Good points, though, on whether it is happening at all. But like I said, that’s only 20% of the issue.

That the earth’s atmosphere has warmed in the last hundred years is incontrovertible, unless you believe in a massive conspiracy.

That the warming trend is gradual but is accelerating is also incontrovertible.

The 2000s were warmer than the 1990s which were warmer than the 1980s which were warmer than the 1970s. The warming trend has increased each decade such that natural variability and manmade cooling effects, which swamped the warming trend before the 1980s, now only has an effect on annual trends.

These are just facts.

The only explanation that scientists have managed to offer consistent with this trend (and other observations, such as how and where the warming occurs, changes in the oceans, ice and glacial retreat, etc.) is increased radiative forcing from greenhouse gases.

People have tried other hypotheses — solar variance, cosmic rays, volcanoes — but none have been found to be consistent with observations and our understanding of physical laws.

Practically the only way that the scientific predictions of increases in greenhouse gas pollution and its effects — global warming, sea level rise, Arctic ice melt, glacial retreat, ecosystem changes — have been inaccurate is that they have been too optimistic. Arctic summer sea ice retreat is way below levels predicted only five years ago; sea level rise in the last 20 years has been at the very high end of estimates; etc.

It’s certainly true that it’s a moral and value judgment whether or not to play Russian roulette with the only planet our species inhabits.

Hi Erika. You said:

“When he actually “does the deed” I don’t believe he sees himself as “paying for his sins” any longer. This is not to say that I agree with his actions. However, sinful or not, he sacrificed himself for the woman he loved.”

If this were true, then I might agree. Of course laying one’s life down for his friends- as Jesus taught and did, or like taking a bullet for a person- is a moral act. Yet these acts are not suicide, they are martyrdom or sacrifice. And this interpretation misses the point of the film; not only that, giving the film this benefit of the doubt misses the larger message that the film is trying to reinforce in our culture.

Our culture is one that has embraced moral ambiguity to a level of insanity, and we are all largely engaged in a sort of group cognitive dissonance when we participate in that paradigm. There are certainly gray areas and moral/ethical dilemmas in life. However, from a Christian perspective (which is the only perspective I claim to have in the review above), suicide is not one of them. As I paraphrased GK Chesterton’s insight above, the line between suicide and martyrdom is in many ways THE defining difference between the moral codes of Christendom and those of humanist frameworks. It is NEVER moral to end one’s life by one’s own hand, no matter the reason, the emotion, or the circumstances behind it. Is that clear enough a stipulation?

The film is teaching the polar opposite. The entire POINT of the film is to bring into sharp focus a presumed tension between suicide and martyrdom, a tension which simply isn’t there. The film is saying: “well, suicide and martyrdom are sometimes the same thing… accomplishing good through what is normally an evil act converts that act into a moral one.”

Can anyone deny that this is what the film’s entire upshot is supposed to be? In the words of scripture, the film is attempting to paint in a favorable light a world in which “everyone does what is right in his own eyes”, and it is “calling what is evil good”. It is for these reasons that I continue to call the film morally repugnant.