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Devil in the Shadows
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled on the world was convincing us he didn't exist."
- Keyser Soze as Verbal Kent as Kevin Spacey as Christopher McQuarrie as Charles Baudelaire
Movies, we all love them. We love good-guys in white hats, romantic situations that resolve themselves in ninety minutes. We love to watch the monsters lurking in the dark waiting to unleash their evil, all the while knowing that a hero will come forward at the last possible moment. Movie monsters are fun because we know everything will be all right. That's the promise movies make their audiences, stick with us and everything will be all right.
Unfortunately that promise isn't the same in real life. Politicians make many of the same promises that the movies do and in fact many do act like movie-stars, but at the end of ninety minutes everything is not all right. Years go by and things get worse. Not only is there no resolution in sight, but they can’t even seem to keep the simple promise of caring for our heroes.
It’s a simple contract really. When you send someone out to do a dangerous job you take care of them if they are injured in the performance of that job. Every employer in America is held to that standard, save one, the U.S. government. From outing our own spies for political gain to out-sourcing at our military hospitals for profit it sucks to be a hero these days.
The scariest part is that we haven’t even seen the whole monster yet. Scooter Libby, Al Neffgen, Donald Rumsfield, Ken Lay, these guys are just ripples in the water. We’re still at the stage of seeing only the darkness and danger lurking just under the surface. “Nothing to see here folks… Go back to the Paris Hilton crotch shots.” Fingers are pointed and speeches are made about how the problem is being cleaned up – all to keep us from looking too closely and seeing the real devil hiding in the shadows. “Oh my God, Brit’s bald and O.J. has slow swimmers”. Nightly pictures of Tara and Lindsey exposing themselves make the news, but taking photographs of our real heroes returning home in flag draped boxes is forbidden. It’s almost as if the number one priority of the institution trusted to protect the freedom of the press, is to kill the story by convincing us that there is no story.
We don’t need another contract with America. We don't need another matinee idol. What we need is someone to guide all these heroes. We need a real honest to goodness leader. Someone willing to shed light on the mold underneath the Congressional carpet. Someone who is willing to listen and change their own mind while trying to change the minds of others. Someone for whom duty, honor and integrity are more than just buzz words but actual values. We’ve been living in a world of make believe long enough, maybe it’s finally time for us to listen to someone who tells the inconvenient truth.
Kyle Pesonen - Staff Writer - E-mail Comments on this story
Does The “Jesus Tomb” Really Threaten Christianity or Just the Power of the Church?
After watching the “Jesus Tomb” special on Discovery and the debate between the film makers and the “experts” that followed, I came to a fairly harsh conclusion. The Church has no interest in the truth of this matter ever being determined. The likelihood of this being the tomb of “The” Jesus is actually not that far fetched. The names inside the tomb correspond to the known family members of Jesus based on the books of the Bible that the Church hasn’t suppressed. If you accept that the box with the inscription “Mariamne” was the ossuary of Mary Magdalene, they even more closely match the accounts in the Gnostic Gospels that were excluded from the Bible because they threatened the tenets of the early Church. Mary Magdalene was noted in the Gnostic Gospels as being especially close to Jesus and was likely Jesus’ spouse. In that time, they would have been the oddest couple on the block if they didn’t have offspring so the discovery of a child listed as their offspring makes perfect sense
Putting all of that aside, what is the Church afraid of? This would not change the deeds of Jesus. It would not change the teachings of Jesus. It would somewhat alter the interpretation of his ascension into heaven but would not necessarily negate it. So make it, “He ascended to Heaven in a wash of golden light as his spirit left his body…” The meaning is the same, only the limited minds of stubbornly ignorant people could not accept that an interpretation from two thousand years ago might have screwed up the details a bit. So he ascended in spirit instead of in the flesh. I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover and don’t recall it actually being specified that his body went up While I can’t claim to have read every version of the Bible because I in fact have a life, in the version I read, he is simply said to have left his disciples to sit at the right hand of God the father. Could that not also mean that he died and his spirit went to heaven? Why all the hocus pocus then and nothing else for two thousand years? The theologians would likely say that Jesus left the Holy Spirit in charge of the Church to look over mankind but from my view, you would think that if the son of God were in the habit of moving his physical body back and forth between Heaven and Earth that he might drop in once in a while to weigh in on people bastardizing his faith by using it to rape little boys and girls or to torture people for not confessing to sins they never committed. Perhaps, the original idea was that his spirit ascended and the shell that was his body got left behind.
I’m sure you’re probably thinking at this point that I believe that the tomb is that of Jesus Christ. I don’t. I don’t have enough information to have formed an opinion one way or another. It is an interesting idea and one certainly worth further study but to the correct point of the Christian scholars, the film did not prove their case to a scientific standard. More empirical evidence is needed to substantiate or refute the claims made by the film makers who are not archaeologists and whose goal was to make an entertaining movie not to gather factual evidence nor to use scientific methods to prove or disprove a theory.
The “truth” now lies in the hands of the Israeli government. If they are not afraid of the consequences, perhaps they will allow the world to know what that “truth” is. They need to release the bones from the tomb for testing and examination. Examination would give good indications if the body of Jesus had been crucified and DNA could establish any familial links between the bodies in the tomb. The questions could likely be mostly answered once and for all with a little science applied.
The Church however, is terrified of that possibility. They would lose their power if they got it wrong. The message of Christ would not be any the lesser but the dogma of the Church would be in shambles. There will always be questions even with scientific examination because it was two thousand years ago and there are no eyewitnesses left to tell how it really happened. Currently all we have to rely on are documents made many years after the death of Christ. Anyone who has ever played the telephone game can tell you how reliable or unreliable those accounts could be. One item I would note though was the thing that nobody talked about. The symbol over the tomb entrance and its possible significance were never really discussed. It is a circle under an inverted V which could be interpreted also as a circle inside a triangle which was a common symbol in various forms early in the history of Christianity representing the Trinity and the inverted V also looks a bit like a Greek Alpha. (Revelations 8:1 “I am the Alpha and the Omega” says the Lord.) Just a little food for thought…
Troy Wilson-Ripsom - Staff Writer - E-mail your comments about this story
