Did you hear about the actress who plays Mary in the new Nativity film? She’s 16, umarried, pregnant, and apparently got un-invited to the official Vatican screening.
This is off-topic, but damn, Jill, I thought you had finals. I hope this doesn’t mean you’ve started using speed (again, only jesting).
Yeah, I do have finals, but I’m stuck in mind-numbing review sessions where I’m not really learning anything, but still feel inclined to go. Hence, mad blogging. And hoping that my subconcious picks up everything I need to know, since I’m not actually paying attention.
Good thing she didn’t have an abortion, eh? Good thing people believed her about the Son of God thing, lest she be stoned to death. 😉
Isn’t the Mary analogy one that should be verbotten as far as abortion rights go? I mean, that’s (potentially) Jesus in there.
And Sandy, did you somehow manage to miss the last line of that picture? It’s one thing to say “don’t judge”, it’s another thing to say “don’t judge because you would’ve been wrong to judge Mary”. The former would be applicable, while the latter warns us not to judge a pregnant teen because you never know if she could be a virgin and carrying the Messiah. This is like something out of The Onion. Imagine a poster with a portrait of Saddam Hussein and the caption “Jesus was sentenced to the death penalty too. Think before you judge this Christmas.” All things considered, you’d be better off with a standard “outlaw the death penalty” poster.
Those bumps on her belly freaked me out for just a second, before I realized they’re her fingers. At first glance, they looked like nipples on an udder.
I think the picture is meant to point out that many religious conservatives are quick to judge unmarried pregnant women (see Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown), especially when they’re pregnant teenage girls. The point isn’t “Don’t judge because it could be Jesus in there,” it’s “One of the most important figures in your religious belief system was a pregnant teenager, who was offered no resources and little help.” The point being, extend some kindness and understanding to pregnant teens, regardless of which choice they make — be it abortion, parenthood or adoption. Shaming them isn’t helpful, and it isn’t very Christian.
“One of the most important figures in your religious belief system was a pregnant teenager, who was offered no resources and little help.” – Jill In whose belief system exactly? Remember, as much as certain Bishops would like to think that they can use the support of fundies as tools to get their own agenda moved forward, these Bishops are as much tools as those pro-Likud Jewish types who relish the “support” given to them by the fundies. IIRC, Protestant fundamentalism views pretty much any celebration of Mary as vaguely Papist and hence vaguely un-Christian. Mary gave birth to Jesus … and that was the end of her role. Who care about what happened to her afterward: so long as she didn’t get an abortion, it was ok, eh?
Interestingly enough, Joseph is commended in the Bible for refusing to make a big judgemental stink out of Mary’s pregnancy, and that before the whole dream-revelation thing. Sure, he wasn’t going to marry her, but he wasn’t going to rant and rave and generally be a jerk about it either. Something to consider as well.
Did you hear about the actress who plays Mary in the new Nativity film? She’s 16, umarried, pregnant, and apparently got un-invited to the official Vatican screening. Hadn’t heard that. I was just impressed that they cast someone with brown eyes and a tan.
Funny, Sandy. When I showed up at church pregnant at 17, my minister defended me with a very similar line. So is he stupid, or just un-Christian?
One of the most important figures in your religious belief system was a pregnant teenager, who was offered no resources and little help. I would agree with you here, but I think pregnant teens are not getting shamed so much for being pregnant, as for having pre-marital sex. The pregnancy just makes the fact of pre-marital sex public, while other teens can keep their own sex a secret from the adult community. The only place you may have a point is that the community may suspect pre-marital sex is happening, but pregnancy forces them to face it. They may resent this, but I still think it’s fundamentally the pre-marital sex that’s being judged. Not, say, the teen’s failure to use birth control. With Mary, she’s a virgin and that takes the analogy to a completely different place. Of course she’s not getting judged. I also disagree with your characterization of Mary being a pregnant teen who “was offered no resources a little help”. Quite the contrary. Husband, family, extended family, shepherds, angels, and what about all of that frankincense and myrrh? And gold? Off-topic, I know. And this is just gratuitous.
I’m with Sandy: thought it was a joke. I mean… I guess maybe it might touch a Christian. But if you subscribe to the notion that there is no magical god sperm and Mary was just lying about how she got knocked up so as to not get stoned, it’s just sort of weird.
With Mary, she’s a virgin and that takes the analogy to a completely different place. Of course she’s not getting judged. I also disagree with your characterization of Mary being a pregnant teen who “was offered no resources a little help”. Quite the contrary. Husband, family, extended family, shepherds, angels, and what about all of that frankincense and myrrh? And gold? Off-topic, I know. Actually, she was judged. Joseph didn’t believe her story, and decided to call off the marriage. He was a nice guy, though, so he decided not to expose her to public shame. Then an angel appeared and backed up her story, and so Joseph married her after all. It’s not that we should not judge because the woman might be a virgin who’s carrying the son of God, but because Mary herself was vulnerable at an extremely difficult time. And, of course, the whole story is about mercy and forgiveness, because it’s about someone who was born in order to redeem all of humanity. And in fact, “You can’t kill this guy because the Son of God was crucified” arguably has some validity from a theological standpoint, but it’s not because Jesus didn’t deserve to die.
