This weekend, we had a sickhouse. Geneva was the only one that didn’t have some kind of sickness going on. We didn’t go to church yesterday. We watched several movies, and I watched lots of dvd extras.

Saw Secondhand Lions for the first time. It was enjoyable, but I have some issues with the whole, ‘it doesn’t matter if its true, just believe in it’ idea. Steven D. Greydanus, of Decent Films, said it well in his review:

There’s a key scene in Lions in which Walter tells Uncle Hub that he doesn’t know what to believe any more and wants the truth. Here is Uncle Hub’s regrettably quotable response: “If you want to believe in something, then believe in it! Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it!” Uncle Hub then goes on to list some ideals he thinks are worth believing in whether they’re true or not: that honor and virtue, not money and power, are what really matter; that good always triumphs over evil; that true love never dies.

Now, the fact is that there is truth to all these propositions, depending on how they are understood. I can even appreciate, in a sense, someone like Uncle Hub having the will to recognize the value of these ideals despite not being in an epistemological position to affirm their truth.

Nevertheless, expressed this way, this is bogus sentimentality, not belief or faith — and this notion casts a long shadow over the rest of the film