So Amp posted some links a couple days ago and stole all my freakin’ links. Seriously, just as soon as I’ve gathered up enough links to feel like I’ve got a good-sized link post, Amp does one and posts everything I’d been saving for you Alas readers so I just abort the idea entirely. It sucks. Seriously man, get with my schedule…

Anyway, here are a few things I found interesting that Amp didn’t snatch up (yet). In no particular order:

• Ms. Lauren and Feministe has a marvelous post about education, standardized testing, and the cynical game of No Child Left Behind from the perspective of a future teacher.
• Take the Book Quiz. I did, read the book that was recommended to me (The Sound and the Fury) and actually kinda liked it. (via Raznor)
• Speaking of Raznor, he was accepted to NAU for grad school, so everyone give the man a hand.
• Here’s why I love One Good Thing so much:
  8:00 p.m. I spend time envying bloggers who are better than me, such as Wonkette, who writes,
  

  Are assholes drawn to the District by some force of nature? Like a giant mother asshole calling her young?

  I spend at least five minutes pretending I wrote that.

  And I spent at least ten minutes pretending that I’d written that witty little bit. Seriously, flea has a great blog going on there. There’s a reason my significant other has read the site’s entire archives and I’ve started on them myself.

  Two crazy liberals can’t be wrong!

• Have you ever called tech support and wondered what the fuck was wrong with them? Salon has your answer. (via Tom Tomorrow)
• Echidne with a good (although old, for which I apologize) post on why people in other countries aren’t too happy with the United States.
• Mark A.R. Kleiman on the connection between Judaism and liberalism.
• S-Train on the similarities between terrorism and gang warfare and how to fix them both.
• What if, when his gall bladder went to hell, John Ashcroft hadn’t been insured? AlterNet preaches it.
• I’ve been meaning to write my great abstinence education follow-up post for, well, months now. Until I get around to that, content yourself with this little brick in the war:
  Teens who pledge to remain virgins until marriage have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who don’t pledge abstinence, according to a study that examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents.

  Those who make a public pledge to abstain until marriage delay sex, have fewer sex partners and get married earlier, according to the data, gathered from adolescents ages 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. But the two groups’ STD rates were statistically similar.

  The problem, the study found, is that those virginity “pledgers” are much less likely to use condoms.

  “It’s difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you’re not going to have sex,” said Peter Bearman, the chair of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, who co-authored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale.

  “The message is really simple: ‘Just say no’ may work in the short term but doesn’t work in the long term.”

I don’t know how much I’ll be able to read posts, write posts, read comments, or write comments for awhile. My DSL has gone screwy and so, until I can set up some kind of dial-up back-up connection and/or get the DSL working properly and consistently, I may not be around.

Ugh. Sometimes, I hate technology.

I was going to write a couple long posts today, but am too depressed. So how’s the weather? It was a way-too-hot seventy-degrees here in the Springs today; I’m not sure if I’ve ever been happier to see the sun go down. It may rain some these next few weeks, but I think it’s safe to say that we’ve seen the last of the snow around here. That’s disappointing.

Lauren at Feministe has posted her one sentence review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so, having seen the movie last night, I thought I’d post my own review, this one in two sentences:

“Poorly developed but interesting. Wait for the DVD.”

Today’s my birthday. Go me! I survived! (Really, that’s important; more on that later.)

Seth Stevenson, Slate’s new ad critic, recently wrote a column criticizing Apple’s new iPod ads (and the old DeBeers diamond ads) because they seemed to suggest that the product was better than the consumer.

Mr. Stevenson describes the ads as being:

He then goes on to describe his reaction to the ads:

At the risk of criticizing the professional critic, I think he misses part of the brilliance of using silhouettes instead of people and so misses how the ads aren’t insulting at all. To understand what Mr. Stevenson missed, we turn to that great tome of art theory: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

In the second chapter, Mr. McCloud discusses the way that humans have a tendency to see themselves and their features in objects that bear no resemblance to humans (cars, light sockets, etc.) and that humans also tend to project themselves onto simplified human forms (in the books case, cartoons). The more realistically a cartoon character is rendered, the harder it is to empathize with that character because as more features are added to that character it automatically has fewer features in common with the reader. A face that is composed of a circle, two dots, and a line for the mouth is more easily identified with than one that has all of those features plus long hair. (I would scan in the pages in question, but am not sure of the legality of such a move. If someone can tell me whether or not that falls under fair use, I’ll gladly post scans of the pages.)

