some reviews found on Yahoo web site on Passion... I hope this is permitted... if not erase...

A Hindu's review.
by dipak_nambiar (movies profile) Feb 25, 2004
282 of 321 people found this review helpful

I am a Hindu and i found this movie absolutely stunning. Irrespective of your faith, i believe that one needs to watch this movie simply because this is a great film. Watch it, this movie will have a profound impact on you.

Athiest/Agnostic view of this movie.
by masamunevii (movies profile) Feb 26, 2004
209 of 221 people found this review helpful

For starters, I don't really believe in any God, any religion, or anything close to any of that for that matter. I wanted to see this movie simply for the sake of seeing how "controversial" it is.

I don't know much of the backstory to Jesus or anything of that nature, but those who say Mel didn't provide much of his teachings and why you're supposed to love Jesus are incorrect. He had various clips of his teachings and how he lived his life before his crucifiction that even someone who isn't religious can respect.

The violence and torture in this movie I believe were necessary. Logically, if a man who is supposedly dying for every man's sins, then he better get the torturing of a billion lifetimes. Mel portrayed his torturing with extreme graphic visuals. Which even I, who is desensitized, had to think, "Holy s**t, leave this guy alone, he's suffered enough." This movie dominates nearly all horror-slasher flicks that I've seen as far as realistic violence and gore.

Even from an athiest/agnostic point of view, I respect how Mel portrayed the last days of Jesus and his suffering. I'm sure many religious people will feel his pain ten times more than I have.

Nothing like Mohammad
by axios7 (movies profile) Feb 25, 2004
147 of 157 people found this review helpful

As a student of Islam, I was most impressed with the difference between Jesus and Mohammad. Mohammad used his revelations to become a powerful political leader. He had power, many wives, (his youngest wife was 9 when he married her), property, and much wealth. Mohammad claimed to be a prophet. Jesus claimed to be God. And according to the movie, the gory death that he died, was in payment for man's gory sins. This movie communicated to me the truth that deepest love is best proven by what we are willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the one we love. If Jesus was who he claimed to be, then there is no parallel to this expression of love, in any other figure in history.

Sorry for this long post Paul, but I just couldn't help it.   Skip it if you don't want to read.   But it did take a long time for me to type so please do read at least that last few paragraphs...   because perhaps it addresses your question, which gets at the crux of the issue: Is Jesus the Son of God?   I don't have the answer but since you seemed to want demonstrable proof aside from the scripture, I thought the most relevant was Soren Kierkegaards material (more relevant stuff is near the end though...)   it took me more than two hours to type this....(but I guess its nothing compared to His sacrifice)   Before we get to Soren's stuff, you also ask "why". I don't know why.  But I have a lot of my own Why questions:  Why didn't God make it easier for us to believe?   Why didn't God make it easier or more palatable.  If God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Perfectly Good, why doesn't he do more about the innocent suffering in North Korea?  Why does he allow people to die before hearing the Good news if thats what he wants the people to hear?   Why does God allow Satan to deceive people into not believing if he can prevent it?   Can he not?   Can't God create a world that's better than this where we would follow his laws, love and not hate and live better lives even with free choice?   Is this best of all possible worlds?   Must God create the best of all possible worlds?  Isn't God obligated to create the best of all possible worlds?   Or shouldn't he at least create one that is better than this?   Even if that means crummy people like me would not exist in such a better world?   Why must we struggle so and "work out our salvation with fear and trembling" when it supposed to be "God who works in us"?  Why does God allow stupid people to govern and split up churches?   Why does God allow nicest guys to die young in plane crashes?   Why does God allow AIDs to rampage the poorest of countries?   Why does God allow the rich to get richer?  Why does God bring about tragic deaths?   Why? Why? Why?   I don't know why.   But all these objective uncertainties and questions and doubts mean I must have even greater faith to believe in Jesus as the Son of God.  

It may not seem relevant at first but the following are some thoughts from Soren Kierkegaard (excerpts taken and "Reprinted from http://www.bruderhof.com Copyright 2002 by the Bruderhof Foundations, Inc. Used with permission, Provocations, compiled and edited by Charles E. Moore - a free e-book on the web!).   Soren lived at a time when all or most of his fellow Danish thought they were Christians.   Soren thought otherwise.  Soren wanted to wake people up to have them realize that mere intellectual acknowledgment of Jesus as the Son of God was not enough.  It had to mean something to them individually, personally.  

