Reading notes

David comes through with an excellent review of The Passion of the Christ at Orcinus:

This is the first time anyone has made a film about the life of Jesus that conceived of it primarily as an action flick. Most of the other previous films about Jesus have been, by comparison, boring and talky. The Passion does away with all that inconvenient and boring talk and gets right to the nitty-gritty of the exciting stuff, which is to say, the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life, with all its beatings and floggings, culminating in a real gore-fest of a crucifixion. …

It’s a revenge melodrama — without the satisfying catharsis of revenge. …

David notes that Bill Cork at Ut Unum Sint “has already helpfully — and quite accurately — catalogued much of the non-scriptural material in The Passion.”

Ultimately, however, even questions like these are washed away in the relentless, grotesquely detailed violence. In fact, it is so stomach-churning that I can’t imagine this film being a recruitment tool for non-believers. Anyone who is not a committed Christian would be more likely repulsed by the gore than attracted to the faith. After all, it is the Sermon on the Mount, not the Crucifixion, that has drawn believers to his teachings for centuries. …

Everything you need to know about The Passion of the Christ is that in it, the Sermon on the Mount is reduced to a one-minute sound bite. …

The theological dimensions of The Passion — extremely limited as they are — serve to reinforce this identification with an extraordinarily narrow view of what it means to be a Christian. Teleological questions about the nature of love and God are mere ephemera in this religious worldview; what matters is the subsumption of one’s entire being to the responsibilities implied in Jesus’ sacrifice.

Read David’s whole review; there’s no capturing its strength in just a few quotes.

Finally, he notes that Salon has a page full of links to other reviews of the movie.

Thanks, David.

2004-03-09 update: David continues his assessment, bringing to bear more historical understanding than I think I’ve ever possessed. Impressive.

Richard highlights the illogic involved in this gay-marriage amendment dipsh1ttery:

In the style and rigor of his argument, Bush talked about marriage as he did recently about Iraq. He made one assertion after another, linking them not with evidence or with logic, but simply with the word “and.” Saddam Hussein is a madman and a threat to the United States. How? Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Doesn’t matter. He was a threat to us all.

It is the same with gay and lesbian marriage. Whatever you may think, it represents no threat to our way of life — no reason to take the very serious step of amending the Constitution. The amendment would not bar or condemn homosexuality, which is the real issue here, but merely turn marriage into a version of a restricted club: Gays need not apply.

[via del.icio.us]

From Wednesday, February 25’s New York Times editorial page:

With his re-election campaign barely started and his conservative base already demanding tribute, President Bush proposes to radically rewrite the Constitution. The amendment he announced support for yesterday could not only keep gay couples from marrying, as he maintains, but could also threaten the basic legal protections gay Americans have won in recent years. It would inject meanspiritedness and exclusion into the document embodying our highest principles and aspirations. …

The Constitution has been amended over the years to bring women, blacks and young people into fuller citizenship. President Bush’s amendment would be the first adopted to stigmatize and exclude a group of Americans. Polls show that while a majority of Americans oppose gay marriage, many would prefer to allow the states to resolve the issue rather than adopting a constitutional amendment. They understand what President Bush does not: the Constitution is too important to be folded, spindled or mutilated for political gain.

I note that this proposed amendment is quite accurately being referred to as the “Hate Amendment” and, even more to the point, the “Anti-Marriage Amendment.” It is indeed both.

I am not wired to be a person who sees things as black or white, generally speaking. But in this, perhaps I am: I think any politician’s attempt to alter the Constitution to remove liberties instead of guarantee them implies (1) no understanding of — or no regard for — its spirit, and (2) Instant Disqualification from holding elected office.

Yeeerrrr out. Period.

[also archived at Truthout]

William Pitt’s insightful words bring Old Testament prophets immediately to mind, and in so doing take my breath away:

The television airwaves have been filled for the last several days with a lot of back-and-forth about Mel Gibson’s new film, ‘The Passion of The Christ.’ …

Why would Mel Gibson make a movie about people in the ancient Middle East and cast it with so many white people? …

In truth, the region where Jesus was born was, and remains, populated by brown-skinned people. The fact of Christ’s non-whiteness is borne out in the historical record, and in biblical scripture. …

The ugly truth which never even occurs to most Americans is that Jesus looked a lot more like an Iraqi, like an Afghani, like a Palestinian, like an Arab, than any of the paintings which grace the walls of American churches from sea to shining sea. …

George W. Bush calls himself Christian. If you believe him, he is on armchair-to-armchair relations with the Almighty, enjoying regular conversations with He Is What He Is on everything from tax policy to invasion plans. …

