Thoughtless for the Day

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"People have waited nearly 2,000 years for Christ to return, so we can wait a while longer for John Frum" - A village chieftain from Tanna

Happy John Frum Day! Look to the skies, gentle reader, because I've the feeling that this is the year in which John Frum's plane will descend...

What? You haven't heard the good news about John Frum? Well, get comfy, because have I got a story to tell you...

John Frum is not only an American G.I., but also the King of America. His prophets built a landing strip on the Pacific island of Tanna island where on day (February 15th - hence John Frum Day) his plane will land and shower his followers with milk and ice cream.

John Frum is the deity at the center of a cargo cult. Here's a wonderful, lengthy article about John Frum from Smithsonian Magazine that does a much better job of telling the John Frum story than I could here.

Like most of the more important things in life, I first learned about John Frum from the book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, which devotes an entire chapter, Phantom Cargo, to the John Frum phenomenon and smarty refuses to dismiss it as just another wacky religion - because it's not. Look a little deeper and you'll realize that the John Frum Experience is an attempt to answer the question as to why some countries are wealthy and others are not. After all, "Why does the white man have so much cargo and the New Guinean so little" is the question which lead to the writing of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Speaking of New Guinea and cargo, in 1933 a group of New Guineans took over a Lutheran Church. They were convinced that the the white man was hiding "the Secret of the Cargo" and that not only had the Bible been mistranslated (either by accident or design), but it was also missing its first page, which revealed the true name of God. As the New Guineans saw it, Jesus had given cargo to the Europeans, but not to them. In fact, the New Guineans were convinced that Jews and Christian missionaries were holding Jesus Christ captive in Sydney, Australia.

I'll leave you with this inspirational exchange between a John Frum believer, named Prophet Fred, and a somewhat stymied Anthropologist.

Anthropologist: What does John Frum look like?

Prophet Fred: He looks like an American.

Anthropologist: Have you ever seen him?

Prophet Fred: Yes, John comes very often from Yasur [the local volcano] to advise me, or I go there to speak with John.

Anthropologist: What does he look like?

Prophet Fred: An American!

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have what is known as a "restless mind", which is a polite way of saying "short attention span". While composing the previous post, I had a series of thoughts run through my head then attempt to escape out my right ear-canal . I've since tracked them down, and have placed them on display below.

Thought Number One: Who started covering women up and why?
Think about it (if I had to, you should too); the burqa and the Duggars' swimwear (yes, there is a link to that site on the Duggars' site. Marion, Don't Look At It - Shut Your Eyes, Marion!) didn't just appear out of nowhere*: for thousands of years, men have been covering women from head-to-toe. This seems counter-intuitive at fist; after all, if you've got a small Bronze-Age village run by men, wouldn't it stand to reason that all the women in that village would be dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC[E]? Clothes might make the man, but men make the rules.

So when and why did men start forcing women to "dress modestly, with decency and propriety" (Timothy 2:9-10)? I honestly don't have a good answer. What I do have is a theory.

Let's say you're a guy living in the aforementioned Bronze-Age village wherein all of the women have been running around in fur bikinis for a century or two. You may have begun to notice that the warriors from the village on the other side of the marsh have a nasty tendency to regularly raid your village and carry off your women. So, you call a meeting of the village elders wherein someone comes up with the bright idea that if you cover up all of the women, raiding parties won't know whether or not they're carrying off Angelina Jolie or Angela Lansbury until they get home and "unwrap the goods".

Maybe this is why, in the ritual of the wedding ceremony, which harkens back to the days of arranged marriage, the groom doesn't get to remove the bride's veil until after he's said "I do"?

Oddly, this led me to...

Thought Number Two: The Worst Wedding Night Ever
Norse mythology (which used to be Norse religion) gives us the charming and equally disturbing tale of Thor's attempt to appear on RuPaul's Drag Race.

Somehow Thrym, king of the Giants, managed to get his hands on Thor's magic hammer (Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud to the white courtesy phone), Mjollnir.** Anyhoooo, Thrym offered to trade the hammer for the hand of the goddess Freyja (for whom Friday is named) in marriage.

At this point the god Loki gets involved in the story: Which, if you know anything about Norse mythology, means that something weird is about to happen. Loki somehow convinces Thor to put on a wedding dress, complete with veil (I don't know a whole lot about Thor's personal life, so maybe it didn't take much convincing), and off they go to the Land of the Giants, where despite the phony Freyja scarfing down an entire ox at a wedding banquet, nobody catches on until it's too late and the hammer is handed to Thor/Freyja as a wedding present (???).

