“Christian” Piracy and the Blinding Effects of Sin

A friend notified me today about a “Christian” website where “Christians” illegally share a variety of forms of digital Christian content—from Christian music to Christian movies to Christian software. Scores of people, many of whom are in seminary training for pastoral ministry, post pirated Bible software on the web and invite others to download it, giving detailed instructions on how to unlock the software and bypass the security features. I’m blown away by how easily “Christians” can steal in order to enable them to have access to biblical resources.¹ Something about that just doesn’t make sense. But that’s what sin does to us. It causes us to act in utterly irrational ways.

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1. I’d image that most of these individuals wouldn’t walk into a Christian bookstore and steal content off of the shelves. The fact that downloadable media and software is intangible makes it much easier to justify. [↩ Back]

The Nativity Story (2006)

I bought The Nativity Story for my parents for Christmas (along with Planet Earth and Blue Planet) and remembered that I had never posted about it here. Shanna and I watched it last spring when it first came out on DVD. It’s not fresh on my mind, so I can’t give a detailed review, but I do remember enough to know that I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

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One Night with the King

Michael O. Sajbel, dir. One Night with the King. 20th Century Fox, 2006. 124 min. PG

[rate 1.5]

Shanna and I watched One Night with the King last night and were incredibly (!) disappointed. We had just finished reading Esther in our Bible reading, so the story was fresh on our minds. We were expecting the movie to tell faithfully the story of Esther. Not so. Probably only 25% of the movie corresponds to the biblical account. I’m not talking about just filling in the details. I’m talking about totally scrapping the biblical story, picking up a handful of those scraps, and then putting them back together in such a way that they are virtually unrecognizable. Well, maybe that’s a little overstatement, but you get my point. Over and over throughout the movie, we’d stop and say, “What?! That’s not how that happened! Why did they change that?” Not quite The Gospel of John! (More like The Ten Commandments.) It wasn’t until the end that we learned that the movie wasn’t supposed to be retelling the biblical story of Esther but the fictional story of the novel Hadassah: One Night with the King. (I vaguely remember reading that, but had forgotten.) Knowing that up front would probably have helped significantly.

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The Ten Commandments (2006)

Shanna and I got another call from the local movie store inviting us to come in for a free rental. We took them up on it and got The Ten Commandments. It was just shy of three hours long, which, in this case, was not a good thing! It stood in stark contrast to the commitment to following the biblical story that The Gospel of John evidenced. I’m not opposed to filling in some of the details to make the story flow. Nor am I totally opposed to omitting some of the story to make it a reasonable length. However, I am opposed to making up all sorts of ridiculous things and adding them in addition to or in place of the biblical account! I did benefit from the few portions that were an accurate recounting of the Exodus record. Seeing the events visualized brings them to life. I’ll read Exodus in a new way next time. This benefit notwithstanding, The Ten Commandments (2006) was incredibly poor. Don’t waste your three hours.