Movie review: ‘Agora’

I first became interested in watching the film, “Agora,” upon reading the synopsis on Netflix, which described the movie thusly:

As Christianity gains steam in Roman Egypt toward the end of the fourth century A.D., a young slave (Max Minghella) weighs his desire for freedom against his growing love for his mistress (Rachel Weisz), an atheist as well as a professor of philosophy.

Agora

Set in the ancient Egyptian city of [[Alexandria]] in the 4th century, the film recounts the personal, social and religious conflicts that begin to take shape as [[Christianity]] gains a wider influence in other regions of the world, like Northwest Africa.

In the beginning, we are met with the atheist philosopher [[Hypatia]] who is instructing her small group of students on the movements of the planets, which were called “wanderers” at the time. Throughout the film, she grapples with the once-important question: In what way do the planets revolve around the sun. She knows, of course, that [[Earth]] is round and that the sun, not Earth, as early believers claimed, is at the center of the [[solar system]], known as [[heliocentrism]]. Because objects fall in precisely the same way from no matter what height, she learns on a trip to sea that the Earth is not rotating in any way that is at once noticeable to humans in real time. Thus she was left with the question of how the concept that we know today as [[gravity]] affects the movement of the “wanderers,” all the while, being ridiculed by Christians for correctly believing that Earth was round. She also ponders a theory that, as best I understand it, held that within the larger orbit of the planets, each individual planet demonstrated its own, more localized and smaller orbit. Hypatia was also attributed by one of her pupil’s, [[Synesius]], later bishop of Cyrene, with the invention of the [[astrolabe]], although some others have apparently come before Hypatia’s.

While Hypatia is wrestling with these questions — in the movie, she says that if she could only figure out a solution of the Earth’s orbit, she could die happy — her slave Davus, an intelligent servant who falls in love with her, later comes to believe in Christianity and joins a rather violent group that eventually subdues the pagans, of which, Hypatia’s father is a member, and destroys the famous Alexandria library, which at one time, was filled with now-lost volumes of learning, smashed, of course, by the believers, who were, as ever, hostile to science and philosophy. Here is the [[Wikipedia]] snippet on that unfortunate scene:

In the late 4th century, persecution of pagans by newly Christian Romans had reached new levels of intensity. In 391, the Patriarch Theophilus destroyed all pagan temples in Alexandria under orders from Emperor Theodosius I.

Later in the film, Davus begins to question the brutal methods dished out by his brethren, stating to one of his fellow believers that Jesus himself forgave those who persecuted him even while on the cross. Touche. Nonetheless, that objection didn’t seem to make a dent on his radical cohorts. The Christian/Pagan conflict then began to heat up in Alexandria as another of Hypatia’s students, [[Orestes]], now prefect of the city, and Hypatia’s confidant, is upbraided for his refusal to kneel to God when a passage in the New Testament is read during a service about how men should not seek advise of women. The apologist leading the serve all but by name identifies Hypatia as one who practices witchcraft, as she is the most well-known woman in the town. In those days, and even in 17th century America, women either bowed the knee or were disgracefully accused of sorcery or licentiousness.

On Synesius’ urging, however, Orestes approaches Hypatia to ask her, at least in deed, to go through with a baptismal to protect her from retribution from the Christians. Orestes said he could no longer protect her with his troops because of increased pressure from the believers. He also said he could not function in his duties as prefect without her counsel, adding that he did not want one of the main Christian leaders to “win” by dividing the two friends. To which Hypatia replied in what I would call the climax of the film:

Oh, Orestes. He’s already won.

She then walks out into the streets and is immediately arrested by the same Christian group to which Davus belongs.

