| 10:32p |
What the Bleep Do We Know? review
I finally saw "What the Bleep Do We Know?" today. Uh. Um… parts of it were good? The scripted parts were funny and interesting and I support their choice to use a deaf actress. I agree that we don't know everything about how the universe works, but I also dislike when people say that and then turn around and tell me that I am wrong for choosing to believe what I believe. They should have called this film "What the Bleep Are We Trying to Say?" because they seem to be going for the whole "it's all good and we don't know anything except YOU! overthere! You're wrong!" which is the ultimate in annoying New Age stereotypes. I found the concept of multiple realities happening at once, intriguing but the editorializing ruined it for me.
"So conditioned to our daily lives that we believe we have no control"
I do agree with that. How many times in our daily lives do we do things because it didn't occur to us that we had any other choice? In our house, my mother only buys three kinds of juice, orange, grape, and cranberry. For the last twenty three years, this is what she's bought. The only time we got different was when she and my dad were both laid up and I had to do the shopping. The kiwi strawberry that I bought was the same price and everything, but it didn't matter once they got better we were back to the same old same old. Most people go through life never "activating" the choices that they have, even when it comes to little things like which juice to buy.
"ugly superstitious backwater concept of god"
Because people don't believe that we are gods? I don't appreciate that.
"God is greater than the most remarkable"
This is true.
"How can any man or woman sin against such a greatness?"
Well, yeah, you can. Sure, God is less touchy than we like to think (IMO) but if we are gods, than a sin against another person is a sin against God, so yeah, it can happen. And if we're not gods, a sin against another person is still a sin against God.
The big problem with all of this is that the woman whose idea it was, JZ Knight, the one who wrote the book and does the lectures, claims she gets her knowledge from a being called Ramtha and…she has been discredited.
"All emotion is is holographically imprinted chemicals."
"They're only in love with the anticipation of the emotions they're addicted to"
Okay, let's go with that. All emotion is really just chemical addiction to feeling good/bad. So all the people I like, and all the stuff I like to do, it's all just a chemical addiction. Alright. I'll leave home tomorrow and never speak to my family or friends again. I will exchange all the food I like to eat for a series of powerful vitamins and protein drinks because it doesn't matter since taste is an illusion anyway. Obviously it only matters who I marry or reproduce with in the sense that our genetics must be compatible and we must be able to work together. Whether they "make me feel good" is irrelevant. This is the sort of great news that everyone needs to hear- I should go and tell other people. So I do. In turn, they tell other people, and someone along the line thinks "this is such a great idea, I need to be more forceful about how important it is. These other people are only hurting themselves by not acknowledging this truth." So when you find people falling for the illusion that the thing they like "makes them feel good", you take it away or force them to stop. Because delusions are wrong and what kind of a person would you be if you went around letting people be lied to?
"We are the only planet in the Milky Way that is in complete subjugation to religion"
Well, YEAH. Because we're the only one that has human beings on it! In fact, we haven't successfully proven that there's any kind of life on the other planets in our system, period. Lack of intelligent life doesn't mean lack of gods but it does mean that there is no one there to worship said gods, so there isn't a religion. But the people on this documentary seem like they just assume anyone watching this believes that there is intelligent life on other planets in our system (sure, I'd love to believe that, but if you're shooting for scientific credibility, you might wanna watch talk like that)
"No such thing as good or bad"
Worst religious idea ever. It's not that I think people are naturally born bad and that they are standing over a yawning chasm of evil that they are naturally going to fall into if they don't punish themselves constantly. I want to believe that people are born good, and most people basically want to be good. However, not everyone is. And sometimes they do things which are bad. Not just bad from my point of view, or bad according to some rulebook, but genuinely, disgustingly, obviously BAD. Lots of times people doing bad things think they're doing good things, but there have also been plenty of times when the bad thing was done with the person totally aware that what they were doing was bad. They planned it out, they took steps to keep themselves from getting caught. That's how courts determine whether someone was competant at the time they committed the crime.
Yes. Sometimes people do evil things because it's funny or because they want to see what'll happen. If you can look at the world and then say "there is no good or bad" I'm thinking you're not really looking at the world at all. I mean, forget the big stuff, the world is full of little, petty evils that just keep building up until they turn into things which are much worse. There's a perfect description in "Good Omens" of how Crowley encourages evil in the world (I believe there are similar passages in "The Screwtape Letters" and "Salem's Lot") and you'd be surprised at how easy it turns out to be.
Or rather, you shouldn't be at all surprised if you've ever actually watched people moving through their days.
1) A significant majority of people will commit any number of little crimes/sins if they think they'll get away with it. For example: How many times have you found garbage where it shouldn't have been left, or left garbage somewhere because you knew no one was around to scold you?
2) A significant number of people will allow something bad to happen to someone else, provided they're sure it won't happen to them too. I'm looking at you, people who ignored Strikethrough/Boldthrough or laughed at its victims because "you're not one of those freaks who writes underage Harry Potter porn". Or anyone who said "it's fine with me if they put security cameras everywhere. I’m not doing anything wrong."
3) A significant number of people continue to use products and services they know harm the environment, were made in sweatshops/slave conditions or support causes they'd rather not support. Or even just services and products that could have an actual, immediate, bad effect on them. See: Everyone who shops at Kohl's or eats at KFC/Taco Bell. They can't even be convinced to do the right thing when it's in their own self interest to do so.
They tried to go on to say that it's not that they believe this is an excuse for sin or licentiousness but oops, too late, the wrong people have already heard the "there is no good or bad" part and they're off running and didn't hear the rest. Most people out there are simply not able to deal with that concept which is why they have to be taught right from wrong. And those rules that religions have are not always as useless as you seem to think they are. In fact, the people who screw up religion the most tend to be those people who are trying to make others follow rules they're not prepared to follow themselves- it's not the simple act of having the rules that screws it all up.
Use of the phrase "there is no good or bad" usually ends up with the person who said it meeting a sticky end, and if it's not them, it's someone else who was "inspired" by them.
"There is no god condemning people, everyone is gods."
First of all, that's grammatically incorrect.
But do you know why gods are gods and people are people? Because people can't handle being gods. Whenever they start thinking they're gods, it always, always, always backfires. I can think of one specific and famous example of a human being that everyone tried to make a god… turned out kind of a disaster, didn't it? And he didn't even want to be one. Leaving that incident aside for a moment, when most people start thinking "I am a god" they do not turn around and go "Oh, so I should treat other people as if they were also gods." What they do is think "I do not have to follow rules anymore and I am entitled to whatever I want. I can't make mistakes, because gods don't do that." If the gods of mythology are the projections of humanity's desires, isn't that kinda scary when you think about how those gods behaved? That is what we'd be like if we were gods.
There's a difference between "God is in you" and "You are God." The second one just reminds me of Warren, Andrew and Jonathan frolicking in that flower filled field wearing crowns and togas and trilling "we are as goddddss!" |