movie review—Noah

What were they thinking!!!

Considering that a major theme for this year's movies seems to be loosely-Christian ideas, it's of some interest to see how those ideas are shown.

Listening to some of the radio ads for the movie “Noah”, it's admitted that “artistic license” was used. I really have to say that it was a pretty serious license, almost to the point of making the story unrecognizable.

True, many of the basics are there. There's Noah, his wife, and three sons. There's an ark, and the animals. There's a flood, with water coming from both the sky and from the ground. Outside of that, though, it gets over into the realm of fantasy, and even worse thing.

For example, there were the Watchers, some kind of angelic beings who had rebelled against God and had been sent to Earth, to live in some kind of rock shells. They resemble the ents from The Lord of the Ring movies, or maybe some of the Transformers from those movies. The Bible makes no mention at all of them, and the notion that they are “fallen angels” who somehow still end up helping Noah becomes problematic, too.

Then, there's Noah himself. For about 2/3 of the movie, he's not a bad sort. It isn't until about the time that the flood begins that we see the emergence of Noah the nihilist, who thinks God wants the human race to end with him and his children, even to the point of keeping his sons from finding wives to take with them, except for Shem who marries a woman who is thought to be unable to have children, and wanting to kill his newborn twin granddaughters, who were born on the ark.

This nihilistic Noah is completely contrary to anything the Bible says about Noah. Genesis 6:18 “But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you.” Genesis 7:7 tells us that Noah's son already had wives, and they went with them into the ark. And Hebrews 11:7 says that Noah built the ark for the purpose of saving his household.

Even outside of that, there is much in the movie that is questionable. In Genesis 6, God plainly tells Noah what's going to happen. In this movie, Noah gets some strange dreams that he must figure the meaning for himself, and one reason for his fall into nihilism is because he thinks these unclear messages mean that God wants his children to be the end of the human race.

Although little is shown of the cities the supposed children of Cain had built, there is the hint that industrialism was one reason for God's displeasure in man, along with the eating of meat. The message from the creation, that man is to have dominion over the earth and subdue it, is put into the mouth of the movie's main bad guy, almost as if saying that this message was not a part of God's original order, but rather something inserted later by man.

Overall, this movie is disappointing, and even distasteful. This movie makes the biblical account of Noah seem like fantasy, and it makes a man of faith look like a psychotic maniac. Sadly, I cannot recommend this movie.

movie review--The Lone Ranger

A Calculated Insult to the US?

Looked at simply as a movie, The Lone Ranger isn't half bad. It's entertaining, humorous, quirky, with lots of action and an interesting perspective as being told as an account by the aged Tonto. So far as that went, I enjoyed it, though it did go a bit long, in my opinion.

But there is more going on here than just another fairly interesting flick, I think. There is something in it that comes off more like propoganda. More to the point, anti-American propoganda, and since it was released the day before Independence Day in the US, I can't help but think that there is something in the nature of a calculated insult in them releasing this movie at that particular time.

If you've seen movies like Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and Avatar, you'll soon find that The Lone Ranger is very much along those same lines.

The main message of this movie could be summed up in the phrase "white guilt". If there is something wrong with the world, well, you can blame the white guys. It's a bunch of stuffy white people who bring Christianity to the Indians whom they consider heathen, while the Indians are fine with their animistic beliefs. It's the white guys who think silver is something of value, while the Indians consider it a cursed rock. It's the white guys who kill senselessly, while the Indians never do so. It's the white guys whose greed causes them to build things like railroads, it's the white guys who believe in civilization and progress. When Tonto is facing down the main bad guy at the end of the film, he tells that man that he's simply another white man, as if him being white explained all of the bad things he had done.

Along with that, there is the notion of national guilt. There is the sense that the USA is what is wrong. Two of the three sets of villains represent the US military and US business. The reason for building the railroad is so that the east and the west of the US can be joined together. It's the greedy white US military leader who screams to his troops to mow down the Indians "For God and country!"

In his book "The Everlasting Man", Chesterton deals a bit with those of his own time who tried to paint the people of the western hemisphere as being essentially sinless until Europeans came and defiled their land and their cultures. He rightly points out that, while one cannot deny the reality of Eurorpean sins in their dealings with those peoples, upon what basis are we to assume that those peoples were themselves so perfect before the coming of people from Europe?

