God on Trial - full movie

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God on Trial - full movie

By Aye Pod

Religion • August 2012 • Views: 1,864

A brilliantly engaging, thought-provoking and moving film

Youtube Video

God on Trial is a 2008 BBC/WGBH Boston television play written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, starring Antony Sher, Rupert Graves and Jack Shepherd. The play takes place in Auschwitz during World War II. The Jewish prisoners put God on trial in absentia for abandoning the Jewish people. The question is if God has broken his covenant with the Jewish people by allowing the Nazis to commit genocide.

The play is based on an event described by Elie Wiesel in his book The Trial of God, though Boyce describes this tale as “apocryphal”. According to Boyce, producer Mark Redhead “had been trying to turn the story into a film for almost 20 years by the time he called me in 2005 to write the screenplay.”

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17 comments

SanFranciscoZionist Sat, Aug 11, 2012 12:53:32pm

Weisel wrote a chilling play based on the same incident, set during the Chmielnicki massacres of the 1600s.

Destro Sat, Aug 11, 2012 6:18:44pm

You can't place on trial something that does not exist.

Destro Sat, Aug 11, 2012 7:02:09pm

The orthodox (small o) Christian explanation is that this world is under the rule of Satan until the second coming and God is actually not in this world except in brief flashes. The orthodox (again small o) Christians consider this world a punishment, the outside of the Garden of Eden. The orthodox (small o) Christian perspective is that they are on earth to die at the hands of Satan until the second coming to witness for Christ against Satan and to be killed for it.

SanFranciscoZionist Sat, Aug 11, 2012 7:38:14pm

Augustine and Irenaeus, those unorthodox heretics, proposed that evil was the result of free will.

Destro Sat, Aug 11, 2012 7:54:30pm

re: #4 SanFranciscoZionist

Augustine and Irenaeus, those unorthodox heretics, proposed that evil was the result of free will.

Kind of makes being good like living in North Korea where there is no free will.

Christopher Hitchens On God and North Korea:

Youtube Video

SanFranciscoZionist Sat, Aug 11, 2012 8:01:42pm

re: #5 Destro

Kind of makes being good like living in North Korea where there is no free will.

Christopher Hitchens On God and North Korea:

[Embedded content]

So you disagree with them? Evil is not caused by the choices and actions of human beings?

I mean, I realize you can't call St. Augustine an orthodox Christian or anything like that, but it sounds pretty plausible to me.

Destro Sat, Aug 11, 2012 8:10:44pm

re: #6 SanFranciscoZionist

So you disagree with them? Evil is not caused by the choices and actions of human beings?

I mean, I realize you can't call St. Augustine an orthodox Christian or anything like that, but it sounds pretty plausible to me.

Evil is a supernatural concept. There is no supernatural. I do not accept the existence of evil.

PS: I am pretty sure Ausustine is an orthodox Christian as in small "o" orthodox as in he help shape the religion. But I can inderstand why he may not be considered orthodox.

SanFranciscoZionist Sat, Aug 11, 2012 8:31:57pm

re: #7 Destro

Evil is a supernatural concept. There is no supernatural. I do not accept the existence of evil.

PS: I am pretty sure Ausustine is an orthodox Christian as in small "o" orthodox as in he help shape the religion. But I can inderstand why he may not be considered orthodox.

I was being a little sarcastic.

St. Augustine the Blessed of Hippo is an eminent Doctor of the Church, and considered one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time, if not the standing great in the field. He's about as orthodox as it gets, to many Christians.

I think that your characterization of the beliefs of orthodox Christians, above, gives a little too much credence to the beliefs of some specific Protestant groups.

Destro Sat, Aug 11, 2012 10:29:19pm

re: #8 SanFranciscoZionist

I was being a little sarcastic.

St. Augustine the Blessed of Hippo is an eminent Doctor of the Church, and considered one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time, if not the standing great in the field. He's about as orthodox as it gets, to many Christians.

I think that your characterization of the beliefs of orthodox Christians, above, gives a little too much credence to the beliefs of some specific Protestant groups.

St. Augustine not highly regarded by the Eastern Orthodox Church and the above I wrote is more in line with what the eastern Orthodox churches preach.

See: [Link: www.desertwisdom.org...]
“The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them the passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honour which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancour and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it”

‑ St. Isaac the Syrian

So from the eastern Orthodox perspective which is closer to the Christian Church fathers (the small "o" I was talking about) they would never have had this crisis of faith presented in the movie above. Why? Because they expect evil to happen on earth against them. To the orthodox Christian, they view themselves as 'insurgents' in Satan's kingdom (earthly world).

