Ep. 210 M. Night Shyamalan Is Giving You Permission to Be a Superhero
Bob reviews the “Unbreakable” movie trilogy, arguing that M. Night Shyamalan knows we need to awaken the superheroes among us. They might not even know who they are–yet.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube trailer for “Unbreakable,” the first movie in the trilogy under discussion.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
The audio production for this episode was provided by Podsworth Media.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
I enjoy these episodes.
So Bob, if you unlock anyone through this episode.. does that make you Mr. Glass?
Be bold and powerful forces will come to your aid.
What you get when psychologists, mix with superheros. Jordan Peterson is THE RED SKULL!!!
https://youtu.be/pU0h9z4rP7U
If you were familiar with the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series, you’d hate the Shyamalan atrocity even more than you already did. He couldn’t have showed less respect for the source material if he was Veerhoven making Starship Troopers.
Great episode but your statement around god not being evil doesn’t work with your immediate argument after that – If evil is so tricky and duplicitous, how do you know you’re not being fooled? Perhaps the being you think of as the good God is in fact a trickster devil that is telling you to obey him and define him as good? How do you know? If you want to make the argument that he’s not tricky enough, how do you know *that*, or any other rebuttal to any of your arguments?
Whatever argument you want to make to single out as correct the particular cultivar of the of the particular species of religion you adhere to, that argument comes down to your reasons along my ability to parse them correctly and accept them. If not that, then just your own ability to reason over mine, in which case I should simply accept the same reasons that have convinced you even if they do not convince me.
When you explain your reasons, you give examples like “I found some money in my pocket”. You admit that just such an occurrence is easily explained away, but you insist you’re too perfect to misremember leaving money anyway. This doesn’t give credibility to how you reason.
You also simply ignore problems, as with the “god is evil” argument or “god an evil trickster you’re simply defining as good” argument – the whole point in both is to question your understanding of god’s character. If you’re saying “nope that’s just not within bounds, god is good and I know it” you again rely on your own sense of infallibility – in this case, the need to not even consider the hypothetical premise of the arguments so as to avoid examining your own understanding. Do you honestly think that your opponents think God exists and is evil? No, of course not – we think your understanding of the world is inconsistent such that you have to carve out special exceptions for rationality, just as anyone who worships a god or cult leader. we want to show you how we perceive the level at which your reasoning is operating – you could be justifying the existence of any malevolent person or deity.
You also ignore the fact that, were god to be all powerful, he could accomplish the good you speak of in infinitely many ways, some that presumably don’t require the raping of babies to death. This is a weird variation of “the ends justify the means” that, for some reason, doesn’t apply to god, just as “evil” conveniently cannot apply to him either. More carving out of exceptions – if it were in any human’s power to stop a baby being raped at no cost, of course that human would be considered absolutely evil for not stopping it. Of course, there’s always a cost to any human action, which makes humans at least marginally more forgivable than some god that can do this costlessly. You must again declare yourself infallible by saying “he’s got his reasons” and leaving it at that. And again, just such a statement could be given by a believer in David Koresh.
You dismiss the evil of babies being raped to death as being mere words of a fiction author in your Harry Potter analogy, who isn’t at all morally responsible for anything that happens to his imaginary characters. This completely dismisses the reality of the suffering that happens, writing it off as farts in the wind rather than very real and horrific terrors that could be, by definition, stopped by an all-powerful god at no cost.
And if I don’t buy these contradictory and baseless arguments I think you’re making – even if the arguments are good and I’m just not correctly analyzing it – I rot in hell? That’s what I get for being unable either to 1) reason myself into your particular cultivar or 2) wholly ignore the reasoning faculty that this supposed god gave me in the first place? Again I cannot ignore my reasoning capacity and say this is a justifiable thing for an all-powerful god to do to me. He seems evil to me if he exists, and he seems most likely to not exist at all.
You may appreciate the following: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UE7ONvyXxm4