alien siege

The SciFi Channel has come out with some real winners lately in its programming, especially the new "Battlestar Galactica" series. While I typically don't enjoy "menancing aliens invading the Earth" types of movies, I wanted to give SciFi's original movie, "Alien Siege" a chance.

I admit that I watched the first 30-40 minutes before falling asleep on the couch. I dozed off and on for the remainder of the movie, but even that was a waste of time. Although I was tired and grumpy when I wrote the review below, it still describes my reaction to the movie. It was highly disappointing, because The Sci-Fi Channel knows better than this.

The premise of "Alien Siege" is that an alien race, dying of a lethal virus, takes the Earth hostage. "Give us 8 million humans, whose blood we need for vaccines," they say, "or we'll blow you all up with our menacing death ray orbiter." The biggest hole in this idea -- and it's a HUGE one -- is quite simply: ever hear of blood banks? Really easy concept: get everyone on the planet to donate a pint or two of blood to the aliens, no one has to die, the whole movie takes twenty minutes, and everyone goes home happy.

The reason why they need whole, live humans instead of just donated blood -- an explanation that could have been dispensed with in about 12-15 seconds -- is not addressed and is never questioned by any of the characters, and so becomes the first albatross around this movie's neck.

The "aliens" have white eyebrows, which is the only thing distinguishing them from humans. Oh, and they each have a blue disc on the right side of the jaw; it closely resembles a playdough pancake, and I think it is supposed to be a communication device.

"Alien Siege" is another one of these original, science fiction productions that suffers from bad math. ("Taken" had a similar problem, but with chronology.) At the top of the program, an official declares that the United States' "share" of the 8 million people that the planet owes to the aliens comes to 800,000. About two minutes later, someone mentions that even though over 650,000 Americans have sacrificed themselves for the cause, the U.S. still owes over 300,000 to the aliens. Huh? 650K + 300K = way more than 800K. I even replayed the beginning to make sure I'd not heard this wrong. Later in the show, the American share is quoted as 900K, with no explanation for the jump of 100K. (I suspect that this was either sloppy writing or the continuity folks falling down on the job. "Was it 800K or 900K? Who cares? No one's going to be paying attention to such a minor detail.")

It was pretty funny to hear -- made as a passing comment at the top of the program -- that all of the other nations simply offered up their prison populations. But not the United States! We have a lottery system, because we're so democratic, and because the rest of the world obviously doesn't give a damn about human rights.

Also, the United States is the only nation on Earth in which there are rebels refusing to cooperate with the scheme of turning over people to be killed (though the U.S. government is only too happy to comply), and they manage to defeat the aliens. Everyone else on the planet is apparently a complacent, alien-bait idiot.

Not to mention that the writing was bad, and the acting was worse.

I'm hoping that when the next one of these "original events" comes along that either a) it's a far sight better than this one, or b) I have enough sense not to watch it. In the meantime, I'll go back to watching "Medium," "The West Wing," and "Battlestar Galactica."

so much stuff

"Simplify, simplify."
-- Henry David Thoreau

Spring is coming.

A Daily OM message this week mentioned The Simplicity Circles Project, a network of small groups that help "people lead lives of high satisfaction and low environmental impact." Always eager to cut through the crap and get to the core in my own life, I forwarded the e-mail to some friends and family members.

One of my classmates from The New Seminary wrote back lamenting the amount of stuff creeping back into her life and her home since she and her mate last purged their household. Rev. Deb wrote:

"I guess it takes more than one go at it to really sink in that we don't *need* all of this stuff! One downfall was moving into a much larger house than we had lived in previously... we had *lots* of space to fill... which we've done quite nicely, thank you very much. Oy. When will I ever learn?"

Her message was a mirror of what I have been experiencing. Prior to my cross-country move last July, I sold off, gave away, recycled, and donated a large percentage of my own possessions. The relocation forced me into what I'd been reluctant to do for years: to reduce my possessions by half. I had purged my closets and cupboards with vigor from time to time, but still had felt anxiety over the exercise. I remember sitting in meditation one afternoon, worrying that this or that item destined for the Salvation Army would end up being something I desperately needed or wanted later on.

