The News or Voyeurism America, and Gibsons pornographic movie about Christ's death

Glancing through the rash of continuing headlines on the Omaha shooting, a couple thoughts flit between my ears. First, the top headlines are ones that focus on descriptions of the violence or experience. Then we get to the inside story on the suicide note, a little info on the "why" of all this I guess. Second, the reason these are headlines are because people want to read them.

We are gossips and voyeurs, and are particularly thirsty for violence. I was even struck by that while watching "Pirates of the Caribbean (part 3)" last night. (As far as imagination goes, the movie had some great moments.) We have a thirst to gossip about, and see, violence. We are not a lot different from Romans at the Coliseum. The news is as much entertainment as anything else coming out of Hollywood. The greedy media moguls are happy to provide what we want: and what we want is to vicariously experience the violence and evil going on in the world.

It has a lot in common with pornography.

By the way, does anyone else out there think the success of "Passion of the Christ" has probably done little except feed our thirst for violence? "But it is about the cross!" you say?

It's in the Bible, why do you want to SEE a depiction of the Messiah being tortured? Is it going to increase your faith? DID it increase people's faith? Really? 370 million box office dollars later (#1 2004), do you see a church with greater faith? Do you see greater faith in the movie's makers? (Gibson's movie after Passion: Apocalypto. Read that link and tell me this man's aim is to make anyone more Christlike.) Maybe someone reading this will decide I am not crazy and that we should start applying our concepts of purity not only to sexual content, but also to depictions of violence and evil.