As the movie concludes, Hypatia is marched up the steps of a church, while ruthlessly being mocked as a witch and whore by the religious. The stunning, soft-faced and exceeding intelligent Hypatia is then stripped naked and is about to be skinned alive. Davus, to save Hypatia from the humiliating and torturous fate, suggests to his Christian brethren with a different technique: stoning. While the group temporary disperses to gather their stones — persecuting tools are always within arms reach — he approaches the woman he loves, wraps her arms around her from behind, cranes his head and looks into her eyes. They both nod in agreement in what must happen. He proceeds to cover her mouth and nose with his hand to suffocate her. When the believers come back, the Hypatia is already dead, and Davus simply says that she fainted and walks out of the church as the other believers throw rocks at the carcass. She’s believed to have been dragged naked through the streets, although the film does not depict this. I would be interested to know if Davus left Christianity after that episode or he continued in his belief. Perhaps he began to follow a more moderate brand or he disavowed his faith. Either is probable since he appeared quite devout, yet humane and thoughtful.

Given how beautiful and reasonably-minded Hypatia is thought to have been, I felt intense anger at the end of this film that such a smart and lovely creature had to endure such a hideous death by people who thought they had God on their side. And more than that, the feeling was tinged with the thought that she probably died in real life by a much worse means than suffocation and also that countless women were burned and hung or stoned as witches because of religion and ignorance. That’s not fiction.

[[Christopher Hitchens]] has written an entire book on the how religion has poisoned history down through the ages, but we can heap on more to the number: the record of science and free thought in antiquity or at any time, really. The famous library in Alexandria was completely upended and basically converted to an animal stable. Who knows how many secular or scientific works of antiquity have been lost because of the pomposity and outright certainty of the religious that they are in the right, when science more and more heaps on the evidence that it’s precisely the other way around. For instance, the authors of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics often use the claim of the historicity of religious texts and the large number of texts that have been preserved through history to validate their supernatural claims. But how many more ancient secular, scientific and philosophical texts might we have if the religious strong hand hasn’t warred against free thought and inquiry since religion was invented? How much history might have been written differently had not religious strong-handing elevated certain preferred works and subdued or outright destroyed others as in the library. For, it is in the religious, that the religious held the power in the times of Hypatia. Else, she would have gotten to live a full life. Else, the works that she so admired in the Alexandria library might have been preserved.

I’ll leave it to those who have yet to see the film to discover whether or not she finally answered the question about the Earth’s rotation and orbit. In total, I thought the videography was excellent, which at times panned away to provocative and unique angles, and at others, expanded out to view the entire globe from space, as if to remind the reader, not only of religion’s near ubiquitous hold on mankind but about Hypatia’s more personalized struggle to figure the calculus of the cosmos.

[rating:3.5/5]

Legislative idiocy

As I have stated previously, that some of our elected officials can manage to tie their shoes in the morning really is a miraculous thing. Rachel Maddow recently made light of a few examples. And here they are:

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And the coup de grace:

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Astonishing. No? About the South Dakota House measure, to reiterate, a lot of folks have the idea of a scientific theory misconstrued. Gravity, as we all know, prevents us from floating off into space. Literally, it keeps us grounded. Too much of it and our bones can’t hold up under the weight. Not enough of it, and we’re heavenward. Our planet has just enough of it. Yet, gravity is still yet a theory. This site explains it well:

In popular usage, a theory is just a vague and fuzzy sort of fact.
But to a scientist a theory is a conceptual framework that *explains*
existing facts and predicts new ones. For instance, today I saw the
Sun rise. This is a fact. This fact is explained by the theory that
the Earth is round and spins on its axis while orbiting the sun. This
theory also explains other facts, such as the seasons and the phases
of the moon, and allows me to make predictions about what will happen
tomorrow.

This means that in some ways the words “fact” and “theory” are
interchangeable. The organisation of the solar system, which I used as
a simple example of a theory, is normally considered to be a fact that
is explained by Newton’s theory of gravity. And so on.

A hypothesis is a tentative theory that has not yet been tested.
Typically, a scientist devises a hypothesis and then sees if it “holds
water” by testing it against available data. If the hypothesis does
hold water, the scientist declares it to be a theory.

An important characteristic of a scientific theory or hypotheis is
that it be “falsifiable”. This means that there must be some
experiment or possible discovery that could prove the theory untrue.
For example, Einstein’s theory of Relativity made predictions about
the results of experiments. These experiments could have produced
results that contradicted Einstein, so the theory was (and still is)
falsifiable.

