REVIEW: Moana (film)

MOANA (2016)
Directors:  Ron Clements, Don Hall
Writers:  Jared Bush (screenplay), Ron Clements (story by)
Stars:  Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Rachel House
Technical: 103 mins., 2.35:1, English, Dolby

Let's see...

Disney logo, check
Ethnic princess, check
Glorification of genetic monarchy, check
Trivializing, stereotyping and monetizing a rich cultural heritage, check
Animal sidekick comic relief, check
Omnipotent magical characters, check
Plug 'n' Play formula, check

Yes, it's yet another Disney signature animated feature poised to empty parents' pockets for licensed merchandise and follow-on video games, with shelves full of dolls, story books and other crap that will be sold on eBay in 25 years as genuine collectors' items.

Take any Disney signature animated feature.  Replace the characters with genies or snowmen or Polynesian demi-gods.  Add a cute animal that pops up at just the right moments to provide a chuckle or two.  Add a slim, empowered princess-type and her sidekick.  Insert into a story that blends five or six different mythos with a stereotypical rendition of some ethnic group.  POOF!  You have a Disney phenomenon.

OK so before I completely trash this film, at least let me get the well-deserved praise out of the way.

The computer-generated, 24-frame-per-minute, full-color animation is gorgeous.  The water, hair and sand textures are truly marvelous to behold.  The camera work is taut, with every shot and move planned to the Nth degree.  The lighting is amazing, with the state-of-the-art ray tracing in abundant view.  The character movements are natural and fluid with a resolution that is mind-boggling.

The score is what one would expect - a single, catchy song that remains stuck in your head as you walk out of the cinema, with a dozen or so inoffensive fillers, fully orchestrated with voices that are clear and pitch-perfect.

The strange thing about this film is the obvious (to me) metaphor for terraforming other planets, specifically Mars, and the need to get off of Earth because we've used up all her resources.  Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but the main theme of the story is rediscovering the ancient art of navigating by the stars to reach a legendary lost land, which magically transforms from a barren, sandy waste into a lush tropical jungle just waiting for human colonists.

Maybe my imagination is just a bit overactive, or I am one of those people who see messages everywhere, but this movie just reeks of metaphor and allegory.  A people maintain myths and legends of lost civilizations and technologies.  One brave soul strikes off to prove not only that the ancient technology does exist, but with an understanding of the myths and the help of the "gods" that it is the key to new lands and a glorious future.

I know, I know...I'm probably giving Disney Studios far too much credit for being clever and profound, but you watch this flick and tell me if you don't see the same thing.  Even my wife, who I would not characterize as a strong media critic, got the "destiny" message loud and clear, she just put it in religious terms, though the "global" meme came through to her, as well.

Given that I am about to otherwise trash this film, I have to think I have an overactive imagination, because kid-flicks can't be that interesting.

My biggest - and really only - criticism is that this film is exactly what you would expect in every detail if you've seen any Disney signature animated feature during the last 30 years.  There is exactly nothing that is new or fresh or even unexpected.  From the opening line, you can practically run the entire dialogue in your head before you are five minutes into the film.  In fact, about the only thing that stands out in a Disney feature for the last 30 years is that Aladdin  and Simba were male title characters.

Disney Studios seems to be on a multi-decadal romp through every culture that does or has existed.  By now, we have been charged to see the same formula applied to Russia, Greece, Arabia, France, China, Sweden, Africa (no country or culture given), and the ocean in general.  About all that is left is South America (no tribe or culture given) and the Phoenicians.

Every Disney animated feature (and quite a few live-action too) since Cinerella has a prince or princess on the brink of inheriting the crown, setting off on a vision quest to at least make it seem like they are leaders, since the only other qualification they have is genetic.  Even Cinderella is from an aristocratic family and marries a prince, and Aladdin is a "prince" of thieves who marries into the royal gene pool.  It seems that Disney Studios is pining for the glory days of inherited power.  There are even a couple of lines in this film that tell us the folks behind the scenes are aware of what they are doing.