That still, small voice within chided, "So, you're afraid you'll get to the end of your life and won't have enough stuff?"

I had a good giggle at myself over that one -- you really can't take it with you -- but I'm not sure that it made the dis-possession all that much easier. Clearing clutter is so much more than just getting crap out of the house; there are so many memories and emotional ties wrapped up in our possessions, and it can be hard to let go, even when we really want to.

(A great discussion of the personal energy we expend on our possessions and our ties to them can be found in Karen Kingston's "Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui.")

Keeping in mind the adages, "Never own more than you can love" and, "What we own comes to own us," I was vigilant in the disbursement of my worldly goods prior to leaving Virginia. I gave away much-prized but seldom-used treasures, sold my entire CD collection on eBay, Freecycled appliances and dog houses, had Vietnam Vets haul away larger pieces of furniture, and had several large moving sales.

Yet the night before the movers were due to arrive, I was astounded by the amount of stuff that remained. Where had all of this come from? A team of faithful friends dropped in to help me sort through it all: while there was an embarrassingly large pile set out with the garbage, much was sent off to Goodwill, and my friends were each gifted with as much as they could haul away. Twelve hours later, the movers came and went; I packed my four four-foots into the car, and we were blissfully on our way.

Arriving in Oregon with only the items loaded into my RAV-4 was a revelation. I had absolutely no furniture. I slept on a sleeping bag underneath the stairs (it was too hot upstairs). I sat on the floor and propped my laptop on an overturned milk crate. I acquired a few necessities here and there -- like a bed and a refrigerator -- but the house, for a time, remained largely bare. For the descendant of generations of pack-rats, that sparse existence was remarkably exhilarating. I had created a truly simplified life.

Several weeks later, however, the movers arrived. While they had loaded the truck with only a fraction of what I had possessed back in Virginia, the volume of boxes and furniture they unloaded in my new house was staggering. Even after the huge East Coast purge, I was astonished to find that I'm still harboring so much 'stuff.'

Months later, I am still unpacking the last of the boxes, shaking my head and trying to figure out why, just last July, I'd thought it was so important to hold onto ten old, rag placemats or a collection of odd fabric remnants.

Getting back to that Daily OM on Simplicity Circles .... Several different folks over the years have recommended "Your Money or Your Life" (Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robinson; Penguin Books), and though I've not yet read it, this was one of the volumes that escaped the purge to make the cross-country journey with me. At the beginning of the week, I was inspired to go hunting for it on my bookshelf and to at least move it to my desk, where I could reach for it when I found a spare moment here and there.

When I clicked on the Simplicity Circle website, guess which book was mentioned most frequently by folks hosting the Simplicity Circles? There are no accidents. Spring is coming. My place could use a good spring cleaning and purging. I'll no doubt be posting more "OFFER" announcements on the Washington County Freecycle board.

hotel rwanda

I was invited out last week to see "Hotel Rwanda." Though this was a movie I had wanted to see anyway, I wasn't sure if I had the guts to go see it in the theatre. My habit with movies is to wait for the DVD release of any movie that might be too much for me to take; that way, I can always hit "pause" and go do something else for awhile, and then come back to the movie when I'm ready.

I am grateful that the violence in "Hotel Rwanda" isn't as graphic or as overwhelming as it could have been (as it should have been?). This allowed the real-life story to come alive to the audience, for the precarious life-and-death struggle of the Tutsis to be something more tangible than the news stories heard by the rest of the world.

I remember listening to such broadcasts about the genocide on NPR as I drove to and from work each day. What was being described in these radio reports was simply unfathomable to me. I was naive and idealistic enough to believe that such violence borne of mass hatred was no longer possible. How do you hate someone based on nothing more than a word stamped in his or her passport? How do you kill someone just because of an antiquated social distinction? We're not talking about the impersonal kind of murder with guns and bullets, that allows assassin and victim to stand far apart, to never touch nor look into each others eyes. The slaughter in Rwanda came on the edges of machete blades, as Hutus hacked their Tutsi countrypeople to death and walked away covered in their victims' blood.

