YOU SPENT HOW MUCH!?

Amidst rumors of James Cameron’s “Avatar” and its blossoming budget (over half-a-billion!?), I would like to make a point. The film doesn’t even have a rating yet. However, even thinking there is a remote possibility that it gets an R rating would be pretty wild. Hit the jump to read why.

Even conservative estimates have pegged the film with an estimated $300 million dollar budget and with that in mind, let’s look at the top domestic grossing R-rated films.

“The Passion of the Christ” raked in $370 million dollars in 2004. The next highest? 2003’s “The Matrix Reloaded” which claimed $281 million.

Now, understand these are only domestic grosses, and “Reloaded” did end up making the largest worldwide gross for any R-rated film with over $782 million. While that is a respectable number, look at a list of the highest grossing films and Cameron’s own 1997 worldwide juggernaut “Titanic” sits at the top and got damn close to bringing in 2 billion dollars in worldwide gross and had over $600 million in domestic gross alone.

The rating? PG-13.

Look at the most recent worldwide blockbuster, Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight”, and it cracked the billion dollar worldwide mark late in its 2008 limited return at theaters to go with $533 million in domestic.

Rating? PG-13.

Let’s say that the total production budget is in fact over $500 million dollars. That would nearly double 2007’s $258 million “Spider-Man 3″ budget, which was insane at the time.

Rating? PG-13.

If you see a trend, there is a reason. Naturally a PG-13 film, especially a blockbuster like those mentioned above and “Avatar”, stands to make a much higher gross by putting a wider range of ages in the seats compared to an R-rated film.

We should also consider that Cameron is aiming this towards 3-D. He wants to push the technology beyond a gimmick and show how it can be essential to engrossing the audience in his alien world of Pandora.

More than that, he wants to showcase the technology he has been working on for years and get even more theaters to install 3-D projectors. He wants to revolutionize the way we see films.

He wants this to be the film that everyone wants to see in 3-D. To make that extra dimension an essential part of the experience.

There is also the factor of an ever-shrinking home-video market that makes this film aimed straight at theaters. This needs to be a film that gives people an extra push to go sit in a crowded theater.

With that goal, you need a film that parents can bring their kids to. You need a film that has an enormous target audience. A film that has a PG-13 rating.

Before you shout at the screen, wailing about how watered down a PG-13 sci-fi film will be, know that mature films have been made with that same rating. “The Dark Knight” immediately comes to mind.

Others? Cameron’s own aim, to top Star Wars, is based on a franchise that has never sniffed an R rating. That rating has not diminished the films in any way.

This is why I think “Avatar” will have parents and kids lining up for 3-D showings on December 18, 2009. I also predict that the film will make back it’s production budget and usher in a franchise that might explode as Star Wars did when it first released.

Even if the film falls short of a phenomenon, Cameron’s sheer scope and ambition should be celebrated in a world of remakes and sequels.

I just finished a three-hour cleaning blitz on my house. It needed it badly. When you have four cats, a dog and two teenagers…well, you get the picture. 

I recently signed up to be an independent Mary Kay beauty consultant.  What is so ironic about it is that it comes on the heels of Beth Moore’s Esther Bible study that we are wrapping up at church.  Back in Esther’s time, beauty was a treatment.  It had nothing to do with who you were as a person.  When Esther was taken into the harem to be presented before King Xerxes, she, along with the other women were given 12 months of treatments.  Six months with oil of myrrh and six with perfumes and cosmetics. Wow…were these women in their natural state so bad?? I guess if they were hard-working maybe they had calloused hands or feet. Their skin may have been dry from the desert sun. In order to be Queen, you had to appear pampered and it took a year to get these ladies’ where they were looking pampered.

