Former President Jimmy Carter is campaigning against the "martial messages" of The Lord of the Rings under the banner of "Compassion for Mordor":

"When I saw the audience in the movie theater cheer when Orcs were killed, I shuddered," Mr. Carter said, visibly pained. "The message of 'Lord of the Rings' is just plain bad.

"We must do something to counteract this celebration of violence," Mr. Carter said emphatically. "To see even trees fight and kill is enough to make any right-thinking person sick to his or her stomach.

"You Europeans, and we in America who identify with your beautiful values of moral neutrality and pacifism, must create a major public relations campaign against these films. We have to use our access to people's hearts and minds to counter that of Hollywood, which is almost always on our side, but for the sake of profits has produced this reactionary propaganda.

"We have to publicize our vision of what the movie should have portrayed. We have to make it clear, for example, that the proper response to Saruman and the Orcs was for Gandalf and his followers to go to the negotiating table, not the battlefield. And if only the Middle Earth had a United Nations and a World Court, no unilateral war against Mordor would ever have been waged."

Mr. Carter went on to offer suggestions about how to wage a public relations campaign to turn people against the martial messages of "Lord of the Rings."

"Let us get the academic community to sign ads in the New York Times and other journals that identify with our pro-peace vision of the world. These ads would declare Gandalf a war monger and imperialist, and emphasize that the Orcs were not evil, but rather suffered from poverty and hopelessness.

"We also need," the former American president continued, "a major bumper sticker campaign. Every progressive must get a 'War is not the answer' or 'Visualize world peace' sticker to proudly respond to 'Lord of the Rings.'

"The stakes are enormous," the distinguished former president said with great emotion. "If enough people start thinking in terms of good and evil, all our years of cultivating moral and cultural relativism, anti-military thinking, pacifism and internationalism will be jeopardized. And college students, our greatest hope, may no longer accept their professors' view of America as an imperialist war monger."

We are socialists. We are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property….and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.

Insurmountable obstacles. Unfathomable paradox. Incomparable heroism. Irrevocable choices. These are the terrain of great movies.

What aerobics is to the body, entertainment is to the soul. We need stories to flex our inner potential to heights we rarely find in the prison of the workaday world. We need stories to connect us to each other, and to set us longing to be better than we are. There are diseases of the soul that mere reality cannot cure.
Act One

'When I use a word,' said Humpty Dumpty scornfully, 'it means what I want it to mean, neither more nor less.'

'My dear old thing,' said the March Hare, 'there's more to it than that. When you say or write something, you've got to reckon that you can't keep tabs on it. Other people may take what you say quite differently from how you meant it. It's like setting a bird free. Once it's gone, it flies where it wants.'

'I'm afraid he's right, Humpty' chipped in Alice , passing him his tea. 'If you want to get through to us, you've got to use words in ways that we'll understand.'

'Absolutely,' the March Hare agreed. 'There's no ultimate reason why we shouldn't call that teapot over there by the name "hot water bottle" instead. But if you were the only one who did call it "hot water bottle" you'd be in for a shock come teatime.'

Alice continued, 'Of course, you could start a new fashion, and if you did it frequently enough then at least all your friends could get the hang of it, and we'd know "hot water bottle" meant "teapot".'

The Mad Hatter had been listening to all this with mounting displeasure. 'What tommy rot! You're both talking as though Humpty could use language to communicate something.'

'He's not as thick as that,' objected the March Hare defensively.

'Not just him - anyone,' the Mad Hatter came back, splattering bits of muffin over the tea party in his intensity. 'Language doesn't give me access to what Humpty thinks. How could I know he was using language in the same way I was? When he says, "I'm having a nice time here" he might mean by "nice" what I mean by "nasty". And we could never find that out, because all we have to say is that what we mean by "nice" and "nasty" are other words. It's all just words. It's as though each one of us is inside a little bubble, all on our own, and every now and then we float close to each other, but we never know what's going on in the bubble next door.' He paused for breath and turned to Alice . 'Another cuppa, please, Alice pet, three sugars.'

