Rehumanizing Noah

I have decided to join the world on one of the most highly discussed topics currently on the internet.  I will, however, be joining what I believe to be the minority in the discussion:  people who have actually seen the movie.  Hold onto your hats, folks, because "NOAH", directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Russell Crowe, Emma Watson, and some other people you only slightly care about, is more biblically and traditionally accurate than you first thought.

Before you start judging this movie, do me two HUGE favors:  watch the movie and read Genesis 6-9.  Four chapters.  That's it.  You can do it.  I promise.  In fact, it'll take most people longer to watch the movie than to read the biblical account.

WARNING:  HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD.

I've read so many people lately talking about how bad of an interpretation the movie is and all the things that are wrong with it.  I will, in this post, be analyzing as many of these issues as I can think of.

See, the key with almost all of these issues is that just because YOUR Bible, an English translation of a book that was written in Hebrew multiple generations and an enslavement after Noah died, says something happened, doesn't mean it literally happened exactly that way.  More importantly, just because it doesn't say something happened, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

When you actually read the biblical account of Noah and the ark, you'll find that there isn't much there.  If you were to make a movie that truly reflected the text including where it seems to put the most emphasis, you might could fill a half hour assuming you had a nice long sequence of Noah meticulously measuring the boat and spent at least ten minutes watching things drown to death.  I don't know about you, but I'd watch the HECK out of that movie!

I'm gonna go ahead and knock out the stupidest complaint I've heard:  (The following should be read in an obnoxiously childish and nasally voice.)  "The movie never even says the word 'God'."  No.  It doesn't.  Nor should it.  If the movie was going to have any kind of accuracy in that respect, the characters would use dozens of different titles for God, all in some language that would make them sound like gibberish to most people (since this story takes place before the Tower of Babel).  It's SO much simpler to simply say "the creator".  Duh.

Now that that's out of the way, let's move on to some real issues.

(The following should once again be read in the same whiny voice used above.)  "God talked to Noah.  There were no cryptic messages or need for interpretation."  ACHOO!!!

Have you ever talked with someone who believes they have heard God speak to them?  I have.  I know one unnecessarily well.  When you get the chance to talk to one of these people, go ahead and ask them if God used words.  Chances are they'll say no.  Compared to most people's interactions with and messages from God, Noah's dreams in the movie are incredibly straightforward.

In the movie, Methuselah makes it pretty clear the way most theologians will agree that God speaks to humans:  "You have to trust that he will speak to you in a way that you can understand."  I think that's a much better lesson from the story than "Noah was awesome and God won't ever talk to you that way.  Sorry."

(Hopefully you're catching on, but, you know, whiny voice.  Ok?)  "There were no rock monsters."

Believe it or not, the movie actually has a fantastic explanation for this firmly rooted in Abrahamic tradition and the books of the Apocrypha.  The "rock monsters" are, in the movie, fallen angels.  Specifically, a group of angels call the Watchers.  That shit's straight out of the Book of Enoch.  They're "rock monsters" because they are being punished for disobeying God's will.  That is actually a little thing we in the business like to call creativity.  If you can find me a photograph of a fallen angel that doesn't look like a rock monster, I may be willing to concede this point.

The real problem people should have with the Watchers is not that they are "rock monsters", but what I consider to be the most clever and intriguing thing about them in this movie:  the reason they fell.

In the movie, they are cast out of heaven for sympathizing with humanity.  They descend to Earth after man is cast out of Eden to teach tem how to use the world to survive on their own.  For this, they are punished with imprisonment their own bodies.  In the Book of Enoch, they are punished for having sex with humans because human chicks are SEXY!  (Seriously.  That's basically what it says.)

If you're gonna take issue with the "rock monsters", that's what the issue should be.  But, really, this answer is less creepy, more interesting, and leads to a beautiful lesson of redemption.  Aren't "God's will is the law even if it doesn't make sense to us." and "Obey God's will and he will welcome you back home, regardless of your screw-ups." much better lessons than "Don't screw members of other species no matter how sexy they are."?

