Прогрессивный журнал Генезис

Sharon and Foster drive out into the desert, where signs of Rapture multiply, from dust storms up to the horsemen of the apocalypse running after and around the car. The message of god is something like: « Look, man, you read the Bible, you think I didn’t mean what I said in it? I TOLD you it would be like this, so don’t whine about it now. You KNEWwhat you were getting into. Pay up » 1 . So it is the exact opposite of the common idea that we should not take divine declarations too literally, that we should learn to discern in them their deeper metaphoric meaning. Ordinary people mostly believe at this level: when asked if they really think that 2000 years ago a son of god was walking around Palestine, they would say that while this is of course in all probability not literally true, there is for sure some higher power which softly takes care of us… the lesson of Rupture is that this very metaphoric approach, the search for some deeper meaning, is a trap. Next, Sharon and Foster are both «raptured», transported to a purgatory- like landscape where Mary approaches them from Heaven and pleads with Sharon to accept god, to declare that she loves god—by just doing this she will be able to join Mary and Randy in Heaven. Foster, although till now an atheist, quickly seizes the opportunity, says that he loves god and is allowed entrance to Heaven, but Sharon refuses, saying that she cannot declare her love for a god who acted so cruelly towards her family for no reason at all. When Mary asks her if she knows for how long she will be confined to the purgatory, condemned to be there alone, Sharon replies: « Forever». In short, Sharon realizes that she « wasted her life appeasing someone who is only toying with her feelings; this would be easier to dismiss if we discovered that God did not exist,» 2 i.e., that Sharon was just caught into her own delirious imagination. But she persist in renouncing a god who is real and really «a narcissist, giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives. The film posits the theory that God is undeserving of our love even if he does exist, that he is in no way any less fallible to pettiness and power trips than the human beings he created. Like many humans, God lives by a set of rules and laws that he applies arbitrarily at his own moral convenience. Tolkin illustrates this by showing the non-believing cop immediately being accepted into heaven by declaring his love for God in a last ditch effort to be saved. He’s merely saying what God wants to hear to save his own skin» 3 . God obviously doesn’t care if you really mean it when you declare that you love him — as the case of Foster demonstrates, you just have to say it. (On a closer look, we can see that things are here more ambiguous: maybe Foster deserves to be taken into heaven more than Sharon since he demonstrated love and care for his neighbors.) Such indifferent and narcissistic god is part of the Christian tradition: for Nicholas Malebranche, in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping those in distress, God also ultimately loves only himself, and merely uses man to promulgate his own glory. Malebranche draws here a consequence worthy of Lacan’s reversal of Dostoyevsky («If God doesn’t exist, then nothing is permitted»): it is not true that, if Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity, everyone would have been lost - quite the contrary, nobody would have been lost, i.e., every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of them. Malebranche’s conclusion is here properly perverse: since the death of Christ is a key step in realizing the goal of creation, at no time was God (the Father) happier then when he was observing His son suffering and dying on the Cross. Sharon’s resistance to God, her refusal to declare her love for him, Op.cit. 2 Op.cit. 3 http://www.sheilaomalley . com/?p=7958. 1 7