principle

Ever since November of 2016, the question has haunted me: How did the conservative Evangelicals I grew up with so thoroughly lose their principles? And the correct answer is: They never had principles.  But for once, I don't intend that as an insult. I mean this as a distinction between two different ways of looking at morality. Evangelicals never had principles; they had RULES. Because that's how their churches train them to think. They (along with the Catholics, who have fallen into the same error) are religious fundamentalists. They don't treat morality as a set of flexible guidelines that can and should change over time; they treat morality as a set of rules that are "the same yesterday, today, and forever". If the Bible said it in 2000 BCE, then it's still binding 4 millennia later (except if there's another rule that negates it, such as the "no bacon" thing being negated by Peter's vision in Acts).  But there wasn't a "That wa...
Read more