Christianity, Judaism and Islam together constitute the core part of Western civilization. God has always been the ultimate existence, the ultimate source and final basis of human rationality and legitimacy. But when capitalism entered the modernist society, through Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, from "I think, therefore I am", "rational legislation" to "absolute concept", the rationality changed from the subjective rationality of the individual to the thorough rationality of the whole world. . As a result, God's dominant position was replaced by rational authority, and God gradually withdrew. This is particularly evident in the film "The Birth of Lies": this film is better called the Birth of God than the Birth of Lies. In the beginning, there were no lies in this world, and everyone would directly say what they thought. For what will happen in the future, the feasibility prediction is also based on past experience or the results of scientifically based normal logical deduction. For example, if you want to have a beautiful child, then you must follow the principles of genetics. Both parents must have good and good-looking genes. Anna has always wanted to have a beautiful baby, so she didn't like Mark at first, because she knew that if the two of them were combined, she would not give birth to a beautiful baby. As Mark’s colleague Brad said when Mark left: I hate you because I think you are a threat to me. Sometimes you make me unable to understand, and I hate everything that I don’t understand. The three-person relationship between Brad, Mark, and Anna is a good metaphor. In the later period of modernism, it was under the continuous expansion of instrumental rationality, which is part of the overall human rationality. People no longer believe in things other than empirical truth and logical truth. In the eyes of rationalists, God is a complete Loser. The eternal love and ultimate existence in religious beliefs and the omnipotent and personified God preached in religion have no basis for existence. Just as it was mentioned at the beginning of the film that Mark is short, fat, ugly, and poor, there is really no possibility for a person who is nearly fifty but accomplish nothing.
An error in the banking system brought a turnaround for Mark. He lied but was accidentally believed. So this real world without lies began to become ridiculous because of the appearance of a lie. People unconditionally believe in things that don't exist at all, because this is a world without lies. Once spoken, all things are facts and truths. At the end of modern society, under the guidance of scientific rationality, people have embarked on the path of material supremacy and made great achievements in material and technology, but the extreme abundance of material has also brought spiritual emptiness. In the post-World War II capitalist post-industrial society, the rapid development of science and technology, especially information technology, accelerated the pace of social commercialization, and increasingly frequent international cooperation has blurred the boundaries between nations and nations. At this time Many people are beginning to realize the negative effects of industrial civilization. "Since the 1960s, what people have encountered is no longer this "sacred madness" that ends in self-destruction, but another form, which Americans call "burn-out," a continuous Work, physical exertion is clean, and people are completely collapsed. This is an experience with the same negative meaning in modern times. But this is no longer anxiety. In anxiety you still have a self, still feel lonely, you want to shrink Return to the self to maintain the integrity of yourself, which means that you know what you should do. But in the "exhaustion" of postmodernism, or in the language of drug addicts, in the "phantom game", what you experience is a In the transformed external world, you do not have your own existence, that is to say, you are a subject that has been decentralized." [Fr Jameson/Tang Xiaobing, Postmodernism and Cultural Theory-Fr ·Professor Jameson's lecture [M], Shanxi Normal University Press, 1986,178, 1-10] It is different from modernism, which mainly expresses the anxiety and alienation of people. It is characterized by flatness, depthlessness, no sense of history, and fragmentation. It mainly expresses the materialization of people who are separated from the subject. This is Lyotard's " The "realistic state of contemporary culture" mentioned in "Postmodern Conditions" is postmodern. The emergence of postmodernism is a critical deconstruction of modernism, a reflection and transcendence of modernism. It pays attention to the individual differences between people, and eliminates the sacred subject that values people in human modernism. In postmodernism, people are decentralized subjects. The postmodern era dispels the meta-narratives of "eternal truth" and "human liberation" in the Enlightenment. Lyotard said, "I define the term postmodern as the suspicion of meta-narratives." Foucault declared that "man is dead" on the basis of "God is dead". Some radical fundamentalists even suggested that we should return to God's embrace without reservation. When Mark was most frustrated, his last relative in his life, his mother, was also on the verge of death. He told her when his mother was about to die: "Death is not a permanent death. You will go to your favorite place. All the people you love and those who love you will be there. You will be young again. You can Run with the treaty, and you can dance to your heart's content. There is no pain but endless and eternal love and joy." This is obviously a lie, but everyone believes his statement because it makes people feel happy. The hypothesis of the future world made Mark so that he had everything he didn't have before. But he was not happy because he found that people were superstitious about the lies he told. He made people all over the world feel happy, but he was not happy, because no one around him wanted to hear the truth.
When anna gave the invitation to Mark a year later, the market became the image of Jesus before the crucifixion, which seemed to become a metaphor for the rebirth of the crucifixion. God needs to be resurrected, but not to return to the traditional image of God, but to rethink rationality. "I define theology as the rational reflection of our time as sacred things, that is, the rational reflection of those things that we regard as the ultimate concern for our own sake." [David Ray Griffin / Sun Mutian Translated, Later Modern Religion, [M], China City Publishing House, 2003, 2, 3-5] "To restore faith in God, while retaining the modernity commitment to freedom, experience, and reason, this can only be based on the postmodern worldview today. It is possible, and the postmodern worldview overcomes both the modern substantive assumptions about nature and experience and the traditional theistic assumptions about divine power" [David Ray Griffin/Translated by Sun Mutian, Postmodern Religion, [M], China City Press, 2003.104, 4-7] At Anna's wedding, Mark changed her image and returned to her original self and told her that everything she said before did not exist, just to make her mother feel at ease. Although money and fame cannot change genetics, a child with a good-looking appearance may not necessarily be happy. Only when parents love each other and their children together can they have a better future. God cannot bring physical changes to your life, but he can influence people's attitudes towards things from within.
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