'Pet, eh?' said Alice from between clenched teeth. 'That sounds like an offensive socially conditioned sexist term.'

'Only to you, Alice dear, just your subjective reaction,' said the Mad Hatter, taking his tea and sipping it. 'Blinking heck, I asked for sugar, didn't I?'

'So sorry,' said Alice sweetly 'In my language "three sugars" means you don't want any.'

'You know jolly well what I meant ...' the Mad Hatter accused as the tea party broke up in disarray.

Ray Bradbury nailed today's entertainment technology. He foresaw extreme sports. He foresaw Political Correctness. It is time that we look to our historical and literary and spiritual legacies and fight to preserve them. If the tide will not stop, we may need to take the advice of this work and begin to commit these things to memory.

More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

...You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Someone, who knows who, coined the term "Political Correctness" a few years back. I do not know if the term came from its proponents or its detractors. The proponents, of the concept if not the term, tend to have left leaning politics. They should know better. Their entire legacy has depended on the opposite, but now they embrace it with the fervor of the most ardent fundamentalist.

Scientists, historians, and detectives observe data and proceed thence to some theory that best explains the occurrence of these data. We can analyse the criteria which they use in reaching a conclusion that a certain theory is better supported by the data than a different theory—that is, is more likely, on the basis of those data, to be true.

Using those same criteria, we find that that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just a narrow range of data. It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religious experiences. In so far as scientific causes and laws explain some of these things (and in part they do), these very causes and laws need explaining, and God’s action explains them. The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence.
Richard Swinburne, Is There A God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 2

All human societies have language. As far as we know they always did; language was not invented by some groups and spread to others like agriculture or the alphabet. . . . The grammars of industrial societies are no more complex than the grammars of hunter-gatherers. . . . Within societies, individual humans are proficient language users regardless of intelligence, social status, or level of education. Children are fluent speakers of complex grammatical sentences by the age of three, without benefit of formal instruction. They are capable of inventing languages that are more systematic than those they hear, showing resemblances to languages that they have never heard, and obey grammatical principles for which there is no evidence in their environments.
Stephen Pinker and Paul Bloom, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” in Jerome H. Barkow, et. al, editors, The Adapted Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 451

"Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory" because as Chomsky (1972) pointed out in language we have a faculty without clear precursors in primate evolution, and as Bickerton (1995) has argued, that appeared suddenly and recently. Such an innovation is incompatible with the revailing "biological species concept" that species transitions occur along genetic gradients that are generated in geographically separated environments. The origin of language appears to be an instance of "saltational" evolution consistent with the concepts of Goldschmidt (1940) or of punctuated equilibria of Eldredge & Gould (1972) that have lacked followers or a specified mechanism. One suggested mechanism – chromosomal re-arrangement (White, 1973; King, 1993) – has been generally disregarded on the grounds that such changes may occur without phenotypic effects, and have inconsistent relationships with species boundaries.
Tim J. Crow University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital Oxford

... inference to the best explanation asks us to reflectively seek the simplest, most complete, least ad hoc account of the relevant data. The innateness hypothesis is now almost universally accepted. Something must account for a universal, biologically hardwired, disposition for humans to acquire and use natural language, as well as to think in some quasi-linguist manner. Natural selection faces huge explanatory hurdles, while the theistic account is remarkably robust. Language may well provide surprisingly good evidence for the existence of God.
THE ARGUMENT FROM LANGUAGE AND THE EXISTENCE OF GOD Jeffery L. Johnson and Josi Potter, Eastern Oregon University

In Melbourne's City Square is a big "Christmas" tree, if I may still use that word without being sued under the Bracks Government's religious vilification laws.

At least, I guess it's a "Christmas" tree, because the council is coy about what precisely it's celebrating by putting it up. Nowhere around the tree is there any mention of the word "Christmas", let alone a single cross, manger or angel. There's just a big sign that in tight-bright-smile letters twitters: "Celebrate Me!bourne."

