03-23-2004, 02:11 AM
If it were up to me, and if I was religious, I would of left the whole story in the bible for reading and not on a screen for seeing. In the human brain the most sensitive sense of emotion is the sense of sight. So to see the sight of the thing that was god in your image, up on a 30 foot screen, getting his guts removed, would be so revolting and so emotionly diswrought that I would live in a world of depression and paranoia afterwards.
To see something like that is quite disturbing, but it is also oddly reassuring. Being Christ, he could have made it stop at any time. He could have killed them all, or performed some wondrous miracle that would have sent everyone running in terror. As Christians, sometimes we try to help bear the cross (metaphorically speaking), but a lot of the time we behave more like the Roman soldiers or the Jewish leaders. So it's very disturbing to see a brutal depiction of him going through that, but it's also reassuring to know he was willing to go through it all, and pray for their forgiveness as his dying wish.
Needless to say, the Good Friday story is also a pretty strong statement by example on how to live a Christian life: to seek out God's plan above your own ambitions, to endure suffering for the greater good, and to forgive those who may cause you harm. Those who are able to follow the example in their daily lives make the kind of good neighbors Occhi was talking about. Of course, non-Christians can have essentially the same moral principles, and some make even better neighbors, but there is a relationship between those principles and some of the "other baggage" that I think is very hard to approach in the realm of philosophy, and impossible in the realm of logic.
To see something like that is quite disturbing, but it is also oddly reassuring. Being Christ, he could have made it stop at any time. He could have killed them all, or performed some wondrous miracle that would have sent everyone running in terror. As Christians, sometimes we try to help bear the cross (metaphorically speaking), but a lot of the time we behave more like the Roman soldiers or the Jewish leaders. So it's very disturbing to see a brutal depiction of him going through that, but it's also reassuring to know he was willing to go through it all, and pray for their forgiveness as his dying wish.
Needless to say, the Good Friday story is also a pretty strong statement by example on how to live a Christian life: to seek out God's plan above your own ambitions, to endure suffering for the greater good, and to forgive those who may cause you harm. Those who are able to follow the example in their daily lives make the kind of good neighbors Occhi was talking about. Of course, non-Christians can have essentially the same moral principles, and some make even better neighbors, but there is a relationship between those principles and some of the "other baggage" that I think is very hard to approach in the realm of philosophy, and impossible in the realm of logic.