If clocking more page views were my sole goal in blogging, I would spend this evening writing another entry about pornography. However, I simply cannot find anything else to say on the subject. Perhaps I should try harder. Despite being published more than two years ago, my entry Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint often brings in a dozen or more Googlers every day.
Writing about sleazy sex is another way to push up my page views. While I will not give away too much about my personal life, I can say that I do not have a whole lot of experience in the sleazy sex department. This is probably a good thing. It markedly improves the odds that I will survive to be an old man. That is not to say that I would not necessarily want to imbibe in some good sleazy (but harmless) sex now and then. In real life though, imagination typically has to suffice. Therefore, I have pontificated as if I really know something about it the world of sleazy sex. Such was the case last January when after spending a few hours browsing through the Craigslist Washington D.C. Casual Encounters site, this entry popped out of my brain. This one entry alone now often overtakes Sharon Mitchell as the biggest reason strangers will connect with my blog.
Another way to bring in readers is to write controversial entries about religion. For many, religion is such a focus of our lives that writing anything that contradicts or even gently lampoons our personal beliefs is likely to draw notice and maybe even some ire. So perhaps tonight, while I poke a little fun at Jesus, my page views will go up. The devil made me do it.
This entry was inspired by my annual visit to the Jesus of the Week web site. For many devoted Christians, Jesus is sacrosanct. To them, he is certainly not a subject of parody. In a way, I agree. Jesus, or at least as he is portrayed in his buffed up form in the Bible, does deserve respect, if not downright admiration. While I have a few problems with Jesus’ portrayal in the Bible (for example, it is inconsistent of Jesus to say, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged” and elsewhere call the Pharisees hypocrites), mainly he comes across as a wise and learned teacher. However, I am often fascinated by how we anthropomorphosize Jesus.
If you are feeling a bit irreverent toward Jesus, or just assume that Jesus is big enough to have a sense of humor, then the Jesus of the Week web site is for you. The site owner pokes gentle fun at the many otherwise excellent (and not so excellent) artistic Christians out there who get perhaps a wee bit carried away imagining Jesus. This is hardly a new phenomenon. As I mentioned when my family and I toured the Louvre last summer, the paintings of Jesus typically portrayed him as a flaxen haired Anglophile. You would be hard pressed to find any visual depiction of Jesus in most mainstream churches in this country as anything other than a longhaired Caucasian. This is probably a good thing. Since Jews were Semites and Semites are hardly a flaxen haired, fair-skinned race, it would be hard to get Junior to identify with a man with dark skin and long, kinky hair. Who knows? Maybe Jesus wore dreadlocks. African Christians of course typically portray Jesus as a black man, which was likely much closer to the truth. Christians in the Far East see him as Oriental. Since no one knows what he looked like, your guess is as good as mine is. However, the odds are he looked more like Yassir Arafat than Sting.
At Jesus of the Week we web surfers get to psychoanalyze the devoutly Christian artist. The results are frequently hilarious. Admittedly, the site owner may skew results to match his audience, which likely consists of mostly disgruntled former Christians, i.e. the damned like me. These artists keep creating depictions of Jesus that, like an excellent bad movie, are hilarious to the dispassionate observer, but which appear devoutly inspired to the believer. Along with each depiction of Jesus comes a short tongue in cheek essay on the picture of the week, yet written in such a way as it is almost never denigrating.
Other web sites out there are less subtle at poking fun of modern Christianity. Perhaps the best known of them is the Landover Baptist Church site and their related sister sites like Betty Bowers and their White House parody site. Arguably, Landover Baptist is such an over the top and rude parody of the bizarre right wing of Christianity, that regular readers may develop something like sympathy toward the Jerry Falwells of the world. That these folks have kept it up for so many years attests to something: probably that they got way more weird religion shoved down their throats during their formative years than they could possibly process and are determined to spend their adult lives getting even.
I have made my own attempt to understand the historic Jesus. It may be that I am as guilty of anthropomorphosizing Jesus as everyone else is. For most of us, whether we choose to or not, we simply must frame Jesus in a modern context. We do this because we live in the present, not two millennium in the past. Only academics like those involved in The Jesus Seminar can come close to fully grasping the historic Jesus and the times in which he lived. Lacking their scholarship and patience, the rest of us are left with the New Testament, which we know has been translated and retranslated and likely does not portray very well its original intent. Most of the original texts have long ago returned to dust. We also know that early Christians ruthlessly suppressed the Gnostic gospels. It is not surprising then our minds fill in the gap between the gospels and the present.
