Howdy Folks!
Bear with me on my thoughts here. I am not a know-it-all as some people on the internet think; but, I am a person who knows-a-lot about a lot of different things because of my formal education and my thirst for more knowledge from books and elsewhere beginning before I started grade school. Much of what I know/learned during my college and university education periods was not from the textbooks nor from the instructors/professors, it was from all of the research I had to do for weekly and term papers.
I often have people ask me to document something I had learned as fact, or told the best I could from memory, in spite of my disability due to a head injury. My response to that was "If I had known that many years later, I would own a computer and got on the internet and needed the references to document my sources, I would have taken more notes while doing academic style study on my own." I never owned a computer until 1998 and what I know about computers and the internet, I learned it by trial and error. And, some of what I know, I had to use a hard-copy manual to half-way understand it.
Oh, when you see typos in my postings, they are not normal run-of-the-mill common mistakes; they are related to the fact that sometimes what my fingers type is not the same as my brain thinks and before I got beat up and hit in the head, I was great at properly spelling words. My "speller" part of my brain still does not misspell words. It's like there is a short-circuit in my brain when my motorskills don't work properly. Oh, I have done quite a bit of reseach on the brain and head traumas, too, which was to help me understand my own disabilities.
While Annie Proulx's original short story only has one reference to religion (that's related to the sad hymn, "Water-Walking Jesus," which Jack Twist's mother taught him and she believed in the Pentecost - Annie Proulx did not write she was Pentecostal, however), the screenplay writers, the director and/or other people related to the final cut of the movie has/have made a big deal of religion in the story.
Here in the United States of America, some people cannot separate their religion from their politics. And, there are millions of people who literally believe that the USA was not only founded on the Bible, they believed that all of the founding fathers, including the ones who signed the Declaration of Independence were "Born-Again Christians."
Some people grew up attending American Public Schools which were still using textbooks published by religious denominations which had/still have their own private schools. A lot of biblically related stuff was in those books and even the illustrations in them were not historically accurate. For instance, every Pilgrim family did not have a Bible in the 1620s. In the Plymouth Colony, the religious leader and maybe a few others cound even afford a Bible. (Oh, my ancestor, Edward Doty, from whom I get my surname, came over on the Mayflower as an indentured servant. He was not a Pilgrim and had run away from home with him having to work off his passage with the guy who paid it.)
Continued in next posting . . .