In this film, the eponymous princess is ready to assume the reins of power over her serfs.  There's a scene where this pubescent autocrat deigns to tell her subjects where to fish or plant a new coconut grove, as if she has within her chromosomes far greater wisdom than the generations of fishermen and coconut-picking women, as she points and orders folks around.

Moana sets off on a quest to find a mythical land with the aid of a chicken, an enigmatic ocean and a demi-god called Maui.  Maui is a Polynesian Thor, who wields a "hook," rather than a hammer, and can turn into a giant eagle, rather than summon one.  He looks Samoan, but he is covered in tattoos like a Maoi.

The impetus for Moana's journey is that her people have over-fished and over-farmed their island (a la Easter Island), but a generations-old curse caused by Maui causes them to fear leaving the safety of their reef-encircled lagoon.  Moana, of course, receives a vision that she is the Chosen One who will lift the curse, learn to navigate the open seas with her hand, and find the new Promised Land.

I really liked the chicken, by the way.

Needless to say, it's a happy ending and the serfs end up bowing and scraping to Moana like good little servants.  Lest the Reader think this is a spoiler, then you have probably never seen a Disney signature animated feature before, but after this film, you will have seen them all.

Moana belies an almost pathological fear of stepping outside the boundaries of formula.  If you've seen enough of these films, you can almost pick out the bits and pieces of the previous films that are strung together with different settings to create product after product.  One could be forgiven if one assumed that Disney Studios was run by a sinister automatron that cranked out new properties on a biennial basis, complete with sound-alike scores and lyrics.

About the only thing that got my attention, besides the stunning quality of the animation, was that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (Maui) can sing, unless he was dubbed or AutoTuned, in which case I retract this statement.

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Unless you are 3 years old and history only began with the election last month, or you are a teen-aged boy looking to feel up Daisy Mae in the back row, you can safely skip this film.  There are far better outings, such as Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.  And when it comes to this formula, the classics like Snow White and Cinderella did it far better and hand-drawn and colored, no less.

Formulas work for medicine and chefs, but in the creative arts, it's a soul-killer and eventually folks get the feeling you are just hypnotizing them while digging in their pockets and wallets.

All that being said, I can't shake the impression that Disney Studios just told the world that the secret to human survival lies in the ancient knowledge and technology hidden in our mythologies, and that our collective destiny lies in terraforming and colonizing other worlds.  If this message was intentional, then I can forgive all the formulaic clap-trap and saccharine culture, since it serves a much deeper and more interesting purpose.

I just hate giving Disney that much credit, though.

Space A-holes Must Die!

Let's stop calling them the PTB and elites.  After all, they are just low-life, greedy scum in 3-piece Armani suits.  I propose the term "A-holes," with a capital "A" to distinguish them from the run-of-the-mill, street variety of a-hole.

These A-holes have sabotaged yet another nation's space ambitions.  India's Mars probe, like so many before it, has been scuttled by the A-holes to prevent...what?  Well, that's the Big 64-dollar question, ain't it?

You see, ever since WW2 and the incredible technologies unleashed by German and Nazi research, these A-holes, who have squatted on humanity's collective head for centuries, have been pressing the space technology to establish their Empire of the Heavens.  These pernicious dogs actually fancy themselves as akin to the gods of ancient myth and they are determined to capture the sky realms for themselves and 'once again' take their place as gods of the Heavens.

What a load of crap, but the problem is the A-holes believe it, and they are willing to kill, maim and destroy anything to get what they want: a New World Order...only they won't be on the World they intend to Order.

Since the dawn of the Space Age, there seems to be a clear agenda that someone (the A-holes) wants to have complete and unltimate control over who gets there and what they can see and do.  An inordinate number of probes seem to fail that don't come from the A-hole military-industrial-financial complex.  The Russian Fobos-Grunt, the British Beagle and now the Indian Mars craft have failed, while the US rovers and orbiters don't seem to have any problem.

And no, I obviously don't buy a superior tech story, since US tech is all off the shelf in Mumbai, anymore.

We can add to the list all the Moon probes that seem to rile up the A-holes, especially when they get too near certain sensitive areas, like the manned landing sites.  One also gets the sense that there is a high-level (bunch of A-holes) sitting on top of any data that other countries manage to acquire.  Everything is just too well managed.

