The Feast of Gods

 So many butthurt posts about blasphemy in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, so here's the real score: The tableau in the ceremony is not a reference to Da Vinci's Last Supper but to Jan Harkens van Bijlert's The Feast of the Gods (1635), with Apollo crowned at the center of the table (no, that isn't Jesus Christ) and Dionysus the god of wine and pleasure in the foreground. Why this reference? Because Apollo and Dionysus are Greek gods, and the Olympics are a Greek invention, a tribute to Zeus.

And, yes, there was a decapitated woman cradling her own head. That's a reference to Marie Antoinette, whose beheading (along with the rest of French royalty in 1793) was a turning point for France moving away from a Catholic monarchy into a republic.

When your only point of reference is your Christianity, anything resembling a tableau or anything including performers in drag or anything with even a hint of impropriety will scandalize you. Read mythology, read history, look at art, do a simple Google search. Don't let your intellectual horizons begin and end with the Bible. (Which, by the way, has scores of children being massacred not once, but twice! So I don't know why, as avowed Bible lovers, violence should bother you.) 

Not everything is about your faith. Especially in France, which is a multicultural and increasingly immigrant society. And because so many of my Catholic friends here on Facebook can afford to travel, please stop with the intellectual laziness and replace it with intellectual curiosity. The French will be French. They will do their thing. France has the grand trappings of its Catholic past, but if you display even a hint of your insular lack of exposure to the immigrant experience or your Catholicism-is-under-attack viewpoint, you will embarrass not only yourself, but the country.