Pop Culture Reduces It's A Wonderful Life To That Last Half Hour, And Thinks The Whole Thing Is About

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

How does this keep happening to me

Why doesn't the Bible just say, "Jesus is God?"

I've made a series of posts already elaborating the backing for Trinitarian beliefs, and so you may be thinking about how it's actually come up several times that the Bible actually does say Jesus is God on a couple of occasions namely in the confession of Thomas and also of course Jesus's famous statement, "Before Abraham was, I Am."

The question remains though, why does the majority of the Bible typically refer to Jesus by other titles other than "God"?

The answer is, actually, what I consider one of the strongest, if not THE strongest argument for the deity of Christ, so hold on to your hats.

The fact that the Bible doesn't outright say "Jesus is God" except in indirect cases is more reflective of the relative importance and etymology of the word "theos" (translated as "God") than it is of Jesus's identity.

That is because this word is relatively generic.

The writers of the New Testament would have considered the word "Lord" ("Kyrios" in the Greek) as a much more definitive way of tying Jesus's identity to Yahweh, the God of the old Testament.

This is because, in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament as quoted by the writers of the New, the word "Yahweh" was rendered, infallibly, in Scripture, as "Kyrios".

(Note: Kyrios translating to English as "Lord" gives rise to the indicator "LORD" in modern English bibles for the name of God.)

Therefore, every time that the New Testament writers use the word "Kyrios" to say "Christ is Lord", they are not merely calling him, "a lord" as someone in the middle ages might perceive it, but calling him God in a much more direct and personally identifying manner than using the term "theos".

Once you have this in mind, the Bible actually says Jesus is God on almost every page of the epistles, because you can hardly turn anywhere without seeing that Jesus is LORD, and it is not shocking why the NT writers found this term more urgent and compelling than Theos, which is already often used many times alongside the divine title anyway, as "The LORD God".

There should be absolutely no need for any confusion here.

So, this has been a tough secret to keep.

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Huzzah!

Queen's Thief New Year Oracle📜🪶🕯️🌿

In a lost volume of his Memories, Pheris Erondites related a dream he had in which the goddess Moira taught him how to predict one's fortune in the coming year. Now I will relate to you this most excellent, totally serious & trustworthy method of divination*:

First of all, you should take the number of letters that form your preferred name, and add to that number the age you will be at the 00:00 hour of the next year according to your time zone. For example:

P H E R I S = 6 letters And he was 45 years old when he wrote this method down, so 6 + 45 = 51

Then, ask yourself how many beautiful earrings you would offer on Moira's altar in exchange to have your fortune told, and add this number to the one you already have.

Pheris's own answer was 1, which was the number of earrings he had in his possession at the time. Using it as an example, we have:

51 + 1 = 52

Then keep adding the numbers among themselves until you get a single number from 1 to 9! For example:

5 + 2 = 7

Now that you have a single digit, click on the page corresponding to it on the list below, and have your new year's fortune revealed to you:

if your number was 1

if your number was 2

if your number was 3

if your number was 4

if your number was 5

if your number was 6

if your number was 7

if your number was 8

if your number was 9

Have a good new year, and be blessed in your endeavors!

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*This oracle is just a joke; please don't take the result seriously!