So, nearly all that we know about the world, from gravity to climate change to evolution are still theories, but as it regards the scientific method, it’s as good as fact. No one disputes that existence of gravity, as we have come to define it.

Thus, the South Dakota’s House’s bill, stating

That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;

doesn’t make much sense. One has to go no further than the Merriam-Webster to grasp the validity of scientific theories. The scientific definition of the word is:

a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena

And briefly on Rep. Franks’ comments on slavery. First, black folks weren’t counted as humans in the Antebellum South, were they? So, right off the bat, Franks’ idea of aborted fetuses are afforded an advantage over slave children. Rightly or not, Franks considers embryos right up to birth to be fully human. Slaves weren’t granted that designation no matter how old or young.

He also noted that slavery was a “crushing mark on America’s soul,” but nevertheless, “far more black children are being devastated by the policies of today (noting, supposedly, that 50 percent of all black fetuses are aborted) than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.”

As I recall, children today aren’t tortured, humiliated, raped (females), separated from their parents and sold as cattle in America today, and abortion by no means can be equated to tragedies befallen to living human beings, children nonetheless. Even if one takes a Christian worldview, the aborted fetuses find a new home in heaven. I’m not going to lay out my view of abortion here, but suffice it to say that it’s egregiously wrong and horrifying that an elected official would attempt to make a political point at the expense of those who suffered under the tyrannical and stupified slave system of the 18th and 17th centuries in this country (much of which folks justified biblically), not to mention the millions who suffered worldwide.

Our not-so-unique planet

I was just watching an episode of “The Universe,” a History Channel series in which the narrator asked:

How common might Earth-like planets be in the universe? Even if only 1 percent of all stars were circled by a planet like our own, that would still mean there are billions of other earths waiting to be discovered.

And according to this article and Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” he indicated:

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy.

And to quote the article:

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said.

“But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

So, notwithstanding basic organisms, what about intelligent life?

Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

That’s just in our own galaxy. The picture to the right shows 10,000 more.

As I’ve said before, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would seemingly create huge problems for young Earth (Actually, astronomy and astrophysics has already disproved young Earth theories) creationist theories about how life began here and, indeed, about existence in general, since the book of Genesis seems to indicate that there is only one planet on which life exists and its at the center of, well, everything that’s relevant.

The following blogger and other apologists suggest that the discovery of life on other planets would not shoot holes in the creation theory.

The discovery of alien life would not disprove Christianity anymore than it would prove evolution. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Bio-Chemist Michael Behe astutely pointed out that understanding how something works or exists now does not prove we know how that came to be the way it is. Applying that to this discussion, it is reasonable to say that even if evolutionary scientists announce the presence of alien life in a far corner of the cosmos, this does not prove that evolution was the means by which it got there. God could just as well have supernaturally created that life apart from earth according to his divine will. So Christians need not fear any negative implications regarding how their Creationist position might be affected by the discovery of alien life. They must simply be ready to say that God can choose to create life where he chooses. — astuteness.wordpress.com

I should note that this writer cites Michael Behe, whose own theories on irreducible complexity have long since been debunked by Richard Dawkins and others and even by his own university.

This apologist site attempts to clarify matters for us, suggesting that any extraterrestrial life that exists cannot be intelligent because the only intelligent beings God created were animals, man and angels (Of course, since the word “animals” includes both multi-and single-celled organisms, they may or may not be “intelligent.”) But looking outside of pages written in Bronze-age Palestine, what are the chances that no intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe? Given the number of possible galaxies (not to mention the number of possible Earths inside those galaxies), the chances would be infinitesimally small. And this question only assumes that intelligent life needs Earth-like conditions to exist. In fact, no rule says that intelligent life absolutely needs human conditions (oxygen, ideal climates) to exist. Who’s to say that a civilization can’t exist given a totally different set of parameters? So, take “infinitesimal” and multiply it by two, and that’s more like the actual chance that intelligent life doesn’t exist somewhere else.

As per its biblical charter, the same site says that the future of the universe is “forever linked to God’s timetable for mankind and the Earth.” And what bearing does this plan have on any potential life elsewhere?