Consequently, the Jesus that emerges depends very much on our personal imagination of him. In many ways, although these depictions of Jesus on Jesus of the Week are often hilarious, they are also comforting. For myself, I find that I want Jesus to be the friendly father type so lovingly depicted by his contemporary followers. I like my image of Jesus as a man surrounded by children whom he gathers in his big arms, or Jesus walking through a meadow full of flowers carrying a lamb under the crock of one arm. I like Jesus as a hunk rather than Jesus as a balding, nearsighted man with dirty feet, a tattered robe and with dirty, unwashed hair. If Jesus were alive today, he would smell so bad you would not want to get within a dozen feet of him. So by all means, give us an idealized image of Jesus. I will smile, I may laugh, and I may even smirk. Occasionally, I may feel touched. At least these Jesuses are typically idealized as loving and harmless.
These depictions of Jesus likely say more about us than of Jesus. It suggests we are still naïve and sappy creatures. These are not necessarily bad traits for us human ancestors some two thousand years later. It means we have a blind side to us, but at least it is a softer and less cynical side.
October 2nd, 2006 at 09:48pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
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Full disclosure: I have not read Dan Brown’s now ultra-famous book The Da Vinci Code. My daughter has read it and greatly enjoyed it. My wife got a few chapters into it before putting it down. She felt the quality of the writing was too poor for her to endure any further. Between the endless publicity, the hype about the movie, and the recent plagiarism case in Great Britain against Dan Brown, reading the book seemed superfluous. Anyone in a first world country who does not know the book’s central thesis is likely living a cloistered life. In that sense, seeing the movie is probably anticlimactic.
However, my 16-year-old daughter saw the movie when it first came out. She said it was a good movie, and volunteered to see it again with me. So partly to have an opportunity to get away with my daughter, we saw the movie together yesterday.
I assume you know the basic key points in the book, so consequently there is little to spoil. However, if you were recently released from cloisters then read no further because I will spill some of its main plot points and dubious assertions.
The Washington Post says the movie may be the first movie that takes longer to watch than to read the book on which it is based. At times, it certainly felt this way. Since my daughter read the book and liked the movie, I strongly suspect your appreciation for the movie will depend on how vested you felt reading the book. As for the rest of us, you may find that the movie to be an over-hyped disappointment.
I do not think that the movie of The Da Vinci Code is bad. Another movie I have seen lately truly qualifies as a bad movie. Instead, it is a mediocre movie. It is a movie that with a different director and cast maybe could have pulled off a satisfying movie. Tom Hanks is an excellent actor. However, that does not mean he is right for every role, even when a movie is formulated to be a blockbuster. He struck me as out of his element as Robert Langdon, an apparently real expert in symbology at Harvard University. In The Da Vinci Code, Hanks seems unable to find a way to express the character, so he wings it and in the process badly misses the mark. Perhaps this is because his character is never well defined by either Brown or Ron Howard, the director. In the movie, Langdon is simply a catalyst to move the movie forward. Hanks though really looks like he wishes he were doing some other movie. Maybe he knew this movie was a waste of his talents, but he could not turn down the millions of dollars he was offered.
However, Hanks is positively brilliant compared with Audrey Tautou. She plays Sophie Nevue, a.k.a the latest direct (and for a while, believed to be the last) living descendent of Jesus Christ. I have to assume she too was stunningly miscast, since this is the same woman who delighted millions with her performance as Amelie in the French made subtitled movie of the same name. Granted in Amelie her role was more of a comedic one. Perhaps she is more suited to comedic roles. Here she comes across as mostly one-dimensional and she is about as interesting as a flat soda. For someone who should be very excited by all the discoveries being unearthed, she seems largely dispassionate.
The movie is supposed to be suspenseful but largely failed to engage me. A few scenes may frighten you a bit. Most of the twists and turns are not hard to anticipate, even if you have only a passing familiarity with the key revelations (as I had). Ian McKellan, as Sir Leigh Teabing, helps to enliven the tedium. Like Robin Williams in the otherwise dreadful movie Cadillac Man, McKellan can help make an otherwise mediocre movie endurable. Paul Bettany is also suitably creepy as the brainwashed masochistic Opus Dei cult henchman Silas. (It was hard to believe this is the same man who played Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He certainly is a versatile actor!)
The book is apparently filled with short chapters. Each chapter end with a cliffhanger. This makes it difficult not to turn the page. The movie tries to emulate this aspect of the book. It certainly does move along at a brisk pace. Unfortunately, in spite of this the movie largely failed to engage me. It is not that I do not find conspiracy theories interesting. I think it is certainly plausible that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. She could well have been pregnant at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Most Protestants take it as given that when the Bible speaks of James as Jesus’ brother, he was his biological brother, not a fraternal one. Naturally, the Catholics would find the notion of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife the most offensive. Since for all but the last 500 years or so they controlled the Christian church, it is plausible that they would want to hide or minimize Jesus’ affection for Mary, since it would go against doctrine.
No, the whole notion of Opus Dei and a plot to keep “the truth” about Jesus obscured for 2000 years is where The Da Vinci Code breaks down for me. It fails my Occam’s Razor test because it is just too far out in left field. Heck, even Jesus’ divinity is more plausible than this preposterous tale of the search for the Holy Grail. At least Monty Python’s movie was funny. This one tries to make you believe the ludicrous. Perhaps as a result the longer the movie went on (and it never seemed to end) and the stranger the plot twists became, the more I started yawning and the less I cared about the conclusion.