When Bush did his little flight-suit strut across the aircraft carrier last May, he proclaimed victory in biblical verse and sent a signal to those Christians who see him as more than a man. Bush, that day, quoted Isaiah’s passage from the Servant Songs about captives coming out and slaves being free. This is the same passage, as described in Luke chapter 4, which Jesus used to announce his coming as the Son of God. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” said Jesus. Bush’s use of this incredibly loaded passage speaks as much to his messianic fantasies as it does to his status as Christian-in-Chief. …

This, BTW, is why the oft-leveled charge of “Bush hatred” against progressive people like me is usually false; personally, I want Mr. Bush to have a long, happy life out of office at his ranch in Crawford, TX. What I’m not prepared to let stand is his — and our — massively sinful behavior parading as messianic:

Yet this is the same man who invades countries without cause and consigns tens of thousands of innocents to explosive, burning death. This is the same man who pushes tax policies that further enrich the wealthy while stripping funds and services from the neediest in this nation. This is the man who speaks the language of vengeance, of fear, of violence. … Sadly, the skewed moral compass of George W. Bush is shared by too many Americans who would call themselves Christian. …

Jesus was no fool. In Luke, chapter 11, verse 21, he said, “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are in peace.” Self-protection, for person and nation, is both moral and intelligent. But vengeance, violence and hatred are not Christian. Mercy, love and generosity are the hallmarks of the teachings of Jesus. If you are to call yourself Christian, you must be for the poor and the weak, and against empire and vengeance. Period. …

Too many so-called Christians are blind to history, blind to the actions of our nation, blind to the hypocrisy of our so-called leaders, and the world bleeds because of it.

Melanie quotes Margaret Kimberley, a political liberal/devout Baptist person — a combination rarer than unearthed diamonds, seems to me — writing in the Dallas Morning News:

Conservative Christians have espoused their views on school prayer, public displays of the Ten Commandments, abortion, gay rights and other issues so vociferously that they have succeeded in making conservative synonymous with Christian. …

As a political liberal who is also a devout Baptist, I have grudging admiration for my conservative coreligionists. They are unrelenting in the promotion of their beliefs and in their alliance with conservative politics. …

[But] it appears that the operative word for those who describe themselves as Christian conservatives is conservative, not Christian. They thrive on the idea of controlling the behavior of others, whether by restricting gay marriage, preventing abortion or establishing the supremacy of their religious and political beliefs, even if their actions subvert religious life as experienced by millions of other Americans. …

It is time for this president and other conservatives to be taken to task when they claim to follow the word of God. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill alleges that the Bush administration planned for a war with Iraq as soon as it came into office, well before the terror attacks Sept. 11, 2001. A good Christian would be reluctant to make war and would certainly not make a case based on lies. Unfortunately, liberal Christians are less comfortable making public proclamations of faith and are reluctant to debate their conservative brethren.

I recently watched Steve Martin’s movie The Jerk after having not seen it since its debut in 1979. I’m reminded of the scene in which Steve’s African-American father is confiding to him an important life lesson before Steve heads off into the world: The father points to a pile of manure in front of them and says, “Now, son, this is shit,” and then points to a can of shoe polish in his hand and says, “and this is Shinola.” Steve repeats back, “Shit, Shinola,” to confirm he’s got it, then steps forward into the pile of shit.

The problem I see in many religious conservatives is an inability to recognize spiritual shit from Shinola.

Margaret reminds me I too have a pastoral responsibility to take these folks to task when they’re in this predicament — when they claim to be following the word of God but aren’t. I’d rather just write ‘em off, because that’s easier. But staying quiet is letting them stomp around in shit unchallenged, soiling themselves and splattering everyone else, and in the splattering making the name Christian an epithet in this generation.

NOTE: I registered at DallasNews.com to read the published article, but now I see its text is available without restriction in Margaret’s blog entry Give Me That Old Time Religion.

[via Melanie]

President Bush said today he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, declaring that such a measure was the only way to protect the status of marriage between man and woman, which he called “the most fundamental institution of civilization.”

This amendment idea is bare-knuckled bigotry and discrimination for which there is no defense. At foundation this idea has nothing to do with homosexuality — it’s all about the willingness to alter our nation’s Constitution to the end of removing citizens’ rights instead of guaranteeing them.

The president is charged with defending the Constitution, not taking a crap on it.

I like Allen’s observations this morning about what thin ice those who use scripture to legislate sexuality are standing on.

The conservative proponents of biblical sexual standards better hope that no one examines the texts they rely upon too closely for many of the Bible’s ideas about sexual morality are quite alien to our own.