An upgraded version of Superman, tailored for the new digital society we live in, addresses some of the social and political themes that matter most to the 21st century audience.

Are you just watching episode 164, Superman 2025?

Welcome to the podcast that shares critical thinking for the entertained Christian.

I'm Eve Franklin.

I'm Tim Martin.

And we decided to, you know, pick one of two superhero movies currently in the theater.

Our other option was the new version of Fantastic Four.

And just like Superman, it's a remake of a remake of a remake.

Yeah, we just can't think of anything new anymore.

We just have to keep remaking old things.

It's been rebooted so many times.

The original boot isn't there anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, this one's interesting.

Superman, in that it's got the exact same title.

Of course, so does Fantastic Four of its original predecessor, the 19.

Was it 78 version?

Yeah.

Good old Christopher Reeve, I think.

Christopher Reeve, 1978.

Yeah.

Yep.

This was a.

A new version of Superman.

He's completely.

I won't say he's completely new because they keep rebooting Superman.

So I think this is probably authentic to a reboot of Superman in the comic books.

I don't know.

I don't have never really followed Superman as a comic book hero.

I've never been into comic books, actually.

The only time I've really read comic books is when I got hooked on Daredevil.

When Netflix came out with the series, I started reading some of the compilations of Daredevil because I couldn't get enough from Netflix.

But I think that Superman, he's been portrayed so many times in a video format.

There's been movies.

The original.

What was it?

Trilogy.

There was more than three.

Was there?

I know that the first one was good.

Second, third, and fourth were awful.

Four or five of them, I think.

Yeah, they just got worse with each one.

The second to last one had Richard Pryor and then it had John Cryer.

Yeah, yeah.

They just got really stupid the more they made.

Yeah.

I don't know that I've even seen them all, but Superman, the original Superman, was a classic.

And it's still a beautiful movie.

If you never have seen it, you should watch it because it's.

I mean, it's a product of its time.

You call it the original Superman, but even that one was a reboot.

Yeah.

Because there had been at least one Superman movie before the Christopher Reeve version.

And there was, of course, the Superman series from the 1950s with George Reeves.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think that There used to be the curse of Superman for the actors that played Superman.

They all like had accidents afterwards or something like that.

It doesn't hold true to the more modern remakes.

So anyway, speaking of more modern Supermans, one of my favorites is the Lois and Clark that came out in the 90s.

It went for quite a few seasons.

It's campy now, but it was actually really good production back in the 90s.

Yeah, it was really enjoyable.

It was a one hour drama, prime time.

And it had a lot of humor and it kind of developed Clark from when he first joined the Daily Planet and met Lois.

And then through the seasons, you kept going, when is she going to find out he's Superman?

Eventually, of course she did.

And I thought the Lex Luthor that was in Lois and Clark, he really departed from the comic book version because he had hair and he was a little more suave and a little less villainous, but he was still a villain.

Definitely.

That was one of my favorite portrayals of Superman.

And whenever I see Dean Cain, I still think of his portrayal of Clark.

Me too.

Every time.

Those are some good memories I have of Superman.

And of course, you can't mention Superman without talking about the music because the Superman theme from the 1978 movie was one of the themes that I think really knocked John Williams up to the top for soundtracks, for scores.

And it's one of his best known.

When you hear that theme, you know it's Superman, right?

Absolutely.

Beautiful music.

Everybody knows the music from Superman.

I mean, probably if you haven't even seen the movie, you would know the music.

It's kind of like Jaws.

It's just you hear that music and you know what it is.

And thankfully, the music for this Superman is by David Fleming and John Murphy.

And they actually play to that theme.

So they weave it through a lot of the pieces that are throughout the movie.

And I appreciate that because, you know, it keeps it real.

It keeps it authentic.

The music, really.

To be honest, I didn't really notice the music until the credits where I didn't like the music.

I'm with you there.

Punk rock has never been my thing.

Yeah, I think it was just the pre credits.

If I'd hung out and watched the credits all the way to the end.

I think it switched back to score after that awful music was done.

But it kind of was.

It tied into the movie.

So I sort of understand now why they put it in there.

But it was a big turn off for me.

But I will play a little bit of the actual score Here so we can listen to it.

All right, so did you want to explain why there was a punk rock piece of music in the pre credits?

Sure.

So, as I'm sure all of our listeners know, James Gunn was hired to reboot the DC Cinematic Universe.

And one of the things he did was he skipped the origin story for Superman, but he did put in tie backs to his time growing up in Smallville, Kansas.

And at one point, he and Lois have a fake argument, like you do, about what is and is not rock and roll.

And he makes mention of his favorite band, which we actually see later as a poster on the wall of his bedroom he grew up in.

His favorite band is a punk rock band called the Crab Joyce.

Is that it?

The Crab Joys?

Something like that, yeah.

Incredible Crab Joys.

Or the Marva.

And as a joke, because the Crab Joys have actually appeared in other D.C. properties as, you know, an offhand reference.

So as a joke, they had a band record a song as the Crab Joys and they played it at the beginning of the end credits.

Yeah, but I mean, it was punk rock, and it was still terrible music.

It was awful.

I don't like Clark's taste of music, let's put it that way.

So I was not excited to go see this movie.

I will be honest up front about this.

I have not really much cared for the DC movies.

I've not gotten into them.

And to be honest, even the Marvel stuff now is kind of whatever.

Yeah, but you had gone to see both of the possible movies.

You said Superman.

There was lots to talk about.

And I had unfortunately had this movie completely spoiled by that point, because a lot of the commentators that I follow on YouTube, various podcasts and stuff that I watch had already talked about it and talked about the good and the bad and, you know, thorough reviews that basically spoiled the movie from beginning to end.

So I wasn't surprised at anything that happened in this movie because I had been utterly spoiled before I went to see it.

Yeah, I have to admit that James Gunn is good at making things funny and entertaining.

And so I was expecting at least that, you know, that I would go in and I would be entertained, and I was.

It was a very entertaining movie.

There is some good, there is some bad.

But in the end, it was a very entertaining movie.

And kudos to James Gunn for doing that, because everybody is making movies so politically or socially, to the.

I guess the template of what society expects in a movie now.

And so typically, it's like too much in your face and too much preachy and.

And not enough entertainment.

So the.

This movie entertained.

It did have some preachy stuff in it, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be.

Yeah, it could have been a lot worse.

Yeah, it could have been a lot.