I so firmly believe that beauty begins on the inside.  We could be the most gorgeous woman on the outside but continually spew venom, criticism, and cut people down, people will look past the beauty and see the ugly on the inside.  Think about these Hollywood “beauties.”  Once you read a tabloid cover while standing in the supermarket line about how nasty they were to a “commoner,” it changes your attitude toward them, doesn’t it?  I used to wish I was as beautiful as they were but I’ve come to see that they live shallow, hollow lives.  Some of them are so thin, you can see their ribs.  How sad is that?  I’ve seen ads in the local paper here looking for extras for a film that Robert Redford is producing and they only want women that are size 0-4.  That’s not a woman. Have you noticed that women that small don’t have any boobs to speak of, naturally, because they don’t have the natural fat that God gave them. So, then they go have implants, which make them sick or kill them.  Botox makes them look permanently scared or like their lips got sucked into a vacuum cleaner.  Fake boobs, fake hair, fake nails, tummy tucks, liposuction, botox…where does it end?

Vanity…vanity, all is vanity.  King Solomon had it right. 

Why can’t we be comfortable in our own skin?  This is who God made us to be.   He never makes mistakes.  Who cares what others think about us?  It is the Lord that we should aim to please.  He’s the only One that counts.

Human nature is to judge from the outside inward.  We tend to size people up by the clothes they wear or the car they drive or their hairstyle.  It isnt until after we get to know them that we see who they are…their personality, heart and soul.

When you look in the mirror each day, what do you see?  I see every physical flaw.  I have a cow lick on the side of my head which makes my hair stick out in the wrong place.  I have crow’s feet around my eyes when I smile.  I have hair that grows funny on the back of my neck causing the layering pieces to look like I have a duck tail.  I see my not-so-white teeth.  I see my double chin.  I see signs of aging.  Sometimes, I wish there were no such thing as mirrors.  Of course, then we might scare people to death if we didn’t have a chance to fix our frightening hair before we left home, right?

I’ve been married 23 years.  I remember when I first saw my husband, my heart did backflips.  He was HOT. I called him a “hunk” and my mother-in-law never let me forget that.  Through the years we have both changed physically.  It is a natural part of aging and some of it has been our own fault of over-induldging.  But you know what?  When I look at him, I don’t look at his looks.  I see him:  the man inside, the man I fell in love with. 

You know what is so wonderful about the Lord?  He sees inside.  He searches our hearts.  He knows us intimately and still loves us unconditionally.  What a wonderful comfort that is! These physical bodies will be left behind when we are taken home to be with Him and I cannot wait to see what my glorified body will look like.  White teeth?  Beautiful, long raven hair without gray streaks? No wrinkles or freckles?  ~sigh~

I remember the first time I read Revelation and it described Jesus with white hair like wool and a white robe, I panicked inside.  Strange, right?  Well, all of my life, as I’m sure with you, man’s depiction of our Lord and Savior has been with brown hair and blue eyes.  That’s our image of Christ.  That’s not what He looks like. He was born a Jew.  How many middle eastern people have you seen with brown hair and blue eyes?  I wondered why Hollywood always put that spin on it.  I guess to make Him stand out from the rest.  The most accurate to me, was Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”   Jim Caviezel had those eyes that were very expressive and his hair and eye coloring were that of what I would expect from Jews of Jesus’ day.  Of course, Revelation does use a lot of descriptive terminology that is not necessarily literal.  The white could be literal but then again it could signify purity.  Jesus is pure and holy.

Each of our personalities are different and our minds are shaped by what we read and watch on TV.  I have really cut back on what I watch on television because once it is in your mind, you can’t just etch-a-sketch it out.  The old saying “garbage in – - garbage out” is true.   As children of God, if Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of your life, then you have the mind of Christ but you also still have your natural mind.  They are constantly at war.  Who wins?  The one you feed the most. 

Oh be careful little eyes what you see….

Be blessed in the Lord!

