The Paradox Machine

Okay so this is getting worryingly dominated by Doctor Who at the moment.

At the end of the last series of Doctor Who the Master returned and turned the TARDIS into a paradox machine. The Paradox is that it brings people back to interfere with their own past which means that they should cease to exist. It is therefore a paradox, they should not be there, it should not exist.

By the end of the final episode the earth was practically destroyed millions killed, the whole of Japan wiped out and the Master about to start galactic war. However the people chant the name of the Doctor and he gains the strength to reverse the paradox and therefore time reverses to just before the time the aliens invaded and the future, the destruction, the murder, and all that pain did not happen. Of course the Doctor and the others with him know what has happened but for everyone else it literally did not happen.

It struck me that sometimes we are paradox machines. We do things which we know we should not do. We know that what we are doing is wrong. We know that certain things are wrong, and by like the Pandora's box we open it and taste the forbidden fruit. The problem is that once we do so it brings in it's wake destruction.

The problem is in real life you cannot just reverse the paradox, in real life you cannot turn back the clock and undo the destruction. However much we may want to, however much we may hope and pray that we could. In the media there is something unsatisfying about it as a literary device, because in real life it does not happen.

In real life we are "paradox machines," praising God and doing all the right things, and then yet at times we blow it all. The religious parallels were striking, the Master was smooth talking and convincing, as these baddies often are - and yet he carried with him death and destruction.

Sin is subtle and attractive but deadly. Jesus came to heal a broken world, but the damage sin causes cannot simple be reversed. We and the rest of the world still have to live with the consequences.