No, I have not seen World War Z, though there's probably a good chance I will at some point (the notion of Brad Pitt in a zombie movie is intriguing). A good friend of mine has two teenage boys that were telling me about this upcoming movie for last few months. They went to see it at... a drive in theater (I actually saw the first Star Wars movie this way). Anyway, here were a couple of quick comments I thought I might share with these young guys. They probably have been stated much more eloquently with much greater thought by someone else, I'm sure. Feel free to riff (not "rip") of any of these, and add your own:
1) The mass of humanity is the living dead, the spiritually dead, and at
every moment defy their creator. Like the driven anger(?) of the zombies, the hatred towards a Holy
God is so strong the spiritually dead would kill this Holy God if they could.
2) The idea of "living dead" could be used as an example of an innate human
belief in immortality and a cheap imitation of the final and holy
resurrection of the dead.
3) The living dead, feed off the living, in the same way many live people
typically suck the life out of other people. In other words, a zombie
represents human selfishness to a superlative degree.
4) Zombie movies represent an innate fear within humanity. We are wired in
such a way that we know we're eternal (at least in the future direction),
but a strong fear is losing our "selves" or our individuality. For those
worldviews that believe that matter is eternal and the soul is not
(humanism, atheism), zombie movies are like, their worst nightmare- that
their bodies live on while their souls (or personality, consciousness, etc.)
do not. Matter is eternal... while consciousness is not?
I like your analysis for apologetics - you make some excellent points. I never thought about that before much and have not seen any of the current fad of Zombie genre and movies - the first ones in the (didn't realize that the first one, "Night of the Living Dead" was 1968, until I just now googled it) - 1970s were enough for me - "Dawn of the Dead". (yuk - at the time they were really freaky and scary - nothing for today's young people - they laugh at them, my 23 year old tells me)
ReplyDeleteThe new fads of Zombies and Vampire love stories is really weird to me.
But you did an excellent job of thinking through the Zombie issue for apologetics. That was helpful.