It is quite one thing for people to point out the ways the US has mistreated people like the various Indian tribes in the nation's history, that is a reality that should be acknowledged and repented of. But it is quite another to make those peoples seem like they had been so idyllic before people of paler skin came. That seems rather far-fetched, and serves the purpose more of propoganda than of truth and history.

In the end, I simply cannot recommend this movie. The propoganda aspect is simply too off-putting to me.

never have a sojrone over for the holiday

Unless it may be something like the day the Bolshies took over Russia, or Castro's conquest of Cuba, or some such leftist day of celebration. May want to pass on the day the Berlin Wall fell, though.

Rewriting History: Thanksgiving or Genocide?

Well, we have the word 'genocide'. Guess we know where this is going.

Thanksgiving — in its original intent — was to mark a good harvest in the plight of the early Pilgrims. While there are disputes about specific dates, most point to the first gathering to the Fall of 1621 where the Pilgrims and [some] local Indians gathered (fewer than 100) to celebrate a feast. Most are in agreement that the Indians were invited simply because the Pilgrims knew that they would have died had it not been for the help of the local Indians.

While it is true that we’re not entirely sure all the specific details, those that we would now categorize as “illegal aliens” not only came without invitation but they came to take over. In fact, beyond the first joint “Thanksgiving,” there were no further meals of mutual peace, dependence, and friendship.

Wow. So, the Pilgrims were "illegal aliens". Should that mean the Sojrones should condone anything they do? But they were white illegal aliens, so they should have stayed in Europe, one may suppose.

But I'm thinking that, really, this Sojrone is afraid of the real story of Thanksgiving, one that puts paid to the things Sojo holds dear.

The True Story of Thanksgiving

The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.

'For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense,'" without being paid for it, "'that was thought injustice.' Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself?" That's what he was saying. " The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.

"Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the 'Great Puritan Migration.' But this story stops when the Indians taught the newly arrived suffering-in-socialism Pilgrims how to plant corn and fish for cod. That's where the original Thanksgiving story stops, and the story basically doesn't even begin there. The real story of Thanksgiving is William Bradford giving thanks to God for the guidance and the inspiration to set up a thriving colony. The bounty was shared with the Indians." They did sit down" and they did have free-range turkey and organic vegetables, "but it was not the Indians who saved the day. It was capitalism and Scripture which saved the day," as acknowledged by George Washington in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789.

So, the story of Thanksgiving is a cautionary tale of the failure of Socialism, which is what Sojo thinks is what is so good and great. No, that story of Thanksgiving must be silenced and not celebrated.

The Sojo article is aptly titled, if one keeps in mind that it is the Sojrone himself who is rewriting history.

that's not what happened

24-7 Prayer vigils have always been used powerfully by God:
2000 years ago the church was born in a 24-7 prayer room.
2020 Vision, 24-7 Prayer, p 6

This seems to be something these 24-7 Prayer people seem to hold on to and believe. But is it true?

Acts 1
12Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is nigh unto Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey off. 13And when they were come in, they went up into the upper chamber, where they were abiding; both Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James. 14These all with one accord continued stedfastly in prayer, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.

Now, this passage does say that they were steadfast in prayer. But it doesn't say that they established some kind of all-day-and-night prayer vigil, or what have you. Furthermore, Christ had already promised that the Spirit was coming to them, before they entered this upper chamber and began waiting and praying.

1000 years ago Celtic monasteries prayed 24-7 and transformed Europe.

300 years ago Moravians prayed 24-7 for 100 years and took the gospel to many nations.

104 years ago a multi-racial 24-7 Prayer Room on Azusa Street in Los Angeles sparked the global Pentecostal and charismatic renewals.

I can't claim to know much about Celtic monasteries and Moravians, so I'll leave that be. But I'm kind of caught in a curious spot in regards to the charismania of today. On the one hand, I simply haven't found a good biblically-based argument against the spiritual gifts like tongues still being for today. The Bible does not explicitly say that it will end when John finishes the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, given how far too many of the leaders in the various forms of the charismatic churches are mindlessly following the words of charlatans, false prophets, false healers, false apostles, televangelists who preach more of people fulfilling their own desires than repentence and faith in Christ, I would contend that what came from Azusa Street has at least been perverted to an incredible degree, to the point even where too many in the charismatic churches, especially the leaders, are actively against God, even as they blasphemously use the names of God and Jesus to give their bizarre and false teachings a thin veil of legitimacy.

