I’m taking a break from books and movies for March Madness. It’s my first time picking a bracket and the first day has not been kind 🙁 But it’s so exciting!
Life is no fun without competition 🙂
I’m glad I managed to finish Angels and Demons last night. The movie and the book were both criticized by movie buffs and my personal friends, which led to me watching the movie on an airplane and only picking up the book now. The movie was not spectacular by any means, but decent by my standard. The book, on the other hand, definitely surpassed my expectations.
The mysteries were spoiled by the movie, but there were a few things about the book that I loved. First were the ambigrams. They were beautiful, and looking at it on paper allowed me to take the time to appreciate the intricate details rather than the short glimpse I got from the movie. Then there were the historical facts, that were omitted from the movie or were simply too much for one to remember while going through the action. Despite the criticism over the inaccuracies, at least it intrigues one to look further into history. But the most thought provoking of all, almost completely amiss from the movie, was the character development, or rather, the various conflicts between science and religion embodied in the characters.
The religion professor who does not believe in religion, and wanders in search for faith says, “my mind tells me I will never understand God, and my heart tells me I’m not to meant to.”
The physicist who recreates Creation says, “Sometimes, divine relation simply means adjusting your brain to hear what your heart already knows.”
His boss has quite the opposite view and argues, “Science has now proven those gods to be false idols. Soon all Gods will be proven to be false idols. Science has now provided answers to almost every question man can ask.”
The physicist’s daughter, while reluctant to follow her father’s fervor for God, came to her own conclusion: “Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”
Ironically, or rather, intentionally, the demon disguised as an angel was the one who made the most profound statements. “Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this. When we as a species abandon our trust in the power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faith… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable… With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed.”
I don’t intend this to be a collection of quotes, but often quotes are memorable because they say in such simplicity what we have struggled so very long to see or express.
I will leave my reflections on religion and faith for another time. For now, I just want to say, any book that makes you think is a good book 🙂
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