Posted on 02/27/2004 3:40:31 AM PST by ejdrapes
A FEW years ago, Mel Gibson got himself into an argument after uttering a series of crude remarks that were hostile to homosexuals. Now he has made a film that principally appeals to the gay Christian sado-masochistic community: a niche market that hasn't been sufficiently exploited. If you like seeing handsome young men stripped and tied up and flayed with whips, The Passion Of The Christ is the movie for you. Some people used to go to Ben-Hur deliberately late, and just watch the chariot race while skipping the boring quasi-Biblical stuff. Alas, that isn't possible with this film. Along with the protracted torture comes a simple-minded but nonetheless bigoted version of the more questionable bits of the Gospels. It's boring all right - much of the film is excruciatingly tedious - but it also manages to be extraordinarily nasty. Gibson claims that the Holy Ghost spoke through him in the directing of this movie, and that everything in it is from the Bible. I very much doubt the first claim, and I can safely say that the second one is false. The Bible does not have an encounter between Jesus and a sort of Satanic succubus figure in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Bible does not have a raven pecking out the eye of one of the crucified thieves. The Bible does not have Judas pursued to his suicide by a horde of supernatural and sinister devil-children. Moreover, whatever the Bible may say, the Roman authorities in Jerusalem were not minor officials in a Jewish empire, compelled to obey the orders of a gang of bloodthirsty rabbis. It was Rome that was boss. Indeed, Pontius Pilate was later recalled by the Emperor Tiberius for the extreme brutality with which he treated the Jewish inhabitants (and you had to be quite cruel to get Tiberius to raise his eyebrows). YET Gibson is evidently obsessed with the Jewish question, and it shows in his film. It also shows when he's off-screen. Invited by Peggy Noonan - a sympathetic conservative interviewer - in Reader's Digest to say what he thought of the Holocaust, Gibson replied with extreme cold-ness that a lot of people were killed in the Second World War and no doubt some of them were Jews. Shit happens, in other words. He doesn't seem to grasp the point that the war was started by a political party which believed in a Jewish world conspiracy. He doesn't go as far as his father, who says that the Holocaust story is "mostly fiction" and that there were more Jews at the end of the war than there were at the beginning, but he does say that his old man has "never told me a lie". And he does say that he bases his film on the visions of the Crucifixion experienced by a 19th-century German nun, Anne-Catherine Emmerich, who believed that the Jews used the blood of Christian children in their Passover rituals. (In case you have forgotten, the setting of the film is the Jewish Passover.) Yesterday, as the movie opened, a Pentecostal church in Denver, Colorado, put up a big sign on its marquee saying: "Jews Killed The Lord Jesus." Nice going. In order to keep up this relentless propaganda pressure, Gibson employs the cheap technique of the horror movie director. Just as you think things can't get any worse, he shoves in a gruesome surprise. The flogging scene stops, and you think: "Well, that's over." And then the sadistic guards pick up a new kind of flagellating instrument, and start again. The nails go through the limbs, one by one, and then, for an extra touch, the cross is raised, turned over and dropped face-down with its victim attached, so that the nails can be flattened down on the other side. The vulg-arity and sensationalism of this would be bad enough if there wasn't a continual accompaniment of jeering, taunting Jews who want more of the same. The same cynical tactic has been applied to the marketing of the movie. Gibson is well known to be a member of a Catholic extremist group that rejects the Pope's teachings and denounces the Second Vatican Council (which, among other things, dropped the charge that all Jews were Christ-killers). He went to some trouble to spread alarm in the Jewish community, which rightly suspected that the film might revive the old religious paranoia. HE showed the film at the Vatican, and then claimed that the Pope had endorsed it - a claim that the Vatican has flatly denied, but then every little helps. Then he ran a series of screenings for right-wing fundamentalists only, and refused to show any tapes to anyone who wasn't a religious nut. (It took me ages to get around the ban and get hold of a pirated copy, and I was writing for the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair.) Having secured a huge amount of free publicity in this way, and some very lucrative advance block bookings from Christian fundamentalist groups, Gibson now talks self-pityingly about how he has risked his fortune and his career, but doesn't care if he "never works again" because he's done it all for Jesus. The clear message I get from that is that he'll be boycotted by sinister Hollywood Jews. So it's a win-win for him: big box office or celebrity martyrdom. With any luck, a bit of both. How perfectly nauseating. In a widely publicised concession, Gibson said that he'd removed the scene where the Jewish mob cries out that it wants the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children's children. This very questionable episode - it is mentioned in only one of the four gospels - has in fact not been cut. Only the English subtitle has gone. (The film is spoken in Aramaic and Latin, though Roman soldiers actually spoke a dialect of Greek.) So when the film is later shown, in Russia and Poland, say, or Egypt and Syria, there will be a ready-made propaganda vehicle for those who fancy a bit of torture and murder, with a heavy dose of Jew-baiting thrown in. Gibson knows very well that this will happen, and he'll be raking it in from exactly those foreign rights to the film. So my advice is this. Do not go. Leave it to the sickoes who like this sort of thing, and don't fill the pockets of the sicko who made it.I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION
Yes he died.
