The Passion Of The Christ

[allarmeniangirl]

I forgot to mention one disturbing detail: that satan/devil thing that appeared on a few occasions in the movie. Although I appreciate the symbolism and connection to the Satan in the story of Jesus and throughout the Bible the particular way it was made in the movie was really bad. Nowhere in the Gospels there is a mention of such a creature (with a child-satan or whatever the hell it might be) appearing in that fasion. It looked like a character from a 'vampire slayer'. In my opinion it was a really bad choice and not fitting the rest of the movie and the story.

I know what you mean. I don't get the point of that satan baby in the movie. Was it to torture Mary or what? They overplayed it, but most of all, the movie was right on the dot.

I havent seen it yet...

You should, just know that they show everything. And I mean EVERYTHING

[SALTnPEPA92]

I know what you mean. I don't get the point of that satan baby in the movie. Was it to torture Mary or what? They overplayed it, but most of all, the movie was right on the dot.

You should, just know that they show everything. And I mean EVERYTHING

everything yani everything??

[allarmeniangirl]

everything yani everything??

EVERYTHING.....very desturbing too, but it's worth it. You know.

[SALTnPEPA92]

EVERYTHING.....very desturbing too, but it's worth it. You know.

kool thanks

[Anoushik]

I thought that the point of the Satan/Satan-baby was to symbolize that just like Jesus was born into mankind and brought goodness, the evil also reigned on Earth parallel to this goodness.

[allarmeniangirl]

I thought that the point of the Satan/Satan-baby was to symbolize that just like Jesus was born into mankind and brought goodness, the evil also reigned on Earth parallel to this goodness.

hmmm, good point. Maybe.

[gevo27]

I thought that the point of the Satan/Satan-baby was to symbolize that just like Jesus was born into mankind and brought goodness, the evil also reigned on Earth parallel to this goodness.

ummm, not quite the point, it is the point of the baby satan that he is born into humanity, as Jesus is being killed.. the whole emphasis on jesus kep on falling down and barely making it to the stand of the cross hill was for him to die before he was crucified.. and thus any part of the prophecy that might have not been fulfilled would have completely bashed the christian faith...

but as the story goes, not abone on his body was broken, cause he died before the others that were cricified with him

[gevo27]

ok, i just realized i didnt answer the question of the symbolism of satansbaby form.. sry.. i gotta get back to you on that.. lol..im tired

[Arpa]

The following excerpt is taken from here;

 

http://www.amconmag.com/2004_05_24/article.html

 

Why post this on HF and Armenian site? See paragraph two.

Antisemitic? Perhaps whatever that means? I have no idea who and what Andres Spindburg is.

 

Not all displaced Palestinians are Muslims.

 

 

By Anders Strindberg

 

 

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is playing to full houses in the Syrian capital Damascus. Watching it here turns out to be much the same as watching it on opening night in New York—customarily rowdy moviegoers observe a reverent silence, the usual sound of candy wrappers is replaced by sobbing and gasping, and, at the end of it all, the audience files out of the theater in silence and contemplation. Many of those watching the movie on this occasion are Palestinian Christian refugees whose parents or grandparents were purged from their homeland—the land of Christ—at the foundation of Israel in 1948. For them the movie has an underlying symbolic meaning not easily perceived in the West: not only is it a depiction of the trial, scourging, and death of Jesus, it is also a symbolic depiction of the fate of the Palestinian people. “This is how we feel,” says Zaki, a 27-year old Palestinian Christian whose family hails from Haifa. “We take beating after beating at the hands of the world, they crucify our people, they insult us, but we refuse to surrender.”

======

 

In the process of “Judaizing” Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion. The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.

[.5Sargavak]

Very interesting.

 

Millions of Germans were killed in WWI and their country was laid to ruins. Most families grew up with no fathers. After the Germans recovered and got some power, they used it to kill millions of Jews.

 

Millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, after they got some power they used it to persecute Palestinians.

 

You can follow this cycle with various peoples. Persecuted Engish puritans-escape persecution-persecute indians and own slaves-

 

The problem of course is, people are really good at pointing out the evils in others but are blind to their own.

 

This does not mean that anything goes because everyone is evil. It just means, in my opinion, that the first and necessary step to fighting against evil in others is to fight against evil in yourself and your people.