I’m really starting to get excited about this paper for my Religion and the Body class. Rather than just stick with “The Passion of the Christ” (over done!) I’m branching out to do a survey of the crucifixion in several Jesus movies. I’m starting with a 1905 silent film, working my way through “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” (duh.), “Jesus of Nazareth”, and a few others in addition to “The Passion.” I’m focusing primarily on Jesus’ body, how it is dressed, treated, abused, what it looks like…etc… It’s something I’ve never really paid attention to before, and it’s fascinating.

My argument right now is that over the years not only has the violence level of Jesus films increased, but Jesus has become more and more super-human. That’s not a theological argument, mind you, but rather just a look at the Jesus character. I mean let’s face it, Mel Gibson’s Jesus would have been dead from blood loss long before he ever carried the cross to Golgotha. But I also haven’t seen many of these movies in quite awhile (if ever) so I might change that working hypothesis.

Oh man, I’m totally nerding out. I apologize. Here… here’s a picture of a hamster for those of you who are bored with this entry already.
I tried to get Archie to help me with my homework. He decided to try and make a nest out of my wool sweater instead. He’s tricky like that.

The difficult thing about being a “Religious Studies” master’s student is that I’m not always sure I belong in “Religious Studies.” However, I think this is an issue for most people in Religious Studies departments. A lot of what we do, what we’re interested in, sort of spans disciplines. Some of us are interested in archaeology, sociology, psychology, history, literature, etc. But we all come together under the umbrella of “religious studies” because what we study has some aspect of “religion” in it… maybe.

So I ask myself: my paper is on film, and while it’s religious film, is it religion? Is what I’m doing film studies or is it religious studies? Do I belong in another department?

Perhaps it all comes down to the question of “what is religion really?”
I’ll get back to you on that one…

PS: Did you know Christian Bale once played Jesus? I don’t know that I’ll be watching “Mary, Mother of God” for my paper, but I just might for my own fascination. Is it possible he could rival Willem Dafoe as my favorite? Uh oh…

In the beginning God forgot to set His alarm clock, so the Earth had to wait to be created. In the later beginning of that beginningful day, God finally got around to creating things. God first created Adam and Eve but they both died in the coldness and darkness of space, so God scrapped that plan. God then created the Heavens and the Earths but the two Earths collided so He only created one. He also created the stars except He created them too close and they all gravitated towards each other, thus imploding into a super black hole that God Himself almost got pulled into. “Dammit!,” God said angrily. As soon as He said His thunderous non-audible loud curse word , the black hole was sent to a place that was damned, immediately, and that’s how hell was created. Eventually God became a little upset with His creation and instead just created an unstable singularity that formed 13 billion years ago that would spawn a universe that would eventually evolve life and conscious life at that.

In the process of evolution, came about Adam and Eve and 2,000 other humans but we won’t mention them. God decided not to intervene anymore since He thought maybe He could only do one thing right and that was to just allow evolution to take its course. He already killed Adam and Eve once. He didn’t want to do it again. Adam incidentally had no attraction to Eve. Instead, he got it on quite frequently with Steve. Thus creating the later distorted history of Adam and Steve that homophobes continuously historically get wrong.

Anyway, Adam and Steve did not begat anything and lived in peace and harmony alone in the garden with whatever animals they decided to arbitrarily name. Eve prayed for a child and never got one because prayer doesn’t actually work. She eventually figured this out and met up with the other 2,000 humans and had kids with a couple of them. For some reason or another, only Eve mating with a guy named Larry created a series of begats that scribes scribed about. Larry begat Enoch, Enoch begat Octavian, Octavian begat …. hmmm…Octavian is not a particularly Jewish name but you get the point. Anyway, 50 begats later and there were more people and because people are diverse culturally in a larger population, those cultural diversions are more noticeable. Thus some groups of people had their own negative views of other groups of people. But out of all of these people came Noah. Everyone just did not seem to have the upstanding moral fortitude of Noah. Noah was like the only guy who did not eat animals. His wife and children, who have no names, would sometimes eat animals but they at least knew the error of their ways. Anyway, Noah believed based on the animal entrails that day that a great flood would occur at some point. But he didn’t really have to use animal entrails, you see, Noah and the now 40,000 other humans lived in a flood plain that flooded yearly. It didn’t flood too high but it was still annoying since it would dampen your feet. So he went ahead and built an ark and lived in it with his wife and children.