But I must admit I feel like I've been an aesthetic person (as described below by Soren) the past few years:

"The aesthetic life is life immediately lived - a life lived for "the moment". It is the lifestyle in which people are absorbed in satisfying their "natural" desires and impulses, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual. These people are solely concerned with their own happiness and believe that the key to happiness is found in externals - who they know, what they do, the roles they play, what they possess, where they live, and so on. They live for enjoyment, on the surface of life. They are observers, spectators, tasters, but not serious participants. They have no real inner life, no real self to offer to others. Their well-being is determined by the choices or moods of others and by forces that extend beyond their control. When they make decisions, they are not internalized. Thus, when things go wrong, aesthetic persons never accept responsibility or blame. Such people are apathetic, indifferent, and unintegrated. They are unable to commit themselves to any one thing. Something better might always come along, and so they split their energies in different directions... same goes for professors, theologians, philosophers, and other intellectualizers who confuse thought with existence and assumes that truth can be formulated into a system of ideas or a set of doctrines. In doing this, the intellectualizer becomes a mere observer of life. He forgets that he exits, and that he must choose and act and take responsibility for what it is he knows... ...must move beyond the aesthetic sphere and into the ethical. The ethical life recognizes the significance of choice. Here one accepts his duty as a moral actor. The person lays aside his many desires or impulses, his careless "freedom" and heeds his conscience, takes responsibility, and fulfills his moral obligations. Aesthetic freedom is really enslavement to the passions and as such leads a person to the brink of despair. By contrast, ethical freedom is the enjoyment and fulfilment of doing one's duty. The person who lives at this level tries to realize in his life what is of eternal, universal value. Such a life recognizes that within the soul there is something (i.e., the eternal) that cannot be satisfied by a sensory life. Hence the realization of enduring values - justice, freedom, peace, love - and respect for the moral law within propel the ethical self forward intoa life of responsibility, of caring beyond one's own immediate interests. Herein lies true freedom... Therefore an authentic, fully realized individual is one who is unified from within, whose actions are one, and who accepts responsibility for his commitments... The key to the ethical sphere is freedom. A "bad choice", therefore, is better than no choice at all. The aesthetic person drifts along with the currents around him."

I am adrift.  When can I take the step to the ethical life?

"The person who lives ethically, however, determines these very currents. It is not enough to just do one's duly. One must passionately choose the path. Life is an either/or, not just between good and evil, but between choosing and not choosing. The person who lives in the ethical sphere lives intentionally, intensively. Such a person possesses character and conviction, and is thus willing to sacrifice himself for something greater than oneself..."

But Soren says we must take a leap to one level further?

"Yet as admirable and as necessary Kierkegaard found the ethical sphere, he believes that life must ultimately be lived on yet another level: the religious sphere. ... an individual lives religiously when he or she realizes that the ethical life is insufficient for solving life's riddles and choices. The ethical life failsto adequately deal with exceptional situations. A fully actualized person has to see himself "before God," to see himself as he really is. When this occurs, the wide chasm between oneself and God becomes apparent, both because of the sins one has committed but also because of one's failure to fulfil completely his moral duty. The ethical individual, if he is truly honest with himself, is one who lives in constant fear and dread precisely because of his inability to fulfil the moral law and his hesitation to give himself absolutely. In fact, the most ethical person is precisely the one who feels most inadequate... God's will, not some abstract law, is what finally matters. And because no human can measure the demands of God, one must ultimately surrender to God in a leap of faith."

"What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as certain understanding must precede every action... I wish to make people aware so that they do not squander and dissipate their lives... [But Doctrine is what people want] because doctrine is the indolence of aping and mimicking for the learner, and the doctrine is the way to power for the teacher, and doctrine collects people.... Most systematizers stand in the same relation to their systems as the man who builds a great castle and lives in an adjoining shack; they do not live in their great systematic structure... Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong..."

As for wanting demonstrable proof of truth that Jesus is Son of God....

"...Pilate asks Christ, "What is truth?"....  Pilate's question is extremely foolish.  Not that he asks "What is truth"" but that he questions Christ, he whose life is expressly the truth and who at every moment demonstrates more powerfully by his life what truth is than all the most profound lectures of the cleverest thinkers.   Though it makes perfect sense to ask any other pseron, a thinker, a teacher, or whoever, "What is truth?" to ask Christ this is the greatest possible confusion.   Obviously Pilate is of the opinion that Christ is just a man, like everyone else.  Poor Pilate!  Pilate's question is the most foolish and confusing question ever asked by a man.   It is as if I were to ask someone standing right before me, "Do you exist?"  How can that person reply?   So also with Christ in relation to Pilate.  Christ is the truth.  "If my life, he might say, "cannot open your eyes to what truth is, then what can I say?  For I am the truth."  

