Atheism doesn't exist

Atheism doens't exist. People think they are atheists because they don't believe in God's representation they were lead to believe in. Or they revolt themselves against the difficulties that the belief in a Supreme Being may bring, once the faithful personal growth doens't come without a struggle. In extreme cases, of socialist revolutionaries rebelled against God's authority, and of satanism practioners, it not about a disbelief in the existence of God, but rather a disbelief in his person, like somebody may distrust another person.

The greatest concept man has ever conceived for the divine reality is that of a Father, as such amorous towards his children. But this is still a representation, suited only for the relationship man develops with God. For example, for an angel, to say that God is a Father won't make much sense, since he didn't have a progenitor. The image of a father he can only glimpse putting himself in the place of other beings, which is not the same as having lived it. God is much more than any representation we can make of him, he is that best reality we know exists.

But that doens't mean representations are not useful. Myths always open human mind with a range of experiential possibilities that mere, let us say, metaphysical acknowledgment might sterilize. Good philosophy -- as Plato knew well and Lao-Tsé better yet -- transits through logical intuition and phantasies. 

Old Boy and spirit, or lack of

There is no goodness in the movie Old Boy. Oh Dae-Su leaves its private jail after fifteen years and does nothing to help a man willing to commit suicide. He will have the opportunity to kill his tormentor, Woo-jin, but, because he would lose the chance to know why he was incarcerated, doesn't do that. His friend No Joo-hwan's death would be avoided if he had.

Woo-jin is the psycopath who jails Oh Dae-Su. He has killed his wife and supervised his daughter Mi-do's upbringing. He hypnotizes both in order to have them become, father and daughter, lovers. His loathsome plan fullfills itself: it is a revenge because Dae-Su had gossiped to the school where they had studied that Woo-jin and his sister, Lee Soo-ah, had had sex. Soo-ah commits suicide then, which is the occasion for Woo-jin to allow himself to become a psycopath.

Once everything happened, Dae-Su just wants to forget and resorts to the same expedient that had him fustigated: hypnosis.

These stories of extreme-grade manipulation remembers me of Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who lived in a nazi concentration camp and lost wife, parents, brother and friends, but left the place to love his fellow human beings. There is spirit beyond the "repugnant desires to moral which were imposed to us by nature" (Freud).