Heck, the BBC story on the Indian probe problems spends a lot of time quoting "unnamed sources" about what could be going on with the satellite.  Now just a doggone minute.  Why do people commenting on space probes need anonymity?  You mean folks can't speak openly about space exploration?  Unless, of course, it's an A-hole expert showing off his inside knowledge about what's really gone wrong with the machine.

Any more, it seems like good national policy to announce that you are sending a probe to Venus, and then announce your Mars intentions once you're safely inserted into a trans-martian orbit.  Declaring up front just looks like mechanical suicide, at this point.

As researchers such as Hoagland, Farrell and Dolan have pointed out, there is a distinct set of dots to connect that make a picture of a set of A-holes with an iron grasp on all things space.  There's also a strong case to be made by these and others that a secret space program exists that serves only the interests of the A-holes.

We can only conclude that the A-holes intend to (or have already) get off the planet, establish themselves as modern-day gods, and then start lobbing crap at us, like meteors and other fun stuff, for fun.  Oh, and while they're at it, they'll nuke us (Fukushima, Stuxnet), choke us (BP oil spill) and futz with our genes (GMOs) to see what they can do to return humanity to the Stone Age and back to slaves for the A-holes...not to mention the pure entertainment value of being gods and killing off a billion or so just for fun.  Kinda like the Sims.

So, are there really a bunch of A-holes who are trying to recreate the powers of the ancient gods and lord themselves over Mankind at our own expense?  I'd say the facts show yes.  I've just presented a tiny bit of the evidence - haven't mentioned the Norway seed bank, Project Blue Beam, crop circles, and the like.

What can we do?  First of all, acknowledge that they really are shitting on us.  Two, that they really are trying to make themselves gods.  And three, that they need their wings clipped in a Big Way.  If you want to see their wet dream, watch Star Trek into Darkness, only pretend that you are the natives about to be toasted by the volcano, rather than Kirk and McCoy.  That's how they see us and themselves.

What a bunch of A-holes.

A Journey To Babel

There are two stories that fascinate me.  One is Noah's Ark and the other is the Tower of Babel.  They exist in nearly every single culture, tradition and myth on Earth, across vast spans of time, and on every inhabited continent (Antarctica has yet to yield its secrets).

The Ark story has been pretty much beaten to death, with tales of folks running up and down Mount Arat for a century looking for boats.  Boring.

But Babel...now there's a fun tale.  What exactly is going on here?  And why is it that so many cultures throughout our history record a similar event with similar circumstances at more or less the same time.  In each case, it is a single event, not multiple ones.  And in every case, the gods get worried about how far and how fast humans are progressing and decide to do something about it.

In every case, Man did not sin or do anything wrong, he simply had reached a point where he posed a direct challenge to the gods.  As Joseph Farrell says, it was a political, not ethical decision on the part of the gods to come down and stir things up.

Perhaps it would be instructive at this point to look at a couple of the stories.  Wikipedia starts us off:

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מגדל בבל‎ Migdal Bavel Arabic: برج بابل‎ Borj Baabel) forms the focus of a story told in the Book of Genesis of the Bible.[1] According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar (Hebrew: שנער‎), where they resolved to build a city with a tower "whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they purpose to do." "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, so that they would not be able to return to each other, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth".

The Sumerians have a similar tale involving the construction of a tower, the gods Enki and Enlil, and the confusion of languages.  The Sumerian word babel means "gateway of god(s)" or quite literally "stargate", while in Hebrew, it is similar in sound to the verb "to confound".

There are similar myths in various African cultures.  The Maya have a version that is nearly identical to the Biblical telling, except that it involves those pesky Giants who keep showing up in the old tales and myths:

After Creation and the Great Flood, there were Giants running around the Earth.  However, they weren't receiving enough sunlight, so they built a tower to reach the Sun.  This act angered the sky gods who destroyed the tower and confused the languages, scattering the people across the Earth.

The Aztecs, South Pacific islanders, Mongols, and many other cultures preserve this story in some form.  Most involve the people of Earth 'speaking the same language', which allows them to work together to 'build a tower' that will either allow them to reach the realms of the gods, or conversely, preserve the knowledge already received by having reached the realm of the gods or given by a renegade god (Enki, Prometheus, etc.).

