I completed viewing Season Two recently. This season is significant because it is a creative departure from the novel by Margaret Atwood which closely guided Season One. The novel and season one end about the same point – the capture of the protagonist, June/Offred.
One thing that stands out for me is that the Republic of Gilead (the fictional dystopic society that has replaced the USA) is supposed to be a theonomic (divine-law) state that stands on biblical principles and laws. The result of this, however, is the spectre of a country that is in fact so terribly unethical and oppressive that it could very well be described simply as "evil" because it condones and actively performs things such as systemic rape, flagrant disrespect of various human rights, murderous suppression of dissidents, random killings and so on and so forth.
Gilead and the Bible
I walked away from Season 2 just flabbergasted at how the Republic of Gilead (and all what it stands for) really reflects badly on the kind of entity the Bible is. This leads me also to ask the very troubling question: what type of person or group does the Bible, when taken and read in a serious yet very misguided way, actually produce? Is the Bible, as the Christian tradition claims, the words (or "the Word”) of God? Hmmm… Didn’t Jesus say, “By their fruits you shall know them” (Mt 7:20)? Or is the Bible just, on the whole, a product of a very malignantly ethnocentric and savagely primitive level of culture that has to be transcended and corrected by the advances that have happened in human history?
Gilead and “Pro-Life”?
Another disturbing aspect of the story is that the Republic of Gilead (i.e., the elites in power therein) exhibits an obsessive concern for the production of "precious" new life (in the form of babies - hence, the creation of the class of "handmaids") but systemically tramples on and destroys life in other areas because of its hypocritical disregard for life (taken in a more holistic sense) and the quality of life of many of its people, as well as the rights of many in its realm. Talk about a warped tunnel-vision or fixation! This aspect reminds me a great deal of some unbalanced attitudes of some Catholic pro-life elements.
A quote I saw on FB from Barbara Brown Taylor (priest, theologian, professor) eloquently summarizes my strong feelings after my viewing:
"Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion-which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will - from their own."