 

Our Palestianian firend Zaki is understanbily enraged over the opression of his people. He says “they crucify our people, they insult us, but we refuse to surrender.” True Christians, like Christ, must surrender. Only after they surrender to God and confess their evil, will they be given the power to challenge evil in others.

 

In the same way, I think we Armenians should always strive to fight our inner evil as we challenge the evils of others towards us.

[gamavor]

In the same way, I think we Armenians should always strive to fight our inner evil as we challenge the evils of others towards us.

 

NO, THANKS! Armenia and Armenians DO NOT pose danger to anyone. They are only dangerious to themselves. The recepie above should be recomended to Anglo-Saxons, Jews and Arabs.

[Sasun]

True Christians, like Christ, must surrender. Only after they surrender to God and confess their evil, will they be given the power to challenge evil in others.

 

In the same way, I think we Armenians should always strive to fight our inner evil as we challenge the evils of others towards us.

Surrender to God - yes, surrender to enemies - no. I think Christ's teaching applies to the first case.

I don't think the Palestinians should surrender to Israel, and I don't think any oppressed should surrender to the oppressor.

[Arpa]

In the same way, I think we Armenians should always strive to fight our inner evil as we challenge the evils of others towards us.

You fight your "inner evil" leave the fighting against the external to us.

Who told we had "inner evil"?

Don't tell me! That Book that sarkavags are supposed to read!

Go tell the purported writers of that Book to fight their own "inner evil"

[loxxsqueen]

Wow Vigil, you are not very Religious you say. .. And you call yourself an Armenian?

[gurgen]

Since when do you have to be religious to be an Armenian?

[Armat]

I’ve been working on my garden lately and words like God, religion, faith just melted away while I was immersed in the planting and admiring my flower’s beauty. Zen, that’s enough.

[THOTH]

Long - but well worth the read (and worth checking out Earl Doherty's other writings as well)

 

Note: Bold/emphasis - mine

 

Mel Gibson's

The Passion of the Christ

 

by

Earl Doherty

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Despite the reservations expressed by some critics, there can be little doubt that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a cinematic masterpiece. While stylized, even theatrical, in character, the acting is impressive, the cinematography breathtaking, the musical score powerful and haunting. Even the film’s message is skillfully conveyed, if not always with subtlety. And to have all the actors deliver their lines―convincingly―in two dead languages (Aramaic and Latin) is something of a tour-de-force.

 

But The Passion of the Christ is also profoundly disturbing, and on more than one level. Complaints about graphic violence are not exaggerated; indeed, what we are presented with is an orgy of brutality, a glorification in its own way of suffering and human cruelty. Gibson clearly set out to push buttons, and he has no doubt succeeded. But he has succeeded perhaps too well. For some people, those buttons should trigger a reaction which the director did not have in mind.

 

The Christian myth of salvation is a powerful one, and has captured―literally―the minds of millions over the centuries. But its foundations are rationally and morally unsound. There are several moments in the film that should serve to undermine the protective wall circumscribing the believing mind. The first is in the opening scene, set in a dark and brooding Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus, knowing what is to befall him, is wracked with fear and dread; the sweat pours from him in horrible anticipation. He asks his Father to let the cup pass, but if that is not possible, he bows to the Father’s “will.” The scene is set for an ordeal that is portrayed―as it is in so much Christian writing―as the will of God himself.

 

The second moment comes late in the crucifixion scene, as Jesus is expiring on the cross. The camera’s perspective rushes dizzyingly skyward, high above the hilltop where so much pain and cruelty have transpired, as though Jesus’ spirit or the wail of his death agony have soared to heaven, and out of that heaven falls a single great drop of water, plunging to earth and splashing onto the rocks near the cross. The tear, we are led to assume, of God himself. God has been moved to weep at the scene below him.

 

The third moment is the final fade-out of the Calvary event. Jesus has been taken down from the cross, a broken body of blood and filth and lacerated flesh, now lying dead in his mother’s arms. The face of Mary (she is consummately played by a little known Romanian actress) is the face of all good and grieving humanity when overwhelmed by the world’s evils and suffering. Then she raises her eyes to the camera as it draws slowly away. For several long moments those eyes rest upon the viewers’ own, quietly telling them that they themselves are guilty of bringing about this monstrous act, this death of man and God.