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. – Matthew 25:40
Oh, but you know it’s okay for her to have a baby out of wedlock because she didn’t have to have dirty ole sex to get her baby. No no, “god” granted her the “Free Pregnancy Pass” so she wouldn’t have to dirty up her vagina with a penis.
I would agree with you here, but I think pregnant teens are not getting shamed so much for being pregnant, as for having pre-marital sex. I actually think it’s a little of both — they shouldn’t be having premarital sex, but they also shouldn’t have been so “irresponsible” as to get pregnant. Case in point: This same image is used for a Facebook group, and some of the comments are as follows: If halfwits don’t know how to use condoms or lack the intellectual capacity to remember to take their pills I see no reason why they should be respected for it. Anyone who brings a child into the world without giving it the best chance it can possibly have is not only selfish, but deeply, deeply stupid. And Jesus was supposedly begotten. He wasn’t the product of too much White Lightning and a premature ejaculation in the loos of a club… and Why on earth should single mothers, by default, deserve our respect? Is there something particularly noble about getting pregnant? Perhaps bringing a child into the world without the ability or maturity to care for it is totally irresponsible? Either way, this group sentimentalises a complex phenomenon in an absurd fashion. There’s a fair share of sex-shaming in there, but it’s more along the lines of “you were stupid to get pregnant, and irresponsible to bring a child into the world” than “having sex is dirty.”
With Mary, she’s a virgin and that takes the analogy to a completely different place. Of course she’s not getting judged. I also disagree with your characterization of Mary being a pregnant teen who “was offered no resources a little help”. Quite the contrary. Husband, family, extended family, shepherds, angels, and what about all of that frankincense and myrrh? And gold? Off-topic, I know. She didn’t get that stuff when she was pregnant — the baby Jesus got it after he was born, and the wise men and shephards were told that he was the son of God. None of that went to Mary, and none of it helped her while she was pregnant. By contrast, Mary’s only help was Joseph, who traveled with her to Bethlehem, where they went from inn to inn and were routinely turned away. One innkeeper finally let them stay in the stable, with the animals. I would definitely characterize that as “no resources and little help.”
Oh, but you know it’s okay for her to have a baby out of wedlock because she didn’t have to have dirty ole sex to get her baby. This is sort of my point, that it was only wrong to judge Mary for having pre-marital sex because she didn’t actually do it. So it doesn’t make sense to tell people not to judge teens for pre-marital sex because Mary was pregnant. Caring for and supporting (financially, emotionally, etc.) someone regardless of their action seems different than “not judging” it. I don’t have a problem with a church judging that pre-marital sex is wrong. In fact, it’s probably a bigger problem that they don’t have the courage to judge it more openly, since disapproval of something without actually addressing it leads to ostracism. For instance, if you’re at a Muslim mosque where the doctrine is that eating pork is a sin against God, and you walk into mosque covered in the bacon bits you’ve just been eating, someone is going to call you on it. Then one of three things will happen: A. You recognize you’re wrong and vow never to eat pork again B. You argue that eating pork isn’t sinful, and you go to a mosque where they teach a doctrine that you agree with C. You agree that eating pork is wrong but say you don’t care and you’ll do it anyway–you get kicked out of the mosque, where you don’t really belong anyway If Muslims didn’t have the stomach for addressing the issue at all due to fear of confronting you with a wrong, it wouldn’t matter whether you were in category “A”, because you wouldn’t have the chance to confess or repent, and you couldn’t properly re-enter the community. Nor would you get thrown out of the mosque, you’d just get quietly shunned. You can see how this would be dysfunctional, a mosque full of people who don’t know or agree on their own doctrines. Likewise, someone in a Christian church where pre-marital sex is deemed sinful should be confronted with the issue if they have pre-marital sex. Maybe they think it was wrong and want to repent. Maybe they disagree with the doctrine of the church. Maybe they don’t know what to think because the church is too uncomfortable addressing pre-marital sex. Regardless, it’s better that the judging take place openly and with some possibility of resolution, rather than behind-the-back whispering, etc.
