Materialists continue to dismiss the notion of immortality of soul, calling it as bull-shit. However Film Industry is least bothered about such ridicule as they know that most people are fascinated by the idea that we have a soul that survives the physical death (of the body). Latest in the series is the movie (IF I STAY, Warner Bros. Pictures, directed by R J Cutler, released last Friday) that revolves around the heroine having an out of the body experience. She has survived a car crash that killed the rest of her family. She `sees' her own shattered body, first by the side of the snow-covered highway and later in a hospital ICU in coma. She is caught in between a choice: should she stay among the living or move on with the departed?
It is interesting to find Movies delving into serious questions like why God permits suffering. For example, an old Swedish film The Seventh Seal written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the bubonic plague pandemic, or Black Death, it tells the story of the journey of a disillusioned medieval knight, Antonius Block, returning from the Crusades and his meeting with Death that has come for his life.
Actually Block encounters Death, personified as a black-cowled figure resembling a monk. Block, who's in the middle of a chess game he's been playing alone, challenges Death to a match, believing that he can forestall his doom as long as the game continues. Death agrees and they start a new game. In between, Block suddenly asks, “Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should He hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles? What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able to? “Death doesn't answer.”
Movie thus presents the view that God will not answer such questions as they are already available from the nature itself. If we have senses, it will not prove some superior Being with senses does not exist. If scriptures contain half-spoken promises, it means such promises have not been made by God in the first place, but attributed to Him; if miracles happened only in the past but do not happen now, it means they have never happened in the past too …. Why does He permit suffering on earth? This question presupposes that people expect Him to reduce them into robots (something that no humans would like) incapable of learning anything new from the experieces. He has nothing to do with suffering on earth—it’s all consequences of action each one chooses; and this is the only way for humans to learn and to grow upward! Experience is the teacher, and experiences are available to everyone in abundance!