The Hidden (And Not So Hidden) Messages in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (pt. I) - The Vigilant Citizen

The Hidden (And Not So Hidden) Messages in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (pt. I)

Jul 8th, 2013 | Category: Featured, Movies and TV |434 Comments

"Eyes Wide Shut" was promoted as a steamy, suspenseful movie starring the "It" couple of the day: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. While the actors were prominently featured in the movie, it is everything around them that told the true story of "Eyes Wide Shut". Stanley Kubrick's attention to detail and symbolism gave the movie an entire other dimension – one that cannot be seen by those who have their eyes wide shut. This multiple-part series will look at the hidden symbolism of Kubrick's final film.

I remember when I first watched Eyes Wide Shut, back in 1999. Boy, did I hate it. I hated how slow everything was, I hated how Nicole Kidman tried to sound drunk or high and I hated seeing Tom Cruise walk around New York looking concerned. I guess I reacted the same way critics did at the time the movie came out and thought: "This movie is boring and there is nothing hot about it." More than a decade later, equipped with a little more knowledge and patience, I re-watched the movie … and it blew my mind. In fact, like most Stanley Kubrick films, an entire book could be written about the movie and the concepts it addresses. Eyes Wide Shut is indeed not simply about a relationship, it is about all of the outside forces and influences that define that relationship. It is about the eternal back-and-forth between the male and female principles in a confused and decadent modern world. Also, more importantly, it is about the group that rules this modern world – a secret elite that channels this struggle between the male and female principles in a specific and esoteric matter. The movie however does not spell out anything. Like all great art, messages are communicated through subtle symbols and mysterious riddles.

Stanley Kubrick unexpectedly died only five days after submitting the final cut of the movie to Warner Bros, making Eyes Wide Shut his swan song. Considering the fact that Eyes Wide Shut is about an occult secret society that eliminates those who cross its path, some theories arose about Kubrick's death and its suspicious nature. Did he reveal to the public too much, too soon? Maybe.

Let's look at the main themes of Kubrick's last creation.

The Modern Couple

The stars of Eyes Wide Shut were the "It" couple of 1999: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Those who were expecting the movie to be a sort of voyeuristic experience showing hot scenes of the couple were probably very disappointed. The audience rather got a cold, egoistic and profoundly unsatisfied couple, one that seems to be tied together not by pure love, but by other factors, like convenience and appearances. While the couple is very "modern" and "upper-class", the forces that keep it together are the result of basic, primal and almost animalistic behavior. If we look at the instinctive behavior of humans and animals, males primarily look for females that have good child-bearing qualities while females look for a strong provider. Remnants of this behavior still exist today as males tend to display wealth and power to attract females while females showcase their beauty to attract males. In Eyes Wide Shut, the couple perfectly follows that instinctive script.

Tom Cruise's character is called Dr. Bill … as in dollar bill. Several times during the movie, Dr. Bill either waves his money or his "doctor badge" at people to get them to do what he wants. Bill is part of the upper class and his dealings with people of the lower class are often resolved with money.

In order to get this taxi driver to wait for him in front of the elite mansion, Dr. Bill tears up a hundred dollar bill and promises him to give him the other half when he comes back. Dr. Bill's motto is probably "Everybody has a price". Does his own wife have a price?

Played by Nicole Kidman, Alice lost her job in the art world and is now fully supported by her husband's salary. While she lives very comfortably, Alice appears to be extremely bored with her life as a stay at home mother. The name Alice is most likely a reference to the main character of Alice in Wonderland – a fairy tale about a privileged girl who is bored with her life and who goes "through the looking glass" to end up in Wonderland. In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice is often shown staring at the looking glass – grooming herself or … maybe looking for something more to life.

Alice is often shown in front of the mirror and making herself pretty. At the beginning of the movie, almost everyone who talk to her mention her appearance. Her daughter Helena (maybe named after Helena of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world) follows in her footsteps.

Promotional images for the movie feature Alice kissing Bill but looking at herself in the mirror, almost as if she was seeing an alternate reality.

While the couple shows signs of fatigue, Bill and Alice put on their "happy masks" when it is time to attend social events. Like the elite people they socialize with, there is a big difference between the facade they put on and reality.