This is what the silhouette ads play on. By taking the consumer, the wearer of the diamond and the user of the iPod, and rendering that person as a shadow they, the advertisers, are inviting the viewer to project his or her self onto the shadows. When the woman grooving to the iPod, or the man giving a diamond to his love, is featureless it’s easier for a person to picture herself or himself as the one grooving or giving.

So really, the spots are no more insulting than the usual advertising fare. Imagine yourself with our product; wouldn’t you be happier, then?

Update (03/17): Just to be clear on this: I think that only Apple’s ads are entirely without offense in this case. As some others have pointed out in the comments, the DeBeers diamond ads are misogynistic in their view that women’s affection can be earned by buying them expensive baubles.

I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.

As others have pointed out, the fact that al-Qaida may have bombed the trains in Madrid in retaliation for Spain’s involvement in Iraq doesn’t prove that there was any sort of connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. All it proves is that al-Qaida continues to try to frame their actions as part of an on-going “clash of civilizations” between the West and the Middle East and Islam and that they’re willing to exploit whatever material they’re given in order to wage their war.

Although argument by analogy is a pretty weak way of going about things, an analogy might help make things clear…

Does this attack on Alberto prove a connection between the Wolves and the Rocks? No, not really, but that doesn’t mean that even though the Rocks were ideologically opposed to the Wolves, the Wolves were still eager to interpret the crackdown on the Rocks through their world-view as an attack on all African-Americans.

The injustices and justices (and Justices) of the 2000 Presidential election will likely be debated for years to come. Hopefully as time goes by, things will settle down some as the repercussions of the event are less immediate and the partisan stakes feel less important. Eventually the debate will be an intellectual one held chiefly between Presidential scholars and history majors. History will judge the extent of Ralph Nader’s role in the election and, if history is fair, that judgment will be different than the one commonly passed today. There are many who believe that Nader’s campaign was largely, if not quite solely, responsible for Bush’s winning the 2000 election. At its heart this argument is predicated on one key false assumption and is, much more importantly, contemptuous of democracy and of the complaints made by the Green party and its supporters.

The false assumption is that all of the people who voted for Nader would have, if Nader hadn’t run, voted for Al Gore. Aside from there being a small degree of ideological overlap between the Green and Democratic parties, there’s no evidence that this is the case. Considering the rightward drift of the Democratic party under the Presidency of Bill Clinton, it’s not entirely unreasonable to believe that some of those voters who voted for the Green party would have stayed home rather than vote for a party they believed to be ideologically identical to its opposition. The so-called “spoiling effect” of Nader’s run is an intellectual exercise that is interesting to contemplate but cannot be proven. Even exit polls that asked voters to rank the candidates in order of preference cannot prove how many of Nader’s voters would have voted for Gore because, again, it’s not certain how many of those voters would have even been to the polling booths in the first place if Nader hadn’t been running. The Democratic party, after all, had little to offer them.

It could be argued that, considering that George W. Bush’s official margin of victory was 537 votes, it’s possible to assume that a handful of Nader’s voters could have swung the election to Gore’s favor this misses the underlying nature of the argument blaming Nader for Gore’s loss: it’s glib dismissal of the Green party’s concerns for partisan points. Every vote cast for Nader was, on some level, an indictment of both the Republican party and of the rightward drift of the Democratic party. To Green party voters, there wasn’t a difference between the alternative candidates they were being offered and so they exercised their democratic right to vote for who they felt best represented them. In response, Democrats who complain that Nader lost the election for Gore are saying that the Green party thwarted their attempt to beat those dastardly Republicans by voting their conscience. The view of these Democrats is that their candidate and their party, rather than their ideology, must win the election; no matter how conservative Gore was he had to win because he wasn’t a Republican and progressive desires or complaints of a rightward drift be damned. Should no third party candidate ever run because he or she might prevent the “correct” big party candidate from winning? That wouldn’t be democracy and yet that’s what many Democrats seem to wish for.