 

And yet, what has come to pass is the will of God, for so the New Testament constantly tells us, from Paul to the Gospels. If the object has been to absolve humanity of its sins, the absolution is at God’s discretion, and it is he who has decided what shall elicit such forgiveness from him. At least, so we would be compelled to conclude. Within the religious view, a system of forgiveness and salvation does not exist independently from God’s creation and direction. It is God who must be placated for the world’s sins, not some eternal force or principle that lies independent of him or of his will. What hovers over the entire film is the brooding cloud of God’s presence, dark and scowling, but one conveying a sense of divine satisfaction at the unfolding of his plan. Whence, then, the tear from heaven, for it surely cannot be occasioned by doubt or regret?

 

The Christian myth thus imputes to its God a preference for suffering and brutality. Less horrific alternatives have obviously been rejected by him. If all things are possible to God, other systems of salvation should have been available. If no standards of good and evil exist outside God’s mind (the position of those who declare that only the God-serving can be good), then he can choose the paths he wishes in order to carry out his designs. As well, if there is to be any continuity between God and his creatures, if we are to gain any insight into his requirements, we must assume that the general standards of good and evil we have acquired are the same as his; otherwise, we are lost in a chaotic uncertainty. If torture, injustice, suffering, murder are evil to our minds, we have to assume they are evil to God’s mind. And yet this is the procedure he has chosen to effect our salvation; moreover, it is one that must be performed by the very people who need to renounce and be forgiven for such sins. To make matters worse, it must be performed on the Deity himself, on the very being to whom we owe love and worship and from whom we are hoping to gain forgiveness. God has established a bizarre system through which our sins are forgiven by the forced commission of the greatest sin of all. This is a deicide to haunt the mind, if not to drive it insane.

 

That such a thing could arise from an eternal, all-loving, omnipotent God is beyond belief―or else we truly live in a mad universe.

 

What are we to make of the juxtaposition of God’s requirement of this barbarous act with his directive that we should “love one another”? Gibson actually intercuts the two elements within the film. Jesus, through the one eye left to him that has not been swollen shut from the beating he has received, sees things along the road to death that prompt him to recall earlier Gospel moments. One of these is the Johannine supper scene, where the love command is given to the disciples, another the Sermon on the Mount with the admonition to the multitude to love one’s enemies. This direct juxtaposition ought to create a jarring incongruity in the mind of the viewer. Is this the same Deity who urges peace and love, and yet has fashioned salvation out of atrocity and murder?

 

At that supper, Jesus speaks what is one of the most oft-quoted lines from any of the Gospels (John 15:13): “There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.” This is a concept which seems to overwhelm most Christians. More than one person interviewed while exiting a theater after seeing The Passion of the Christ has said: “To think that he suffered all that for me.” Altruism is a commendable feature, even of a god; we humans consider the capacity for it to be one of our highest virtues. Yet there is a difference between a person rushing into a burning house to save someone at the risk of his own life, and a person who sets the fire himself in order to play the hero. The latter has perpetrated the evil, and has hardly set a good example to the community. If he has somehow managed to make the occupant feel responsible for the rescuer’s need to set the fire, the situation becomes unconscionable.

 

One of the most compelling secondary roles in this film, and a fine piece of acting, is that of Simon of Cyrene, who is pressed by the Roman soldiers into helping Jesus carry the cross. While adamantly reluctant at first, Simon is soon so moved by the wretched man struggling alongside him that he strives to take on the full weight of the cross himself and even to become Jesus’ protector from the vicious soldiers. This is true altruism, and once they arrive at their destination, he is forcibly sent on his way. Gibson portrays him as a stranger, and his beliefs are unknown. He is not a follower of Jesus and may not even be a Jew. I like to see him as the film’s token atheist, though I am sure that Gibson did not intend him that way.

 

Mary’s sorrowful, penetrating gaze with her dead son in her arms reminds one of every priest, minister and televangelist who would convince us that it is perfectly normal for their God to act like the stern parent who, when the child spills his supper, goes ballistic and destroys the house, leaving the family cold and miserable, and then accuses the child of being responsible. In The Passion of the Christ, God is the unseen director of the action, the scriptwriter, the casting director, the special effects producer. This picture of a God who has masterminded the ghastly events so vividly presented in this film is not a pretty sight, and Gibson’s sometimes over-the-top presentation only brings this home with shocking clarity.

