Even as a TBM, I had doubts about me ever being exalted. I assumed that there would be good things waiting for me after this life, but godhood? Creating worlds without number? Fathering countless billions of spirits who would either worship me forever or be eternally cast off? That just seemed so far beyond me. But I did believe that some of us mere mortals would eventually become gods. I didn’t know where to draw the line, but I was sure that all of the presidents of the church take the express lane to godhood.

I met Gordo twice-once when he was an apostle and once when he was head honcho (one meeting involved a brief conversation, the other time it was just “good morning, nice to see you. Nice to meet you Sister Hinckley”). I shook Tommy Monson’s hand at a temple dedication (I think he just said “good morning” to me). Years later, I remember thinking “wow-I shook hands with two people who will be gods someday.”

Just one of many former beliefs that embarrass me now.

I see god every time I look in the mirror.

Now send me money.

all the cash, wine, and meat goes to the priests as gifts from the gods for their faithful service...

I might be crazy but I'm waiting for Monson's Pepsi bottle to fall from the sky.

I love references to (somewhat) obscure 1980s movies.

You might be crazy as well. Something tells my Gordo and Tommy were.

It was a horrible movie.

It was a great movie.

You just don't believe in Coca Cola bottles.

Atheists don't believe Coke bottles exist in remote regions of Africa.

Atheists don't believe soda bottles exist anywhere.

Our Dave, well, you could show him a Dr Pepper bottle, a Mountain Dew bottle, even a Grape Nehi bottle and he STILL wouldn't believe.

There's no reasoning with such people.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2019 12:17PM by Lot's Wife.

Maybe TAB? We could pull that one out of Africa?

Dave, do you believe in Fresca cans?

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It was a great movie.
>
> You just don't believe in Coca Cola bottles.

I suggest you:

a) look at which country made this movie.
b) the nature of that country's society at the time.
c) who the main characters are and what they look like.

If you do that, you might want to reconsider your support of this movie as "great".

> I suggest you:
>
> a) look at which country made this movie.

My heavens, you are right! All art should be judged based on the country in which it was created! The fact that Michelangelo was patronized by a repressive and megalomaniacal pope and Leonardo by the Medici and the Borgia families; the fact that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were operating in Czarist Russia; that Shostakovich composed in the Soviet Union; that many of the Roman and Greek philosophers and writers lived in tyrannical countries: this means their output was bad--nay, evil!

Art should be evaluated on the basis of its national origin. Thank you, anonymous but ambitious god. You make art appreciation so. . . simple!


--------------
> b) the nature of that country's society at the
> time.

Ibid.

No, ibid! Nothing produced in the US while it was a native-killing, slave-owning society had any artistic or philosophical merit. Nothing done in Canada (ever been to Canada*?) while it was expanding westward at the expense of the Native Americans has any redeeming artistic value. All art should be evaluated according to the nature of the society that produced it. But something is bothering me, nagging at my memory as it were. . .

Yes, yes, I know! You are parroting Karl Marx! Are you a closet Marxist, my friend? Or just a westerner who has through the offices of the Illuminati indirectly imbibed cultural Marxism?


---------------
> c) who the main characters are and what they look
> like.

Ibid!

The characters in Crime and Punishment, in the Brothers Karamazov, include some unsavory people--so the books should be burned. Burned, I say!

You see, once again your insistence--per Marx--that all human activities are the superstructure arising from the structure of the polity, which arises from the substructure of class, leads us right into Orwellianism.

By the way, did you know that 1984 was really about Great Britain and the West and not about the Soviet Union?


--------------
> If you do that, you might want to reconsider your
> support of this movie as "great".

I'll let you in on a little secret. I don't really think The Gods Must Be Crazy is "great." A fun, creative, amusing film coming from an unexpected place, yes. But will people remember it in a hundred years? No.

The problem is that according to your and Marx's standard--that intellectual output must be valued according to the polities that produced it--we must live without truly great art or music or philosophy. That is precisely the mentality against which Orwell strove.

But I'm afraid I am with Orwell on this. I don't want to live in your benighted and paranoid world, Jordan.* I really don't.




*Note the insistence again on inserting politics into a discussion that is not about politics. Note also the wide reading, with quite limited comprehension, of history and Marx and Orwell and political theory. Consider additionally the use of the quotation marks before the period--"great".--in accordance with the British system of punctuation. Altogether it doesn't leave much doubt about who "Anon god in embryo" is.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2019 02:20PM by Lot's Wife.