The Hindu version is particularly interesting, as it combines the symbol of the Tree of Knowledge with the Tower/Babel myth:

There grew in the center of the earth the wonderful 'world tree,' or 'knowledge tree.' It was so tall that it reached almost to heaven.  It said in    its heart, 'I shall hold my head in heaven and spread my branches over all the earth, and gather all men together under my shadow and protect them, and prevent them from separating.' But Brahma, to punish the pride of the tree, cut off its branches and cast them down on the earth, when they sprang up as wata trees, and made differences of belief and speech and customs to prevail on the earth, to disperse men upon the surface.

So, let's dissect this story a bit.  First of all, the language thing.  There is no evidence in the historical record of Mankind ever having used a single language, right?  Or is there?  Even today, if you look around, there is one Universal Language that spans countries, cultures and time.  That language is mathematics.  All of our vaunted technology is based on some kind of mathematical discovery.  Radio waves, lasers, computers, even such mundane things as alternating current, convection ovens and headphones, are all mathematics brought into our physical world.

As Galileo Galilei said, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”  And don't we use mathematics to reach orbit and the other planets?  In other words, isn't mathematics a single language that allows us to reach the realm of the gods?

Well, not really, because mathematics is split into many different types and disciplines.  There's algebra and calculus and physics, and so forth.  In other words, our language of math has been 'confused' or 'confounded'.  And what is the Holy Grail of science but the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), which should unite all forms of mathematics under a single, elegant set of formulae.

Sounds a lot like the story of Babel, the fracturing of languages, and a current effort to restore what was lost to men.  And mathematics does indeed allow us to reach the realm of the gods, of that there is no doubt.  So if we are able to find the Holy Grail of the GUT, isn't it true that 'nothing would be withheld from us that we purpose to do'?

Nikola Tesla summed up the confusion of the Great Language quite nicely, "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."  This implies that if we can get our language straight, we can do 'anything we propose to do,' including engineer reality itself, as Tesla was attempting to do.

Now what about the 'tower'?  Folks have proposed dozens of locations and structures.  Alexander the Great destroyed the giant ziggurat of Babylon called Etemenanki.  But I think that if we accept that the One Language is/was mathematics, then the tower may have a completely different interpretation.

In Western culture, there are basically two main structures associated with towers: one is a place of worship, and the other is a university.  We can dispense with the first, since it preserves myth and superstition and keeps us afraid of obtaining the realm of the gods.  The other, however, is about preserving and advancing knowledge, and particularly the sciences, logic and philosophy, which are founded on the One Language, and indeed seek to obtain the realm of the gods.

Therefore, couldn't the Tower of Babel have been an enormous university or library?  After all, the great structures of the ancient world, such as the Library at Alexandria, were devoted to preserving and advancing knowledge.  The great universities of Europe are all dominated by large towers, and in fact the towers are emblematic of the universities.

Across the planet today, people are building taller and taller towers as signs of wealth and scientific prowess.  Towers have always been symbols of achievement, and they require lots of precise mathematical calculation to erect safely.  Many towers, such as the pyramids all over the Earth, not only required precise math to build, they encode all kinds of mathematical equations, formulae and constants in their structures.

Richard Hoagland's theories concerning Cydonia on Mars posit monumental structures built on profound mathematical knowledge that is embedded in the design and relationships of structures on that planet.

Thus, we can now tell the Tower of Babel story in a slightly different way.  Mankind had amassed a great amount of knowledge that either allowed or was on the verge of allowing him to reach the heavens, and perhaps even begin to engineer the fabric of space/time itself.  God-like powers, in other words.  The gods, a race of extraterrestrial, technologically advanced beings, were alarmed at Mankind's rapid growth that threatened their hegemony over the heavens and their exulted rank as gods.

So they took the decision to pop down and destroy the great university/library where all this knowledge was stored and substitute false or misleading science and mathematics that would prevent Mankind from obtaining god-like power.  This sent people off in a hundred wrong directions unable to work together because their mathematics were confused and fractured.

