AVATAR, SCIENCE FICTION AND REALITY

The following is a ramble I entered on the World Pantheism Movement website in a discussion of the film Avatar which, I'm proud to say, I didn't run off to see:

This rambles, but at root, it's a critique of Avatar from many angles. When I was in the Navy in the 50s, I was in the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club so, at one time, I was a fan of that genre, and I got to know it fairly well. I still think Fahrenheit 451 is an excellent film. I found and bought a beat up tape in a library sale that I still own. And the film Gattaca far surpasses any of the Star Wars films. I like Gattaca for its cinematic artistry, its style and the staging and sets. Simple and beautiful and based in character. What always sets most science fiction apart from serious art is that science fiction is nearly always idea driven rather than character based. That's okay and I'll go see a science fiction film, but I'm hyper critical. Matrix is just one single idea stretched over three films. Good guy versus bad matrix. A waste of time and effort. One was enough. The recent Star Trek movie could only appeal to Trekkies. Lines repeated from the TV show to titillate the infant mind. Why do I say that? Think... at what age are children delighted to have the same phrase or fairy tale repeated again and again? It arises at a specific emotional and intellectual stage of development! I don't know how many times I winced when TV Captain Picard uttered the tiresome phrase, "Make it so!" Right out of WW II just like Lucas's air battles. Bradbury wrote a few good books in which character predominates. I admit that I no longer dabble in science fiction literature, and I've heard that in the literary arts some writers are working on some interesting concepts. I suppose it might benefit me to find and read a few good science fiction books.

Two recent films that use scientific research in fascinating ways are Momento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and they are outstanding because character predominates over their scientific ideas. Here's an interesting detail. I think it was Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens) who wrote that someone in Hollywood called him at one time to ask if it would be possible to erase the memory of a bad love affair. Though Damasio didn't name names, I'd swear that someone involved in Eternal Sunshine must have been his caller.

Finally, I think Fellini's "8 1/2" is a fantasy neuro-scientific film that broke down the barriers between memory, hallucination, fantasy and dream life and reality about as well as anyone could. I may have been simple-minded when I first saw that film, but, let me tell you, it really challenged me, and I didn't understand it for the longest time. I didn't understand his technique or what he was about, but when it finally hit home that he was giving us a stream of consciousness presentation of life through the dreams, imagination, memory and life of a single individual without attempting to frame the shifts for us to understand, that taught me more than any Avatar could ever teach me about humanity's imaginative life or future.

I'll admit that taste is an opinion and everyone is truly an expert on his own tastes, so who am I to quibble? I only quibble because I'm afraid that the sort of films that entertain me might not be made anymore, and I don't like the thought of that one bit. Nor do I like special effects films like Avatar which aren't up to my standards but which will make films ever more expensive, and I'm not even entertained by them, no matter how much they cost nor what gimcrackery they employ.

O, I just thought of The Truman Show, another excellent film that opened my brain up anew. That far surpasses any recent science fiction yarn that I can think of made in the last decade, Avatar, I Robot or not.

This is an addition to my ramble on the Avatar thread. I also, at a very young age, was a fan of Asimov's Foundation novels. F A S C I N A T E D! I think I read them all in high school.

O NO... AMERICA'S GROWING WEIGHTIER!

Was your mommy a fatty? What does that mean for you? What does it mean for the US? Of course who cares what a mom weighs as long as she loves us even if it dumb us down a little bit?

"Omega-3 fatty acids are a limiting factor in building brains, and are stored in a woman's hips and thighs. New evidence shows a relationship between a woman's stores of these essential fatty acids and her cognitive ability and that of her offspring...
Waist-Hip Ratio and Cognitive Ability: Is Gluteofemoral Fat a Privileged Store of Neurodevelopmental Resources? by William Lassek & Steven J.C. Gaulin, In Evolution and Human Behavior 29, 26-34 (2008). Click here for more"

AN POWERFUL LETTER BY A PERSON OF INTEGRITY

Dear Catholic Church: Excommunicate Me - An Open Letter

by Paul Constant
Apr 6, 2010

Bishop Richard Malone
c/o Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland
510 Ocean Avenue, P.O. 11559
Portland, Maine 04104


I am addressing this letter to you because my entire life as a Catholic took
place in Maine. I was baptized into the Catholic Church at St. Matthew in
Limerick a few weeks after my birth in 1976. And I was confirmed 16 years
later at St. Anne's in Gorham.

Even though I have never believed in God or the afterlife or anything else
that Catholics profess, I did get confirmed in the church of my own free
will, and though every baptized human being is supposedly a "full Catholic"
at the moment of baptism, the consensual sacrament of confirmation*
supposedly, in the words of the church, "renders the bond with the church
more perfect."

My father, Joseph Constant, worked his whole life, adored his wife for 45
years, and loved us no matter what. And I decided when I was 16 that as long
as I was living under his roof, I would continue to be a full member of his
church. He wanted to meet us again one day in heaven, and he believed that
there was only one way to do that: by believing in the One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church. My confirmation was a tribute to him, but it only went so
far: After I struck out on my own, I lived as an atheist.

But I suppose that, technically at least, I'm a Catholic, one of the
millions of Catholics whom American bishops profess to lead and, when the
church inserts itself into our political process, claim to speak for.

Today, Bishop Malone, I am demanding that you excommunicate me. I cannot in
good conscience belong to your church anymore; I do not want to be counted
with the 200,000 Catholics in Maine, or the 68,115,001 Catholics in the
United States of America, or the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world.

