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World Exclusive: After Life Season 3: The First few Minutes
After Life | Season 3 Official Trailer | Netflix
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episodes will be released on January 14th.
Just Three Things. Written for #Afterlife by Ricky Gervais and Andy Burrows
July 10, 2022
Ricky Gervais
London, W1F 0LE
UK
Dear Ricky,
Tony: No. I do feel like she’s still here. And it’s like I’m in two minds. One knows the truth. She died. Logical. There’s no heaven. No reincarnation, no ghosts. I know that. But then I feel her inside me. All the time. Like she’s still part of me, guiding me. ( sighs ) It’s weird.
Anne: That’s because you’re human, and nothing really makes sense.
Tony: Look at you, Kierkegaard.
Anne: It’s okay to have feelings, you know. Things that aren’t logical. Science makes us understand how to stay alive longer. Feelings give us the reason to want to.
Tony: Or not want to.
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During the film series AFTER LIFE the atheist character Tony Johnson struggles with suicidal feelings. Is there hope in atheist framework that says we are just machines? I want to offer an alternative filled with hope later in this letter.
According to Ricky Gervais and his humanist friends science tells us that we are the result of time and chance!
TIMOTHY WITMER noted:
Hans Rookmaaker and Francis Schaeffer have written extensively on what has happened to the arts, as they have become expressions of the increasingly secular and irrational perspective pervasive in Western culture. For example, Jackson Pollock reflected meaninglessness and despair in going about his “art” by placing canvases on the floor and dripping paint on them from cans swinging above them. This was to communicate that “chance” rules. But even then he couldn’t escape the order of God’s universe—because the laws of gravity and motion dictated the movement of the paint!
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Guardians of the Secret by Jackson Pollock
Film: Play It Again, Sam (1972)
In 1972’s Play It Again, Sam, Allen plays a film critic trying to get over his wife’s leaving him by dating again. In one scene, Allen tries to pick up a depressive woman in front of the early Jackson Pollock work. This painting, because of its elusive title, has been the subject of much debate as to what it portrays. This makes for a nifty gag when Allen strolls up and asks the suicidal belle, “What does it say to you?”
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Woody Allen takes this and makes an application from it!!!! Woody Allen in Play It Again Sam
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Uploaded on May 20, 2009
Scene from ‘Play it Again Sam’ (1972)
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Allan: That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?
Museum Girl: Yes, it is.
Allan: What does it say to you?
Museum Girl: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
Allan: What are you doing Saturday night?
Museum Girl: Committing suicide.
Allan: What about Friday night?
Ricky Gervais is member of the British Humanist Association and an atheist. Therefore, it is logical that he thinks life is a result of TIME and CHANCE!
In episode 2 of the second season of AFTER LIFE is the following discussion:
Tony: I drink in times of trouble. I can’t help it the world is filled with trouble. It is a horrible place. Everyone is screwed up in someway. Everyone has worries like money or health or famine, war. We are chimps with brains the size of planets. No wonder we get drunk and try to kill each other. It is mental.
Matt: Always good to talk.
Tony: I was just explaining my new plan is to drink myself to death till I eventually implode in on my own evolution.
In his interview with Russell Brand Ricky Gervais asserted, “We are machines. We are machines trying to understand ourselves and that is hard. Will there one day be a computer suffering from anxiety? I reckon so. We are chimps with brains the size of the planet….I don’t understand consciousness…”
Francis Schaeffer noted:
Modern man resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God.But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.
This ties in well with what Schaeffer said in describing Andy Warhol’s art:
THE OBSERVER June 12, 1966 does a big spread on Warhol. Andy is a mass communicator. Someone has described pop art as Dada plus Madison Avenue or commercialism and I think that is a good definition. Dada was started in Zurich and came along in modern art. Dada means nothing. The word “Dada” means rocking horse, but it was chosen by chance. The whole concept Dada is everything means nothing. Pop Art has been said to be the Dada concept put forth in modern commercialization. Everything in his work is being leveled down to an universal monotony which he can always sell for $8000.00.
ANDY WARHOL says, “It stops you thinking about things. I wish I were a machine. I don’t want to be heard. I don’t want human emotions. I have never been touched by a painting. I don’t want to think. The world would be easier to live in if we all were machines. It is nothing in the end anyway.”