If director Ron Howard had at least taken the time to throw in a little romantic tension, perhaps the movie would have been more enjoyable. Yet Hanks and Tautou are not given any opportunities to develop chemistry. Their mutual interests are wholly academic. The closest they come to any sign of affection is a chaste kiss Hanks gives Tautou on her forehead at the very end of the movie. When it finally ends after 149 minutes, I felt mostly relief.
The result is a B movie masquerading as an A movie. It gets 2.7 on my 4.0 scale.
(If anyone wants my take, not necessarily on the movie’s central thesis, but on the meaning of Jesus’ life, read this entry.)
May 28th, 2006 at 09:09pm
Posted by
Mark |
The Arts |
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I had a brief flirtation with the Methodist Church in the 1990s. We were shopping around for a Sunday school for our daughter, who needed some religious education. Terri had taught Sunday school for a Methodist Church in her single days and thought the religion was pretty benign. There was a church close by so off we went. It wasn’t a bad experience. This particular church had a female minister, which seemed cool to someone raised in the Catholic faith. The church was bright, the classrooms clean and well run and it had a very wholesome feel to it. Yet it was a bit too Christian for my tastes. That’s why my daughter eventually ended up at the religious education program at a Unitarian Universalist church.
I can’t claim to know much about their theology but I know enough now not to ever go back. Why? Because yesterday a Methodist Philadelphia minister was defrocked for violating a church law that requires ministers not be practicing homosexuals. The minister, Irene Elizabeth Stroud, was found guilty of being “a self avowed practicing homosexual.” Oh, the horror! Imagine what would happen if more Methodist ministers were homosexuals. Why, Methodists might get comfortable with the idea that homosexuality by itself has no more bearing on someone’s ability to minister than the color of their hair!
I have to wonder why is this an issue in the first place. Don’t Methodists read their Bibles? In the Bible that I read Jesus is a wholly nondiscriminatory human being. He hung out with prostitutes and lepers. In Jesus’ time the Jews treated Samaritans with contempt. Jews would even walk around areas of Palestine where they lived. Yet the clear message from the Parable of the Good Samaritan was that no one should be scorned simply for being different. We are all the same.
It is way past time to give homosexuals equal opportunities in all professions. But forces would much rather keep us stuck in the past. The major networks, for example, recently refused to air ads from the United Church of Christ. The ads emphasized that their denomination accepts gays and minorities while many other churches do not.
The ad features two bouncers standing outside a symbolic church selecting people to be permitted to pass the velvet rope to attend Sunday services. The bouncers reject two men and an African-American boy and girl, while letting a white heterosexual couple through.
What was the Church of Christ’s real sin here? It’s not that it welcomes homosexuals and minorities in its membership. The real sin was that it emphasized that other churches — lots of other churches — are quite comfortable with the practice. And it points out quite correctly that Jesus did not turn away people who came to listen to him. Not only do virtually all mainstream churches refuse to ordain homosexual ministers, but lots of mainstream churches also are openly hostile to gays in general. The Mormon Church’s wholly unenlightened interpretation and almost sneering attitude toward gays comes immediately to my mind. Want to see the Samaritans in contemporary Christendom? Talk to a Gay Mormon. They can tell you how the Samaritans felt.
No, we must not hear the truth about rampant, ignorant and prejudicial intolerance in mainstream Christian denominations. Instead we must project a false image of Jesus and real Christianity. We must ignore that much modern Christianity is about as Christ-like as Ghengis Khan. For example, is there any doubt what a 21st century Jesus would have said about the United States invading Iraq? Just in case you forgot, turn to Luke 6:29:
If anyone hits you on the cheek, offer the other also. And if anyone takes away your coat, don’t hold back your shirt either.
But what are we getting from so called “mainstream” ministers about homosexuality? From Jerry Falwell we get vitriol like:
“These perverted homosexuals … absolutely hate everything that you and I and most decent, God-fearing citizens stand for. Make no mistake. These deviants seek no less than total control and influence in society, politics, our schools and in our exercise of free speech and religious freedom.”
From Pat Robertson:
What kind of craziness is it in our society which will put a cloak of secrecy around a group of people whose lifestyle is at best abominable. Homosexuality is an abomination. The practices of those people is appalling. It is a pathology. It is a sickness, and instead of thinking of giving these people a preferred status and privacy, we should treat AIDS exactly the same way as any other communicable disease.
Were I a Christian I would be seeking out churches that not only have read the words of Jesus but also actually try to live by them. So congratulations to the Church of Christ for getting the real message of Jesus. They must have read Matthew 7:
Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravaging wolves. You’ll recognize them by their fruit. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can’t produce bad fruit; neither can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So you’ll recognize them by their fruit.
December 3rd, 2004 at 05:32pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
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