The Messiah and Silent Bob

I wanted to give a quick "attaboy" to the righteous dudes in The Vatican for NOT freaking out about the new film "The Messiah" from Iranian director Nader Talebzadeh.

The media have dubbed the move, now showing in Tehran, as an Islamic response to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

As you can imagine, releasing a film of this subject matter in the Middle East presents ample opportunity for gasket blowing, ape going, cool losing and generally wigging out. I mean, we all remember the little embassy burning episode that happened with some newspapers printed likenesses of Mohamad, right?

Luckily, the "religion of peace" doesn't consider Jesus Christ an important enough prophet to go ballistic (literally) over. And also luckily, the religion of "fish on Friday, beer on Saturday and confession of Sunday" doesn't consider it a ruler-on-the-knuckles offense for a movie maker to say that Jesus is NOT the son of God.

In fact, rather than condemn Nader Talebzadeh for saying that Muslims don't consider J.C. to be the messiah, the funny hat dudes in Rome actually gave the film an award for "promoting interfaith understanding."

Imagine that -- trying to understand and get along with the infidels. It gives me hope that maybe Kansans and Missourians can learn to live together.

But most importantly, I think it's great that Jay and Silent Bob are able to continue their movie careers after the Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse films.

tagged: Iran, movie, Vatican, Kevin Smith, Jay and Silent Bob, Messiah, Nader Talebzadeh, Muhammad, Askewniverse