What?
One of the movie producers of American Psycho and Never Die Alone has written an article in Salon blaming Abu Ghraib on ... you'll never guess ... Christians who watched The Passion:
Perhaps the relationship between a U.S.-made blockbuster about Christ's pain and the pain inflicted by our soldiers abroad is closer and more inevitable that the notion of "irony" would suggest, because many of the torturers are no doubt heartland Americans, many of them surely devout Christians -- the core audience of "The Passion of Christ." They are the people Bush directly addressed when he characterized the war as a crusade, a fight against evil in the name of the God. The aptitude of Christians for delivering pain draws on a rich, millennial tradition -- a tradition built on certainty and a Manichean worldview. The ability to torture somebody both requires and confirms this certainty; the torturer's exhilarating privilege is to feel right by God while doing what is normally forbidden.
Most likely, some form of torture has been done by every side of every war in history, with or without Christianity. But a handful of soldiers (who are now being prosecuted) torture some people in an Iraqi prison and we can damn all the Christians who believe in the sacrificial atonement of Christ.
Oh, and we can be certain that Christians are evil for being certain that good and evil exist. Makes sense to me.
Seriously - is Salon just having a hard time finding people to write for them, or are they really this vacuous and bigoted?
(via Balaam's Ass)
June 23, 2004 04:31 PM"because many of the torturers are no doubt heartland Americans, many of them surely devout Christians -- the core audience of 'The Passion of Christ.'"
If the sweeping assertions weren't so incredibly preposterous (were there mobs of torturers -- or is he defining ALL soldiers as "torturers" now? were they polled at the torture chamber doors so that we could get a denominational head count?), the assertions could still be dwarfed on the ridiculous scale by the amazing assumption that the torturers had time to be "audience" for anything anyway. Seeing that most soldiers stationed overseas would have a hard time getting their hands on a copy of "The Passion," it is beyond me how a writer could strain to make a connection between torture inflicted on Christ and/or torture inflicted on or by Christians and what happened with Abu Ghraib.
Help me if I'm missing something.
Pondered by joy at June 23, 2004 05:58 PMI could be very wrong here, but I thought the offenses that took place at Abu Ghraib happened at the end of 2003/beginning of 2004 (first couple months). And the "Passion" came out on Ash Wednesday, February 25th. Leaving aside the "tortured logic", wouldn't there be a timeline problem here as well?
Pondered by Jeff Price at June 23, 2004 08:14 PMTo be fair to the author, I don't think he's specifically saying that watching the Passion caused people to torture Iraqi prisoners. I think he's saying that the same proclivities that make people want to watch the Passion also make people want to abuse others and take pictures of them. Whatever.
But, showing the discrepancies of the timeline does take some of the wind out of his sails.
Pondered by maphet at June 24, 2004 08:43 AM