Jordan wins so much on RfM. One would think that he'd be tired of winning by now.

He's an intelligent, well-read man but was evidently never taught how to apply logical scrutiny to his own thinking. And he'd rather hide behind pseudo-pseudonyms than send his email address, even a throw-away email address, to CZ.

It's a pity to waste significant raw resources of any sort.

We quasinyms abhor the needless waste of valuable pixels, be they raw or refined.

Skip the gymnastics, here is a black African view:
https://www.southerneye.co.zw/2015/03/27/the-gods-must-be-crazy-is-racist/

"The filmmaker, Jamie Uys, was himself a cog in the propaganda machinery of the apartheid State, producing, alongside the likes of Heyns film production house, films that sought to justify apartheid in the eyes of the world...

"It is not an understatement to say that the film depicts black people as hopelessly unsophisticated ignoramuses. Since The Gods Must be Crazy was made in the 1980s, many texts, academic and non-academic, have been produced that are united in their condemnation of its racism...

"The logical conclusion in this structure is that the colonising West as a site of knowledge production and practices, is supreme and therefore, has legitimacy over its “other” – the San or formerly colonised Africa. Accordingly, the San can only be explained through tropes of idiocy and backwardness. This constitutes the film’s epistemic violence as its discourses does harm to Africans..."

Dr Litheko Modisane of the Centre for Film and Media Studies – University of Cape Town in "Sunday World"

Gymnastics? No, Jordan, it's logic.

You said above, and defend here, the notion that one should praise or condemn literature based on the national and social origins of that literature. Since Apartheid South Africa produced The Gods Must Be Crazy, the movie is by definition lousy.

But does your rule make sense? Is Cry the Beloved Country, likewise a product of Apartheid South Africa albeit one highly critical of the country's sins, to be rejected? Your rule says yes, because nationality is more important than content.

How about Tom Sawyer, that indictment of US slavery? Again, your standard says that we should denounce the novel despite its explicit criticism of involuntary servitude.

How about Dickens, who fiercely criticized the social inequality of British society? You would have us throw out his books because he lived in a cruel and inequitable society rather than embraced because he demanded change.

No, Jordan, your rule makes no sense. Marx was wrong when he touted the substructure/structure/superstructure framework, and you are wrong now when you parrot him.



PS: Your quotation of a "black African view" again evidences your racism--the topics of some of your first recent posts, back when I still took you seriously. Now you are adopting Franz Fanon's dictum that racial and ethnic identity should inform our evaluation of an author's output. I reject that view. For someone who constantly decries cultural Marxism, you slide into Marx's and Fanon's ideological habits with remarkable facility.

"You said above, and defend here, the notion that one should praise or condemn literature based on the national and social origins of that literature. Since Apartheid South Africa produced The Gods Must Be Crazy, the movie is by definition lousy."

Tell that to the Trinidad government who banned it because of its subtext. The South African censors - who were pretty thorough at the time - wouldn't have allowed open international distribution unless it was in line with national policy. The main problem is not its South African origin but its imprimatur.

I don't think the movie is necessarily deliberately malicious, but it lacks a huge degree of self-awareness, and for that it is as naive as its "hero".

As an allegory of religion - so so. I bought it more when I saw it in the 1980s... Perhaps it works slightly as a satire on the commercial aspect of religion. After all the whites didn't just bring soda to Africa, they tried to sell religion right from the start. Even Islam in Southern Africa spread mostly through trade.

So we are to look to the Trinidadian government for our standards in evaluating art?

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So we are to look to the Trinidadian government
> for our standards in evaluating art?

I doubt they had very good tastes, but I understand their thinking on this matter. The sjambok was on the mind of the censor.

I am actually very surprised that you like this movie. I saw it many years ago on video when I was much younger and more naive.

The whole cargo cult concept might work better these days if it was about time travelers or aliens visiting a remote past.

I saw it as a cute & crude fable back then, but now I see it as something more sinister and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. (I believe Trinidad even went as far as banning it.) I don't think the writer was consciously racist, because these attitudes were normal in his society, but it hasn't aged well.

South Africa has changed a lot since then, has a majority black African government and so a lot of the attitudes in it are no longer acceptable there.

It plays with the idea of the cargo cult as a satire of religion, but it also portrays the Bushmen as childlike morons. It's actually not that accurate historically either. Bushmen have traditionally been more isolated and nomadic than most of their Bantu* neighbors, but they had still been making low level trade with them (and whites) for at least a century before this movie was set.