I have been watching the events of the last few weeks with horror. The pope
(an ex-Hitler Youth whom your fellow bishops used to refer to, lovingly, as
"God's rottweiler") whined during a Palm Sunday homily about what he called
"petty gossip." That "petty gossip" is a tsunami of reports of child rape
perpetrated by Catholic priests across the globe and attempts by bishops,
archbishops, cardinals, and the pope himself to cover up that child rape by
moving ordained rapists to new parishes where they could, and did, rape
again. That "petty gossip" includes one case in which the pope halted an
internal investigation of a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who is alleged to
have raped more than 200 deaf boys.

And then, on March 30, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights placed an ad in the New York Times dismissively accusing the
Times of "looking for dirt" that "occurred a half-century ago" and saying
that the church's "pedophilia crisis" has "all along" been a "homosexual
crisis." He accused the Times of flogging this story to further a
progressive agenda that includes "abortion, gay marriage, and women's
ordination."

I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are
second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your
missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries
that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important
thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic
situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has
become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is
unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the
planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or
the concealment of child rape.

You might ask, Bishop Malone, what my father will think of all this. Joseph
Constant died on August 20, 2009, after a long battle with acute pulmonary
fibrosis. The sacrament for the sick gave him great comfort at the end, and
I thanked the priest for administering it. But then, at a mass that was
dedicated in Joseph's name in September, instead of a homily about how
Joseph lived the kind of life that other Catholics should emulate-generous,
faithful, good, true-the priest showed a video. You came on the screen that
had been set up on the altar (as you did in all the other Catholic churches
across Maine that weekend), and my family was forced to watch as you gave a
hate-filled lecture about why Maine's pending gay marriage law must not be
allowed to come into force, and then you had every church under your control
pass the collection plate a second time solely to collect funds to fight
marriage equality. (Thanks in large part to the Catholic Church's
efforts-efforts that included threats to remove charitable Catholic
organizations from the state if the law was approved-gay marriage remains
illegal in Maine. You must be so proud.) You took an occasion intended to
celebrate my father's life and spoiled it with hate speech.

And so it is with deep personal satisfaction, sir, that I say-and I'll put
it so you can understand it-to hell with you, Bishop Malone. To hell with
your church. To hell with the pope, especially. If you think the Catholic
God actually smiles down on you from heaven for your hatefulness, then to
hell with that God, too. I renounce your church, your God, and your
traditions. I will not be a part of any organization that welcomes and
comforts hatemongers, child rapists, or you.

I demand that you excommunicate me immediately and that you send me
confirmation as soon as possible that you have expunged me from the roster
of the Catholic Church.

Paul Constant
c/o The Stranger
1535 11th Avenue, Third Floor
Seattle, Washington 98122

PASSING OF A FRIEND

Geoff Hays died December 19th, 2009 of cancer. Not from smoking. The first time I met him in 1976, he was exiting a woods south of Cheney, Washington where he'd spent the night sleeping between two matresses among the trees. Like several of us in that Cheney crowd, he got sober after that with AA and continued sober most of his life save for a very early slip whose date I can't recall. From that time on, he remained free of alcohol. Though his life never achieved the financial rewards his intelligence ought to have given him, he was the kindest of men. In his later years, he always seemed able to turn any character defect that I said I was struggling with into a positive character trait. He was that kind and that considerate. A physically big man, he was a gentle giant, and I could always count on his compassion and caring. I miss him and love him—a comrade of many years.

RAISING THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE

Here's another comment on the Columbian newspaper website which I recently entered.

Darel,

I hear you and I understand, but your thinking ought to be broadened. As long as we keep our discussions well within the premises of Darwinian evolution and our appeal is to bottom line of survival and self-interest, all of us will continue to argue and debate and scream at one another like monkeys not long out of the tree.

In the history of humankind, the average worker, be he/she hunter-gatherer fresh out of Africa, carpenter in Nazareth, vassal on a knight's domain, Russian peasant under the Czars, factory worker in 19th Century England or mine worker in early 20th Century America has rarely, if ever, made enough to take care of his daily needs and, simultaneously, put enough away to fare well [welfare] in old age. Unlike monkeys and most mammalian cultures which have rigid dominance hierarchies like ours, conscious humans speak out when they feel unjustly treated. Out of this conscious knowledge of economic unfairness and from Acts in the Bible, the idea of Communism arose as a possible solution to the problem of basic animal genetic inequality. Communism failed because it didn't allow for the selfishness factor that remained even though it was supposed to alleviate Darwinian selfishness. People with the genetic qualities to transcend rose to the top of Communist societies too, but, in those cultures, the democratic ideal was not strong enough and dictatorships arose. Not only that, it's true that some people tried to milk the culture and so didn't work hard and rode along on the labor of people who did believe in communism and worked hard at it.

Capitalism's design seems pretty close to the right economic system to allow for good distribution of goods and services, but it was designed when more than 90% of the people lived and worked on farms and most humans lived in small caring (as long as you conformed) communities . Communism arose in closely clustered human industrial societies where the JOB had become critical to survival because, now, items necessary to survival had to be purchased with wages.

It seems that no matter what economic system humans invent, those with the most aggressive genetic qualities rise to the top (then try to maintain power) while the passive ride along for free and the person in the middle works his behind off and, at the end of life, has to depend on his children to support him. Or he/she depends on charity near life's end.

I'll conclude by saying America's system seems fair enough as long as those with the most favorable genetic inheritance realize, like FDR, that no economic system will allow most of us to retire with dignity unless we all agree that those with the most must contribute, through taxes, to keep the bottom from desolate poverty and to support comfortable old age for anybody who has worked throughout her life at low wage jobs necessary to society.

In any event, our discussions about economics must rise above Darwinian shouting at one another.