Brushing With the Elite

Bill and Alice go to a classy party given by Victor Ziegler, one of Bill's wealthy patients. Judging from Victor's house, he is not simply rich, he is part of the ultra-elite. While his party is very elegant and is attended by highly cultured people, it doesn't take long for the viewers to realize that this facade hides a disgusting dark side. Also, small details inserted by Kubrick hint to a link between the party and the occult ritual that occurs later in the movie.

When entering the party, the first thing we see is this peculiar Christmas decoration. This eight-pointed star is found throughout the house.

The star at Zeigler's house is nearly identical to the ancient symbol of the star of Ishtar.

Knowing Kubrick's attention to detail, the inclusion of the star of Ishtar in this party is not an accident. Ishtar is the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, war and, mostly, sexuality. Her cult involved sacred prostitution and ritual acts – two elements we clearly see later in the movie.

"Babylonians gave Ishtar offerings of food and drink on Saturday. They then joined in ritual acts of lovemaking, which in turn invoked Ishtar's favor on the region and its people to promote continued health and fruitfulness."
– Goddess Ishtar, Anita Revel

Ishtar herself was considered to be the "courtesan of the gods" and had many lovers. While inspired in bed, she was also cruel to the men that got attached to her. These concepts will constantly reappear in the movie, especially with Alice.

During the party, Bill and Alice go their separate ways and are both faced with temptation. Alice meets a man named Sandor Szavost who asks her about Ovid's Art of Love. This series of books, written during the times of Ancient Rome, was essentially a "How to Cheat on Your Partner" guide, and was popular with the elite of the time. The first book opens with an invocation to Venus – the planet esoterically associated with lust. Interestingly enough, Ishtar (and her equivalents in other Semetic cultures) was considered to be the personification of Venus.

Sandor drinks from Alice's glass. This trick is taken right out of  Ovid's The Art of Love. It sends Alice a message that is not very subliminal: "I want to exchange fluids with you".

Sandor's name might be a reference to the founder of the Church of Satan: Anton Szandor Lavey. Is this Kubrick's way of saying that this man, who urges Alice to cheat on her husband, is a part of the occult elite and its decadent ways? The Hungarian man is apparently skilled in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) as he nearly hypnotizes Alice with well calculated phrases about the futility of married life and the necessity of pursuing pleasure.

Meanwhile, Bill is discussing with two flirtatious models who tell him that they want to take him to "where the rainbow ends". While the meaning of this enigmatic phrase is never explicitly explained in the movie, symbols talk for themselves.

Rainbows Everywhere

Rainbows and multicolored lights appear throughout the movie, from the beginning to the end.

The name of the store where Bill rents his costume is called "Rainbow". The name of the store under it: "Under the Rainbow". Kubrick is trying to tell us something…Something involving rainbows.

As if to emphasize the theme of multicolored rainbows, almost every scene in the movie contains multicolored Christmas lights, giving most sets a hazy, dreamy glow.

Almost every time Bill enters a room, the first things we see are multicolored Christmas lights.

Sometimes Christmas lights are the focal point of attention.

These lights tie together most scenes of the movie, making them part of the same reality. There are however a few select scenes where there are absolutely no Christmas lights. The main one is Somerton palace – the place where the secret society ritual takes place.

Sharply contrasting with the rest of the movie, Sommerton  is completely devoid of multicolored lights. Everything about this place is in sharp opposition with the "outside world".

In Eyes Wide Shut, there are therefore two worlds: The Christmas lights-filled "rainbow world", where the masses wander around, trying to make ends meet and the other world… "where the rainbow ends"-  where the elite gathers and performs its rituals. The contrast between the two world give a sense of an almost insurmountable divide between them. Later, the movie will clearly show us how those from the "rainbow world" cannot enter the other world.

So, when the models ask Bill the go "where the rainbow ends", they probably refer to going "where the elite gathers and performs rituals". It might also be about them being dissociated Beta Programming slaves. There are several references to Monarch mind control (read this article for more information) in the movie. Women who take part in elite rituals are often products of Illuminati mind control. In MK Ultra vocabulary, "going over the rainbow" means dissociating from reality and entering another persona (more on this in the next article).

