The Binary Circumstance

This is not an article about the new movie, “The Hoax,” starring Richard Gere. But I should point out that I saw an interview with Clifford Irving who wrote the phony autobiography about Howard Hughes and he said that the more fantastic he made his lies, the more people believed them.

Having said that…

Tomorrow, millions of people around the world will celebrate what is arguably the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on some members of the human race by other members of the human race.

Christians celebrate Easter as the day that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Christians believe they will do that same after they die and that non-Christians will be punished for not believing the same.

None of it has ever been supported by any evidence, yet that has not stopped Christianity from being used successfully to manipulate people into submission and irrationality for over two thousand years.

It’s a sad day and certainly nothing that rational people can celebrate with a clear conscience.

This article about the Easter Bunny makes you wonder why people don’t “grow out of” their Christian beliefs.

The Easter Bunny is an example of folklore mythology which children are sometimes taught to believe. Some people don’t approve of teaching of an existence of the Easter Bunny. Not everyone believes in the Easter Bunny, and most, if not all, eventually “grow out of” their belief. Other prominent characters thought of in this way are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

And Jesus Christ.

And all other human beings who have been turned into gods by our imaginations and superstitions.

UPDATE 4/8/07: Trey Givens adds his own insights and wicked humor to this subject. Love the part about the electric chairs and syringes.

The DaVinci Code turned out to be a much more interesting and thrilling movie than I expected it to be from the reviews.

It is often said that movies are never as good as the books that inspire them, but having never read the book, I cannot make that comparison. My impression is that people who read the book were very disappointed in the movie.

For me it was like watching Casino Royale, the most recent James Bond movie. It seemed contrived in a way to create a sense of drama and to produce thrills but the story was jumbled and confusing. All the thrills, puzzles, and violence, even the self-inflicted kind, seem to exist so the viewer will never look at the story too critically. I had difficuty knowing who was on whose side at different points. Nonetheless I still enjoyed it and its interesting take on the origins of Christianity.

Anybody who’s read anything beyond the official Bible about Christianity knows that the Catholic Church edited the gospels to include sections favorable to protecting their own power over individuals while throwing the rest away, so the basic premise was not new to me and seemed perfectly plausible.

Most of all it was fun to watch my belief that religious people live in their own fantasy worlds–and will do anything to protect their fantasies–enacted on film. I doubt most people saw it that way, which is probably why they didn’t like the movie as much as I did.

Other books related to The DaVinci Code.
Other DVDs related to The DaVinci Code.

I recently had the opportunity to see Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

The data and the before and after pictures were all very effective in communicating the point of the movie which is that we are entering a “period of consequences” when we will see rapid changes in the environment due to global warming. Watching the movie, it is hard to escape considering the possibility that the human race could easily go the way of the dinosaurs if we don’t pay more attention to how our actions are impacting the temperature of the planet and consequently other forms of life that share it.

While Al Gore is straighforward and convincing in communicating his message, I found him self-congratulatory at times. When the movie was about him it was less interesting than when it was about the changes that have taken place recently in the environment.

The fact is that the universe doesn’t place a high value on human life. We are no more valuable to nature than any other species which is to say we have zero value to universe.

We can be disposed of through extinction very quickly and the process of evolution will go on without us, creating new species of life that are better adapted to the environment that we abused to the point of killing ourselves.

Remember that over 99% of the species that have ever lived on the planet are now extinct. Humans could easily join that majority.

Movies have always had a dual purpose when it comes to reality, they help us imagine new possibilities but at the same time are guilty of creating romanticized images that aren’t real and not attainable, except in a fantasy land, much like religion.

Buzzimage.com shows how they created CGI special effects for various projects including Brokeback Mountain.

You mean all that beautiful scenery and all those sheep weren’t real?

Playback tip: It was too slow to download even with my DSL and the video kept stopping for the download to catch up. Hit the pause button and do something else. It will continue to download. You can start playback when it’s almost downloaded for a seemless, fascinating playback.