Or “One hundred nails”, which is the name of an italian film with the most memorable scene: The crucifixion of books in a Christian library. We have heard of book burnings but not of book crucifixions. Now it is a wonderful film with a message to booth, but it made me think of protestant religions such as Lutheranism and Calvinism and later fundamentalist brands which take God as inalterable, beyond change, etc., and I thought: “Like a book”.
A book is bound by it’s covers. It is it’s pages, determined and completed and unalterable, in the sense that when you pick it today it is still the same as when you picked it up yesterday and will be the same tomorrow.
The religions of the “book” would seem to prefer such a God whose revelation is done and contained, unalterable in a few thousand pages of their holy writ. Now imagine that Jesus was God’s incarnation, then, wouldn’t his crucifixion be the same as the crucifixion of the hundred books in Cento Chiodi.
The film seems to have had differing reviews, but I appreciate what you are saying. What damages “God” the most? Is it a lack of sentience or a rigid idea, taken literally and without the possibility of change? Is it the openness towards divine inspiration or the obedient bowing to an image made by theologians?
I find the Bible and the various other books carrying religious material very inspiring – once I have been able to understand, and that is something that doesn’t always come to me without difficulties. It isn’t so much the book, but how the book is handled. If you have a teacher who assists you with your own search, helping you find the answers yourself rather than telling you what the answers are, you generally find that the relationship to the book is more relaxed.
“The letter of the scripture is death.”-- paraphrase of Paul.
How refreshing it is to find a religious thread not begun by atheists who are arrogant or theists who are closed-minded. I’ve not see the movie. But I’m prone to believe, maybe as Bob does, that what we consider to be truth evolves. Humans can know nothing of absolutes. We project what we experience into the unknown. This is like putting a flashlight beam into the dark and seeing as reality the parts of things exposed by the beam. The parts are not all that is. They are all we can see.
Many folks I meet here and elsewhere demand that there be absolute, unchanging truths. I suspect that this demand, whether from theists or atheists, is based on some need for self-substantiation, some remedy for existential angst, some human search for closure, finality, escape from the onerous business of having to walk in the dark.
Crucify the books? That is crucifiction of the mind. A book is, at best, a projection.