Worse, which is really sad when that's the best thing we can say about Hollywood these days.

I would say my initial reaction to this is it's not the Superman that someone from my generation would expect to see.

So if you were raised on the 1978 Superman and on Lewis and Clark and even Smallville on the wb or, you know, things from the past, you know, the old versions of Superman, this is not the Superman you're going to expect.

This is a completely different Superman.

He's vulnerable.

He's not invincible.

And I mean vulnerable on multiple levels.

Yeah, he's still learning his way around.

Yeah.

And he can get hurt, which is not something that you.

In all of the other versions of Superman, unless there was kryptonite, he was pretty much invulnerable.

I mean, there wasn't much that could hurt him.

In this instance, the movie starts out with him being hurt quite badly.

So it's definitely not the Superman that someone from my generation would expect to see.

And that's okay.

I mean, he's a Superman for a new generation.

He's a reboot.

Honestly, it's okay.

It's just not going to speak to our generation, I think, as much as it would be to a younger generation, maybe.

I can see what you're saying there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that he continues to speak to me because I understand what they're doing, making him more vulnerable, less of a cosmic power than he has been in many of the previous movies.

But it definitely is a different take on every other Superman we've seen on the big screen, Right?

Yeah, he's different.

Like I said, he's not what you would expect.

And for some people who reviewed the movie, that was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back for them.

And I think that's where some of the criticism is coming from, is that he is a completely different Superman.

And, I mean, he still represents what is good in humanity.

He still stands up for the same values that the original Superman stood up for.

And that kind of comes into question in this movie.

It's actually part of the story.

But in the long run, he is, at least as a status symbol, he is still the Superman that we grew up with.

It's just he's a different take on it.

And that makes Me happy because there has been some reboots of Superman that were less moral.

And I'm trying to remember now, what was the name of the movie, the one where he had Lois, had his child?

I can't remember.

Oh, I don't remember that.

So it was Superman Returns.

That one was one that kind of portrayed him in a less moral.

He was less of a moral figure there.

And that bothered me when that one came out.

That was kind of a presentation of Superman that I just didn't care for.

There were parts of the movie that were okay, but overall, he was just less of a moral symbol.

You know, had a child out of wedlock and all that kind of stuff.

So I think if we were to go our old route with this movie, we would cover a lot of themes that we have already covered before.

Some horses that we've actually beat to death multiple times.

Some of those themes would be the responsibilities of a hero.

We have dealt with multiple superhero movies in the past, and we always tend to gravitate to what is a hero as a theme.

I don't think we're going to touch on that quite as much this time around.

The other one that we have dealt with, and there's a couple of our past episodes that I initially thought of when we did Gemini man, we talked about nature versus nurture.

It was like the biggest theme in that movie.

And I think this version of Superman actually has a very strong similar theme of nature versus nurture.

And almost to the same level that Gemini man had.

I feel like the exact same level.

Yeah.

Exact same level.

Yeah.

Which we're not going to talk about that.

So if you want to hear our discussion on that nature versus nurture, that applies to Superman as much as it applies to Gemini man, go and listen to our episode on Gemini man.

Because we've already beat that horse, so we're not going to beat it again.

But I just wanted to mention it because it is in the movie.

It's actually a very strong theme.

And if we didn't at least mention that it was there, somebody would probably take us to task.

So it is in there.

We've just talked about it before, so we're going to gloss over that one.

And then, you know, this one also kind of deals with the whole modern setting of an old movie, which the MCU kind of did with Spider man, which it works.

If you're going to take an old thing that happened in comic books in a very old setting and you bring it up to the new world, the story is going to have to change because cell phones and Internet and social media and all this kind of stuff has happened.

And it's changed the characters of the story because they're now interacting in a completely different world.

And that's really strong in this.

And there is an aspect of that that I am going to deal with as a theme.

But there is a great deal of social commentary going on in this movie that I think maybe because we're in it, we don't notice it as much.

And so we definitely will have to touch on that.

But I thought it was interesting.

You know, you've brought me to task in the past about some of the comments I made about Spider man homecoming when we talked about it.

And.

Oh, yeah, it's kind of revised my understanding of how to view superhero movies because you were right.

I mean, Spider man was set in a modern New York City.

You know, my vision of Spider man was based on what, a 50s or 60s vision of new York City, and it just doesn't exist anymore.

So if we're going to bring these characters to life in our modern world today, they need to be upgraded to match, you know, the world that they would live in if they actually did exist today.

And, you know, frankly, even in your example, one of the things you were calling out was Peter Parker, Spider man is in Queens.

Right.

You were talking about the ethnic makeup of Queens, but that was the ethnic makeup back then.

And even New York City has changed so much in the past 30, 40 years or more.

Yeah.

I did a research paper once on the great molasses flood of 1919, and it was very significant that the flood happened in an ethnically very Italian area.

But that area in Boston is completely changed now.

It's actually all tourist.

Yeah, yeah.

So things change.

It's harder for us.

You know, we grew up with a different ethnic composition for everything that we think about.

And we gotta beat ourselves on the head until we realize that it's not the way we think it should be.

Yeah, yeah.

The world has changed and.

Yeah.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Right.

Some of it might be, some of it may not be, but it is what it is.

And so when I made those remarks, and, you know, I don't want to dwell on this anymore, but when I made those remarks about homecoming, it wasn't out of a desire to appear as being racist or.

Or anything.

No, absolutely not.

I just thought that it didn't match the comic book version.

It wasn't authentic, and that bugged me.

But I'm learning that you Got to let go of that stuff.

That the authenticity is dated and old, and we want to bring these stories into 2025.

You know, you don't want to have to watch it and go, wow, that was made, like, 40, 50 years ago.

Like, Lois and Clark.

Yeah.

Are dating ourselves.

Yeah.

My final initial reaction is, did I love the movie?

Probably not, but I enjoyed viewing it, and I think we'll have a good discussion.

Yeah.

On to you.

Yeah.

So I avoided all the, you know, reviews and everything because I knew at some point I wanted to see Superman and I wanted to see Fantastic Four.

So I did my best to avoid spoilers, and clearly there were places where you couldn't avoid them, but I went in a lot more ignorant of everything that was going to happen.

One thing I did know going in was the actor who plays Superman this time, named David Corenswet, is actually geek royalty.

Not only has he played Superman on the big screen now, but his grandfather invented something.

