An article in this morning's New York Times about The Da Vinci Code being made into a film...not quite yet, but some talk about it.

The collapse of the Roman Catholic Church is part of the new planetary scenario. I believe we are living under the last full papacy. When JPII goes to heaven, a new guy will be put in, but only to oversee the dismantling of the whole operation.

The Code has opened up the public imagination to the notion that organized religion is at least suspect, if not dangerous. We don't need it. We've outgrown it.

Epiphany

A Christian feast celebrating the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. January 6, on which this feast is traditionally observed. A revelatory manifestation of a divine being.

A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.

A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: “I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself” (Frank Maier).

We are not emotionally mature enough to send humans to Mars. If you had thought that we were ready to venture outside our Terra/Luna confines, look at this piece on US plans for weapons in space. I suggest we stay at home on our own planet until we grow up.

The Passion of the Christ: A Nail in the Coffin of Organized Religion

Every form of culture, in its vanishing, receives its most elaborate and intense expression. (William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light)

A couple of weeks and $212 million (domestic box office) into the screen history of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a bit of the dust kicked up around its opening seems to be settling –– a good time, perhaps, to reflect dispassionately on what the film might represent as a cultural phenomenon.

Audience reactions to the movie are all over the place, from adulation to freak–out (at least one patron died of a heart attack in the aisles), but critical appraisals are virtually unanimous: the depiction of the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus is violent in the extreme, a sadistic dead-man-walking downer that strives for a realism bordering on fanaticism.

Unsparing, punishing realism apparently was the essential approach to the Jesus story for Gibson and his colleagues. One of the publicists working on the film’s pre–release promotion got the Pope himself to say after a screening, “It is as it was!” –– as if the Holy Father were present at the Crucifixion and therefore qualified for religious quality control. Later, the Vatican repudiated the “alleged” Papal statement by saying that the Pope holds no opinions on matters of artistic expression (you can hear Julius II, who commissioned art from Raphael and Michelangelo, turning over in his crypt), but the seed had been planted.

“The Passion of the Christ” appears to want us all to return to religion, and Gibson’s fundamentalist take on it in particular, as if extreme realism by itself could pry souls open. But, ironically, this in–your–face cinematic Stations of the Cross might be another indication that organized religions everywhere are on the way out. The drift at this moment in history is away from the specific practice of religion, with its doctrines and regulations, and toward a more eclectic and personal spirituality.

A recent Gallup poll [1] confirms a trend which sociologists and others have observed for some time –– Americans are abandoning institutional religion in favor of “cafeteria style” faith, and replacing denominational dogma with a more nonspecific “spirituality.” The results of the survey suggest that despite their outward affiliation with a religion and frequent church attendance, “less than half of Americans live their daily lives strictly by the code or teachings of their religious faith.”

“People want more than a long-distance relationship with God,” Gallup says. Organized religion puts priests, ministers, rabbis, ayatollahs, rinpoches and gurus of every sort between your and my relationship to the Divinity. But if it is true that so many of us are growing away from the “long–distance” religious dynamic in favor of direct spiritual experience, how to explain this peculiar movie?

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace has explained how a culture at the edge of extinction explodes into a ritualistic ‘revitalization movement.’ The end of a cultural activity is announced by the activity’s frenzied and fanatical application by its core adherents. From this perspective, organized religion resists being dragged kicking and screaming to the bone yard by making itself even ‘more religious.’

In this way, Mel Gibson is right in line with, Pat Robinson–type Protestant Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sunni Muslims in Egypt, Shii Muslims in Iran, Buddhist and Hindi monks in India who incinerate themselves to protest modernity, and religious fundamentalists in other places around the world who are trying to reverse the inexorable decay of organized religion by applying it more vigorously –– literally, violently, and fanatically.

Karen Armstrong, in her brilliant study of religious fundamentalism, “The Battle for God,” tells us that fundamentalists “fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past.” If you were wondering about the use of Aramaic and Greek in “The Passion of the Christ,” it’s only another way the film seeks to be literal, and therefore “pure.” Dr. Armstrong: “To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture…” –– remember that Gibson leads a small congregation of reactionary Roman Catholics out in Malibu who hear Mass in Latin.