If God had created intelligent life on other worlds, it is hard to imagine that their lives would be calibrated by the failures of Earth’s inhabitants. It seems unlikely and unfair that their distant planets would be destroyed by God because of His plan for Earth [If so, I guess that would make them doomed to eternal fire by proxy]. The implication of Scripture is that there are no other intelligent beings besides man, animals, and the angels.

It’s also hard to imagine that adults in Africa, who may have never heard about Jesus, will go to hell simply because of their ignorance of scripture, so we don’t have to look beyond our atmosphere for instances of unfairness. But these types of arguments are really the only way apologists can right the ship: to subvert what we know about the universe and to claim that any theory (evolution, the big bang, gravity!, etc.) doesn’t square with scripture and should, thus, be discarded. And when things don’t make any sense at all (For instance, the problem of extreme suffering and/or the fall of man under the auspices of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent god who knew about the whole tragic scenario before he set it in motion)? Just tout our lowly ignorance versus God’s omniscience.

Blue Dogs, more comic book-esque names

What is with the propensity to come up with comic book, superhero names for political factions, politicians and generals in Washington? Down through history, we have:

  • “Old Rough and Ready” (Zachary Taylor),
  • “The Railsplitter” (Abe Lincoln),
  • “Old Hickory” (Andrew Jackson),
  • “Young Hickory” (James Polk),
  • “Sage of Monticello” (Thomas Jefferson),
  • “Sons of Liberty” (anti-Loyalist group in American Revolution)
  • “Copperheads” (anti-Civil War, pro-peace and possibly slavery faction of the old-school Democrats)
  • “Blue Dogs” (current right-wing faction of the modern Democrats, once known as Dixie-crats”)

There are actually many more of these sorts of nicknames. The most recent to my knowledge has been this anti-health-care reform faction of Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition. The Copperheads, or the Peace Democrats, actually strike me as a similar group to the Blue Dogs. Although the party today and the party in the mid-19th stood for vastly different ideals, I see similarities. As we know, the Republicans in the mid-19th century were the more progressive, generally anti-slavery faction, while the Democrats were generally in favor of the South and for maintaining the institution of slavery.

The Copperheads wanted to the Civil War to end and blamed it on the abolitionists. They wanted peace, to their credit, but that would be at the expense of allowing the institution to continue. They said Lincoln was abusing his powers as president. Bizzarely, the most prominent Copperhead faction was the Order of the Golden Circle (the Golden Circle being the perceived and wished for circle of slavery extension from the southern United States around through a portion of South America back around to the South), and its most prominent politician was Clement L. Vallandigham, who was exiled in Canada for awhile.

The Blue Dogs, thus, are the fiscally conservative wing of the Democratic Party, as it exists today, but they are also, to their discredit, the more lobbied group by the health care industry:

… more than half the $1.1 million in campaign contributions the Democratic Party’s Blue Dog Coalition received came from the pharmaceutical, health care and health insurance industries, according to watchdog organizations. — Democratic Underground

and, like the Copperheads, are speaking out against the president taking too many liberties to expand federal power.

Given their ties to the health care industry, the Blue Dogs have largely adopted stances against health care reform. Go figure.

Should Black History Month be a thing of the past?

In a Feb. 8, 2009 column, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker supplied her view of Black History Month, dubbing it, “quaint, jarring, anachronistic.”

Coming from a black person, this comment itself may sound jarring. But it’s really not. As Tucker notes, even after Carter G. Woodson’s original 1926 Negro History Week went into effect, black folks were still the but of racial epithets and racial acts. Lynchings were still imminent for many. Segregation was still very much in force. Then, as now, Black History Month or Week or whatever we want to call it, means little, for those recognitions do little to repair scars, smooth hatreds or open locked minds.

As a child, I certainly remember sitting through special lessons in class geared to teach us about the important contributions of black people through America’s history, from Stowe to Tubman to Douglas to Du Bois down to King and Jackson (Jess, not Michael, though Michael has made important contributions as well). But even then (although it probably didn’t occur to me at the time), it merely seemed like we were just throwing black folks a bone, as if to say, “Sorry about those 150 or so years of slavery and another 100-plus of oppression and inequality under the law. Here’s a month just for you. Enjoy!”

