The Glory Of Easter

[Snow]

Tonight I went to The Glory of Easter at Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. Big Production, camels, horses, flying angels... the whole shebang. Guess I'm glad I went -- once. Found it to be passionless, well-done but hollow.

The Church does a huge Easter Pagent. Wonder how it compares?

http://ldstoday.com/home/level2/2005-03-10easter.php

[pushka]

Speaking of Easter...and I apologise if this subject has been discussed here before when I wasn't around, but did anyone watch Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ?

If so, what did you think of it?

I thought it was a very moving film...I was especially touched at the scenes depicting Mary, Jesus's mother, at various times with Jesus before the night of his being taken from the garden of Gethsemane...such as when he was building a table for somebody...and moreso, I was really moved, to tears, at the sight of her running to Jesus when he fell with his cross, and it flashed back to a scene from his childhood when he fell over and Mary ran to help him...I think it brought a little human depth to the film.

I know that lots of people have objected to the level of violence in the movie, but I feel that it rightly depicted the level of violence being meted out to convicts/troublemakers of any kind at that time, so is appropriate.

What do you think?

[pushka]

Another link on the topic of Easter...an interesting read...

http://www.bagism.com/webboard/msg/7609.html

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by pushka@Mar 11 2005, 10:15 AM

Another link on the topic of Easter...an interesting read...

http://www.bagism.com/webboard/msg/7609.html

Nothing I haven't read a dozen times before, and very unimaginative.

Basically, the argument is that Christians whose Christian principles inform their political views are hypocritical because (Brown says) they emphasize certain principles at the expense of others. For example, Brown says Christian conservatives are "cherry-picking" moral issues by opposing gay marriage, while divorce is just as great or greater a threat to marriage.

This is disingenuous. Christian conservatives are focused on the gay marriage issue now because Brown's ideological fellows are focusing on it. Gay marriage wasn't an issue even ten years ago; now Brown's side of the aisle is trying to push it through. It's not a question of "banning" gay marriage; you can't "ban" something that doesn't exist. Brown's liberals are trying to create something, and Christian conservatives are opposing them. There is no hypocrisy in focusing your energy on one issue at a time; to do otherwise allows your opponents to concentrate their full energies at decisive points, and win one issue at a time while you're trying to be strong everywhere.

And Brown's being disingenous about divorce -- it was largely his side of the political aisle that created no-fault divorce and eliminated torts for alienation of affection. What he's saying is that Christian conservatives should re-fight a battle they've already lost, while liberals go on to win the next battle. Thanks for the advice, dude, but my experience is that taking advice from the opposition is a good recipe for allowing it to win every contest.

As far as Brown's "Christian conservatives are hypocrites for emphasizing scriptures condemning homosexuality over (his emphasis) scriptures condeming the rich" point -- well, "being rich," per se, isn't condemned in the Bible, as Brown suggests it is, and "giving all one's wealth to the poor" isn't a universal Biblical requirement. (It was a specific challenge to a specific rich young man.) The problem is being overly attached to material goods -- which you don't have to be rich to be. In fact, the honest truth is that people who don't have lots of money are a lot more concerned about money than people who do.

In any case, Brown isn't really arguing that religious conservatives ought to keep on upholding sexual standards as long as they also emphasize his favorite religious issues. He wants them not to advocate their positions at all. The scripture he omits is Jesus' condemning the Jewish leadership for focusing on ritual commandments while neglecting the weightier matters of the law, like judgment and mercy, which He said they ought to have done "and not to leave the other undone." Liberal interpreters of Christianity often overlook this point. True, religious conservatives often get overinvolved in some issues at the expense of others -- but the answer is not the liberal response of abandoning the overemphasized doctrines entirely. No, Christianity involves more than sexual morality; in fact, that's probably of secondary importance. But that's not to say it ought to be ignored entirely.

As for Brown's equation of church-state involvement and the Crucifixion, that's a stretch. First, Brown's say-so that the Sanhedrin were "religious conservatives" may be true or it may not be. One could argue that Jesus was actually the true conservative, calling the authorities back to the roots they'd abandoned in favor of a formalistic, conventional, hollow religion. Most religious reformers upset the status quo not because they're "liberal," but because they upset people who've made comfortable compromises with the sterner requirements of religion. Look at Martin Luther or John Calvin. Nothing "liberal" about their theologies (although ironically they liberal implications of the Reformation helped advance political liberty). The Reformers' theologies were kind of a Christian Wahhabism, an accusation that the Catholic authorities had strayed from the original doctrines of the Bible and of Christ. Renaissance Catholicism was actually quite humanistic, far more so than the Reformers were.