I grew up with devouring the choose your own adventure books, and I actually heard about this on an interview on the Today show, of all places, that my wife was watching.

And I just got such a kick out of that.

The idea that, you know, all these years later, he's coming back to the geekiness of Superman with that kind of geek royal blood flowing through his veins.

I just loved it.

Yeah.

For James Gunn, I thought he did a good job on the tone and direction.

I was happy to hear they were involving him in the dcu because I didn't like how dark some of the other DCU stuff had gotten.

Yeah, I liked the Zack Snyder cut of the Justice League, but even that was dark.

And you and I have talked on this podcast a couple times about how the DCU just was really lacking the humor that made it, you know, as enjoyable as many of the Marvel, especially the earlier Marvel movies were.

It was just too serious.

Yeah.

And when you're doing a superhero thing where it can't be real and, you know, going into it, you have to suspend your disbelief to sit through superheroes because it can't be real.

And then to make it so gritty and real and depressing, you know, it's just.

There's no reason to sit through it anymore.

It's not entertaining.

It's almost depressing.

Yeah.

He brought humor and heart back into it, so it really.

It feels like a story.

You don't mind suspending your disbelief for the whole time because you feel like you've been paid back in chuckles, you know?

So I was glad to See gun on this.

And he did a really good job balancing everything out in there.

I liked Superman's portrayal as being less invincible than many of the previous portrayals.

I feel it was more a George Reeves portrayal than it was a. I don't know.

Christopher Reeve was more invincible than George Reeves, but nowhere near as invincible as Henry Cavill's Superman was.

So I was glad to see this rollback.

But then, of course, that version, the DCU had to build all this up to get to the death of Superman, and he had to be cosmic force for the death to mean what they wanted it to mean.

But I liked that he was a vulnerable hero here, even though he was still powerful and he was actually a team player.

The introduction of the Justice Gang in Superman, I. I knew the other heroes were in there.

I did not know what role they played or how much of the movie they would be in.

I was very pleased to see that he worked with the members of the Justice Gang in a way that actually felt like camaraderie, even if that camaraderie was the type that you have with your older brother and you guys constantly throw digs at each other or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

I think you're speaking of a specific character, too.

Yeah, I might be.

I might be.

I mentioned before a little, just a little bit, how much I appreciate that James Gunn was able to interject so much of the issues that we face in modern society without getting terribly preachy in many spots.

There are a couple of places where he does, but I think he might even have been called out if he hadn't done that at that point.

I feel like he did make it more about the story than just about Superman, and I appreciated that.

Speaking of supporting characters, one of my favorite actors that I first encountered in the TV show Firefly, Nathan Fillion, plays the DC character, the DC Green Lantern character Guy Gardner in Superman 2025.

And Guy Gardner in the comics is an atrocious human being.

He is a jerk of the highest order, a narcissist and an egotist, but he's a hero.

And if you know anything about the Green Lantern Corps in the DC universe, they are essentially galactic police, and they're assigned a beat of space to protect against intergalactic threats.

So he's a cop that you really don't like, but he's funny.

And Nathan Fillion, he's the humorous but jerky soul of the movie that they put his character in, I thought was just a nod to the DC origin of all the characters.

And he did just such a great job.

And the interaction with Guy Gardner was equally good.

Everybody just treated him like Gardner's at it again.

Just ignore him.

You know, I'm getting tired of mid credit and post credit scenes.

I don't feel like either of the ones in Superman 2025 were worth it for me.

I don't like I saw a mid credit scene, but I don't.

I didn't.

Well, I didn't stay to the end.

But yeah, you, you litter.

You know, at the very end of the credits when they roll up the part that says thank you, Georgia for letting us film here or whatever it is, that's where it was.

It was after that.

What was it?

All it was was Superman and Mr.

Terrific looking at a building that came back together in the solution to the crisis.

And it was.

And the entire thing was off by like 3 inches.

And they were talking.

What do we do about it?

I don't know.

You do something.

It was sort of funny, but it wasn't worth sitting through all the credits for, that's for certain.

Well, I'm glad I didn't stay then.

The, the mid credits scene introduced a surprise character and it sort of explained away one of the, see, that's negative.

Things that the thing with his cousin Supergirl was not a mid credits scene.

It started, but it was in there before the credits.

Was it really?

Yeah, the mid credit scene was him sitting, sitting, watching the moon with the dog that was in the middle.

Oh, that's weird.

I could swear they were in opposite order for me.

Anyway, so I didn't like Crypto the Superdog, which is saying a lot because I am a dog guy through and through.

But the fact that Crypto was so undisciplined really got under my skin.

And I didn't understand why Superman had this dog with him if he couldn't trust the dog not to attack people.

That seemed really irresponsible to me.

And yet he was willing to go all the way to a pocket universe to try and rescue the dog.

Yeah, exactly.

What I mean.

Come on.

There's this anti credit scene that sort of explains that it turns out the dog belongs to his cousin and his cousin is a what could only be thought of as a college frat girl sorority girl of the worst variety, going from club to club and you know, yada, yada, yada.

And irresponsible.

Yeah.

The robot Gary says, oh, that explains so much.

And it sort of redeemed the dog in my eyes.

Yeah, but yeah, I don't like that.

They just brought the Supergirl in long enough to do that.

I thought it was sort of a throwaway.

Well, it may have been like them, you know, suggesting something coming in the future.

I don't know.

Yeah, that's exactly what they use those scenes for.

Yeah.

The teaser for the sequel.

Yeah.

Overall, I thought it was better than I expected.

It was funny and heroic.

I like how James Gunn raised the bigger questions, and I actually came out of it with one particular theme in mind that I had to reduce from a six hour discussion to ten minutes.

And I appreciate that it didn't get too preachy.

I mean, there's some politics stuff in there, but even his politics stuff doesn't harp on American politics the way you expect Hollywood to.

Yeah.

I mean, you could apply it almost from either side.

The things that he says.

Yeah.

I mean, the left side of politics would say, well, he's talking about this.

And the right side of politics would be saying, well, he's talking about this.

And they would both think they were right because he doesn't name names or really point fingers.

So I think that was very well done.

It really is a rare talent to be able to do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What was it?

It's probably a misattributed quote, but there's a quote that I think I heard attributed to Winston Churchill.

It probably wasn't defining diplomacy.

Diplomacy is the act of telling somebody where to go.

They used another term for it, where to go, and having them look forward to the tr.