(You know the drill.  Whiny.)  "Noah didn't fight people off of the boat."

Really?  You think that Noah just built a highly conspicuous boat and then when things started flooding no one tried to get on?  I don't even feel like giving a long response to this one.  Just grow up and get real.  Human nature is easy to predict.  Either there was no way whatsoever for them to get on the boat (highly unlikely) or Noah beat them off with a stick.  Literally.

(You don't have to imagine this one as whiny.  This one's basically legit.)  "Shem, Ham, and Japheth had wives when they got on the ark."

I'll grant you that the simplest interpretation of the story would suggest this.  In fact, almost any sane person would interpret the story that way.  It puts off the incestual creepiness of repopulating the earth off for one more generation . . . but still just one.

What the Bible actually says is that they and their wives got on the ark, which, technically, they did in the movie.  Just creative interpretation.

(Let's whine again.)  "There were no stowaways on the ark."

How do you know?  Were you there?  Whatever.  Let's just chalk this one up to Hollywood and move on.

(I'll let you off without whining on this one.  I don't agree with you, but I understand why you would be upset here.)  "Noah didn't try to kill his grandchildren.  He was a good man."

Did he try to kill his grandchildren?  The Bible doesn't say he did.  It also doesn't say he didn't.  Might he have?  Consider this:

Let's assume for a moment that Noah was a human with human thoughts and human emotions.  (I know.  Shocker.  (I know.  I shouldn't have to even say this, but people don't seem to get that.))  He was presented with the idea that mankind was so irreparably screwed up that God planned to drown the entire world.  You don't think that Noah would take a moment to reevaluate his own existence?  Or his family's?  Humanity ruined creation and infected themselves with sin.  Every human is sinful.  Period.  It's really not a very far leap at all to "all of humanity should be destroyed".  Killing his grandchildren would have been the only way to ensure humanity's extinction.

Noah made a conscious decision to let all of humanity die.  He believed that human kind was so evil that they deserved to drown.  All of them.  If you met Noah right now, you probably wouldn't think he was such a nice guy.  But, more importantly, you haven't met Noah.  For all you know, he was a racist prick.  You just don't know.

Let's look at the lesson though.  Which would you rather have taught to you:  "You must follow God's will to the letter.  There is no disobeying."  or  "God gives you choices in life and allows humanity to be masters of their own fate."

(Last one, and I'll even let you have it whine-free.)  "The movie supports evolution."

Yep.  It sure does.  But you know what?  It also supports creationism.

What the movie actually does is present both stories simultaneously and layers them together so that you can clearly see that you can believe in the big bang theory and evolution and still believe God created the heavens and the earth.  That's what I believe, and I LOVED that sequence in the movie.  If you see nothing else, find a way to see that sequence.  Nothing so succinctly explains the harmony between science and religion as that sequence did.

Is this movie an actual purely biblical retelling of the Noah story?  No.  But no sane person would enjoy that movie.  It would suck hard.  It is, however, a fantastic movie.  The movie does a beautiful job of presenting the lessons it wants, especially the primary lesson of cleansing inherent in the story.

The problem most people are having with the movie is that they want the fluffy version where everyone is good or bad and the good guys win.  They don't want to watch people drowning to death.  They don't want to think about the characters having lives.  They want a cute little old man surrounded by pretty animals with a rainbow above them.  If you want that, don't bother with this movie.  If you want that, try VeggieTales or another children's show.

This movie is a fantastic example of how the Bible can be interpreted creatively.  You can stick with the childish story you were raised on, or you can join those of us not bound to tradition and enter a whole new realm of story telling.  If you did both favors I asked for at the start of this post and still don't like this movie's interpretation of Noah, do me one more favor:  when I start writing biblical stories, don't even waste your time reading them.  I can tell you now, you'll hate them.

I support creative interpretation.  Everything else is just boring.

