The Passion Of The Christ

Well, maybe that's because when folks try to take away my wife's right to choose, they're not quoting out of the script to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (the best of 'em, btw) when they do so.The reason we atheists pick on the Bible is because we live in a culture where plenty of people are using it to try to tell us what to do.(Oh, and personally, I'll attack Star Trek: The Next Generation at the slightest provocation. Don't get me started on my deep abiding hatred for Catherine Polaski.)

Well, it pretty much is - it's hard to rationalize a play where the happy ending means a Jew renounces his religion. But Shakespeare was writing in a time where that's exactly what a happy ending meant - Shylock is going to heaven now instead of being damned for all eternity.On the other hand, it's the year 2004, now. There's no excuse for anti-semitism. Is that what Gibson's play is about? I don't know.You know what bothers me more than the anti-semitism angle? The violence. This is a movie about a bloody, painful execution. And people are going to take their kids to see this! I know plenty of fundamentalist Christians (of every stripe) have kind of a fetish about the crucifixion, but I don't think it's appropriate for kids.What is the deal with kids and movies these days? I love movie violence, like Kill Bill (that movie was like a Christmas present to me), but both times I saw it in the theatre folks were their with their 14-year-old kids. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy but there's something about institutionalized rape that would make me uncomfortable as a 14-year-old seeing it with my dad, or as a dad seeing it with a 14-year-old.I guess I'm just curious about what kind of mindset makes it ok for a kid to see clearly adult levels of violence under parental supervision, as though the presence of the parent is going to make it all ok.

No, because I distinguish between the script and the performance. The script is anti-semitic. That doesn't mean that you have to automatically play it that way.I caught a performance once at the Cottesloe Theatre in London (part of the National Theatre) that treated Shylock's forced conversion as a tragedy, which it sort of is. The play ceased to be anti-semitic and instead became about anti-semitism. The problem is that they didn't use the Bible as a script. They wrote a new script based on the Bible. If that script is anti-semetic, it's inappropriately so and they don't have a culture of anti-semitism to hide behind, because in the year 2004 we should be past that.But we shouldn't condemn it sight unseen anyway. I'm trying not to, I guess. And I really don't care so much because I don't plan on seeing it.