Preview

The Bible vs. the Matrix

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
2012 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Bible vs. the Matrix
The Bible vs. The Matrix
The Matrix is a current movie and the Bible is a piece of inspired literature that has withstood scrutiny throughout the ages. The Matrix has many biblical themes and it parallels the Bible in numerous ways.
Let me briefly explain a simplified plot of The Matrix. The story centers around a computer-generated world that has been created to hide the truth from humans. In this world people are kept in slavery without their knowledge. This world is designed to simulate the peak of human civilization which had been destroyed by nuclear war. The majority of the world's population is oblivious to the fact that their world is digital rather than real, and they continue living out their daily lives without questioning their reality. The main character, Neo, is a matrix-bound human who knows that something is not right with the world he lives in, and is eager to learn the truth. He is offered the truth from a character named Morpheus, who proclaims that Neo is “the One” (chosen one) who will eventually destroy the Matrix, thereby setting the humans “free.” For this to happen, Neo must first overcome the Sentient Program agents who can jump into anyone's digital body. They are the Gate Keepers and hold the keys to The Matrix.
Our other work for comparison is the Bible. Briefly summarized, the Bible’s message is truth about this world we live in. We are told our world is controlled by evil powers in high, spiritual places; “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). However, the earth and the universe were created by God; “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The world system was created by man, but inspired by Satan; “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the Gospel of the glory of

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Early in the movie, Neo pulls a book off of a shelf, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations, and opens it to reveal that it contains electronic contraband. In an instant, the directors ask us to consider his work. It completely avoids asking the logical question that follows after finding out that all of 1999 is an illusion: How are we to determine the truth or reality of any experience? The moment we believe that our senses are untrue, we can never fully trust them again. The Cartesian advice that fits this scenes is: “it is the mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.” (Descartes 60) With The Matrix being…

    • 301 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The Matrix” (1999), written and directed by The Wachowskis, is an action, science fiction, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving. The premise of the film is a dystopian future in which humans are inside a shared simulation, which is perceived by them as reality, and the machines, that have achieved consciousness, use the body's energy as a power source. Neo (Reeves) is a computer programmer who comes to the realization that the world is not what it seems and is soon drawn into a rebellion against the machines.…

    • 1201 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Eventually, you will have a choice to make; a choice that will define: “How to survive life in, The Matrix?” In ‘The Matrix’ nothing is real however, your mind has been conditioned to believe it is real! The Matrix is far too big to defeat; no one can escape it, and we haven’t the means or intelligence to beat those in control! Through my research, I discovered that America is a society of functional illiterates!…

    • 18144 Words
    • 57 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Matrix and Exodus share some familiarity that can be recognized by anyone. With similar themes and plot they can be closely related. However, both go about their situation very differently from each other. The literal parallels between Exodus and The Matrix both share a story centered on a man who is called upon to set his people free from slavery to salvation. In Exodus, Moses is assigned by God from the talking burning bush that he must rescue the Hebrews from Pharaoh and lead them to Mount Sinai. While in The Matrix, Neo is brought out of The Matrix to the real world, Zion, and many believe him to be “The One.” Neo denies the claim, but later in the end of the film discovers his true role and destiny as the prophesied savior of humanity.…

    • 599 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Matrix Hero's Journey

    • 930 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The Matrix is a movie written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. The story of the film revolves around Thomas A. Anderson (Keanu Reeves) who is a computer programmer by day and a hacker named "Neo" by night. He has spent all of his life intuiting that there might be something else. His doubt is reaffirmed with a message received on his computer: "Matrix owns you." Thus, Neo begins the desperate search for a person he has only heard of: another hacker named Morpheus. Morpheus is someone who…

    • 930 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The movie Matrix can be considered a modern allegory of the allegory of the cave. Like the people in the cave, humans, trapped in the Matrix, see only what the machines want them to see. They are deceived into believing that what they hear and see is the only reality that exists, and accept the illusions of their senses as the only part of truth. But Neo, the main character, is forced to face the painful truth, when he is pulled out of the capsule that kept him prisoner of the virtual reality of the Matrix. Neo suddenly discovers that what was before his life, were only shadows, reflections of…