So, simply linking what their doing to Azusa Street may not mean much.

Finally, we simply have this plain fact--nowhere in the New Testament is any church commanded to set up some kind of all-day-and-all-night prayer thingy. Paul never mentions such a thing in any of his letters, the epistles of James and Peter and John are resoundingly silent on such a practice, and Jesus Himself doesn't mention the supposed need for it. There is nowhere any promise that if the churches were to put such a notion into practice, they would be blessed and their churches would grow and they would be cool.

So, I would contend that the notion that God has used such things powerfully is a bit of a stretch.

so, biblical christians are nazis?

At least, that's what this person thinks.

Two Crazy Rooms in the Church Lady’s House

It’s like you’re at the Church Lady’s house on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. The two of you are sitting in her sun room, sipping sweetened tea and nibbling Cheese Nips, or whatever, having a lovely chat.

In the course of the afternoon you ask to use the restroom. “Why, it’s just down the hallway there,” says the Church Lady. So you go down the hall, find a door, open it, and instead of a bathroom find this:

I'm not sure how to post the picture here, but it's a picture either from a Nazi concentration camp or maybe from a movie scene in one--a couple of rows of men in striped outfits. The only spot of color in the picture is that someone has put an upside-down pink triangle over the men's numbers. I wonder what that triangle is covering up, perhaps a Star of David, but I digress.

And the blog author is pretty straight-forward about it.

“Back there! In the two rooms! One’s got some gay guys being rounded up by Nazis, and the other’s got people being burned alive! C’mon! We’ve got to do something!”

It always amazes me how such people think the Nazis were right-wing. By way of correcting that, let me point to a book that puts paid to that notion.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Must be off, but only wanted to show how disgusting these oh-so-tolerant lefties can be.

they're the good guys, of course

So, back to McLaren's flavors of Bible reading...

2. Reading the Bible conversationally:

Which means...what, exactly.

If a culture is a community of people who converse (or argue) about the same things across many generations, it makes sense to learn the contours of the main players in the conversation.

Oh, yes, because, of course, the Bible is a conversation. Yeah, Right.

For example, in the gospels, Jesus enters ongoing conversations among Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Herodians, priests, scribes, prophets, Roman authorities, excluded sinners, and the poor.

Really? Jesus just kind of threw out his thoughts about things, like your typical coffee house denizen at a jaw session, just kinda making a point, giving his opinion, let's have some feedback and maybe he wasn't really right or anything?

I rather think that Jesus was doing more than just entering into and joining some kind of antenicene form of the emergent conversation.

Across the Hebrew Bible, there is a persistent tension between priests (who are the institutional caretakers of what we might call “organized religion”) and prophets (movement leaders who critique the very status quo of ritual and sacrifice that the priests work so hard to defend from the forces of chaos and compromise).

Now, I think I know the Bible pretty well. Maybe not as much as scholars do, but fairly well. And I haven't noticed this "persistent tension" McLaren claims is there.

First, let's consider his characterizations of priests and prophets. Were priests the institutional caretakers of the organized religion of ancient Israel? Perhaps that's not a wrong description, though it is rather simplistic. Plus, given that it's McLaren saying it, it carries a certain slam with it. Priests were, first of all, established by God, and their function was very important.

McLaren's characterization of prophets is rather more problematic. They weren't "movement leaders". And their job wasn't some kind contra-priests thing, where they just went around being subversives of the things the priests did, and being OT anarchists who were only trying to cause trouble.

Perhaps someone else has a better definition for what the prophets did, but so far as I can tell, their messages were mostly to political leaders of Israel and Judah, sometimes to other nations, and on occasions to all the people of Israel or Judah as a whole. They primarily dealt with sins, personal and national, calling the people to repent of those sins, and at times telling them what judgment is coming if they don't repent. There is also a far future element to their prophecies, where God reveals things to them about what will happen at the end of days, both the horror and the final deliverance.

