This is not a review so much as a discussion of the two documentary films indicated in the title. Right off the bat I am torn, harboring conflicting opinions about what I have viewed as a whole, just as the subtitle above may have torn you. Most people are probably on board with the ‘against politics’ notion. Some folks might have hung around for the ‘against profit’ idea. Even fewer are willing to completely toss out our notion of divinity along with the political and economic bathwater that buoys it.

The subtitle of this article is the most concise interpretation of the films that I was able to offer. I find myself unable to offer a coherent opinion as to its value so will not offer a rated review. Before examining this film, which I urge you to view, I should at least stake out my positions, such as they are, so that you might be able to weight my interpretations with the aid of my prejudicial baggage. For starters I believe [and I understand belief to be irrational] in good and evil.

I think that politicians come in two varieties.

The vast majority of politicians are evil people seeking power, and willing to do limitless ill, in the pursuit of personal gain. That gain may range from money, to fame, to the implementation of their beliefs, to nothing more than Grade A USDA Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader quality companionship.

The minority of politicians seek to do good for little old you and me. Those nuts really scare me. I’ll take the scumbag arms manufacturer with the stunning cosmetic surgery experiment on his arm over the high and mighty dreamer and his earth wife any day of the week. At least the scumbag knows he is doing evil and might therefore be circumspect.

When Grandma told me that ‘money was the root of all evil’ I did not believe her. I knew good people with money then [Dad, for instance, always had change in his pocket.], as I do now. I work for a man that has made millions, yet declines to make more millions at the expense of his employees’ working conditions. For him business began as a means to make his family secure, and has expanded into a means of making the families of his workplace dependents secure. To my mind money is just a surrogate for influence and possessions, things which I have not valued greatly in my own life and don’t have a lot of vested interest in.

Virtually every person I have known believes me to be an atheist, as I lack the capacity for ‘faith’. I curiously hold onto my belief in good and evil, perhaps a holdover from my childhood cultural conditioning. I was recently waiting at a light rail station when a very classy looking lady about my age approached me as a missionary. At a station full of sub-literates she had singled me out, for I had been reading. Although I knew we could not see eye-to-eye I was glad for the conversation, and not just because I might have had another form of missionary work in mind for the lady.

The lady introduced herself as ‘Arlene’ and we shook hands. As she noted that I was reading Half Broke Horses, she asked, “Have you ever tried the Bible?”

“Yes, three times.”

“Might I ask you why you came back to it twice?”

“I love a good war story. I’m a big Old Testament fan.”

“What about the New Testament?”

“I was able to stomach Jesus for the full three reads. But Revelations, by that angry geek on his Greek island, not me. Now the Psalms, I’ve read at least six times, and will again.”

Arlene smiled, apparently elated that I didn’t rant on about what I did not like about her holy book, “The Psalms are also my favorite. They have a meditative quality that appeals to me. Have you considered joining a congregation?”

“Really, I lack the capacity for faith. I honestly think I’ve read too much to believe in anything.”

She smiled sympathetically, as if I had just told her I had pancreatic cancer, and patted my hand, then slipped a brochure into it. In turn I gave her a card for my website. We also had a brief discussion as to the history and merits of the King James and New English bibles, which I cannot reconstruct from memory, but which was pleasant. She then took my address so that she could send me a book her church had produced on Saul, who I am very interested in.

Fine-looking Arlene in her tailored dress and high sensible heels and the grungy homeless-looking scrub in his thirty year old bomber jacket and five year old work boots parted with a smile, and later a waive as she drove off in her minivan.

I tend to manage similar encounters with all believers in the same way. The only religious group which members always part without a smile is the atheists. They always seem so pissed off at the world.

