Monday, May 22, 2006 | And for your reading pleasure... Here's a bit of Political Waves commentary, by Jude. Awwww jeez, this Da Vinci Code blowback is just stretching the envelope -- is there justification for the continued use of the words "heresy" or "blasphemy" in a 21st century conversation?  The concept itself is archaic -- it represents a war on thought, a censoring of ideas!  My Americanism is showing here, but -- come on!  There are [still, for the moment] LAWS about that!   Christians in India will now starve themselves to death to protest this movie -- how different is that from Islam killing and burning to keep their Prophet from being "cartoonized?"  Not much.  You can't declare war on an idea -- and GOD is immune from attack!  Our ideas about God, that's a different thing ... and how Divinely Inspired is it to die ... cause yourself to die ... in God's name?   I'd suppose this is the intense tag-end of Pluto in Sag -- the truly dark and deluded notions about religion revealing themselves; we've got the rest of it playing out too, the legal, the higher learning, the international.  But the religious stuff just amazes me.   See, here's the thing -- I love my little dog a whole lot; he's a 14 year old long-haired miniature doxy named Widget.  The older he gets, the more eccentric -- and the more we pander to him.  My son and I have a "personal relationship" with the Widge ... we've developed a narrative over the years.  We give him "adventures."  If my son is watching races [he loves NASCAR,] at some point one of us will say, "The Widge used to ride with Jeff Gordon, he had his back."  The other of us will say, "Yeah, I remember when the pit crew .... [wah wah wah.]"  Widget has a lot of personal mythology, at this point -- he knew Adrian before Rocky did -- he waxed on and waxed off with Mr. Miyagi -- he personally supervised the counting of votes in Florida and argued the hanging chad issue before the courts -- and he considers the other four-legged's in the Pea Patch intellectually depressing.  And, known only to this household and the Wachowski brothers, Widge is actually The One, not that wannabe Neo.   The Widge takes all of these projections with a wag of his tail, a tip of his head and a loud bark for yet-another biscuit.   As much as we enjoy the Widget dialogues, the bottom line is -- Widge is a [beloved] DOG [read it backwards]. We could dress him up [we don't,] we can pretend he is as human as we are, we can attribute human emotions to his little pea-brain, but bottom line?  Read it backwards.  It is for our own entertainment and amusement that we make the Widge a hero; he graciously allows us to use him for alter ego projections [as long as the biscuits keep coming.]  The same dynamic here is being used as people view a movie that questions the historical accuracy of their personal mythologies. In order for them to have their "personal relationship," they've made God not only human, like themselves [discarding the warning against that by their own Biblical teaching,] but cranky, easily insulted and consequently, vindictive.  The Christians will only kill themselves, since their Jesus wasn't a warrior -- but they project their "hurt feelings" out in a thought-system that defines their God as One who will choose a side, guard His territory and ask His followers to die for His Glory.     We do NOT know God's mind -- and He/She/It/They need[s] no defense or sacrifice from us.  If Jesus could walk on water, he could have saved himself from crucifixion; his story would have been that of a crusader rather than a teacher.  That's not what the Book says -- why do WE insist on saying it?  It's absurd, all of it.   [Widget, by the way, thinks that the Vatican should call a halt to this shameful business, and gain a bit of the credibility they lost when behaving MUCH more lethargically toward their responsibility for covering sexual abuse than they have for a movie based on fiction.  He thinks the last article is pretty good, too .] -- Jude