My Favorite Number

Currently, my favorite number is -1/12 for one very particular reason.

But before you hear that reason, do me a favor and start adding together all the counting (mathematicians call them "natural") numbers.  You can use a calculator if you like.  There is a very particular reason for this.

But before you hear that reason, a story!

Once upon a time, there was a hotel with infinite rooms and no vacancies.  One day, a man came to the completely full hotel and asked for a room.  Now, the clerk working at the front desk was extremely clever.  He told the man that getting him a room would be no problem.  The clerk then went to the woman in room one and told her his plan.  The woman in the room agreed, packed up her things, and went to room two, sending its occupant to room three.  The person from room three then moved to room four, the person in room four went to room five, five went to six, and so on.  The clerk then showed the new guest to the newly vacant room one.

The infinite hotel paradox is fundamental in the explanation of why I have chosen my favorite number.

Now, consider the following equation:

U=1-1+1-1+1-1+ . . .

It's easy to see by looking at this that if you were to stop after an odd number of actions, U=1, and if you were to stop after an even number of actions, U=0.  What if, however, you never stopped?  What if you continued this infinitely?  What would your answer be then?

To answer these questions, I will add U to itself and use the principle from the infinite hotel paradox to shift the numbers by one position:

  U=1-1+1-1+1-1+ . . .
+U=    1-1+1-1+1- . . .

Set up this way, you can see that all of the positive 1's line up with a negative 1 and vice-versa except for the first one.  Thus, we know the following:

2U=1

Simple algebra then tells us that U=1/2.

So if you add and take away 1 an infinite number of times, you somehow end up with 1/2.  Math.

That result almost makes sense.  1/2 is the average of the two numbers the equation was bouncing between, so it seems appropriate that it would end up there.  I'm not done, though.  Consider this infinite sum:

X=1-2+3-4+5-6+ . . .

We're now going to use a similar premise to the one above.

  X=1-2+3-4+5-6+ . . .
+X=   1-2+3-4+5- . . .

If you do this arithmetic, you'll see that you end up with this:

2X=1-1+1-1+1-1+ . . .

Look familiar?  What I've just shown is that 2X=U.  We already know that U=1/2, so 2X=1/2.  Do your algebra and you'll find that X=1/4.

Alright, folks.  Here we go.  Hopefully, you've been adding up the natural numbers this whole time, because that's where we're going next.  When you get done adding all of them together, we're going to call that number N.  If you like equations better, N looks like this:

N=1+2+3+4+5+6+ . . .

Now, let's figure out what N is.  You just keep on adding so you can check my work, and I'll start subtracting X from N.

 N=1+2+3+4+5+6+ . . .
-X=-1+2-3+4-5+6- . . .

If you're still with me, you can see that all the odd numbers will disappear and all the even numbers will be doubled.  So you'll be left with this:

N-X=4+8+12+16+20+ . . .

Which some of you may recognize as this:

N-X=4(1+2+3+4+5+ . . . )

Now, notice that the right side of this equation is simply N being multiplied by 4.  We know that X=1/4, so I'm going to do some substitution and rearranging.

N-(1/4)=4N (I substituted in 1/4 and N.)
-(1/4)=3N (I subtracted N from both sides.)
N=-1/12 (I flipped the equation and divided by 3.)

So there you have it.  If you add all of the natural numbers together, the answer is -1/12.  Want to know something weirder?  Physicists have used this result in string theory.  That's right.  The people unravelling the mysteries of the universe are using the fact that 1+2+3+4+5+6+ . . . =-1/12!

No foolin'.

Results like this are the reason why I'm convinced that math is closer to philosophy than science.  In order to believe this, you have to accept that infinite sums are things we are allowed to work with.  Some mathematicians disagree.  That's when we enter this weird debate over whether or not numbers exist.  I tried to write an explanation for this debate, but these guys' videos do it so much better:

Do Numbers Exist?
Is Math a Feature of the Universe?

It ultimately comes down to this question:  Do we discover mathematics or do we create it?