A perfect example of this, if you believe the official story, is the Mars Climate Orbiter - a multi-million dollar spacecraft lost because one set of scientists was using metric measurements, while another was using Imperial standard.

This ensured the supremacy of the gods and kept Mankind out of the rarefied realms.  As Farrell said, it was a political decision, not one based on evil doings or moral corruption.  Thus, the Yahweh character now appears to be more insecure than all-powerful.

All of this brings up two rather profound questions.

The first is, would destroying towers today have the same effect on human culture: scattering, confusing, causing dissension?  For that, we must thoroughly examine what has happened to our individual and collective psyches since the 9/11 attacks.  It sure seems that the destruction of the Twin Towers has scattered and confused humanity, pitting us against each other rather than focusing on concerted effort to advance the species.  Could the perpetrators of that crime have taken a page from ancient myth?

The other question that arises is, if the gods got nervous the first time humans endeavored to reach the heavens through stargates and took severe action to prevent it, could they do it again?  If/when we start getting too close to god-like abilities, will some external force come down and stir the pot again?  If so, could the rise in UFO sightings in the past 70 years have something to do with that?  And will we humans be able to stop it this time?

And much more to the point, from the perspective of the Big Picture, are humans ready to obtain that kind of power?  After all, we seem incapable of solving some of the most mundane problems with our species.  It hardly seems advisable to let us go mucking around with the very fabric of space/time, much less carrying our errors into the cosmos.

Sure, the Babel incident was done to humanity to keep it unable to enter the heavens, but was that decision made because we threatened the hegemony of the gods, or because we threatened the peace of the Universe?

Looking around, I'd guess the latter.

Pax Romanae

Ah, once again we celebrate that time-honored pagan celebration of Easter.  It began with Maundy Thursday, led into Good Friday, followed by Holy Saturday, and culminates in Easter Sunday.  If you are a Christian, then you have most likely been read (few actually actively read...) the Gospel accounts:

On Thursday, at sundown, Jesus and the Apostles gathered for the Passover meal.  Later, some of them repair to the garden for a walk and some fresh air.  Jesus gets arrested, taken before the Sanhedrin, gets condemned to death, but wait!, let's let the Romans do it so we don't get blamed for killing a major political figure.  So they haul Jesus to Pontius Pilat, who in turn interviews Jesus but doesn't get very far.  So he sends our hero half way across Palestine, to Herod, who plays around with Jesus a bit and then sends him half-way across Palestine again, to let old PP have another go.  Old PP takes our hero out back and has him whipped a little, then puts him up in front of the crowd, who naturally chooses the thieving, murdering liar Barabbas over our hero (a perfect example of democracy in action).  Thus at a loss on what to do with Jesus, PP orders him taken up the hill and crucified at the mob's request.  Finally, by noon on Friday, Jesus is hung out to dry.

That has got to be one of the fastest examples of the Wheels of Justice ever recorded!  In less than 12 hours, Jesus has a couple of trials, is hauled back and forth across Palestine, sees pretty much the entire ruling class of the region, and dies by noon the next day.  Pardon me if I have a problem with this story.  In fact, even the Gospels seem to have a bit of a problem.  Matthew, Luke and Mark pack all the action into one night, but good, old John says it a little different, giving us two days.  Hmmm...and that's the Gospel Truth.  Go read it.

So, we have this little time-line problem going.  But, that's not all...

You see, the story of God-Becomes-Man-Dies-And-Resurrects was ancient even in Jesus' time.  In fact, the story is one of the oldest in Humanity's collection of stories.  By some accounts, this story is well over 10,000 years old.

One example is the Egyptian story of Osiris.  Seems Ossy got into a battle and was hacked into 14 pieces.  His sister/wife Isis collected the pieces, all except for the phallus which disappeared, and reassembled them inside a tree trunk.  The missing phallus was replaced with a magical device that allowed Isis to impregnate herself before she sealed up the tree trunk and threw it in the Nile.  Three days later, Osiris was resurrected in his new trans-human form (with the magical phallus, we presume).

Now the whole bit with tree trunks and three days has a familiar ring to it, que no?  Not to mention the rather thinly veiled renditions of Mary and Jesus in the image of Isis and Horus.

