More Dark Knight

Back in Dec 2008, I had blogged about a discussion event we had at my church about the Dark Knight as part of a Cinematics program (Dark Knight blog).    At that time, the speaker presented his perspective and showed clips from the movie.

I just finished watching the movie and have some additional comments and thoughts.  The movie makes some very strong philosophical statements from a very dark worldview perspective.  The Joker said that he wanted to turn a White Knight into a Dark Knight, to win the battle for the soul and conscience of Gotham City.  The Harvey Dent character, who is the person the Joker "turned" (physically illustrated by one side of his face "normal" and the other side burned almost to the skeleton), said "The only morality in a cruel world is chance" (which he played out by flipping a coin to determine whether he was going to kill someone).    This is the naturalistic evolution worldview - that life came to be by chance; and just evolved over time.   In this point of view, there really is no basis for morality; whereas, in the Christian Worldview, morality is defined by God's absolute standards for ethics.

While the outcome of the incident with the ferry boats showed the positive decision for good (based on the absolute standard of "Thou shalt not kill"); yet, each boat went through a process representative of existing methods for determining "morality" in a world that has rejected absolute moral standards:  social morality (deciding what is right based on the majority vote) and might-makes-right morality (those with the power making the decision). 

Even Batman, in the movie, made a philosophical statement that sounds "good" but is really a LIE.   He said "Sometimes truth isn't good enough.  Sometimes people deserve more."  Yes, we have all been guilty of "white lies" in the name of protecting someone from the truth; and in the movie, it made a case for suppressing the truth so the people would not lose hope.  BUT, that is a very dangerous point of view, and a lie is a lie is a lie.    I do believe that truth and honesty is the best policy; and it is very clear in Scripture how essential TRUTH is.   In fact, as the Truth Project clearly illustrates, the age-old cosmic battle is the one between the TRUTH of God versus the LIES of this world.