In essence, the Democratic party has only itself to blame for Gore losing the 2000 election. It did little enough to appeal to progressive voters and so shouldn’t sulk when it didn’t get enough of the progressive vote.

When most people read they hear the written words spoken in their minds. A disembodied vocal of authors, narrators, and characters fills their minds’ ear acting out plays and essays, novels and poems. Blogs are composed with words and so are no exception to the rule, so chances are that you’re hearing a voice right now.

Sometimes the voices that readers hear are the voices of actual people. Mothers speak with familiar tones in letters to their children, and stories traded between friends are still heard as though over the phone even if read alone in silence. Some actors, even, can take over a character so that no matter what voice readers may have heard before they cannot help but hear the actor’s now. How many Harry Potter fans will always hear Alan Rickman when they read Severus Snape? How long with Lawrence Olivier be Hamlet?

Usually, though, the voices people hear are new, unique, and private. Each reader hears his or her own version of a character’s voice that is created from the reader’s perception of the character’s gender, age, race, ethnicity, personality, history, and personal appearance and how these things interact to create a whole person. These perceptions on the part of the reader can be the difference between a sympathetic character and one the reader hopes gets side-swiped by a bus. Everyone bring prejudices to the table while reading; people will inflict their views of blacks and whites and hispanics or men and women or the rich and the poor on the characters.

It’s not just characters that people’s views effect, though. The reader’s views of people and their various types will also have an effect on the way that the reader views the author and the author’s intentions. A book or article written by a white woman will be viewed differently than a book or article written by a black man even if the content of the book or article doesn’t change significantly, or even at all. A book about growing old that is written by a teenager will probably be viewed as more artificial, more constructed, than one written by a sixty-year-old even if the words themselves remain the same. (Alternatively, the teenager might be praised as some sort of genius of insight while the sixty-year-old might be criticized for wasting people’s time with the minutiae of life as a senior citizen.)

In a sense, readers construct voices to read with for authors in the same way that they do with characters. If the reader believes that all senior citizens are crotchety and sarcastic then a book with a picture of a wrinkle-bedecked person on the dust jacket will be read in a voice that drips sarcasm and shrilly screams between the lines for you to cut your hair and get off the lawn. The author’s tone is constructed from the reader’s perception of what the author might or must be like.

Works published by anonymous authors are not immune to these forces of imagination and projection. Even though a reader may not have a byline or an authorial picture to attach the work to, the reader will still make certain assumptions about the author’s personality and history and will respond accordingly. In effect, though the author has no tone of voice but the one that the words themselves suggest, the reader will construct a tone and pitch based on what they think the author is like even without much evidence to back that claim up.

These factors can be observed with a good degree of regularity here in the blogosphere. An off-handed remark by Glenn Reynolds about liberals needing to be rounded up and shot is more likely to be viewed as a joke by his conservative readers, because of their perception of him as a fair-minded and well-balanced individual, and is more likely to be taken at face-value by liberals, because of their perception of him as some sort of fire-breathing extremist. A comment by Atrios along similar lines but concerning conservatives would have similar reactions but with reversed party lines. (And, yes, I’m horribly stereotyping, but you get the point.)

In her post in response to my first post about the Crucifixion, Jeanne d’Arc at Body and Soul wrote:

The only problem with this sentence is that I’m not a “she.” I didn’t correct it at the time because it’s my personal opinion that gender is mutable and ultimately irrelevant, but her comment made me think and remember. One of the first comments in response to my first-ever post at Alas (kinda), A Comment on Rape and “She Asked For It,” was from Cleis of Sappho’s Breathing who said:

I suppose that that’s what I get for naming myself PinkDreamPoppies. It makes me wonder, though: what voice do people hear when they read my posts? How much of a difference does it make to rAnDoMp0sTeR if he or she views me as a female instead of as a male? Have there been readers who agreed with me or disagreed with me or misread something I said based entirely on their perception of my sex?