Finally, there just doesn't seem to be this "persistent tension" McLaren claims. Yes, sometimes the prophets spoke against the priests, but they did so because the priests weren't doing right. Samuel, for example, was given a prophecy concerning Eli because Eli was simply not being a very good priest--he was, for example, allowing his sons to abuse their positions, and they were sexually immoral. But the prophet Zechariah has a prophecy of good to the high priest Joshua, in Zechariah 3.

There's more that McLaren says, maybe I'll get back to it later, but for now, I'm content enough to put paid to the ways he's tried to revise history, to make the relationship between priests and prophets in ancient Israel into something similar to his take on the current emergent church movement, with of course the emergents being like the good-guy prophets who went around causing trouble and making outrageous statements and basically being anti-establishment for no better reason than being anti-establishment.

the book never written

My first foray into the works of Chris Hedges came a bit of time ago, when I found his book Losing Moses on the Freeway at a nearby library. I was especially interested when one part of the book dealt with chess and some chess players. It was in reading this part, though, that I came on a rather interesting passage, this one here

The chess craze, ushered in by Bobby Fischer in the 1970s, hit the United States. Rossolimo, who made it into Fischer's book on the 100 greatest games he ever played, never capitalized on it, but Frohlinde did. He made money, big money, selling chess sets of of his shop.
Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway, p 149

What gave me pause was his mention of a book by Fischer "on the 100 greatest games he ever played".

When I was pretty intensely into local tournament chess, I became rather familiar with the literature of the game. It was, of course, an ever expanding body of literature, and I haven't kept up with the latest things, but as I was playing in tournaments in the 1990's, it would have been well past the time when Fischer would have written anything, at least up until his return.

Fischer himself did not have a great deal of that literature to his name--much has been written about him and his games by other people, but I've found only three books that Fischer himself as the author.

One is rather poorly-made instructional book called Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. I had a copy of it at one time, and it was a bit disappointing.

Fischer's most famous work, and one rightly considered a classic, is My 60 Memorable Games, published in 1969. In the preface to this book, Fischer himself makes mention of an earlier book, Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess, published in 1959. This book, Fischer says, has 34 of his games in it.

Now, My 60 Memorable Games does have a game that Fischer played against Rossolimo. It is game #52 in that book, and the game was played in the 1965-66 US Championship, well after Fischer's first book was published.

All of this rambling to say that, I have no knowledge of Fischer publishing a collection of his 100 greatest games, like Hedges says. The closest I can find to such a thing is Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games, which has 60 games in it instead of 100, and even the use of 'memorable' instead of greatest is telling. In Fischer's own words from the preface, "All of the 60 here offered contain, for me, something memorable and exciting--even the 3 losses". It would be doubtful that Fischer would put losses into a collection of his greatest games--at the least ,it would be an unusual practice.

In other words, although Hedges seems to be trying to reference a real work of chess literature, the information he gives about it is wrong, both in a concrete sense (60 games instead of 100) and a more abstract sense (memorable games instead of greatest).

It would be too easy to make too much hay over this error. It may have been a simple error, a bit of carelessness maybe. But the fact is, the error was made, and it was one that could easily have been avoided.

For one thing, the mention of the book is made in what is essentially a throw-away comment. It adds a bit of information, but nothing crucial to the point. One could understand that Rossolimo "did not capitalize one...(t)he chess craze" without having to know that Fischer included a game against Rossolimo in his book.

For another, it would have been easy to have verified the name and nature of the book. Hedges wrote this book fairly recently, it was published in 2006, and sites like Amazon were around. A quick search of some kind would have easily sufficed for him to get the correct information about the book.

But he doesn't seem to have done enough to verify, and so he wrote about a book with 100 games in it that doesn't exist.

And being wrong about a simple, easily verifiable thing like that, leads one to think, what else is he writing that may be wrong? Maybe nothing else, maybe all else he writes is correct, and this was just a singular slip. But it does cause the eyebrows to go up.

very early constitutionalists

By now, I hope you can anticipate my three-part answer...Second, he seems to be working from a constitutional approach of the Bible, which privileges him to pass judgment as if he were a Supreme Court justice...

Instead, this image of Jesus as a conqueror (in Revelation 19:11-16) reassures believers that the peaceful Jesus who entered Jerusalem on a donkey that day wasn't actually weak and defeated; he was in fact every bit as powerful as a Caesar on a steed...

