SAW (2004) | The Terrifying Truth About Jigsaw’s Twisted Theology

Ryan Does: Pleasure to bring into this discussion about saw my good friend Josh Patterson. Josh, I was hoping maybe you could tell people listening today who you are and maybe a little bit of what what you what you've done, what you've contributed before we jump full on into this conversation about saw and morality and the value of life and all sorts of just easy topics. Right on, dude. Yeah, well, so my name is Josh Patterson. I am the host of the Rethinking Faith podcast, which I started back in ⁓ October of 2018. So that's been going for a hot second. Let's see. I am an ordained member of the clergy, which is a weird thing to say because I do not work in vocational ministry anymore. but I'm ordained in the Kyrian network, which shout out Kyrian. Stuff that I've contributed to. I've written like Sorry, I wrote a chapter for a book called Deconstructing Hell, wrote a chapter for a book applying the concepts of open and relational theology to like participation. How do we participate with the divine? I did a piece, another chapter for a book on ⁓ Dr. Thomas J. Ord's notion of amnipotence, which he uses to replace the word omnipotence in ⁓ classical theism. And then currently I am kind of heading up a project that's gonna be an edited volume bringing together radical theology and process theology. So two kind of similar in that they're kind of on the margins, but vastly different ⁓ kind of ways of thinking because one thinks metaphysics is cool and the other one says metaphysics is dumb. So what happens if we bring them together? It's a very nerdy thing, Ryan. Listeners, I I just need to take you behind the scenes for just a just a brief second. Josh and I have been friends for many years now. And any anytime he gets on a roll, he starts saying these $5, $10 words. And I'm like, man, we're gonna need to circle back around to that one because I don't exactly know what that means. I've just learned this about Josh. When he cares and is passionate about something, he puts a lot of work and effort towards it. So we're gonna apply ⁓ some of his expertise, some of his work that he's done in various different parts of thought, of philosophy, of religion to discuss. Saw today, and we're gonna talk about the value of life. How do we put value on life? How does the jigsaw killer put value on life? But Josh, I want to ask, ⁓ just before we jump into more details and a plot summary, how were you introduced to Saw? Because you were actually the person that introduced me to Saw. So I just want to know how far back the origin story goes. Jeez. ⁓ let's see. I so I had a friend when I was in high school that was super duper into. the horror genre overall. They were a collector. They had all of this horror stuff, you know, like movie posters and action figures and life size mannequins, which are creepy. ⁓ like their house was almost kind of like like going into a museum. It was kind of wild. Wow. So anyway, they kind of like I got interested because I had a friend interested. And like, you know, when you're making friends, a good thing to try to do is be like, hmm, let's see what interests they have. It w more often than not it works. Free tip for the listeners. How to make friends. ⁓ so anyway, yeah, it got me introduced, and ⁓ I think yeah, I mean it just it kind of went from there. And that's when I started exploring, ⁓ got me into like classic slasher films at first. So Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, ⁓ these kind of things. And then Saul just kind of came as a natural, you know, progression. ⁓ so I think. ⁓ I probably s watched Saul and it came out the original one in two thousand four, so I was only ten. I definitely didn't watch it when I was ten. I think I first encountered it, probably started watching in college. I kind of got obsessed with ⁓ collecting Blu ray at the time. Well you're one of those guys. Big binder of Blu ray and I had to get all of the Saul movies, so I bought it as a collection. I still have the collection, I don't have a fucking Blu ray player. So great. The Blu-rays out outlasted the Blu-ray player. That's like that explains my VHS collection. ⁓ I don't have a VHS player anymore, but I have a stack just stacks of VHS. I'm sure that's not I'm not the only one with that story. But I love that I love that a friend got you introduced to Saw, you introduced me to Saw, and I can't say, you know, in 2004 when this was coming out, this was not something I would have even been close to allowed to watch. It probably wasn't something I would have gravitated to at the time at all. I was I was a nice little youth group kid. I wasn't gonna watch this. This is I mean the kind of the niche term within, you know, the horror genre is like this is quote torture porn. And needless to say, I wasn't gonna be allowed to watch something under that subgenre. But well, you could always call it body horror and then it's less you know, less ⁓ less sexy. P word is gone. Yeah, yeah. Get rid of that. The only Like risky thing about this movie is that it was called Torture Porn. We're gonna dig into that pole kind of nuance. I'll I'll bet with this discussion. But I want to give listeners that maybe aren't familiar with Saw a little bit of detail and a plot summary, and then we're gonna jump into our topic with Josh, pick his brain, and hopefully along the way, we can learn a thing