Christian Thoughts #004: on "the Mad Hatter"

Behold the ruinous powers of Tim Burton.

   UGH, no. Not that Mad Hatter. This Mad Hatter.

"Hats don't kill people. People in hats kill people."
~Mad Hatter quote from Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader

   Ah, much better...

   The Mad Hatter, AKA Jervis Tetch, is a Batman villain. He has been my favorite Batman villain since his debut episode "Mad as a Hatter" from Batman: the Animated Series, a staple of my cartoon diet in the 90's. There he was voiced by the late-great Roddy Mcdowell. There he had elequonce, sophistication and all the arrogance that spins any mind in madness.
  
   But I always felt the Mad Hatter was underappreciated. He is kind of a back-burner Batman villain. He always seems to be the least threat. Hopefully a DC writer comes along that really does him and his mind control justice.

   Which brings me to an observation: the Mad Hatter's mind control ability was used in his debut episode to force his secretary (named Alice, of course) into falling in loving him. Yet at the same time, the Hatter realizes that using his mind control  on Alice removes her free will and reduces her to an empty shell, "a soul-less little doll" as the Batman in his gravelly tone put it.

    Philosophically, this is an important fact. Love cannot exist without free will, the choice to love. Forced love, or forced will to do anything, is not a choice, is not free will, and is not love. But with free will comes the possibilty of denying or withholding love. And so we have our world today, a world full of human beings that from the outset of our race had the choice to love but we withheld love for the sake of rebellion, violence, pride, selfishness and hate.

   Yes, Genesis is philisophically sound. Did Adam and Eve have free will? Certainly. Did they have a choice? Yes, to either love and obey God or to disobey Him and sin.

   Critics of Christianity claim that evil in the world disproves the existence of a loving, all-powerful God, certainly the Judeo-Christian God. In reality, all that evil prooves is that God created humans with free will and that humans chose to abuse their free will for evil.

 

   As sacreligious as it seems to follow up a topic as profound as free will with a simple pencil sketch... it's too late. I already did follow it up with a simple pencil sketch.

 

   As far as the drawing, which is mine, I don't appreciate how the feet turned out, but I have to say it was fun to sketch. I could get really exaggerated with his expression and physical features because the Hatter's always been sort of comical and skewed, cartoony when compared to some of the Batman's more realistic rogues.

 

   Other old sketches of mine can be found at: http://daichinnraoss.deviantart.com/

  ~norton