Sir, - It might be true that violent movies lead to violent acts on our streets, as implied by Robert Dunlop in your letters page (May 18th). Or it might not. In any event Mr Dunlop's objective of starting a debate on the topic is a worthy one.
The mind boggles, however, at his suggestion that the Judaeo Christian ethic can be of assistance in reversing the perceived trend towards more violence in society. This is a tradition that is predicated on violence. In our schools, young children are invited to dwell on every smallest detail of the execution of a man through his being suspended on a specially constructed device by means of nails driven through his limbs. His death was used for centuries, in its turn, as a justification for the insidious violence of anti Semitism. The idea was, as enunciated to this writer by his primary school teacher in the 1950s, that the Jews "were condemned to wander the earth because they crucified Our Lord".
In history, we have had the Crusades, where countless thousands of innocent men, women and children were brutally put to death; the institutionalised torture of the Spanish inquisition; the routine and officially sanctioned burning alive of "heretics"; Oliver Cromwell opining that "God will be pleased" at the handiwork of his troops in the cities of Limerick and Drogheda.
There is now the situation in Northern Ireland which has the most generous analysis, been exacerbated by the refusal of various church authorities to countenance integrated education. The same page that contained Mr Dunlop's letter had another one deploring the violence done to young males by circumcision, another Judaeo Christian speciality.
We seem to have only very recently ended an era where one particular branch of the JudaeoChristian tradition, the Roman Catholic Church, presided over a system of public education where brutality and violence were used as tools of instruction. Very obvious psychopaths were given free rein over children in the name of education, including religious instruction. In the process whole generations were given the clear message that violence was a legitimate means to achieve any objective, and it could even be practised on the youngest and most vulnerable members of society.
A screenplay by Vincent Tarantino would not make a good blueprint of how society might be ordered. However, on the evidence of history to date, it might just be preferable to using the Judaeo Christian example of how things should be done. - Yours, etc
Findrum,
Convoy, Co Donegal.