Quick Take on Interstellar

I watched Interstellar last night and I have mixed feelings about it. Basic spoilers implied ahead.

From a science standpoint, Interstellar educates the audience about how relativity works (although inconsistently) in regards to time dilation and how it is related to gravity. On the flip side, the movie also propagates the myth that black holes transport people places rather than kill them. I don’t care if movies educate, but I don’t want them to pass on wrong information as if it is correct. Science fiction is at it’s best when it takes unknowns and fills them with what could be true, not when it takes things we know are wrong and misleads audiences.

The movie also implies that the emotion of love transcends the mind, a theme many religious types and romanticizers would like about the film. Love as a motivator for the characters involved would be enough to keep the story together, using it as an attribute of the universe makes the movie feel more fantasy than sci-fi. They might as well evoke the Force.

The ending feels contrived and there are the typical Nolan plot holes, but it was worth seeing. The cinematography, acting, and music were great.

God Offers No Choice

God's judgment, as seen by most theists, can only be just if those judged choose to sin or be saved. I believe we are not free to choose anything if our present and future is known by an omniscient being. Allow me to show my work by analogy.

Just before his death, Lincoln seemed to have made a choice to go to Ford's Theatre. From the President's perspective he felt he had a choice, but look at it from our perspective. Lincoln's action is an historical event which is known. Lincoln, essentially as a character in a history book, has no choice but to go to Ford's Theatre because any action on his part has been acted. Even if we went back to Lincoln's time, armed with our fore-knowledge, Lincoln would still be bound to the actions that we know he will make (providing we don't interfere, of course.) This means that Lincoln's perceived choices, and our own, are an illusion if a being is capable of viewing us as history either in the present, future, or independently of time.

Set up a camera on someone. They will do a variety of things that you probably wouldn't be able to predict in the moment if you were there. However, if you watch the video later, then watch it again, upon second watching you will be able to predict perfectly their every move. The person on camera, while acting, perceives free will from their perspective. However, the recording of the person, from the perspective of the omniscient video watcher, is not free to act. To anyone who knows our future, we are essentially a recording.

A being with all-knowledge of an event, whether it be God or a well-studied time traveler, would view the present as a history or recording. There are no surprises to this being because there is only one way for the events to unfold. Each person involved follows only one path. No choices are made because choice deals with the availability of options and there are none.

If choice is only an illusion of our limited perspective as this shows, then a god's sentence of eternal reward or eternal punishment is exacted upon helpless people with no ability to change their fate. It is exactly as fair and just as arbitrarily and immediately sending newborn babies to heaven of hell.

Boycotting Boycotts

Consider the following boycott scenarios.

• I boycott my local Catholic church for covering up priest pedophiles. I didn’t previously go to church nor did I contribute to their collections. It doesn’t hurt me, but neither does it hurt the church.
• I boycott Chick-Fil-A for their CEO’s stance on gays and for their contributions to like-minded organizations. I really like Chick-Fil-A and spent money at their restaurants on a weekly basis. It hurts the company in losing one of their regular customers, but it also hurts me in that I am losing a favorite lunch spot.

The first boycott is not effective while the second is effective because an effective boycott must hurt both the boycotter and the boycottee. From the point of view of the boycotter, the choice to punish a brand for a distasteful policy is a desirable statement that outweighs the undesirable personal consequence. However, when a potential boycott is the hardest to make, and necessarily the most effective, the potential boycotter may opt out of boycotting. In these cases, I’ve thought about another option.

When Ender’s Game comes out in theaters, I will buy a ticket. I’m a big enough fan of the source material that I obviously hope it’s good, but even if it’s bad I’ll be curious to see just how bad it is. Since the author, Orson Scott Card, is a vocal Mormon with ideas and contributions of which I don’t agree, I have some desire to boycott it, just the principle. I recognize that in this case I could pirate Ender’s Game so that Card doesn’t get to put my good money to bad use. At the same time, I feel he deserves to be paid for work that I recognize has value. This leads me to my boycott alternative: I will enjoy a night at the movies and then contributing the ticket price to an organization that works toward goals opposite that of Card’s charities. Instead of this boycott hurting me recreationally, it will only hurt me financially because I will basically be paying twice the ticket price in “protest” of Card’s views.