or two and maybe apply it to how we ourselves value life personally. So Saw came out. ⁓ October 29th of 2004. This was to the wide US audience. It had come out earlier that year, I believe, on the festival circuit. And it was directed by James Wan, who went on and did a ton of other work in the horror genre. He's still doing work in the horror genre as a director and producer. And it stars ⁓ Carrie Elwiz, who some people might know as the actor from The Princess Bride, Robin Hood, Men in Tights, what I was first introduced to to him with was Liar Liar, the Jim Carrey comedy. ⁓ so needless to say, none of those movies are even remotely represented in this movie. Not one thing. Not at all. I didn't even realize that until you texted me yesterday. Yeah. You started sending me gifts of ⁓ the different videos or movies or whatever. And I was like, ⁓ it's the guy from Manning Tights. Because this movie has no familiar vibes for him as an actor. They also, Danny Glover is in this movie. Lethal Weapon, Angels in the Outfield for this guy. I'm sure there's a bunch of other bird ⁓ other movies that Danny Glover is much more pronounly known for. But like Angels in the Outfield was my introduction to Danny Glover. ⁓ but he shows up in this like this franchise feels like on the whole, it's just like, ⁓ so and so. I remember them from that one thing. They're in a Saw movie. Sure, why not? Later on in the franchise, the the actor who plays Luke and Gilmore Girls. Shows up in multiple movies. I've never seen him in any other thing besides Gilmore Girls and Saw. Like, what is that? Like, that is insane. We also have ⁓ Lee Winnell, who was ⁓ the writer on this movie as well. He has gone on to be a very big deal at directing horror movies now, but he was one of the main characters in this as well. Just kind of crazy how he wrote and he's now directing, and he was one of the dare I say stars. Of this movie early on, and Tobin Bell, who plays the Jigsaw killer John Kramer. That is the little bit of detail you need to know. And I just want to break down a quick plot summary for you. It goes, Saw follows two men, Adam and Dr. Lawrence Gordon, chained up in a grimy bathroom by the sadistic killer Jigsaw, who forces them to play a deadly game to test their will to live. With Gordon ordered to kill Adam or his family dies. The twist reveals that the dead man in the room, John Kramer, is actually the jigsaw killer who was present the whole time, leaving Adam to die after Gordon escapes by cutting off his own foot. Real heartwarming tale about friendship and love. It's a it's a gnarly movie. Like that's there's no getting ⁓ around that, Josh. I felt warm and jittery watching it, Ryan. ⁓ yeah, it was there's no way you can watch this and not just have like warmth in your heart. If if of course you have not been subjected to a jigsaw trap and there is still warm blood running through you, that is ⁓ they get really wild and out with the traps that they do in sequ in subsequent movies. ⁓ but Josh, I want to start off our conversation about the value of life in Saw just by asking, can we ever know who we are in a safe, comfortable life? Or does it, like these jigsaw victims, does it take a limited situation, a restrictive circumstance to actually reveal our true character. Hmm. It's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I'm not convinced that we can ever, you know, truly know who we we are. I think we remain a mystery even to ourselves. And once we are put into certain kind of situations, I do think it often is revelatory of things that you know matter most to us. Or we might surprise ourselves what we do, you know, in certain kind of situations. And so I think it's gonna seem a little bit out of left field, but one thing that I do think is interesting about this though, if we kind of want to ⁓ jump the gun, so to speak, so that we don't have to be put in one of Jigsaw's traps or face something crazy ⁓ to reveal the depths of who we are. I think this is where you know, someone like Kierkegaard could come into play nicely, an existential philosopher, ⁓ when asking the question, what is worthy of my finitude? And so often in our culture, I feel like we suppress death and we pretend that death isn't coming for all of us. ⁓ which Ryan, if you don't know, we're all gonna die. ⁓ good to know. Spoiler alert for the end of like my personal movie. Yeah, which is why cynics, you know, I'm stealing this from Rob Bell, but he makes a point that like cynics are boring because they don't go far enough. They're like, ⁓ we gotta wait. Forever at the you know restaurant for our food the other day. It was like, no, you waited 30 minutes. Like it's the worst day ever. Like, nah, dude, we're all gonna die. Like the cynic doesn't go far enough. So someday you're not gonna have the opportunity to wait 15 minutes for waffles. Like just understand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think what's interesting though is like the practice of like, say momento mori, remember your death. It brings us face to face with our finitude ahead of time, and then we can learn. By actually looking death in the face, something about our own values, morals, you know, ethics, whatever. So I hope I don't need that situation to reveal these things. ⁓ I think maybe by pondering death and being honest about it, and then asking myself, what is worthy of my finitude? You know, knowing that I will