true-memes blog

The authors of this film, in spite of their sophistication about many important issues, unfortunately seem to be totally clueless as to the nature and purpose of religion. If one were to take their argument in Part 1 and apply it to science, it would be like saying that science should be shunned because the scientific method is part of a conspiracy by scientists to create ways to blow things up and control people with fear. Should we ban science because it is used to make bombs? Science has done good things AND bad things. The same is true of religion.

They leap from their critique of organized religion to an attack on theism itself. This will turn off a lot of people and cause others (like myself) to be embarrassed by the know-it-all attitude of the narrator. Parts 2 and 3 include a lot of important material and I want to recommend this film, but Part 1 makes me cringe.

They also fail to reconcile Part 1 with the montage of images and commentary at the end of the film, which includes many highly theistic religious figures, including none other than Jimi Hendrix, a very religious man, whose statement about the “power of love” vs. the “love of power” is one of the most potent and concise of the entire sequence.

The authors appear to be completely unaware that religion is primarily about personal spiritual values, in the same way that science is about physical things, and philosophy is about the meaning of it all. Religion, in spite of its myths and abuses, functions as the conceptual repository for the VALUES of civilization. And what about PERSONAL religion, which is practiced completely apart from religious institutions?

The ability to appreciate love and to recognize what is good and true requires the development of a concept registry, just like an understanding of physics or an examination of the merits of Plato. Science, philosophy and religion ask different kinds of questions and look for different kinds of answers, but it takes all three to get a full picture of reality.

Philosophically, the film seems to advocate “being” over “becoming”, as if we should only do one and not the other. Why not BOTH? “Becoming” suggests direction, growth and being alive. From the perspective of personal growth, the notion of the sun as a metaphor for God seems quite apt and even artistic.

To the person who thinks independently about these things (apart from church dogma and doctrine) the idea of God usually suggests, at the very least, the idea of a “higher self”. We become what we worship.

If a person “worships” power and wealth, then that person’s life will become focused upon the acquisition of power and wealth above all else. If a person thinks of God as the personal inspiration for all they hold to be good, true and beautiful, then that person will grow spiritually in those directions.

Values — good or bad — are expressed personally, in personal relationships and by institutional constructs that are created and agreed upon by PERSONS, not by giraffes, artichokes, lamp posts, or moon rocks. Values are meaningless apart from their personal expression. As a matter of fact, it’s impossible even to think about values without imagining their personal implications and consequences. How can there be love if nobody’s home?

Is it surprising that God is thought of as a personal presence? Meeting someone that we respect and admire brings out the best in us. A list of virtues written on a piece of paper does not have the same kind of transformative effect. But where do we look to find someone who is truly worthy of worship? Do we abandon the idea because human company inevitably comes up short?

What would this film have us do? Give up our reach for higher spiritual values? Throw away our relationship to God? To be replaced by what? Where else can we look to find a living reality that has the power to inspire and transform the way we relate to each other?

If we are “all one”, as the film suggests, why is there so much fighting going on? How does this idea accommodate our difficult but meaningful personal relationships and an independent point of view? Without individual selfhood and personal relationships, how can we learn to love and grow?

The film does not bother to define the term “God” or explore the depths of its possible meaning. Instead it sadly attempts to discredit relatively advanced religious belief (that God has something to do with love) by associating it with primitive religious beliefs (hell and damnation). It also makes no effort to sort out and separate church dogma from useful religious concepts.

In the rush to make their case that Jesus never existed, they completely overlook his extraordinary and unprecedented teachings about the nature of God, as recorded by his early followers. The church legends ABOUT Jesus WERE plagiarized and added into Christian doctrine in order to win converts from the existing cults of the day. This is an old strategy that not surprisingly explains the historic repetition of mythological ideas. Jesus did not teach these things.

Our problem is not that theism is a fraud, although it HAS been abused in the ways that the film describes. Getting rid of religion is not the solution, what we need is BETTER religion, just like we need better science and better philosophy (and better government). Just as getting rid of science would throw us back into the arms of superstition and ignorance, ridiculing people’s sincere inner reach for higher values does NOT make the world a better place.

REAL religion (true spiritual values) may in fact be our most effective leverage for recapturing and restoring the “Zeitgeist”.

There’s THEIR kind of collapse and there’s OUR kind of collapse.