Card’s primary boycott-worthy view in my opinion is being against gay marriage, so I will likely give to a LGBT charity. In the end, I think this will be more effective than a traditional boycott on a personal level since very little of the cost of my ticket will go to Card’s bank account and again only a fraction of that will go to his causes while the entirety of my extra nine bucks will go against his cause. On a public level, it isn’t quite as effective because I won’t be participating in the inevitable organized boycott of the movie which can only be measured as a factor in the movie’s failure (which I feel is unfair because it punishes everyone else involved in the movie in addition to Card.) In the end, every boycott is a personal boycott and this option is the best for me and might work for you whether you apply it to Ender’s Game, Chick-Fil-A or whatever.

Additional boycott tip: If you do decide to boycott something, it probably won’t be noticeable unless it is part of a large-scale and successfully organized boycott. To make your personal boycott efforts noticable, write to the business or brand you are boycotting and tell them why you are doing it. If you were previously a regular customer, be sure to say so. I’ve done this before with advertisers of particularly harmful radio hosts and heard back from some of the companies. Whether they do anything about it or not, they’ll at least know, and that matters.

Hokey Religions & Ancient Weapons

Faora Doesn't Get Evolution

I admit, I’m a strange bird. I’m always keeping an eye out for content for this blog which has me coloring even the most secular interactions in my day-to-day as metaphors for religion. When I see something that inherently does have religious themes, I’m so distracted about how to leverage it into a post that I stop living in the moment. This weeks opening movie, Man of Steel, has inherent Christian themes--yet I barely realized until retrospection. This goes to show, as much as I think about Jesus, I think even more about Superman.

Spoilers follow.

Sure, Man of Steel depicts Kal-El as a miraculous birth who grows up to stand beside stainglass windows of JC and float out of space ships crucifixion-style, but as I said before, I barely noticed in the awesomeness that is Superman. The only thing that bothered me enough to take me out of the flick was a mid-fight speech in which General Zod’s right-hand woman waxed poetic about the merits of evolution over morality. To sum up, she said that their military core of Kryptonians had evolved past the more primitive concept of morality and that history shows that evolutionary progress always wins. *Heavy sigh.* Can’t we save the evolution talk for the X-Men? It’s kinda their thing.

Faora, Zod’s follower, has an oversimplified view of the Theory of Evolution that I would expect from a Christian fundamentalist, but not so much from a member of a highly advanced civilization. First off, it’s nonsensical to say that only Zod’s sect is lacking in morality seeing how Kryptonians at large clearly have morals--see exhibit A, Jor-El. Evolution doesn't so dramatically effect a threesome of criminals and leave out the general pop. It just doesn't work that way.

Second, Zod has a sense of morality, just not the sense of morality. He clearly cares for the people of Krypton in that his purpose until the final battle is to either save them or repopulate them. It could be argued that Zod only cared about certain bloodlines, but then so did Jor-El. Super-Dad opts to save his own bloodline while Zod, presumably, could have saved many, just not all. (I realize that Jor-El allowed for future generations of Kryptonian bloodlines through the Codex in Kal-El’s cells, but that eventuality is a long-shot compared to Zod's pro-active use of the Codex.)

And third, the message is oversimplified to the point of falsehood. “Evolving past morality” implies that we also evolved to morality. This means, to her villainous logic, that altruism is a trait that was once selected for survival, but then stopped being selected. I can’t think of how that such a change could have occurred within the Phantom Zone--especially when only a single generation was trapped. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Feora was victim of a Texan education.

Of course, I’m over thinking this, but propagating a message that couldn’t be true in their world or ours to a theater-going public that already largely buys into it is a bad thing. It’s made worse when churches are capitalizing on it by quoting the film as part of their Jesus was the first superhero campaign. I just hope Man of Steel 2 isn’t subtitled “The Passion of the Clark.”