Jill, I still don’t believe that the religious objection to teen pregnancy is failure to use birth control properly. However, even if some combination of religious and societal rules say that the irresponsibility in getting pregnant is itself a sin, it doesn’t apply to Mary since she didn’t get pregnant through irresponsibility, any more than she committed the sin of pre-marital sex. As for the “resources”, fair enough that Mary didn’t get the gold, etc. while she was pregnant. She got it right after she stopped being pregnant. Having the money is most useful once you’ve got a child to support, but still, technically true. On the other hand, Mary was only at the manger for a short time before she stopped being pregnant also. From what I understand, the reason they got stuck in a manger was because all the inns were overflowed due to the census. I guess you can speculate that somehow the stigma followed them to Bethlehem or they were so destitute and normally people had money for bribes to get in the inns. Maybe they were the only ones in a manger, or maybe lots of other people didn’t even have that and had to stay in a tent. But it’s speculation. That doesn’t address what their financial situation was for the majority of the time while Mary was pregnant, prior to the trip to Bethlehem. Is there any evidence that they were especially poor or that their family cut them out? Didn’t their families and extended families support them? Once again it becomes speculation, and the only thing I can think of either way is the time when Mary and Joseph forget Jesus at the temple when he’s a kid, and that’s because of the custom of the huge extended family where they’re all taking care of each other, such that the parents aren’t keeping tabs on their own kid. If they were cut out of the family, that wouldn’t have happened. It may sound nitpicky, but I don’t see any support for your argument that Mary was particularly alone or without resources.
Did you hear about the actress who plays Mary in the new Nativity film? She’s 16, umarried, pregnant, and apparently got un-invited to the official Vatican screening. I don’t know about the “uninvited” part, but she is pregnant http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/6/story.cfm?c_id=6&ObjectID=10413564
Well here was where I got it from: http://www.cathnews.com/news/611/144.php The irony of the situation (if true) is what’s killing me.
Sandy, sandy, sandy. Your bacon bit analogy left out option D: Ditch organized religion altogether. I became so tired of guilt inspired self-hatred and constant moralizing that I stopped being a Christian in my late teens. Ironically, after years of healing from this emotional mess, I finally started to experience a sense of spirituality—for the first time in my life. You know what really sucks? Kids are more vulnerable to this damaging rhetoric than adults. As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing short of emotional abuse. While I’m aware of branches of Christianity that do not take pride in condemning others, it seems that the most vocal members of a religion are often its most judgmental members. A fine example is the Religious Right: they’ve been giving Christianity a bad reputation for a couple decades now. Do you really want to add to that momentum?
Thlayli – Some of the actors who played the wise men have Middle Eastern sounding names, and Shohreh Aghdashloo, who is Iranian, and Alexander Siddig, who is from Sudan, are also in the movie. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool too, especially after white blue-eyed Jesus in the Mel Gibson movie.
Wrenching briefly off-topic into pedantsville: From what I understand, the reason they got stuck in a manger was because all the inns were overflowed due to the census. Of course, the whole census justification to get Jesus of Nazareth somehow born in Bethlehem (as prophesied for the Redeeming Messiah) is tosh. The Romans were the most pragmatic bureaucrats of the ancient world, and there is no way they would have disrupted the commerce from which they drew taxes by forcing people to leave their town of residence to go anywhere other than the nearest market town for a day-trip to see the censor and be counted. That’s certainly not how they did the census in Italia: why on earth would they do it in this most impractical way in Palestina?
…Alexander Siddig, who is from Sudan, are also in the movie. He is? Gosh darn it. Now I have to go see this movie. In other threads, I found this to be hilarious: “And Jesus was supposedly begotten. He wasn’t the product of too much White Lightning and a premature ejaculation in the loos of a club…” Mostly it’s because that’s very close to how I think Yeshua was concieved. But then, I don’t require that my “nice philosophers that have good ideas” be perfect in every single way, all the way down to their conception.
Just a few connections: Mary is played by the young actress who was in Whale Rider; Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays John the Baptist’s mother, was the mother in the family terrorist cell in 24 a year or two back and was in House of Sand of Fog (her interesting life story here).
holy shit, Alexander Siddig? After Syriana, I declared him my new imaginary boyfriend. I love him. But I have no patience for nativity movies. 🙁
Thlayli – Some of the actors who played the wise men have Middle Eastern sounding names, and Shohreh Aghdashloo, who is Iranian, and Alexander Siddig, who is from Sudan Who was originally Siddig al Fadil, or something like that; he changed it in the fourth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in order to screw with the merchandising, due to some argument he’d had with them, I believe.
Dr. Bashir? Yeah, I might even think about renting this, but I’m with Lorelei on this one. Bible movies…meh. Siddig, however, is an amazing actor. He was the only reason Kingdom of Heaven was worth anything to me.
I’d heard that Siddig changed his name due to people f*cking up the pronunciation far, far too regularly. Hi simply got sick of it and decided to make life easier for all concerned. But that could just be fan gossip…. Of course, hearing that both he and Ms. Aghdashloo are in it almost makes me want to see the film. *Almost*, having very little patience with Nativity movies/TV shows/books in general.