The Simpsons and religion:
The Simpsons season finale tonight dealt with organised religion, specifically Catholicism and Protestantism. The episode itself was all right (though the view of Catholic school was very fifties--come on, Bart saying the sign of the cross in Latin, the nun with the ruler... Maybe when my parents were in Catholic school), but at the end, Bart says something to the effect of "can't you see we're all Christians and all basically the same?" I saw this as a giant cop-out (the usual late episode Simpsons problem of not being able to end episodes), but more than that, I also saw it as totally false.
The differences between mainstream Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism in the US are huge (I will admit that the scary right of both religions DO show lots of similarities). Doctrinally, of course, there are huge differences. Catholics believe in salvation through faith and good works and Protestants believe that a believer will be justified by his faith before God. Catholics believe that priests can absolve sins and in purgatory and Protestants don't, since God will justify the sins of the believer. Protestants believe in a universal priesthood of believers, that lay people must help govern the church as well as read the Bible. Catholics believe in a community of believers, not a priesthood; this difference is more than mere semantics. A Catholic's relationship with God is through his community of believers; people with whom he shares the sacrament of the Mass with each week. The reason that the priest used to pray facing away from the people was to show how he was praying with them, facing the east just as they were. While ultimately God will judge each of us alone, until that day one prays as part of a communal prayer. A Protestant's relationship with God is intensely personal, God is approached not through intermediaries, but directly.
I don't know which one of these is right, if either is and both are not. I know what I believe, but faith is a deeply personal thing. But it's a bit disingenuous to claim that Catholics and Protestants are essentially the same. They really aren't, all messages for religious tolerance aside.
Which reminds me, I saw Kingdom of Heaven this weekend. Once you put aside the ludicrous main plot, it was an enjoyable enough movie. They got the little stuff right, so it seemed to be a relatively accurate picture of medieval cities and warfare. But the religious plurality injected into the movie was totally anachronistic. Saladin was by most accounts a pretty good guy and was pretty tolerant of Christians who paid his taxes, but (spoiler alert, as if you don't know how it ends) he would not have put up a cross in the church in Jerusalem after he took the city. Religious plurality was not a medieval concept.