More than ten years later, I am still struggling to get my mind around such an atrocity, and the question of why the West did not step in to stop the bloodshed.

I won't say that "Hotel Rwanda" helped me to make any greater sense of this tragedy; I'm not sure there is any sense to be made. But it did offer a glimpse into the quiet courage and desperate generosity of some of those involved, and it put human faces to the news reports. This movie -- more specifically, the genocide it portrays -- has not been far from my mind in the days since.

religious intolerance

In the fall of 2003, a number of participants from the previous summer's Conversations with God Teachers' Tutorial banded together to write a book to help promote Humanity's Team (http://www.humanitysteam.org/)—a network of individuals and groups around the globe "seeking to free humanity from the oppression of its beliefs about God, about Life, and about each other in order to create a different world." The book—to have been titled Messages from Humanity's Team—never got off the ground, but I had put a good bit of work into my chapter on religious intolerance.

So as not to let this effort go to waste, I am posting this chapter below. All "TNR" footnotes refer to The New Revelations by Neale Donald Walsch.

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Several years ago, I was teaching a course on religious diversity to a class of ninth and tenth grade girls. We were discussing the common origin of the “Abrahamic faiths” — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and one of the students asked a simple and powerful question: “If all of these religions are founded on love, why is there so much violence in the Middle East?”

But religious intolerance isn’t limited to the Middle East. These same prejudices are acted out across the globe every day, even here in the United States of America, where freedom of religious expression is guaranteed by the Constitution. Yet in Tennessee, a pagan high school student was assaulted by her peers when she chose not to attend a Christian revival meeting. In Maryland, a cross was set on fire outside of an Islamic school, just a week after two Pakistani students had been shot in the same county. And in Utah, two fundamentalist brothers believe that God told them to murder their sister-in-law — and her infant daughter — because her views on marriage in the Church of Latter-Day Saints differed from theirs.

Where is the love and compassion preached by the world’s faiths? Where is the “tolerance”?

It is time for each one of us to make the choice to live up to the highest ideals of our individual faiths, rather than the basest perversions of dogma. If each person took to heart the compassionate standards of his religion or of her personal beliefs — to love our neighbors, to seek to harm none, to honor love as our foundation — and build a life on embracing these truths, we would be living in a much different world.

We live today in a world of extreme intolerance, never seeing that “the problem facing the world today is a spiritual problem.” (TNR, 2) Instead of bridges, we build barriers with our beliefs, shutting out those who follow a different path, and even use this as fuel in our political and military battles, referring to our enemies as “the evil-doers.”

Religious tolerance is slippery, with the ideal of a spiritually diverse utopia and the reality of a violently divided world seemingly too far apart to bridge the gap. But is “tolerance” the answer? If my neighbor and I tolerate each other’s different faiths, but I earnestly pray each night for her wayward soul, lest she spend eternity ablaze, how accepting am I of her beliefs? And if she cannot respect my faith, how much must she respect me as a human being? We rely on “tolerance” as a path to peace, but we still live in a world of division.

As practiced in the U.S., religious tolerance endeavors not to exclude anyone, yet often creates even greater exclusion. So as not to offend those of other faiths, we ban prayer in schools, so no one gets to pray or reflect. Because of the sharp dividing lines in many religions, we decide that if not everyone can express his or her faith, then no one can.

Because organized religion as you currently create it is largely an exclusive experience. It is exclusive to the individual or the group experiencing it. You have not found a way to include everyone in the same experience — that is, society as a whole — because you have not found a way for everyone to agree on how the experience should be experienced. (TNR, 41)

“There are some things that work and some things that do not work about religion. “ (TNR, 72) And this exclusivity is not working, as it builds more walls than it breaks down.

Our religious institutions focus more keenly on the differences between “us” and “them” than on the similar truths pervading each tradition. And “it is the teaching of their separatist philosophies and their exclusivist theologies that make some organized religions not merely inaccurate, but dangerous,” (TNR, 279) as we use these differences to label each other as “wrong,” to judge and to condemn each other, and even to justify violence against one another.

