Radical or Moral

In the Documentary For the Bible Told Me So, there is a lot of discussions of people’s interpretation of the bible. Especially the verse of Leviticus 18:6 “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female. It is an abomination”, this came into play a lot because it is one of the few verses that explicitly condemns homosexuality. The big discussion was people’s interpretations of the Bible, whether they were a more literalist interpretation or a more general and relative interpretation. The documentary showed the more literal interpreters having the more ‘bigoted’ and conservative views on homosexuality because they were taking the words that the bible was saying and then applying that their modern lives. The other people in the documentary that took the more general and relative rout to seeing the bible were those who were able see homosexuality as something that isn’t necessarily bad because they understand that the bible was written in a time that is different from the time that we are currently in and that as time progresses the meanings of things change. These same people see the Leviticus verse as being about reproduction and its necessity at the time, whereas the literalist see this verse as being solely about homosexuality being wrong without any other context. These different views show the big relationship between an active interpretation of media and its effect on how people chose, or choose, to form their views around this interpretation.

The views in this documentary are important because they show how important ones own views and the way that something is presented to them can change the way people think. One big point from the documentary that showed this was an interview in the documentary of a woman on a street who was talking about Christians and their views on homosexuality. In this interview, this woman said that most Christians hadn’t even read the whole bible, but rather chose to just listen to what other Christians who had supposedly read the Bible were saying. This issue with this is that people don’t get the chance to actually see for themselves what the bible says, but instead are told what they should think because the people who are telling them this are the ones who are perceived as these beacons of god and god’s word and if they didn’t listen to these people they would be seen as going against god. This goes a bit with the encoding/decoding idea because some of these people are able to understand the concept that these preachers and ministers are going to preach different things according to what their specific church believes and these people who choose to continue to go to these churches where things are like this need to be able to decode what these ‘beacons of god’ are saying and then choose if its made to radicalize them, or if it’s actually meant to teach them a real and important message.

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