die, what kind of things are are worth doing in life? So I the that phrase of what's worthy of my finitude is something that's Come around a lot in the recent years of me being surrounded by you, ⁓ some of our mutual friends, and a philosopher named ⁓ Aaron Simmons. ⁓ and he he introduced this term to me for the first time. And I still am unpacking it because it is one of those statements that's so simple, but then the working out of it is a lifelong endeavor. So it's it's it's a simple little like bite-sized thing to chew on, but then you're like. ⁓ my gosh, I've been chewing on this for a long time. It's like, well, you're not gonna be done chewing on it. And an another another thing, you mentioned Kierkegaard. ⁓ there is this concept that I am just kind of dipping my toe into with some of his work of the aesthetic stage and what what like what what begins there, this leap of faith that he writes. extensively about what is the aesthetic stage and how does it kind of work into the theme of valuing life in Saw. Cause I think John Kramer's motive for trapping these people is based in some of that aesthetic stage conversation that Kierkegaard starts. Yeah, yeah. So what you're you're pointing to is Kierkegaard kind of lays out these three stages of life, so to speak. So he has the aesthetic, ⁓ the ethical, and then the religious. And that's kind of the order it moves in. And so the aesthetic stage, kind of just think of it as like hedonistic and like pleasure focused, which ultimately Kierkegaard argues that like that stage of life ends up ending in boredom, in despair, in feelings of meaninglessness. So yeah, that's kind of that's the aesthetic bit. It's it's the hedonistic, it's the pleasure. And so I think, I don't know, it in relation to the the movie itself, I think it does, I mean it's it's pushing, like if our what's the Character's name that's not the doctor. I have it in front of me, Adam. So Adam seems to kind of be the one that's more in that ⁓ aesthetic place, right? He's like the one that's like doing drugs and he's the one that wants the cigarettes when they're in the room. He's the one kind of giving into those things. And then the trap almost pushes him into the realm of the ethical, which is the next stage in Kierkegaard's bit, where I think maybe the doctor, like Dr. Lawrence, kind of starts there, although I think. Jigsaw's trying to make a point that, like, I don't know, as a doctor, he's his job is constantly to tell people that they're gonna die. And like in the movie, they kind of make it a point that like that it seems like the doctor treats patients just as like the patient, as a number. Because if you remember, ⁓ the one guy pops up and says, No, this patient's name is John. Yeah. Like this human being. Yes. So the doctor is even in this kind of like gotten into this space where as a doctor, you're supposed to be ethical, you're supposed to take, what is it, the Hippocratic? Hippocratic oath. Yep. Yeah. ⁓ do no harm. But he's kind of just resolved to like these are just numbers. ⁓ I'm an oncologist. I tell people they're gonna die, and then they die, and kind of use it as like a case study. So I do I mean, I don't know. I think it is it is pushing both of them in those various stages. and I think we can often get caught up in that, you know, kind of in the aesthetic stage, especially with just like how our freaking culture works. Yeah, exactly. Like I think culture, like the aesthetic stage is probably what culture is. Like pop on social media, it's selling you a s the aesthetic stage. Yeah. Right? Twenty-four-seven, ⁓ three sixty-five, all the all the time. Yeah, yeah. And so we can kind of get stuck there. And so I I do think that, you know, again, the traps can represent ⁓ things in our lives that pop up that push us to consider different aspects of life that might be more worth considering. You know, Yeah. That's where like that's where I feel like Jigsaw comes along and he imposes this ethical question on them. It's not like they're arriving at this, like, well, I had that affair and you know, I just realized it wasn't fulfilling, or I got that promotion, or I was seeking after that thing. I was I was just knee deep in that hedonistic urge to follow the the different rabbits around. This is where Jigsaw Imposes that, like, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to now? And he says, I don't kill people, which is in and of itself an ⁓ ethical dilemma. They even call it out in the following movies. But he says, I don't kill people, I give them room to achieve their own salvation. Now, there's no way, there's no way ⁓ you do not have a thought on that, Josh. I've talked to you about so many different things, and I can't. I can't believe that that room that room for salvation, what like is he actually in a sick, twisted, morally depraved way saying he is a vessel through which they can save themselves? Yeah, I mean I think this is interesting. So I don't know. I don't want to, you know, jump the gun, so to speak, but this does remind me of of two things. Like one, I want to look at Jigsaw, like that question of is he a murderer? Because it makes me think of God. Yep. And ⁓ the second bit, you know, I kind of want to look at like the the suffering aspect in the the salvation piece. So what's interesting about the whole question is Jigsaw murderer because technically he never kills anybody. He captures people, he places