After reading Trish's blog about the movie the Ten Commandments and her mention of The Prince of Egypt, I'm reminded of a notion I first encountered in high school. An English teacher I had for the first two years of my literary studies at the time, he is probably the reason I'm an English major, used to talk about the "Disneyfication" of Greek myths. He boasted that when Disney makes a movie about these topics, they dumb it down and do it a real injustice. In particular he mentioned the film Hercules in which his quest to do good through out the land was a journey to find his parents. However, the "real" story involves a journey educed by Hercules murdering of his family. Crazy right? I used to watch that movie all the time without knowing its real basis of reference.
In regards to how we approach the Bible I think a similar element is in play, this idea that we can't talk about certain parts in certain contexts, or we talk about these parts so they play to our liking. All the raping, murdering, and warfare chapters were left undiscussed in my confirmation classes. And in doing so we were presented with the "good" version of the Bible. Is this the right way to go about it? Maybe. I think that a lot of what makes the Bible, and literature in general, great is its subjective nature, the way we discover it for ourselves.
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