The Passion: Gottfried on Zmirak

One of the best things about Zmirak's essay on The Passion is the way it provokes intelligent response by highlighting the key issues in contemporary intercommunal relations, to use a phrase from Indian politics. This was certainly the case with the good people on my friends list and some visitors as well. Now Paul Gottfried, an editor of the journal in which it appeared, has written a friendly but critical response which I think advances the agrument a good bit further. Here Gottfried comments on the paragraph I quoted the other day:

Although I too find excitement in C.S. Lewis’s bold assertion, "Jesus was either the Son of God or a wicked, deranged imposter," this either/or seems in retrospect overstated. Certainly one can thrill to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or his magnificent parables without having to find in them the revelation of his divine status as presented in John, Chapter One. One might even reasonably contend that Jesus’s sublime moral teaching has led some into accepting his divinity. I’m not sure how credible as a savior someone would seem who might otherwise be taken for a "wicked impostor." John also suggests that the only religious choice available to Jews in the first century was either the acceptance of the divine Jesus or the "highest, purest religion," which was then Rabbinic Judaism...

Click on the above if you are not terminally sick of the whole business. Or if you want to see the discussion carried beyond the dubious merits of the film that started it.

Nailed in the Skull

Royal Melbourne Hospital neurosurgeons removed the nail in a delicate four-hour operation even though Shorten, who was expected to make a full recovery, had offered to take the nail out with a pair of pliers.

O'Leary Cow Innocent?

In all, over a 24-hour period, an area of land the size of Connecticut was burned. Wood speculates the main body of the comet crashed into Lake Michigan, with peripheral fragments causing the fires in Chicago, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Republicans Backing Law of the Sea Treaty

1. LOST would hand over to international bureaucrats the power to regulate 70% of the world’s resources;
2. LOST would give international bureaucrats the power to assess taxes on the United States;
3. LOST would provide for a multi-national court system to enforce its provisions; and,
4. LOST would ratify assertions of communist China that the treaty confers jurisdiction over the South China Sea and, by inference, Taiwan.

With thanks to vaquera for the heads-up.