To repeat, Revelation is not portraying Jesus returning to earth in the future, having repented of his naive gospel ways and having converted to Caesar's "realistic" Greco-Roman methods instead...

Revelation celebrates not the love of power, but the power of love. It denies, with all due audacity, that God's anointed liberator is the Divine Terminator, threatening revenge for all who refurse to honor him, growling "I'll be back!".
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, pp 120, 124-125, 126

McLaren is dealing here with someone's quote, which clearly seens Revelation 19 as being a prophecy of Jesus' return, and one that is literal--Jesus will return as a conquering king, to being judgment to some people.

McLaren doesn't like that. He likes a pacifist Jesus, and hates it when Jesus just won't conform. So, he has to go to some lengths to try to makes the other person (isn't it against their code to disparage the other?) he quotes seem ridiculous.

Now, I think the one he quotes is someone who's around today (McLaren attaches no name to the quote, neither in the contents of the book nor in the footnotes, which seems rather iffy to me). And since it is someone who's around today, he may think he can get away with his interpretive shenanigans.

But I find it interesting that he appeals to the ancient church (a bit I did't quote here) in support for his reinterpretation, because some in the early church agreed more with McLaren's critic than with McLaren.

emphases mine

“So that you ought rather to desist from the love of strife, and repent before the great day of judgment come, wherein all those of your tribes who have pierced this Christ shall mourn as I have shown has been declared by the Scriptures. And I have explained that the Lord swore, ‘after the order of Melchizedek,’ and what this prediction means; and the prophecy of Isaiah which says, ‘His burial is taken away from the midst,’ I have already said, referred to the future burying and rising again of Christ; and I have frequently remarked that this very Christ is the Judge of all the living and the dead. And Nathan likewise, speaking to David about Him, thus continued: ‘I will be His Father, and He shall be my Son; and my mercy shall I not take away from Him, as I did from them that went before Him; and I will establish Him in my house, and in His kingdom for ever.’ And Ezekiel says, ‘There shall be no other prince in the house but He.’ For He is the chosen Priest and eternal King, the Christ, inasmuch as He is
the Son of God;
Justin Martyr, dialogue with Trypho, ch 118

For the prophets have proclaimed two advents of His: the one, that which is already past, when He came as a dishonored and suffering Man; but the second, when, according to prophecy, He shall come from heaven with glory, accompanied by His angelic host, when also He shall raise the bodies of all men who have lived, and shall clothe those of the worthy with immortality, and shall send those of the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.
Justin Martyr, First Apology of Justin, ch 52

If the Father, then, does not exercise judgment, [it follows] that judgment does not belong to Him, or that He consents to all those actions which take place; and if He does not judge, all persons will be equal, and accounted in the same condition. The advent of Christ will therefore be without an object, yea, absurd, inasmuch as [in that case] He exercises no judicial power. For “He came to divide a man against his father, and the daughter against the mother, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law;” and when two are in one bed, to take the one, and to leave the other; and of two women grinding at the mill, to take one and leave the other: [also] at the time of the end, to order the reapers to collect first the tares together, and bind them in bundles, and burn them with unquenchable fire, but to gather up the wheat into the barn; and to call the lambs into the kingdom prepared for them, but to send the goats into everlasting fire, which has been prepared by His Father for the devil and his angels. And why is this? Has the Word come for the ruin and for the resurrection of many? For the ruin, certainly, of those who do not believe Him, to whom also He has threatened a greater damnation in the judgment-day than that of Sodom and Gomorrah; but for the resurrection of believers, and those who do the will of His Father in heaven. If then the advent of the Son comes indeed alike to all, but is for the purpose of judging, and separating the believing from the unbelieving, since, as those who believe do His will agreeably to their own choice, and as, [also] agreeably to their own choice, the disobedient do not consent to His doctrine; it is manifest that His Father has made all in a like condition, each person having a choice of his own, and a free understanding; and that He has regard to all things, and exercises a providence over all, “making His sun to rise upon the evil and on the good, and sending rain upon the just and unjust.”
Irenaeus, Against Heretics, Book 5 Chapter 27

Who knew that, so early in the Church, they had the Greco-Roman constitutional view of things, even before there was a Greco-Roman constitutional view around. Too bad they didn't have McLaren around as something like a prophet, to keep them from it.