Unfortunately, there are certain perceptions of what it’s okay for men and women to say, think, and do and for some people it is so unacceptable for people of the “wrong” gender to do the “wrong” thing that their view of a specific action can be altered depending on what gender they think is performing it. I wonder how many men liked George Elliot’s novels who would have hated them had they know she wasn’t a man?

This doesn’t apply solely to the written word. Colors of lipstick that are sexy when on a woman’s lips can be decidedly unsexy when on a man’s. A man or woman who was attractive enough to make out with can suddenly become disgusting when it’s discovered that the man or woman is not what they appear to be. Football can be a national pastime until women want to play, then it’s comedy. Men can’t dress or decorate unless they’re gay and thus “half woman, anyway.” Need I even mention the wage gap?

People needn’t wonder about any internet person’s gender, though, if they know where to look.

This raises other questions, though, about what whether or not those differences in the way that men and women write are created by social forces or are biological forces. However, that’s the subject of another post.

So how much changes for you?

The whole article is worth reading, but the highlights are as follows:

First, Mayor West of New Paltz, NY makes clear the biggest difference between himself and Former Chief Justice Roy Moore. Namely, a respect for the rule of law.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country…

I’m curious to see how this case turns out not just in light of same-sex marriage but also with regard to the right of municipal authorities to violate laws on the basis that they view them as being unconstitutional. The same-sex marriage issue is, as I understand it, somewhat tricky because there isn’t any clear precedent on the federal level concerning same-sex marriages so the issue isn’t quite the same as a mayor banning abortion meaning that the situation as a whole is somewhat without precedent … But I’m also not a lawyer, so anyone who knows better feel free to leave a comment.

Disappointing news from Wisconsin and Kansas:

And (semi-)good news from Idaho.

Finally, a separate AP report puts things in perspective by noting that, even after legalizing same-sex marriages, life in the Netherlands goes on as usual.

From the same article, a glimpse of America’s future after it has, inevitably I believe, allowed same-sex marriages:

I find it amazing that Mr. van Mourik honestly believes that the falling same-sex marriage rates are a sign that legalizing same-sex marriage is entirely unnecessary. If the number continues to fall relative to the population over the course of the next five or six years, he might have a point, but unless that happens he’s failing to recognize a basic fact of life: when something has been prohibited for whatever reason, there’s always an uptick in its use shortly after it’s finally allowed. Think of how much water you drink when you’re thirsty or the opening weekend returns for a hot new movie or the spike in alcohol consumption following the end of prohibition.

The same-sex couples who were waiting to be married did so as soon as it was legal, and now that that store of couples has married itself out the rates are falling back to what I suspect will establish themselves as normal levels. A similar phenomenon will happen in America’s future; we’re not going to see 1,500 same-sex marriages in Multnomah County every week, but that doesn’t mean that same-sex couples don’t want to be married or won’t be getting married.

Read, as they say, as Amp would say, the whole thing.

After two terms in the Senate that have been distinguished primarily by being indistinguishable from having a party-line-voting log in the same position, Ben Nighthorse Campbell (CO-R) is retiring. This makes me happy because Campbell was one of my Senators and this gives me a chance to vote in a representative of Colorado that doesn’t make the state look like bunch of backwards jackasses. (Because, really, Marilyn Musgrave hasn’t exactly given Colorado a good name.)

If Bill Owens runs in the seat, it may well be in the bag, but there’s a chance he might and there’s a chance that some of the Democrats who passed up on the chance to run earlier in the year will reconsider. Looks like we’ll just have to see how things turn out, eh?

If everything is going according to schedule, Multnomah County started issuing (or being authorized to issue; I’m not sure how the three day waiting period plays in to this) about twenty minutes ago. Congratulations to the soon-to-be newlyweds of Portland, and congratulations to the higher-ups in Multnomah County for having the courage to stand up for equal rights.

… Er, check one. Check two.

Everything working around here?

Check. Check…

Jeanne D’Arc at Body and Soul expressed surprise over my earlier post wondering why some people are so obsessed with the crucifixion of Jesus. As she said, “Blow me over. I always thought that was a Catholic thing.”

