Saturday, July 7, 2012
Bummer news at the moment. All the actors who’ve read the script for Leap: Revelation like where it’s heading, except Alex. Wouldn’t be a big deal except that he’s the main character. He said he didn’t feel comfortable “pushing” Sunday worship as the mark of the beast and Sabbath as the seal of God. I can understand where he’s coming from, I used to believe like him, that it didn’t matter, and that going to church on Sunday isn’t submitting to Papal authority. The problem though is that there’s ZERO scripture evidence for this view. He used Romans 14:5 (which I used to use as well) and I pointed out that the passage is referring to fasting and days to fast, not a day of worship. It’s interesting to me that the message of this trilogy is to study for yourselves and the film is supposed to challenge our beliefs. As the production team, are we exempt from that? From being challenged? Of course not! Before writing that draft, I took some time to pray and study all the points of view again. I said, “What does the Bible teach about the beast, it’s mark, and how it relates to the plagues?” I can say without apology, that the views presented in the film are Biblically sound, make the most sense and can’t be questioned when you take in the scriptures as a whole.
So, at this point I have a few options. First, I’m praying for Alex that God gives him a desire to seek the Truth, not even for the sake of the film (it can take months or years to explore it all), but for his benefit. I’m also playing with a few other story ideas since I’m not sure if he and I will agree on the story for this film, I hope we can though. But if not, depending on Chelsea and Yelena’s involvement, I’ll probably do a parallel story about one of the other crews mentioned in Leap 2. They’ve been followers of the original Leap Crew and take up the mantle of preaching Truth when the first Leap Crew vanishes (at the end of Leap 2, they’re in the mountains). This puts them on the Vatican’s radar and the story can then be almost the same as my original draft, just replacing the old crew with a new one.
If I do go this route, it’ll give us some fresh faces, while still allowing me to keep parkour involved, since that’s what the fans want to see. The only thing I’ll really have to do is figure out a way to explain what happened at the end of Leap 2. Maybe the character Crystal can make a cameo or something and give a small exposition scene. Something that just occurred to me about going this route is that it helps my trilogy mirror the Bourne franchise. The newest film coming out this summer is is a parallel story about another agent with the same problems, and Leap 2 was supposed to be my nod to Bourne.
Anyway, please keep the film in your prayers.
What the heck, I’ll leave a comment… I’ll not comment on whether Sabbath observance is required, or whether Sunday was exchanged for Sabbath at some ancient point in time…
I will however point out that ‘Sunday Laws’ per se, in the US, have been ‘protected’, not from religious grounds but ‘worker protection’ grounds. This is a curious state of things in the US. The Separation of Church and State seems to make laws requiring religious observance are unconstitutional, yet, laws which disallow ‘activity’ on one day or another, if they can be justified in terms of non-religious reasons, such as ‘no power on Sundays’, because we have energy shortages, or no sales of gasoline as a ‘conservation’ means, or in the referenced ‘workers protection’.
The problem here is that while ‘engaging in activity’ can be apparently legally prohibited, requiring ‘church’ attendance, can not be at the moment legally required.
Personally I worry a lot that the ‘religious affiliation’ of a majority of the Supreme Court Justices is nominally ‘catholic’… I can recall when there was great to do about JFK’s ‘Catholicism’… but obviously not enough to prevent him from being elected President…
Ok… I will comment on the Sabbath issue… As far as I know, and perhaps things have changed… ‘Sabbath’, that is the 7th day, rather than the 1st day, by the usual and customary mesopotamian based reckoning of ‘7 day weeks’, has always been justified by its designation in Genesis, and being re-stated in the 10 Commandments, which as far as I know have not be dispensed by some sort of ‘that was the Temple Worship Laws’.
I think are some things about the 10 Commandments that seem to some people to have some ‘leeway’… such as ‘murder’ vs. ‘killing in self-defense’, or even Augustine’s ‘Just War’… and of course one could always say that Sunday is the 7th Day from the previous Monday… or in the case of the Muslims, Friday is the 7th day from the previous Saturday…
You hit the nail on the head with the worker’s protection. I think unions will play a large part if things play out similar to the way we’re depicting them in this series.
“The problem here is that while ‘engaging in activity’ can be apparently legally prohibited, requiring ‘church’ attendance, can not be at the moment legally required.”
True. This is why in Rise of the Beast we tied Sunday attendance to the welfare system, enforced via the microchips that everyone gets so uppity about. The gist of what we set up in the film is that the churches were fitted with sensors that would talk to your chip. Walk into church on Sunday and your welfare/unemployment/food stamps was automatically added to your chip. If you didn’t go to church, the chip was deactivated at the end of the night. A bit sci-fi? Perhaps, but it worked in the realm of the film.
“and of course one could always say that Sunday is the 7th Day from the previous Monday… or in the case of the Muslims, Friday is the 7th day from the previous Saturday…”
Only if you were to count the previous day as both a seven and a one, which is never given as an example in the Bible.
Just a brief reply… while I do ‘worry’ about government, these days I’m far more worried about ‘private enterprise’, which has grown to the point of being as large and far more invasive than ‘government’, except in the most extreme totalitarian states.
If you want to ‘weave’ Sunday observance into things… if Walmart decied to ‘close all stores’ on Sunday… no governmental agency would say boo… no ‘credit transactions on Sunday’… etc… and of course there’s always the ‘credit check’, which some how could be tied to ‘showing up at a specified/approved church’… only scores of 666 or better get loans… (I thought I’d just throw that one in there… I think the current ‘good’ score is about 664…).
This of course doesn’t tie this as a specific ‘Mark of the Beast’, or to ‘The Vatican’ in any clear way, such as was the case from about 400 CE to about… well… mid 19th Century, because while the control of the Catholic Church was lessened in ‘protestant’ areas, the Protestants themselves often set up governance which was based on their specific interpretations, and made laws requiring conformity… or how did Rhode Island get settled if not by dissidents from Massachusetts… but I digress.
Until a few years ago, the concept of ‘mark’ was fairly ‘physical’, tattoo, or ‘observance’, but these days a ‘mark’ could be an electronic record in a computer somewhere and one’s own ‘thumbprint’ or bio-identity feature used to confirm identity.