Yeah, I feel like that's the same sort of skill that Gunn and the writers worked into this.

They made it so people could look at this from both sides of the political or the.

What's it called, and think he was on their side.

Yeah, political aisle.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And they think not political so much as conservative and liberal or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, before we get into our actual theme discussion, I do want to remind you to support our podcast and.

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That's a keep you listening teaser.

Teaser.

Yeah, it's interesting that in this reboot of Superman that I think the Lex Luthor character is even more villainous than I think you've ever seen him before.

He like tops the chart of villains I don't know that I've ever seen.

He's always been portrayed as a wealthy man with power who sees Superman as a natural rival.

In this version, he really comes across as evil.

Like evil evil.

And I was thinking about that because, you know, the, the classic Lex Luthor, he's the classic villain.

And he's in a way, he really just personifies what the Bible says about wealthy people.

And that's all he does.

I mean, he's just a power hungry wealthy person.

Of course there's scripture that addresses that one or two.

The one that always comes to mind and the one that's most misquoted is from 1st Timothy 6, 6 through 10.

It's but godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out.

If we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

But those who want to be rich, fall into temptation, a trap, and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge people into ruin and destruction.

For the love of.

Money is a root of all kinds of evil.

And by craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

And most people leave the love of off when they quote that.

And they just say that money is the root of all evil, which.

Money is kind of a necessity in the world.

So it's when you put it up and make an idol out of it, or the sole goal of your existence is to make money, then definitely it is the root of all kinds of evil.

And I think that Lex Luthor has always historically, been the counterbalance to, like, I've already been talking about Superman as a moral character where he's just.

He loves people, he sees the good in people, and he exists for the truth, justice, and the American way.

And so Lex Luthor is always me, myself, my money, my empire, my control, my power.

And so he's always just been the natural nemesis there.

Yeah.

I'd like to say that Gunn did a good job revealing Lex Luthor's true colors one step at a time in this movie.

Yeah.

In the earliest part of the movie, it seemed like Luther was just trying to get the government to see metahumans for the danger that they pose to the civil government.

But as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that Lex Luthor is no saint.

No, no.

And he even admits it in the end.

So you had put in a scripture here that I think works to this as well, because in his attempts to manipulate governments and the world, I think it was all about himself, really.

Yeah.

You want to give that scripture.

Yeah.

And, you know, the reason I was thinking about this is because we talk about the corrupting power of wealth, the love of wealth.

It's a lot.

I mean, and I don't mean we.

Are you just watching podcast as much as I mean, we Christians?

It's a very common theme, and we see it a lot.

Real life, too.

So, yeah, I wanted to put in a reminder that God knows what's going through their minds and what is in their hearts.

And all the way back in the Old Testament, in Isaiah, God said, look, guys, this is the way it is.

So Isaiah 10:1 3 says, Woe to those enacting crooked statutes and writing oppressive laws to keep the poor from getting a fair trial and to deprive the needy among my people of justice, so that widows can be their spoils and they can plunder the fatherless.

What will you do on the day of punishment, when devastation comes from far away, who will you run to for help?

Where will you leave your wealth?

And it goes on like that.

And I think I, as I was reading this, I think I actually used this scripture recently in the last couple episodes.

But they're still serving a purpose for God, even though they are working, only they believe to their own ends.

So even when we see evil people, you know, behind a big corporation and they're doing something that is clearly for their own gain, they're still serving that purpose.

So we just need to keep that in mind as we do this.

Yeah, right.

And you put this in the context of the fact that we serve as a sovereign God who is in control and all knowing and all powerful.

I think sometimes, especially when it comes to, like, politics, we Christians tend to forget that God is in control.

No matter who is the president of the United States or the, you know, starting wars in the Middle east or.

Anything that's going on, invading a neighboring country.

Right.

All of the wrongs and the ills and the stuff that we see going on and that we get really up in arms about.

It's like God ordained all of that.

It doesn't happen without him either causing it or allowing it, one or the other.

Right.

And so everything that we see in the world is acting towards God's ultimate purpose for the world.

And so it's hard sometimes, especially when we're looking at politics and we want to argue with each other about politics or whatever, that we have to remember that God is sovereign over that.

And if he allowed our current president to be president, then there's a purpose for that.

So not to get into politics, but I wanted to allude to that because, you know, James Gunn is really presenting Lex Luthor as, at least in this one, very similar to Satan.

I wouldn't say that he's actually trying to make him Satan in this, but he's definitely acting like a Satan in this movie.

And at first I was thinking, well, you know, then that would make his nemesis, Superman, into a kind of savior.

And there's some parts of the movie that kind of play into that.

But at the same time, we're looking at a very imperfect savior who is actually more vulnerable than any of the other versions of Superman as his savior.

So it doesn't really work as a perfect analogy.

But it was obviously what James Gunn was trying to do because we find out about halfway through the movie that Lex Luthor is.

He's got this pocket universe that he's created.

I think it was sort of by accident, but he took advantage of it and he's using it in kind of like a hell.

Like he's imprisoning people there.

His own personal little hell?

Yeah, yeah, his own little personal hell.

And complete with a mythological Sharon esque type ferryman of the dead.

Which when that came up, I was just like, oh, my goodness, what are they doing here?

I didn't even make that connection and I can't imagine how I missed it.

Yeah, he even looks like the ferryman Sharon.

Right.

So when that was on screen, I was just like.

It would actually jumped into my head.

This is like an analogy for hell and like, they're like taking you into hell with that.

And so it was just super obvious to me that.

That he was using symbology there.

And then Lex is nearly.

Luther.

Lex Luther.

I don't know him by his first name.

He's just.

How close are you two exactly?

We're not a first name basis.

Luther is present in a very fian way.

Like, you know, the whole Mephistopheles.

I don't know how many of the younger generations know who Mephistopheles is, but.

So he's kind of like a.

Well, Faust is probably something they don't understand either.

Yeah, yeah.

They don't even know.

I'm sorry, but Mephistopheles was a character from an opera, believe it or not, portrayed as a demon who would go to people and offer them their heart's desire in exchange for their soul so they could live with the thing they wanted most for the rest of their lives.

But then when they died, he got their soul.

And so Luther is very much presented like that.

Like he's telling people what they want to hear, he's giving people what they want, but it's only for himself that he's doing it.

And if they cross him, then he sends them to his personal hell.

And it's very Faustian.