She may have been surprised by my post because she thought it was only Catholics who were obsessed with the crucifixion; I’ve been surprised by the comments to my post that reveal how wrong I was in thinking that this was a predominately Protestant thing. In my mind I had it that the Catholics had the traditions surrounding the crucifixion–the Easter Day reenactments, the bloodied Jesus hanging on the wall–but the Protestant fundamentalists were the ones who really liked to dwell on the violence in their everyday speech and in their weekly sermons. Perhaps I’m wrong in that, but I don’t know that there are is a growing number of Protestants who are focused on the violent aspects of the crucifixion. As many have pointed out, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a movie steeped in Catholic imagery that has the Bible Belt Christians embracing it wholeheartedly.

There’s a reason for this.

Before I can explain what this reason is and where it comes from, I’ll need to describe two other groups I often encountered among the conservative Protestant set. These groups are the martyr-obsesed and the Revelation-obsessed. When it comes to Protestantism, the martyr-obsessed tend to be a subset of the crucifixion-obsessed, while the crucifixion-obsessed tend to be a subset of the Revelation-obsessed.

Like the crucifixion-obsessed, the martyr-obsessed tend to be male, outwardly devout, and leaders in their congregations and Bible study groups. Also like the crucifixion-obsessed, the martyr-obsessed have a tendency to make torture the subject of their Bible studies and bring up violence in their casual conversation, but unlike the crucifixion-obsessed the martyr-obsessed have broadened their area of interest to include every Biblical figure who was tortured and/or slain for his or her beliefs rather than focusing specifically on Jesus.

I knew one such martyr-obsessed man by the name of Bob. He was an ex-marine who had been converted to Christianity when he was in his thirties by a branch of the Crossroads Project. Because he had three teenagers, Bob was heavily involved in the youth group and was a member of the Bible study that eventually became the de facto youth group Bible study due to the number of families with teenagers who belonged to it. I was good friends with Bob’s sons and an active member of the youth group, so I had plenty of opportunities to interact with Bob and to participate in classes and devotionals lead by him. His favorite discussion topic was “How to resist the temptations of the secular culture,” almost always taught by way of a Biblical figure who stood up for God even in the face of potential or actual punishment. I can remember one particular lesson revolving around Stephen, the first Christian to by martyred in the New Testament after Jesus’ resurrection.

Stephen was stoned to death for his beliefs. His story is told in the book of Acts. It begins with Stephen in Jerusalem performing miracles and teaching the Gospel. A group of Jews were unable to argue him down so they conspired to have Stephen brought before the Sanhedrin where false witnesses would testify against him. There Stephen gave a speech denouncing the Jews for never having listened to a prophet of God and for having betrayed and murdered Jesus. This so enraged the Sanhedrin and the people present that they took Stephen outside the city to stone him. After begging God not to hold this sin against the people Stephen was blessed by God such that he fell asleep while being stoned so that he wouldn’t feel the pain of the rocks being tearing his body and crushing his bones. The important part of this story to Bob as he lead the Bible study, was not the bit about the evil Jews or the bit about the stupid Jews or the lesson underneath the anti-semitism that it’s important to do as God commands or the lesson about standing up for what you believe or that God rewards those who forgive others; rather, the most important part of the story to Bob were the rocks, the torn body, and the crushed bones. What Stephen said, how he said it, why he said it, and the fact the he stood up for his beliefs were all secondary. What mattered was how much it hurt.

So the lesson consisted of descriptions of what happened to various organs when hit by rocks, how the skin would split more from pressure than from jagged edges, how the bones would break, when the skull would crack and what would happen to the brains once held inside. I don’t know how accurate his information really was, but Bob knew how to speak in such a way that left people squirming uncomfortably. I can’t recall know if it was he who brought a large rock in as a prop for the lesson, or if that was someone else at a different time, but I do recall being asked to imagine how it would feel to have that rock thrown into my chest or head. The implication was that if I wouldn’t be willing to take that, my faith wasn’t strong enough.