The models ask Bill to leave the "rainbow world" (there's a Christmas tree right behind them) to indulge in the debaucherous rituals of the occult elite.

Behind the Curtain

Bill's flirting with the models is interrupted when Ziegler calls him to his bathroom. There, we get a first glance of "where the rainbow ends" – the dark truth about the elite.

Bill meets Ziegler in his gigantic bathroom. The man is dressing up and is with a naked unconscious woman…who is not his wife.

If we rewind a little, when Bill and Alice first entered the party, they were welcomed by Ziegler and his wife in a room filled with Christmas lights. We saw two respectable couples talking about respectable things in room full of enchanting lights. But when Bill goes "where the rainbow ends" (notice there are no Christmas lights in the bathroom) we see reality: Ziegler with a Beta programming slave who overdosed on goofballs. When the woman gains consciousness, Ziegler talks to her in an odd, paternal matter, highlighting the fact that he's the master and she's the slave. The luxurious setting of this scene is Kubrick's way of saying that extreme wealth does not necessary equal high morals.

Ziegler then urges Bill to keep everything he just saw a secret. The world "where the rainbow ends" must never be revealed to the outside world. It operates in its own space, has its own rules and depends on the masses' ignorance.

Questioning Marriage

While Alice ultimately rejected Sandor's advances, she was nevertheless enticed by them. The next day, Alice tells Bill that she could have cheated on him at the party. When Bill tells his wife that he loves and trusts her, she completely loses it. She then proceeds to tell him a story about how she was once ready to cheat on him with a naval officer she met in a hotel. This cruel story highlights the "Ishtar" side of Alice as she brings up in her husband feelings of jealousy, insecurity, betrayal and even humiliation. In short, Alice purposely summoned everything that is negative in relationships to pop Bill's "love bubble". This wake-up call prompts Bill to embark in a strange journey around New-York city, one that has multiple level of meanings. That strange night will ultimately lead him to the exact opposite of a monogamous relationship: Anonymous, masked copulation with strangers in a ritual setting. Bill's journey will be further analyzed in the second part of this series of articles.

Conclusion of Part One

The first part of this series about Eyes Wide Shut took a broad look at Bill and Alice, a modern couple that has the "privilege" of brushing with the upper-echelon of New York. While everything appears great on the surface, Kubrick quickly tells the viewers to not be deceived by appearances and to not be impressed by exhibitions of wealth. Because, behind the "rainbow world", exists a dark and disturbing reality, one that Kubrick exposes in many subtle ways throughout the movie.

While Bill and Alice are simply "guests" in the elite circle, they are nevertheless fascinated and attracted by it. They see in this lifestyle a way of fulfilling their dark and secret needs. In the next part of this series, we'll look at the occult meaning of Bill's journey – a story told by subtle symbols peppered throughout the movie.

Read part II of the series —>

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Eyes Wide Shut at 15: Inside the Epic, Secretive Film Shoot that Pushe | Vanity Fair

Eyes Wide Shut at 15: Inside the Epic, Secretive Film Shoot that Pushed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to Their Limits

On July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick's final film opened in theaters. The legendary director of The Shining and Lolita had teamed up with the most famous married couple in Hollywood, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, for a film that probed insecurities about fidelity, sex, and marriage itself. It was a huge story even before an extended production schedule and rumors of on-set frustration made it seem that the master director was merely torturing two of the world's biggest stars. In this adaptation from her book, Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor, Amy Nicholson looks at the film itself, as well as its production, and the many ways that Eyes Wide Shut pushed Cruise and Kidman—as actors and as a couple—to the breaking point. July 18, 2014 1:02 pm

From Everett Collection.

Kubrick's obsession with secrecy so infected his cast and crew that no one has ever spoken about it in detail. The day-to-day life on set can only be inferred from facts and hints. The most major fact: Eyes Wide Shut was exhausting. Kubrick had asked Cruise and Kidman to commit to six months. When they landed in London in the fall of 1996, the couple fully expected to return to Hollywood by spring. Instead, they stayed on through the summer, fall, and another Christmas. Filming wrapped in January of 1998, but in May they were summoned back for more months of reshoots. Altogether they'd spend 15 months on Eyes Wide Shut, the Guinness World Record for the longest continual film shoot.