 

Of course, this is not the only example of God’s tendency to overreaction. Lurking in the background through Gibson’s film is the figure of Satan, portrayed by a woman, though she comes across androgynously. God may be the mastermind, but Satan is the vulture, the agent in God’s scheme of things who reaps the rewards from humanity’s weakness and guilt. Behind Satan lies his abode (mercifully not shown in the film), the terrible place of unending punishment repentant humans have been saved from by the torture and murder of Jesus. Again the anomaly is striking. It is murderers and other evildoers who are fated for such a place, yet it is the murderers and evildoers who have been called upon to perform God’s act of salvation.

 

It is supremely ironic that the faith movement which has most hailed itself as the religion of love contains the two most brutal and inhuman concepts ever to emerge from mankind’s religious compulsions: the crucifixion of Jesus and the punishment of Hell. Christian history is replete with the extermination of heretics, crusades against the infidel, religious wars between its own sects, bloody inquisitions and witch-burnings. One has only to view Gibson’s film to get a sense of where the ultimate inspiration has come from.

 

Two other lines in The Passion of the Christ have an unintended impact. As Jesus struggles along the hard-cobbled street, falling several times under the weight of the cross (before Simon is pressed into service), his mother Mary and her companion, Mary Magdalene―played by another compelling actress who speaks hardly a single line―follow at a distance, reacting to the unfolding horror. With each stumble, Mary is torn by grief and pity, by the heart-wrenching concern of a mother for her son. This may be the most emotionally affecting element of the entire film, and should genuinely move the viewer to tears. At one fall, we are given a flashback to Jesus’ childhood when Mary rushes to comfort the boy as he tumbles in the field. In the present moment, it is too much for her, and throwing caution to the wind, she rushes to his side as the great wooden beams crush him once more to the paving stones. “I am here, my son,” she says. This is the one moment where Gibson truly stumbles, for he cannot make the next line work. Amid the agony of mother and son, Jesus gasps: “Mother, see, I have made all things new.” Gibson has adapted this verse from Revelation (21:5), where it is spoken by God. Those who are not struck by its sheer incongruity within this film are probably beyond redemption. To think that this orgy of cruelty and suffering we are in the process of witnessing, from the grisly bloodletting of the scourging which seems to go on for hours to the graphic driving of the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet, was the means which served to change the world, that this was God’s way of making “all things new,” only speaks to the human mind’s ability to hold the most irrational and outrageous ideas and build a faith around them.

The other line comes in the supper discourse. To his disciples Jesus declares, as Christianity has declared to the world for two millennia: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The line is disconcerting coming from the Jesus of this film, as played by Jim Caviezel. His is a relatively unpretentious portrayal, a gentle good man with an appealing charisma. For him to voice the sentiment that has long served to divide families, peoples, nations, turn non-believers into infidels, consign vast portions of humanity that never knew or had a chance to know this singular savior to the ranks of the damned, seems out of place even in this film.

 

But that has always been the effect of religious belief: division, factionalism, alienation. No one faith has ever gained, nor will ever gain, a universal following. And so there will always be outsiders, pagans, enemies, candidates for damnation. Sectarian allegiance instills a sense of superiority, privilege, sanctity, while those not part of the spiritual elite are relegated to outer darkness. Gibson’s film drives this home, with its setting of murderous conflict between differing religious convictions, a conflict that continues to wreak havoc even unto our own day. The bloody ordeal of one man becomes symbolic of the effects of infection by the idea of the supernatural within the human brain.

 

The saving death of Jesus represents a primitive concept, the principle of blood sacrifice both of animals and of humans which was regarded by ancient and prehistoric man as the fundamental way to placate and intercede with the gods. It was part of the natural order; in fact it was so taken for granted that no one anywhere in the bible, Old or New Testaments, offers a justification for it, or an explanation of how it works. Christians today are just as much in the dark about why the death of Jesus should have atoning power with God. Ironically, those same modern Christians would universally regard the ritual killing of humans or animals as outdated and repugnant in any other area of society’s life. And yet they continue to endorse it by their adherence to the idea of Jesus as a blood sacrifice on their behalf.

As modern science and culture progress, the suffocating weight of ancient superstition is hopefully becoming more evident and more unacceptable. The extreme expression of anything always provokes a backlash. The further the pendulum swings in one direction, the more energy is imparted to it for the backward swing. Perhaps we ought to be thankful to Mel Gibson for laying out the stark reality of Christianity’s world-view.

Edited June 18, 2004 by THOTH

[bellthecat]

Long - but well worth the read (and worth checking out Earl Doherty's other writings as well)

Long - boring - and written without displaying even the slightest hint of intelligence.