In the past, I have argued that we should completely stop using the word “collapse” when referring to the destruction of the WTC Towers.
http://www.truememes.com/semantics.html

My main points have been that 1) the word “collapse”, as a global descriptor, does not properly convey the explosive character of many of the dynamic features of the destruction and that 2) the government and media have exploited this fact in their relentless use of the word as a way to minimize citizen awareness of the explosive features.

Both of these factors work against us in our efforts to get the truth out, and in fact suggest that whenever we use the word “collapse” in this context, we are, to some degree, unwittingly endorsing government/media propaganda — in spite of whatever else we may be saying.

We can see parts of both buildings begin to collapse, but these are sub-dramas within the larger scope of the overall destruction. Our choice of descriptive language for the ENTIRE event must allow for ALL of its dramatic global features, including the release of tremendous amounts of non-gravitational energy. Frequent and exclusive use of global descriptors that suggest an energy-added event would greatly help our cause, I believe.

I’m bringing up this topic again (at the risk of becoming annoying) because I recently had a thought that I think is worth sharing…

When WE talk about how the Towers “collapsed”, it is with the idea that the “collapse” has been initiated by the use of some type of explosives or incendiaries. When NIST or NOVA talk about how the Towers “collapsed”, they are projecting the false assumption that a collapse is actually possible WITHOUT explosives. The intended communication in each case is thus the complete opposite of the other, but the language used is the same in both cases. This can be very confusing, especially for non-technical folks who have already been convinced by what they’ve seen on TV.

We’ve all had the experience of trying to tell someone that the Towers collapsed because explosives were used and then the person will say something like “Oh, that’s ridiculous!” and dismiss the entire consideration with a wave of the hand. In the introduction to David Ray Griffin’s new book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, he presents an interesting analysis and overview of possible reasons for this sort of a priori truth rejection in relation to 9/11 questions.

It seems to me that a very specific kind of belief influence comes into play whenever we discuss the destruction of the Towers. For example, people who were persuaded and convinced by the highly produced animations and visualizations that MIT created for NOVA and the Discovery Channel “know” (or think they know) that the Towers really could have collapsed without any help from explosives. They saw it happen on TV! End of story. The scenario was made to seem like a real possibility and many believed without questioning.

Live news footage, animations and graphic visualizations have become melded together in memory in such a way that the average lay person is no longer able to separate them. They are remembered and interpreted as one impression. And throughout these formative media experiences, we were constantly told: “collapse, collapse, collapse…” The term “collapse” was installed as a trigger in people’s understanding, and it arouses beliefs and mental images that support the idea that buildings can simply fall apart all by themselves. The word has been booby-trapped.

Webster Tarpley examines this sort of media-based sensory empiricism in Chapter 13 of his book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror. We are dealing with a mass epistemological phenomenon wherein people believe what they have “seen with their own eyes” — forgetting that they actually saw it on a TV or computer screen. As part of our counter-strategy, I believe it helps us to become aware of the verbal triggers that are associated with these pseudo-empirical belief constructs.

When one of us says that explosives were used to cause the “collapse” of the Towers, the whole idea will seem ridiculous to a lot of people because they have beliefs and mental images planted in their memories that tell them that buildings WILL collapse WITHOUT explosives, so the explosives hypothesis seems bizarre and unnecessary as an explanation. These are the kind of people who trust the integrity of NOVA and PBS and think that 9/11 truth is just a collection of fantasies and political rhetoric by people who don’t like Bush. They think we’re annoying and that we’re getting in the way of more important issues.

We know, of course, that steel-framed buildings cannot possibly collapse without explosives, so when WE say “collapse” we’re arguing that explosives are causing the “collapse”. But for someone who has already been convinced (by media-fed sensory empiricism) that explosives are unnecessary, all of our arguments will be dismissed without consideration because they contradict his or her newly minted a priori assumptions.

On the other hand, buildings obviously, logically and unquestionably cannot “explode” without explosions. They can’t be destroyed without destruction and they can’t disintegrate without disintegration. The same can be said for dismemberment, pulverization, demolition, etc.

For many people, the word “collapse” has unfortunately been pre-loaded with false meaning (not unlike “conspiracy theory”). Why trigger unnecessary and avoidable resistance when we can seize the opportunity and reframe the question in such a way that true perception may once again become possible?