To all this, we add the story of the Roman emperor Constantine.  He was watching the Roman Empire sliding inexorably into the history books, led in part by infighting among dozens of competing religions.  In an effort to quell the bickering and save the empire, he ordered a bunch of religious types into a room in Turkey and told them to come up with something.  Which they did.  It is called the Universal Roman Church, or Roman Catholic.

The council of Nicea blended pieces of several religions into a single amalgam that made everyone happy.  The monotheists had One God.  The polytheists had a Trinity.  The goddess worshipers were given Mary and the Osiris worshipers were given Jesus.  The Sun worshipers were given Sunday and those who just needed a pantheon and ancestor worship were given saints.

None of it really resembled Christianity, which was a whole different beast.  The Christians believed that their guy was the new Fisher King, come to establish the Kingdom of the New Age.  Their religio-political movement was an outcrop on the Essenes, who in turn had blended certain aspects of Judaism and Buddhism.  Their system postulated apotheosis, in which every man could become god through certain practices.

The whole idea of apotheosis is really central to this whole thing.  Certainly, the Buddhists believe in it, and various sects throughout Western history believe in it.  There are hints of it throughout the Old and New Testaments, even as Jesus said 'all this I do, you can do, and more.'  In the US, George Washington is assumed to has undergone apotheosis, and that moment is enshrined on the ceiling of the US capitol dome.  Some scholars argue that Jesus also went through this process, as he began by calling himself the Son of Man, but later changed to the Son of God.  Go read it.  I'm not making this up.

At any rate, Constantine (remember him?) had hit on a solution to the ills of the Roman Empire.  Now, the emperor was truly the center of the official religion, and that religion had something for everyone.  No matter what your parental belief system was, you could find the core beliefs all tied up in a neat little box in this Universal Church.

Did it work?  Well, the Catholic Church is the richest, most powerful organization on Earth...right now.  It is the single largest land owner, and the leaders of the world still come to the Emperor (now called Pope) to get their blessing and approval.  Roman Law is the core of most legal systems on Earth.  Pretty much all corporations are given their legal status as 'persons' through a complex and very well hidden link to the Vatican.  In fact, the Vatican is the only sovereign religious headquarters on Earth.  And it has survived and perpetuated the Roman Empire throughout the world for 2,000 years.

Don't know about you, but that sounds pretty darned successful to me.  In fact, few seem to realize it, but the Godfather series of books and films were really a documentary.  I avoided watching any of the films until last year.  Despite their fame and adulation, I had no desire to see them.  I knew what was in them.  I had seen it first-hand.  The scene where Michael gets absolution from the future pope...well, there you go.

The banking ills of the world are laid at the feet of the Vatican.  Its bank is the root of all evil.  All roads lead to Rome.  That's why no matter what horrible things the Church leaders do, the institution is untouchable.  No major event on Earth occurs without the blessing and approval of the Vatican.

Oh, and who killed JFK?  The Vatican, of course.  JFK signed an Executive Order creating a new, independent US currency based on silver.  Look it up.  He died not long after that.  How dare a Catholic stand up to the secular power of the Holy Roman Empire?  From that point forward, we were given the Pax Americana.  Now why do you think they'd use a 2,000 year old dead language for that term, and run everything out of a city in Virginia that is up to its gills in Graeco-Roman architecture?

And trust me, when the American Empire, and the Pax Americana falls into dust, the Romans will still be there.

Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.

Why Worry About Facts?

"Do you want to accompany me go to the chruch?" she asks in the standard Englishnesian syntax.

Can't think of anything I would less like to do, frankly. Two hours of hellfire and damnation speeches interspersed with over-loud rock-beat music and people speaking some kind of jibberish sold as 'the language of the angels.' Just doesn't appeal to me, especially since they generally completely mangle the facts.

"But it's Christmas," she protests.

Exactly. One of the most fact-deprived holidays of the christian calendar.

"It's Jesus' birthday. You must go to church," she protests.

Ah, just the opening I was hoping for. I love it when people step in the middle of their own ignorance. She's holding her modern mistranslation of previously mistranslated versions of The Book. I ask if I may see it.

