Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!
I grew up in the church. It was a liberal church, to be sure, but still in the church. I have long since given up religion as well as religious belief. It’s my position that religion, as a rule, makes things worse, a notion probably put into my head by the title of a Christopher Hitchens book, but one that I stand by. I’m in mind of Hitchens as I look at Medusa, a recent film out of Brazil. This is a film that is clearly referencing Jair Bolsonaro in a lot of respects, at least in terms of its approach to the effects of extreme belief.
Hitchens tells an anecdote of an interview with right-wing whackaloon Dennis Prager where Prager asks him if he were in a foreign city and was approached by a group of young men, would he be more or less nervous if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting. Hitchens responds by saying that, staying only with the letter B, he’s had that experience in Baghdad, Belgrade, Bosnia, Bombay, and Belfast, and if you were ever in any of those cities and you saw men leaving a prayer meeting, you knew exactly how fast you had to run in the other direction. Thanks to Medusa, we can add Brazil to the list.
