Again, the basic fallacy is the same: no doubt Christians have collaborated in all kinds of evil schemes involving bloodshed, the oppression of women, and racism. I have a hard time imagining the script writer thinking that such a statement would come across as anything but naive absurdity. Sophie, you have the power to take thousands of years of bloodshed, and the oppression of women, and racism…with this one act you can make it all go away, put everything to rights at last! But it went something like this (when Teabing is trying to convince Sophie to “reveal herself” as the heir of Christ, in order to bring the secret truth of the Priory to the world–Teabing is talking): It was a bit longer, so I’m sure I’ll get it wrong and this is more of a paraphrase. I can’t believe anyone would put it forward who has taken a serious and hard look at human nature, religious or areligious. I feel it is strange not because the data don’t support such a supposition, but because it is so obviously a superficial reading of the data. So it is strange to me how often I run across people who are saying, in one form or another, that many of the world’s great ills are somehow caused by God (the idea of God, that is, according to them). Pay attention: when the wizard behind the machine of war is finally revealed, we will all stare, not into the face of some lie about God’s existence, but into our own hearts, and our own lust for power and control. ![]() In other words, the base motive for religious killings is the same as the base motive for any other type of killing–but the word “God”, like the word “patriotism” or the words “national security”, gets mouthed as a way to spin deaths so that they seem less barbaric, less arbitrary, and less for a certain party’s benefit. The fact is that, while religion does spawn its fair share of killing, it is only insofar as religion is being used by those with power to kill those they don’t like (for, I’m certain, fundamentally non-religious reasons). Obviously, none of those statements come anywhere near true. Or, what would be most absurd, (c) if we were polytheists, we wouldn’t kill people. Or, (b) if we “de-invent” God, there will be substantially less killing. But it’s only an interesting statement in light of another proposition, which I take here to be necessary and implicit, namely that (a) if we hadn’t “invented” the one true God, there would have been no religious killing. He says:Īs long as there has been the one true God, there has been killing in his name. (Or if he did, it was done in such a way that I missed it).įirst, there is a statement Ian McKellen’s character (Leigh Teabing) makes after the argument over the truth of the Priory myth. As we will see, it’s to Dan Brown’s credit that he didn’t write such laughable dialogue into the novel. Now, mostly what I want to talk about is two broader-picture statements which occurred in the movie explicitly but not in the book. In the movie, Robert takes one glance at it and says, “We need a mirror,” as any non-catatonic English-speaker would. But it is quite clearly (there’s a picture in the book) English. In the book, the characters agonize for a long time over its deciphering. It is covered with “mysterious writing” (in reality, just English written reflectedly). The one change I really liked about the movie was the part where Robert finds the seal under the sign of the rose in the keystone.
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