"Stanley had figured out a way to work in England for a fraction of what we pay here," explained Sydney Pollack, who joined the cast as the corrosive tycoon Victor Ziegler after the extended shooting forced original actor Harvey Keitel to cry uncle and drop out. "While the rest of us poor bastards are able to get 16 weeks of filming for $70 million with a $20 million star, Stanley could get 45 weeks of shooting for $65 million." Though every six months Cruise spent in London cost him another $20 million film he wasn't making—plus he had the fledgling Cruise/Wagner production company to oversee—he swore to the press he had no qualms about his extended art house sabbatical.

"I remember talking to Stanley and I said, 'Look, I don't care how long it takes, but I have to know: are we going to finish in six months?'" said Cruise. "People were waiting and writers were waiting. I'd say, 'Stanley, I don't care—tell me it's going to be two years.'"

Kubrick is legendary for his perfectionism—to reconstruct Greenwich Village in London, he sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines. But his approach to character and performance was the opposite. Instead of knowing what he wanted on the set, he waited for the actors to seize upon it themselves. His process: repeated takes designed to break down the idea of performance altogether. The theory was that once his actors bottomed-out in exhaustion and forgot about the cameras, they could rebuild and discover something that neither he nor they expected. During The Shining, he'd put Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall through 50 takes to figure out what he wanted, causing Duvall to have a nervous breakdown. For Eyes Wide Shut, given his stars' extreme pliancy and eagerness to please, Kubrick went further, once insisting that Cruise do 95 takes of walking through a door.

"In times when we couldn't get it, it was just like, 'Fuck!'" admitted Cruise. "I'd bring it upon myself because I demand a lot of myself." But what he never asked—at least, not openly in the press—was if there was an "it" Kubrick wanted him to get. After all, a director who demands 95 takes could be exacting—or conversely, he could be ill-prepared and uncommunicative. Cruise's overpreparation had served him well in the past. Not here. He got an ulcer, and tried to keep the news from Kubrick. At its core, the Cruise/Kubrick combination seems cruel: an over-achieving actor desperate to please a never-satisfied auteur. The power balance was firmly shifted to Kubrick, yet to his credit, Cruise has never complained.

Kubrick defenders—Cruise included—insist the legend was fully in command. "He was not indulgent," Cruise insisted to the press. "You know you are not going to leave that shot until it's right." Yet it's hard not to see indulgence when even small roles demanded prolonged commitment, like starlet Vinessa Shaw's one-scene cameo as a prostitute, which was meant to take two weeks and ended up wasting two months. Adding to the peril, Kubrick also refused to screen dailies, a practice Cruise relied on. "Making a movie is like stabbing in the dark," the actor explained. "If I get a sense of the overall picture, then I'm better for the film." Cruise couldn't watch and adjust his performance to find his character's through line—a problem exacerbated by the amount of footage the director filmed. For most of the cast, who appeared only in one or two moments, they had only to match the timbre of their character's big moment. But Cruise alone is in nearly every scene and had to spend the shoot playing a guessing game. Not knowing which of his mind-melting number of takes would wind up in the film, he still had to figure out how to shape a consistent character from scene to scene. Given Kubrick's withholding direction and the exponential number of combinations that could be created from his raw footage, it's understandable if the forever-prepared actor found himself adrift.

Adding to the actor's peril was the part's personal and emotional risk. Kubrick decided to find his story through psychoanalyzing his stars, prodding Cruise and Kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret. "Tom would hear things that he didn't want to hear," admitted Kidman. "It wasn't like therapy, because you didn't have anyone to say, 'And how do you feel about that?' It was honest, and brutally honest at times." The line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred. The couple slept in their characters' bedroom, chose the colors of the curtains, strewed their clothes on the floor, and even left pocket change on the bedside table just as Cruise did at home.

