My brother Dick texted me, “Young-sook and I went and saw the movie Bonnhoffer,” and I sighed, but didn’t reply.
Both my living brothers are mega-Christians, who often see right-wing propaganda movies. I’m the family’s movie buff, so sometimes I’m invited, and after I (always) decline they tell me later how great the movie was.
Over the past few years, they’ve invited me to see Sound of Freedom, the conspiracy-theory-soaked story of a shady guy who says he rescues people from child sexual abuse trafficking, and 2000 Mules, the lie-‘documentary’ about the stolen election of 2020 which, of course, was not stolen, and Am I Racist?, where the answer will be no, and God’s Not Dead 5: In God We Trust, where the answer is in the title, and a recent Ronald Reagan hagiography titled Reagan.
I hadn’t even heard of Bonnhoffer, which is how I knew it’s a Christian fake-movie. Did some quick googling, which reveals it to be Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, about a Lutheran minister who “joins a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and fate to save millions of Jews from genocide.”
Wikipedia tells me Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a real person, a preacher who resisted the Nazis and was hung for plotting to kill Hitler. That could make for an interesting movie, but this movie is from the same liars who made Sound of Freedom, so it probably has Bonhoeffer as an action hero fighting immigrants and abortionists.
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Downtown, a few blocks from Pike Place Market, a street preacher was doing what street preachers do, hellfire and brimstone into a microphone. It was amplified so loud you could hear his Christian nonsense from two blocks away, and if you walk a third block there’s a different preacher. And the mayor wonders why people avoid coming downtown.
God is great, see, but He needs an electrified amplifier, cranked up to 12.
To get where I wanted to be, I had to get past the preacher, and even on the other side of the street it hurt my ears. “Dear poor sweet child,” he said. “Dear poor sweet child, pooooor sweeeeet child…” I looked around and couldn’t guess who he was talking to. All of Seattle, I guess? We’re all poor sweet children?
“Dear poor sweet child,” he said for the fifth or sixth time, then paused for dramatic effect before raising his already-amplified voice for his grand appeal: “Hath… thou… forsaken Him?”
And I stopped and inhaled, and screamed at that charlatan from across the street: “Yes… I… hath!”
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I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again the next time: I love the First Amendment, and strongly believe every human has the right to say what they want, whether it’s smart or stupid, and whether I agree or don’t.
But that cannot possibly include a right to say it over amplified speakers in a public place where people can’t escape it.
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When I was a kid and then a young adult, I pondered the big questions of religion and politics, humans, ‘god’ and the meaning of life, etc, but found no answers. You assume or at least hope everyone does that pondering, but most people seem to settle for bullshit answers like God or Trump or whatever.
I haven’t settled, but no matter how loud the speakers are cranked, Christianity is not the answer for me.
When I was a kid, I remember thinking that eventually, things would make sense. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” is what old people said, and I assumed that they understood, and that eventually I’d understand, too.
Turns out it’s all bollocks, of course. Nobody understands jack crap, certainly not the preachers and teachers who pretend they understand and want to explain it.
There are no answers to the big questions, but most people fake it, hang on by white knuckles and fingernails to pretended answers, because for most people, having no answers is unbearable.
If you ask me — and nobody ever has — it’s better not knowing, and admitting that you don’t know, than pretending.
Check back with me after I’ve gotten the diagnosis and Doc says I have six weeks to live or whatever, but even when that happens, I’m pretty sure it won’t change my outlook on the big questions.
1/1/2025
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