them into a situation, and then ultimately his victims end up killing themselves. Or doing harm to themselves. And so what's interesting to that, you know, to me, is if you were to ask, if I were to ask you, Ryan, okay, what do you think? Is Jigsaw morally culpable for the murder of these people? I feel like most people would be inclined to say yes. I think you would you'd be hard pressed to find somebody that wouldn't, in at least instinctually, be like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because he set up the trap, he created the trap, he dreamed it up. He captured the person, he threw them into the situation against their will, and now here they are. So he doesn't do anything to them, they do it to themselves. But anyway, that's this is why it makes me think of God. Within, you know, philosophy forever, not forever, but a perennial problem, an ongoing problem, is the problem of evil when it comes to God. So classically speaking, people tend to believe that God is all powerful and all good or all loving. And so the problem of evil Can be phrased like this. If God is all good and all powerful, then why is there suffering in the world? Either God is not all powerful and can't prevent suffering, or God is not loving because of the suffering. And so one way people go about doing this is you kind of have the deterministic route, which are kind of like Calvinist within the Christianity world, where they say, predestined, preordained everything that happens all for the glory of God. So like even a butterfly flapping its wings, God predestined that. I think that God is morally reprehensible because the Holocaust, right? ⁓ and somehow that's supposed to bring God glory. ⁓ so the next thing that people tend to go to is they'll be like, okay, well, God gave us free will. God created the world and we are humans and we have free will. So God's not responsible for the suffering. We are because we're the ones that did it. And this is where I want to bring in Jigsaw. Because how is that any different from what Jigsaw does? If God creates a world where God knows what's going to happen, because again, in classical theism, God is omniscient. So God knows everything, including the future, which I think free will is an illusion if God knows the future, but that's a different conversation. But so God knows everything that's going to happen, chooses to put you in this world, and then those things happen. So like when bad things happen to you, God knew it was going to happen, put you in that world against your will. And like God's maybe not doing it, you're doing it to yourself. But how's God know different than Jigsaw? So I think that's rather interesting, which is why I'm a processed theist. And my way out of the problem of evil is to say that God is not all powerful, that God's power, ⁓ is the power of love. And it is ⁓ non-coercive. So God cannot prevent genuine evil unilaterally, but necessitates human ⁓ creaturely cooperation to do so. And I also reject that the future is known by God because I think the future is open, genuinely. Like you and I are writing history with the divine. And even God doesn't know the future perfectly, just as a realm of kind of possibilities. So that's kind of the jigsaw bit. Just a quick just a quick follow-up because listeners might be hearing that maybe for the first time, or you listen to Rethinking Faith and you're checking this out because you want to hear Josh dig into Saw and you're like, ⁓ I've heard Josh say that before. ⁓ then you are like me, friend. I Josh and I have talked about this extensively privately. ⁓ and I wanna I wanna just maybe reframe the question into a hypothetical. Yeah. If if ⁓ if what you're saying and how you're framing the future and God's power of love, what would what would Saw, what would Jigsaw look like if he more reflected that version of the divine? Hmm, that's a good question. So instead of it would you more hugs. More hugs, more loving. It wouldn't Jigsaw wouldn't be putting people in these traps to begin with, but Jigsaw would be kind of more so it's gonna get weird because Jigsaw is a person. Right has like, you know, a body and all that kind of stuff. The divine doesn't have a body, the divine is spirit. ⁓ so a something that's a little bit different is the divine is, I believe, present in and through all things at all times. And so if somehow Jigsaw could do that, instead of Jigsaw being the one that sets these traps, say another person, like what's the guy's the other character in the movie who also is kind of you find out at the end is a part of the trap. You they kind of make it look like he's his accomplice, but really he's not. He's like Yeah, ⁓ the Danny Globus character. Yeah ⁓ a detective tap. Well no, Detective Tap the the the white guy. Zeppel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Zepp. So it would kind of be like Jigsaw is like this ethereal present in it through all things. And Zepp is kind of like the one that, you know, Jigsaw can see carrying out these evil things. And Jigsaw is kind of like trying to use persuasion to be like, hey, dude, probably we shouldn't do this. Yeah. That's not really our best option. Yeah. But Zepp has the choice to ignore the divine call, the divine lure. ⁓ to do what is good and beautiful and true, and goes against the will of the divine to create these kind of traps and put people in them. Okay. Okay. And so my conception