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The Matrix - welcome to the real world

I hadn't seen this film in ten years but I came across it on the TV the other night and it's inspired a few trains of thought.  I started watching just before the crucial scene where Morpheus meets with Neo and offers him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find out what 'the matrix' is.  Morpheus offers two pills: if Neo takes the blue pill, he will wake up in his bedroom and think their whole conversation was just a dream.  If he takes the red pill, he will find out what the matrix is, but there will be no going back.

Neo takes the red pill, and wakes up in a womb-like pod attached to tubes.  He looks out of the pod and sees row upon row of others, stacked hundreds of storeys high.  The whole of humanity is being used to generate energy to supply the machines which have taken over the world following an apocalyptic battle.  The pods both support human life and siphon off the energy generated by people's bodies, while keeping the people comatose and plugged in to an incredibly complex simulation which makes them believe they are living ordinary late 20th century lives - going to work, eating meals, playing with the kids and so on.  This computer simulation is the matrix.  Life as Neo has always known it is just a computer-generated dream.

I was at uni when The Matrix came out, and one of the campus magazines ran an essay competition inspired by the film.  To enter, you had to write around 1500 words explaining which pill you would take and why.  Would you choose the comforting illusion that everything was OK, or the harsh reality that things were very, very wrong?  Did it matter that ordinary life was 'not real,' since it was the only reality you had ever known?  

I suppose some people see the Christian view of the world as a matrix which keeps people in blissful ignorance of the harsh truth that everything is random and meaningless.  Like Alicia in The Good Wife, they would rather face a painful truth than allow themselves to be comforted by something that wasn't true.  I'm not sure that the Christian faith is as comforting as many people say it is - after all, following Jesus doesn't stop anyone from dying young, living in poverty or battling depression.  But I suppose it does offer two things: the assertion that this life has a meaning beyond what we create ourselves and the hope of life beyond death.

To follow a different thread; I said rather obscurely in my last post, and will attempt to express more clearly here, things do not always look the way we expect them to.  Things are not always what they seem.  The matrix looks real enough, but it isn't (whatever 'real' means).  One academic apparently once asked another why people thought the sun revolved around the earth for so many hundreds of years, and his friend replied, "Because it looked like the sun revolved around the earth."  Then the first man asked, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked like the earth revolved around the sun?"  I wonder, what would it look like if it looked like the world was created and sustained by an all-powerful and loving God?  Genuine question.

In the Christian worldview, ordinary life is not as 'real' as the reality beyond it.  Our everyday lives feel very all-encompassing while we are living them, but Christians believe that God is more real than our reality.  So in a sense Christians would agree that we are in a matrix, from which we will one day be awoken to meet God face to face.  'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.' (1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV)

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