A thought about "Bablyon A.D."

This is probably going to be known to history as one of the most stupid Hollywood films of 2008. The basic premise is that a Russian mafia boss hires a mercenary (played by Vin Diesel) to smuggle a young girl from a monastery in Mongolia into the United States. Along the way, we eventually learn that the girl has a virgin pregnancy with twins who are thus enormously powerful and potentially messiahs. Vin Diesel's character must therefore make every possible sacrifice to keep this girl from falling into the clutches of the New Age church that is trying to take over the world.

Let's think logically about this for a minute. The whole point of a virgin birth in Christianity is the fact that it is miraculous in nature. Ergo, it follows that producing a pregnant virgin by any type of rational, scientific means is, by definition, not a miraculous birth at all. That any Christian (or for that matter, anyone who isn't an idiot) would ascribe any religious implications at all to a technically virgin woman who had been inseminated by a supercomputer or a robot is utterly inexplicable. The characters in this film even live in a future where you can find cloned Siberian tigers in cages in the middle of Kazakhstan, but supposedly a virgin birth is still mysterious and profoundly theological to them.

This takes us to the fundamental premise of the film, which is the sloppy Hollywood assumption that whatever the Hollywood filmmaking class thinks about American culture circa 2008 will be the commonplace, unremarkable way of life circa 2017 and beyond. It therefore makes perfect sense for a religious establishment of the future to make a bid for global domination by attempting to fake a virgin birth. Surely the Hollywood consensus is that American Christians are more than stupid enough to fall for it.