one of the two b's in bible is for me

You know the Bible 86%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic! You find this blurb insipid and over the top! Fortunately, you can add a couple snarky sentences to the end of it!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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Kieran got a 97% on this quiz. I decided to take it also because, in the course of my Lutheran upbringing, I actually read the entire Bible when I was in high school.* Cover-to-cover, alpha-to-omega, Genesis-to-Revelation, In-the-beginning-to-Amen.

The quiz provided some intriguing foggy mental nostalgia: several things I recognized as questions I would have once been able to answer but now the memory was past dim and into just plain dark. And then there was this one question about a donkey that I didn't even recognize as something I would have once recognized, although I'm sure it was something I once knew full well. Anyway, as you can see, my scriptural retention was much worse than Kieran's, and I will not be winning any games of Go To The Head Of The Sunday School Class.

BTW, the two parables of Jesus that still come to mind for me from time to time are that of Workers In the Vineyard and that of the Two Sons. Although, in neither case, do I take away the intended lesson: the former comes to mind as I think about how I should focus on my own rewards and not worry about things relative to the effort/reward of others, and the latter to mind when I think about how it is worse to tell someone you are going to do something and then not follow through than it is just to tell them you aren't going to do it in the first place.

* Granted, it was "The Living Bible," which is an attempted easier-reading translation. It says something about the readability of the Bible that while the most common word in written English is easily "the", and the most common word in spoken English is even more easily "I", the most common word in the Bible is "and."

for those who feel that 'great man' explanations of history are not quite enough...

...there is always its close cousin, the "Great Man plus God" explanation of history. Here's an example from the end of John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940

"Hitler not only succeeded in merging nationalism and socialism into one tremendous force; he was a new kind of rule, representing a new kind of populist nationalism... It was thus that in 1940 he represented a wave of the future. His greatest reactionary opponent, Churchill, was like King Canute, attempting to withstand and sweep back that wave. And -- yes, mirabile dictu -- this King Canute succeeded: because of his resolution and -- allow me to say this -- because of God's will, of which, like every human being, he was but an instrument." (p. 218)

Voltaire is famous for having written "If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him." Less well known are his next three words: "To stop Hitler."

nominee, jfw award for most unfortunate use of the word 'probably'

The NYT has a story about a Christian film company being criticized for casting a gay actor as a missionary in one of its films. The story includes the following quote from the weblog of someone listed as a president of a Baptist seminary:

"Granted, we must not overreact. And it would probably be an overreaction to firebomb these men's houses. But what they have done is no mistake. It is a calculated strategy."

Actually, if you want to have a rousing round of despair, check out the post itself and comments to it.

talk about the passion

Of course, there has been the entire debate about the potential manifest or latent anti-Semitic content of Mel Gibson's Passion, now set for a debut on 2,800 screens. Seems perhaps understandable that the Anti-Defamation League would be a little concerned by a film about the Passion from a man whose father still today says that the Holocaust was "mostly a fiction." True, I would hate to be judged by some of my father's more idiosyncratic views on world affairs, but then again (a) these views, even at their nuttiest, are nothing even remotely-remotely along the lines calling the Holocaust "mostly a fiction" and (b), more importantly, unlike Mel Gibson, I have no problem with explicitly disavowing paternal positions I think are nutty.

Anyway, this post isn't about that part of Passion anyway. It's about this idea that Passion might serve this nice function in the service of religion by helping the strengthen the faith of believers and perhaps to convert some of the unfaithful. While perhaps true, it overlooks another function I expect Passion to serve in the spiritual realm: even without seeing it, I have become convinced that, along with, say, the cinematic oeurve of Pauly Shore, it will be in heavy rotation among the films playing on the video screens in the torture cell where I will spend eternity rotting in hell.