I’ve rented it (Prime Suspect) at Blockbuster. Are you the English actor Charles Dance?

Am I forced to choose only one!!?? Well, it would be West Side Story, not just the incredible music, but the wonderful dancing. I want to tag onto something that Annette comments on: the wonderful ability of musical art to address important issues, and share an experience that I had with the movie South Pacific. Like West Side Story, South Pacific deals with the issue of intolerance and fear of others from a culture we don’t know. When I was 13 or 14, South Pacific was playing at a local drive in and I asked my dad if we could do a daughter/dad thing and go and see it. I was thoroughly engrossed in the movie and was surprised when at some point mid-movie, my dad started up the car and we left. I immediately asked why and kept asking why we couldn’t stay to see the rest of the movie. He was very angry and said something about how he could just predict how it would end: The two couples would overcome their differences and live happily ever after (we hadn’t stayed long enough to know that the younger white Navy guy would not stay with the beautiful native girl he loved). As I look back, I can see how my dad in subtle and not-so-subtle ways wanted to see that I was ‘carefully taught’ to believe that white people were superior to other people. I don’t know what happened to my dad in his early life that taught him those lessons of prejudice, but I am glad he wasn’t able to teach them to me. While I do tremendously enjoy the more ‘non-message’ musicals like “Hello Dolly”, the ones that touch my heart the closest are the ones that can frame sometimes hard-to-hear points-of-view through great music, staging, and dancing.

This is certaily a unique website and I appreciate the thoughtful posts of everyone. (And thanks to the ladies who started the site, I visited after I heard you on Charlie Rose.) I want to thank especially the civil tone of the Christians who have posted their beliefs. Although I don’t believe the Bible is the innerant, inspired word of God as evangelical Christians do, I believe that your beliefs should be treated with respect, just as I believe that my opinions should be treated with respect. If we can’t figure out how to do this, the whole world is in big trouble.

What an interesting discussion this is. In my early teens through to my late 20s, I was a born-again Christian (raised in the Lutheran tradition and believed that anyone who confessed Jesus as Savior and Lord was a Christian), and actively participated in many evangelical activities to spread the Gospel. Also sang in a couple of small ‘pop’ Christian siniging groups traveling around Canada and the United States to ‘share Jesus’ with people so they could be ‘saved’. I no longer consider myself a Christian and while I do believe there is some kind of meaningful afterlife after we die, I certainly don’t know for sure — I am quite comfortable with this unknowingness about an afterlife. What I am more curious about, is what people believe human beings are. Are we just sinful people who need to be saved? Do we have a spark of the Divine that can be nurtured? Do we live ‘in’ God and are therefore each a unique representation of God in this world, or do we live outside of the Divine Spirit and need to either believe a certain something (e.g., Jesus) to have God live in our hearts/souls or do we need to do something (e.g., love our neighbors as we love ourselves) to get to a place called heaven? I think it is ultimately what we believe being human is that is going to shape how we treat each other and live in this world.