Reflections on Life and Faith,
by David Keating

The Day the Earth Stood Still

April 28, 2007

     If you're a science fiction buff you may remember a movie from the early fifties that starred Michael Rennie as an alien sent to Earth to tell us to knock off all the killing each other stuff. The movie was called The Day the Earth Stood Still.

     It was the most memorable of a raft of similar fare that came out when the full destructive potential of atomic bombs began to seep into the collective consciousness of average folks like you and me.

     Did those movies do any good? Impossible to say I suppose. The planet isn't a radioactive wasteland, so that's a plus. If even one person watched that movie and decided not to push some big red button someplace, it accomplished more than its creators could have ever hoped.

    A lot has changed since that movie came out in 1951. Unfortunately, much is still the same. People still die for lack of food and water. We still settle our differences through war and lesser violences. And we still look for some outside authority to come along and solve our problems for us. Because that was really the premise of the movie. Rennie's aliens had created robots whose sole function was to eliminate anyone who threatened the peace. They were remorseless and unstoppable. They had a simple moral code. Break the code and die. Ergo, no one broke the code. At least, not more than once.

     Now, some people find this is a comforting thought. To be sure, there's a certain freedom to be had from handing over responsibility for right and wrong to someone else. When we're young, we look to our parents or other adults to act as referee. When we're older, it might be a cop or a politician or the CEO of the company we work for.

     And sometimes we like to foist the job off on God.

     We decide that there's really nothing that we can do to make the world better. In fact, no matter what we do, the world is going to be just as nasty a place tomorrow as it is today. And we console ourselves about our inability to change the world with the thought that someday God is going to come swooping in and fix everything.

     In fact, if that's the case, we don't need to worry too much about doing anything at all. We can just leave it all up to God.

      The catch to this of course is that according to the way some people read the Bible or the Q'uran, God's way of fixing things is kinda like the way the robots in that movie do it. Wipe out most of the planet. Frankly, it seems to me that we already have enough people trying to do that.

     Luckily, that's not the only choice we have. Not in the movie, where Rennie's character tells us to get our act together or expect the robots, and not in our faith.

     Solving global warming, ending war, averting a famine, or welcoming the new neighbour, isn't a matter of waiting for someone else to act for us. Not even if that someone else is God.

     It’s a matter of acting for ourselves.

     The CEO doesn't need to wait for the politician to force ethical choices. The politician doesn't need to wait for the environmentalist to lobby for responsible policies.

     And you and I don't need to wait for space aliens, or even God, to come swooping down to our backyard to know that we can shake our neighbour's hand, give a blanket to someone who's cold, and encourage each other to live the Golden Rule.

     That would truly be a reason for the earth to stand still.

     And I'm sure God won't mind in the least.

David Keating