Books & Cinema

BOOKS AND CINEMA
Journalists, Thinkers, Researchers, Documentarians, Modern Myth Makers and Story Tellers

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The f-word crops up in the most respectable quarters these days. Yet if the provocative title of this exposé by Hedges (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning)—sounds an alarm, the former New York Times foreign correspondent takes care to employ his terms precisely and decisively. As a Harvard Divinity School graduate, his investigation of the Christian Right agenda is even more alarming given its lucidity. Citing the psychology and sociology of fascism and cults, including the work of German historian Fritz Stern, Hedges draws striking parallels between 20th-century totalitarian movements and the highly organized, well-funded "dominionist movement," an influential theocratic sect within the country's huge evangelical population. Rooted in a radical Calvinism, and wrapping its apocalyptic, vehemently militant, sexist and homophobic vision in patriotic and religious rhetoric, dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. Hedges's reportage profiles both former members and true believers, evoking the particular characteristics of this American variant of fascism. His argument against what he sees as a democratic society's suicidal tolerance for intolerant movements has its own paradoxes. But this urgent book forcefully illuminates what many across the political spectrum will recognize as a serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society. (Jan. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Scientists repeatedly prove the limited amount of fossil-based fuels left in the world and emphasize the environmental effects of using them. Yet many Republicans ignore science in the name of God while promoting a debt-driven consumer society. Debt, radical religion and fuel have been individual sources of expansion and destruction for many nations throughout history. Utilizing these precedents, Phillips provides detailed and troubling criticism of the United States' excessive dependence on and promotion of these three factors. Phillips predicts these practices will significantly diminish the power of the United States in international politics. In navigating this sometimes complicated book, Scott Brick delivers an outstanding performance. His command of the text will leave listeners believing that he wrote the book. His intensity matches the author's urgency while his emphasis proves a great value in determining the important information. Nonfiction audiobooks of this breadth often become cumbersome and daunting with information overload. But Brick leads his listeners with the gift of a master performer who knows his audience. While extras such as a time line, bibliography or character glossary could only improve this audiobook, the clarity of the text through the efforts of the author and narrator make it well worth the listen.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Amy Goodman is the courageous and tenacious anchor of Democray Now!, speaking truth to power, challenging public statements and policies of elected officials, no matter the political party affiliation, exposing the profiteers of wars and the exploiters of people and natural resources of nations across the globe. While corporate network stations were giving voice to the beating drums and cheerleaders in the lead-up to the March 2003 Iraq invasion, she was interviewing peace activists and experts who could testify that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in iraq, people such as former Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, whose crews nearly cleaned Iraq of their destructive weapons from 1993 to 1997.

Nearly forty years ago, my college political science professor gave me some clarifying advice, "If you want to know why events occur and wars are waged in the world when they seem to defy your sense of reason and moralit, follow the money trails to those who benefit." This should be the credo of any political journalist, for matters domestic and foreign. However, we live within the empire and the empire wreaks of corporate fascism--ownership and control of our elected officials, our military, our healthcare delivery system, our labor and consumers, our educational systems, and our communications and news media--all in the hands of corporate oligarchies. The manipulations of voters is through the electronic voting machines and through the unquestioning religious faith of masses of people. Who can challenge these deeply-entrenched institutional ills that work so much against democracy and people's access to truth? Amy gained a place on the airwaves during the 1990s, after her courageous work in Indonesia and East Timor, where she was nearly killed trying to get the truth out about the massacre by Indonesian troops, armed and financed by US tax dollars. As host of Democray Now! her voice reaches people through hundreds of public radio and television stations and worldwide through the Internet at www.democracynow.org.

Amy Goodman hosts the likes of Noam Chomsky, probably the top intellectual voice on American activities in the world of our time. She also hosts the likes of Howard Zinn, Chalmers Johnson, Seymour Hersh, Jeremy Skahill and many others noted for speaking truth to power or exposing those who would try to deceive us. Also, many former intelligence and military experts who left their professions in ethical opposition to what their respective agencies were doing to people in the world. It is refreshing to hear in-depth interviews with ordinary people who have demonstrated heroism in these extraordinary times when so many of our personal freedoms and rights have been at stake and when fascism has never been so clearly exposed through the lobbyist-controlled federal government of the United States.

Stay tuned to Amy Goodman every weekday and read her and her brother's reflections on these extraordinary times, the people who shape them, and how important it is to have a free, non-corporate-sponsored news media with journalists who are beholding to the people they inform and not those who would seek to control us.

A scholarly work by Tim Callahan.

