{"id":1112,"date":"2011-12-25T01:57:01","date_gmt":"2011-12-25T05:57:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1112"},"modified":"2015-07-11T06:01:25","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T10:01:25","slug":"its-a-religiously-misguided-life-on-the-worth-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1112","title":{"rendered":"It’s A Religiously Misguided Life : On the worth of life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Re-watching the old film It’s A Wonderful Life<\/em> on Christmas Eve, the classic ending really bothers me.\u00a0 An angel, sent by God, helps a man change his mind about committing suicide by showing him what life would be like for his loved ones if he had never been born.\u00a0 The key to the plot is that life turns out to be bad for them, and some people are even dead.\u00a0 What if life had been better for them?\u00a0 What if his wife had married some other man, had had different kids, and had been just as happy?\u00a0 Would that have justified George Bailey’s suicide?\u00a0 That is, how do we value the worth of a man’s life?\u00a0 It’s A Wonderful Life<\/em> does it by showing what effect that life has on other lives.\u00a0 I suppose it works in the dramatic sense — it makes for a good and touching story with a good and touching closing scene.\u00a0 But it doesn’t really espouse an honest message.\u00a0 Instead it encourages a sort of “if-it-weren’t-for-me” sense of self-worth, which I think risks being more warped and prideful than honest.<\/p>\n

When we ask “what is the worth of a man’s life?” it’s really an incomplete question, because worth is not an objective value.\u00a0 What is a man’s life worth to whom<\/em>?\u00a0 To another man?\u00a0 To himself?\u00a0 To God?<\/p>\n

The great thing about the worth of a man’s life to God is that it never changes<\/em>.\u00a0 There’s nothing you can do to make God think less of you.\u00a0 He created you and knows you too completely.\u00a0 The bad thing about the worth of a man’s life to God is that it’s hard to detect.\u00a0 It’s not apparent.\u00a0 God doesn’t tuck you into bed at night or give you flowers or shower you with love songs.\u00a0 And while we might still feel God’s love in some ways, we can never feel it completely, and it’s easy to forget about it and\/or doubt it exists at all.\u00a0 And even if we do believe it, we can’t understand<\/em> it.\u00a0 It’s hard and unnatural for us to value others in some unchanging way like that.\u00a0 It may be a comforting thought to know our worth to God is more than we can understand, but we can’t relate<\/em> to it.\u00a0 So someone like Hitler had worth to God?!\u00a0 A man who murdered millions and millions of people?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 That is not to say that actions don’t matter, but they don’t matter to God’s sense of your worth.\u00a0 Hitler, and any wicked man you can think of, is worth just as much to God as you are.\u00a0 Can’t accept that?\u00a0 Join the majority of humans.<\/p>\n

This concept is completely ignored in the It’s A Wonderful Life<\/em> ending.\u00a0 Instead, George Bailey is encouraged to change his sense of self-worth by being frightened by the conveniently poor circumstances of his community had he not been born.\u00a0 In the real world, that just might not work.\u00a0 Without you being born, the world might very well be much the same, if not better.\u00a0 If that’s where you’re getting your sense of self-worth, of course you will have problems.<\/p>\n

The angel in the movie, Clarence, leaves George with this quote: “Dear George, remember: no man is a failure who has friends.”\u00a0 It reminds me of another quote from The Muppet Christmas Carol<\/em> that the reformed Scrooge sings in his final song: “If you want to know the measure of a man, you simply count his friends.”\u00a0 I don’t like these quotes; they’re placing more emphasis on the value of friendship than the value of being a good person, as if having friends somehow makes you a good person.\u00a0 If you’re a good person, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have.\u00a0 Certainly it’s nice<\/em> to have them and it\u2019s good to be thankful for them, but they should not be sought out for the sake of themselves.\u00a0 Friends are not a vital recipe to life.\u00a0 A man should be honest and virtuous first.\u00a0 If being honest and virtuous costs him friendship, so be it.\u00a0 A moral man with no friends is better than a wicked man with many friends.\u00a0 I suppose the problem is that it’s natural for a man to get a sense of self-worth by trying to see himself through the eyes of others, and the more friends he has, the better he feels about himself.\u00a0 I think that is very misguided.\u00a0 It would be better if Clarence had written: “Dear George, remember: no man is a failure who follows the way of the Lord” or “Dear George, remember: no man is a failure who trusts in God” — maybe those are a bit more cheesy, but they’re much more truthful, which Clarence, being an angel<\/em>, should know.<\/p>\n

What George Bailey really needed was not a change in his sense of self-worth.\u00a0 He needed to be reminded of his priorities.\u00a0 He got way too emotional about money, and the awful consequences of not having enough (like going to jail).\u00a0 He needed to be reminded of how important his friends and family were to him.\u00a0 His problems had nothing to do with him being born or not.\u00a0 And that’s what made the alternate reality effective; the absence of his loved ones as he knew them, not the remembrance of the virtuous deeds of his past.\u00a0 That\u2019s just messy screenwriting.<\/p>\n

Merry Christmas!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Re-watching the old film It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve, the classic ending really bothers me.\u00a0 An angel, sent by God, helps a man change his mind about committing suicide by showing him what life would be like for his loved ones if he had never been born.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[53],"tags":[454],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-hW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1902,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions\/1902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}