The townspeople were actually pretty amazed by the size of the unnecessary thing. They thought it had to be inspired by something more radical than mere animal entrails. “It must’ve been something like a guy that creates planets or something that inspired Noah, duh! It couldn’t have been some stupid animal entrails that led him to create something as impractically stupid but still incredibly fascinating as that ark! Duh!”

So Noah went along with their nonsense, saying, “yeah, it was some planet-making guy that inspired me”. He also thought about bringing some animals into the arc to turn it into some kind of floating house zoo. He put as many animals into the ark as he could.

Turned out the ark was a success. Noah became a multi-thousandaire overnight. Everyone wanted to see that stupid ark and look at the animals. Unfortunately Noah’s success would turn out to be a success in a completely unexpected way.

It began to rain, and rain, and it wouldn’t stop raining. It rained so much that it was like a 500 year flood event. Noah and his wife and children were safe in the ark and so were the animals. But, you know, the people weren’t so safe. Noah tried to convince them to get on but they didn’t want to. Unknown to Noah, the other humans knew a friend named Carl just down the street who also built an ark but it did not stink like animal shit. So, they got on that one instead. Poor Noah, if only he had known they survived. Instead, he assumed that they had all died. He also assumed that the world had flooded for no apparent reason at all and that it was 40 days and 40 nights but that just sounded good because 40 seemed mystical to him. The real time of the flood was actually less than 40 hours.

Anyway, some people one day decided to build a tower and it did not work because it was structurally unsound. It fell immediately when they built the first layer. Not wanting to sound so unsuccessful, the tower builders claimed it was 40 layers tall. When other people confronted the tower builders about the tower not being as tall as they claimed it to be, the tower builders just started claiming they could not understand the other people, “Blah blah blah, I can’t hear you! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” This perplexed the other people making the other people actually believe that the tower builders couldn’t understand them because the falling tower must have caused them to speak different languages and this obviously must’ve been true. I mean, the tower builders can’t understand them. Logically, they must be speaking another language. So maybe this is a sign from some planet-maker that they shouldn’t build large towers (even if they weren’t really that large) because coorperation of that magnitude is actually just an illusion and it’s actually really deep down non-cooperation. So any cooperation must mean non-cooperation. Thus people should not cooperate. Maybe there should also be a lack of common ideals and use of reason too. As a result, wars were invented that day. And it’s been like that ever since.

So later, at some time, there were some laws set down. Like don’t lie with other people that don’t seem aesthetically pleasing. Also, let’s confuse aesthetics with morality and say that you shouldn’t morally lie with other people who are not aesthetically pleasing. Like don’t lie with your sister, gross! Don’t lie with your uncle, gross! Don’t lie with an octopus, gross! Don’t lie with a man if you just happen to be a man…wow that seems somewhat pleasing to us…I mean… gross! Don’t cut your beard, gross! And so grossness was the basis of morality at that time and remains that way today. Good times. Also justice came in the form of killing someone with stones. Good times!

So there was a town, you know Sodom and a town Gomorra, and some kind of perpetrated vice happened there. Sodom and Gomorra were then destroyed. It’s not really important how and why, just that at this point the actual deistic God was wondering why this particular point is so well documented Biblically, you know? Boring!

Anyway, there was this man named Moses and he saw to his surprise a burning bush talking to him one day.

The bush said, “lead your people free from that sinister Pharaoh.”

Moses said, “what’s wrong with Pharaoh, he’s a perfectly decent man?”

“Moses! Do not question me! You know I always have to provide a sound answer to the best of my ability!,” said the bush.