The "secret" origins are actually not so secret at all, save to those of unquestioning religious faith, who shudder at the notion that any of their preconceived notions about their holy book may be errant, misplaced, or simply wrong. As we close the end of the first decade of the 21st century, within a half-century of monumental scientific discoveries and technological innovations, we are linked as a global community in this Information Age through telecommunicaton/computer-based marvels. Yet, a number of people still cling to what they believe to be a literal belief in archane, conflicting, metaphorical and mythical religious manuscripts written by ancient authors and scribes long before science and research revealed the real and rational truths about ourselves, our origins and our universe. Many people are suffering through severe poverty and/or are living under theocratic dictatorships where freedom to read any book or to critically evaluate and discuss ideas is forbidden. In these cases, we might understand how many people, deprived of information, computers, or even the basics for human survival, have been forced into compliance of a religious theocracy, ruthlessly applied through harsh laws and little educational opportunities. Here in the United States, where we pride ourselves for our freedoms and opportunities, it seems inexcusable for parents to deny children access to the facts and theories borne of scientific and rational research, and to shelter children from reality through the rigid application of dogmatic doctrines and an unquestioning faith in ancient primitive religious texts. The books contained, and the books denied inclusion, were voted upon by competing political factions of the early Christian Church of the Holy Roman Empire, but this does not stop a massive number of people believing in such nonsense, such as:

Adam and Ever were really the first man and woman, 6000 years ago, even though homo sapiens have been roaming the earth for well over a hundred thousand years.
A god, believed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, decided that the only way to save humankind from the sin committed by the first man, four thousand years previously, was to send his son down from heaven to be tortured and brutally killed by being nailed to a couple of wooden crossbeams and left to hang in the sun. And this only occured in the Middle East at a time when the rest of humankind was settled and traveling in areas across the globe. Could this god not have simply declared people free from the sin of Adam, a man who lived so long before them? Could he not have devised a clear means of revealing himself and his love for humanity, and done so in a way that would reach all them? And, remember that Adam's "sin" was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Was this less a "sin" and more a perceived threat by a jealous god that humans might have creative and free thoughts like gods? Who, with any rational mind, open to truth, could buy these ideas?
This same god, in the Hebrew bible, creates the world in humans twice (Gen. 1:1 to Gen. 2:4a, creation no. 1; Gen. 2:4b to the end of chapter 2, Creation no. 2), then figures he blew it, saves a few human souls and every existing animal in the world and puts them on a ship that, according to biblical design, simply could not be built, nor would be functional, if it could, and floods the planet. An odd story of an all-powerful and all-knowng god, especially when he says after the deluge has receded that he may have made a mistake in flooding the planet and won't do it again.

These are just a couple of examples of the nonsense and mind-bending that such stories would make to anyone who would really strive to take them literally. However, the Bible of the Hebrew books and the Christian New Testament are literary treasures of infused mythologies that preceded them, metaphorical tales and fables and make this a wondrous resource for literature and some history, although many accounts of events seem anachronistic to corroborating resources outside of these texts.

My thanks to Tim Callahan for writing this book. It is an important reference book in my personal library. I am sure, for those aware of the material and many good references offered up by Callahan, as well as those reading about these facts and perspectives for the first time, that this will be an enlightening and utile tome. Alas, I am prevented from sharing such enlightenment with certain family members and friends of an extreme evangelical Christian bent, who intently keep themselves so much in the darkness without reason nor even a healthy skeptcism about what they believe, but I have yet to decipher the code for unlocking the steel trap of rigid, unquestioning tautological faith that encapsulates many a religious mind even when reality, facts and reason stand oppositionally before them.

I appreciate that most people are compelled to be religious, and that we seem to be hard-wired in our brains to be religious animals, and that religion has been a benefit, as well as a curse, across the millenia of human existence. Still, each religious group contends to have god on their side for their own religious campaigns, conflicting with each other or not. If each of these opposing religious groups refuse to even question their own perspectives, yet hold on to them for dear life (out of fear of death?) what hope is there for humankind and the education of its children? For more on these questions, I recommend David E. Commings' book, Did Man Create God?: Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Reasoning Brain?, a comprehensive and scholarly discussion of biology, genetics, evolution, "Intelligent Design", the neuroscience of religion and related activities and behaviors, the nature of religions east and west, and possible directions for religious and/or spirituality in this age of science and reason.

For the record, I am an agnostic by reason, an atheist by probability, and secure in putting all assumptions up for question, even those by which we come through the most reasonable and scientific scrutiny.

