Coffee and fundamentalism
Saturday, February 28, 2004
I’m at the coffee shop sippin’ my mocha and listening to the group of eight people at a table next to mine.
They’re entertaining the hell out of me with their heated discussion of The Passion of the Christ and how it compares, both favorably and not, with their fundamentalist ideology.
The older man—he looks like a clone of Charlton Heston from Ben-Hur—is declaiming quite forcefully about how The Passion depicts Christ’s final hours “exactly as it happened!”—as if he has some authoritative, indisputable knowledge of the events.
And I suppose, as a fundie, he figures he does have that in the Bible.
The rest of the group is agreeing with that but picking at small details and also complaining about the relentless violence, and a woman who looks to be about my age is complaining about how she had never seen an R-rated movie until now, but she finally had to see an R-rated movie because, gosh, it’s the story of her personal Lord and Saviour, but why did it have to be R-rated and ruin her perfect record of never seeing anything worse than a PG-13 movie?
Urk.