Posted on 03/15/2012 11:52:17 AM PDT by NYer
You think you’ve heard nearly every stupid thing there is to hear and then someone even stupider comes along and lowers the bar again.
From the Daily Telegraph:
Dante’s Divine Comedy ‘offensive and should be banned’
The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination. [You just knew the UN would be mentioned, right?]
Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president.
Divided into three parts – Hell, Purgatory and Heaven – the poem consists of 100 cantos, of which half a dozen were marked out for particular criticism by the group. [I wonder if these chuckleheads have the slightest idea what Dante is doing in the Divine Comedy.]
It represents Islam as a heresy and Mohammed as a schismatic and refers to Jews as greedy, scheming moneylenders and traitors, Miss Sereni told the Adnkronos news agency.
“The Prophet Mohammed was subjected to a horrific punishment – his body was split from end to end so that his entrails dangled out, an image that offends Islamic culture,” she said. [The Koran has a lot of things in it that offends me. The Koran should be banned. I'm offended also by stupid activist groups. Gerush 93 should be banned.]
Homosexuals are damned by the work as being “against nature” and condemned to an eternal rain of fire in Hell. [And?]
“We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism,” Miss Sereni said. [Face palm.]
Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked “the filters” to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said.
[...]
I can’t take it anymore.
I think I’ll have some Tuscan wine and read some Dante.
Ping!
I never read it. This makes me want to.
“Dantesque Contrapasso”
is that an Italian gaited horse?
I’m surprised it has lasted in schools as long as it has.
Public Schools have already banned it. They refuse to teach children to read , and the illiterates that graduate from public high schools are not even close to having the ability to comprehend it.
Like, man, who was, like the Virgil, dude, like and what the hell is an Aeneas? Is that like licorice man?
If you’ve never picked up a Bible, why bother picking up Dante?
From Wikipedia:
Contrapasso (or, in modern italian,[1] contrappasso), from the latin contra and patior, "suffer the opposite": refers to the punishment of souls in Dante's Inferno, "by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself."[2] A similar process, though a penitential one, occurs in the Purgatorio.[2]
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