The only one that I know of that was stoned and didn't die was Paul. Although there is some discussion about that. It is possible that Paul didn't even know for sure.
Tribune7: "I suspect a Mother Teresa would be the first. She did have a good track record there. :-)"
Hint, hint: The very, very, religious are legalists who compare themselves among themselves.
Those sorts of mentalities do not view themselves as being "low-life sinners". And unlike Jesus, they avoid even being in the company of "low-life sinners" for fear of being contaminated by them.
They think that God isn't talking about them when He says that ALL human effort to act in accordance with divine or moral law (righteous behavior) are like menstrous rags to Him.
By their self-righteousness, they are denying that only the righteousness of Christ imputed to them will make them acceptable to God. [The *gift* of Christ's righteousness: Rom.5:17]
Isn't that special?
Among the people who Mr. Hitchens puts in that category is Mother Teresa. It's pretty safe to say Mother Teresa would have been the first person to assist Mr. Hitchens if he should find himself in the situation you describe.
While, I often myself in agreement with Mr. Hitchens in this matter he is a hypocrit.
Hypocrite: "Actor. One who affects virtues or qualities he does not have." I don't see where Hitchens fits that definition "in this matter". Maybe you can explain it to me.
On the other hand, Hitchens sees where some others might fit that definition. What would be your definition of the sort of behavior mentioned here?:
"..Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as Mother Teresa demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996.
Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …
[MT took] misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.
Where did that money, and all the other donations, go?
The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.
But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order.
Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
...Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story.
One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing.
Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. ..."
Hitchens affects the virtues of being honest, objective and reasonable. Concerning Mother Teresa and the Passion he is obviously not.
You quote a long tract from Hitchens attacking Mother Teresa. Why do you believe it? The people who knew here best appreciated her.
By SUSAN CABA CALCUTTA, India -- The truest tribute to Mother Teresa Saturday was in the streets of her adopted city. While cardinals, queens, diplomats and politicians paid homage in a state funeral that stressed her devotion to the have-nots of the world -- but included few of them -- tens of thousands of poor and working-class Indians assembled behind barricades to watch her cortege pass.
She was saying this when it was not cool:
God told us, "Love your neighbor as yourself." So first I am to love myself rightly, and then to love my neighbor like that. But how can I love myself unless I accept myself as God has made me? Those who deny the beautiful differences between men and women are not accepting themselves as God has made them, and so cannot love the neighbor. They will only bring division, unhappiness, and destruction of peace to the world. For example, as I have often said, abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace in the world today, and those who want to make women and men the same are all in favor of abortion.
Here's a short biography. She's done far more than Hitchens will.
I think many of the first followers of Jesus were Jewish, probably. Perhaps you are right, calling them Christians is not tecnically correct.
Don't know where to find box office data, all I know is the thing took in 25 million plus on opening day, in the middle of winter, no less.
I have no opinion on it one way or the other. This is not about me and what I believe.
You are the one that used the word "hypocrite" to describe Hitchens.
In the excerpts I provided, Hitchens portrayed contradictory behaviors by various people.
The names of the people involved aren't important.
My question to you was, and is, what word would you use to define such behaviors -- if they indeed did occur as he stated? That's all.
Yes. Exactly.
My question to you was, and is, what word would you use to define such behaviors -- if they indeed did occur as he stated?
The more important question to me is what if they didn't. What if they are exaggerations, taken out of context, or made up entirely?
And what if the teller of these things -- who also is attempting to destroy a reputation -- claimed to be a man of truth and a lover of people?
Based upon the various comments I've seen and heard some people make about the movie, the "message" they are "getting" has more to do with their pre-conceived notions, personal agendas, and personal perceptions, than with anything having to do with reality.
Tribune7: "The more important question to me is what if they didn't. What if they are exaggerations, taken out of context, or made up entirely?"
Don't worry. I won't ask you more than three times to answer the question. You've proven my point.
Actually your point is "the very last person who would stop to render meaningful help to a low-life sinner like him, would be the very, very religious."
My note to you was Mother Teresa has a well deserved reputation for
a: being very, very religious and
b: doing just that to "low-life sinners"
You then imply that Mother Teresa didn't do those things and provide as evidence a link to writings by Mr. Hitchens. Is Hitchens telling the truth?
The intellectually honest who were watching you tap-dance know what my point was, and know that you proved it. The opinions of the rest don't count.
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