I wonder how black children or youths feel nowadays when it comes time for the lessons on black leaders throughout history. Do they feel proud? Undermined? Embarrassed? No doubt, those lessons are important and every child, black or white or brown or yellow should be well-grounded in our own history. But shouldn’t we now, in the 21st century with a black man holding the highest office in the land, move past all the silliness of giving certain groups special tokens simply for being a certain color? As the new president has continually stressed, black people’s history is so inextricably bound up with America’s history that none of us can escape it. And why would we want to?

Tucker also notes that many traditional textbooks “gloss over” certain ugly periods in our history like Jim Crow and Reconstruction and the Black Codes. I would say this is largely true. Frankly, I knew little, if anything, about Reconstruction, lynchings or Jim Crowe before going to college. Some of that lack of knowledge falls on me. I didn’t have the hunger for learning that I do now. But part of that falls on our educational system. I knew all about Black History Month, even as a tyke. But after that month was over, it was back to pilgrims, stage coaches and manifest destiny (Interestingly, we learned less about the human atrocities resulting from that “destiny.” We did, however, touch briefly on the Trail of Tears. Thousands of Native Americans relocated from their homes and thousands dead. But let’s quickly move on.)

In short, at this point in our history, we can now, and should, move past the necessity for Black History Month. Of course, as a white person, it seems tougher for me to theoretically and socially to say such a thing than it is for Tucker. But perhaps that’s the point. The fact that it seems harder for a white person to say that proves the point. It’s time to move on and integrate the history of black folks with the history of America, both in our textbooks and in our social conscious. Or, as Tucker concludes:

Americans young and old, black, white and brown, will understand that black history and the nation’s history are one and the same. — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Quote of the day: Dec. 28, 2008

I’m currently reading Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason.” Phillip Foner, in his biographical introduction to Paine’s widely read work said this of Paine’s hunger for learning, despite the “meagre education” he received at Thetford Grammar School:

He continued his process of self-education throughout hsi life, convinced that ‘every person of learning is finally his own teacher.’ ‘I seldom passed five minutes of my life however circumstanced,’ he once observed, ‘in which I did not acquire some knowledge.’

Note: I thought it might be interesting to keep a running log of some of the better quotes from my personal reading each day (or as often as I can.) This is the first such post.

More Hispanic workers die on job; South Carolina holds highest rate

—Interestingly, the day after I submitted the previous post, The Associated Press ran a story about high death rates among Hispanic workers. The full text can be found here: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jdpxinePZgOwybkhwlComPxQ0o6AD9142EEG0 and the details of a study referenced in the story is here: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5722a1.htm

Long story short, the story attributes language and literacy barriers as partial contributors to this.

“Many of the Hispanic workers in construction are undocumented, and many of those who are recently arrived do face a language barrier,” said Rakesh Kochhar, associated director for research at the Pew Hispanic Center.

“A language barrier hinders understanding of a job, or the risks associated with it, or safety precautions,” said Kochhar, who was not part of the new study. — The Associated Press, June 5, 2008

Also, because of the nature of their condition, i.e.: lack of formal education, financial need, most of these folks work tough, physical jobs that are demanding on the body and often risky. The other noteworthy point of the article was that South Carolina boasted (probably not the right word) the highest death rate among Hispanic workers in the country at 23 out of 100,000 laborers. The article attributes a recent influx of Hispanic workers into the area as inflating the numbers to that degree.

Here’s some graphics to that end:

Hispanic worker related deaths/injuries versus others

Most common ways to die

State by state

In defense of Hispanics

A particular candidate here running for solicitor, or district attorney, has put up campaign signs around the county I live in which read: “Convict & Deport Illegals.” State-level district attorneys can do no more in deporting illegals than you or I. The race is for South Carolina’s 10th Circuit seat. Chrissy Adams is the incumbent, and Sarah Drawdy is the challenger. To Adams’ credit, at least she seems to understand the basic roles of the office she holds.

