Isidora goes to the movies: Dr. Strange

If you ignore all the New Age theory that serves as a quick explanation for how people can wield powers that are really awesome in 3D because they keep turning cityscapes into something out of M.C. Escher drawings, the actual meaning of Dr. Strange is quite o(O)rthodox.

• Death is the enemy 
• But death is good for us: it teaches us that life is meaningful
• Time is a problem (related to death)
•  There is a being beyond time 
• (in this story, it's Evil but the thinking clears a path for that being as Good as per St. Augustine - see below)
• Evil beings want to trick us and use the promise of eternal life to do so

My understanding of God being beyond time has been enhanced by this recent article in First Things, which presents what Saint Augustine thought on the subject: 

So what was this eternal God doing before he made the world? On Augustine’s reading, there was no such “before.” There was no “then” then. Eternity is the dimension of God’s own life. It has no beginning and no end, no parameters or margins or boundaries outside of God himself.  On the other hand, time was willed and created by God as a reality distinct from himself. In his treatment of the world, Augustine again proves to be original in his thinking. He says not only that time and the world were created by God but that they were at once created together. They were co-created, so to speak, for time is coextensive with the world. This is how Augustine puts it: God created the world not in time but with time. What this means is that time is not some primordial container—an infinite bucket of moments—in which certain events happen. Time is not a receptacle; it is a relationship.

As for Dr. Strange's time loop solution to the problem of the Big Evil, don't try that at home.