It’s a losing battle. Here in the real world, most of us aren’t interested in saving religion. We are growing up spiritually, and growing away from the patriarchal, rule–bound religious structures of our spiritual childhood. We are beginning to understand that we may not need religion (“religare, to restrain, tie back”) to restrain our own unruly passions to tie us back to God. We can define the Divinity and relate to It directly on our own, thank you.

When you think about it, Jesus himself was on the side of the personal spiritual seeker –– and quite against organized religion. He likened the Pharisees and Sadducees, those rigid interpreters of God’s law, to whitened sepulchers and encouraged his listeners to seek the Kingdom of God within their own hearts and souls. Jesus was anti–religious. In the end, that is what got him crucified.

“The Passion of the Christ” is a religious shock treatment designed to convert the heathen and bring the wayward back into the fold, but the jolt doesn’t work. It just reminds us that the dinosaur of organized religion is lumbering slowly but surely toward extinction, leaving considerable blood and gore in its path.

The new biography of Jung is making the round of reviewers. The New York Times reviewer turned in a scathing report, making him into a boor and wife-beater. The genius of Jung was that he understood myths as the dreams of the collective unconscious -- and dreams as personal myths.

What is needed now is to cultivate a cosmic consciousness.

Mars approaches. And burns people to death! Ten thousand or more in France, where idiot families left their old people in sweltering apartments while they went on les vacations. A report from The Guardian this morning says that a total of 36 kids died this year in cars -- distracted parents or daycare workers left them in the backseats, the temperatures got up to 140 degrees.

I'm looking for more of this, not less, now that Jupiter is on the scene.

When I saw the pictures of New Yorkers enduring the power outage, I was trying to place the expression of their faces. They were blank, numb. These same expressions -- or lack of expressions -- are on the faces of holocaust victims as they are being liberated. I'll try to find some of these for comparison.

These are the early hours of the power failure in the northeast section of The Culture, but not too soon to mull over its meaning.

I am starting to see that Mars is kicking us in the pants, and that this may be just the beginning -- Mars, which is approaching us quickly (next week is the closest meeting in 60,000 years, as far as anyone can tell). Mars is Power. Interesting that the first pictures of Earth from Mars came in only three months ago, on 22 May.

But beyond the obvious, I am thinking that The Culture is being asked to examine its conscience about Power -- by being Powerless for a time. Much is being said of 'the grid.' The first time I heard it mentioned, on NPR, I thought the announcer said 'the greed.' So if the grid is being unmasked and failing, there may be some hope toward The Culture salvaging itself. I wouldn't count on it, of course. The operative image of what's happening in these years is still the Titanic going down.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887)

Loss of power.

A gay Episcopal bishop? Why not? Certainly many churchmen would qualify...and have through history -- I'm thinking of Augustine, and probably St. Paul. The real issue here is: organized religion's main purpose, it appears, is to contain human sexuality -- to rein it in, to corner it, to deny it, to consign it to secrecy, to slow it down, and finally to torture and burn people for it. So, of course, it pops up in peculiar places -- like priests (men of God) obsessing over pre-teenage boys...or synods called (as this weekend) to discuss the grave matter of a bishop being a homosexual. It's not even the homo...just the sexual that causes organized religion's blood pressure to spike.

Look, we would be so much better off if the O. R.'s simply passed into the elephant's burial ground...and left the rest of us in peace to find our own sacred sexual expression. If they insist on hanging around, well, they can do that, then just go to hell.

I am haunted by the pictures of Saddam's sons. I am also devastated inside from the descriptions of the tortures they perpetrated. I seem to be too sensitive for these reports. Last month, I decided not to renew my subscription to The New Yorker. I am beginning to close down -- not to information, but to The Culture, and it's slant on information. All this should go without saying, noting the other things I have done lately (i.e., moving out of the country), but it still comes as a surprise to me that I want to fold my own tent of The Culture.

