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Woody Allen’s Match Point

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Woody Allen’s latest film, Match Point, illustrates the depths to which Darwinian nihilism is dragging popular culture. The protagonist, Chris Wilten, murders his pregnant mistress and an innocent neighbor in order to protect his position in his wife’s wealthy family. His philosophical justification for his crime is that human existence is due to pure chance, hence is morally meaningless. Here is a direct quote from the film:

It seems that scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance—no purpose, no design.

As it turns out, Chris gets off scot free due to a chance event.

Anyone willing to take bets how long it will be before we hear defendants in court invoking the Darwin Defense in extenuation of their crimes?

Comments
"Today we are at a crossroads. One road leads to hopelessness and despair; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we choose wisely." - Woody AllenMung
May 24, 2006
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Reminds me of J Budziszewski's essay in First Things, "The Second Tablet Project." (Trying to get along on the second tablet of the Decalogue while pretending the first tablet is hooey.) It never ceases to amaze me when Darwinists and naturalistic materialists tell us, on the one hand, that God is a fiction and morality therefore subjective, and, on the other hand, that some acts are clearly immoral (invariably, at this point, allusions to the Holocaust are made. How they try to have it both ways!terrylmirll
May 23, 2006
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its funny that this discussion is going here because back a few months ago I was having a rather good back-and-forth with a theistic evolutionist, and I kept trying to get him to express some sort of interest or concern in the side-effects of Darwinian thinking (in terms of morality, education, etc.) and he claimed to have absolutely no interest in, or understanding of these phenomena. It was very frustrating, because to most people, the connection is obvious. It is great to see a film made which is such a mirror of this intellectual process (even a stupid film like this one) Perhaps the unflattering view it gives of this nihilism will shed some unexpected light...tinabrewer
May 22, 2006
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Mats I think the answer to Dahmer's question was self evident given the fact that the interview was conducted from a jail cell.ftrp11
May 22, 2006
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"Anyone willing to take bets how long it will be before we hear defendants in court invoking the Darwin Defense in extenuation of their crimes?" You mean, something closely resembling the following words? "If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…" [Mass Murderer] Jeffrey Dahmer, in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, Nov. 29, 1994. http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/tools/Quotes/dahmer.asp ........... Ah, the joys of evolutionism!Mats
May 22, 2006
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Hmm... a professed atheist making a movie about Darwinism and using it to justify murder. I don't want what he's smoking. ;)jasonng
May 21, 2006
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I would much rather have my neighbor be someone who is biologically illiterate, but who understands right from wrong than to have my neighbor be fully versed in neo-Darwinian thought, but who doesn't understand, "thou shalt not kill" or "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."bFast
May 21, 2006
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We have already witnessed moral relativism hard at work in our schools and other public institutions, including the three branches of our government (note the Clinton/Lewinski afair). But the pitiful slide of ethics into the dung heap is only a part of the problem with the Dawkins/Darwinian morality de jour. What really scares me is the use of purposeless Darwinian evolution to actually justify crimes such as rape and infanticide - claiming them as natural, evolved traits with a genetic basis that have been selected for their contribution to the survival of the human species. Search for MIT psychology professor Pinker's article from the New York Times, or biologists Thornhill and Palmer's "adaptive reproductive strategy" of rape outlined in their book "A Natural History of Rape". As Roberto Rivera expresses it: "Since our culture has rejected the Christian account of the origin and purpose of man - an account shared, in large measure, by Judaism -it finds itself at a loss for explanations. While our culture wants no part of the tradition it rejected, it isn't ready to live with the implications of the replacement it embraced." (see http://www.boundless.org/2000/features/a0000236.html)dougmoran
May 21, 2006
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Supposedly, Clarence Darrow successfully persuaded the judge presiding in the murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to give them life imprisonment instead of death by arguing that they were not to blame for being exposed to Nietzsche's writings. Nowadays, I wouldn't be too surprised to see somebody completely acquitted on those grounds! Society's going to hell in a hand basket. Sometimes I don't know if we should be trying to slow the process down or speed it up!

crandaddy
May 21, 2006
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what a boring, silly movie. One thing about it was perfect, though: the use of the arch anti-materialist Dostoevsky to frame the story of the end-results of materialism is such a terrible condemnation of the end of art under the reign of the nihilists! I read somewhere that Richard Dawkins is sure that had Beethoven lived today, he would happily have written "Ode to Evolution" instead of the Ninth Symphony to Schiller's Ode to Joy. How diseased do things have to become before the dried-up, uninspired nonethingness of nihilism is finally admitted? One can only feel pity for a soul so empty that he could compare blind, purposeless evolution to the brotherhood of mankind under the influence of "freude" and think them equally worthy of such exquisite music...tinabrewer
May 21, 2006
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"Anyone willing to take bets how long it will be before we hear defendants in court invoking the Darwin Defense in extenuation of their crimes?" Something similar: "At Dayton, Bryan read out Darrow's famous excuse for the earlier defendants: "Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? . . . Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university." As Richard Weaver commented on Bryan's use of the Leopold and Loeb record: "To Darrow's previous position that the doctrine of Nietzsche is capable of immoral influence, Bryan responded that the doctrine of evolution is likewise capable of immoral influence."" http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9702/iannone.htmljohnnyb
May 21, 2006
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Scientists who are not blinded by a philosophical commitment to blind chance are finding design everywhere they look. The philosophical, theological and ethical implications of materialism, embodied most definitively in the doctrine of Darwinism, are nihilistic at best. That's one of many reasons I changed my mind and converted from militant atheism to Christianity.GilDodgen
May 21, 2006
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