With all the hoopla this week of the Superman Returns movie, you might be interested to know that almost all our superheros have some kind of denominational affiliation. Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Catholic—you’ll find connections in the storylines of our best hooded, caped, spandex-covered, super-people.

Superman—Methodist
Let’s start with Superman—the blue-tights-and-red-undies-wearing man of steel himself, who is reported to be a Methodist. This has never been explicitly stated in any way, but the reasoning goes like this: Clark Kent was raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent who live in the strongly Methodist Mid-Western area of the United States. The Kents are regularly portrayed praying, going to church, and saying things like ‘well, if the Lord wants it to happen, He’ll make it happen’. As an adult Superman hasn’t been a regular churchgoer, but he has, however, occasionally visited ministers of various Christian denominations for counsel, guidance, and even confession.

Supergirl and Superboy—Methodist
Do you remember Supergirl? Generally considered Superman’s female counterpart, Supergirl first appeared in 1958 and several variations of her have appeared in comic books since then. But during the late 80s and 90s, Supergirl was an active Methodist. Her minister, the Reverend Larry Varvel, was based on a real-life Methodist minister of the same name.

And did you ever hear of Superboy? He was a clone made from the DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor. Like Superman, Superboy was also raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent, and while not particularly religious, he often wondered about the state of his soul, and once uttered what appeared to be a prayer to God asking that fundamental question, "Why am I here?"

Superman’s other close colleagues have denominational connections too. Jimmy Olson is a Lutheran, Lois Lane is a Catholic, Perry is a Baptist, and Lex Luthor is Jewish (although a non-observant one, as Jews today thankfully remember).

Spider-Man—Protestant
How about Spiderman? Peter Parker’s precise denominational affiliation has never been clear and he’s never been depicted as a regular churchgoer. But Parker has exhibited a clear belief in God from time to time, and experts say his personal code of ethics reflects a Protestant Christian background. One comic strip shows him asking God why bad things happen to him, with what seems like a conversation between him and God ensuing. Another shows Peter Parker turning to prayer in the face of imminent danger. He begins, "Hey, God? It's Peter again..."

Batman—Episcopalian/Catholic (lapsed)
On the subject of Batman's religious affiliation, there’s some disagreement among fans as well as writers about whether he’s a lapsed Catholic or a lapsed Episcopalian (or Anglican in our terminology). Apparently his father was Episcopalian and his mother Catholic, and Bruce Wayne’s fake headstone above his grave has a Christian cross above it.

The Hulk—Catholic (lapsed)
And remember the Incredible Hulk? Dr. Bruce Banner, as his alter-ego was called?

Dr. Banner is typically portrayed as an essentially "non-religious" scientist. But he explicitly identified himself as a lapsed Catholic in an episode of The Incredible Hulk TV show, and in one of the comic book series he was portrayed as a Catholic who believes in an afterlife. When Betty Ross, the love of his life, once believed Banner was dead, she joined a convent and began training to become a nun. Later they married, and the point is that if Betty was sufficiently Catholic to almost become a nun, she was probably Catholic enough to want to marry a fellow Catholic too.

So, Dr Bruce Banner, The Incredible Hulk, is a lapsed Catholic; Batman is a possible Anglican; Superman is a Methodist, and Spider man an unnamed Protestant. I’d like to know what a Presbyterian superhero would look like, or even a Pentecostal!

Superman consults Christian ministers when he needs advice; Supergirl regularly attends church; Superboy asks God what he’s doing here; The Hulk believes in an afterlife, and Spiderman prays.

It seems even Superheros need to bow the knee for some divine help every now and then.

It may only be 14 years away, but experts say life in the year 2020 is going to be very different. Popular science magazine Cosmos recently asked some of the world’s leading scientists to forecast the future, and this is what they came up with:

By 2020 the North Pole will be almost entirely free of ice and the West Antarctic ice sheet will also be breaking up. Seas will rise and earth’s low-lying areas will be flooded. Apart from the challenge to human survival, the animal and vegetable kingdoms will be hard hit too, with many species heading to extinction. And this is all just 14 years away.

Depending on how we respond to this atmospheric warming, our power sources in 2020 will be much more diverse, with wind, wave and solar energy becoming more important. Cars will probably run on diesel fuel, or electric and petrol hybrid engines. They also predict the extinction of the four-wheel-drive!

According to astronomers at SETI (that’s the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute), by 2020 life will have been found in outer space. They say the race is now just determining which of their various technologies will find our galaxial neighbours first.

A cure for cancer may well be found by 2020. At the very least deaths from common cancers will be greatly reduced.