I flip to Matthew. Ah, here it is...the shepherds were tending their flocks in the firlds when angels appeared in the heavens. I avoid the temptation to go into the validity of UFO sightings in biblical times and stick with the facts.

So, Jesus was born on December 25th, right?

"Yes, of course," she confidently replies.

I open Google and search for average weather patterns in Israel, a country which did not exist 2,000 years ago. Just as I suspected. December is the coldest, wettest and windiest month of the year. What damn fool shepherd would be tending his flocks in the fields in the dead of winter? But just to be sure, I look up current weather conditions in Bethlehem, a city which did not exist 2,000 years ago. Hmmm...10C, which is what? 50F, with a chance for rain. Sounds like perfect camp-in-the-field-with-sheep conditions to me.

"Things were different back then," she protests.

Oh, so global warming has made the region colder in the last 2,000 years? A familiar argument. Al Gore's been using it also. I understand. It's difficult when facts get in the way of a good story. So I click over to Roman fastivals, since Rome was around 2,000 years ago.

Would ya look at that...December 25th is the Roman fastival of the Birth of the Invincible Sun God. Gee, do you think there's a connection? After all, every modern christian faction is a break-away from the ROMAN church, which is a vestige of the ROMAN empire, which celebrates its rituals in basilicas, which originally were ROMAN indoor markets.

I'm just sayin'.

She has that blank look on her face that tells me that, like most christians, she has already turned off and tuned out. Most people don't want to hear facts that get in the way of fun fairy tales. But, I'm on a roll here.

So I launch into how Buddha and Mohammad were actual historical figures, whose lives are independently documented. Even Hinduism has evidence that their panteon may be based on actual, historical people and events millions of years ago, though the jury is still out. Christianity, however, requires one to take on faith that there was someone named Yeshua, who was a carpenter by trade, and who, at the age of 30, changed the world, leaving not a single historical trace of his existance.

However, there are remarkable similarieties between his story and a much older one, the story of Osiris, Isis and Horus. It's all there: virgin births through miraculous means, death and resurrections (using trees and 3 days, no less), betrayers (Seth), physical ascentions into heaven, all of it. There's even the strange way that Egypt keeps popping up in the whole Gospel storyline, not to mention numbers like 3, 13, 33 and so on.

It's still early and I haven't had enough coffe yet, so I avoid getting into the whole discussion on the etimological similarities between the names Osiris and Jesus, or the wine and bread rituals used by Egyptians and christians alike.

I really didn't want to get into Amun Ra, the highest of all Egyptian gods, the father Sun, whose name is used by many major religions when imploring the deity for favors. "Amen," "amin," "ohm," nearly everyone says, after they pray fro victory or wealth or another man's stuff. Nor did I want to get into the whole symbolism of the single eye of Amn Ra, or the All-Seeing Eye, or even the Indonesian word for "sun," matahari, which literally means 'eye of the day.'

She was still blankly staring at me, waiting for my response. Facts had completely unphased her. It's always the same argument. You have to make a leap of faith. You have to clear your mind and accept Jesus into your heart. And really, that's the problem. I can't turn off my rational mind and just swallow fairy tales as truth, especially when someone wants my hard-earned money to tell me that I'm a sinner for not following blindly in just the right way.

Nor can I accept religion. To me, it's just pro sports writ large. This team against that team. these players are stronger than those players. Killing millions to prove that this fairy tale is 'mo betta' than that one.

I can't believe that three gods are really just one. I can't believe that peace comes through war. I can't believe that love is proved by hate. I can't believe that law is established through chaos. My mind refuses to accept that black is white. I even have a hard time suspending disbelief at the movies. All I see up there is special effects, actors, lighting, camera angles, propaganda.

A control system is a control system, no matter how benign it purports to be. I do not follow. i do not lead, for that matter. I just present facts, research and think. Then I act on what I find.

I sure as hell don't want to be berated, sung to and babbled at for two hours, then asked to pay for the priviledge.

She was still waiting for my answer, as if my 38 minute diatribe had simply not occured.

OK, if it makes you happy, I'll go with you.

"Good, go take a bath," she ordered.

Now them's fightin' words.