"As with Pilate, in our day Christ as the truth has also been abolished: we take Christ's teaching - but abolish Christ.  We want truth the easy way.  This is to abolish truth, for Christ the teacher is more important than the teaching.   Jst as Christ's life, the fact that he lived here on earth, is vastly more important that all the results of his life, so also is Christ infinitely more important thatn his teaching.   Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of it; the only true way of acquiring it.  Truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but a LIFE.   Truth is not a property of thought that guarantees validity to thinking.  No, truth in its most essential character is the reduplication of truth in yourself, within me, within him.  Your life, my life, his life expresses the truth in the striving.  Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, FOR US, TRUTH MUST BE LIVED.  

To properly know the trut is to be in the truth; it is to have the truth for one's life.   This alwasy costs a struggle.  Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification.  In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life.  The Gospel says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the one whom he sent, the truth.  John 17:3.   That is, I only know the truth when it becomes a life in me.  

[Christ's] teaching is infinitely superior to all the inventions of any and every age, an eternity older and an eternity higher than all systems, even the very newest.   His teaching is the truth - not in terms of knowledge, but in the sense that the truth is a way [life] - and as the God-man he is and remains the way; something that no human being, however, zealously he professes taht the truth is the way, dare assert of himself without blasphemy. ... The truth is lived before it is understood.  It must be fought for, tested and appropriated.  Truth is the way.  

A true believer is infinitely interested in what is real. ... the object of faith is not a doctrine... The object of faith is the actuality and authority of the teacher; athat the teacher actually is.  Therefore, faith's answer is absolutely either yes or no.... Do you accept as fact that he, the Teacher, actually exists?   Please note that the answer to this is a matter of infinite concern.  Of course, if the object of faith (Teacher, Jesus) is only a human being, then the whole thing is a sham.   But this is not the case for Christians.   The object of Christian faith is God's historical existence, that is, that God at a certain point in time existed as an individual human being. 

Christianity, therefore, is not a doctrine about the unity of the divine and the human, not to emention the rest of the logical paraphrases of typical religious thought.   Christianity is not a doctrine but a fact: God came into existence through a particular human being at a particular point in history.

When Christ came into the world, it was difficult to become a Christian and for this reason one did not become preoccupied with trying to understand it.  Now we have almost reached the paraody that to become a Christian is nothing at all, but it is a difficult and and very involved task to understand it.  Everything is reversed.  Christianity is transformed into a kind of worldview, a way of thinking about life, and the task of faith consists in understanding and articulating it.  But faith essentially relates itselve to existence, and becomeing a Christian is what is important...

Can one come to know anything about Christ from history?   No.   And why not?  It is because Christ is the PARADOX, the object of faith, and exists only for faith.   About him, nothing can be known; he can only be believed.   You cannot come to know anything about Christ from history.   Whether one learns little or mucha bout him, it will not represent who he is in reality.  Obtaining historical facts makes Christ into someone otehr than who he in fact is.  

Can't you at least demonstrate from history that Christ was God, even though we might know little else?   Let me ask another question first: Can any more absurd contradition be imagined than wishing to prove that an individual person is God?   Now think of proving that!  How can you make something that conflicts with reason into something reasonable?  You can't, unless you wish to contradict youself.   The so-called proofs for the divinity of Christ that people claim Scripture sets forth - his miracles, his resurrection, his ascension - are not when you think aobut it, in harmoney with our reason.  On the contrary, they demonstrate that believing in Christ's works is a matter of faith. 