"I'm an action transvestite really, so it's running, jumping, climbing trees... putting on make-up when you're up there!" - Eddie Izzard

All this talk of clothing and lack thereof led to...

Thought Number Three: The Emperor's New Clothes
The great irony of the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes is that it has been told to generations of school children as an example of the virtue of questioning authority, yet not once, to my knowledge, has some little child, upon hearing the story, raised his or her hand and said "Wait just one Odindamn minute! While the kid in the tale did manage to point out the emperor's swinging scepter, and no point did he also point out that it was a stupid idea to have an emperor in the fist place and that, perhaps, a parliamentary form of government might be a better idea. And while we're on the subject, if the same kid had pointed at either the Pope, the Dalai Lama, or J. Edgar Hoover and said 'Hey, look at that guy in a dress', his brains would be all over the sidewalk. Now where's my box of juice?"

* I should point out that the Muslims swiped the idea for the burqa from the Byzantine Christians, and the the Duggars' swimwear was probably inspired by...hmmmm...LSD in their water supply, perhaps?

** I don't know how Thrym did this. Yes, I've getting at least four books on Norse Mythology sitting only a few feet away, but I'm feeling too lazy to bother to look this up.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the latest religious stats as of 9:00 AM EST on 12/17/09:

• Oral Roberts is still dead (and, perhaps partially responsible for our current financial crisis)
• Speaking of financial crises: Rod Parsley is going broke
• Ray "Banana Boy" Comfort is in trouble
• Charlie "Is it me or the outhouse?" Daniels is still an idiot
• The Catholic Church may have killed the sequel to a movie that nobody saw
• Idiots toss kid out of school for drawing Jesus (although the kid seems to have confused Easter with Christmas)

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every two or three years or so, I re-read the Bible and the Koran. Although it neither has the exciting narrative style of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the raw ferocity of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the poetic beauty of the Bhagavad Gita, nor the balls-to-the-wall comic insanity of the Book of Mormon, The Bible is still as captivating on my tenth read-through as I was on my first.

One of the many great qualities of the Bible (Yes, I'm being series. The Bible is a fascinating tale of a people's journey from a hunter-gather tribe to an agrarian society) is that it unapologetically jumps right into the high strangeness. Take, for example, Genesis 6:4 (which I believe takes place about five pages in to the King James version):

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The sons of whom did what to whose daughters???? No clear explanation is given. We hear about God's frisky lads and then the story just moves right along to Noah. It's as if you were to find a paragraph in a history book about how much George Washington's time-traveling cyborg son loved cake, and then the next paragraph was all about Valley Forge Forge.

So, who were the sons of God? I'm glad you asked. Here are four possibilities which I've ranked in what I believe to be from the least plausible explanation tot eh most plausible (Based on city mileage: your level of belief may vary) :

1) The sons of God were aliens - as in space aliens
OK. OK. I'm just tossing this one out there for the sake of argument. So please keep on reading and don't click over to the Decemberists' site to see if they're writing something cleverer (because they most likely are).

Yes, there are more than a few folks out there who see Genesis 6:4 as proof positive that ET got it on with Wilma Flintstone. There are, of course, three rather serious flaws with this theory. The first is that it implies that someone from an advanced civilization would be attracted to a dirty, smelly Bronze Age hippie chick. The second is that geneticists have yet to stumble across any group of people - or single individual - with Vulcan DNA. And the third argument against the Copulating Klingon Hypothesis is that it's completely batshit crazy.

2) The sons of God were fallen angels

I actually like this theory. Not because I find it even remotely plausible, but because it not only shows what natural story-tellers human beings are - being able to take a single sentence and construct a separate narrative around it - but because many Christians and Muslims believe this: in fact, this is the Koran's official position on the sons of God. The Koran explains that the purpose of the Great Flood was to wipe out the race of giants - the Nephilim - who were spawned by the angelic/human coupling.

If even you believe in angels - which I don't - this theory has both a scientific and theological holes in it. The scientific problem is the aforementioned DNA issue. Just as with the Raelians (yes, they're promoting "Intelligent Design"), no angelic haplotype has ever been identified.

From a theological perspective, the angels are described elsewhere in the Bible as genderless non-corporal beings. It's not clear why they would suddenly sprout genitals and pop off for a wild weekend in Cancun. And why use the term "sons of God"? Why not just say angels?