To the Jews in this movie, their crisis of faith comes from the fact that God is not acting to save them in the earthly world per the covenant. To the orthodox (small and big "O") they expect to die for Christ. They expect to be persecuted for Christ. The purpose of a Christian is to witness for Christ and to witness involves living as a Christian and to be killed for Christ. The martyrdom of course is to show the humans under Satan's rule what the glory of Christ is like by showing contempt for death because as martyrs for Christ they expect to live again when Christ returns and overthrows the reign of Satan on earth.

So the question of 'why do bad things happen to good people' is nonsensical to orthodox Christians. They expect, as part of their faith in Christ while living in Satan's world for bad things to happen to them.

SanFranciscoZionist Sat, Aug 11, 2012 11:33:37pm

The Western Church is messing things up with their insistence upon the doctrine of free will, and they have accordingly been removed from the sample. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is now to be considered 'orthodox Christianity' for the purposes of this discussion. It should have been clear from the start that this was who we were referring to.

Since I do not know enough about Eastern Orthodox theology to debate this point with any seriousness, and more to the point, don't actually trust that you do either, I'm going to bypass my first impulse, which was to go back to Irenaeus, and throw up my hands.

freetoken Sat, Aug 11, 2012 11:43:19pm

re: #9 Destro

I'll just note that the idea of "evil" as a personification, e.g., "Satan", predates Christianity, and indeed in one of Christianity's progenitors, Enochic Judaism, speaks of fallen angels, etc..

"Evil" and the personification of such is pretty widespread in human belief systems, even if other words are used. Theodicy is a particular problem for Theists of all stripes, though many American Christian fundamentalists actively work against the idea that theodicy ought to be considered at all.

Ayeless in Ghazi Sun, Aug 12, 2012 3:10:21am

re: #11 freetoken

Theodicy is a particular problem for Theists of all stripes, though many American Christian fundamentalists actively work against the idea that theodicy ought to be considered at all.

No theist has ever dealt with it satisfactorily and it remains a common reason why believers, even fervent ones abandon theistic belief (eg following a personal tragedy/terrible personal injustice). Totally makes sense that the fundies don't want to talk about it.

PS when believers try to explain natural evils, like AIDS, by invoking the 'evil is a consequence of man's free will', argument, that's when it get's really ugly.

Ayeless in Ghazi Sun, Aug 12, 2012 3:20:27am

re: #9 Destro

So the question of 'why do bad things happen to good people' is nonsensical to orthodox Christians. They expect, as part of their faith in Christ while living in Satan's world for bad things to happen to them.

They should strictly speaking I guess, but christians generally do still feel compelled to try to explain away evil as per the usual failed arguments.

Ayeless in Ghazi Sun, Aug 12, 2012 4:19:33am

re: #13 Aye Pod

They should strictly speaking I guess,

Although I have to say I've never come across a christian who would argue that evil is the natural condition of the world at the moment, they always try to explain it away in my experience.

Destro Sun, Aug 12, 2012 1:58:22pm

re: #10 SanFranciscoZionist

The Western Church is messing things up with their insistence upon the doctrine of free will, and they have accordingly been removed from the sample. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is now to be considered 'orthodox Christianity' for the purposes of this discussion. It should have been clear from the start that this was who we were referring to.

Since I do not know enough about Eastern Orthodox theology to debate this point with any seriousness, and more to the point, don't actually trust that you do either, I'm going to bypass my first impulse, which was to go back to Irenaeus, and throw up my hands.

I was using small o orthodoxy as in the original Greek Christian Fathers who did not dispute free will but all agreed this world was the domain of Satan and God's kingdom was to come. The big O Orthodox of course being closer to the source material keep this doctrine still but to be fair western Christians are close to it with some modifications.

Destro Sun, Aug 12, 2012 2:05:49pm

re: #14 Aye Pod

Although I have to say I've never come across a Christian who would argue that evil is the natural condition of the world at the moment, they always try to explain it away in my experience.

Well if you live in the west you run across western Christians. Eastern Christians who are closer to the original Christians see the world differently. That is why monasticism arose in the east so that the Christian monastic could escape the evil world and be purged of it's Satanic born fleshly desires.

Destro Sun, Aug 12, 2012 2:10:20pm

re: #14 Aye Pod

Although I have to say I've never come across a christian who would argue that evil is the natural condition of the world at the moment, they always try to explain it away in my experience.

[Link: oca.org...]

As far as this world is concerned, the Orthodox believe that although it is essentially “very good,” created this way by God, it is ruined and spoiled and in the power of evil. It needs to be healed and purified. In a word, the world needs salvation in order to be what God made it to be.

Because this world is, in its present ambiguous form, both good and evil at once; and because it requires salvation in order to be the perfect dwelling-place for God and man that it was made to be, it will always remain a world of relative values until being finally transformed by God at the end of the ages.

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