There was a movie that came out in 2008, 2009, something like that. I think I remember what theater I saw it in so I'd put it right in there. It was called Atonement. Did you see this one? It was one of those fancy artsy kind of movies that all went mainstream in the late 2000s there was this little

window where really smart movies made it big and then superheroes and explosions took

over and those movies kind of got relegated over the last 10 years but this one you might have seen it was significant had Kara Knightley it had

Professor X James McAvoy

You know what I think the Weasley guy in that was a young Benedict Cumberbatch. Hang on a second. How about that? It sure was. Dr. Strange, Sherlock. Oh, in 2007, I was wrong on the date.

It's a really good show and if you haven't seen it I really would recommend it it's not

particularly uplifting because the theme of the show is the impossibility of

atonement by human means that is we just can't really truly go back and fix the things we got wrong.

It's not a sci-fi movie, but time travel isn't an option and since time travel isn't an option there's nothing we can do to truly

repair at the root the stream of human wreckage that all of us leaves behind.

Now I don't want to paint a bleak picture. We also all leave behind all kinds of beautiful stuff and redemptive stuff. We're a weird mixed bag that way. But the stuff that we really drag with us tends to be the guilt, the ick, the things where maybe it seemed

like a good idea at the moment, or maybe we knew dang well it wasn't a good idea at the moment, we were

mad, or we felt wrong, or we were just socially awkward, or we had a weird burrito, I don't know we just didn't behave well

and we heard other people and we did damage but yeah what can you do I mean even if

there weren't all of the social repercussions and social memory and personal pride, like I said earlier, we still can't go back in time and unmake the damage so that that hurt never happened, so that people never suffered because of what we did, so that we never suffered because of what we did so that we never suffered because of what we did.

And so the point of this movie is atonement is kind of a myth.

We can try to square accounts a little bit. We could try to make things better, but ultimately you don't really get to do that in this world.

And that, in a nutshell, is the human problem, right? I mean, that's why there's religion.

That's why the Bible exists.

That's why if you believe what I believe,

God reached into the mess of human depravity.

And I was like, I'm going to put a redemption story right over the top of that sucker.

...