Here are my impressions of “A Mighty Heart”, a film that could have offered important insights into 9/11, but didn’t…

“A Mighty Heart” presents itself as a true story, but is in fact a fully-funded attempt at creating myths and martyrs, a slick but tiresome propaganda package that quickly loses credibility due to its obvious bias and unrelenting exploitation of tear-jerking flashback memories and heart-rending emotional outbursts from a “vulnerable but tough” Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), who is also very pregnant. Her stunning good looks were apparently enlisted to shore up the questionable content of the film. Any words that emerge from close-up shots of those voluptuous lips MUST be true, after all. Thankfully, the theater was nearly empty on a Friday night.

The Pearls and those who come to their aid are all flawless individuals who are guided only by exemplary motives and impeccable intentions. In the world portrayed in this film, only the shadowy “terrorists” have motives and maneuvers that are complicated beyond explanation, while the values and virtues of the victims are, without fail, wonderfully simple and touchingly commendable in every detail. It’s a simplistic fairytale set-up, where the lines are clearly drawn between those who are purely good (the “good guys”) and those who are purely evil (the “terrorists”: sub-human dregs who are ignorant, violent, deluded, wicked, dirty, and they sweat a lot).

The Pakistani investigators are hardworking, upstanding folks who know how to use a little torture once in a while to get results in the service of a just cause. The message is clear: we should learn from them and stop being so namby-pamby. The film’s portrayal of Randall Bennett, an American Diplomatic Security agent posted in Karachi, is supposed to convey him as an earnest and concerned contributor to the rescue effort, but he ends up being nothing more than a “me-too” tag-along, dodging bullets while he pointlessly includes himself in Pakistani sweeps of the usual suspects. His only memorable lines are his expressions of envy for the Pakistanis’ use of torture. He otherwise has nothing to say of any real significance and spends most of his screen time either on the phone or standing around trying to look serious and sincere, Hollywood style.

Daniel Pearl may have been an honest and idealistic journalist (I don’t know if he was or not), but I would not trust that belief based just upon watching this film. Here, he is presented to us as too perfect, a paragon of virtue, a man of rare ideals, fearless and handsome, always smiling and loving, and he of course would never deny his Jewish identity. He embodies the perfect formula for a martyr-to-be. He is the hapless young idealistic Jew who is only interested in reporting the truth, but has amazingly just learned (after living and working in Pakistan since the build-up to the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan) that (gosh, gee whiz) if you are going to interview a known “terrorist”, it’s best to do it in a public place. Deep, thoughtful advice, to be sure. And that’s about as deep as the film is willing to go.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Daniel Pearl was “of course” killed mainly because he was Jewish, underscored by a soft-filter flashback to his and Mariane’s Jewish/Buddhist wedding and a weepy scene about how a street in Israel was named after his grandfather. The unspoken subtext (of streets being created that needed naming) subtly reinforces the Zionist propaganda myth of the “land without a people for a people without a land”, while Israel and Israelis, by association through Daniel Pearl (”Mr. Perfect”) and his grandfather, are projected as inherently virtuous in every respect. (Note: my daughter was recently taught in public middle school that Palestine was mostly unoccupied when the Zionists arrived and that the few Palestinians living there left willingly! Who is writing our children’s textbooks?)

Arabs, on the other hand, are portrayed over and over again as anonymous and barely civilized, living in overcrowded squalor and poverty while they consume themselves with chaotic and unflattering activity. And the only way to get decent food in Pakistan is to hire the chef from the American embassy.

The theory is put forward that the stupid terrorists may have killed Pearl because, in addition to being Jewish, they may have believed he was working for the CIA and was using the Wall Street Journal as a cover. Terrorists can be SO paranoid sometimes. The ISI also comes up once or twice during snippets of cryptic, dead-end dialog, but the connections BETWEEN the ISI and the CIA (never mind the Mossad), and the likely reasons — other than Pearl being Jewish or a covert agent — for why someone might have wanted him assassinated are never mentioned.

To the film’s credit, it uses the word “alleged” in its final claim that Pearl was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “terrorist mastermind” who has confessed to just about everything under the sun except the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, the film also deliberately creates scenes wherein 9/11 “conspiracy theorist” views are presented, but only as a device to discredit them via contrived context and make them seem ridiculous.

The “vast international terrorist network” is the REAL enemy, and don’t you forget it.