Anyway, even if the Crucifixion did result from a corrupt interplay between church and state, it does not follow that the church and state must be separated entirely and religion hermetically sealed in a (shrinking) private sphere. The Crucifixion was the result of human sinfulness. In that particular case, it involved the subversion of the political authority by a religious mob. That shouldn't surprise anyone; in the context of time and place -- a Jewish society organized around religion -- corrupt religion would be the natural place for human corruption to be revealed. In a more secular context -- try Stalin's Soviet Union -- human corruption is revealed in the corruption of secular ideology.

Pointing out that bad things have happened when religion has been involved with politics isn't an argument for walling religion off from the public sphere; bad (worse, in fact) things have happened when secular ideologies have become involved with politics. Instead, we ought to consider what level of involvement is appropriate, and what checks and balances ought to restrain the inevitable weakness of humans for corrupting everything they get their hands on.

I believe that the United States' traditional accommodation between politics and religion -- a refusal to establish a state church, or to make religious doctrines into law, while at the same time allowing religious expression in the public sphere so long as it is respectful and not proselytizing -- is a reasonable approach. The United States separates religion and politics far more than most of the far more liberal states of Europe, which have state-supported churches and teach Christianity in schools. I reject the idea that an ecumenical invocation by a priest or rabbi or imam at a city council meeting is the equivalent of hanging an Iranian teenager for fornication, but that's the kind of comparison Brown's fellow ideologues seem addicted to making.

[Traveler]

Originally posted by Snow@Mar 10 2005, 10:17 PM

Tonight I went to The Glory of Easter at Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. Big Production, camels, horses, flying angels... the whole shebang. Guess I'm glad I went -- once. Found it to be passionless, well-done but hollow.

The Church does a huge Easter Pagent. Wonder how it compares?

http://ldstoday.com/home/level2/2005-03-10easter.php

Interesting that the term Easter is a pagan term - not Christian. Since Israel came "out of Egypt" it was known as passover. I have no idea why traditional Christianity droped passover for Easter - because it appears the early church retained the concepts of passover but applied everything to the resurection of Christ. I could speculate but I do not care to flaim the non-LDS Christians that are upset enough that LDS do not go along with much of tradiitonal Trinitarian Christianity focus on the cross.

The Traveler

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by Traveler+Mar 11 2005, 01:49 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Traveler @ Mar 11 2005, 01:49 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Snow@Mar 10 2005, 10:17 PM

Tonight I went to The Glory of Easter at Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. Big Production, camels, horses, flying angels... the whole shebang. Guess I'm glad I went -- once. Found it to be passionless, well-done but hollow.

The Church does a huge Easter Pagent. Wonder how it compares?

http://ldstoday.com/home/level2/2005-03-10easter.php

Interesting that the term Easter is a pagan term - not Christian. Since Israel came "out of Egypt" it was known as passover. I have no idea why traditional Christianity droped passover for Easter - because it appears the early church retained the concepts of passover but applied everything to the resurection of Christ. I could speculate but I do not care to flaim the non-LDS Christians that are upset enough that LDS do not go along with much of tradiitonal Trinitarian Christianity focus on the cross.

The Traveler

Blame it on the English language and the Venerable Bede (the guy who applied the pagan name "Easter" to the feast of the resurrection back in the Dark Ages in Britain).

In the Romance languages, the word for Easter is related to Passover -- "paques" in French, "Pasqua" in Italian, and "Pascua" in Spanish. Same with the Scandinavian languages -- "Paska" in Icelandic, "Pask" in Swedish, "Paske" in Danish and Norwegian. Also "Pasen" in Dutch. English and German ("Ostern") are about the only languages to use the pagan-based term. So it's more an Anglo-Saxon thing than a Trinitarian thing.

[Lindy]

I hear they are releasing The Passion of the Christ, The Recut in some areas I found a statement from Mel Gibson referring to the cut version of the film

-------------------------------------------------

"Gibson says he listened to people who said they didn’t take children because the film was too intense."

“These comments inspired me to recut the film to cater to those people that perhaps might not have seen it because of its intensity or brutality,” says Gibson.

--------------------------------------------

I may be able to go and see it this time around..... I knew I couldn't handle it the first time

[USNationalist]

lol, you weenie lindy. You seriously havent seen that movie yet? The brutality is what makes it so "powerful".