I’m an Old Testament person myself. The New Testament Christians are just too unassertive and docile for my liking.
I like the idea of a vengeful Lord who smites evil and obliterates enemies at will.
There are too damn many evils in the world these days and not nearly enough vengeance.
Confusion is the theme in this frightful story. The ogres of political correctness set this one into motion right after the close of the Dark Ages. They put a hefty price on the forgiveness of your sins. (These were the primitive days when they had debtor’s prison instead of a simple bankrupcy filing.)
Then the poor got ticked off because they couldn’t possibly afford the going price for all their sins. The Protestant Reformation happened, and viola — penance for all sins was suddenly free for the asking.
Thank God we still have a criminal justice system that exacts a price for criminal types of sins. You’ve got to wonder, though. If the penance for confessing your sins is less than the agony of losing weight for participating in the sin of gluttony — how might that affect our propensity for real crimes?
If we are taught from our earliest days that stealing candy from a broken vending machine, or office supplies from work, cheating on our tax returns, or using fake mileage on our expense accounts, even stealing from investors by hoodwinking them with false expectations — if all these things can be forgiven with a friendly chat with a priest, a silent prayer to Jesus, a dollar in the silver plate on Sunday at church — how, then, are we to resist the larger temptations?
I was tempted to call this film an allegory disparaging the injustice of detaining Muslim extremists in Guantanamo Bay. But, no — that’s too superficial. They have justice enough (three square meals a day, a Caribbean climate, classes in Islam, cable TV).
A vengeful Lord would put them in detention in Alaska where they can suffer in the freezing cold.
Instead, I decided the moral of the story was the need to build up our resistance to sin by exacting a price for all that we confess. How else will we develop any moral resolve? People cannot even use the rhythm method of birth control any more.
They have zero resistance to lust and must have sex whenever they want it, and I mean pronto.
Thus world population will grow by 3 billion in the next twenty years — 3 billion more human beings to live in abject poverty, in addition to the 4 billion in that state right now.