3) The sons of God were the descendants of Seth and the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain

This theory proposes that the sons of Adam and Eve's third son, Seth, copulated with the daughters of Adam and Eve's troubled middle child, Cain. While it eliminates the troublesome intervention of UFO's and over-sexed angels, there is a problem with this idea: why would the pairing of run-of-the-mill humans result in giants or "men of renown"?

4) The sons of God are actually the sons of Gods - plural

The actual Hebrew term applied to the sons of God is "beni ha-elohim", which translates as "sons of Gods". The same name - beni ha-elohim - is later used in the when the sons of God(s) again turn up in the Book of Job.

This theory holds that the words of Genesis 6:4 are a hold-over from an earlier time when the ancient Hebrews were polytheistic and accepted that the gods of the peoples who lived around them were just as real as their god and that these gods often fathered children with mortal women - just as the gods in classical mythology did, siring many of the heroes of the Greco-Roman world.

The biggest problem with this line of thinking is that some Biblical scholars will point out that the plural of God was often used by the ancient Hebrews as a term of respect. Still, if you consider passages such as "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", the polytheistic approach does have certain advantages over the other three.

It just isn't nearly as much fun.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello, and welcome to another installment the in the "Why Things Suck and How to Fix Them" series. This time we'll be looking at monsters – their history; how we, as a people, totally dropped the ball on our collective mythology; and what we can do to make monsters relevant once more.

Postmodern society has given us many wonderful things: The internet, Stem Cell treatments, and the inspirational movie Showgirls(it's inspired me to stay up until 3 am on at least four occasions), are all examples that immediately spring to mind. But one area in which the postmodern world has pulled a collective Ted Haggard is our declining ability to tell a decent monster story. Please allow me to begin to make my case, and then to veer wildly off track.

Antiquity overflowed with monster in much the same way that your local Whole Foods overflows with old hippies who are willing to pay $18 for a jar of organic peanut butter. There was the Minotaur (who roamed a vast labyrinth into which young people would disappear; never to be seen again - not unlike Neverland Ranch); the Cyclops; the Gorgon; Tiamat; Goliath, etc. [For the definitive explanation of why the ancient world overflowed with tales of monsters, be sure to read The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor] But I'd just like to focus on what can arguably be called the first monster story: The Epic of Gilgamesh

There's a section in The Epic of Gilgamesh in which the hero encounters an immensely strong subhuman "wild man" named Enkidu. So, how does Gilgamesh deal with Enkidu? Does he dispatch him with his trusty sling and handy rock? No. Does he don his magical armor and impale Enkidu on his magically Freudian sword? Nope. What Gilgamesh does is to pacify Enkidu by hooking him up with one of the sacred prostitutes from the local temple. Genius. Every monster movie ever made would be greatly improved by this plot device.

Colonel Rogers: Mr. President, I'm afraid that bullets have no effect on the monster. We've tried attacking with jets, but it just swats them out of the sky.

President Rogers: It's already crushed millions of people to death, and it's headed toward a large concentration of orphanages. What can we do? We've tried everything.

Dr. Rogers: Ummm...not quite everything...

So, it's obvious that the first step towards making monsters relevant again will be digitally adding hookers to old horror movies. If you thought Jamie Lee Curtis" character in Halloween was clever for poking Michael Myers in the eye with a coat hanger, you are really gonna love the new version wherein she introduces the masked maniac to "Miss Cheri".

Books would also greatly benefit from having a few ladies of the evening dropped into their pages. Do you think high school students would be reluctant to read Beowulf if they knew three chapters were devoted to the protagonist showing Grendel a seriously good time in Vegas?

Conversely, if you popped Jason from the Friday the 13th films into the middle of Pretty Woman you'd have a chick flick that women could still cry over and that men might actually enjoy.

The second step towards making monsters relevant again is to instill an appreciation of the aforementioned monsters from antiquity in young children by convincing them to dress up as Cyclopes and Gorgons for Halloween. Look, I don't have any progeny, but even I know that it might be more than a little difficult to convince a nine-year-old who wants to spend October 31st in the guise of a Transformer to opt for a Centaur costume instead. And I seriously doubt that many little girls who had their hearts firmly set on dressing like princesses will be easily swayed to parade around the neighborhood as Echidna: "The Mother of Monsters". This is going to require some serious incentive. That's why, this Halloween, I'm putting a sign in my window that reads "We Only Give Candy to Kids Who Appreciate the Classics". If little Billy really wants that Snickers Bar, he had better start working on a pretty damn convincing Panotioi costume right now!

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)