The Life of Pi is about a man who is telling his story to another man--a writer. Someone has told the writer that if he listens to Pi's story, he will believe in God. So he gets Pi to tell him about his life.
Pi begins his story by telling how, as a boy in the country of India, his belief in God was begun by the belief in many gods. Then a Catholic priest tells him about the Christian God. After beginning to love the Christian God too, he learns of the Muslim's Allah and begins to worship him also.
Then after the writer learns of Pi's unusual love for many different religions, Pi tells him that his father decided it would be best if they moved to Canada. It is during this part of the movie that we are shown Pi's miraculous account of how he survived the sinking of the ship that contained his family and the animals from the zoo the family was relocating. Finally, Pi ended up in a life-boat with a tiger, a zebra, a hyena and a monkey.
The movie is compelling and beautiful with its magnificent scenes of oceanic storms, sea creatures and the tiger on board the life-boat.
Most of Pi's story is about what happened during his days at sea on the life-boat with the tiger. Then the writer comments about how fantastical the story is so Pi tells him that when he was in the hospital after the ordeal was over, insurance investigators who were looking for the reason of the sinking of the ship, came to question him and he shared with them the same story.
However, the businessmen did not believe it and asked him to tell them something they could put down on paper and turn into their office.
This is when Pi tells a new story. He recounts being in a life-boat with his mother, a very wicked man and a sailor. He sees his mother and the sailor murdered by the wicked man. When Pi gets the chance he finally kills the killer.
The writer then understands that Pi is telling the real story and that in the first story, he has made it more bearable and beautiful by thinking of the people as animals.
Up until then, the movie had me. I could understand a young man being traumatized by watching his mother's execution--so traumatized that he preferred a story about a tiger. But it was the next part that lost me.
With tears in his eyes, Pi asks the writer which story he prefers and then tells him that it is the same with God.
So, this whole movie was actually propaganda for telling us that there are many ways to God. Choose the "story" you like best.
It has already become the mantra of many today--the Oprah-like faith where "there are many paths to God."
But life is not like a good game of Let's Make a Deal where no door is a wrong door and behind each curtain is a prize. Yes, there are pretty stories out there and believing one of them might give some the warm fuzzies as they lie to themselves but pretty stories don't change the Truth.
And the Truth is this: Jesus said that there was one way to the Father and that way was by Him.
Lump all the other religions together if you want and you might as well because none of them leads to eternal life in the presence of the Creator. Jesus Himself drew that line. No pretty story about choices can erase it. Either Jesus was lying or He was telling the truth. If He was lying, one would not place the story of His life on earth and subsequent death and resurrection with other stories, one or all of which could possibly be true. But if Jesus was telling the truth, then the other stories are just that: stories.
But they are more than that. They are dangerous stories. Any story that has the potential of leading people astray from the truth is dangerous. 2 Timothy puts it this way. 2 Timothy 4:3-4
King James Version (KJV)
3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
So the Bible tells us that the time will come when people will not listen to the sound doctrine of the Word of God. Because of their lusts (which I believe describes many today) people will listen to other stories. I also thought verse four was extremely interesting especially in light of "The Life of Pi."
"And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."
The life of Pi was a fable, one that put the belief in Jesus as the Son of God, on par with other religions. The only trouble with that story is that it's Satan's rendition. For he is the mastermind behind all the other religions. He is the one who wants us to believe all religions are the same. He is the one who says: It's all about believing the story you want to believe.
Show them beautiful tigers, tears of a good man and injustice in a cold world and you'll have some people today at your fingertips and they will have hell in their eyes.
And that's the view from this catbird seat...