Let me say it again. No, I'm not Christian, but I honour a religion that is deep in our culture, and which has everywhere built societies famed for their freedom, tolerance and wealth.

I also know there are now too few days in the dead-God year when we're asked to think of others, let alone of a man happy to die for the salvation of strangers.

This is why taking the Christ out of Christmas – or, here, removing Christmas completely – is cultural and social vandalism.

Look what it leads to. "Celebrate Me!bourne," the sign says, with red-painted emphasis on Celebrate Me! Yes, kill our celebrations of culture, religion and history – our celebrations of giving and joining – and we're left with "Celebrate Me!". Not us, but me, me, me – to the last echo in that empty room.

The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions.

Socioeconomically, the religious and secular groups are similar in some ways and different in others. For example, there is little difference between the groups in income (both have average household incomes around $49,000) or education level (20 percent of each group holds a college degree). On the other hand, the secular group is disproportionately male (49 percent to 32 percent), unmarried (58 percent to 40 percent), and young (42 to 49 years old, on average). In addition, the ... data show that religion and secularism break down on ideological lines: Religious people are 38 percentage points more likely to say they are conservative than to say they are liberal (57 percent to 19 percent). In contrast, secular people are 13 points more likely to say they are liberal than to say they are conservative (42 percent to 29 percent).

... The data show that if two people — one religious and the other secular — are identical in every other way, the secular person is 23 percentage points less likely to give than the religious person and 26 points less likely to volunteer.

...Charity differences between religious and secular people persist if we look at the actual amounts of donations and volunteering. Indeed, measures of the dollars given and occasions volunteered per year produce a yawning gap between the groups. The average annual giving among the religious is $2,210, whereas it is $642 among the secular. Similarly, religious people volunteer an average of 12 times per year, while secular people volunteer an average of 5.8 times. To put this into perspective, religious people are 33 percent of the population but make 52 percent of donations and 45 percent of times volunteered. Secular people are 26 percent of the population but contribute 13 percent of the dollars and 17 percent of the times volunteered.

Some people might object to my conflation here of religious and nonreligious charity. One might argue, for example, that religious charity is more likely to take place for non-altruistic reasons than is nonreligious giving and volunteering: Religious people might give because of social pressure, for personal gain (such as stashing away rewards in Heaven), or to finance the services that they themselves consume, such as sacramental activities. Therefore, disparities in charity might disappear when we only consider explicitly nonreligious giving and volunteering. The ... data do not support this hypothesis, however: Religious people are more generous than secular people with nonreligious causes as well as with religious ones. While 68 percent of the total population gives (and 51 percent volunteers) to nonreligious causes each year, religious people are 10 points more likely to give to these causes than secularists (71 percent to 61 percent) and 21 points more likely to volunteer (60 percent to 39 percent). For example, religious people are 7 points more likely than secularists to volunteer for neighborhood and civic groups, 20 points more likely to volunteer to help the poor or elderly, and 26 points more likely to volunteer for school or youth programs. It seems fair to say that religion engenders charity in general — including nonreligious charity.

It's interesting how so many people reject, at an intellectual level, a Christian or religious worldview, and yet will accept it at a mythical level. They reject religion in the name of reason, but joyously embrace it when dressed with the imagination. They accept with their hearts, what they reject with their heads. But the heart precedes the head, and myth precedes reason, and so Tolkien has managed to completely bypass people's prejudices and inject in them a saving dose of Reality.