The technology we use by 2020 will be impressive. As far as computer games are concerned, we’ll no longer sit in front of a keyboard and screen—handheld devices will connect us to people across the globe while we’re standing in the supermarket que. And self-cleaning surfaces will be found in our homes. Coated with ultraviolet-light- absorbing particles, the kitchen bench of tomorrow will disinfect itself better than a swipe of the sponge with a dash of bleach.

By 2020 scientists even predict the rise of ‘intelligent clothes’. Special fabrics fitted with monitors will study our health as we work, sleep and exercise; sports clothes will tell us if we’re stretching or bending in ways that are harmful, and some clothing will even be embedded with mobile phone chips—if we’re injured our body temperature and physiology will trigger the chip and call the nearest hospital.

And by the year 2020 folks, the new era of domestic bliss will have dawned. No more cleaning, dusting or doing the laundry. No more ironing, folding clothes or tidying the house. No wiping up of the toddler’s dribble or vacuuming up hubby’s toenail clippings. These tasks will all be done by our own domestic robots. Androids are predicted to be the ‘must have’ item of the 2020s and are even expected to be treated like pets, according to the Cosmos article.

So, technologically, scientifically, environmentally and inter-gallactically, life in the year 2020 is forecast to be unique indeed. But will we be any happier? Will we be more fulfilled or content?

Winning the war on cancer suggests so, but our environmental future suggests not. If the pundits are right, we’ll be cancer free at the same time we’ll be overwhelmed by natural disasters.

But leaving the dramatic cases aside, will our wireless, internet-enabled global gaming consoles and ‘must have’ domestic robots help in our quest to find meaning and harmony? Recent research out of Duke University in the US suggests people have fewer close ties with family and friends today than 20 years ago. It’s suggested our rapid adoption of the internet is a major contributing factor to this break down in face-to-face contact. And as for the robots, maybe we’re losing something by giving up the dirty work of household chores. I’ll never forget hearing a leading suicide-prevention expert explaining his method of working with depressed teenagers. The first thing he does is take them into the kitchen to do a load of washing up. Before the automatic dishwasher arrived, some of the best conversation between parents and children took place at the kitchen sink. So often our technologies save us time but leave us lonely, don’t they.

Ultimately, the future’s unknown. But if half of this Cosmos article is right, in our ecological and technological decisions we’ll need the wisdom of God to ensure we don’t do more harm than good. On that note a proverb from The Message Bible comes to mind:

Trust God from the bottom of your heart;
don't try to figure out everything on your own.
Listen for God's voice in everything you do, everywhere you go;
he's the one who will keep you on track.

I don’t know if you caught the ABCs Australian Story program this week. A very moving program looking at two women suffering from a rare and debilitating disease called lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or LAM for short. It strikes women of child-bearing age, attacks their lungs, and at this stage a lung transplant seems the only option for a chance at survival.

Mary—a young woman in her twenties—was one of the two featured. After diagnosis, various lung collapses and operations, a doctor told Mary that having children would be too great a risk to her health—another disappointment. Then, a couple of years after her diagnosis, Mary’s husband rang her one day to say he’d had enough—he couldn’t cope with her sickness anymore, and hated the fact they wouldn’t be able to have children or be a normal family. So Mary lost her health, the opportunity for a family and then her husband—the one person she expected would still by her thick and thin.

Mary’s family have stuck by her, thank goodness. Although one comment made in the program left me sad. Talking about Mary’s husband leaving her, one family member said, “I think [Mary] was a little bit naïve… thinking that, you know, you're there for thick and thin and for better or worse, in sickness and in health.”

Naïve? What are marriage vows for if they’re not to be believed—to be trusted? ‘For better or worse, in sickness and in health’—marriage vows are a promise. If it’s naïve to think a promise should be kept, well, call me naïve. I hope I’m naïve enough to keep the promises I made to Merryn in our marriage vows. I certainly hope she’s naïve enough to keep hers to me.

And I just hope another man walks into the life of a twenty-something woman named Mary with lung disease, and shows her how naïve he could be too.

With the horrors we’ve seen in Lebanon this week, it’s hard to know what we sitting in our lounge rooms can do. Pray, yes. Thank God we live in a peaceful society, yes. And now that the hundreds of Australians originally trapped there have been ferried out, we can indeed thank God for their safety.

But what else can we do?

Perhaps we can learn to think clearly. In an article on the Israel-Lebanon war this week, Jim Rice—editor of Sojourner’s magazine, a Christian peacemaking publication—was able to bring some clarity to this complex situation.

To supporters of Israel this week’s bombings of Lebanon might be seen as a justified response to the terrorist actions of Hezbollah and Hamas—of a nation surrounded by its enemies. Then again, others see the region's most powerful military force illegally occupying Palestinian land and engaging in massive, disproportionate attacks on innocent civilians.

“The violence of Hezbollah and Hamas should be unequivocally condemned and opposed,” Rice says. “It cannot be ignored or underestimated that the two terrorist organizations have as their goal the eradication of Israel.”