In Praise of Heretics Everywhere
MH Pathfinder

Doherty, Earl THE JESUS PUZZLE: DID CHRISTIANITY BEGIN WITH A MYTHICAL CHRIST?, Copyright 1999, 2005 Earl Doherty,
published by Age of Reason Publications

The apostle Paul visited Jerusalem during his life on several occasions, yet not once does he refer to having walked in the place where an earthly Jesus walked, was arrested, tortured and crucified, or resurrected from his tomb. No reference to Calvary, nor to the events which led up to Jesus' death. How can it be that the major author of the epistles of the New Testament makes no reference to a man, Jesus, with any historical reference to what is the crux of his own personal faith? How can it be that Paul, this major Christian figure, never wrote about the earthly Jesus who supposedly became the Christ of faith? More importantly, how is it that professing Christians could have missed such an amazing ommission? There are only a couple of references to Jesus in writings outside of the New Testament, but these passages seem out of sync with the context in which they appear, and it is no secret that scribes ammended manuscripts with passages to bolster their messages and/or beliefs. Was the passage in writings of Josephus that refer to a man named Jesus added later and/or abridged? These are the questions that Doherty addresses, and he comes up with the hypothesis that Jesus may never have existed as a real historical figure, but was a mythic, otherworldly personality, whose resurrection took place in the netherworld, but nowhere here on earth.

Whether one buys into Doherty's hypothesis that Jesus may be a product of gospel mythmakers or not, his thesis inspires one to further investigation and analysis. And, it is no secret to scholars studying ancient myths and religions that the mythic hero, born of a virgin under a star of the East, teaching and performing miracles, and dying only to be resurrected, is a common figure in over a couple of hundred ancient religious mythologies. Most of these precede the Jesus myth by centuries.

Interestingly, Harris is not just focused on debunking religious faith, though he makes his compelling arguments with verve and intellectual clarity. The End of Faith is also a bit of a philosophical Swiss Army knife. Once he has presented his arguments on why, in an age of Weapons of Mass Destruction, belief is now a hazard of great proportions, he focuses on proposing alternate approaches to the mysteries of life. Harris recognizes the truth of the human condition, that we fear death, and we often crave "something more" we cannot easily define, and which is not met by accumulating more material possessions. But by attempting to provide the cure for the ills it defines, the book bites off a bit more than it can comfortably chew in its modest page count (however the rich Bibliography provides more than enough background for an intrigued reader to follow up for months on any particular strand of the author' musings.)

I am always amazed when I awake each morning, realizing that I can realize at all, that I can stand back from myself and say, "Hey, that's me," through the mirror of my own mind. I wonder, as Carl Sagan once quipped, if "we are the windows through which the Cosmos looks back upon itself." No one explains this odd paradoxical nature of being a self-referential, conscious being better than Douglas Hofstadter in ways accessible to the non-scientific layperson and with great wit and humor. He presents several playful examples of self-referential thinking, while pain-stakingly explaining how a simple on/off binary code can loop into complexities of expression. Eventually some of these complexities can seemingly defy our sense of reason, such as MC Escher's drawings in which figure and ground loop back and forth, or the fugues of Bach, sometimes with complexities of six or more harmonious parts, looping in and out of each other, or Kurt Gödel's mathematical models which loop back upon themselves, or the oddity of a mobius strip. His original best-seller was GÖDEL, ESCHER AND BACH: THE ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID, followed by THE MIND'S I, and METAMAGICAL THEMAS. Hofstadter also writes for Scientific American. I AM A STRANGE LOOP is Hofstadter's attempt to simplify the material from his earlier books, to offer a more concise and readable explanation of self-referential thinking than his previous large tomes. I like clarity, and I like the witty writing style of Hosftadter, in explaining such an important subject. For those unfamiliar with Douglas Hofstadter, I AM A STRANGE LOOP is a nice jumping-off point, which may inspire you to want more, and to loop back upon his earlier reflections in one of his first three and more comprehensive works.

The late Dr. Carl Sagan left a monumental body of work of books, lectures and as a scientist and as an activist against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Cosmos series is a fitting legacy to his life devoted to bringing the scientific sojourn of cosmological discovery and learning to the layperson, with an oftentimes poetic narration of the wonders of the life and the universe, within the context of an extensive history of the sciences. Sagan produced the COSMOS series for public television nearly two decades ago. This is a remastered 7-DVD set with comments by Ann Druyan and others to update the knowledge base of science since the series first aired. I also recommend a few books by Dr. Sagan in the book section.