Why has the Titanic become a myth?

"People say, why are you so fascinated by this wreck? And for me it's a study of human psychology and the way people deal with crises. And they dealt with it in different ways. Some were in denial. Some were in a trance. Some just took action, didn't think, just went, just did. And others were craven cowards who thought only of their own survival. We all know that we would fall somewhere on that spectrum but until our lives are really put at risk - you know, the moment of truth - we don't know what we would do. [...]

"Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before? There was this big machine, this human system, that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now. Within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm of the world, you have different classes, you’ve got first class, second class, third class. In our world right now you’ve got developed nations, undeveloped nations. You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn. We can’t turn because of the momentum of the system, the political momentum, the business momentum. There too many people making money out of the system, the way the system works right now and those people frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren’t ready to let ‘em go. Until they do we will not be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we’re going to hit it, and when we hit it, the rich are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on. It’s going to be poor, it’s going to be the steerage that are going to be impacted. It’s the same with Titanic. I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people."

- James Cameron, Director of Titanic (1997) and Titanic 3D (2012),
National Geographic: Titanic - the final word.

Today is the centenary of the sinking of the HMS Titanic. Some people have got excited at the fact that some young people took a while to discover that the 1997 James Cameron blockbuster film* was based (at least at the macro level) on actual events. But that is not what I mean by myth. The story itself has become a shared cultural reference point, a story picture of flexible but fairly-well defined meanings. Why has the story of this particular ship been so often invoked, when so many other (often numerically greater) maritime tragedies have been quickly forgotten? As Cameron points out, the narrative of these events is very easily turned into a parable, or a myth - as the ship itself was already mythic in name and epic in scope when it was launched. We want to make sense of tragedies, and this one, for all its mysteries, seems to offer some pretty clear morals. Pride goes before a fall. We're all in the same boat. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

And watch out for icebergs.
*And its recent perfectly-timed-for-maximal-cash-in-from-free-media-publicity 3D re-release.
H/T Joe Romm for the reference and second quote.

A parable

Every day while walking up the 193 steps to my desk I pass the smallest nature reserve in the country, a tiny locked garden that thrives with all manner of wee, sleekit beasties.

Today as I walked past, a man, slightly inebriated, climbed over the fence, stumbled through a couple of low bushes, exclaimed loudly to his two friends who had remained behind "It's beautiful! No, I mean seriously, it's really beautiful!" and then proceeded to unzip his pants and relieve himself.

Whether the point of this parable is as an illustration of so many of our interactions with the created order, or is related to the fact that I kept on walking, thinking this was someone else's problem, I am not entirely sure.

Jesus was no capitalist usurer

Brad offers a reading of the parable in Luke 19.11-27 that may turn a few common assumptions on their head. But to my mind it makes a lot of sense of some otherwise uncomfortable details.

The implications of this reading are significant, since it removes one of the few passages used by defenders of usury to claim that Jesus (implicitly) overturns the scriptural prohibition against charging interest on a loan. It goes without saying that this practice is a central pillar of our present economic system.

Can Christians be bankers?

The parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18.23-35 is justly famous as an illustration of the gratuitousness of divine forgiveness. The debt of the first servant is larger than the entire GDP of multiple Roman provinces at the time (or so I have heard). Don't ask how this man had amassed such a debt; dodgy loans are apparently nothing new. Perhaps someone got a tasty commission and knew there was little regulatory oversight. But I digress...

The main point of the parable, however, is not the enormity of the debt forgiven the first servant, but the failure of that servant to treat his neighbour in the light of the forgiveness he himself had just received. It is a striking image of one of Jesus' central teachings: that we are to forgive others as we have been forgiven by our heavenly Father.

Yet listening to this parable in church last Sunday made me wonder: the image is financial; is the application also financial? That is, when Jesus warns against a failure to cancel the debts of one who cannot repay us and says that God will not forgive us if we do not forgive others, is he only talking about moral or relational debts? Are actual monetary debts excluded? I see no reason that they should be. And Jesus isn't talking about restructuring bad debts, or recovering what can be recovered. The entire debt is forgiven.

This is a profound teaching and would, it seems to me, effectively make it impossible for a Christian who takes the teaching of Christ seriously to work at any of the major banks. Thoughts?
I also cannot see how a Christian can work in (much of) the advertising industry either, but that is for other reasons and is perhaps a post for another day.