While governments may call for tolerance, the religions themselves have not learned how to embrace this practice. Instead, “[we] teach [our] children to believe in an intolerant God, and thus condone for them their own behaviors of intolerance.” (TNR, 20)

Faith — even with our differences — should be what brings us together. But when one group uses dogma to judge and condemn another group, can we not see that we are closing our hearts and shutting ourselves off from our own humanity? “In some cases it is organized religion itself that preaches against community and integration, claiming that God never intended people of varying races, cultures, and nationalities to commingle, much less intermarry and co-create.” (TNR, 61)

“How can we ask the world to heal itself when organized religion — the very institution that was meant to provide that healing — does nothing but inflict more and more damage, open wide and wider the wound, spread further and further its righteous indignation, its non-acceptance, its utter distain, its total intolerance?” (NDW in TNR, 47)



In the words of The New Revelations:

This spiritual arrogance is what has caused [our] greatest sorrows. [We] have suffered more — and caused other people to suffer more — over [our] ideas about God than over [our] ideas about anything else in human experience. [We] have turned the source of the greatest joy into the source of [our] greatest pain. (TNR, 5)

So how do we turn this around, trading tolerance for true acceptance and respect?

“It is the basic nature of human beings to be loving.” (TNR, 160-161) Compassion and love are the true nature of the human heart and the gifts of all faiths. Judgment is an invention of fear. But what is there to fear? Only the flood of light and love when we open our hearts and minds.

In the past, we have seen “different,” and have thought, “evil.” It is not the differences between faiths that are evil; it is the intolerance of those differences that is evil.

As many souls as there are in the universe, there are that many diverse and wonderful paths to the divine. Why not celebrate and encourage each other’s path to self-knowledge and union with the divine? What amount of security do we need to be able to understand that accepting the validity and beauty of another’s faith does not in any way diminish our own? Quite the contrary. Supporting another person’s connection with God instead strengthens our own.

We can choose to recognize that we are all climbing the same mountain, toward the same goal of communion with God. We can choose to stop seeing members of other religions as competitors for that goal of the mountain peak, and recognize them as fellow climbers. We have a choice!

No one religion has the market cornered on God. No one faith tradition has exclusive access to Spirit. No path is “better,” “truer,” or more “right” than any other. The third new revelation states:

No path to God is more direct than any other path. No religion is the “one true religion,” no people are “the chosen people,” and no prophet is the “greatest prophet.” (TNR, 97-98)

Moses brought down the Ten Commandments, didn’t he? And Jesus brought forth the teachings in the New Testament, yes? And Muhammed’s words are what the Qur’an is all about, no? So who is more ‘holy’? (TNR, 97)

Is saying a rosary better than saying the savitu? Is the practice called bhaktimore sacred than the practice called seder? Is a church more sacred that a mosque. Is a mosque more sacred than a synagogue? Am I to be found in one place and not the other? (TNR, 129-130)

Can we not then recognize each other as true seekers on separate paths to the same destination, even though your God and mine may have different names? In the words of SriSivananda Saraswathi Sevashram:

When one God dwells in all living beings, then why do you hate others? Why do you frown at others? Why do you become indignant towards others? Why do you use harsh words? Why do you try to rule and domineer over others? Why do you exploit folly? Is this not sheer ignorance? Get wisdom and rest in peace.

There is more common ground than there are barriers. Gandhi understood this when he stated: “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew.” Yet this is not about blending or abolishing religions. This is about choosing loving inclusiveness over dividing exclusiveness. It is about individuals choosing to open their hearts and their minds and taking this understanding with them into their churches, their mosques, and their temples.

Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng chides:

No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. No peace among religions without dialogue between the religions. No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundation of the religions.

Each of us holds the choice of tolerance in our hands. But as we open our hearts and open the doorway for this dialogue with seekers of other faiths, we must also choose to tolerate those who do not themselves choose tolerance. In the face of intolerance, we can back down; we can shut ourselves off again. Or, as suggested by the Five Steps to Peace, we can live our lives as demonstrations of our beliefs, not as denials of them.

What kind of world do we want to live in? One that builds barriers and promotes violence and hatred in the name of God, or one that builds bridges and sows seeds of compassion and benevolence? The choice is ours.