I mean by "narrative" a story. But not any kind of story. I refer to big stories - stories that are sufficiently profound and complex to offer explanations of the origins and future of a people; stories that construct ideals, prescribe rules of conduct, specify sources of authority, and, in doing all this, provide a sense of continuity and purpose. Joseph Campbell and Rollo May, among others, called such stories "myths." Marx had such stories in mind in referring to "ideologies." And Freud called them "illusions." No matter. What is important about narratives is that human beings cannot live without them. We are burdened with a kind of consciousness that insists on our having a purpose. Purposefulness requires a moral context, and moral context is what I mean by a narrative. The construction of narratives is, therefore, a major business of our species; certainly, no group of humans has ever been found that did not have a story that defined for them how they ought to behave and why. That is the reason why there is nothing more disconcerting, to put it mildly, than to have one's story mocked, contradicted, refuted, held in contempt, or made to appear trivial. To do so is to rob a people of their reason for being. And that is why no one loves a story-buster, at least not until a new story can be found. Much of our ancient history concerns the punishments inflicted on those who challenged existing narratives-Socrates was given hemlock, John the Baptist lost his head, Jesus was crucified, Muhammad had to seek shelter in a cave. Even Moses, who fared better than most, was held in contempt by his own tribe, who thought the worship of golden calves had much to be said in its favor. In our era, the great story-busters - Darwin, Marx, Freud - were anything but lovable to the mass of people whose traditional narratives they attacked. I think I may say that even today there is nothing lovable about them, even to those who give credence to their arguments. Moreover, these story-busters have not had the effects they imagined, since old stories die hard. Darwin, I think, would be amazed to know how many people still believe that we are the children of God rather than of monkeys. Marx would be astounded at the staying power of the great narrative of nationalism. And Freud, who was sardonic about the future of an illusion and thought he had discovered that Moses was an Egyptian and not a Jew, would have to acknowledge that cold-hearted reason and meticulous scholarship are no substitutes for the great narrative of Genesis.

Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past can Improve our Future New York, Knopf, 1999 pp101-102

In all, there is much to commend this film. I want to make that clear before I launch into my main complaints. The quality of what has been produced is such that even its extremely severe defects, and there are several, are not adequate to render it unworthy of enjoyment by any true Tolkien fan. That being said, however, it is essential to look at the rather glaring problems that come bursting forth from the screen as both the "Fellowship of the Ring" and the "Two Towers" are first viewed. In a nutshell, those defects center around the often inexplicable and always utterly inexcusable deviations from the story line of the books. This wretched sin occurs in two basic forms; changes in the personalities of major characters and changes in the actual plot line itself.

For those who have never read the books, you will love it. For those who read the books long ago and don't remember details, you also will love it. For those who are huge fans of the books and remember every detail, parts will annoy you. Yet, my guess is most of you will still remember that Jackson has done a fine job in depicting the works of Tolkien, with great special effects and characterization of a majority of the ensemble cast. Some of you won't get past those changes, but most of you will love it even with the somewhat flawed changes.

...Unlike other movies that house awful brutality, Return contextualizes it in a way that makes it in no way gratuitous. I contrast this film with steaming turds of post-modernity like Kill Bill and Matrix Revolutions. All three films are loaded with battles, heroes and darkness, but Return gives them something real to fight for friendship, family and the meek who confound the intelligent elite who corner the market on overt power. All of my movie-lovin’ friends drooled over Kill Bill, and Return will embarrass anyone who attributed any post Pulp Fiction greatness to Tarantino. The curtain of Matrix Revolutions is pulled back and we find out that Neo may not even exist. Spoon-bending and questioning reality is not the things heroes are made of.

Folks, we are in trouble. We have been blinded by low craftsmanship, low expectations and the ultimate dumbing down of the audience that the studios more than willingly are happy to underestimate. But Return could only be made by a 20th century devout Catholic who devoured Latin, Norse mythology, participated in WW1 and watched the horror of WW2 unfold before his eyes. Don’t look for moral-relativism in Return, it ain’t there. We see “good” men try to negotiate, understand or bargain with evil, and they are crushed and despised even more than the Orcs who may not have had a choice in the matter.

I can’t describe the joy of watching a Hobbit and his gardener dismantle the arrogant evil of their times...