Comment by ajross
4 months ago
Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
Uncle Tom's cabin actually should be banned based on their rules, but not because of its depiction of slavery, for the ending, where Uncle Tom refuses to rat out the slave women he helped escape and in turn is brutally whipped to death, whilst forgiving those who are whipping him. The violence and gore in the ending is enough regardless of the rest of the book.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
Again, distinguishing "advocacy" as your criteria for censorship is censoring on interpretation. I know you are sincere in your opinions about this, they won't change, and I even share them.
They are still our opinions. We share the planet with people who think, equally inflexibly, that the bible does not advocate for slavery and genocide. And the way we do that without resorting to terrible violence (including slavery and genocide!) is by agreeing to disagree by not censoring each other.
But it does, and explicitly - it isn’t a matter of interpretation. Repeatedly god commands his followers to slaughter men, women, children, and even the animals of their foes. Repeatedly god tells his followers to enslave people, and that it’s fine to treat them abysmally as long as it’s not so bad that they die.
This isn’t my opinion of what the bible contains - any more than I could argue that Hellraiser is a cute movie about bunny rabbits.
Not all facts are subjective.
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There is no reasonable reading of the bible which fits your narrative.