The AfD wants Germany to distance relations with Europe and the United States while getting closer to Russia and China. This is weird for a party that claims to want Germany first and to focus on distinct German culture and values. Shouldn’t authoritarian Asiatic empires be the opposite of German values and culture? And don’t other European countries and the US have much closer values and culture? Long-term, and worst case scenarios, China and Russia are empires that would force the world under their authoritarian heel if they could. Despite America’s many flaws and self-interests, its goals are freedom, trade, and defense. True imperialism is antithetical to its ethos. When the AfD says German values, it seems to mean no immigrants and: imperial, anti-enlightenment, anti-Western, and fundamentally unChristian values.
The oldest surviving structure built by a Muslim ruler is the Dome of the Rock, built on the location of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It was a real imperial dominating occupier move.
A more accurate translation of the Old Testament is not that ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, but that ‘when he began to create the heavens and the earth’…meaning, this is just when he began to create them, and…it is not the beginning of time.
Nolan’s central trick: “Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the center of The Odyssey.” Zeus’s Law in Nolan’s Odyssey is more similar to the Christian and Jewish golden rule than ancient Greece’s Xenia. The problem with the modern right isn’t that they haven’t obeyed the golden rule, it’s that they detest it. Cruelty toward the weak, the poor, the stranger, the immigrant…is glorified. Trump’s policies are built on the logic of tribute, not compassion, love, or reciprocity.
To Homer, Odysseus’s trick, using their common religious beliefs to fool the Trojans and to destroy Troy and slaughter its people…to Homer, Odysseus was a hero, but to Nolan, it was a great crime and that Odysseus needed redemption.
In Homer’s time, slaughtering innocent people wasn’t bad as long as they were the other. After Jesus and eventually the enlightenment and eventually applying these principles to societies…we don’t believe slaughtering people is okay just because they aren’t us. Using our common moral principles to trick each other is not heroic. We believe that from a long chain of history, but that chain’s strongest seed was Jesus.
Nolan made the Odyssey about the values of Jesus. Not the values of the ancient Greeks. Not the values of Homer. Not the values of Trump.
The modern right cares about power and the need for cruelty. Jesus cared about love.
Throughout time and space, different peoples have had different ideas of which acts are moral and which are not. People take the moral instinct, and come to different conclusions.
Romans tended to think that those with power had the right to use it and to not care about the downtrodden. Charity was done to make you look good, not because helping people in and of itself is a good thing. Charity was focused on helping your kin and allies, not human beings because all humans have value.
Jews thought you should help your neighbor, but not all humans on Earth.
Jesus taught that everyone matters.
Jesus appeared to really think that a rich person could not get into Heaven. Modern Christians find excuses to ignore that. Bible scholar Bart Ehrman said that when Jesus said, with God, all things are possible, he meant God could change rich people’s hearts, convincing them to give away their wealth.
Jesus taught that you don’t need atonement to be forgiven. But his followers thought his death was an act of atonement. So, Jesus was crucified partially for teaching that you don’t need atonement, then his followers codified Jesus’s death as an atonement!
The writer of the Book of Revelations was advocating for things that went starkly against what Jesus himself is purported to have said.
One of the reasons Revelations was included in the Bible was because it could be used to argue for the Trinity.
Revelations was written to specific Christians who felt that they were being persecuted by the Roman Empire, and it was promising that the good Christians would triumph and God would punish the persecutors.