> A vile, demented movie? Sure, it's a vile, demented religion.
Arguing that one flick represents a whole religion with hundreds of millions of adherents and a 2,000-year-old history is like saying, "All Marxists are just like [insert your favorite knuckle-headed Marxist]." Except that the over-generalization is even more absurd.
In this case, this flick is the personal vision of a particular very rich Hollywood dude who belongs to a marginal Catholic sect and obviously has a serious violence-addition problem of some sort, based not only on this moom-pitcher, but also his previous oeuvre, in which he repeatedly exhibited himself to the public being beaten to a pulp. He obviously is getting a little too old for this sort of thing, since he decided to recruit another actor-sucker to take the punishment this time.
For an excellent background piece on the peculiar theology behind the flick, see <www.unomaha.edu/~wwwjrf/2004Symposium/Lawler.htm>. Prof. Lawler treats the history of the "Traditionalist Catholic" sect, which rejects the Second Vatican Council, quite thoroughly. I especially liked Lawler's reference to Mel's tender regard for his wife:
"On being asked by Peter Boyer, interviewing him for a New Yorker article, whether being a Protestant disqualified him [Boyer] from salvation, Gibson responded simply: 'there is no salvation outside the Church.' He then went on to talk about his non-Catholic wife. 'My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am. She’s Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that [outside the Church there is no salvation] is a pronouncement from the Chair. I go with it.' Things could not be more clearly articulated - both Gibson’s going with the Chair and his innate discomfort with the Chair’s teaching, maybe even with God, if his wife is not saved."
The background to this is that, since the Council of Trent in the 16th century, which was responding to the Reformation, the official Catholic position was that the Catholic Church was the "body of Christ," meaning that if you were outside that "body" Christ couldn't save you. The 2nd Vatican Council in the early 1960s became much more inclusive, but old Mel, going with his sect's rejection of Vatican II, feels he has to condemn his own wife to hell-fire (or at least purgatory, I suppose -- I don't know old Mel's position on the exact arrangements in the hereafter).
In any case, I don't see that we need to get this het up about one obviously nutsy flick. Yes, a lot of X-tians as sick as Mel will eat it up, but a group as large as Christendom obviously will contain plenty of sick people, just as any other equally large group does. Simply, there are all kinds of X-tians, just as there are all kinds of lefties. (In fact, some lefties are X-tians.)
Another question is: is there something in the teachings and traditions of X-ty which tends to make its adherents sick in this way? And of course other ways -- homophobic, racist, patriarchal, pro-slavery (back in the day), etc., etc., since all of these and other social bad attitudes have been encouraged, to say the least, by various Bible texts and traditional X-tian teachings. Quite likely, I would say, but the way to deal with this is to deal with these social sicknesses as such, and leave it to the X-tians how to fix up their religious beliefs to respond.
For example, this whole resistance to gay/lesbian marriage, it seems to me, is just religious bigotry, since the only apparent reasons for objecting it are "ooh, the thought of guys or gals marrying each other just makes me feel icky," and "God tells us it's wrong." We can't do much about the "it just makes me feel icky," but we can say, "Your idea that God says it's wrong is just your religious view, and trying to impose it on others is religious bigotry. We will fight that just as we fought the idea that the Bible said that black people were inferior to whites, and suited to be slaves. You have two choices, alter your religion so it doesn't teach that any more, or quit your religion, but you don't have the choice of poisoning the society all the rest of us live in."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax