Documentary shows how the Bible has been used to justify discrimination
From the Salt Lake Tribune
Opening Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival is Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So," a documentary in the independent film competition. The production, which took more than three years to complete, was funded in large part by Orem-resident Bruce Bastian, co-creator of the word-processing software that became WordPerfect. The film shows how the Bible's verses have been used to justify, over centuries, various forms of discrimination, and how today religious conservatives use the Good Book to back anti-gay rhetoric....Peppered throughout "For the Bible Tells Me So" are snippets, including a cartoon, outlining statistics and research findings. Mixed in is the annual revenue of Bible-thumping moneymakers. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, brings in $138 million a year, the film reports. Robertson: $459 million....
The problem, too, the film points out, is the masses blindly accept biblical interpretations offered by these popular personalities rather than read and study for themselves. As a result, historical context is ignored, as are broader and supplementary materials, said the Rev. Laurence Keene, a soon-to-retire sociology professor at Pepperdine University.
"I have a soft spot in my heart for literalists because I used to be one," he said in the film. "There's nothing wrong with a fifth-grade understanding of God [or the Bible], as long as you're in the fifth grade."
Take, for instance, the word "abomination," which is used over and over by fundamentalists to describe what the Bible says about same-sex relations. Keene reiterated in a phone call this week that the word "abomination" refers to actions that were deemed "ritually impure." Other abominations include eating pork or shrimp, wearing linen and wool at the same time, and commingling crops.
Abominations, Keene explained, are not "intrinsically evil or immoral"; they are the actions that were considered "unclean" or "un-Jewish" at the time when the Hebrew people were trying to build a nation and procreation - requiring sex between a man and a woman - was paramount.
Bill McCartney