It's very much like he is this demon who is controlling people.

So while that works really well as a.

Like a Satan character, it doesn't work so well for Superman to kind of be the nemesis there.

Because even though he goes down to the pocket universe, he's.

He's brought in as a captive and he's jailed, and then he, with help, manages to resurrect and then bring all of the saints out of this, out of prison in the.

In the pocket universe.

So there's some, you know, kind of parallels there.

But he doesn't do it alone.

And he's, you know, Helped quite a bit by others.

And so it doesn't really fit so well.

But I think that that was kind of what maybe Gunn was referring to.

I mean, it was kind of like it doesn't work from biblical sense, but I think that may have been what he was alluding to.

I don't know.

Yeah, it seemed a little too obvious for it not to be an intended illusion, but maybe I'm wrong.

You know, I actually checked out what James Gunn's public religious beliefs are, and it turns out he and his brother were raised Roman Catholics, but have since expressed a great deal of disdain for organized religion.

Makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I'm not gonna.

Not gonna go there.

Yeah.

But what I thought was interesting was he talks about faith as being a very personal thing and apparently prayer and, well, prayer at least I don't remember if I saw Bible reading or anything like that in there, but prayer is still a big part of his life.

So maybe it was intentional then.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I don't want to, like, belabor this issue because we have other things we want to talk about, but I do want to bring up some scripture.

Mainly just want to talk and kind of remind our Christian listeners about what Satan is to the redeemed believer, because he does have a role in our lives.

And if he didn't, there wouldn't be so much scripture about him in the New Testament.

So just going to mention a few of these, mainly just run through them quickly as a reminder.

So in 1st Peter 5, 8, 9, it says, Be sober minded.

Be alert.

Your adversary, the devil, is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.

Resist him firm in the faith, knowing that the same kind of sufferings are being experienced by your fellow believers throughout the world.

And, you know, this is kind of a warning that he is an adversary.

He is out there and he's trying to make us slip.

But he's not our master.

We don't have to give in to him.

We can resist him.

He's not omnipotent.

He's not all powerful like God is.

He is just a fallen angel.

And he can speak into our lives in a way that makes us distrust ourselves and distrust God.

But we can resist that.

We don't have to believe him.

In Revelation 2, 9, 11.

This is to the Church of Smyrna.

I believe I know your affliction and poverty.

But you are rich.

I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.

Don't Be afraid of what you are about to suffer.

Look, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison to test you.

And you will experience affliction for 10 days.

Be faithful to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.

So this is kind of once again reminder that Satan has power in this world, but he has no power over our eternal souls.

And so when he controls the world, which he does, there are obvious minions of the Satan active in.

In our world today.

You can see them.

They.

They do evil things, but they are powerless before a sovereign God.

Like I said earlier, God is still sovereign over all of that.

So he might let them hurt us in the physical sense, even throw us in jail or whatever.

But if we stay firm in the faith, God will make that right in the end.

God uses that hurt, right?

Yeah.

Second Corinthians 11, 3, 4 says, but I fear that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your mind.

Minds may be seduced from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

For if a person comes and preaches another Jesus whom we did not preach, or you receive a different spirit which you had not received, or a different gospel which you had not accepted, you put up with it splendidly.

So this is just a reminder that one of the tools of Satan is to present false gospels and false Christs.

And so we have to be very literate.

We have to know our Bible.

We have to know our scripture, as we have discussed many times before.

We have to be able to see and recognize counterfeits and be able to spurn them.

And that's what Satan does.

He creates counterfeits of Christ in the culture.

And we have to be able to recognize those and not follow after them.

And then one more.

Ephesians 6, 10, 11.

Finally, be strengthened by the Lord and by his vast strength.

Put on the full armor of God so that you can stand against the schemes of the devil.

And that is just a reminder that that's how we fight Satan is, you know, using the full armor of God.

And you can read in Ephesians 6, if you don't already know what the full armor of God is, you can read the following verses.

I think most Christians know that.

Yeah.

From Sunday school.

From Sunday school or VBS or whatever.

Yep.

Yeah.

All right, well, we got a lot more to talk about, so I'm gonna move on.

The theme that I came out of the movie theater thinking of was was going back to the old spider man saying, with great power comes great responsibility.

You're mixing your universes I know, it's terrible.

I. I could very clearly see how GUN was addressing that theme in Superman.

So I worked out a number of points to talk about, and it should only take me.

I'll do it in four different points over six hours.

No, seriously, there is a lot about Superman's power in here and how he's supposed to be using it.

There is one scene in particular that I thought was very telling, and that's when Lois Lane convinces Clark Kent to let her interview him as Superman.

And she warned him multiple times that he would not like it, and he still let her do it anyway.

And guess what?

He did not like it.

But at one point during this interview, they are talking about something that Superman did off screen before the movie started, where he went to a foreign country in, you know, what would have been the area of Tajikistan, because Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and all that on our map.

And he prevented a benign power from invading its neighbor because they were claiming that they were going in to rescue their neighbors citizens from oppression.

I know that sounds very much like what's going on in the world today, but that actually wasn't.

That wasn't the point of that.

During the interview, Lois says, well, before you stopped this war, did you discuss it with the State Department?

Did you talk to the President of the United States?

And it really highlighted the question for me of if Superman has the power to stop wars and doesn't do it, is he wrong?

And it's a very interesting theological discussion for me because it pits two elements of the Bible seemingly against itself.

It comes down to a moral obligation versus a legal obligation.

Superman judges these invaders as a threat.

So even though he's not officially sanctioned, he goes in and prevents the invaders from invading.

He is answering to a higher moral law.

And they make note in the discussion that he is able to hear things and see things that other people can't do.

But that's.

None of that is admissible in court.

But it raises the point of, when do you disobey the government?

Because we look at Romans 13:1 through 2, and probably, you know, the people who listen to our podcast probably know it.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.

For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed.

And those who resist will incur judgment.

But as Christians, that's not a catch all.

It doesn't give us permission to do anything.

We have a higher authority that we have to answer to in Acts 5, 27, 29, it says.

And when they had brought them, they were set before the council, and the high priest questioned them, saying, we strictly charge you not to teach in his name.

Yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man's blood upon us.

But Peter and the apostles answered, we must obey God rather than men.

So I feel like Gunn was intentionally putting this moral question in there.

Did Superman have a responsibility above and beyond international law?

And I think he did.

