Catholic fatwa

I kind of gave up on teaching for the next couple days (the kids turned in rough drafts of an essay yesterday and have to turn in a final typed version tomorrow, so there's not much to do here). I'm showing "Millions" instead. It's about two kids who find a huge sack of money. The younger one is a little wierd, like, he's obsessed with saints and keeps having visions of them. It's great so far, although I've seen the first half 5 times and haven't seen the end yet (ah, teaching).
Anyway, at one point, Saint Peter shows up and says the miracle of the loaves and fishes wasn't for real. What happened instead, he says, is that as they passed the plate around, each person only pretended to take some fish and bread, and got their own food out of their pockets instead and started sharing. That was the real miracle, that people shared their own food with others.

Anyway, about the third time I watched this scene, I thought, you know, this is a little blasphemous. It's still a nice story, and really well-intentioned and I personally? Well I have no problem with blasphemy. But it struck me as having parallels with Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. See, if you haven't read it, there is plenty of stuff in there that could have freaked people out, but apparently what really did it, what caused the fatwa to be put on Rushdie, was the re-telling of the Muhammad stuff. In the book, it's not even that different than the story as told in the Qu'ran, it's just that there's REALLY no room for personal spins on the story in Islam. Anyway, I was just thinking that it's probably a good thing that the Catholics don't issue fatwas, or there'd really be a hell of a lot of people in hiding, probably including me.

P.S. If you thought the bad poetry was bad the other day, go back to the page and search under my last name. Apparently I have two distant fourth cousins twice removed who are real schlock artists.