"As an actor, you set up: there's reality, and there's pretend," explained Kidman. "And those lines get crossed, and it happens when you're working with a director that allows that to happen. It's a very exciting thing to happen; it's a very dangerous thing to happen." Added Cruise, "I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up." At least the two actors had an auditory cue to distinguish fact from fiction: on camera, Kidman changed her Australian accent to American. But there was also external tension pressing down on their performances as both actors—especially Cruise—were media savvy enough to recognize that audiences would project Bill and Alice's unhappiness on their own marriage, which was already a source of tabloid fodder. Even during the course of filming, the couple had to successfully sue Star magazine for writing that they hired sex therapists to coach them.

Kubrick's on-set wall of secrecy even divided Cruise and Kidman. To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, Kubrick would direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a handsome naval officer—an imaginary affair that haunts Bill over the course of the film—Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. Not only did he ask the pair to pose in over 50 erotic positions, he banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband's tension by telling him what happened during the shoot.

Co-star Vinessa Shaw would eventually admit Kubrick had exhausted the once-indefatigable actor, confessing that compared to Cruise's "gung ho" first months of shooting, by the end, "He was still into it, but not as energetic." Still, when gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote that the Eyes Wide Shut set was miserable, Cruise quickly fired back a letter insisting that his and Kidman's relationship with Kubrick was "impeccable and extraordinary. […] Both Nic and I love him." Added actor and director Todd Field, on set for six months to play the pivotal role of the piano player Nick Nightingale, "You've never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director." However, Cruise's devotion to Kubrick's massive mystery masterpiece would prove damaging to his screen image.

Good vs. Right

It's hard to love Cruise's character, Dr. Bill Harford. He's closed off and slippery, a cipher whose choices don't make consistent sense. What personal history screenwriter Frederic Raphael had included in the original drafts—Harford's strained relationship with his father, his guilt over his prurient interest in female anatomy—Kubrick had purged from the script, leaving Cruise to play a shallow voyager who only serves to lead the audience on an odyssey of sexual temptation. Also on the page but deleted from the final film is Bill's explanatory voice-over that invited the audience to understand his feelings. Worse, Kubrick deliberately shunned including the Tom Cruise charisma fans expected in his performance, raising the question of why he cast Cruise at all. Why ask the biggest star in the world to carry your film and then hide his face under a mask for 20 minutes?

Though this is a story of sexual frustration—an emotion Cruise had played with conviction in Born on the Fourth of July—and jealousy, which is just the darker twin of Cruise's signature competitive streak, his performance in Eyes Wide Shut feels flat. He'd done vulnerability better in Jerry Maguire and had captured neutered paralysis a decade and a half before in Risky Business. Yet in nearly all of Eyes Wide Shut's key emotional moments—his wife confessing to her first and second psychological "betrayals," his patient's daughter professing her love over her father's corpse, nearly kissing a call girl's corpse in the morgue, being unmasked at the orgy—Cruise's face is stiff and visibly unfeeling, almost as if he never took the mask off at all.

Cruise's blankness makes Eyes Wide Shut take on an element of kabuki theater, the art form where emotional perception—not projection—is key. The whole film feels like an exercise in theatricality, as though Dr. Bill is not a person but a prop. This isn't a movie about a human possessed with distrust and jealousy—it's a movie about distrust and jealousy that simply uses a human as its conduit. With Cruise hidden in a mask and robe, the intention is to hide his individuality in the service of a larger ritualistic machine. Even in his scene with the impossibly sweet prostitute played by Vinessa Shaw, their conversation about how much cash for which physical acts doesn't spark with lust but limps along like the characters themselves are merely performers recognizing that this is the negotiation that is supposed to take place. "Do you suppose we should talk about money?" he asks—it's as if their whole conversation is in air quotes.

To critique Tom Cruise's performance in Eyes Wide Shut, it's important to distinguish between good and right. Measured against any of his previous screen roles, his acting reads as terrible. It's artificial, distant, and unrelatable. However, the terribleness of his performance translates into a tricky logic puzzle. On-screen, we're given only one take of the 95 attempts that Cruise shot. If Kubrick was a perfectionist who demanded Cruise repeat himself 95 times on the set, and in the editing room rejected 94 of those takes, then the "terrible" take Kubrick chose must be the take that Kubrick wanted. What feels flat to the audience must have felt correct to the director, so even though it's hard to appreciate Cruise's performance, at least one person must have thought the chosen take was perfect: Stanley Kubrick. And for Cruise, a perfectionist himself who was determined to make his master happy, we're forced to defend the "badness" of his performance by recognizing him as an excellent soldier following orders.

Yet critics under the sway of thinking that the great Kubrick could do no wrong and Cruise, the popcorn hero, could do little right, blamed the actor for the director's choices and groaned that "Our forever boyish star just can't deliver." The irony, however, is that in 45 years of filmmaking, Kubrick had never asked his actors to deliver. His films had earned Oscar nominations for their acting only twice: Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus (1960). In his much shorter career, Cruise himself had earned as many Oscar nods. That fact alone speaks to the limited value the director placed on acting—to Kubrick, his cast was merely a tool for his vision and individual performances subservient to his intimidating authorial style. Kubrick's disinterest in actors is evident even in Eyes Wide Shut's credits, which despite including two directors (Pollack and Field) and two great character actors (Alan Cumming and Rade Serbedzija) filled the rest of its cast with new faces and 10th-billed TV actors. As much as Cruise wanted Eyes Wide Shut to prove, yet again, that he could act, Kubrick clearly had scant interest in giving him the opportunity.

Cruise made himself vulnerable before Kubrick and his devotees, but instead of being rewarded for his emotional and financial sacrifice, audiences dismissed his performance as callow. He couldn't even ask his by-then dead-and-buried director for support. Eyes Wide Shut's fallout wasn't flattering: he was blamed for the film's failure, and the tabloids took a savage interest in his marriage, which would last only two more years. Yet Cruise continues to defend his two years of hard work. "I didn't like playing Dr. Bill. I didn't like him. It was unpleasant," admitted Cruise a year later in the only public criticism he's ever given. "But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn't done this."

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Mornings & Evenings w/John Lennon

Mornings & 
Evenings 
w/ John Lennon

I should've released this yesterday,  too busy, but for a month or so, ending on this date a long time ago, he was working on his latest album at the record plant on the first floor...

I worked as a negative film cutter at a small edit house in the same building, west of times square...

almost every morning, as we entered the building together, we wished each other a good day,

one of us always holding the door for the other...

almost every evening, we left the building together,

always wishing each other a good evening, always the black limo waiting for him...

He was John Lennon...

except on this night many years ago, after wishing him well, I arrived home,

turned on Monday Night Football to hear Howard Cosell announce that John Lennon had just been shot

and killed...

As this day approaches a great sadness comes over me, not because I knew him but because how easily any of us can just disappear...

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The secret foundation that contains the world’s paranormal artifacts

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http://clyp.it/lekq13np

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A Miracle in Scientific American - Reality Sandwich

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A Peacful God? 30 of the Most Violent Exhortations from the Bible, Torah and Quran | Alternet

30 of the Most Violent Exhortations from the Bible, Torah and Quran

How well do you know your Holy Books?

The world has watched in horror while members of ISIS justify the next mass murder or icy execution with words from the Quran, followed by shouts of Allahu Akbar—God is the greatest! If beliefs have any power whatsoever to drive behavior—and as a psychologist I think they do—there can be little doubt that the Quran's many endorsements of violence play a role in how exactly ISIS has chosen to pursue religious and political dominion.

At the same time, it should be equally clear a sacred text filled with violence is insufficient to trigger mass brutality unless other conditions are present as well. Culture, empathy, education and empowerment—and other factors scholars understand only in part—appear to have a protective influence, safeguarding even most fundamentalists against the worst teachings of their own tradition. We know this in part because the Bible contains commandments and stories that are as horrific as those being used to justify butchery in Iraq and Syria.

The following 30 violent exhortations are drawn from Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. The generic word "God" is used for all deity names, and names of places or people have been replaced with generic terms. How well do you know your Torah, Bible or Quran and Hadith? Can you tell which is which? Give it a try and then check the key at the bottom.

1. Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the [holy man] who represents God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged.

2. I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those, who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes.

3. I will fill your mountains with the dead. Your hills, your valleys, and your streams will be filled with people slaughtered by the sword. I will make you desolate forever. Your cities will never be rebuilt. Then you will know that I am God.

4. Fight them until there is no more [disbelief or worshipping of other gods] and worship is for God alone.

5. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

6. Whoso fighteth in the way of God, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.

7. Make ready to slaughter [the infidel's] sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and posses the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants.

8. [God's messenger]... was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The [holy man] replied, "They [women and children] are from them [unbelievers]."

9. Then I heard God say to the other men, "Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all – old and young, girls and women and little children."

10. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.

11. Keep [my holiday], for it is holy. Anyone who desecrates it must die.

12. The punishment of those who wage war against God and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement.

13. If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.

14. It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he had made a great slaughter in the land...

15. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

16. I shall terrorize the [heathens]. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them, because they oppose God and his apostle.

17. A [holy man's] daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death.

18. So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.

19. Everyone who would not seek God was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.

20. And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.

21. But if [a girl wasn't a virgin on her wedding night] and evidence of the girl's virginity is not found, they shall bring the girl to the entrance of her father's house and there her townsman shall stone her to death, because she committed a crime against God's people by her unchasteness in her father's house. Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst.

22. The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, "O [believer]! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

23. If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you.

24. God's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: 'None has the right to be worshipped but God."

25. Cursed be he who does God's work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood.

26. God said, "A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. [Prophet], you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But God desires killing them to manifest the religion."

27. Anyone who blasphemes God's name must be stoned to death by the whole community of [believers].

28. When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) [your religion]; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them... If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them [a tax]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek God's help and fight them.

29. Anyone else who goes too near the [Holy Place] will be executed.

30. Killing Unbelievers is a small matter to us.

Is the Quran more violent than the Bible? The question is hard to answer. A tally at the Skeptic's Annotated Bible counts 842 violent or cruel passages in the Bible as compared to 333 in the Quran. That said, the Bible is a much thicker tome, and even though the New Testament endorses and adds to the violence in the Old, when percentages are compared, the Quran comes out ahead. In addition, the kinds of cruelty and violence vary as do the perpetrator and victim and the extent to which any verse can be interpreted as divine sanction for the behavior in question. Either way, this short test offers an illustrative sample from each sacred text.

Bible and Quran believers who recognize verses in this list will no doubt protest that they have been taken out of context, as indeed they have. I think the appropriate response to such a complaint is a question: What context, exactly, would make these verses uplifting, inspiring or worthy of praise? In what context are passages like these some of the most important and holy guidance that the creator of the universe might think to impart to humankind? In what context is a book that contains these passages and many, many more like them the apogee of divine goodness and timeless wisdom?
Members of each Abrahamic tradition are quick to point out the rational and moral flaws in the others. I wonder sometimes, what this world might be like if they were as quick to examine the flaws in their own.
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Key: Odd numbered quotes are from the Bible, even numbers from the Quran or Hadith. 1. Deuteronomy17:12 NLT; 2. Bukhari 11:626; 3. Ezekiel 35:7-9 NLT; 4. Quran 2:193; 5. Matthew 10:34-35; 6. Quran 4:74; 7.Isaiah 14:21 NAB; 8. Bukhari 52:256; 9. Ezekiel 9:5 NLT; 10. Quran 8:12; 11. Exodus 31:12-15 NLT; 12. Quran5:33; 13. Leviticus 20:10 NLT; 14. Quran 8:67; 15. Numbers 31: 17-18 KJV; 16. Quran 8:12; 17. Leviticus 21:9 NAB; 18. Quran 9:5; 19. 2 Chronicles 15:12-13 NAB; 20. Quran 17:16; 21. Deuteronomy 22:20-21 NAB; 22.Bukhari 52:177; 23. Deuteronomy 13:7-12 NAB; 24. Bukhari 8:387; 25. Jeremiah 48:10 NAB; 26. Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 484; 27. Leviticus 24:16 NLT; 28. Muslim 19:4294; 29. Numbers 1: 51 NLT; 30. Tabari 9:69

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

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