I think that's what Gunn was saying.

You know, they dealt with this in the mcu too, because during, what was it, Captain America Civil War, that was all about them trying to make them all sign agreements that they wouldn't do anything without the oversight of a government committee.

So it's very much a similar idea, you know, that.

Are you responsible to governments when you're saving the world?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't make that connection.

I suspect it probably shows up in comics fairly frequently.

I'm not a big comic reader.

I only got back into it recently because I wanted to read the series that seemed to be informing the MCU ultimate series.

But even that got a little too tough to stomach.

So, yeah, sometimes God's law is going to require us to stand against earthly authority.

And when we do, it may not work out well for us.

They may send us to the lions, but we need to stand for the Gospel.

Right.

So the question for me is, if you don't act, is it a sin?

And it seems like at the bottom of my emails, I have the Latin phrase that basically says it's a.

Not a paraphrase, but it's the original version of the quote that says, all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Which I guess really isn't a quote, but it's the original Latin version from Socrates or something like that.

And I firmly believe that, and I'm backed up by scripture on it.

James 4:17 says, for whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it for him, it is sin.

So that's an interesting nuance to what sin actually is.

That's not to say if you don't know it's wrong, it's not sin.

But if you know it's right and you don't do it, it is sin.

And I don't want to take that entirely out of context because James is talking about a much larger issue there.

I encourage you to read the entire book of James.

It is very effective in breaking down Christian living.

My favorite book.

So.

But James isn't the only one to address this, obviously.

Proverbs 24:11 12 says, Rescue those who are being taken away to death.

Hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.

If you say, behold, we did not know this, does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?

And will he not repay man according to his work?

So basically it's saying, God knows whether or not you knew it was right.

Even if you convince yourself that you didn't know, he knows.

Yeah.

And he's going to hold you accountable for it.

And I love to go back to the prophets.

Ezekiel 33, 8 through 9 says, if I say to the wicked, o wicked one, you shall surely die.

And you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way.

That wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.

But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, that person shall die in his iniquity.

But you will have delivered your soul.

Yeah, I was thinking when you were going into that, the verses that become before that is about the watchmen and not, if you saw the army and you don't blow the.

The horn to warn, then it's on you.

But if you blow it and that's ignored, then it's on them.

That really does speak to.

You know, there's this meme on Facebook, or at least it was all over Facebook when I left Facebook.

I haven't seen it since coming back.

About how Christians who are trying to save people are so intrusive and so annoying, and we actually see it as trying to rescue people from a burning house.

Yeah.

And the hard part is they don't know it's burning.

Yeah.

Or people driving on a road that's going to send them over a cliff.

And you're trying to step in front of them and say, no, don't go this way.

Yeah, but that's the thing.

If we give them the chance and they don't take it, then we have given them the chance.

Right.

And if we continue to give them the chance and they don't do and they don't take it, then we have continued.

We have continued in Christ.

And that's an important differentiation, I think.

And this all goes back to the question of if you don't do what is right, is it a sin?

What you believe is right is sin.

And it is.

And I think that's what Gun was showing us with Superman's action was he knew that this supposed benign leader of the Invading country was a crook.

Right.

He couldn't prove it, but he knew it.

So he took what he believed to be a right action.

And I appreciate that they put that storyline in there.

And his frustrated response to Lois actually says that because she's like, did you have the permission of the US Government?

Or whatever?

And he was like, I didn't need it.

I was acting on my own, you know.

So, yeah, he wasn't, like, blaming the US for what he did.

He was like, this was me.

I did this.

It has nothing to do with the U.S. so, yeah, he was using his own authority.

And, you know, did he even have a responsibility to.

To bring the United States government into it?

Because it.

Yeah, and I don't want to get too deep into this because it really does touch on a very sensitive political topic right now, but Superman is actually an illegal alien.

He just happens to be a really illegal alien.

Or a real alien.

Yeah.

So, you know, is he acting as an American?

He certainly grew up in America, and he took part.

He was adopted in practice, but not in law.

How were they going to adopt him?

In law?

Yeah.

Hey, we found this kid in our cornfield.

Can we adopt him?

Sure.

Yeah.

So anyway.

But I mean, he.

He has been partaking of the American way for his entire adult life.

So, you know, he is as American as well.

Apple pie, really.

Since he first appeared in Action Comics, you know, he's been part of.

What was the old tagline?

Truth, justice, and the American way.

Right.

Did he have a responsibility to get the State Department involved, get the president involved?

And I honestly, I look at that and go, I appreciate that he didn't, because he'd have gotten tied up in red tape for decades.

Yep.

But he was looking at his responsibility to the greater good.

And as Christians, we have a similar thing.

Philippians 3:20 through 21 says, but our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his inglorious body by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

So we will get our glorified body, but our citizenship is in heaven, and that's who we answer to.

So Christians, we ultimately have to answer to the higher power of God's instructions as presented to us through his word.

We are sojourners in a foreign land.

Yep.

And once again, sometimes that's going to differ from our nationality.

I think that Clark Kent, as a seasoned reporter for the Daily Planet, knew exactly what he would be biting off if he had Tried to go through the proper channels for it and chose not to.

So there was one last thing that I briefly wanted to talk about, and that's in the movie.

They used news broadcast to make a very clear reference to our current society with having conservative channels or GOP leading channels and liberal news channels, you know, Democrat party leading channels.

And in particular, they seemed to be parodying Fox News with one of their hosts.

I don't remember the host name, but it was one who was essentially a mouthpiece for Lex Luthor.

And Lex Luthor would go on his show to have this mouthpiece parrot the positions that Lex was making regarding the danger of the metahumans.

And then when Lex uncovered an actual truth about Zoo Superman, he used that same anchor to spread that truth in such a damaging way.

It was just.

He used this.

He used this pundit presentation as an evil thing.

And that put me in mind of 1st Peter 2:12, keep your conduct among the gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Basically, as Christians, we shouldn't be giving people an appearance of impropriety if we can avoid it, because it will be used against us.

And to besmirch the name of God.

And doing the right thing doesn't always guarantee praise.

Sometimes it's even the other way around.

Sometimes it guarantees misunderstanding.

And you know what?

That's exactly what we see in today's digital world, where social media is being used to manipulate and distort the truth, because that's what generates clicks.

Yep, yep.

And you caught a thread in the movie that I completely missed, and it played out in Superman in a really interesting way.

