Fox owns the original film for infinity, but Disney owns Empire and Jedi. I'm fairly hopeful that a collab-box set could be in our future, assuming that Lucasfilm's claim to have destroyed the original negatives was just a bluff.

For Disney movies, I'd recommend Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King when they're younger. Hold off on The Hunchback of Notre Dame until they're a little older (there's a considerable amount of sexuality and scariness), but once they're at the right age it's undoubtedly the most mature of the Disney Renaissance films. I'd advise against The Little Mermaid—as Eddie has said before, it can be pretty damaging to a kid's worldview, particularly if that child is a girl.

I think this is the nuttiest fundamentalist site devoted to Harry Potter I've ever seen.

To start with, Dorkman posted this extremely useful video in the Raiders thread:

There's an incredibly fascinating and illuminating book called The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) that has a whole chapter devoted to polytheism. The most interesting parts of this chapter are when it goes into the Bible's own support for polytheism. Examples:

The Dead Sea Scrolls render Deuteronomy 32:8-9 as

"When Elyon divided the nations,
when he separated the sons of Adam,
he established the borders of the nations
according to the number of the sons of the gods.
Yahweh's portion was His people,
Jacob his allotted inheritance."

Later Hebrew texts of this same passage redact it to read "the sons of Israel" instead of "the sons of God", and "the Most High" instead of "Elyon", because by this time Jewish theology was monotheistic. Elyon was the patriarch god in the Canaanite religion that also included Baal and Asherah, and "the sons of the gods" is used everywhere else in the Bible to refer to deities—not angels, who have their own separate Hebrew word. Yahweh is presented in this passage as a young warrior-god who inherits—not chooses—His people from His father, the patriarch deity Elyon. English translations bowdlerize this, as did the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic text, but fortunately we still have the oldest texts to preserve this bit of religious retconning.

Also, the book of 2 Kings describes the pagan god Kemosh defeating Yahweh's power in battle. When Kemosh's servants sacrifice the king's own son, his wrath comes down upon the Israelites—whom Yahweh said would win the battle—and defeats them.

One major problem, though, is that for every find that corroborates something mentioned in the Bible there's another find that disproves something. The Israeli government actually hired a team of researchers to look for archaeological evidence regarding the Exodus and the wanderings in the Sinai Desert. They were forced to conclude there was none.

Also, a lot of that "evidence" isn't evidence for anything. The fact that there is a common flood story does not prove that the Bible's version is true; it merely suggests that there a was a huge flood across Mesopotamia and the various civilizations were all trying to justify it. Same for the Code of Hammurabi. So the later Hebrew law bears similarity to it...erm, so what? How does discovering that the Hebrews copied an earlier law system prove anything at all about the existence of God or the reliability of the Bible?

Even more important than the archaeology is the fact that we know that Judaism was polytheistic for centuries, until a major catastrophe forced them to reconsider their religious practices. Archaeological finds are small potatoes when we know that the central monotheistic beliefs of the Jewish religion were ripped off from Zoroastrianism and did not exist for centuries.

Finally, just the existence of the places the Bible mentions doesn't mean anything. You still have all your work cut out for you trying to provide evidence that the Exodus happened, that Jesus was the Son of God, etc. etc. And to quote Christopher Hitchens, even if we could prove that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead (neither at all likely), it would not mean He was the Son of God.

Assuming he ever works again.

I feel the same about Nicolas Cage. Yes, he's chosen to be in some godawful films, but his acting is always 100% committed no matter what he's doing.

There's a fantastic novel by the author of The Golden Compass called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ that deals with this issue. Long story short, there were two babies born to Mary, one called Jesus and one called Christ. Christ is hired by a shadowy figure (who is heavily implied to be Satan) and ordered to follow his brother and record his words—but to deviate from the facts when "the truth is more important than history"—and ultimately takes on the role of his dead brother to fabricate the resurrection. It was a very interesting read. Also notable is that it provided a very sympathetic look at the Pharisees; Caiaphas, the high priest, doesn't want to execute Jesus, but has no choice because Jesus is going out of His way to stir up trouble and is going to bring the wrath of the Romans down upon the entire Jewish population unless something is done.

We still need someone to do 2010: Moby Dick; unless something has changed since Teague last posted, that should be the last one.

Just did some counting on the FTP: 118 clips uploaded, and only one and a half movies left. Well done, gentlemen.

I'll take Legion--one of my faves. You guys can have at the rest of them.