of the divine is that God ⁓ is suffers with. So Whitehead says that God is our companion, the fellow sufferer who understands. So God knows what it's God would be like, know what it's like to suffer as Dr. Lawrence as he cuts his foot off. Like God would be. With Dr. Lawrence in that sense, you know, wish, yeah, it's I mean it gets confusing. Yeah. I just wanted to propose the yeah. I just wanted to propose the opposite. ⁓ and I maybe going going out of less the the realm of the abstract to the more deeply personal, everyday, practical, more pragmatic question would be: we know that there is suffering and hurt and hate in the world, disease, all these different things. And whether we what do we Wanna abstractly assent to this or not, people hurt people and people commit crimes and ⁓ egregious things against others. So when we come out of the other side of that, of a period of suffering or an act is done to us, why is it that most of us would probably come out of a situation that we survive, like a jigsaw trap? We come out of it with a more appreciation for the life we have. Or maybe to say it a different way, the life we were able to keep. Well, I think it it's because it it pushes us up against our finitude. Most of the time when tragedy strikes in life or or suffering or bad things, it brings us face to face with death, which is something that we intentionally try to avoid at all costs. And once I think once that happens, it yeah, it puts things in perspective for us. ⁓ it helps us see like in life what things we were maybe taking for granted, you know, something like that. And so, yeah, I think just suffering, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, has that effect. And so, like for me, I would never, you know, if I go theological again, I would never want to say something like God causes suffering. I don't think God is capable of doing that. Instead, I would want to say that God is actively working in every moment of becoming. To squeeze the most amount of goodness, beauty, and truth out of even the worst possible situations. So it's not that I think God uses suffering to teach us a lesson, but I think suffering can offer lessons depending on what we do with it. Like we can't, we can't change our past, but we can change how we relate to it. Right. So even if like a really shitty, evil, traumatic thing happens to us, we can't change that. But we can choose to to learn something out of it if we want to. I just don't I don't want to say that God does that to people. Right. I wanna because Yeah. That creates a spider's web of very visceral connections that immediately impact people's perception or their living out. Of their own reality. Because if if you say that, and if that is a definitive statement that I'm fair, a handful of people have said throughout human history, then that has complications further down the road, no matter how you come down on on that one thing of does does he or does he not cause those things? So, Josh, I wanna I wanna kinda start to land here with a might seem like a cutesy question. But when we get to the end of Saw, ⁓ Lawrence leaves. He is wounded by the experience that he has gone through in this grimy, crap covered basement. ⁓ and he leaves, but Adam is left there, still chained to the wall. And Lawrence says, I will come back for you, I promise. And Adam is terrified that Lawrence gets to leave and he is still there relying on this man's word. So one of them leaves wounded, one of them stays still whole, but searching. Then John Kramer gets up. He's been the dead body in the room the entire time. He gets up and he says, game over. So many different things have been revealed through this whole process. I heard all of it. So this entire situation is contrived by one man's definition of good, of the value of life, who values life, who doesn't value life. When we get into subsequent movies, he puts people in these traps for absolutely ridiculous reasons. Small reasons. And then others like, you killed 20 people. It's like you had a parking ticket. Like any kind of like the gambit runs wild. Is he truly a murderer or some kind of sadistic, twisted life coach? Yeah, I don't know. I think, hmm. I mean, I want to say Jigsaw is a murderer, but all maybe it's a both and. Yeah. But if I think about Jigsaw metaphorically as the shit that happens to us in our life, again it we can choose to learn from it if we so please. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess in a way you can say he's some kind of like radically sadistic, evil life coach. I like as a pedagogical tool, I don't think it's helpful. I would not go about doing it the way that he chooses to. That's not the next book. Our test scores are down in the country. We're switching methods. Let's try the jigsaw method. Do you want an A or do you want to keep your fingers? Life is about making decisions. Saying yes to one thing is saying no to many things. Have your choice. See, I don't know. It yeah, it's like it's weird. I mean, I think it's just, you know, it it it comes back to the whole like suffering and trauma thing. And like, I don't know, because the question could be the same again if we turn it on God, jigsaw in this sense. Then is God a sadistic, evil, radical life coach just trying to teach us some lessons? I hope not, because that God is not worthy of worship, in my opinion. I would agree with that. Can't in any meaningful way be