Rice goes on to say, however, that media coverage of this new Middle East war can tend to paint a misleading picture of the two sides being equal in power. Rice says, “While their intentions are indeed malevolent, [Hezbollah and Hamas] have nowhere near the military capability of Israel, which wields one of the most powerful military forces in the world (with the aid… of more than $3 billion per year from the United States). The death toll in Lebanon in the first six days of the war has been tenfold that in Israel - according to The New York Times, 310 people, most of them civilians, have died in Lebanon while Israel has suffered 27 casualties, 15 of them civilians, since Israel began its attacks.”

“As Christians committed to the cause of peace,” Rice says, “our role is not to "take sides" in the struggle, in the traditional sense, but rather to stand for the "side" of a just and secure peace. We can ignore neither the horror of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians (including direct attacks on school children) nor the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories (with all its "collateral damage" to Palestinian children).”

Jim Rice then suggests some things you and I can do:

Firstly, Be consistent in denouncing the violence of both sides - especially when it is deliberately aimed at civilians.

Secondly, Pray for the emergence of new political leadership on both sides - both of which seem lacking in creative, courageous, moral, or even pragmatic leadership.

Thirdly, Challenge any religious voices that seem utterly one-sided, completely neglecting the suffering and legitimate grievances of both sides.

Fourthly, Pray for new ways for Christians and churches to join Jewish and Muslim peace lovers in finding real and practical solutions for Middle East in which both states can live with security and democracy.

And, finally, Rice asks that we pray for better solutions than endless war to solve the real threats of terrorism in our world. To fail is to put all of our children at risk.

Yes, we pray. We pray for a ceasefire. We pray for lasting peace. And we pray that innocent lives will stop being lost. As one person put it this week, peace in the Middle East will only come when love for child overwhelms hate for neighbour. Now that’s something to pray for.

I’m really getting into the BBC show Absolute Power, airing on the ABC at the moment. It’s about a public relations firm called Prentis McCabe and the lengths to which they go to ‘spin’ the day’s news to their client’s advantage.

A little while back one of Prentis McCabe’s celebrities got himself into trouble, with his misdemeanour splashed across the newspapers and 6 o‘clock news reports. So, the firm swung into damage control. Their strategy was to persuade the public that this person wasn’t necessarily a bad person; instead he was suffering from a disease that led him to act badly. And because they couldn’t find a disease that fit his transgression, they did the next best thing—they invented one. They called it Maquiro-Hennel Disease, gossiped it to tabloid editors and even set up a website on it. The really funny thing was that within minutes of launching this website on Maquiro-Hennel Disease, they began receiving emails from people glad to finally know what’d been wrong with them all these years!

The truth-contorting efforts of Prentice McCabe do backfire occasionally.

A couple of weeks ago the storyline revolved around a public servant who did something very illegal and went to jail for it. In jail he supposedly found God and wrote a book about his discovery. The problem was it was all false. The public servant’s conviction and jail sentence had all been an elaborate hoax to sensationalise the book and sell more copies. But when the public servant was released, he really did find God, wrote a second book about his real conversion and exposed Prentis McCabe as the ones behind the original scam!

The language in Absolute Power is pretty rough at times and so are some of the themes. Stephen Fry, who plays Charles—that’s Prentis McCabe’s senior partner—has some great lines though. ‘We all lie,’ he said in one program, ‘I’m just part of a profession that’s required to be economical with the truth.’ In another show he said reflectively, ‘There was a time when people stood by their falsifications. Now it’s honest liars like me that are martyred.’

I like the humour and wit of Absolute Power. It’s incredibly well written. But I think it’s giving us more than entertainment. As Charles Prentis places ludicrous stories in the tabloids, destroys the reputations of his enemies, and makes heroes out of the lowest of the low, he shows what happens when truth becomes a commodity to be bought and manipulated. It could well speak powerfully to our generation.

In our postmodern times it’s popular (even beneficial) to believe truth doesn’t exist—that all we really have is a variety of viewpoints, all considered ‘truths’, even if they contradict each other. If that’s true (if I can use the word), we’re in trouble. As Os Guiness has said, without truth we’re all vulnerable to manipulation. ‘If truth is dead,’ he says, ‘right and wrong are neither… [and] the conclusion is simple: Might makes right… Victory goes to the strong and the weak go to the wall.’

As the morally-destitute folks at Prentis McCabe turn their wife-cheating entertainers, ruthless politicians, bad-boy footballers and duplicitous TV personalities into saints, we soon see that when absolute truth dies Absolute Power reigns.

Maybe the genius of a show like Absolute Power is that, with a witty line and a belly laugh, it shows just where our popular beliefs could be taking us.