I just watched the movie “Her” for the fifth time and cried just as much as I did in my previous viewings. To me, it’s a very successful aesthetic expression to be able to effect that kind of response in me (I think most movies are shallow and egregiously manipulative due to corporate influence).
It made me think about the topic of the Book of Job, which we’ve been discussing a lot here. Because of the gulf of time and culture, some skeptics regard the Book of Job anachronistically and have a difficult time relating to its message on natural evil-caused suffering. Conversely, some Jews and Christians feel intimately connected to the Book of Job, relate to it immediately, and expect "skeptics" to understand the meaning outright—despite the huge temporal/cultural void that exists. It’s a Bronze Age allegory expressing the common fears and hopes of the ANE culture. What’s so hard to understand about that? seems to be their stance (though I'm generalizing).
Now more than ever, I think it’s important for Jews and Christians to rely less on the Bible to convey meaning and look to good expressions of the same concepts in modern art to convey truth and open "closed" minds. Christianity Today journalist and columnist Philip Yancey used to publish (I’m not sure if he still does) a publication called Books and Culture, which reviewed books that reflected common issues honestly, without that bad fundie/evangelical aftertaste. I think we need an amplification of the importance of ambiguity in the human experience and less emphasis on ancient books that, frankly, this present culture isn’t at all equipped to process. The evidence I’d present for that is the large contingent of literalist Christians and unsophisticated skeptics who constantly troll each other with meaningless noise, essentially resembling simians flinging feces at each other.
It made me think about the topic of the Book of Job, which we’ve been discussing a lot here. Because of the gulf of time and culture, some skeptics regard the Book of Job anachronistically and have a difficult time relating to its message on natural evil-caused suffering. Conversely, some Jews and Christians feel intimately connected to the Book of Job, relate to it immediately, and expect "skeptics" to understand the meaning outright—despite the huge temporal/cultural void that exists. It’s a Bronze Age allegory expressing the common fears and hopes of the ANE culture. What’s so hard to understand about that? seems to be their stance (though I'm generalizing).
Now more than ever, I think it’s important for Jews and Christians to rely less on the Bible to convey meaning and look to good expressions of the same concepts in modern art to convey truth and open "closed" minds. Christianity Today journalist and columnist Philip Yancey used to publish (I’m not sure if he still does) a publication called Books and Culture, which reviewed books that reflected common issues honestly, without that bad fundie/evangelical aftertaste. I think we need an amplification of the importance of ambiguity in the human experience and less emphasis on ancient books that, frankly, this present culture isn’t at all equipped to process. The evidence I’d present for that is the large contingent of literalist Christians and unsophisticated skeptics who constantly troll each other with meaningless noise, essentially resembling simians flinging feces at each other.
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