(But, one should never expect much from something written by a person named Duke, Earl, King or Prince )

 

The author (and obviously the poster) has not even grasped the fundamental point that the Gibson film is about the "Passion of Christ". It is NOT about the doctrine of Christianity, it is NOT about what is written in the Bible. To try and attack Christianity using the contents of this film is like trying attack the lifestyle of the ancient Greeks based on the Holywood movie "Troy".

 

The film is the cinematographic equivalent of a late medieval Passion play, complete with all the imagery and iconography that those theatrical events contained - almost nothing of which had to do with what was written in the Bible (for example you will not find any mention of Veronica and her handkerchief in the Gospels). It arose from a world-view in which everything is connected to everything else and nothing happens without there being a specific reason for it happening. And the more momentous the event the more momentous that reason must be.

 

Steve

Edited June 19, 2004 by bellthecat

[THOTH]

(yet) More Thomas Paine:

 

As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin.

 

The Church of Rome having done this, it then brings forward Jesus the son of Mary as suffering death to redeem mankind from sin, which Adam, it says, had brought into the world by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But as it is impossible for reason to believe such a story, because it can see no reason for it, nor have any evidence of it, the Church then tells us we must not regard our reason, but must believe, as it were, and that through thick and thin, as if God had given man reason like a plaything, or a rattle, on purpose to make fun of him.

 

Reason is the forbidden tree of priestcraft, and may serve to explain the allegory of the forbidden tree of knowledge, for we may reasonably suppose the allegory had some meaning and application at the time it was invented. It was the practice of the Eastern nations to convey their meaning by allegory, and relate it in the manner of fact. Jesus followed the same method, yet nobody ever supposed the allegory or parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the Prodigal Son, the ten Virgins, etc., were facts.

 

Why then should the tree of knowledge, which is far more romantic in idea than the parables in the New Testament are, be supposed to be a real tree? The answer to this is, because the Church could not make its new-fangled system, which it called Christianity, hold together without it. To have made Christ to die on account of an allegorical tree would have been too barefaced a fable.

 

But the account, as it is given of Jesus in the New Testament, even visionary as it is, does not support the creed of the Church that he died for the redemption of the world. According to that account he was crucified and buried on the Friday, and rose again in good health on the Sunday morning, for we do not hear that he was sick. This cannot be called dying, and is rather making fun of death than suffering it.

 

There are thousands of men and women also, who if they could know they should come back again in good health in about thirty-six hours, would prefer such kind of death for the sake of the experiment, and to know what the other side of the grave was. Why then should that which would be only a voyage of curious amusement to us, be magnified into merit and suffering in him? If a God, he could not suffer death, for immortality cannot die, and as a man his death could be no more than the death of any other person.

 

The belief of the redemption of Jesus Christ is altogether an invention of the Church of Rome, not the doctrine of the New Testament. What the writers of the New Testament attempted to prove by the story of Jesus is the resurrection of the same body from the grave, which was the belief of the Pharisees, in opposition to the Sadducees (a sect of Jews) who denied it.

 

Paul, who was brought up a Pharisee, labors hard at this for it was the creed of his own Pharisaical Church: I Corinthians xv is full of supposed cases and assertions about the resurrection of the same body, but there is not a word in it about redemption. This chapter makes part of the funeral service of the Episcopal Church. The dogma of the redemption is the fable of priestcraft invented since the time the New Testament was compiled, and the agreeable delusion of it suited with the depravity of immoral livers. When men are taught to ascribe all their crimes and vices to the temptations of the devil, and to believe that Jesus, by his death, rubs all off, and pays their passage to heaven gratis, they become as careless in morals as a spendthrift would be of money, were he told that his father had engaged to pay off all his scores.

 

It is a doctrine not only dangerous to morals in this world, but to our happiness in the next world, because it holds out such a cheap, easy, and lazy way of getting to heaven, as has a tendency to induce men to hug the delusion of it to their own injury.

 

But there are times when men have serious thoughts, and it is at such times, when they begin to think, that they begin to doubt the truth of the Christian religion; and well they may, for it is too fanciful and too full of conjecture, inconsistency, improbability and irrationality, to afford consolation to the thoughtful man. His reason revolts against his creed. He sees that none of its articles are proved, or can be proved.

[THOTH]

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." -- Thomas Jefferson (letter to J. Adams April 11,1823)