-- Dr. Igor Reneus, Damien (season one, episode one)
"You're the second of only two prophets whose coming is foretold in the Bible. In Isaiah 14:12, God calls you 'Son of the Morning.' You bring the beginning of an era of enlightenment."
--Ann Rutledge, Damien (season one, episode six)
The show serving as a sequel to the original The Omen manages to do something that one might never see in any other entertainment: Damien makes its antichrist a conflicted and at times even Biblically righteous person. Here is an antichrist who neither has planned to seize power throughout his entire life nor rushed to take advantage of entire groups willing to usher his malevolent reign in to the world stage. Here is an antichrist who saves a child from being crushed by a train, who tries to talk a disabled veteran out of taking his own life. Damien himself is a philosophical imbecile like the majority of developed characters in entertainment, asserting asinine or contradictory things about theism, fatalism, morality, and epistemology, but when Damien begins, the titular character is far from a selfish, overtly vile character on the level of how he treats other people.
However, there are numerous characters plotting for or against Damien's eventual ascension to the throne of the world, including some, according to his secretive guardian Ann Rutledge, who want the antichrist to come because they are Christians. In a total betrayal of their supposed Christian moral commitments, these people want what they expect to be the worst tyrant of all time in power for the sake of bringing about God's triumph over Satan and the antichrist, yet this is to actively hope for evil to be done because good will eventually follow it! Christianity is utterly contrary to utilitarianism, as within the Biblical worldview, a motive or deed is sinful in itself if it is genuinely wrong; there is no situation where anyone has to sin or should sin (a logical impossibility given that evil is what should not be done) except in extremely rare moral dilemmas where a person, because of stupidity or apathy, found himself/herself in a context where to either act or not act is to sin [1].
The irony is that other supposed Christians who are terrified of the antichrist arrange to have Damien murdered, something that contradicts Biblical teachings for the same reason as the goal of the so-called Christians who want the antichrist to come because of the ultimate outcome. Both groups are guilty of the fallacies of utilitarian moral ideas. If murder really is immoral as the Bible very plainly states, there is no situation or person to which this would not apply. No matter how extreme the stakes are, how strongly a person feels about the matter, or the morally positive or negative consequences of a course of action, murder would be evil by nature. Most Christians and non-Christians are not very philosophically competent, but none of the Christians in Damien represent reason, Christianity, or Christian rationalism.
This setup is made all the more ironic when Damien himself only begins to gravitate towards murder and a disregard for moral ideas--his own merely subjective moral perceptions or preferences, but moral ideas nonetheless--when he is repeatedly harassed or targeted by people of various ideological and personal allegiances. Damien adds his own utilitarianism to his idiotic philosophical misconceptions about reality as a whole and the Bible in particular, including the idea that moral obligations as opposed to moral feelings can exist without a deity and the idea that the specific deity of the Bible causally dictates every event and human behavior. Nevertheless, he is not alone here in embracing such ideas that are asinine whether or not Christianity is true, for there is by logical necessity no moral authority or obligation if there is no God (or if the uncaused cause does not have a moral nature) and, regardless of its veracity, the Bible does not teach theological determinism of human actions.
From the Catholic figures--and it is of course not the case that Catholicism is genuine Christianity as it is--to Damien's eager overseer Ann Rutledge, contradictory or assumption-based beliefs are regularly mentioned in Damien. None of the typical philosophical incoherence of what characters say can lessen the uniqueness of having an antichrist who does not want to be a servant of Satan and the person who will trigger the apocalyptic events of Revelation. The Beast is an unwilling, reluctant convert to the whims of Lucifer. The only loosely fatalistic thing about the role of the antichrist here is that if Damien dies, another person will supposedly become the antichrist instead, yet a dagger of Megiddo with the ability to kill him allows him to choose to continue living or end his torment on Earth. That he only gives in to his expected role after protesting the nonexistent spiritual determinism of Christian theology and human existence is one of many ways that this antichrist is far more than a cliche oppressor. Even more significantly, the Bible's scattered references to a singular antichrist do not actually conflict with many of these traits of Damien.
No comments:
Post a Comment