If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth, most non-believers will be too busy freaking-the-hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of the PAY web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.
Check out the full story from Wired magazine.
Lionsgate has released a movie trailer for Larry Charles’ documentary Religulous, which follows Bill Maher as he travels around the globe interviewing people about their God and religion. It looks well produced and extremely clever. Seeing so many religious points of views strung together serves to illustrate the absurdity of these widely varied beliefs. I clearly is not workable for all these religions to co-exist… in fact, the film appears to illuminate the bigotry of religious groups towards each other’s faiths. I hope this movie is able to find wide release. Look for me with my large popcorn.
Truth conquers all… I wish. Clearly this is one of those maxims that requires its own brand of faith to believe. The difficulty of the problem is compounded by the sheer number of “truth-tellers” that do little else than to spread myths, half-truths, and downright lies.
I certainly have faith that this human race will slowly become enlightened. The number of rational thinkers currently on this little blue marble FAR outnumber those at any prior period in human history… and that number continues to increase not just in absolute terms, but also in relative terms.
That’s all I have for today… thanks for reading. Incidentally, do me a favor and let me know you stopped in by dropping me a comment. I enjoy doing this for the cathartic effect, but wouldn’t mind an intelligent discourse on occasion as well. Cheers!
I just watched Frank Miller’s ‘300′ again today. It truly is an impressive work. This story is impossible to tell without the extreme violence. To the filmaker’s credit, they tone down the gore and blood quite a bit by stylizing the spurts and splashes into mostly dark brown droplets. There is hardly any bright red in the movie other than the capes worn by the Spartans. It’s very artful, clever, and historically significant (if not 100% accurate). This is an important chapter in human history that occurred a mere 2,500 years ago and it was about freedom.
What caught my attention more than the viseral imagery and over-the-top Persians was the story and the characters. King Leonidas, his wife Queen Gorgo, and Dilios are fantastic characters. Xerxes the outlandish megalomaniac scoffs at the idea of a few hundred Spartans stopping his advance.
And so the Spartans and the Persians meet at Thermopylae. I won’t drag you through the whole history, but except for the dramatic visualizations, the movie brilliantly tells the tale of several incredible days of battle for freedom. See Wikipedia for an impressive retelling of the Battle of Themopylae.
My point in bringing all this up is the quote by Dilios at the end of the film. It is now a year later and the Greeks are several thousand troops strong and resisting another invasion by the Persians. In the final moments of the movie, he says:
This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine…
What a shame that things didn’t quite work out that way… but imagine… what if we could rid the world of superstition and myth? Truly, that would be the dawning of a future that I look forward to and desperately want to be a part of.
The extraterrestrial is my brother… So the Catholic Church seems to believe that extraterrestrial life is a possibility. How long before they come around on biological human evolution?
popes-astronomer-insists-alien-life-would-be-part-of-gods-creation
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”
<Insert audible heavy sigh here>
Other blog references:
theapostolicreport.wordpress.com
And the people replied…