Yeah, yeah.

So the final theme I wanted to talk about was the social science of a digitally focused world.

And you really introduced it well, because in this movie, the whole point of what Lex Luthor is doing to Superman is based on public perception.

It's based on how he can twist people through the digital media that they're exposed to.

In fact, when we get into his pocket universe, we actually see he has this massive army of literal monkeys that are like cyborgs or something.

Their number one task is to sit there and smear Superman on the Internet and social media.

So they just go into all the social media sites and they're making sure that even Superman's fans are only seeing negative content about him.

And then when he broadcasts this thing that he discovers about Superman, he leaves out the part of the truth that would make it make more sense to the people who actually knew Superman.

And that was that there was only half the message that Superman ever was exposed to, and that he had to use a digital genius who is actually kind of made into a cyborg to even hack the rest of the message and figure out what it was.

And so this truth that he presented about Superman wasn't really the truth.

While it was a true message, and all the experts said it was true and verified that it was true.

It was only part of the truth.

And that truth actually turned into a lie because it was presenting Superman in a way that was a complete untruth because he didn't have the rest of the message.

He never lived by it.

And so I think that in the way that they present this in Suran, it's very much an exposition of what it is like to live in our digital world, because we are all living in a digital bubble where the things that we see digitally are often curated based on the things we look for.

And I'm trying to thread the needle on this discussion because I really don't want to go into politics, but, yeah, that's where it typically resides, is political stuff.

Yeah, it's the algorithms that are looking at what catches our interest and where we click right.

And frequently.

That's political stuff.

It's political stuff.

It's also social stuff.

It can be religious stuff.

It can be science stuff.

So, yeah, there's everything that we see is curated based on our interests and.

Or controlled by media who wants us to think differently.

And this happened during COVID I know that you and I disagree about some of the stuff on Covid, but it happened a lot during COVID because there were certain media that were literally shutting down any topic that was against the mainstream line on Covid out of an.

Interest of public safety.

Yes.

Which I thought was bogus, regardless.

Yeah.

So they were literally silencing people who had views that probably should have been heard about COVID and what was going on in our country because of COVID And that's probably a safer topic than to talk about politics.

But it's unfortunate that because some voices can be silenced, that means that the mass amount of people who are maybe not as educated in looking for answers for themselves and looking outside of the lines that they're restricted in never know the truth because they're not exposed to it, they never see it, and so they believe lies and then they act upon those lies.

Or they may even believe partial truths and never know the whole truth.

And now we're Living in a culture where we have these large language models.

People call them AI.

They're not really intelligent.

Yeah.

They basically have all of the sequestered piece of the.

I say all of the Internet.

They don't, because depending on which AI, and I'm putting that in quotes, you're talking to whether it be Gemini on Google or ChatGPT or what's the one on X?

There's one on X as well.

I can never.

Is that Grok?

Grok?

Yeah.

They all have a specific set of information that they are trolling for answers.

And if that sequestered amount of information doesn't have the truth, then the answer they're going to give you is not the truth.

Because they don't have the truth.

Right.

And they don't know the difference.

They don't know the difference.

They can't tell that the information they have is not complete or inaccurate.

Yep.

And I'm going to give you an example from our last episode.

So we did an episode on how to train your dragon and the composer for the music we mentioned in the podcast, and you used a large language model to help you craft the show notes because you were tired and sick and that's fine.

Yeah.

The large language model that you used for some reason believe that a completely different person wrote the music for how to Train youn Dragon and actually corrected us in our show notes, saying, oh, they said the wrong person.

This is actually who did it.

And so I'm reading the show notes that you drafted before I posted and I'm like, what?

Where did that come from?

And I researched it and found that the person I said had recorded the music, the composer of the music, was the actual person who composed the music.

They'll know who that LLM came up with.

Yeah, but it was another composer, so it would have made sense to somebody who wasn't reading it closely.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know.

So they can give you wrong answers.

In fact, I think frequently they give wrong answers.

But if you're asking it, you don't know what the right answer is.

So unless you know what the right answer is and you're just asking it to catch it in a lie, then.

Yeah, you really have to be very careful.

Very, very careful.

So I heard about something and I found that there's a lot of people who don't know about it.

It's just one of the many commentators that I watch on YouTube brought up this thing called the Debt Internet Theory, and he explained it pretty well.

And then I asked you about it.

You hadn't heard about it.

I asked some people about at work that should have known about it, and they didn't.

So I found out it's probably not as big a thing as maybe I thought it was because I'd heard about it.

But the concept of dead Internet is that it's kind of a conspiracy.

There's kind of two parts to it.

So there's part of it that maybe isn't so much a conspiracy, but then the hardliners who follow this kind of turn it into a conspiracy.

But the dead Internet theory is that a lot of the Internet activity today is actually bot driven.

So, like the views on YouTube videos, the activity on websites and algorithms in, you know, like the advertising for social media, the ads that you get when you play games on your tablet or phone, that kind of stuff is all AI driven or bot driven, and it creates a false sense of success.

So you think, oh, I'm getting all these views, I'm getting all these listens or whatever.

Yeah.

And it's not true because there's tons of these, like, AI bots that are out there, you know, trolling websites for information or whatever.

And you could see this kind of in advertising.

So I'm sure all of us have been where we were on Facebook or something and we saw this clickbait article that the tagline caught our attention.

Oh, I want to know more about that.

And you click on it and it sends you to a website that just blitzes you with ads.

So it's like a paragraph of text with three ads in between every paragraph.

I'm sure I've seen them.

They're driving me nuts.

It's one of the reasons why I use an ad blocker when I troll the Internet now.

Yeah, but you get blitzed with all these ads.

Well, there's an agent behind those ads who has sold those ad spots to companies who are doing legitimate advertisement, most of them.

But what they do is, is they go, well, I can get you a hundred views in an hour.

And they're like, oh, good, we'll buy them to do our ads through.

Well, they're getting 100 views, but they're getting it from one person who looked at the website and got blitzed with a thousand ads in like, you know, a minute.

And they didn't see any of them because they're like scrolling past, trying to find the actual, you know, thread of the.

The story, which turns out to be nothing.

Because it was all point to get you to look at the ads.

Yeah, exactly.

And they accidentally Refresh it, and they get counted again, even though it's the same person and the same ads.

And so it's like multiple counts of one person seeing a blitz of ads that they don't really see, and so it doesn't really count.