“No, I did not know that, I just met you, burning bush.”

“Oh, I see. Well, anyway, I don’t necessarily have time to answer that one but, the reason Pharaoh is bad is because he has terrible fiscal policy. He doesn’t have enough money to spend on his projects, so he just prints more money off, thus not applying a sound fiscal policy, do you understand?!”

Moses just sighed and said, “Yes, you are right. No one can live under an administration that just spends, runs out of money, and so simply just prints off more money to spend. It’s ridiculous because it just creates situations of inflation.”

The bush says to Moses, “anyway, you must let your people go!”

“Who are my people!?” wonders Moses.

“Um….the slaves?”

“What?! The slaves. There is only two of them, and they’re actually indentured servants, working to become citizens of Egypt through the work for amnesty program. What about the middle class? Won’t they be pretty badly hurt by the rising inflation and possible collapse of the housing market?”

“Everyone will be hurt by the inflation,” said the burning bush.

“So, why am I not taking the middle class too?,” asked Moses.

“Okay, take the fucking middle class with you too!” the bush thunderously yelled.

“By the way, this burning bush thing is too weird, I think I’m going to tell them that you are a planet-maker. Is that okay?”

The bush thought about it, “hmm, what is a planet maker?”

“A planet maker,” said Moses, “is the latest theory. Basically, we exist on a planet right? Well, that planet had to get there somehow.

Well…it came about by something that makes planets. And the theory also suggests that the thing that made planets probably looks similar to the culture who thought up such a theory and is certainly a man or something with a penis. Yes. It’s gotta have a penis. It would be quite odd for it not to. And the penis is probably pretty big in relation to the rest of it.”

“Well,” the bush said, “I do like being thought of as having a big penis. So yes, please call me a planet-maker!”

So Moses went to Egypt and freed the two indentured servants and the middle class. Pharaoh put up no fight. He decided that he wanted to do something else for a living, so he became what he always wanted to be, a rock collector.

The Red Sea was pretty low that day and for no apparent reason people began to claim that Moses had parted it but Moses said, “yeah, kinda, my feet are displacing the low amount of water that makes up this crappy sea and in a sense you could say that that’s parting it.” And, this made Moses kind of superstitious in his thinking. Moses thought to himself, “earlier today I saw what I think was more frogs and locusts than usual. Maybe the bush sent those.”

In actuality, Moses saw frogs and locusts all the time, he just seemed to be paying more close attention due to everything seeming of much more spiritual significance after that encounter with the burning bush.

In fact, when you really think about it. The bush really hadn’t actually been talking to Moses. For one thing, the bush just happened to be on fire from a lightning storm. And you see, civilization during that time had not invented INTROSPECTION yet. Moses was actually the first one to have developed this ability. Not knowing what introspection was, he mistakened his own thoughts for the burning bush’s.

Anyway, so Moses introspects some more in his confusing way of doing so, and finds to his astonishment that there are 10 commandments. The 10 commandments are not actually that important but they seemed to be a step up from grossness morality that seemed to plague everyone that day and still to this day. You know, honor your father and your mother. Stuff like that. Except there ought to be exceptions but maybe exceptions were assumed. We’ll never know since Moses never wrote that down. I mean, seriously, you don’t want to honor your father or mother if they’re not good parents and they’re not trying to be. Seriously.

So anyway, some Jews were speculating one day that clearly the planet-maker had to have at least one child to be absolutely perfect. However, the planet-maker had to be perfect enough to also not have a planet-maker wife because let’s face it, this man has to be too good for even a woman. However he could not be too good for sex. He still had to impregnate somebody.

That somebody was Mary. She was actually impregnated by Joseph but Joseph felt like he was man enough to make planets. This is what happens to all guys under the influence of testosterone and mead: They think they can actually make planets. So he started saying quirky things like, “I Joseph the planet-maker, hereby impregnate Mary!”

