Notes from the Swami re: The Passion of Christ, etc.

[LWolf]

aka Steve Bhaerman, a favorite of mine.

It was an email, mods, not on his website at this point, so no link; I snipped this out of the email, but didn't snip for length since I couldn't link to the rest:

The Passion: A Dispassionate View, or
“Gory, Gory Hallelujah!”
By Steve Bhaerman

“The Passion” has been such a box-office success that naturally, there is already a buzz about a sequel. So, let me quell one rumor and start another. Apparently, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that Mel Gibson plans to take a lighter approach to similar subject matter in a sequel titled, “There’s Something About Mother Mary.”
But as I watched 90 minutes of excruciating, vivid, bloody violence toward the Jesus character, I did get an idea for the next project: A 50 million hour sequel detailing similar (and worse) violence done by the church in Jesus’s name. There would be the witches, heretics, the nonbelievers and the unorthodox, and of course the Jews. Because, technically Nazi Germany was a “Christian” nation, and even if Mel’s dad says the holocaust didn’t happen, I got 6 million distant relatives who say it did.
And as I watched the Pharisees in the movie so fearful of Jesus’s insistence that God is bigger than orthodoxy, I couldn’t help think of our current batch of Christian fundamentalists who have crucified the true Christ energy a thousand times with their anti-love judgmentalism. It’s interesting that the love between people of the same sex has generated such a high level of hatred among these folks. Yesterday, the Biblical passage, “What God hath put together, let no man put asunder’ came into my head, and it occurred to me that maybe God (in His/Her ultimate wisdom -- or pesky playfulness) has made gay marriage the contemporary crucible for the love vs. fear conversation.
Now as loudly as the fundamentalists rail against the “abomination” of two men lying together, apparently when an entire government lies together, that is of no consequence. I just saw a piece on the American government’s complicity in the Argentinean and Chilean death squads over the past thirty years (can you say “Hen-ry Kis-sin-ger?”), and I don’t recall any outcry by religious fundamentalists on this un-Jesus-like behavior. (This, in contrast to the Catholic priests and nuns who were among the “disappeared” because they actually saw a relationship between Jesus’s message and the political, social and economic repression in Latin America.)
Maybe it’s time for those Christian-identified folks who feel that to “bomb-a-nation” is the true abomination to begin to prod and poke the religious Right (i.e., “The Grinch that Stole Christianity”) with the question, “What would Jesus REALLY do?” Were we to fast forward the Passion scenario 2,000 years, would Jesus be strutting in front of an army like our own Fearless Leader -- or would he be more apt to be whacked by one? As a carpenter, he might indeed be driving around in a pick-up truck, but I’m doubtful the truck would have a “God, Guns and Guts” bumper sticker.
The trouble with “The Passion” was that it ends up being nothing more than a paean to patriarchy. Maybe the sequel needs to be “The Compassion,” and those of us choosing to feed the wolf of love, and starve the wolf of fear and hatred get to write this new movie by living it. Forget seeing it -- billions would flock to this flick to be in it.