Instead of just doing a film review of Constantine's Sword (***), it seemed more apt to relate it to this thread. Author James Carroll is both brave and well-intentioned in this historical documentary (told as personal biography) regarding the origins (and brazen Christian culpability) for the relentless persecution of Jews throughout the last couple of millennia as being the killers of Christ as portrayed in the New Testament Gospels. On his journeys, many poignant and fascinating stories emerge and for many, I suspect, they will come as quite a shock to dearly held beliefs.
The real truth (as I see it) is simpler, starker and more shocking than even he, as a former priest, could understandably bring himself to contemplate. That Emperor Constantine (and many of his predecessors and successors), at a time of waning military influence, cynically and ruthlessly used Christianity as a means of oppression is clear, but the film doesn't reveal its special underlying strategy (and the one that gave it its unique leverage), that of forced acceptance of the historicity of the gospels, of fundamentalism. And therein lies a poetic tragedy because all the bloodshed and persecution and perversion and corruption and slaughter at the hands of the bearers of the holy cross was (and continues to be) committed on account of a distorted account of something that never even happened about someone who almost certainly never even existed. A fucking work of fiction.
And furthermore, neither was there a real decline of the Roman Empire, it just morphed from a military into a vast religious empire whose pagan origins and hierarchy are pretty much intact to this very day. The movie's footage of US Christian evangelists, and of the charlatans, pederasts, murderers, warmongers, child-molestors, perverts, and shameless self-serving crooks creepily dressed up as popes and bishops, will send a very real shiver right down your very real spine. And especially that nightmarish last shot of Ratzinger.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Amen
Yeah, it's weird, I remember being really shocked when I began to look into the history of the Christianity back during my college days and seeing how much of it was rehashed paganism... though my faith had already begun to become shaken during my senior year in high school, when I read "Brave New World", oddly enough (perhaps because in that book God is replaced by Henry Ford, which made me begin to wonder if the Christian God was nothing more than a replacement for something that came beforehand). My only complaint about how my parents was raised me was the fact that they gave me a religious upbringing (in fact, I accompanied them to church almost every Sunday with my brothers for the first 18 years of my life). I think, it messed me up to some degree and I've spent the last 10 years of my life trying to shake all that off. I often wonder if, had I been raised with no religious beliefs, I'd be a much different person than the one I am today.
Brave New World is a pretty terrible book.
Terrible?
I hope you mean, as in events in- not as of.
If so, you poor person. That book blew my 11 year old mind to shreds.
I was raised without religion.( Dad mormon, got himself formally thrown out, as he said, its a crock of horses hit.) Mum tormented by Catholic nuns, who liked to treat hyperactive/dyslexic kids by hitting them and making them sit in trash barrels. So they said- NO!! No religion for you.
You might have done what I did ( although I doubt it, as part was from begin disabled -christianity, and beaten/ the rest- my own search for what the hell was going on, as no one seems to be able to tell me why it was ok to treat me like a leper )-
which was go thru religions, like a catholic schoolgirl thru the hockey team, then became new age ( I was pre-teen- ok?Ive a excuse for being a wishy washy unicorn, fairy, crysta fancier ), then wicca ( raised by dad, wondered WTF xtians had with only MALE gods? Men great, but whats up with that? ), then the mystical kabbalah, dion fortune, on to Crowley, and it only gets worse from there! ( No seriously, it worked out well. Have a look at Aleister Crowleys A..A.. system, without reading ANY propaganda on him.
He actually found what made all those holy men thru the ages, experience what they did ( common factors ) and then DID THE SAME STUFF> I mean hard core, serious science on it. Yoga like it was going out of style. Pretty amazing.
If it cured someone of a 20 year reading binge of trying to figure out WTF made religion, religion ( beyond the political issues which William so handily shows here )=you might dig it.
Or not! Im no cultist trying to recruit anyone. But I do like a good scientist uncovering strange and unusual things. Maybe bugs, might be rocks, could be weird visions. Go figure.
Post a Comment