called love, you know, but I don't know. That's not really an answer to your question. I wanna you know one one of my one of my kind of like personal ⁓ things I want to get out of these conversations discussing how horror explains our lives is What I have learned interacting with these things and having these conversations. And I think one thing that I'm I'm picking up from this is sometimes when we come through these horrible, horrific situations, we have ⁓ there's a few different ways we go with this. In this movie and subsequent movies, we do see Lawrence Gordon again. And he is still maimed by this experience. He is hobbled by it for the rest of his life. And we see other people go through traps where they cut off their own arm or they they they maim themselves in some permanent way and they're always reminded of it. And it does through a sick situation produce a different living out of life for them. And I don't think we can credit Jigsaw with that. I think we can credit them reframing suffering for that. I like, I like I I I really did. Like what you said along those lines. But then there's also the opposite. One of the traps earlier on in this movie that we see is the reverse bear trap, probably the most famous saw trap because of its visual aesthetics. Amanda, the woman that goes through this, becomes a disciple of Jigsaw. And she is enthralled by this, like, man, if I make other people suffer, maybe I can help them learn the lesson. And that's like, let's just be very clear. That would be the wrong way to go. it. So I think to all that to say, I think this movie does a good job of unintentionally showing that there are many different responses to suffering and to the survival instinct that it creates in us. Some people just they just straight up give up. Some people know that it's inevitable and they don't even really fight it, which is sad and depressing. I don't like that one. But that is a real thing that people in life do when they're confronted with suffering. And I I look at this and I just think, wow, human beings handle suffering in a wide variety of ways. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think too, I'll I'll just point to ⁓ something within the Christian tradition that I think is interesting in regards to this kind of wounding tr suffering type stuff. So ⁓ you know, if we take the story of Jesus, the crucifixion and the resurrection, when Jesus, according to the gospels, is resurrected. Jesus' scars remain. And I think that's something important that we should kind of take into consideration in life. Like I think that's saying something. The scars, the past traumas, all of that remains in the person of Jesus. He's been resurrected, he's new, all of this kind of stuff. But the the trauma still sticks around. The scars are still there. And so then to your point, the question becomes when we live out of those scars, when we live out of that suffering. How do we allow it to impact us? Do we use it to become cynical and wish to impose our own scars on other people? Or do we allow the scars to instead of you know break us down, break us open, so to speak, make us more generous to make us more, you know, loving, whatever? And I think one other thing with with ⁓ the scars or the wounds that I find interesting is the story of Thomas, who often gets called doubting Thomas. Yeah. ⁓ in like kind of a pejorative sense. And this I'm gonna tie this into Kierkegaard too. I promise this will all sense. Let's go. So what's interesting about the Thomas bit is he was kind of Jesus' like like the rah-rah go Jesus kind of disciple, right? And then Jesus dies and at the first telling of like Jesus appearing to the disciples, Thomas isn't there. And you're like, ⁓ that's strange. Like wasn't he the rah rah disciple guy? And now he like easily bailed on the whole Jesus thing. Like, nope, that guy is dead. And then the second time Jesus appears is when you have kind of the famous encounter of Thomas and Jesus. And he's like, I'm not going to believe unless I can touch your scars and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think there's actually something interesting in that because it's it's this is where it becomes existential, a leap of faith, so to speak. If the wounds of Jesus, how I see that, represent and symbolize the wounds of the world, right? The story of the crucifixion is God choosing not to be God without us. Identifying fully with the human condition, scars and all, to the point of death, and then continuing to carry those scars with him. By inviting Thomas into his wounds, so inviting Thomas to identify with the scars, with the wounds of the world, it is in that place that Thomas finds faith. Not belief, but an existential risk, a way of being in the world, ⁓ comes when we identify with the wounding, ⁓ of the world with all of those who die cross dead, ⁓ so to speak. So I think that's one that's a positive spin we could put on songs. Yeah. Ridiculously sad Josh, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. ⁓ I know I hope that ⁓ a listener out there will resonate with ⁓ some of the the questions we've proposed and maybe some of the reframing we've also proposed. on how to engage with our own suffering, the value of life, and and how Saw is a lesson, how Saw can teach us something about what it means to be human. And I just ⁓ really, really appreciate this time. Yeah, man. It was fun. Thanks for having me.