LeeQuod: Thank you for posting the Muggeridge passage. It's brilliant. I think that's why this movie left me like I'd just been punched in the gut. It ends at tragedy and offers no hope, no whiff at redemption, no larger perspective like that of Muggeridge. It leaves you dealing with the agony of unchecked evil. It's why I recommend that people go and see what a world/worldview without hope really looks like. I should add that the movie is filled with biblical allusions. One of the most striking scenes is, in essence, a re-creation of Peter's denial of Christ. Christians who watch the movie with their eyes and ears open will see the human story of the fall . . . but not the whole story of humanity, because you'll find no redemption here. And I think the filmmakers intended it that way.

Love so vast evil can't comprehend it?

David wrote: "Evil so vast, innocence can't comprehend it." What an absolutely striking turn of phrase. It makes the scandal of the Atonement all the more mysterious, I think. (Perfect innocence taking on the entire world's evil - how?) I remember the jibe from atheists to the effect that if God is all-powerful, how is it He lost 6M of His "chosen people"? This, of course ignores that about as many non-Jews died in the Holocaust. But it does serve to direct attention away from the fact that the Third Reich was rooted in non-Christian philosophies. Ravi Zacharias has included Holocaust themes several times in his speeches and his books. One of his most powerful speeches quotes this passage from the famed British journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge; I think it provides some useful perspective to this and indeed, other recent threads as well: “We look back upon history and what do we see? Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter-revolutions, wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of ‘the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.’ “I look back on my own fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that, ‘God who’s made the mighty would make them mightier yet.’ I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last a thousand years; an Italian clown announce that he would restart the calendar to begin his own ascension to power. I’ve heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as a wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka. I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people desired, they could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests. “All in one lifetime. All in one lifetime. All gone with the wind. England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of those precious fluids that keep her motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate. “All in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.” “Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life.”

I understand your point, labrialumn, and in fact it occurred to me that I would like to see a similar film made about the abortion industry. I want to make sure we don't let another thread go too far off-topic, and turn this thread into a political battle that has nothing to do with David's original post. But I do understand and wholly agree with your point.

Think about the 4,000 babies murdered by being drawn and quartered in America; today and every day. Visualize that. And never forget.