    • 111 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Phil 201 essay

    • 675 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Comparing and contrasting the synopsis “The Matrix” to Plato's “The Allegory Of The Cave” and also Descartes “Meditation I Of The Things Of Which We May Doubt” which have several similarities and also some differences. In all three of these stories the main idea is that reality is in question. In the Matrix, the human being is in a pod like machine that is controlled by a computer simulating what we think and know to be reality. Reality is not only created but manipulated to deceive what is truly surrounding you, when you are clearly in a pod unaware of what reality really is. In Plato's “The Allegory of the Cave” this also focuses on two different realities based on what is in fact real and what is perceived. Plato's view on the prisoners being fooled into a false reality by placing fake objects around them to trick their perception of reality and also put them in a one track state of mind, while life goes on outside of where they are captive. This is similar to The Matrix because in both stories the people are being manipulated to believe a reality outside of what is truly happening at the present time. In both stories, the person that has been captive for a certain period of time but then is able to experience reality outside of just manipulated perception has doubts, they are in disbelief of what they are actually able to witness for the first time. Reality, not perception but what is truly real happening and not being simulated or manipulated so that you would be fooled into believing something that is not real. In the Matrix, Neo lived a pretty normal life as an everyday human being but could not sleep well and like Plato stated that the prisoner would have to sense something, get some kind of feeling that something just was not quite right about his surroundings and the way they were existing. Another similarity is that the prisoners and pods were being manipulated to believe a false reality by people above them.…

    • 675 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Both Neo and Prisoner were deceived into believing in a falsehood: that they lived in the real world. In the Matrix, Neo lived most of his life without knowing he was a prisoner of the machines. When he escaped, he realized that he lived his life in a virtual world that felt indistinguishable from the real world. In the Allegory of the Cave, the Prisoner thought that…

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    If the universe is so bad… how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps, but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief… The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was…

    • 1018 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In this movie, we are introduced to a world in which machines had imprisoned man into a virtual world called “the matrix”. There the main protagonist “Neo” founds himself living in this world in questioning whether is real or not, and manages to scape with the help of a group of survivors from the real world. Yet the real world was not what he expected, earth was devastated by a long war between man and machines, and what is left of humanity lives in an underground city were the sewers of the old world use to be. We can consider the Matrix to be the cave, and the shadows projected by the fire, it also presents two possible outcomes from finding true knowledge. In the allegory, Plato believes that if an individual manages to escape from the cave it could end up in two ways. The first way indicates that if a man manages to escape the cave, he would be overwhelmed by the light, and the actual shapes of the shadows he saw, “Don’t you think he would be puzzled, and believe what he saw before was truer than what was shown to him?”(Plato pg2) indicating that the individual who got out would have trouble believing the things from outside the cave would be real. In the movie Neo faces the same problem when he is liberated from the matrix believing that the real world was actually a dream. The second way this could end up is if the individual finds himself to overwhelm by the real world to the point that…

    • 1325 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Matrix, Morpheus and his team find in the matrix Neo and help him escape the agents to safety. Morpheus gives Neo a choice, come with him into the real world or live in ignorance. The choice is simplified into blue pill and a red pill. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Neo chose to…

    • 674 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The first half of the book, “The Bible and Myth,” Oswalt takes the time to define what a myth is and what differentiates the Bible from a myth. The first chapter deals with the Bible in the framework of its backgrounds and its influence to humanity at large. The second half of the book, “The Bible and History,” look at several philosophical thoughts proposed by others that attempt to explain the Bible’s importance separate from historical authority.…

    • 1067 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1944 fascist Spain, a girl named Ofelia, fascinated and obsessed with fairy-tales, is sent along with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather, a ruthless and somewhat evil captain of the Spanish army. During the night, she meets a fairy who takes her to an old faun in the center of an old labyrinth garden. Upon meeting the Faun, he tells her she is the lost Princess, Moanna, and that her father, the king of the underworld, has sent out messengers to open portals so she could return. However, because there is only one portal left she must be tested and carry out three tasks to prove her “essence” is still intact and that she hasn’t become mortal. Though it is subtle, the movie, Pan’s Labyrinth uses quite a few references to the bible to tell it’s story.…

    • 671 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bible Among Myths

    • 9041 Words
    • 25 Pages

    The author, a research professor at Wesley Biblical Seminary by the name of John N. Oswalt, attempts to explain the similarities and differences of the Holy Scripture and its teachings from that of the neighboring Ancient Near East beliefs. Moreover, he attempts to answer the question of how scholarly opinions of the disagreements found between Genesis and Babylonian accounts of the origins of the world.…

    • 9041 Words
    • 25 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Matrix Film Analysis

    • 1902 Words
    • 8 Pages

    ‘The Matrix’ is a science- fiction film directed by brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski. The film was highly appreciated and well received by both the audience and critics. ‘The Matrix offers a dystopian view of the future by exploring the relationship man has to machine. The film experiments with the use of intertextuality to create an intricate plot where all scenes are of utmost relevance. The Matrix is a film consisting of many sub-plots, however they all eventually lead to the development of the main plot…

    • 1902 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays