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The place starts out as a soda joint in the 1950s. Then, with each passing decade, it changes, slowly degenerating to the point that, by the time of the story, it's become a gloomy punk-rock nightclub.
One evening, when the son is drunk and depressed, the floor splits open and up from the darkness emerges this guy in a protective suit. The guy's family had gone into their bomb shelter during the Cuban missile crisis, thinking the world had been destroyed. The guy in the suit is equally terrified and doesn't say much to the son, just goes on his errands and later returns to the hole. The son thinks he's seen a religious vision and starts a cult that worships the god-like beings that periodically emerge from the hole.
That subplot in the movie is so clever because it speaks to the dangers of apocalyptic thinking -- it just might cause you to live in a bomb shelter for two decades -- as well as the voracious need of human beings to find something to worship.
It always makes me think of a line from Dostoevsky's "The Brother's Karamazov," that says, "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship."
My friend David Eldridge and I were talking the other day about freedom, and the rule of law, and how Christianity plays a part in both.
David, who's the pastor at Calvary Baptist Church, said the absence of law is no real freedom at all but rather the rule of chaos, a kind of tyranny.
That, we both agreed, applied to religion as well. There have to be some guidelines, some parameters, else wisdom and foolishness, as well as excellence and paltriness, are just opinions.
On the other hand, the way in which man usually goes about formulating those guidelines is to start codifying religious beliefs, building edifices of rarefied statements that eventually paint him into a corner. It's a kind of self-imposed slavery to his own dogma. That dogma then stands in for man when he's too weak, or too frightened to face the ambiguity of life.
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say 'Make us your slaves...'" says Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.
"They will marvel at us and look on us as gods because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful."
Religion can produce true freedom, but only if it starts from the understanding that it's imperfect, manmade and ultimately just an educated guess.
If religion takes as a primary task the building up and affirmation of humanity it avoids the pitfalls that come from pretending to know the mind of God and seeking to impose that understanding upon others.
Undoubtedly there is a religious dimension to human existence. The son who inherited the diner, as well as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, both testify to this truth.
The way to keep from enslaving ourselves is to base the much-needed guidelines for our faith on principles that open the person to the religious dimension within, not just on what we think we know about God.
God doesn't need our rules. We do. They might as well reflect the compassion and sympathy -- the best of human traits -- that lead to genuine freedom.
Contact Daily Journal religion editor Galen Holley at 678-1510 or galen.holley@djournal.com
To see more of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.djournal.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Tupelo, Miss. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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