My Belief in Batman - Or why I am who I am

This won’t be long, because I know I’m not going to say anything that hasn’t been said already. But here it is anyway: There is no God. There is no great source of goodness, and there is no great source of evil either.

Wait, let me explain why that isn’t cynical.

I just saw The Dark Knight Rises. That seems like a non-sequitur, but bear with me. We need to phase back to 2005. In 2005, Batman Begins came out. I was also 14, which was a big year for me, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Fourteen was the year I met everyone that was going to make serious waves in that era of my life. The person I am now? Yeah, she started forming at 14. There was the ass who broke my heart first, whose lasting contribution was the hard lesson “don’t play with kids who are mean to you.” There was the girl who was my best friend through most of high school, and she is responsible for the foundation of what people now call my “hipster-ness.” More importantly, she taught me that if it makes me happy, it’s alright to be weird. It’s okay to like anime, and sing songs about pirates in the school talent show. It’s okay to wear mismatched shoes and listen to music that doesn’t play on the radio, so long as you do it so passionately the criticism of others can’t possibly reach you inside your euphoric bubble of bizarre. There was the boy who would eventually become the man that most recently re-broke my heart. And while it’s easiest to talk about him like he never existed, even now I have to admit that if you broke me down into individual parts, his fingerprints would be on every nut and bolt. While I only met him at 14, we bonded over Batman.

The important thing here is not the Batman movies – which I have seen – nor the Batman graphic novels – which I have devoured – nor the massive universe of games, books, art, characters, or other various pieces that make Batman so further reaching than your average, non-comic reading, non-Xbox playing, non-wholly committed fan will be aware of. The important thing is what Batman stands for, for me.

See, 14 was another big year for me because it was the year I started wearing bikinis. And swearing. And watching R rated movies. And that’s a big deal because they were the first small steps in rejecting my father’s faith. And while I don’t think there is a giant, white, bearded clock maker out there watching us lead our little lives, I have to believe in something. We can live without religion just fine. We can’t live without faith, and faith cannot live without community. I think, at its purest, that is what religion is really about, and I have no opposition to that. So as my faith in a nice boy with a beard and a hammer, who was not white, had no published stance on homosexuality, and was probably misdiagnosing things like epilepsy as demon possession (I’ll give you a pass on that one, dude) started to fade, I had to replace it with something. The replacement wasn’t voluntary, but as my unwavering faith in redemption so long as I ate some bread and prayed twice a day began to waver, my new faith in people started shoring itself up.

I wasn’t the first person to say it, and I don’t think Nietzsche was either, but he put it better than 14 year old me could have. To paraphrase, Nietzsche said there is no such thing as truth. Truth is a social construct, or put another way, truth is something we all agree on so hard that no one can disagree. I like this, for a couple reasons. First, it allows for shades of grey I never felt my religion allowed for. Okay, we all agree rape is bad… but what about marital rape? What if she gets pregnant? Can she have an abortion? What if it was her husband who raped her? Shades of grey. And those shades of grey are really the only way we’ll ever be able to answer those hard questions. When I pushed the issue at church, the answer I got was, “God knows.” Well, that’s not a particularly helpful answer for a 14 year old. It’s not helpful now. I don’t think it’ll be helpful later. And I never liked being told what was right when I felt mostly capable of figuring it out myself. That was the second reason. If there is no universal truth, there is no universal law I’m being held against. And even if you claim to have the real version of a universal law, why do the guys down the street say you’re wrong? It’s not universal if no one agrees. The logic still doesn’t fit inside my brain. If there’s no real right, and no real wrong, and we’re all just doing the best we know how, the world starts to make a little more sense. And that spawned into the third, and biggest, reason I agree with Mr. Nietzsche: if there is no universal truth and there is no universal law, then there is only human truth and human law. Therefore, there is no universal source of good and no universal source of evil, there are only human sources of good and evil. And since good and evil are never really in black and white terms, not wholly, my shades of grey faith held true. And therein lies the final and greatest tenet of “What I Believe (Subject to Almost Constant Revision).”

The source of all the greatest things in this world, for good and for ill, come from people.

It’s taken me years to articulate that. I still think I’m doing it poorly. What I am roundaboutly getting to, though, is where I got the tools to figure out what precisely it is I have faith in, if not my father’s zombie carpenter. And once I built the foundation of that faith, how I articulated it. And reinforced it with a community of like minded thinkers.

The answer is this, and it reads like a list of my favorite movies and books. I got it from Batman. And Lord of the Rings. And Cowboy Bebop. It comes from Shakespeare. It comes from Anna Karenina, from Star Wars, from Spider-Man, from the works of Isaac Asimov, from Charlie Chaplin, from X-Men, from Blade Runner, from Notes from Underground, from Teeth, from Tanya Davis’s poem “How to Be Alone” and from the stand-up of Brian Regan and Louis CK. All those things other people go looking for in church pews – a sense of belonging, belief in something worth while and greater than myself, trust that people are mostly good – I find in director commentaries, in behind the scene footage, in online forums late at night.

And it all started with Batman in 2005.