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.
The Bible doesn’t clearly support liberal or conservative ideology. It is written in different times by different authors, it contradicts itself, it doesn’t line up with any modern ideology, and doesn’t clearly give direction on most, if any, modern political issues.
At the nation’s founding, the Bible was not the most quoted text. This claim comes from a study that includes a lot of sermons reprinted on pamphlets, so, every time a religious sermon was printed on a pamphlet, which happened a lot back then, that counted as quoting the Bible. Additionally, these weren’t founding fathers quoting the Bible, but preachers preaching.
The most cited authors at the time of the founding were: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.
The period when the US Constitution was drafted has the lowest church attendance in US history.
The Federalists did not cite the Bible at all around the founding. The Anti-Federalists cited the Bible as nine percent of their citations. The Federalists, those who wrote the Constitution, did not cite the Bible when arguing for the Constitution. They believed in separation of church and state.
Christianity is a deep part of American culture and history, but people falsely exaggerate its direct role in the founding of the country.
Many state governments violated the principles of separation of state and church, but when the founders, who were sent by the states, came together to make a Constitution, they left such violations out of the new federal government and forbade acts that would create an established religion.
Utter nonsense. Requiring public schools to post the ten commandments in their classrooms is forcing a particular religion down the throat of every child, using taxpayer funds. It is advocating the value of the Bible over other religions or non-religion. If a Muslim majority school district required every classroom to post lines from the Quran, people would be outraged. Unless the class is literally studying religion or that area of history, posting religious texts is advocating that or those religions and is an act of establishing an official religion.