I am on the planet that you call Mars. From here, your world seems like a garden paradise. Full of possibilities. We have been observing you for many of your centuries. We have seen a great deal from here. From time to time we send Ambassadors to you. They appear as you, and in fact they voluntarily erase their Martian memory for the duration of their mission in order to harvest information in the most unbiased way.

For the first time in very many eons, we are alarmed. We see your species, which had been nursed to become the husbands of your planet, drowning in a sea of the inconsequential. You have no idea who you are, where you have come from, where you are going. You are on the verge of becoming an interplanetary disappointment.

Sometimes, recently, we have despaired of your ability to go to the Next Step. You take one step forward, and two steps backward. We continue to walk among you -- to guide, to teach, to encourage your evolution upward. Much rides on your blossoming, because you are part of our solar system...the other planets (there are twelve, by the way) are depending on your development to make the rest of us complete and whole.

We have work to do. We watch you spinning your wheels. Sometimes we feel there is nothing to do but to let you pass and wait for the next planetary opportunity with another species.

We have moved closer to you now than we have been in thousands of years. Consult your astronomers. See that we are here, ready to help.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Hillary autobiography, 'Living History,' has the highest sales marks for a nonfiction book at Barnes & Noble. I couldn't care less about Hillary. She's the past...the very distant pre-9/11 past, which is even more past than past. Seeing her mug all over the Internet is something like rumaging through a time capsule. I wish she would just go away...and take her nutty husband with her.

Her book should be called 'Dead History.'

But, never mind. The United States will be breaking up soon. It will go away just as suddenly and seemingly effortlessly as the Soviet Union did. The arc of evolution is acending with increasing velocity, and there's no room for the Other Empire in the scheme of things.

Hillary, go away -- or if not, stay and be the last President of the United States.

More handwringing from the pundits. Franch Rich in today's New York Times: Visit "Art of the First Cities" at the Metropolitan Museum — an exhibition of delicate Mesopotamian artifacts safely held by non-Iraqi museums — and weep for the many comparable pieces that are being destroyed or stolen as our occupation forces fail to secure the peace.

From an article by Amory Lovins in this month's Resurgence:

According to the World Bank, of the six billion people on Earth, three billion live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day, which defines the absolute poverty standard. Access to clean water is denied to 1.5 billion people. Meanwhile, the world's richest 200 people are worth an average of $5 billion each.

The UN Development Program says that $40 billion a year would cover the cost for every poor person on Earth to have clean water, sanitation, basic health, nutrition, education, and reproductive health care.

The US armed forces costs the country $11,000 a second.

My heart leapt when I saw them. They took my breath away. The first pictures of Earth from Mars have come in from the Mars Global Surveyor. My heart is in my throat. This is what we have been waiting for -- an image of our planet from another planet. My soul sings!

The evolutionary leap in consciousness being experienced on our planet was begun in earnest by the image of Earth from the Moon. But the Moon is still Earth-space. This photo captures both the Earth and the Moon...from a place truly outside ourselves. Now, at last, we have this image of a blurry little aquamarine marble against the black velvet backdrop of space. Us! Everything will speed up now!

H.G. Wells in 1898: 'No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.' War of the Worlds

We had projected all our human drama of envy and bellicosity onto that splendid planet; now it returns to us bearing this gift -- not with 'envious eyes' but with the clear eye of a camera's lens. Mark it down as a milestone in New Time: Earth as seen in the evening sky of Mars, at 9 a.m. EDT, May 8, 2003.

This icon will create the new paradigm we have been craving and expecting. Hasten the day.

What's with Canada? Yesterday it was announced that the country is breaking out with mad cow disease, and today another case of SARS was uncovered in Toronto. That makes 24 people dead of SARS in Canada. We must do something immediately to end this threat to our democracy (tainted burgers! runny noses!): I suggest a regime change.

We are all immigrants into a new time.
Margaret Mead

Naturally, I want to believe, with Brezsny and the rest, that our species is awakening -- he even has a quote from Teilhard on his site -- but I wish they would begin to give us specific examples of how consciousness is quickening. Some days (like today, for instance), far from feeling awake, I just want to take a nap.