They means they would have known of glass bottles long before the time it is set. They also knew waterfalls weren't the edge of the Earth... These are pedant points, or "Goofs" as IMDB calls them, but they are the least of the movie's problems.

* Bantu in the proper sense, not the 1980s SA definition.

Seriously? I saw it as a child and it didn't give me any sense of racism or reducing a whole ethnic group or even tribe down to idiot peoples.

You are judging your experience with it by looking at it politically which is what you do.

Picasso was a horrible person. So in your logic anyone who likes his art is a horrible person.

I agree with Lot's wife here.

"I don't really think The Gods Must Be Crazy is "great." A fun, creative, amusing film coming from an unexpected place, yes. But will people remember it in a hundred years? No."

But I think it will be remembered in a hundred years if human civilizations are still around like they are today. It will show theatrically something long dead. These peoples as they were seen from a "civilized" perspective. The gods of civilization are crazy too!

https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3603-Leave%20uncontacted%20tribes%20alone

> The gods of
> civilization are crazy too!

And a good deal more destructive.

Yeah. Imagine indigenous peoples dragging huge amounts of plastics washed up on their beaches.

"Cargo cult" has acquired a new meaning now that the stuff washing up on the beach is not valuable First World stuff but rather plastic bags and dead turtles.

I’m just glad I didn’t sign a billion year contract.

Let's say even a quarter of the 108 Billion people who have lived on planet earth complete the training and become gods and have billions of children. Then, combine them with all the other people from other planets who become Gods and do the same, I think someone is going to have start building some border walls between galaxies with that kind of overpopulation or the entire Universe is going to be facing Intergalactic Warming and even the dinosaurs for "Earth starter kits" will need to be farmed like salmon and shrimp.

Mormons are farmed for alien glory. Kolobyent Green.

I’d like to know what goes on in a guys mind who actually believes he will become “it”, and what the wives think of their lords and masters having as many women as they want while their roles are too give birth forever and ever.
Is that the official role for the ladies?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2019 10:38AM by bearlaker.

As a kid in the 50's when we were all still really really getting planets--like for sure---I used to daydream about the flowers I would create and had some ideas for some really cute animals. And I wanted to create a new primary color making it four!

I took it all very seriously and assumed there would be a long training period. I wasn't thinking much about ruling everyone, drowning anyone I didn't like, or making commandments and stuff. And no way was I daydreaming about having lots of sex with myriad wives, ick. But the rest sounded pretty cool. Like learning how to turn staffs into snakes sounded fun.

They should have left the fun stuff in. The church lost momentum when it dumbed itself down I think. Most people don't care about facts and reason. They want to be promised the Moon.

I wanted to be an avenging angel. 8). I had stopped believing by the time I became interested in the girls.

Avenging angel. How cool is that! Celestial Danite.

Even cooler is living in Bear Lake if that is why the moniker. I always wanted to live there so badly. Raspberry shake forever!

Same, I didn't think I would ever raise to God hood status. Besides, I didn't like Mormon's, esp leaders, when I was a Mormons and I didn't want to be associated with any of them in Godville. I thought I would do just fine in the telestial kingdom. I think Godhood would be lonely and reminds me of that Mac Davis song:

Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble
When you're perfect in every way
I can't wait to look in the mirror
Cause I get better lookin' each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man
Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble
But I'm doin' the best that I can!

I used to have a girlfriend
But I guess she just couldn't compete
With all of these love-starved women
Who keep clamoring at my feet
Well I could probably find me another
But I guess they're all in awe of me
Who cares? I never get lonesome
Cause I treasure my own company.

As a Supreme Grand Master of Humility, Ted, it would be my pleasure to nominate you.

I flipped Joseph Fielding Smith the bird.

...From about five rows back ... in the old SLC Mission Home.

He had to have seen me!

But he didn't say or do a thing...

Probably cuz I was cleaning my fingernails with my switchblade.

Odd how gods always require people to believe in them to feel important!, and always require worship or else!! Actually,When someone is worthy of Love? it simply comes natural, why would you have to demand it or otherwise sizzle folks arghh!? or put them in a dark box forever for not loving you? lol, perfect Divine Love gets quite a weird definition when left to we humans,haha.
Some times Valhalla makes more sense, but I am no Viking, or summerland but I am no WiccaPerson. Maybe we keep coming back, one thing is evident, Life must want us having earthly life experience, maybe we keep coming back for more experiences, forever. hmm.