a question about religion and film

I just saw Anthony Hopkins in The Rite last weekend. It was a halfway decent movie with its high points but after The Exorcist it is difficult for any exorcism-themed supernatural thriller to impress or cover new ground. (Although, Drag Me To Hell wasn't bad and the Angel episode I've Got You Under My Skin had a nice twist.)

It occurs to me that (even apart from the super-obvious examples like The Ten Commandments or The Passion of The Christ) there are plenty of Hollywood movies which assume that Christianity is basically true (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Rapture, The Book of Eli, Left Behind). There are also a number of movies where Hinduism is true (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Love Guru) and movies where Buddhism or other Eastern philosophies are true (The Golden Child, Little Buddha, a number of martial arts films). But I was hard pressed to come up with a movie where Islam was true. Apart from The Message, the only one I could think of was The Jewel of the Nile (which is actually full of your typical Arab stereotypes, but the "Jewel" of the title is an Egyptian Sufi with real powers.) Are there any others?

since when was blindness a good thing?

I know that justice and liberty are distinct, but the previous image of Bush as a vampire reminded me of the powerful Langston Hughes poem:

Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

Many summers ago I was sitting on the porch of the house I was living in at the time, having a conversation with some folks about religion. One of the people there was an African-American Bahai and somehow the conversation turned to the question of why Islam seemed appealing to so many Black Americans. His answer, especially coming from a Bahai, really surprised me. He basically said that a history of oppression gave Black people a unique capacity to recognize the truth when we see it. I would question the narrow racialism implied by both examples, but would still suggest that even if it doesn't provide one with special race-based wisdom or insight, a collective history of oppression will at the very least give a person a low tolerance for bs.

a philosophical view of easter

Today I picked my copy of The Cornel West Reader and reread one of the pieces called "A Philosophical View of Easter". In it, West engages in a rather sophisticated explanation of what he means when he says resurrection claims of Christianity are "true". He lays the foundations by giving a thoughtful critique of Hume and what he calls sentential reductionism ("the view that sentences have their evidence for or against their truth or falsity isolated from and independent of other sentences."). And then he questions the empirical foundations of modern science by pointing out that even things like electrons, magnetism and black holes cannot be perceived directly and are mere theoretical constructs which we only have indirect access to.

By the same token, for West, the truth or falsehood of Christianity isn't a matter of whether the tomb was empty the Sunday after the Crucifixion, but is also something indirect. As West puts it:

I am suggesting that the primary test for the "truth value" of particular Christian descriptions and their resurrection claim is their capacity to facilitate the existential appropriate of Jesus Christ. This means that any "true" Christian description makes the Reality of Jesus Christ available, that it promotes and encourages the putting of oneself on the line, going to the edge of life's abyss and finding out whether the Reality of Jesus Christ... can sustain and support, define and develop oneself in one's perennial struggle of becoming a fuller and more faithful self in Christ.

I think this alternative notion of truth is definitely interesting but it seems a bit of a cop out. I sympathize because I think I went through something similar in terms of my own path but in general, if you have to go through a great deal of mental gymnastics in order to justify a certain religious label to yourself, then maybe it is time to think about shopping for a different religious tradition? Just a thought.