Ricky’s atheistic humanism makes his selection of the song SILENCE by Dave Thomas Jr. perfect for AFTER LIFE because there has been no revelation from above which brings me to this discussion below.
Francis Schaeffer when he was discussing the artwork of Francis Bacon then he skips over to Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, and John Cage and compares them to Bacon in their view that possibly that a message break forth from the impersonal chance universe:
I have an essay on Francis Bacon by John Russell. Methuan published it in London in 1964.
Bacon goes on, “In my case all painting–and the older I get, the more it becomes so–is an accident.” Now this is very important and to think of Jackson Pollock putting on his paint as a pure accident and you may remember my lecture on Paul Klee.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) speaks of some of his paintings as though they were a kind of Ouija board. Klee thinks that the universe can speak through his paintings. Not because he believes there are spirits there to speak, but because he hopes that the universe will push through and cause a kind of automatic writing, this time in painting. It is an automatic writing with no one there, as far as anyone knows, but the hope that the “universe” will speak.We think of John Cage with the universe speaking though chance.
Now Bacon continues and he says something very similar to what Pollock, Cage and Klee believed, “I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things that are very much better than I could make it do. Perhaps one could say it’s not an accident, because it becomes a selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.”
Now here from Francis Bacon’s own viewpoint. An absurd universe in a total sense and in some element of the paint taking on its own personality and a message may come through from impersonal source.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Chance rules. If a man starts out only from himself and works outward it must eventually if he is consistent seem so that only chance rules and naturally in such a setting you can not expect him to have anything else but finally a hate of life.
I like Francis Schaeffer‘s term “Mannishness” of man. He defines it as those aspects of man, such as significance, love, rationality and the fear of non being, which mark him off from animals and machines and give evidence of his being created in the image of a personal God.
(Francis Schaeffer pictured)
The scientist Blaise Pascal is quoted by Sagan and then Sagan notes, “Most of the philosophers adjudged great in the history of western thought held that humans are fundamentally different from other animals…”
Blaise Pascal pictured below
As you know Pascal was the inventor of the barometer and he lived from 1623 to 1662. Pascal also observed, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man,and only God can fill it.”
What is the solution? “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The scriptural directive is not for us to work harder to achieve God’s favor (Romans 3:20), but to accept God’s mercy through our repentance and receiving Christ as a free gift (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Adrian Rogers visiting with President Reagan above
RICKY you want some evidence that indicates that the Bible is true? Here is a good place to start and that is taking a closer look at the archaeology of the Old Testament times. Is the Bible historically accurate?
(Belshazzar’s Feast is a major painting by Rembrandt now in the National Gallery, London.)
Adrian Rogers observed the Bible is affirmed through historical accuracy. Do you remember the story about the handwriting on the wall that is found in the fifth chapter of Daniel? Belshazzar hosted a feast with a thousand of his lords and ladies. Suddenly, a gruesome hand appeared out of nowhere and began to write on a wall. The king was disturbed and asked for someone to interpret the writing. Daniel was found and gave the interpretation. After the interpretation, “Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.” (Daniel 5:29). Basing their opinion on Babylonian records, the historians claim this never happened. According to the records, the last king of Babylon was not Belshazzar, but a man named Nabonidas. And so, they said, the Bible is in error. There wasn’t a record of a king named Belshazzar. Well, the spades of archeologists continued to do their work. In 1853, an inscription was found on a cornerstone of a temple built by Nabonidas, to the god Ur, which read: “May I, Nabonidas, king of Babylon, not sin against thee. And may reverence for thee dwell in the heart of Belshazzar, my first-born favorite son.” From other inscriptions, it was learned that Belshazzar and Nabonidas were co-regents. Nabonidas traveled while Belshazzar stayed home to run the kingdom. Now that we know that Belshazzar and Nabonidas were co-regents, it makes sense that Belshazzar would say that Daniel would be the third ruler. What a marvelous nugget of truth tucked away in the Word of God!
The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.
Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002
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Ricky Gervais 25/07/2021 Facebook Live at 28:29 mark Ricky answers my question about Sam Harris
The Daily Hatch 