No Country for Old Men Spirituality Quotes

Anton Chigurh doesn't exactly (or at all) believe in God, but does have deeply held beliefs: that chance and randomness have power over the world. But even he can't seem to get away from the idea that events can carry deeper significance, as we see here where he talks about the journey of one little coin to a small Texaco gas station. Random? Maybe. Meaningful? Definitely.

Sheriff Ed Tom doesn't know what to think of a man who said he knew he was going to hell fifteen minutes before he died in the electric chair, and frankly neither do we. It just goes to show you that religious belief isn't necessarily going to keep you from being a cold-hearted killer.

Ed Tom's friend from El Paso seems to in the throes of an even bigger spiritual crisis than the one Ed Tom is suffering. What's the point of living is when the whole world is just one big bloodbath of money and drugs? It's a toughie, and the Coen brothers don't provide any easy answers.

Sheriff Bell always thought that finding God was just a part of growing older, but it didn't work out that way for him. He actually has less faith as he gets older, since he's decided that the world is going to hell and that God has pretty much given up on him and humanity in general. We doubt that opinion is going to make him very popular at the nursing home.

Sheriff Bell thinks that one of the reasons he has no faith is because God has judged him unworthy of His attention. Talk about feeling sorry for yourself. Want some cheese with that whine, Sheriff?

Sheriff Bell's relative Ellis isn't going to sit by and listen to Bell whine about how God has deserted him. The truth is that it often takes just as much faith to despair as it does to have hope. Sheriff Bell seems determined to think that the world is an awful place and assumes it's true because it's negative. But how can he know what God thinks? Isn't that the whole point of God?

Sheriff Bell isn't afraid of dying, as he makes perfectly clear when he walks into a crime scene expecting to be confronted by the psychotic Anton Chigurh. It's his soul he's worried about—and humanity as a whole. That's something that'll keep you up at night.

Sheriff Bell isn't worried about dying. He's worried about committing himself to a certain type of faith only to find out that the world is just a big tangle of random violence. Notice all the language of gambling here? ("Chips" are what you bet in card games; "hazard" actually comes from the name of a game of chance.) You could definitely make the argument that Bell and Chigurh are both trying to figure out whether they believe that the world is really just a game of chance.

Anton Chigurh might be a psycho killer, but he still believes in some kind of fairness when it comes to judging whether people should live or die. Fairness—or some twisted kind of fairness—is his only moral (and spiritual) code. In this case, he thinks it's "fair" if he lets his potential victim call heads or tails on a coin toss. We think it might be okay to let fairness slide just this once and not kill the poor lady, but, then, we live by no code.

When Carla Jean insists that Chigurh take responsibility for his actions, Chigurh deflects it right back. He argues that he's just randomly bouncing around the world in the same way a coin would travel from place to place, and that's his spiritual outlook on nearly everything: no God, no universal master plan, just good and bad luck.