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Titanic
by John J. Dwyer
- I regret that my $4.00 matinee
ticket has helped Titanic become the number one-grossing
motion picture in American history. Had I known the content of the
film, I would not have gone to see it.
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- Even more do I regret that
droves of Metroplex Christian families have allowed their children
to see this brilliant, larger-than-life epic—once, twice,
thrice, even more!
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Why do I make such a fuss about a
secular movie? For two reasons—because of what the film is
and because of what it is not.
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What Titanic is, is over
three hours of snobbish, greedy, cruel rich people having their way
with the benighted poor. One can only wonder how the film’s
writer-director James Cameron brought himself to accept from the
evil rich of our day the $200 million necessary to make the film.
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Even the movie’s one “church”
scene portrays the haughty, self-sufficient wealthy barring the
film’s hero from their service.
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Ah, the “hero” so many
Christian parents have sent their children to watch. He is a
shiftless bohemian barely out of his teens—if out of them at
all—who smokes, drinks, gambles, mocks all manner of social
convention, and has lately lived the life of a reprobate painter in
Paris, France, sleeping with that city’s women of the night,
while painting them nude, the evidence of which the movie
graphically shares with us.
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Which brings us to the teenaged
heroine. Cameron’s standard for young American womanhood asks
our hero to paint her nude as well, which the film again shares
graphically with us. She also rebels against her mother, offers
obscene gestures, and makes such passionate love (It used to be
called fornication) to her new “boyfriend” that her
character over 80 years later remembers the affair as her life’s
greatest love.
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What great role models for American
youth.
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Meanwhile, back in 1912, the real
Titanic went down, amidst such an outpouring of heroic sacrifice
that books were written, monuments built, and, now, web sites
established “To the brave men who gave their lives that women
and children might be saved.”
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Who were these men? For one, Edward
Smith, English captain of the ship. Yes, the same man portrayed in
the movie as an ineffectual, tea-sipping incompetent who after a
quarter-century sailing “hasn’t learned a thing.”
And who, shattered by the tragedy, selfishly allows the waves
crashing over the Titanic to engulf him.
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In reality, Captain Smith refused a
saving place on a lifeboat, rescued a baby from the water, and left
his spot on a capsized lifeboat so that others could survive. Those
others saw him swim away into the icy sea and, after a short time,
become still.
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Other men swam through the freezing
Atlantic and placed their own infant children into the safety of the
lifeboats, then remained in the water to die, so the small crowded
craft filled with women would not sink under the added weight.
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Multi-millionaire Benjamin
Guggenheim perished after saying, “No woman shall be left
aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.”
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And while Hollywood’s version
of a titanic hero tells a man who is praying “Yea, though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no
evil,” to “get outa my way if you’re gonna walk,”
God’s version of a hero, Scottish Pastor John Harper, behaved
a bit differently. He got his four-year-old daughter to a lifeboat,
then proceeded to share the saving gospel of Jesus Christ and His
accomplished work with everyone he could.
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As he struggled for breath in the
frigid black water, Harper shouted at a man who clung to a drifting
board to “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be
saved.”
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The man would not respond. Finally,
the dying Harper called once more, “Are you saved? Believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” Then he went
down.
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After Harper drowned, the man
believed in Christ. He was later rescued and testified that he was
John Harper’s “last convert.”
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Now what a tale Hollywood could have
told with that.
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The death of the righteous who
dieth
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Is gateway to life evermore;
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The joy that all glories outwieth
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For him is laid up in store.
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Painless and tearless,
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With “no more sea,”
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Beauteous indeed
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Shall the morning be.
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