Some stupid nitwits overheard this sexual episode, and believed, for no apparent reason, that the planet-maker himself was impregnating Mary. But instead of hearing the name Joseph, they actually thought they heard the name Jehovah, which was actually forbidden not because it had any reference to any deity or meant anything in Hebrew but it was actually a swear word. So they thought, “wow, this planet-maker has an obscenity for a name. We dare not speak its name except by whisper!” So the planet-maker’s name was now Jehovah. Anyway, some day, probably December 25th + or – two weeks, Joseph and Mary’s son was born. His name was Jesus the Christ, for absolutely no apparent reason.

Jesus was not like normal children. Jesus was actually very bright. He invented the first pair of shoes that could float a person above water. He also invented modern day morality. He thought people just needed to respect each other and not hate each other over things that just seem gross. Jesus really hated grossness morality. It was just plain awful. To dispel grossness morality, Jesus hung out with some of the most gross people alive and continued to say that these people were good! Now, you must understand, these people were absolutely gross and disgusting. Even with our super advanced morality of today, it’s hard not to fall into the grossness morality and think, “that’s just wrong!”

Jesus was an amazing psychologist. He created his own psychology that he named demon psychology, so that people could understand it better in their own terms. In this psychology, whenever he’d spend years psychoanalyzing someone and the patient finally got better, he’d say, “those demons are now casted out!” When these stories of his psychoanalysis were written down, the whole psychoanalytic procedure was not written down. That seemed very boring to the ancients. So they just summed it up. Thus Jesus was portrayed as casting out demons in a matter of a few seconds, instead of over the course of a month through semi-modern practices of psychology. This didn’t make Jesus very happy that his work was summed up this way, but he just shrugged and said, “well, there’s an idiot born everyday. All you can do is turn the other cheek.”

Jesus was a little impatient with the stupidity around him so he got himself 11 people to educate about rules of morality and psychology with some annoying guy tagging along. These 11 idiots never seemed to understand anything Jesus was trying to tell him. But the 11 idiots knew there was something special about Jesus, but they were always wrong about what made him special. Eventually they concluded that he was some kind of son of planet-maker/son of man thing. It seemed to stick.

Anyway, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who was a very beautiful and successful business owner. Jesus and Mary did not have kids, instead, they adopted, thus ending any possible stupid speculation about his blood line and all that crap.

So, how did the story about Jesus winding up on the cross occur? Well, that was another guy named Jesus who looked quite similar just trying to steal the real Jesus’ thunder. People got tired of his crap so they nailed him to a cross.

Later there was this guy named Saul, who actually never took up the name Paul. That was just another guy the scribes confused Saul with. You see Saul was just a merciless killer. Perhaps the confusion over Paul and Saul has to do with the fact that Paul killed Saul out of self-defense. But anyway, Paul was a good planet-maker believer, although he seemed to not understand anything Jesus said at all, for one thing wrongly believing Jesus to be the son of a planet-maker and clearly confusing him with the other Jesus that got crucified. Paul also erroneously believed that the planet was not developed through some cosmogenic evolution, which clearly if he had just reasoned a little further he would have understood. Paul was after all, capable of good empirical reasoning.

Probably one of the short comings of Paul is his problem with homosexuality. What Paul did not seem to realize is that homosexuals were only evil during his time. That was the only point in history in which homosexuals were morally evil. There was some kind of odd virus that attacked homosexual men in a such a way, given their genetic structure, that would actually make them evil in heart but not necessarily evil in deed. But later, this virus went away and homosexuals were their benevolent selves again. The same as they had always been. Scientists used to think homosexuals were a separate group of people, but they’re just like you and me, but just gay. In fact, homosexual thoughts are actually quite common among people who are quite heterosexual. Or even among non-sexual things like rocks. Homosexual thoughts are probably most prominent in beings known as homophobes. Homophobes’ main task is the attempt to always try to block these homosexual thoughts through thoughts (usually in the form of hate of homosexuals) that always seem to relate back to the thoughts which they’re trying to block, a very unfortunate process to find yourself in. If you find yourself in this nonsense thought process, please do yourself a favor and act on your homosexual thoughts with a consenting male over the age of 18 immediately. Make sure you let your wife know before hand.