There were other lessons about other martyrs from Bob and people like him. After the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came over the twelve disciples shortly after Jesus’ ascension into Heaven, the Twelve divided to spread Christianity to other parts of the world. We got lessons about what happened to them: Peter was crucified, according to tradition he was crucified upside down; John died a prisoner on Patmos island shortly after writing the book of Revelation; others were burned or boiled alive. What happened to the disciples reads like an anthology of torture. We also got lessons on the prophets: Isaiah was cut in half with a timber saw, starting at the crotch so that he’d take longer to die; Ezekiel was ordered by God to tie himself to the ground and literally eat shit. Then there were the early Christians: Paul, who was beheaded; the nameless others who were fed to lions, killed in the Colosseum for sport, or impaled on spikes to be doused with oil and used to light the city.

There were object lessons in this. Hold your hand above the candle and see how long you can take it. Can you feel how it burns? Now imagine that that’s going over your entire body and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Hold your arms out to either side. I’m going to read the account of Jesus being crucified, or I’m going to talk about Peter being crucified, and I want you to hold your arms out for as long as possible. That was only twenty minutes; imagine doing that for six hours. Kneel down here and put your neck on this block. See that basket in front of you? Imagine that it’s filled with heads and that the block is slick with blood. This would be the last thing you’d see in life.

The implication behind these lessons was the same was the implication behind Bob’s lesson about Stephen: if you couldn’t take that–the heat, the blood, the heads, the cross–then your faith wasn’t strong enough. Your faith needed to be strong, not just because you could walk out that door and get hit by a bus, but because Jesus could come back at any moment.

That line, that bit about Jesus coming back, is the fixation of the second group of people I’ve set to describe to you: the Revelation-obsessed. If you’ve been following the culture war for long, they really don’t need much of an introduction. I’m not sure how many of these people there really are since the sales for something like the Left Behind book series aren’t a very reliable counter, but I do know that their numbers are growing and their voice is getting louder.

The central belief of the Revelation-obsessed is that the world is soon going to end as it’s described in the Bible. I’ve decided to refer to this group as the Revelation-obsessed as the book of Revelation is the Biblical part most often associated with the end of the world. However, the Evangelical view of the world’s end is descended from the original Catholic view of the apocalypse which was cobbled together from different parts of the Bible including Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Second Peter, the Gospels, and Revelation. So things like the Rapture (when all of the true Christians are taken bodily from the Earth in a single instant), which is taken from a vaguely-worded section of Second Peter, and the assault on Jerusalem by Gog and Magog (a coalition of countries) prior to the Rapture, which is taken from Ezekiel, aren’t necessarily agreed on by all. Some say that the Rapture will not occur at all, others say that the Rapture will occur at some point late in the apocalypse, while others take the view that the Rapture will be the first sign of the end times. Therein lies the problem.

The Revelation-obsessed are a people convinced that the end of the world is coming soon, but there is no consensus as to when the world will end and what signs will precede it, meaning that the faithful are left debating whether the end times are set to begin at any moment or if they have already begun. Either the clock is ticking toward midnight or is ticking past midnight, but in any case: the end has come. Because of the conflicting ideas about what elements, exactly, would make up the apocalypse it’s hard to give an impression of what the Revelation-obsessed are fearing, but there’s a generic story-arc that fits all of the interpretations of Revelation et al. that I’ve heard so far. At some point in time, a single figure who is Satan incarnated in human form will rise to power and will establish by way of war and trickery an empire that covers the whole of the planet. This figure is the Antichrist. At the same time that the empire of the Antichrist is being established, a new religion that is a corrupted version of Christianity will become the single dominant religion. Eventually this religion will hold up the Antichrist as the holiest of holy figures. During the reign of the Antichrist, Christians will be rounded up and tortured to death or executed for sport as they were in ancient Rome. After a period of time, Jesus will come down out of Heaven, wage a holy war on the Antichrist, and then cast the Antichrist into Hell. At this point some believe that Jesus will establish an earthly kingdom for a period of time, or will simply end the world right then, but in any case that’s the end of time.

So what does all of this have to do with Evangelical support for The Passion of the Christ, and what does it have to do with the growing number of Protestants who are crucifixion-obsessed?

Many of the martyr-obsessed and crucifixion-obsessed fundamentalists I’ve met have been of the opinion that the end of the world was either about to kickoff or had already been running for awhile and that Christians would soon suffer through a Holocaust of their own. These people also tended to be of the opinion that Christians were already and oppressed minority in the United States, making it that much more likely, in their view, that we may soon begin to see modern-day Stephens stoned to death in the wake of show trials.

