Teaching religious intolerance using religious intolerance

Tomorrow, the U.S. Air Force Academy is mandating that hundreds of students and faculty members attend a closed-door lecture on religious intolerance. It will also show clips from Constantine’s Sword, an upcoming movie. Catholic League president Bill Donohue registered his objections to this event today:

“ The person pushing this agenda is Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation; he also appears in the film. In the mission statement of his organization, he stakes out a position against any member of the armed forces being ‘compelled to conform to a particular religion or religious philosophy.’ But evidently Weinstein has no problem orchestrating a propaganda film that trashes Catholicism—in the name of fighting religious intolerance—all the while insisting that the cadets and faculty be ‘compelled’ to attend.

“The movie is based on the widely discredited book by James Carroll, an embittered ex-priest. The book says the Gospels are inherently anti-Semitic and that unless the New Testament is gutted to the point where the messiahship of Jesus is rejected, Christian anti-Semitism will not end.

Well maybe they are using the vaccine theory to explain this. That is use an anti-Catholic source to explain religious tolerance, kind of like using snake venom to help with snake bite victims.

Southern Appeal

The movie Constantine's Sword is coming out during the Pope's visit. I guess with Easter being early this year they couldn't get it out in time for Holy Week. Christopher Blosser's excellent "Benedict in America" blog previously posted on this movie and the background to Carroll's book that mistakenly got labeled history instead of alternate history.

In other fun Catholic entertainment news Carl Olson posted on NBC doing four-hour mini-series based on the novel, The Last Templar, by Raymond Khoury, a basic Da Vinci Code clone. This book like the Da Vinci Code tried to pass itself off as not just being fiction since the author says "The Last Templar works as a thought-provoking exploration of religion in today's world, and of historic fact versus faith, particularly regarding the origins of the Catholic Church."

In even more art news we have another homoerotic version of Christ's Last Supper being displayed which shows the Apostles having an orgy. Now you might think, boring! Yet another homoerotic piece of art where an artist isn't even creative enough to do something new. Though this painting was displayed a the museum of Vienna's Roman Catholic Cathedral and the museum curator was rather surprised at the negative reaction.

Guess you can't guess how he defended the original decision? Well actually I bet you can guess since it was basically "art should be allowed to provoke a debate." I guess museum curators are no more creative than many modern artists. But he must be pretty smart and have a degree or something. The reason I say this is only someone with a degree could say the following:

"I don't see any blasphemy here," he said, gesturing at a Crucifixion picture showing a soldier simultaneously beating Jesus and holding his genitals. "People can imagine what they want to."

Yeah you with dirty minds it's all your fault that you jump to a conclusion instead of seeing the deeper symbolic meaning.