Hmmm… beneath the first assumption is another assumption – that both god and spirit exist… doesn’t the bible itself mention something about building houses on sand?
I’m quite comfortable with the second assumption… and I like the irony I see in having someone find LTOC blasphemous for the precisely the reason I don’t.
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Well, since FoG said that this was a problematic part of the movie for him…
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Well, that’s not what I got out of the movie, at all!
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Again, it’s a little unclear to me where they’re getting this. I thought the movie was using Jesus’ life as a metaphor for all the spiritual confusion and cowardice that every one of us must face as we grow. It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but if I had to bet, I’d say that Jesus voices these ideas at some point in his spiritual journey, and they misconstrued it as being the “moral” of the movie.
As has been said before, LTOC explicitly states that it is not intended as a factual account, and is just using Jesus as a metaphor. And clearly the movie doesn’t say that one thing is as good as another: the crucifixion is clearly presented as being better than no crucifixion. Jesus tries and rejects a number of ideas as he grows spiritually, moving from “the axe” to a philosophy of love and so on.
It seems to me that the real fact of the matter is that FC’s just don’t like the movie, and they have to create ex post facto reasons for their dislike. Where did this dislike come from? Most likely it originates in the fact that LTOC isn’t bland Sunday-school fare. FC’s would be protesting “The Rapture” if it had made enough of a splash. FoG hasn’t seen either movie (and he hasn’t seen The Inferno either) but at least he’s heard of LTOC, and been told that he should dislike it.
-Ben
Haven’t had a chance to find a physical copy of Bloom’s book but the argument he’s making–from what I’ve gathered from summaries/reviews–is fairly interesting. He’s essentially making a case that Dante is important because the Divine Comedy is enduringly strange? Or, depending on Bloom’s take, Dante’s strangeness has been assimilated into our culture so that the strangeness is now a norm. Either way, it’s an interesting thought.
By the way, I enjoyed his redefined western canon. Very complete. He gets points for including CLR James and Crashaw (one of my favorite early poets).