The Gospel of Judas
This
Gospel of Judas thing is proving to be quite an amusement. Says the website, the gospel is "a lost gospel that could challenge what is believed about the story of Judas and his betrayal of Jesus." Um . . . why?
Was there supposed to be something unusual about unorthodox traditions about Christ and gospels relaying those traditions? Such things have been the order of the day since the beginning, and they don't command any authority by dint of being ancient/well-received/well-disseminated, etc. It's pretty simple: To be an orthodox Christian, you have to take on faith that the tradition about Christ's deity, his humanity, his mission, etc., are accurately preserved through the Holy Spirit. If you can't muster that faith, then you will place yourself in one of the Christian traditions that spring up in the wake of new teachings, or go to another faith altogether.
Personally, I'm going to watch the documentary with interest (heresies fascinate me), but it's the yahoos who get "woken up" by it that are going to be agonizing to listen to tomorrow. I mean, jeez, I bet you thought Dan Brown had an inside track, too.
Labels: heresies, modernism
Food for thought
This article is a few months old, but I just found it.
You guys know I consider abortion an act of violence against women, that the woman who has an abortion is in no way evil, or heartless. As I've stated before, women
don't need condemnation for having abortions, they need healing for the heartbreaking violation of their bodies that is abortion. So, keep in mind that these excerpts are not offered in a spirit of condemnation or anger, but of incredulousness.
In a bit of synchronicity, I had just been thinking about Sophie, and how I wanted to abort her, and as I was reading this, she woke up and started crying.
A GOVERNMENT agency is launching an inquiry into doctors’ reports that up to 50 babies a year are born alive after botched National Health Service abortions.
[The guidelines of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists] say that babies aborted after more than 21 weeks and six days of gestation should have their hearts stopped by an injection of potassium chloride before being delivered.
Quick: When we want to ascertain if a person has life or not, what do we check for? Answer: A heartbeat. The question is begged: Isn't life then a prerequisite for a heartbeat?
“They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation,” [Stuart Campbell] said. “I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine.”
Because the baby's body resisted the command to die, this is considered "substandard medicine."Paul Clarke, a neonatal intensive care specialist in Norwich, has treated a boy born at 24 weeks after three failed abortion attempts. The mother decided to keep the child, who is now two years old but is suffering what doctors call “significant ongoing medical problems”.
The baby obstinately refused to die.
A systematic investigation of data collected through the CEMACH indicated that there are at least 50 cases a year nationwide in which babies survive abortion attempts.
Someday, these babies are going to grow up. What, I wonder, will they have to say about their beginnings? And will they told to just shut up, as is as the growing movement of women who speak about the violence done to their bodies and psychology by abortion?
Labels: pro-life
Illegal immigration
I've gone and misplaced the newspaper now, but last week's
One Voice, our diocesan newspaper, had a few articles about illegal immigration which distressed me. As you may have heard, some prominent Catholic officials are publicly urging their priests to disobey the laws regarding illegal immigration, and this was the tenor of the article. What amazes me about this is the apparent ignorance (though that hardly seems possible) of the
very obviously inhumane and unjust situation which illegal immigration puts the immigrants themselves in.
Here's what I mean. If a person is an illegal immigrant, he cannot legally be hired. But he wants to work, so he agrees to work under the table--which means the employer can pay him next to nothing and require him to work unreasonable hours. Which means large corporations which want to offer Low Prices Always will knowingly hire illegals in order to exploit them for all they're worth in order to save money on payroll in order to offer those Low Prices Always. It means these immigrants are being treated in ways that citizens would never have to put up with, and it means they have no means of redress for it, because they're here illegally.
That is why the priests are mistaken in aiding illegal immigrants across the border (note that this is entirely different from providing humanitarian assistance to illegal immigrants, which should absolutely be encouraged)--not because we don't want them durn brown people on our street, but because it amounts to complicity in the creation of an underclass of slaves exploited for our greater comfort.
I wish I could find that article. . . .
Labels: illegal immigration, politics
King Kong: A review
We're the sort of people who don't get to go to the movies more than once every few months or so, but who rent everything and anything. So we hadn't seen
King Kong yet, and if it hadn't been Peter Jackson directing, I probably would have passed it up as a typically packaged project with no value other than to make money. I had heard only two things about it, in fact: One, a comment from John McLaughlin (whose show I'd rather shave my calluses than watch, so I don't know how I even heard it) that the movie was a rendition of the tired old Romantic myth of the noble savage, and two, that it was what I'd assumed it was--a movie just to make money.
I should have known Peter Jackson would make better.
Since I was probably the last person in America to see it, I won't bore anybody by regurgitating the plot details. We'll get right to how I knew what I'd heard was wrong. My first inkling that these indictments were wrong came when the crew landed on Skull Island and encountered the natives. My anthropological soul was instantly interested. Natives with bones through the bridges of their noses? I'm all over that. And as they began their attack of the crew, I said to Adam, "Wait . . . I'm not seeing any noble savages here." Indeed, not. There was nothing of Rousseau's evocations of the unspoiled primitive man about them. They were, in fact, hardly human in their viciousness, violence, and bloodthirstiness.
When the crew enters the jungle, they begin their battle with the native fauna--and what fauna. Beasties of all manner come out to eat them, relentlessly pursuing the very out-of-their-element crew as it stumbles through the underbrush. Dinosaurs, gigantic bugs, and some kind of toothed worm all make quick work of them. (The bugs put me through some contortions when they began to creep out of the crevices, waving their long, spindly legs, as I wrapped my arms about my head, stamped my feet on the floor, and began emitting a high-pitched screech.
Shudder. And to think they really used to be that size. . . .)
What's all this about, this long, unyielding sequence of confrontation with nature? As with the natives, it was no attempt to romanticize nature. In fact, after the heroine, Ann, falls off a cliff, is caught in a tangle of vines and swings feet from the pursuing meat-eater which has likewise been caught by the vines, the creature
still snaps its jaws at her.
Nature is relentless. It is driven by the instinct to eat, and eat it will.
But, you see, it's not just the primitive fauna that's characterized by relentlessness. Because Carl Denham, the calculating moviemaker who has brought them all to the island, is also relentless. Though he's lost his footage in one of their escapes, he will not be dissuaded from making his fortune off the adventure, no matter how many of the crew is eaten in the process. To that end, it's Kong he'll take home instead of reels of heretofore unseen jungle life.
And when he has the giant ape, has chained him up on the stage in New York City, where he charges the soft-palmed elite of the city to come in and be entertained by this bit of nature, they sit in their chairs and are delighted by the sight of this animal, which is, of course, there for their pleasure, no other purpose. Because you see:
We are driven to be entertained, and be entertained we will. Nature wants to make use of us for its food, and we, likewise, want to make use of nature for our purposes, be it entertainment or be it our greater comfort.
We're just the same as the bugs, the worms, the dinosaurs, and the man-sized bats, only we do it in a cleaner, more efficient, more polite way.
Later, when Kong has been murdered for his lack of cooperation wih our aims, he lies among urban flora of skyscrapers as, buglike, the natives swarm over him for their share in the kill: namely, to take his picture.
In
King Kong, Peter Jackson indeed put nature on display in all its savageness, but there's no nobleness here. Not in the unsightly natives with their ungodly chanting, not in the huge carnivores that assail the crew--and definitely,
definitely, not in the civilized New Yorkers who swarm in to consume the latest novelty.
Labels: reviews