What can all the miracles really demonstrate anyway?  At most that Jesus Christ was a great man, perhaps the greates who ever lived.   But that he was -  God - no, stop;  that conclusion will surely miscarry....  Precisely the same holds true whenever we try to infer from the results of a person's life that therefore he was God.   True, if God and humankind resemble each other so closely so as to essentially belong to the same category of being, the conclusion "therefore Christ was God" makes perfect sense.   But this is nothing but humbug.  If that is all there is to being god, then God does not exist at all!  But if God belongs to a category infinitely different from human, why then neither I nor any one else can start with the assumption that Christ was human and then logically conclude that therefore he was God.   Anyone with a bit of logical sense should be able to see this.  The question of whether or not he was God lies on an entirely different plane; each person must decide for himself whether or not he will believe Christ to be what he himself claimed to be.   Faith protests against every attempt to approach Christ by means of historical facts.  Faith's contention is that the historian's whole approach is blasphemy.   How strange!  With the help of history, that is, by looking at the results of Christ's life, we think we can arrive at the conclusion that he was God.   Yet faith makes the very opposite claim.   Anyone who begins with this kind of logic is guilty of blasphemy.  The blasphemy is not so much the hypothetical assumption that Christ was a human being, but the thought that the results of his life can be separated from who he was.  When you scrutinize the facts, you make Christ out to be just a man.... Christ is the divine-human paradox that history can never digest or convert into a proof.  Even with what we know of Christ life and of all his brilliant works, they will pail in comparison to his coming again in glory!  Or perhaps you think that Christ's return will be nothing more than progressive result of his life in history?  No!  Christ's return willb e somehting entirely different, something that can only be believed.  That Christ was God incarnate in his lowliness and that he will come again in glory, all this is far beyond the comprension of history.  This cannot be inferred from "facts" or from history, no matter how matchlessly you regard them, except through a matchless lack of logic.   It is definitely beyond history's capacity to demonstrate that God, the omnipresent One, lived here on earth as an individual human being....

truth is an objective uncertainty held fast through personal appropriation the most passionate inwardness...  at the pointe where the road divides, objective knowledge is suspended, and one has only uncertainty, but this is precisely what intensifies the infinite passion of inwardness. Subjective truth is precisely the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite.  

I observe nature in order to find God, and I do indeed see omnipotence and wisdom.   However, I also see much that is troubling and unsettling.  The sum total of this is that God's existence is an objective uncertainty.... Now the definition of truth stated above is actually a paraphrasing of faith.  No uncertainty, no risk.  No risk, no faith.   Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and objective uncertainty.  In other words, if I apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because I cannot do this, I must have faith.  If I want to keep myself in faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty.... Again, without risk, no faith; the more risk, the more faith...  Therefore, the more objective reliability, the less inwardness; the less objective reliability, the deeper the possible inwardness.  Hence, when the paradox is the object of faith it thrusts away by virtue of the absurd, adn the corresponding passion of inwardness is faith.   What then is the absurd?  The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up, has come into existence exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any other human being. ... Christianity culminates in paradox (God in Christ, God on the Cross); and paradox and passion fit each other perfectly, for paradox perfectly fits a person situtated in the extremity of existence.... Thus, if someone wants to have faith and reason too, well, let the comedy begin...

What happens?   With the aid of reason, the absurd becomes something else; it becomes probable, it becomes more probable, it may become to a high degree exceedingly probable, even demonstrable.   Now he is all set to believe it, and he dares to say of himself that he does not believe as shoemakers and tailors and simple folk do, but only after long and careful deliberation.   Now he is all set to believe, but lo and behold, now it has indeed become impossible to believe.  The almost probable, the probable, the to-a-high-dgree and exceedingly proable, that he can almost know, or as good as know to a higher degree and exceedingly almost know -  but believe, that cannot be done, for the absurd is precisely the object of faith and only that can be believed with the passion of inwardness.   Christianity claims to be the eternal, essential truth that has come into existence in time.  It proclaims itself as THE paradox and thus requires the inwardness of faith - that which is an offense to the Jews, foolishness to the Greeks, and an absurdity to the understanding.  It cannot be expressed more strongly: Objectivity and faith are at complete odds with each other.   What does objective faith mean?     Christianity is nothing of the kind."

In sum, I think what Kierkegaard means is that whether Jesus is Son of God is an objective uncertainty, which is why it is an object of faith.  

Supernatual miracles detract from your faith.    It would make it more rational to believe.   But look at Isrealites.   They should have believed.   But their belief did not come from the supernatural miracles.    Same for the Jews during Jesus time.   If miracles would have made people believe, or know, that Jesus was the Son of God, Jesus should not have been hung on the cross; but he was.   We think we will have more people believe if God showed more miracles.  But I think not.   I would hope that more people come to believe Jesus by seeing the passion, but after reading some of the reviews from the movie critics, I understand that hardened hearts will be hardened hearts.   Rational demonstrable evidence will not help develop faith, or as Soren would put it, cannot help faith.  

But why should we believe?   Because it is worth it?   What does it mean to truly believe?   To Kierkegaard, you must live it out.   Not just mentally acknowledge it.   We must live out in life the challenges of our faith and belief, to be what one says we are.    So Paul, yes, live out your thoughts and beliefs.  Do something about North Korea.   Because you are right; something must be done about those bastards in North Korea that are killing our own brothers and sisters.    TRUTH and FAITH MUST BE LIVED OUT.   But whether to do it on your own or to do it with faith and reliance on the almighty.... you decide....