These visions of immanent persecution have, I believe, led many fundamentalist Protestant Christians to become interested in the persecution of Christians and/or prophets of the past. The question or whether or not your faith is strong enough for you to hold your hand over the candle or be burned alive is a pressing question to these people because it’s something they may have to literally face in their lifetime. This idea that the world will soon be ending, and with the end times there being mass slaughter of Christians, has led to the rise of the martyr-obsessed and crucifixion-obsessed among the Protestant fundamentalists.

This fixation on the end of the world is also a contributing factor to the widespread Evangelical support for The Passion of the Christ. With the end times approaching, many fundamentalist Protestants feel that a battle line has been drawn in the sand and that something must be done about the heathen culture of the United States before the end times. Some feel that if the culture is repaired that the apocalypse will not come, others feel that it is their duty to convert as many people to a righteous lifestyle, by force if necessary, before the world ends, while still others feel that they need to build up the United States as a base of Christian support for the coming war with the rising Antichrist. The Passion of the Christ is one of the things on that line in the war for America’s soul. Regardless of how pre-Reformation the depiction of the crucifixion is in that movie, it’s a movie about Jesus and a criticism of the movie is a criticism of Christianity at large. For some, not seeing The Passion of the Christ or questioning its motives and religious merits is a fundamentally anti-Christian act.

It does not help, of course, that many fundamentalist Christians really do feel that the Jews killed Jesus. It also doesn’t help that for some people, this movie is an object lesson not entirely unlike holding your hand above a candle flame. When watching the movie, they might say, think about what Jesus did for you and ask yourself if you could do that for Jesus. You may have to when the end comes.

There’s one more point I’d like to add, and it’s very important: I’ve been careful to try to use the term “fundamentalist” as often as possible because I’m trying to make a vital distinction between the people who believe this and the majority of Christians in the world. Not every person who is a Christian believes that the world is going to end in the next couple of years and so everything must be done to pull the United States back from the brink of Hell. There are Christians who support same-sex marriages and Christians who would like to kick in Jerry Falwell’s teeth but won’t because it violates their beliefs or because they just haven’t had the chance yet.

The people I’ve discussed in this post are not the majority of Christians, and so you should not hold these beliefs against all Christians. On the other hand, the people I’ve discussed have done a good job of cowing less fundamentalist Christians into following their lead, which is really what the ascendancy of the Religious Right has been all about: a small group of fanatics who have done everything they can to force their definition of Christianity on other Christians and non-Christians in the country, while convincing those Christians who disagree with them that disagreement will hurt Christianity as a whole.

They’re not the majority of Christians, just the most vocal.

In case you haven’t heard the news yet here’s the skinny: President Bush has announced his support for an amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit same-sex marriages and–according to some–civil unions. The Associated Press report on the subject can be found here.

The fallout has already started to drift to the ground. The opening paragraph from the aforementioned AP report is a good way to begin, I think.

I’m sure you can parse the language on your own, but I think I’ll go ahead and call attention to the words “quick,” “election-year” and “Republicans […] not rushing.” A few remarks from those not-exactly-rushing Republicans:

Unfortunately, our Democratic front-runners haven’t exactly been something to be proud of in response.

The Daily Kos has a brief reaction and round-up of notable quotables.

Josh Marshall has a good analysis of why Republican members of Congress might not be too happy with Bush announcing this when he did. Andrew Sullivan responded to the announcement with outrage and a feeling of betrayal. He’s also posted letters from some of his readers here, here, here, and here. The Poor Man thinks this is Bush’s Waterloo. I think the best summary of the situation comes by way of Discount Blogger:

One of Alas’ own comment threads got a brief testimonial and reaction from “Gavin”:

So… Now that you’re all caught up, discuss.

I was raised in a relatively conservative Christian household and was a devout member of a conservative church in my hometown for many years (in fact, the church was more conservative than even Focus on the Family, headquartered on the other end of the city; the church believed that using instruments while praising God was a terrible sin). In all my years of church camps, Sunday services, bible schools, and mission trips there was a particular quirk of some devout Christians that I’ve not yet been able to understand: why are some people so fixated on Jesus’ crucifixion?

