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I don't think Rich is wrong at all.
I think Gibson has got to get a life, get over his violence fetish, and stop worrying about who killed who 2,000 ago - who we're taught later "rose from the dead."
This may be hard to hear for people like Gibson, but human beings have suffered much worse deaths over the last 100 years. When I look at pictures of children starving in Africa, or the condition of the concentration camps victims we liberated in Nazi Germany (to name only 2 illustrations), I think Jesus had it easy. 18 bad hours and that was that. And, besides, his death fulfilled prophecy, and his alleged (since I wasn't there) resurrection was the key event that set Christianity in motion. Without that death and resurrection, Jesus is just another Jewish prophet.
Gipson is entitled to make any movie he wants, but, spiritually speaking, there's no reason whatsoever to make a movie that focuses on such a narrow and prejudicial window of Jesus' ministry as this movie does. Considering the number of right-wingers who are applauding this movie (people who strongly support capital punishment), I don't think this film is likely to have any meaningful impact on transforming our world into one where Jesus' philosophy of love, and of turning the other check, is more likely to get an honest hearing. When you add in the fact that Gipson's father was a Holocaust denier, and that finishing Daddy's work seems to be a big theme in American culture at the moment, I think Gibson's spiritual credibility has dropped even lower.
Matt, a graduate of Fordham University (a Jesuit educational institution)
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