And so the ad saying, I can get you thousands of views, and they're really only getting maybe a handful of views a thousand times.

So that's kind of what Dead Internet theory is based on, is that kind of thought that there aren't as many people seeing things as you think they are?

I think that part is perfectly reasonable.

Yeah.

It makes sense from a monetary standpoint, which makes me think it's probably true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, like, people on, you know, their YouTube videos generating income and that kind of stuff.

How many views are they really getting, you know, and are they, like, full watching views or people who just clicked on, oh, that wasn't the video I wanted.

And they clicked out, you know, and the reason why I kind of latched onto that was because last year we switched hosts for our podcast, and when we did so, our listens went down, like, super fast.

Like, the first month we were on the.

On the new hosting, it kind of blitzed us.

We went like.

We actually doubled for, like, the first month or two, and then it just halved over what we were getting with the previous host and the Christian podcast community that we're a part of.

I was talking to some of the other podcasts.

They're all kind of seeing this dip.

So we got to talking.

It's like we were on Blueberry before.

Maybe Blueberry was jacking up the numbers to make them look better, you know, to keep podcasts and that maybe now we're actually seeing realistic listens.

Like, these are the actual people that are listening to our podcast.

And before, it was maybe not real.

So it makes you question that kind of stuff.

It's like, well, maybe they were inflating their numbers to, you know, keep our business.

Anyway, I'm sure it happens.

The conspiracy side of Dead Internet is that there's some big baddie out there.

Either the government or the New World Order or the Deep State or some lizard people.

Yeah, that.

That are somehow controlling the masses through this Dead Internet thing.

Less likely.

I mean, there are people who believe that.

Was it the Freemasons or the Jews or.

There's people who believe there's always some big conspiratorial group that's in control of everything.

I can tell you who that conspiratorial group is, is Satan, because God is in control and he's always trying to throw a wrench.

Membership is easy.

Yes.

So, you know, not to get political again, but this is the social world we live in.

We live in a world of curated information that is polarized to what we think and what we believe or what we want to believe.

That's what Satan did in the Garden of Eden.

He just.

He rephrased it all.

He curated the information of what God had said to Eve and made Eve think, oh, maybe this is right.

Right.

Yeah.

And so we're just as vulnerable as the world is, and we can be in our own little bubble created by our own Internet activity, and we can see the information that we want to see.

And if we're not wise to the ways of the world, we can get sucked into some really bad holes.

And discernment is just so important.

It's always been important.

It always will be important.

Doesn't matter whether we have our Bibles on our phones or whether we have Bibles in different versions in a book form.

It is still our ultimate source of truth, and we always need to go back to it.

It always has to be, number one, we must stay grounded in God's word because we should always be suspicious of man's opinions.

And I don't care what you've got.

To be critical of it.

Yeah, you have to be critical and you have to be suspicious because the world is not Christian and the world does not love Christ, the world hates Christ.

And when we put our trust in the world, it's going to get us in trouble, because they may have the best intentions.

They may have what they consider to be truth on their side, but they are man's opinions, and they are by their very nature against God because they are not Christian.

And so just, you know, final reminder about that.

In First Timothy 6, 20, it says, Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, Avoiding irreverent and empty speech and contradictions from what is falsely called knowledge.

So this is, you know, the experts of the world.

They live in a different worldview, just like our podcast is all about critically looking at things that the world produces in entertainment.

And this is their world that they live in.

They think it's true, they think it's real.

They're just looking at it the wrong way.

They have the wrong worldview.

And like I said, they can have the best intentions in the world, but they're wrong.

And their father is Satan, who is the father of lies.

Ephesians 4:11, 15 says, and he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers to equip them, the saints, for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God's Son growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ's fullness.

Then we will no longer be little children tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning, with cleverness in the techniques of deceit, but speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way in.

Into him who is the head Christ.

So this is what the Bible says about the world's philosophies.

They blow us around.

They're cunning, they're clever, they're based in deceit, once again reminding us of, you know, be cognizant of the counterfeits in this world.

And then I added this at the last minute because we're recording this on Sunday.

I always end up pulling something useful out of the sermon when we record on some of it Sunday, I'm like, I've got the podcast going in my head, and I'm listening to the sermon through that filter, and so I'm like, oh, I can use that for the podcast.

So this was used in our sermon this morning.

Jeremiah 17, 5, 6.

This is what the Lord says.

Cursed is the person who trusts in mankind.

He makes human flesh his strength, and his heart turns from the Lord.

He will be like a juniper in the Araba.

He cannot see when good comes, but dwells in the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land where no one lives.

This is followed by the difference to that is a person who trusts in the Lord who is blessed with bounty and all of that kind of stuff.

So this is a picture of what it looks like when we trust mankind over God.

It's just a reminder that the digital world is full of.

Of Satan.

It really is.

And we just have to be very discerning and know our scripture, know where we stand in our faith, and believe that God is sovereign over everything.

Just be careful.

Just like the experts in Superman were explaining to the world that, you know, this message that was put out to Superman was authentic.

And in the end, it was a lie.

It was telling the world something about Superman that was not true, may have been expertly presented and expertly accurate, but in the end, it was a lie.

And that's what the digital world is full of.

I think that pretty much wraps up what we all want to talk about in Superman, but I'm sure there were other things that we didn't talk about other than, of course, the topics we chose to pass on because we've already beat them to death.

But if you have any other comments you want to make about Superman, feel free to come in the Discord and start a chat about that.

We'd love to partake.

I don't know what we're going to be doing in September.

I haven't even looked to see what the movies are.

But we both noticed a news article.

Actually you brought it to my attention.

That chilling news article.

Yeah, chilling news article that made us think of a very old movie that we have never reviewed that we may go back in time and do because it's very relevant to today.

I think it was very prophetic, actually.

Very prophetic.

Sci fi.

I think it's listed in AFI's top 100 movies too, isn't it?

So if anybody would like to hear us review the old movie Gattaca, let us know because we're actually thinking about it pretty strongly.

If there isn't anything super interesting in the theaters in September, we may just go ahead and do it because it really is.

Actually, you said you've never seen it.

I've seen it a couple times.

I haven't.

Yeah.

So we may end up doing Gattaca for September, but please let us know you're out there.

We love to hear from our listeners and thank you so much for listening.

We really do appreciate it.

I'm Eve Franklin.

And I'm Tim Martin.

And don't just watch.

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