Anyway, given this unfortunate environment Paul found himself in, he derived very wrong conclusions. I mean, the water table for some reason or another was filled with whiskey and not with normal water. Thus the whiskey was clearly infiltrating Paul’s otherwise brilliant brain. So Paul could only come to some of the most nonsense conclusions. For one thing Paul thought Jesus would return, that there was a set of churches that must control what people believe, and that these people would be called Christians. The sad thing is, the Christians wouldn’t be practicing psychology and developing better forms of morality. They’d just be believing that Jesus, son of the planet-maker, was also the planet-maker Himself, thus creating 2000 years of theology trying to justify that terrible erroneous belief.

Moving on to John the Revelator. John the Relevator is known specifically because of the book of Revelation, which he wrote. Before John became a prophet he was a retrodictor. That means, he used to predict past occurrences based on present circumstances. This career did not work out for him so well because he was such a terrible retrodictor. He’d go up to random people and tell them, based on the sadness you are now feeling, something tragic must have befell you at an earlier time. But the people would respond, “no actually, we just suffer from a chemical imbalance brought on by genetics, actually. We just need our serotonin re-uptake inhibitors that the Lord planet-making Jesus created for us and some cognitive behavioral therapy of course, duh!” So John the Retrodictor became John the Predictor or John the Revelator. This seemed to be a more appropriate course of action since no one could really see into the future, except if they actually observed law-like properties of matter through scientific experiment. John found that he actually wasn’t a very good predictor. He’d say, “and the sun will rise at noon time tomorrow!” And of course it wouldn’t happen. So John just knew he had to hit the whiskey, and so he did. And after that, he wrote the entire book of Revelations. And it seemed to work, because the Church accepted it.

And that’s how everything happened. All the other stuff is merely accidental to the story of the Bible.

That concludes the story.

The first trailer for “Edge of Darkness” is here:

The film stars Mel Gibson (The Passion of the Christ), Ray Winstone (The Departed), Danny Huston (X-Men Origins: Wolverin) and Shawn Roberts. Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) directed. The film centers on a veteran cop (Gibson) whose only grown-up child (Novakovic) is murdered on the steps of his home. The cop unearths his daughter’s secret life and discovers a world of corporate cover-ups and government collusion.

Lukas Eggen

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry. According to the ADL, throughout history dramatizations of the passion of Jesus Christ have provoked violence against Jewish people as being “Christ killers.” It came as no surprise then that the ADL was seriously concerned immediately prior to the release of Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ.

The ADL was concerned that people viewing the film woukd leave the theater with highly stimulated emotions. That raw emotion can become the breeding ground for the rationalized hatred of or violence against Jewish people. We cannot dismiss these concerns as irrational. They are very much grounded in reality and in history. ADL representatives made it clear that these potential consequences could become reality even though completely unintended by the filmmaker.

Of course it is true that some Jews killed Jesus—2,000 years ago. But so did some Romans. To accuse all the Jews of that generation (or all the Romans) of being responsible for the death of Jesus is preposterous. And in order to hold anyone (Jew, Greek, or other) not living during that generation responsible for the death of Jesus we must move out of the realm of history and into the field of theology.

The theological truth is that we are all responsible for the death of Jesus. He took upon Himself the sins of all human beings—that includes you and it includes me. A related truth is that the evil powers and principalities at work in the spiritual realm also played a role in the death of Jesus.

Therefore, assigning blame for the death of Jesus on one particular race of human beings is an error of the gravest magnitude. Using His crucifixion as a justification for hatred and violence against anyone is in complete violation of what His death means and is as sinful as any human behavior can get.