Addressing Drawdy’s claims that she would get tough on illegal immigration, Adams said:

(Drawdy) doesn’t understand the system, or she is playing on the heartstrings of people. If I could deport them, I would.

All we can do as solicitor is convict criminals. Judges sentence based on the crime committed. If a crime calls for probation, that is what a person gets. Judges’ sentences are based on facts, not immigration status. The federal government is the only agency with the authority to deport.

— Anderson Independent-Mail, May 17, 2008

But local and state-level candidates and elected officials (especially in the South) know all one must do to drum up votes is say they hate brown folks and want them out of the country to cater to their white, blue collar demographic, many of whom apparently feel they aren’t getting a fair shake economically. Thus, someone has to take the fall. If that demographic did not harbor those feelings, politicians would simply move on to the next hot-button issue that may excite and swing voters their way.

At the center of it is an irrational fear this country will be changed by an influx of Hispanics. The New York Times in a recent and blistering editorial against the injustices done to immigrants called this fear, “The Great Immigration Panic.” Referring, in part, to a raid by government officials on a meatpacking plant in Iowa, the editorial said:

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away. — NYTimes.com, June 3, 2008

According to the article, “hundreds” of workers were imprisoned, while the company that hired them remained unscathed.

Yes, many immigrants are here illegally. Yes, they broke the law by coming here. But what was their modus operandi for doing so? While many people’s M.O. for breaking the law is sick pleasure or mental illness, immigrants’ M.O. for breaking the law is hunger and the desire for their family to not have to live in poverty anymore. Legal Americans struggling in this country are arrested everyday for the same M.O., but immigrants don’t enjoy the same rights under the law, and more times than not, don’t enjoy similar rights even as people.

What many fail to understand, then, is that illegal or not, immigrants are still human beings. They have families back home or in the states and they have mouths to feed. They want what we all want: a shot at something better. But do we denigrate them to something less than human? Even the worst alleged murderers or sex offenders have their day in court. While many subjectively convict and crucify people in their minds without knowing any details, the law treats people with more dignity than most who call themselves conservatives.

The central irony of the right, or perhaps paradox, is that, while it is supposedly the party most evangelicals swing to, its axioms are often the least Christ-like. We don’t have to examine how the party’s policies on war and retaliation, health care and tax breaks for the wealthy undermine what the New Testament is about.

But such a vehemence against Hispanics, floating under the guise of “the law,” is at best, misguided, at worst, ugly. The folks who rage so adamantly against immigration care about their livelihoods, their legacy and their family’s future and are likely fearful that such things would be wrested from them if en masse immigration were allowed to continue unchecked. But, if they follow the Christian tradition, are these not only secondary benefits to life? Did Christ not say, throw down everything and follow me? According to the Bible, God is unconcerned about whether a person works 30 years to amass some given amount of property, for those things slip away from us more and more each day. He seems more concerned with how much one is willing to sacrifice for others.

Suppose the United States was truly a Christian nation, a theocracy, and your pastor was the president. Would the citizenship of the U.S., that being a congregration of 304 million, turn away the hungry fleeing from the south? Would that sort of U.S. hunker down, shut down its walls, become isolated from the world and ignore Christ’s message of caring for the downtrodden? If so, that’s not the Christianity that I want to be a part of, and it’s not the sort of Christianity read about in the Bible. In fairness, one must remember Romans 13, which says all must obey the laws of the land, while Acts 5 implies one must obey the laws of the land unless they come in contradition with the laws of God. Inhumanity is a law against God. Thus, it’s unclear why some on the right appear to be puppets to the law and so sternly clinch their fists against lawbreakers, when human life, in spite of the law, is being desecrated all around them.

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

Too often legal status is confused with identity, and some act as if legal status, like a wayward heart, can’t be rectified. But it can. It’s often much easier, however, just to sear an “illegal” mark branded into people’s foreheads, corral and turn them together into an evil monolith and never, never once look into their eyes and find out what makes them tick. I have a hunch it’s the same stuff that makes us all tick. The “Them and never Us” mentality is something quite the opposite from ideals that put common decency and humanity above all else. We need to nurture, instead, a belief that “They” can, and must, become “us.”