I’ve known some Christians, typically male, typically very outwardly devout, who obsessed over the crucifixion in a way that seemed, at times, to border on the unhealthy. These were the people who would devout weeks of their sermons and/or small group lessons to the gory details of how many times Jesus was lashed, how much it would have hurt to be nailed and tied to a cross, how it would have felt to have died in that particular way, and so forth. They often reminded me of horror film aficionados discussing their favorite dismemberments, beheadings, tortures, and eviscerations from the various horror movies they’d seen; the thrill seemed to be in the amount of blood spilled and the number and volume of screams emitted rather than in the context of the situation.

These teachers and friends from my past have been in my mind a lot lately in light of tomorrow’s release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The movies has already become notorious without having been released. The flogging of Jesus occupies forty minutes of the film. The Romans flip Jesus face-down before hoisting his cross. The beatings are brutal. The violence is unflinching, some say excessive, and is the bulk of the movie. The film magazines and some film reviewers have spoken as though this is the first “uncensored” movie made about the crucifixion of Jesus, but they seem to have forgotten the glut of passion movies made since the beginning of the history of film. The last days of Jesus’ life, particularly the crucifixion, is one of the single most popular film subjects because when the first films were being made they were often based on stage plays, including the ever-popular passion plays. The number of passion films has declined since more original films began to be made, but there’s hardly been a lacking for them, so it seems that Mel Gibson’s film doesn’t seem to be adding much.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that of all the films made about Jesus the overwhelming majority of them have been made specifically about the crucifixion, often with the stated goal of showing the crucifixion in a more realistic, more brutal way than has ever been shown before. The level of violence has, yes, increased as movie standards for violence have shifted over the years, but why does the one-upmanship occur in the first place? Why do people feel the need to constantly run over the details of what is, regardless of your faith, a deplorable and cruel act?

The crucifixion-obsessed Christians, when I asked, explained that they spoke extensively about the particulars of the death of Jesus because they felt that not enough people really understood what Jesus had gone through in order to save them. I can understand this, except that there were often so many of them, so many stomach-churning descriptions from so many different sources, that it didn’t seem reasonable to me that a study of the Book of Mark should take six weeks, four of which were spent on the crucifixion alone. The number of repetitions, sometimes at the drop of a hat in casual conversation, seemed excessive to me.

Another explanation I’ve received many, many times is that this obsession is necessary because the crucifixion of Jesus was the single most important act committed in the Gospels. It seems to me that the Christians who say this have forgotten the rest of the story and why the rest of the story is important. The bulk of the New Testament is made up of letters dedicated to discussing why Jesus being raised from the dead was so important, why his being resurrected was such an everything-changing event. Even with this, though, the cross and the crucifix are the symbols of Christianity. I’ve never been to a church (with the sole exception of a Latter-Day Saint temple) where a cross was not on prominent display, bringing to mind the act of the crucifixion rather than the act of resurrection.

Why is the symbol of Jesus and Christianity so often the cross, a reminder of the bloody and disgusting and less important event, instead of the empty tomb, a reminder of the real reason why Jesus’ coming mattered at all?

I’m not asking this question to be antagonistic or critical of Christians or of Christianity. I’d genuinely like to know the answer.

Continuing this week’s trend of computer-related posts, I have a question for any LaTeX users out there:

How do I break a line such that the line that follows it begins at the point where the break occurs rather than beginning at the side of the text margin? I’m thinking here very specifically of character changes in dialogue written in verse. Something along the lines of:

                  Francisco
Give you good night.
                  Marcellus
                    Holla! Bernardo!
                  Bernardo
                                    Say,--

I suppose that that doesn’t exactly fit what I was wanting because of the character names. So let me pose the question a different way: Consider the piece from Hamlet I quoted; how would I format do that with LaTeX?

Earlier today I decided that I would be better off living a Microsoft-free lifestyle and set about purging my computer of Microsoft products.

While not yet entirely finished, the project goes on…
Read the rest of this entry »

Good news:

Bad news: