Noah Facts #2: What Was Noah’s Drunken Nakedness About? It Ain’t Peeping Ham

Posted on February 28, 2014 by admin

Continuing the conversation about all things Noah, thanks to the upcoming movie with Russell Crowe. I thought I would add some positive elements to the conversation with some factoids and research about the Biblical Noah so you can be prepared to watch the movie with wisdom and discernment.

I’ve written a Biblical fantasy novel called Noah Primeval. I’ve researched this topic extensively. Noah Primeval has been a category bestseller on Amazon for 3 years. It’s first in a series of novels called Chronicles of the Nephilim.

Buy the novel Noah Primeval, here on Amazon.com in Kindle or paperback. The website www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com has tons of way cool free videos, scholarly articles about Watchers and Nephilim Giants, artwork for the series, as well as a sign-up for updates and special deals.

Noah’s Nakedness: It’s Worse Than You Realized. Ham is a Rapist.

I hear the new Noah movie does show Noah getting drunk after the Flood and exposing his nakedness. Well, guess what all you literalists who think Noah should be a sinless character, it’s in the Bible (Gen. 9:20-21). Noah the righteous got drunk. Which means even men considered righteous by God are sinners and blow it. I don’t know what the movie does with this, but there’s so much more to the meaning than a mere scene of Post Traumatic Stress.

In my novel series Chronicles of the Nephilim, Noah’s son Ham rapes his own mother (Noah’s wife) that results in the curse of the fruit of that maternal incest: the child Canaan. This brutal scene is not mere voyeurism of depravity, it is the very theological foundation of the future of Israel. And that foundation is not imagined fantasy, it is the actual Biblical basis of the Jewish claim on the Promised Land of Canaan, as odd and controversial as it may seem. But Genesis is no stranger to odd and controversial stories.

Here is the text from the Bible:

Genesis 9:20–27
Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.”

Literalists have a difficult time with this passage for several reasons. They do not like to admit the fact that Noah becomes a drunk after being the worlds’ greatest Bible hero of that time. They read Genesis 6:9 that says Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and that he walked with God as being a description of Noah as some kind of moral perfectionist one level less than Jesus. But as explained in the appendix of Noah Primeval, they miss the fact that righteousness was having faith, not moral perfection.

Secondly, having faith was not perfect faith because all Biblical heroes falter in their faith.

Thirdly, “blameless” was a physical Levitical reference to genetic purity (as in “spotless” lamb) that was most likely a reference to being uncorrupted by the fallen Sons of God (more on this in a later post).

Fourthly, walking with God did not mean being sinless. Noah was a sinner with imperfect faith and obedience as every believer is. His broken humanity is how we identify with him and draw our inspiration.

The real problem for literalists who do not consider the ancient Near Eastern poetic language of Genesis is in concluding that an entire nation was cursed simply because one of its forefathers saw his dad without clothes on! While it is technically possible that ancient Mesopotamians had some holy taboo about a parent’s nakedness that we are simply unfamiliar with, there is nowhere else in the Bible that affirms the absurdity of such a taboo.

There are however, several places that explain the concept of “uncovering a father’s nakedness” as a figurative idiom for having sexual intercourse with his wife.

Bergsma and Hahn’s masterful article “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse of Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27)” elucidated for me the notion that I used in my novel that Ham had forced maternal incest with his mother, Noah’s wife.(1) They explore the different scholarly explanations of “uncovering Noah’s nakedness” and disprove them: voyeurism, castration, and homosexual paternal incest. There are simply no references in the Bible anywhere that reinforce any of these interpretations.

The only one that is reaffirmed and makes sense is that Ham’s uncovering his father’s nakedness was an idiom or euphemism for maternal incest.

They explain that the definitions of uncovering nakedness in Leviticus 18 are tied to the practices of the Canaanites (sound familiar? Canaan is cursed?). And the Biblical text itself explains that in a patriarchal culture, uncovering a man’s nakedness was an expression that actually meant uncovering his wife’s nakedness.

Leviticus 18:7–8
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness.

Likewise, they explain, “Lev 18:14, 16; 20:11, 13, 21 all describe a woman’s nakedness as the nakedness of her husband.”

They then prove that “seeing nakedness” and “uncovering nakedness” are equivalent phrases and are the usual expressions of sexual intercourse in the Holiness Code of Leviticus (18:6; 20:17). It could not be more explicit than Deuteronomy 27:20:

Deuteronomy 27:20
‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife, because he has uncovered his father’s nakedness.’

Biblically, “uncovering a man’s nakedness” was an idiom for having sexual intercourse with his wife.

What then of Shem and Japheth walking backward so as not to see Noah’s nakedness? Surely, this is not a reference to avoiding maternal incest, but a literal covering of Noah’s body with a cloak?

In that case, the literal and the figurative collide in a metaphor of meaning. The authors explain the apparent incongruity this way:

The brothers’ actions play on the broader meaning of the phrase. Not only did the brothers not “see their father’s nakedness” in the sense of having intercourse with him, but also they did not even dare to “see their father’s nakedness” in a literal sense. Where Ham’s act was exceedingly evil, their gesture was exceedingly pious and noble. (2)

The final clincher to making sense of this bizarre passage is the curse of the son Canaan. Throughout Genesis 9, Ham is oddly and repeatedly referred to as the father of Canaan. It is a strange repetition that draws attention to itself and is finally climaxed with Canaan being cursed instead of Ham for Ham’s dirty deed.

Well, if Canaan was the fruit of that illicit union of maternal incest between Ham and Emzara, it makes perfect sense within that culture that he is cursed. It may not sound kind to our modern ears, but it is perfectly consistent with that Biblical time period.

Ham sought to usurp his father’s patriarchal authority through maternal incest which was “uncovering his nakedness.” The fruit of that action, the son Canaan, is a cursed man. And that cursed man is the forefather of a cursed nation. Remember, in the ancient world, family bloodlines were all about survival and keeping them protected.

The writer of Genesis, whether Moses or a later editor, was clearly showing the origins of the evil curse on the land of Canaan that they were about to take from the Canaanites. Canaan was cursed to be a servant of the Shemites, or Semites of Israel, and that one justification of their conquest of the Promised Land.

In short, the Canaanites are the Seed of the Serpent at war with the Israelites, the Seed of Eve (more on this in upcoming posts), and they deserve to be dispossessed of their land by the God whom their ancestors rejected and by whom they were cursed.

Of course, there is much more to the story than that, for there were giants in the land of Canaan as well, giants that were the descendants of the Nephilim, the original Seed of the Serpent.

I tell this story in the novels Joshua Valiant and Caleb Vigilant to see how that all fits together. But what is this “Seed of the Serpent” thing? Look for the next post for an introduction to the Giants.

Buy Noah Primeval to read more of this interesting Biblical research about all things Noah, and for a well-researched retelling of the War of the Seed of the Serpent with the Seed of Eve. It will make the Bible stories come alive like never before.

FOOTNOTES

(1) John Sietze Bergsma, Scott Walker Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20–27)”, Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 25, ed. Gail R. O’Day, 25 (Decatur, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005).

(2) Bergsma, Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness,” 33.

Noah Facts #1: Sunday School Was Wrong!

Posted on February 26, 2014 by admin

With all the talk surrounding the upcoming movie Noah, I thought I would add some positive elements to the conversation with some factoids and research about the Biblical Noah so you can be prepared to watch the movie with wisdom and discernment.

I’ve written a Biblical fantasy series of novels called Chronicles of the Nephilim that begins with Noah Primeval. Yep, you guessed it, a novel about Noah. But Noah actually is a character who lives rather long so he shows up in several of the novels. I’ve researched this topic extensively for the novels, Noah Primeval has been a category bestseller on Amazon for the past three years. I wanted to share some of the fascinating things I’ve discovered. The following is taken from the preface to the novel Noah Primeval.

It’s Okay to Use Fictional Embellishment when Retelling the Story of Noah. The Point is to Stay True to the Original Meaning.

Since my blog post critiquing the worldview of the early script of Noah went viral, certain misunderstandings have inevitably occurred.

First off, EARTH TO CYNICS: I WAS NOT COMMENTING ON A MOVIE I HAVE NOT SEEN. I WAS CRITIQUING A SCRIPT I HAD READ. Big difference. As I said, oftentimes, the story can change from script to screen. So I was careful to make that distinction. I wish that readers would have been as careful in reading it distinctly. As a scriptwriter I can tell you that the arrogant claim by directors and producers that a script is only a blueprint for a movie and therefore not worthy of treatment as literature, is a half-truth. Which is to say that it is a half-lie. Yes, it is a work in progress. But it is a story embodied in a written form that certainly does express character, theme, message, drama. And all that is WORTHY as a written form of story in and of itself, to appreciate and critique.

Secondly, I have little patience for fundamentalists and hyper-literalists who demand absolute reproduction of every jot and tittle of THEIR INTERPRETATION of Biblical facts or a movie is heresy. They think the application of fantasy elements and creative license is an abomination. They simply don’t know their Bibles that are full of mythopoeic imagery, fantasy, and imaginative embellishments. I write all about that stuff here and here. DO NOT thrown me into that camp. I write about movies all the time whose worldview I may detest, but nonetheless appreciate some truth in them wherever it is found. We live in a messy world, people. No movie is perfect. There is good and bad in every movie. Heck, I even saw some good in The Da Vinci Code. It was uh, it was…. Uh…. good acting…. by that one character who played that hotel clerk… Okay, sometimes the bad does outweigh the good.

I can tell you right now that the trailers I saw for Noah were awesome and visually captured the notion of what the Flood may have been like. After I see the movie, I will be discussing all the good elements, not just what I don’t like. Just like I always do. Of course, I also know that trailers were cut precisely not to offend the Christian audience and to draw them in, so trailers are not the best guide to what a movie actually is all about.

I wrote VERY CLEARLY in that post that the fantasy elements of the script that I read, and for that matter of what we are hearing about now, is not inherently the problem. I will explain below that I have used fantasy and mythopoeic elements in my own novel, Noah Primeval.

What matters is not the use of fantasy in and of itself. What matters is the worldview or sacred story being told. The MEANING of the story.

But even then, too many people are extremist and unthinking in their reactions when they disagree with a post. They just jump to all kinds of ridiculous conclusions. So they think that if you critique a script then you hate it. Same goes for movies. It’s like they never read the good parts you pointed out. This is a mentality in the Christian camp that spends too much time damning everything and pointing out what’s wrong with everything. The only thing worse are those who bless everything and follow the zeitgeist of the era like lemmings right into the sea.

Let me say it again: What matters is not the use of fantasy in and of itself. What matters is the worldview or sacred story being told. The MEANING of the story.

My novel Noah Primeval is the result of Biblical and historical research about Noah’s flood and the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context of the book of Genesis. While I engage in significant creative license and speculation, all of it is rooted in an affirmation of what I believe is the theological and spiritual intent of the Bible. For those who are leery of such a “novel” approach, let them consider that the traditional Sunday school image of Noah as a little old white-bearded farmer building the ark alone with his sons is itself a speculative cultural bias. The Bible actually says very little about Noah. We don’t know what he did for a living before the Flood or even where he lived. How do we know whether he was just a simple farmer or a tribal warrior? Genesis 9:2 says Noah “began to be a man of the soil” after the Flood, not before it. If the world before the flood was full of wickedness and violence, then would not a righteous man fight such wickedness as Joshua or David would? Noah would not have been that different from Abraham, who farmed, did business and led his family and servants in war against kings.

We know very little about primeval history, but we do learn from archeological evidence that humanity was clearly tribal during the early ages when this story takes place. Yet, nothing is written about Noah’s tribe in the Bible. It would be modern individualistic prejudice to assume that Noah was a loner when everyone in that Biblical context was communal. Noah surely had a tribe.

There is really no agreement as to the actual time and location of the event of the Flood. Some say it was global, some say it was in upper Mesopotamia, some say lower Mesopotamia, some say the Black Sea, some say the earth was so changed by the flood that we would not know where it happened. Since Genesis has some references that seem to match Early Bronze Age Mesopotamian contexts I have gone with that basic interpretation.

The Bible also says Noah built the ark. Are we to believe that Noah built it all by himself? It doesn’t say. With his sons’ help? It doesn’t say. But that very same book does say earlier that Cain “built a city” (some scholars believe it was Cain’s son Enoch) Are we to assume that he built an entire city by himself? Ridiculous. Cain or Enoch presided as a leader over the building of a city by a group of people, just as Noah probably did with his ark.

One of the only things Genesis says about Noah’s actual character is that he was “a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God” (Gen. 6:9). The New Testament clarifies this meaning by noting Noah as an “heir” and “herald” of righteousness by faith (Heb. 11:7; 2Pet. 2:5). The popular interpretation of this notion of “righteousness” is to understand Noah as a virtually sinless man too holy for his time, and always communing with God in perfect obedience. But is this really Biblical? Would Noah have never sinned? Never had an argument with God? Never had to repent? As a matter of fact, the term “righteous” in the Old and New Testaments was not a mere description of a person who did good deeds and avoided bad deeds. Righteousness was a Hebrew legal concept that meant, “right standing before God” as in a court of law. It carried the picture of two positions in a lawsuit, one “not in the right,” and the other, “in the right” or “righteous” before God. It was primarily a relational term. Not only that, but in both Testaments, the righteous man is the man who is said to “live by faith,” not by perfect good deeds (Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17). So righteousness does not mean “moral perfection” but “being in the right with God because of faith.”

What’s more, being a man of faith doesn’t mean a life of perfect consistency either. Look at David, the “man after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22), yet he was a murderer and adulterer and more than once avoided obeying God’s will. But that doesn’t stop him from being declared as “doing all God’s will” by the apostle Paul. Or consider Abraham, the father of the Faith, who along with Sarah believed that God would provide them with a son (Heb. 11:8-11). Yet, that biblically honored faith was not perfect, as they both laughed in derision at God’s promise at first (Gen. 17:17; 18:12). Later, Abraham argued with God over his scorched earth policy at Sodom (Gen. 18). Moses was famous for his testy debates with God (Ex. 4; Num. 14:11-24). King David’s Psalms were sometimes complaints to his Maker (Psa. 13; Psa. 69). The very name Israel means “to struggle with God.”

All the heroes in the Hebrews Hall of Faith (Heb. 11) had sinful moments, lapses of obedience and even periods of running from God’s call or struggling with their Creator. It would not be heresy to suggest that Noah may have had his own journey with God that began in fear and ended in faith. In fact, to say otherwise is to present a life inconsistent with the reality of every human being in history. To say one is a righteous person of faith is to say that the completed picture of his life is one of finishing the race set before him, not of having a perfect run without injuries or failures.

Some scholars have even noted that the phrase “blameless in his generation” is an unusual one, reserved for unblemished sacrifices in the temple. This physical purity takes on new meaning when understood in the genetic context of the verses before it that speak of “sons of God” or bene ha elohim leaving their proper abode in heaven and violating the separation of angelic and human flesh (Gen. 6:1-4; Jude 5-7). I will post more on this, later.

Noah Primeval seeks to remain true to the sparse facts presented in Genesis (with admittedly significant embellishments) interwoven with theological images and metaphors come to life. Where I engage in flights of fancy, such as a journey into Sheol, I seek to use figurative imagery from the Bible, such as “a bed of maggots and worms” (Isa. 14:11) and “the appetite of Sheol” (Isa. 5:14) and bring them to life by literalizing them into the flesh-eating living-dead animated by maggots and worms.

Another player that shows up in the story is Leviathan. While I have provided another appendix explaining the theological motif of Leviathan as a metaphor in the Bible for chaos and disorder, I have embodied the sea dragon in this story for the purpose of incarnating that chaos as well. I have also literalized the Mesopotamian cosmology of a three-tiered universe with a solid vault in the heavens, and a flat disc earth supported on the pillars of the underworld, the realm of the dead. This appears to be the model assumed by the Biblical writers in many locations (Phil. 2:10; Job 22:14; 37:18; Psa. 104:5; 148:4; Isa. 40:22), so I thought it would be fascinating to tell that story within that worldview unknown to most modern westerners. The purpose of the Bible is not to support scientific theories or models of the universe, but to tell the story of God through ancient writers. Those writers were people of their times just as we are.

I have also woven together Sumerian and other Mesopotamian mythology in with the Biblical story, but with this caveat: Like C.S. Lewis, I believe the primary purpose of mythology is to embody the worldview and values of a culture. But all myths carry slivers of the truth and reflect some distorted vision of what really happened. Sumer’s Noah was Ziusudra, Babylon’s Noah was Utnapishtim, and Akkad’s was Atrahasis. The Bible’s Noah is my standard. So my goal was to incorporate real examples of ANE history and myth in subjection to that standard in such a way that we see their “true origin.” Thus my speculation that the gods of the ancient world may have been real beings (namely fallen “sons of God”) with supernatural powers. The Bible itself makes this suggestion in several places (Deut. 32:17; Psa. 106:34), and it also talks of the sons of God as “gods” or supernatural beings from God’s divine council (Psa. 82:1; 58:1; Ezek. 28:2).

In short, I am not writing Scripture. I am simply engaging in a time-honored tradition of the ancient Hebrew culture: I am retelling a biblical story in a new way to underscore the original theological truths within it. The biblical theology that this story is founded upon is provided in several appendices at the back of the book for those who are interested in going deeper.

I, Frankenstein: The Monster Accepts Jesus as His Personal Lord and Savior

Posted on January 24, 2014 by admin

Sci-Fi Fantasy sequel to the original Frankenstein by Shelley. Okay, do not put a high expectation upon this one. It’s sci-fi fantasy for God’s sake. Have some fun. I did. It’s the story of Frankenstein’s monster 200 years after the novel takes place. He is still alive in the present day because he is a creature in between the worlds of the living and the dead. He is alive but he has no soul. The unique and surprising and delightful twist is that it is ensconced within a Christian worldview of spiritual warfare between demons and angels for the future of mankind.

The story’s set up is an expansive alteration of the War in Heaven motif of the Bible. There is an order of angels between the archangels and earth who fight against the 666 legions of demon hordes who want to start a war to destroy all of mankind. Okay, pretty standard boring sameness. But the storytellers add an original twist that the angels are the Order of the Gargoyles. So they look frightening even though they are the good guys. This is actually based on the medieval notion that gargoyles were put on cathedrals not as demons but to scare away the demons. Not bad. To add to that, their symbol that makes their weapons “sacramental” and able to send demons to hell is what looks like a triple cross, a symbol, no doubt of the Trinity.

Now it is an incorrect tradition that we call the monster created by the doctor, “Frankenstein.” Frankenstein was the doctor’s name, not the monster’s. But a clever angle brought in is that, as the demon villain says, “We are all sons of our fathers. So denying who we are means we are lost.” Thus at the end of the film, we understand the meaning of the title, “I, Frankenstein.”

Frankenstein considers himself rejected by God and man because of his lack of a soul and that he was created by man instead of God. This is a thematic idea that returns in the story. Frankenstein wanders the earth with existential angst. This is a journey of identity, as the monster seeks to find out who he is while killing demons who are after him. And why are they after him? Because he holds the key to the ability of the villain to create an army of Frankenstein monsters to rule the world.

In the mean time, the Gargoyle order discovers him and also rejects him because they too consider him without a soul and rejected by his maker. But the awesome Queen of the order suspects not. She thinks that God has kept him alive for a higher purpose, and that “it is not for you or I to deny God’s purpose.” She also says that “all life is sacred,” so it would be wrong for the angels to kill him. Wow. A return to the Victorian theme that wrestles with the Christian God and the value of human life. (Whoops, they just slipped in a pagan twist by saying “all life” is sacred, not the Biblical version that “human life” is sacred. Of course, this is the premise of the idolatrous animal rights fascists and enviro-fascist crowd who deny human exceptionalism. Since “all life is sacred,” then we must allow human life to suffer by prohibiting economic activity in areas that contain “endangered” rodents, insects, and other examples of “all life.” Which means, when people say “all life is sacred” what they REALLY mean is that human life is dispensable because they will let humans die to save rodents and insects. The true haters. But I digress.)

Because the monster was never named by Frankenstein, the Queen gives him a new name: Adam, an obvious nod to the Biblical first man created by God. But again, they believe that he is not a human, angel, or demon, and therefore an uneasy tenuous relationship between Adam and the Angels.

Okay, I want to applaud this movie for using a Christian mythology as its worldview. That has become so rare in Hollywood these days that I am shocked whenever I see it attempted in a positive way. I believe the writer is a Christian, and I also know how much pressure there is on Christians to keep Jesus out of their Hollywood blockbusters. After all, we wouldn’t want to offend the small 20% of people who don’t like Jesus just for the 80% majority who basically do. Better to offend 80% by keeping him out of it (Hollywood logic).

About the best you can get is the Cross symbol and the fact that you are fighting on the side of the angels of heaven (Notably connected to the Biblical angels Michael and Gabriel). Unfortunately, as in I, Frankenstein, this all too often distorts the meaning of redemption into “being a good person.” As the love interest in the movie says, “You’re only a monster if you behave like one.”

In reality, we are all monster children of our father, the first and fallen Adam, and only by becoming children of the second Adam through faith, can we be redeemed of our badness. One of the few sci-fi fantasy movies that actually did a good job of embodying faith as the essence of redemption was “End of Days” with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But on the other hand, I can certainly see that this story could be seen as a Christ story using Frankenstein as the “Second Adam,” who was a unique being between two worlds (like Christ’s dual nature of God and man), resurrected, and in whom is the redemption of mankind. In that sense I embrace this mythos. It ain’t perfect but neither am I and neither are my stories. I like that.

On the down side, the entire premise of the movie falls apart because of some of the choices made in the logic of the story. Or should I say, “illogic.”

SPOILER TERRITORY: So, the whole scheme of the villain demon, Naberius is to use the scientific technology that Frankenstein discovered to create an army of undead to take over the world. The premise is that 1) Reanimated corpses like Frankenstein have no soul, 2) the demons sent to hell need bodies to be able to come back to inhabit so they can take over the world, 3) Demons cannot inhabit a body with a soul, so 4) they can inhabit the reanimated corpses because they have no soul.

Oh boy, what a mess. The problem is that Frankenstein ends up surprising the villain by having a soul, so he cannot be possessed! Frankenstein has discovered that God has given him a purpose of fighting these demons. Okay, fair enough. But then that means that the entire scene of demons entering the army of corpses at the end could not possibly work, even though it is shown as happening. Whoops. Unless I missed something about Frankenstein being special. I might very well have.

Secondly, the entire premise of a reanimated human life not having a soul is completely poor theology and dangerous. In the Bible, a “soul” is actually the Hebrew word for “breath.” The idea is that human life is spiritual or soulish. It was a gnostic Greek notion that the soul was the real essence of our identity that inhabits the body like a ghost in a machine. To the ancient Hebrew the body was as much our identity as our life or soulishness. They were inseparable. It is after all the body that God says he will resurrect! Secondly, the Bible is clear that demons possessed humans who clearly had souls. Not good.

But the most dangerous is this notion that created human life is without a soul is the very abominable justification for the social engineering of human life without rights. It was the basis of slavery and it is the basis of current debates about cloning. To own human life because man is in some way its “creator” (not actually true, if man starts with living organisms or DNA as he does in all genetics research). This is of course the justification for atrocities of all kinds, from slavery to holocaust. And it is the very issue undergirding modern genetic experimentation on human life.

But I have to say, I don’t damn this story for its silly illogical and unscientific premise about human souls. After all, sci-fi fantasy is not about reality, it is a metaphor for spiritual meaning. This movie tries to affirm Christian spiritual meaning by subverting the Frankenstein tradition with a spiritual warfare motif taken from the Bible and unfortunately diluted of the real essence of the Christian worldview: Faith and that other unique hybrid being considered the most vile monster of all in our secular world: Jesus Christ.

Hunger Games 2: Big Government Catching Fire

Posted on December 16, 2013 by admin

Sci-fi Dystopia sequel about a world tyrannized by government control of the masses. Same basic story as the first one, only this time, Katniss, who won the gladiatorial Hunger Games in the first movie must now enter a new Hunger Games for all the winning tributes of previous Hunger Games.

Pretty simple and straightforward and not a bad idea. Except that the first half of the movie was pretty boring watching Katniss dealing with the politics of being handled by the government marketing for their own nefarious purposes as she tries to defy it in subtle ways and maintain her usefulness to the state to keep herself alive. The government is using her to promote what she hates and she is trying to protect her loved ones, including her boyfriend from being punished by the state. Lots of discussions and maneuverings about the effects of how they spin and image her.

Whatever, just get to the games!

My problem with the first movie was that it made teens killing teens bloodless and like a videogame which cheapened the moral point and actually promoted a dehumanizing violence. They should have shown how brutal it was so that it would be repulsive and make a moral point.

This time, they try to make the violence more real and less television, BUT less personal or human and more about man against nature or forest traps. So much of their time is spent avoiding a poisonous mist and baboons and other “traps” rather than killing the others. I think this also cheapens the serious moral component of the story, and makes it like a ramped up Survivor TV show. But it is also less interesting because the conflict is less human.

But the revolution is brewing for movie #3.

There was a cool moment of grace in the movie when Katniss speaks of Peta (I can’t remember for sure who) saving her in the past and realizing that “He could have killed me, but instead he showed me mercy. That’s a debt I couldn’t pay.” Yes, that is Grace. And that is the only way out of a system of justice or injustice.

But the biggest thing that stood out to me was how eerily familiar the statist tyranny was. The world where big government controls everyone’s lives and is incestuous with rich liberal privilege and big business and big media looked scarily like the current Obama administration that has been taking America down the path of Big Government control and statism with the support of Big Media and Big Entertainment. And that’s the purpose of sci-fi futuristic movies: to show us where we will end up if we continue down the course we are going.

Make no mistake, the enemy in this movie is Big Government. The wealth that surrounds it is not free market wealth, but the kind of crony privileged class that grows up and surrounds political regimes of power, like Hollywood and Big Business in the hands of the Big State (you know, like, ahem, right now). They buy the privilege and use it to crush true free competition and control the information for the masses. The bizarre media elite of the Capitol in Hunger Games looks like only slightly exaggerated versions of the carnival like celebrity world of our own Hollywood.

And all this statism is done in the name of taking care of the people who aren’t as good at taking care of themselves. The people don’t know better, so the government must give them what’s good for them. And in so doing create an even bigger disparity between the rich and the poor as only those who are hooked into government can grow fat from the teat – and everyone else becomes poor. Sound familiar?

Simply put, it’s fascism.

Ender’s Game: Ludicrous Movie Spouts Identity Politics, Child Supremacy and Insect Rights

Posted on November 1, 2013 by admin

Sci-fi Action. I love the coming of age genre if done well. I even admit that children can sometimes have a special skill or insight because of their youth and lack of experience. And yes, I understand that placing children in the role of heroes has a certain commercial appeal to many people. Sometimes seeing the world through a child’s eyes can be an entertaining and enlightening experience. And yes, again, I know the novel is very popular with youth (which doesn’t surprise me).

But I’m sorry, this movie was laughably ludicrous. I think it is because it is founded on a fundamentally fallacious notion that is very popular in our society: That children contain the wisdom we lack and need. It is about the inappropriate elevation of juvenility. We’re not even talking teens here or college age. If the characters were that old, I might actually not laugh as loud. But in this case, the heroes who save the earth are an army of military leaders under 15 years old.

The beginning of the movie sets the premise that the earth was invaded by some insectoid aliens and the only way to overcome them is to train children to lead the forces because, after all, kids are so good with video games. Ender is the “One,” the promising young cadet that Harrison Ford’s General character believes will lead their forces to victory because he supposedly has a special character quality Ford is looking for: It turns out it’s the ability risk all in order to win. But he has to train him and so most of the movie is about cadet school and preparation for the big battle.

But that is only the beginning of the sheer ridiculous nature of what happens next.

Full Metal Jacket with children this is not.

The problem is that the story is so serious and has such high stakes with an epic status (and epic music) that we expect to see a Mel Gibson or a Liam Neeson handle it as mature adults. Or at least a young up and coming adult star. But a tiny pre-teen cannot hold up that kind of dramatic weight. It just doesn’t work (Maybe in an animated cartoon, where everything is tongue in cheek, but not here). And here’s why: Because pre-teens who have not even entered puberty yet, are simply biologically, spiritually, and morally undeveloped. And we all know that. They do not have the capacity to handle sexuality (though the world of entertainment tries to force that on them). They cannot deliberate big moral stakes because they need to be taught right and wrong because they are basically selfish little creatures. They can’t lead complex battles because true war strategy requires maturity and experience of understanding psychology that no children, no matter how genius, can possibly have. The genius or special skills that a child may have would be raw technical skills like hand eye coordination on a video game or maybe a sharp memory. None of these things hold up against the real world of mature human or sentient interaction. It’s just laughably ludicrous to suggest so. That is why I could not keep a straight face watching it.

Nobody in this movie is believable in their role. Ender is supposed to be some “chosen one” but he is just a scrawny little zero who has cherubic cuteness that I did not believe for one moment hid any kind of strategic genius, let alone the “hardness” of soul or ruthlessness that he was supposed to be exuding. Really? This cute little cuddly kid ruthless? Not for one minute. When he fights two different bullies and beats them up, truly cringe-worthy moments.

Ender is wrestling with the kind of issues that we are all familiar with in hard core military situations like cruel drill sargeants, A ruthless General, bullying competition, and the valor of self sacrifice and complex psychological war strategy. Watching the movie was really like watching children play war (which is outlawed by the public schools BTW). They take it all so serious, but we just watch them and chuckle, “How cute they take themselves so seriously.”

The drill sergeant, bless his heart, was a big lovable black guy trying to sound like he was mean, which made me cringe for the poor sweet man.

The bully, and this one I could NOT believe they did, the BULLY was an officer who was a tiny little rodent guy who was the SMALLEST one on the entire squad. The shots of them face to face made me laugh. Ender, “the oppressed” looking down at the bully, who was almost cut out of the shot he was so dang small. I kept thinking, even Ender, the scrawny little pip, could hurt this guy.

Almost nothing in this movie was believable.

Wait, I take it back. The only thing believable was the existence of little girls in the military. I say this because anyone who knows the reality of the frontlines of war will tell you, women cannot compete in real war scenarios. Our anti-science fascist government women-in-the-military policy notwithstanding, they drag the military down because they are not biologically built for the level of physical stress needed. The standards have to be lowered to accommodate them, which places more lives in jeopardy and gets more soldiers killed. But I guess the Left doesn’t really care about soldiers dying anyway. BUT at this young child age in the movie, boys are so undeveloped that girls really are about their equals in the physical realm. They haven’t developed yet. Okay, so I’m for girls in the child military I guess. If we are going to kill ourselves with politically correct lunacy, we might as well go all the way.

SPOILER ALERT: Now, on to the ludicrous themes: The whole movie is a subversive attempt to undermine the strong military superiority of America. It builds up this scenario that the aliens are large insects in order to get us to really cheer for Ender to become the hero and kill them all. They swarm like bugs. Get us to perceive them as “the Other,” in order to show us our bigotry at the end when Ender realizes he is guilty of committing genocide against the aliens.

We are supposed to realize that the insects are actually sentient beings who were only trying to communicate with us and build their own army to protect themselves. And we in our fear strike out to kill them all pre-emptively in order to protect ourselves because we believe they are going to kill us all. “It’s us or them,” as the General says. Because the insects invaded earth once and were repelled, they are now going after them to kill them at their home planet so that they can not just stop the war, but “stop all future wars.” (Of course, the first invasion of the insects is discovered later to just be all one big misunderstanding. Oooookay.)

Hmmmm. What political connection do you suppose they are trying make with that analogy in our world of Islamic “swarms” where America is the only one holding back the explosion of worldwide Islamic imperialism? Like maybe Iran, right? Yeah, right. Except Iranians are not like insects. They are simply an evil nation led by an evil leader that is building nuclear warheads in order to wantonly kill Jews and anyone they don’t like, just like Hitler, AND they have said so themselves. History proves they will do it. This is obviously the analogy they are trying to make. But the comparison doesn’t even begin to work.

And that is also the fundamental flaw of the analogy of this film. It denies the image of God in man, it denies human exceptionalism and likens human beings as no more valuable than any other animal. As if a colony of insects is as important as a colony of human beings. It is the evil and insanity of animal rights activists. Insects are NOT sentient beings. They’re not even similar to sharks, tigers or other predators whose nature is to kill and eat. This storyteller took just about the worst possible analogy you could make for his point. It actually disproved his own point.

They will say, “How do we know there aren’t creatures out there that are sentient just like us but are insectoid?” (This is “moral equivalency” foolishness) And these same idiots call Christians stupid, as believing in fairy tales and superstition? To liken insects to humanity is anti-scientific sophomoric moral nonsense, and reminds me of the evil stupidity of animal rights activists who try to protect cockroaches instead of human beings.

To posit that a human / insect comparison is an analogy to racism or colonialism in our world is laughably preposterous. Should we also stop the genocide of viruses and bacteria because we are arrogantly considering human beings as superior life forms? In fact, if there is no human exceptionalism then you can’t even criticize humans for “genocide” as if that is wrong because that is the act of placing a SUPERIOR MORAL status on humans that they do not have. Nature does what it does, and if we are simply the same as all animals, then you cannot damn us for doing what we do by nature, which includes genocide.

Another failed analogy that doesn’t only fail rationally. It fails morally and existentially because not for one moment watching this movie do I think that anyone will believe that those insects re the moral equivalent of human beings. We know humans are exceptional, and that is why we have a basis for knowing racism and so-called imperialism is wrong while still knowing that humans are exceptional to other animals. Because we are created in the image of God. Without God, all you have is survival, and things like genocide are not wrong.

There is one little statement in the film about the insect population that they are pursuing our planet for our water because, “like us, their population rate is unsustainable.” REALLY? These filmmakers really believe this Overpopulation Lie at the very moment that statistics show that almost all the developed nations have population rates that are in fact dying out? We are not replenishing our populations fast enough to sustain our life. The EXACT opposite of the Left Wing overpopulation fascists who want to kill more people so we aren’t such a burden to the goddess Mother Earth. Sheesh. The lunacy does not end.

So there’s a young child soldier who is a Muslim that says an obvious Muslim saying to Ender, “Salaam Alykum,” which means peace be upon you. Again, Really? A positive Muslim character but not a single positive Christian character? This is another irony of the film’s bigotry. The closest analogy to the colonizing insects in the movie is precisely imperialist Islam, the most ruthless colonialist swarm of all history. They actually and truly are trying to take over the world and would like to impose Sharia or Islamic Law on everyone. Right now, Islamists are killing thousands around the world in the name of Allah because they believe that infidels should die. But the positive religious character is a Muslim, not a Christian? Ironically, if Muslims had their way in America, the Hollywood filmmakers who made this film would be the first to die along with the gays. While we Christians would be hiding the victims in our cellars and basements like Anne Frank. But no, the positive religious character in this movie is a member of that imperialist colonizing religion Islam.

The big thematic point that Ender says is “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, at that moment, I love him.” I have wrestled with this very theme myself in a movie I wrote To End All Wars (Netflix and Amazon), so I am not adverse to the issue. But this is a moral issue that requires a nuance of thinking, and understanding between rules of combat and rules of captivity. It cannot be reduced to the childish politics of leftist anti-exceptionalism.

Ender’s Game cannot even begin to come close to being a worthy depiction of that epic moral question because it so completely gets all its analogies wrong and sets up an absurdly unbelievable premise of wise children saving the world, and utterly fails in its far left wing identity politics mixed in with a dose of child supremacy and insect rights.

Please, End the Game, Now!

Gravity: In Space No One Can Hear God Scream

Posted on October 9, 2013 by admin

Space Action. A Russian satellite is blown up and its field of debris, moving at thousands of miles an hour, now threatens the lives of three astronauts working on an American space station.

It’s an amazingly simple premise, almost too simple. One would think “How can three slow moving space suits in a vacuum be an interesting action story? For 90 minutes? One could not be more wrong. Within minutes of its opening, this action movie delivers a rollercoaster ride of thrills and excitement that does not stop until the very end frames.

Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a troubled engineer who is in space for her technical know-how to help fix the computer systems on the American space station. George Clooney is Matt Kowalski, the care-free experienced astronaut who brings a light hearted teasing and probing of Ryan’s unease for a perfect balance of opposites.

Within minutes we discover that the Russian space station has been blown up and its debris field is on its way toward the protagonists. Matt and Ryan barely survive their first encounter with the debris that has turned into miniature missiles devastating everything they hit and incapacitating their return flight space shuttle. But survival isn’t enough because Ryan is now cast adrift into space, and the debris field is orbiting the earth, which means it is set to arrive again in ninety more minutes. Based on their first encounter, you just know there’s no way they can endure another one. Talk about a ticking clock.

So the rest of the movie is just one complication after another that blocks Ryan and Matt from their goal of getting out of there and over to a Chinese space station to find a way home. Raw yet simple good old fashioned action that keeps you on the edge of your seat with some stunning visuals of earth and space that will change your mind about the emotional potential of such a story. (No large spaceships and lasers and explosions and aliens needed to keep you on the edge of your seat. But it still cost 100 million dollars to make, so go figure)

But it is not without an emotional subplot. We soon discover that Ryan is a troubled soul who has resigned her life to misery and found her way to space because it’s one place to be alone and “not be hurt by anyone” down on earth. Evidently, she lost her young daughter to a “stupid” chance accident so simple as hitting her head on the ground and now she doesn’t care about her life. No mention whatsoever is made of a father to the daughter, as if a man does not matter or ever mattered, a glaring deficiency of the human soul of this story. Look even if the guy was a jerk, that would have affected Ryan through pain. But to completely ignore a man is feminist clap trap. Matt, on the contrary, has learned to take his own betrayal by his woman on earth as one of his many silly stories he tells to keep his spirits high and his soul from facing his own loneliness.

SPOILER ALERT: So when forced with the need to survive in the face of impossible odds, Ryan is brought to the point of giving up and wanting to just go to sleep in the coldness of space. To give up her meaningless life. With one last idea of hope, she finds the drive to keep going and make something of her life on earth if she can only get back. Of course, the odds continue to pile up against her all the way to the very end for a truly exciting adventure.

The personal story of Ryan is a helpful metaphor for her to return to a productive life on earth. The vacuum of space becomes the isolated “space” to which we withdraw to protect ourselves from the pain of human hurt or betrayal or loss. Okay, not bad. I like it.

Okay, now I want to admit that after interacting with some others on the next issue, I have changed my mind and have rewritten this post. I had argued that there was no transcendence in this story, but I was wrong. There was, I just missed it. It was very subtle. But it was there. Thanks to those who corrected me!

Ryan’s quest becomes one of mere brute survival that rings with the angst of today’s typical postmodern. So she survives to go back to work with a new appreciation of being alive? So what? As she says herself in the movie, she’s still going to die eventually. She doesn’t really have a higher purpose for her existence in the face of death. What is the significance or meaning to an earthbound existence? The drive for survival wakes us up to how we have squandered our time, wasted our humanity. But that can only have meaning in the face of a higher truth, transcendence, like Oh… maybe God?

There are a couple references to God in this story. One is a moment where Ryan does not pray because she says no one ever taught her how to pray. So she doesn’t. The other is a visual comparison of two images in two different space stations, a Russian icon postcard of the Trinity in the Russian space station and a Buddha (or Confucious?) statue in the Chinese station. But Ryan has no personal interaction with these visuals. They are alien to her and amount to a postmodern relativistic comparison of empty god images.

Come on, REALLY? A woman in despair over her daughter’s death and facing her own meaningless demise and she doesn’t have a single thought about her Maker and the afterlife? She doesn’t utter a single prayer to a god she may have doubts about? She admits that she doesn’t know how to pray because no one taught her how. Instead she utters a prayer to her departed Matt for inspiration. It’s the humanist’s god substitute. They need transcendence so they create their own imaginative substitute to fulfill that inner vacuum because they don’t want to face God.

At the end when she is finally safe on terra firma, she grabs some sand from a beach and looks up and says, “Thank you.” But to whom does she say this? The film is ambiguous. Now, she had been “praying” to Matt the entire previous situation that she got out of up in space, so consistency would dictate that she was saying that to Matt as well. But I do think the filmmaker was ambiguous enough for those who wanted to believe she had found a simple faith to import their desires into the ambiguity. I admit I like ambiguity sometimes. That’s what art does. It doesn’t always answer all questions and leaves room for interpretation on the weightier or more mysterious issues.

I felt that the spiritual gravity of the situation required we know who she was saying thank you to. But I have to admit that the story structure does subtley point to that prayer being to God. Here is why: Ryan’s character arc would dictate that if she began “not praying” to God in the beginning of the story, then it would make more story sense that she ends praying to him because she is changed and is a new person, as are all protagonists in good stories. Maybe she was “praying” to Matt as her human savior in space, but ultimately learns that it is God who saved her after all, and her “thank you” is now to God.

It’s a tough one. Ah, the ravages of ambiguity! And thanks to those who opened my eyes to what I had missed. The movie is better than I first thought it was.

The Mortal Instruments: A Dualistic Story of the Supernatural Without God

Posted on August 23, 2013 by admin

Action horror. Hot girl realizes she’s both Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker in a Twilight World of battling werewolves and vampires. (In this movie, zombies “don’t exist,” so right off the bat you know it is an inferior horror film)

The movie starts out rather well with a very cool sequence of Clary, a young artist high schooler I think, learning that she has a secret identity she is not aware of. Her mom is hiding her true identity to her, she can see demonic and angelic things others cannot, and demons in the form of earthly creatures are after her.

As soon as the mythical background starts to be explained, everything becomes very jumbled and hard to follow. She eventually learns she is a “child of the Nephilim.” Though this is never really explained except I think it occurs when someone drank from a chalice cup that an angel Raziel offered at the Crusades. Didn’t make much sense to me.

So this is why she can see the spirit world, because she is half-human, half-angel. It’s a Nephilim story! And all the demons, vampires and other monsters want to find that magic cup that Clary’s mother has hidden, while Clary has the location embedded in her memory somewhere. Although I couldn’t remember why drinking from the cup was so wanted by the villains. I think it was because that would make them half-angel? Oh, I don’t remember, it was just kinda dumb.

So, normal humans are called “Mundanes” because they can’t see the spirit world (The American word for “Muggles” – Give her a break, you gotta call them something and it’s gotta reflect the fact that they are blind to one half of reality). Vampires and werewolves are called “downworlders” because they inhabit the world down here. And the good guys are “Shadow Hunters,” which are Nephilim who kill demons. If you know anything about the Biblical Nephilim, none of this makes any sense. But if you want to follow a cool Biblical fantasy tale about the Nephilim, check out this cool series. Meanwhile, Clary realizes she has the ability to tattoo runes on herself that bring powerful enchantments to stop demons and other stuff.

So the worldview in this story seems to downplay angels to almost non-existent. Sure, the evil arch-villain Raziel was an angel, but the heroine’s helper ally, the shadow hunter Jace, a scrawny effeminate kid who is somehow able to topple big bad bulky muscular guys, explains that “he’s never seen an angel.” So, I’m sure they are there in the series, but not in this movie. But when they retrieve weapons from a church, Clary asks about the religious reality behind their battle. Jace explains that they “know no religion,” and they could just as well hide their weapons in a mosque or a buddhist temple or Hindu temple. He then says he doesn’t believe in religion, he “believes in himself.” Then when Clary learns about the history of the evil angel Raziel, she is told by a master shadow hunter that they are engaged in a battle of good and evil, “a war that can never be won.” In other words, the world is a Dualistic eternal battle between opposing good and evil that are pretty much equal and always in conflict – hey, just like Star Wars! Just like Eastern Dualism! And then she realizes whose daughter she is and you go, “Hey, just like Star Wars!” Okay, sorry I spoiled it for you. You won’t miss anything cause it’s all rather vapid.

No reference whatsoever to God occurs in this story of supernatural demons and AWOL angels. It’s another riduculous attempt to hijack the mythos of Judeo-Christianity and to exorcise the most essential element, God, while keeping the corpse of the imagery and trying to resurrect it with occultic spells and magic. BTW, I have no problem with having occultic elements in the story per se, but the context determines their meaning and in this world, there is some abstract impersonal force that is actually quite boring because it has no personality and no metaphysical sense to it.

Okay, there is one tiny waaaaay ambiguous cool reference to God when we discover that the musical genius Bach was a shadow hunter and playing his music uncovers demons because it makes them go mad and they reveal themselves. Bach was a Christian who wrote music to God’s glory, so that could have been meaningful in its proper context.

One cool statement at the ending sums up the reality of spiritual awareness. Clary is sad and scared that “I don’t see the world the same. I see demons and angels.” To which Jace responds, “The world is the same. You’re just different.” That does sum up the reality of spiritual enlightenment, even if it comes in the context of a contradictory dualistic worldview.

The Host: Socialism Kills the Individual Spirit

Posted on August 10, 2013 by admin

A flaccid futuristic dystopian morality tale about Collectivism vs. Individualism. Another kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If it were not for the phenomenally talented acting of Saorise Ronan, this movie would be terribly boring and tepid. As it is, it is only boring and tepid. How the heck do you say that name? “Seer-sha Ronin.”

Okay, the wonderful Saorise plays Melanie, one of the last people left on earth who have not been taken over by a parasitic alien population that gives you shining blue irises. Evidently, these aliens are called “souls” and they are ethereal but physical glowing tentacle little things that you insert into a human by making a cut in the back of their neck. The alien then embeds itself in the human host and takes over the consciousness. The human soul is still there, but it becomes dormant as the new being takes over.

But these are not the evil malicious soulless beings of the traditional Body Snatchers fame. These are actually nicer than humans. In fact, the narrator at the beginning of the film states that “the earth is at peace, no hunger, no violence, the environment is healed, and everyone is courteous to all. Our world has never been more perfect.” There’s just one problem it isn’t our world anymore. So no matter how nice they are, they are still invaders who are stealing our home. AND they are without emotion and physical passion. In other words, this is the worldview that believes that we can only find harmony by using reason and denying the passions of humanity. Maybe a metaphor for the Enlightenment.

Melanie gets caught and has a “soul” implanted in her. But she is a rascally independent spirited individual, who is not easily suppressed, and she fights in her mind with the being that has taken her over, named the Wanderer, or Wanda. The government or collective or whatever it is, has agents who seek to hunt down all the last remnant of humans in order to finalize their colonization of the planet. So they want to use Melanie to track them down by exploring her memories, not accessible to the Wanderer Wanda. Melanie fights back and is able to touch something in the heart of this “soul” being, and Wanda decides to escape the compound and find the humans to help them. Or something like that.

A small group of humans are hiding out in a secret cave in the desert led by a strong leader, Jeb, (William Hurt), who says, “This isn’t a democracy, it’s a dictatorship. A benign dictatorship.” So the obvious comparison is that human society is the opposite of the aliens, it is individualistic but led by strong leaders and has passion and emotion. It’s messier and more dangerous, but it is our humanity and we cannot deny it. Messy freedom is more desirable than safe control. Which is the same theme as the director’s other films The Truman Show and Simone. This is an important theme to him obviously.

But this is a deliberate parable about the danger of collectivist thinking (like socialism, leftism, communism). At one point, an alien says to a human, “You think the loss of your will is too great a sacrifice, but we have to think of the common good.” To which Melanie responds, “Call it what you want, this is murder!” Murder, that is of the individual soul, the freedom of the individual as it sinks into the collective.

Melanie finds the secret human group and they divide over wanting to kill her or keep her alive. Since she might be a spy or she might betray them. So the whole thing is set up to be a moral dilemma that wrestles with our identity as humans. And this is the problem with the movie: Because so much of the struggle is an interior dialogue between Wanda and her host Melanie, you have long lingering shots of Melanie’s face contorting through the inner debate as we hear it in voiceover. This kind of inner monologue does not work well with movies in such an extensive fashion, because it becomes less dramatic and more mental. HOWEVER, as I said, Saorise is such a talented actor, that she made it tolerable.

Wanda begins to prove herself by helping the group, saving someone who tried to kill her, and falling in love with one of the human guys. So the whole thing is about learning to love and accept the “Other.” From fearing them as hostile to seeing they are just like us capable of the same loves and fears and goodness as well as badness. But the moral problem comes when they realize that to release the aliens from humans, they can’t seem to keep either alive in the process. So how do they free Melanie? Are they any different from Wanda’s colonial race by slaughtering her people? It’s a good moral dilemma that carries interest despite the otherwise lame drama.

The whole thing looked pretty low budget with cheesy TV action. I’ve seen better TV action actually. And there were a lot of goofy holes that made me cringe. Like the humans putting on sunglasses at night to hide their pupils after they have been pulled over – like they’re not going to be told to take them immediately off. And then there’s the fact the Melanie does not want to tell the humans that she is inside with the alien still. You see, they believe that the old person is totally gone and taken over. But they aren’t. Then why the HECK would she not want to tell them that she is inside still? Especially if they might kill her because they believe she is not there anymore!!! Argh. Obviously to keep the plot going or there would be no moral or dramatic tension. And then there is the kissing. Obviously written by a woman because it is through the kiss that the inner Melanie is brought out. When she kisses her old boyfriend, she gets angry for him kissing the body that is in control of by someone else. Oh, it’s all a bit too silly. But kinda cute. Chicks will like it.

The silliest of all is the liberal mindset at the end when we discover that you cannot remove the alien from the human “by force. It can only be captured by kindness and love.” In other words, if they just coax the little things out, they’ll come out and everyone lives! Oh puhleeze. And then when the evil alien Seeker who has been trying to find the humans becomes violent herself, but is captured, rather than killing her, the good alien says, “There has been too much death. Not death, exile.” So they send her to another planet deep in space – WHERE SHE CAN “VIOLENTLY” TAKE OVER ANOTHER SPECIES OF CREATURE. And it is violence, even if you do it nicely and softly. Because the point is that it is violence against the individual. This is the stupidity of liberal thinking about judicial punishment. Liberals think that if we just treat evil and violent offenders with understanding and “put them away,” in exile of jail, we will fix the problem. But the reality is recidivism, repeat offenders who are simply released to commit their violent crimes on someone else. And that is exactly what this movie was unwittingly affirming is to release evil upon someone else other than “us.” THAT is barbaric cruelty. The barbarism of unintended consequences of liberal thought.

The cure in this story unfortunately is worse than the disease. It perpetuates the very violence it seeks to decry by not fighting evil with force.

Elysium: A Preachy Apologetic for Obamacare

Posted on August 9, 2013 by admin

Marxist Utopian Tale told by Greedy Hollywood Capitalists. Coming from writer/director Blomkamp, whose District 9 was agitprop for illegal alien activism, and Matt “Elmer Gantry of Leftism” Damon, one should expect it. I have to hand it to Blomkamp, he is a cunning propagandist storyteller.

It is the story of Max, played by Damon, an ex-con trying to go straight with a job in a futuristic dystopian overpopulated, polluted Los Angeles in an overpopulated polluted planet…

Right there, you have to stop and face the fact that the Population Explosion Myth is a pernicious lie that is intended by social engineers to redistribute power and wealth with themselves in power of course. From Malthus to the laughably ridiculous Paul Ehrlich, who is still shamefully treated as an “expert” in the media, this view still finds its way into belief systems of the ignorant and uneducated. Ehrlich was prophesying 40 years ago of mass famines, no natural resources, and billions of overpopulation, all by 2000! Wow, what a respectable scientist – and a prophet! Or should I say, “profit” since he became one of the “evil rich” promoting his lies. And they still give this destructive man a voice in the media.

Okay, I digress. So, back to the movie — all the poor people are left to fend for themselves and be exploited by corporations down on earth without sufficient healthcare. Meanwhile all the rich people have fled to a giant space station in the sky called Elysium where everything is a rich foo foo party and they have magical medical machines that heal every disease or disfigurement known to man (A tree of life metaphor). Of course the evil rich people want to keep those magical medical machines to themselves and don’t want to share them with all the poor people below. So they blow up any spacecraft of “illegal immigrants” trying to get to Elysium for their cures.

Everything goes wrong for Max in the oppressive system of clichés below. He’s just a guy trying to get back on his feet, but he is a victim of police brutality by robot cops who have no law or justice programmed into them, he is given no understanding by a robot government parole officer for his extenuating circumstances, and he is rejected as disposable waste by the company that employs him when he is a victim of radiation poisoning at his plant.

So he is going to die in five days. It’s no wonder he becomes a revolutionary! Elysium is simply a Classist Socialist parable that inspires more hatred of the rich. I wonder if those Hollywood filmmakers, like Damon would like it if a bunch of illegal aliens besieged his mansion to have access to his excessive riches for healthcare. I. Think. Not. Which is why this kind of stuff is just hypocrisy masquerading as concern for the marginalized. I don’t see Damon or Blomkamp giving up their wealth to help heal the world’s poor. Oh, right, they are preaching about it, so they are exempt. Oh, that makes the poor feel better. Yep, that is the definition of hypocrisy. Kinda like receiving Arab oil money to make a movie libeling fracking. Oh, this darkness runs deep.

It’s a pretty cool sci-fi action premise that enables Max to wear an exo-skeleton suit to give him superhuman strength in a transhumanist world where technology is integrated into the human organism. And I must say, Damon’s character is an excellent vulnerable hero who you really wonder at times if he is going to get out of the jams he gets into. That is good storytelling. In a morally bad story.

But the plot turns on the fact that the evil chief of security on Elysium, played by Jodie Foster as a strangely accented slick, cool headed, and dictator-minded villain, plans a coup where she will take over Elysium under a “national security crisis” in Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder fashion. But in order to do so she must get the special program that will reboot the computer system of Elysium with her as the new president. The only problem is, that program has been stolen and downloaded into Max’s brain. So she sends a vicious bounty hunter after him, and thus an exciting chase movie.

Max gets up to Elysium, but his plan, with the help of the “Resistance” is to download the reboot but do it in such a way as to make ALL PEOPLE ON EARTH citizens of Elysium. This is because citizenship is what keeps them from getting their grubby little hands on the magical medical machines which will, in the words of the Resistance, — I kid you not – “Save Everyone.”

This is a Christ Story. But remember, not all Christ stories are Biblical. In the movie, early as a child, Max’s Mary-like Mother tells him he is special and has “one thing he was born for.” So, Max ends up giving his life to save the planet to heal all people. Isaiah 53:4-5 says that Messiah carried our sorrows and was beaten up for us so that by his death, we are healed.” Elysium is an example of how the Christ story is subverted by another religion of Leftism to twist it away from relationship with God to a revolutionary heaven on earth. If you really want to see the end result of this false religion you want to read The God That Failed by Koestler.

It is also important to note that the movie does unwittingly show that the act of redistribution is always founded on violence. Can anyone say Karl Marx?

The very notion of utopian magical medicine that will save everyone is of course the dog whistle for nationalized healthcare. On the surface it seems like such an obvious compassionate thing to do. I mean, shouldn’t we pull down the rich and redistribute their wealth so everyone can have healthcare? Don’t you care about the dying children? Should the rich have care that the poor do not?

Well, actually most of us do care about the dying children and good healthcare, which is why nationalized healthcare is evil, because it actually results in less healthcare for all at higher costs, less quality, and hurts the poor most of all. We are already seeing the horrible heinous effect of socialized medicine in Europe and now the US. In America, because of Obamacare, health insurance is skyrocketing, people are losing their insurance — almost as many people will be uninsured under Obamacare as before it — intrusive government control breeds disincentive for medical research which is already resulting in less medical advances, which means worse care for ALL, not better care for all. Even some leftists are admitting that there are death panels to ration healthcare which means less health care for all, and especially the elderly and the poor. You see, the rich will always get the best healthcare, but now, Obamacare is creating the very disparity or gap between the rich and poor that it claims to break down! And those selfish bastards who created the laws are exempting themselves from it because they KNOW it will not be good for them (just like those rich on Elysium). Socialized medicine results in worse medicine, less people provided for, and the poor are hurt worst of all.

THE FACT: The profit motive in medicine created the best medicine in history for the most amount of people and more specifically for the poor like never before. Socialized medicine destroys that. If you care about the poor like I do, you should be against socialized medicine. Does this mean there aren’t problems? Of course not. It ain’t perfect. Does this mean we should be for the rich having the best care alone? Of course not! They will get it no matter what. What it does mean is that if you take away the profit motive from medicine in the name of socialist utopian lies about everyone getting healthcare, EVERYONE WILL NOT GET IT, and the government will control it and you will have worse care for less people at higher cost and the poor will be hurt the most. What kind of person would want that kind of world?

Bottom line: If you care about the poor and about the best medicine for all, you should support free market medicine with profit motive, because that is what helps the poor and provides the best for most. But if you believe in government controlled healthcare, you support hurting the poor and worse medicine for all, while feeling as if you care.

R.I.P.D.: Evil Must be Punished or There is No Justice

Posted on July 20, 2013 by admin

Men in Black with evil souls instead of aliens. Or Ghostbusters 2013. Ryan Reynolds plays Nick, a cop who finds himself killed in the line of duty and winds up on R.I.P.D. the Rest in Peace Department of “heaven” or whatever it is. They need his skills to help catch renegade evil souls called, Deados, who have escaped the big sucking wind tunnel to the afterworld, in order to hide out on earth in disguise among the living. What Nick, and his veteran partner, Roy, played by Jeff Bridges as a rascally western style sheriff, soon discover is that the evil souls have their own planned apocalypse, and can I say, it ain’t bringing heaven to earth.

Nick discovers he has about a hundred years to help the RIPD, or “take his chances with judgment,” of which he is not too sure he will do well. So he jumps at the chance. The partners have to hunt down the dark souls, whose presence is revealed by their decaying effect on their living quarters. Electricity flutters, and homes fall apart or are covered with grossness and slime. Their own spiritual decay is manifested in them looking ugly and monstrous, but they are able to disguise themselves as normal humans. Their true natures come out when offered Asian or Indian spicy food (I don’t get that one, but you gotta have some rules for the world you create).

Unfortunately, Nick, himself is not a clean soul, as he was involved in taking a little from the coffers of captured criminal gold when he was alive. But he does it only to be able to bless his wonderful loving wife, who means the world to him. Living on a cop’s salary is a temptation to skim.

So, if they can capture the souls and bring them back into a purgatory like holding cell in the sky, then they will eventually be brought to judgment.

Nick’s journey is one of being able to let go of his wife, and redeeming himself since he was taken at too young an age and would be unable to clear his name to her because he wants to right his wrong. But as his partner reminds him, no one dies at a good time, it’s always an inconvenience for our plans.

The bad guys’ plan is based in something called the “Staff of Jericho,” which has ancient roots in the Old Testament times, but it is not really explained so it becomes a mere plot device similar to Ghostbusters. But the point is that it is an ancient pagan religious device that does evil through the spiritual world. In this sense, the picture painted by this movie is a kind of Christian worldview against paganism.

But it’s really more of a Christian worldview subverted by cosmic humanism.

This movie was a mixture of good laughs, warm romance, humanist redemption and SFX. I love the premise. It’s very clever. Because it is an unavoidably spiritual premise, there is unyielding talk of hell and eternal punishment for “bad people.” This is one of those narrative and ethical “proofs for the existence of God.” You cannot tell satisfying stories and you cannot have a moral or ethical universe that does not include real punishment and reward. C.S. Lewis argued that the notion of punishment, far from being the “unfair behavior of a cruel god,” who “casts people into hell,” the notion of punishment is what actually gives meaning and dignity to the human on both a societal level and by extension a spiritual one. If you do not punish a being, then you are denying them the essential dignity to choose good or evil. You are saying that they cannot but do what they do, whether through psychological or internal chemical manipulation or whatever. To punish is not to be cruel at all (if done justly of course), but to affirm that the being could have done otherwise and had the inherent dignity and capability to do so. To freely choose to do good or evil is the thing that dignifies humanity. If we are but victims of our social groups or scientific natural causes, then we are mere puppets to be socially engineered by the elites. And guess who those elites would be? You got it. The privileged ones who believe in those views: The scientific materialists, naturalists, socialists and other totalitarian utopian left wing radicals (to whom the only “evil” is a God who judges – and his followers).

But if there is a God who punishes or judges, then that means he made us with the inherent dignity and power to do right. Our choice not to do right does not make us diseased or sick, but evil. A God who does not punish or judge evil is the most cruel and unjust being possible because billions of innocent victims are denied justice and recompense in favor of the criminal evildoers getting away with it.

Thus the saying, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” In justice, if you do not punish evildoers, you are punishing the victims (which includes the family and loved ones of those victims). No, worse, you are torturing them by allowing the evildoer to escape justice which intensifies and magnifies the loss of the loved ones for the rest of their lives. It’s like torturing the victims.

Ah, if there was only a way in which our spiritual crimes could be paid for AND we are forgiven, only then can justice and peace embrace. Now, who could be that perfect mediator to fulfill both justice and grace? Who can save us from this body of death? Thanks be to…

Do I digress?

And that is where this movie falls apart. Since the only taboo in some studio movies is GOD, the filmmakers ditch the only logical and reasonable reality of a personal God who judges and replace him with a “universe that judges in its ultimate wisdom.” The universe in this movie is a godless one. It is a pantheistic view that makes the entire universe as if it is the supreme being. Which is ultimately unsatisfying from a story perspective, because now you have a personal story of personal beings who are interacting not with an ultimate person, but with an impersonal abstract force or accumulation of natural laws. BORING. They could have easily used the generic term “God” which would still mean whatever most people wanted it to mean anyway, but it would have been a more satisfying story with a personal connection. Depersonalizing the deity is suicide for storytelling and theology. Impersonal forces do not “judge,” only personal beings do, because “judgment” is an ethical notion between personal beings.

Another half and half movie. Half good stuff about judgment for our deeds on earth, half terrible stuff about a godless pantheistic universe.

And another thing in this movie: What happens when a bad soul doesn’t want to go back in supernatural handcuffs to the “holding cell” to await his judgment? Well, then the RIPD has guns with special bullets that annihilate the soul, destroy them forever. Do not go to Hell, do not collect one hundred dollars, just straight into oblivion of non-existence.

So I got to thinking. The souls who have escaped are all obviously evil, as evidenced by their manifestation. So, if they are going to go to judgment anyway, what would you rather want (as an evil soul), eternal torment or non-existence? And it seemed to me that I would rather cease to exist than suffer forever under punishment. So from the perspective of a spiritual criminal, getting blown away by the RIPD might actually be preferable to judgment.

But from “the universe in its ultimate wisdom” perspective (Ahem, God’s perspective), it seems to me that annihilation would be the ultimate devaluation of human worth because the lack of existence makes the human worth nothing, while continuity of existence, even in judgment, maintains that the human is in the image of God and therefore has eternal value. Kind of an extension of what I was saying about punishment above.

OR would the devaluation of the human into nothing be the ultimate judgment? I can see why some might see it that way. But then again, would God devalue his own image in a human being? I kinda doubt it.

But whatever the case, we do have the promise from God that “He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury” (Romans 2:6–8).

And if you want to see if anyone can actually attain this “righteousness,” go here.