The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

Seems like everywhere you look these days, you see super heroes, ghosts, vampires, aliens, monsters, zombies, and other extra-reality things. Not really, of course. On TV, in books, magazines, game boys, Xboxes, wherever. I’m wondering what the attraction is. Why this escape from reality into what is usually something so dark it would seem unattractive at best.

Face it, believers.  There is no such thing as a vampire. Or a ghost. Or Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster, or zombies, or people who can fly and throw lightning bolts, or aliens. Well, maybe extra-terrestrials; it seems rather solipsistic to call them aliens, don’t you think? I don’t say they don’t exist; with trillions of possible worlds out there, that would be incredibly arrogant.

However, the other stuff is just plain dopey. How about a TV show starring a good vampire? Are you kidding? He sucks people’s blood to stay alive, and he’s a good guy? Double stupid. Little green men capturing people and taking them to their space ship to have sex with them or stick weird things into them. Triple stupid. Sounds to me like delusions of grandeur. I do get the super hero thing. The bubble brains who watch that stuff probably are experiencing momentary transference — wishing they could fly, or at least leap tall buildings at a single bound.

Okay, so if there’s no proof that any of these things exist, how about God?  No proof there, either, right? All these things take a leap of faith. But the dumb things are an easier leap, because they don’t really have any effect on your life.

Believe in God and you have to walk the line — at least as well as you can. Believe in that other crap and you just have to stay out of dark alleys, or wear a garlic clove around your neck. (Which, I guess, rules out Italian vampires. There are lots of unanswered questions like that. For instance, can you ward off a Jewish vampire with a crucifix?)

I do remember loving the mummy pictures when I was a kid.  Walking home in the dark, positive I could hear that step, scrape, coming behind me. (It never occurred to me that I could run rings around a gimpy mummy.) I remember being scared out of my wits the first time I saw The Thing (from another world). The operative word here is “kid.”

But these days even grown-ups believe in all that stuff. That fascination, it seems — that belief — should have been left behind years ago. The question is, I guess, has all that stuff become some kind of a substitute for religion? It’s certainly at the other end of the scale. Can you believe in those things and still believe in God? I guess you could peg them all as creatures of the devil. But I don’t think that enters into it.  I think the opposite is true. These beings represent a life that is totally ungoverned, basically answering to no one. Okay, there is the vampire holy water crucifix thing. But even that doesn’t seem to work anymore.

All of this seems somehow to mirror a much larger picture — the shift from the moral code we’ve always lived with (we called it God, ten commandments, golden rule, etc.) and the moral abyss into which we are being thrown. Pretty much every great nation’s demise has been foreshadowed by a turning away from morality, a relaxation of accountability, the growth of the “if it feels good, do it” mentality.

That doesn’t mean you have to believe in God. But whatever you call it, you must have some kind of higher standard in place, an ideal to pattern ourselves after. Or irresponsibility inevitably becomes chaos. It’s well under way in the United States. Just look at today’s headlines — at the greed, licentiousness, murder, lies, and viciousness in America, and the apparent utter lack of conscience. Bernie Madoff, for example. Or a man who walks into a church and shoots the pastor, or walks into a school and kills two dozen children he doesn’t even know.

What in God’s name has happened to the most wonderful country in history? Oh, sorry, God’s about gone. Maybe that’s a clue.