Some say the Pope doesn’t know the Bible because the Bible supports the death penalty. But, the Bible has all sorts of dos and do nots that almost all Christians ignore. The Pope is going deeper than hypocritically and inconsistently following something just because it is in the Bible. He is using reason and theological principles combined with the Bible to determine what is right and wrong.
For those who think the Bible started the seeds of human dignity that later led to the abolition of slavery even though God is clearly cool with slavery in the Bible, then you don’t have a consistent argument saying that because God commanded, or was cool with, the death penalty in Biblical times, we must be for the death penalty now.
The Pope is using the same Christian argument for overriding the Bible’s pro-slavery passages to override its pro-death penalty passages.
Two reasons the four gospels were chosen were 1) they were older so they had more time to spread and become more well-known. 2) when the canon was being put together, these four could be better used to argue what the Orthodox believed compared to adding others or removing some of these.
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.