Allan Harvey wrote:
>As much as I disagree with Mr. Johnson on some matters, and as much as I
>wish he would *voluntarily* be silent rather than pursuing his misguided
>anti-evolution crusade, I join with others on this list (everybody but
>one person as far as I can tell) in wishing God's comfort and healing for
>this brother. And I could use God's healing for that part of me that is
>tempted to wish him ill.
I suspect the "one person" is presumed to be me.
There is a movie called The Mission that I have seen 20 or 30 times. I
think every Christian youth group, indeed every Christian, should see the
film and discuss its messages. Set in the 1700's when Brazil is handed
over to Portugal by Spain, it focuses on a small group of Jesuit priests
who have set up a Christian mission in that region. The Jesuits were
committed to absolute obedience to the Catholic hierarchy. Yet when the
leader of the priests (Jeremy Irons) is told to abandon his mission, he
chooses instead to stay with his tribe of native converts. Others in his
band of priests decide to organize the small tribe into a fighting
force to resist the attacking Portuguese, thereby disobeying their leader
who urged pacificism
One of the priests played by Robert DeNiro constructs a crude cannon aimed
at a bridge the Portuguese soldiers must cross. As he prepares to fire the
cannon, a small boy is wounded, and he pauses to help the child. When he
returns to the cannon, a soldier has disabled it, and now it won't
fire. Even though I intellectually supported the pacifist position taken
by the leader, in the emotion of the moment, I wanted the cannon to
fire. It was a gut reaction that I would have recoiled from had I been
asked outside of the immediate passion I felt at that instant.
In the last scene only a few small children remain alive. All the adults
and most of the children have been slaughtered. The handful of surviving
children enter a canoe to paddle upriver and begin again. In the water by
the canoe there is a broken violin which the natives produced as part of
their crafts industry and a cross carried by the Jesuit leader when he died
at the hands of the Portuguese. A native leader had even picked up the
cross and carried it proudly into the blaze of gunfire before he too
fell. A proud moment for those who love the cross. But now, a small naked
girl pauses before entering the canoe. The violin is retrieved, the cross
remains in the water.
I wish no one ill. Not PJ. Not Osama Bin Laden. No one. Where there is
life, there is hope. The hope of enlightenment. The hope of
redemption. Of course, that is me in a moment of quiet reflection. In a
moment of passion, you may get a passionate response.
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago"
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