You see, I regard atheism to be a religion. Atheists argue that they are practicing anti-religion. I argue that most religions are built on the notion of the ‘exclusivity of their truth’ and the falsehood of other belief systems. Atheists preach logic and reason, yet the father of logic and reason, Aristotle, held out a hope for a God, ‘The Mover Unmoved’ behind the veil of physical manifestation. I wager that Aristotle would be just as perplexed at an atheist’s [and they did exist in his time, most notably on Sicily] ‘belief’ that such a universal consciousness is not possible, as he was at his society’s traditional notion that a chief of a dysfunctional family of murderous adolescent gods sat bearded upon a mountain and hurled down thunderbolts at impious transgressors, when, that is, he was not ‘macking’ earthly babes under cover of some cheesy disguise.

Who is more off base, the person who believes in the existence of a supernatural being which cannot be proven to exist, or the atheist who believes that something that cannot be disproven does not exist? With proof and disproof impossibilities are not both parties expressing ‘faith’ in a belief rather than knowledge of a fact?

For what it is worth, I am not an atheist and not an adherent to any faith what-so-ever. I suppose I am closest to being an agnostic. But such a perpetual claim to ignorance would be unbecoming an author with my outsized aspirations. So whatever the hell it makes me, those are the perspectives from which I have just viewed the documentary movies Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Addendum.

I have viewed these films in the order they were made. I do not think it is necessary to view them in this order. Furthermore, if you are a Christian you may well be unable to get past the first third of the first film, which is dedicated to debunking your religion. Of the two films I think the second to be more informative. Neither film comes off as an angry atheistic rant. The film makers even invoke comedian George Carlin as an atheistic spokesmen from beyond the grave, quite ironically I think.

The main point of these films is that human actions do not reflect human nature but culturally imprinted behavioral patterns. Religion is held up as the baseline method of mind control, the Adam and Eve of brain washing. The documentaries then go on to utilize many prescient quotes from history and literature, searing film clips of injustice and destruction, interviews with antiestablishment authors and intellectuals, and an unobtrusively narrated storyline. The amount of text blurbs interspersed throughout will render Zeitgeist incomprehensible to the average sub-literate viewer.

The case against God is made without venom, and is one of the more lucid and methodical deconstructions of the religious model. The film errors I think, in its almost exclusive focus on Christianity, and fails to fully utilize much of the material introduced as evidence. For example I will site the use of ‘comparative religious studies’ below, which forms the basis for the anti-Christianity argument in the films and is not honestly represented.

Comparative religious studies emerged in the 1950s and bloomed most fully in the 1980s. It grew out of the work of field anthropologists at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who were literally engaged in a generations-long race to interview survivors of displaced indigenous cultures and record the findings before evidence of their existence was erased by economic and missionary activity. On one hand you had corporations and nations bulldozing and flooding sacred precincts and missionaries turning children against the beliefs and traditions of their forefathers, up to and including their language. On the other hand you had some guilt ridden geeks trying to learn the dying language and record every nuance of the defeated culture before it breathed its last.

By the 1950s, the field notes in and most of the indigenous peoples dead, displaced and westernized, scholars such as Joseph Campbell began using the tools of the archaeologist, art historian, and psychoanalyst, among others, to work up models of belief systems. This is a huge subject. Suffice it to say that researchers found that religions had more commonalities than exclusive characteristics. Since this site is largely dedicated to combat arts, let me use an analogy. Envision the Pope as a karate master, the Dali Lama as an Aikido master, and The Prophet as the father of boxing. The professor of comparative religious studies would therefore by a Mixed Martial Arts advocate.

So the message of the people who pioneered comparative religious studies was something like ‘no religion has an exclusive truth, but are all expressions of the human spirit yearning for enlightenment’. The producers of Zeitgeist use the ‘inclusive’ tool of comparative mythology to demolish the ‘exclusive’ religion of Christianity. Where the discipline of comparative mythology would indicate that this legitimizes Christianity as part of the common human spiritual experience, the irrational atheists that produced the film state that Christianity cannot be legitimate because it shares so many commonalities with other faiths. The case that Christianity is false because it does not hold exclusive truths as claimed by its faithful is marshaled as conclusive evidence against it in the same segment in which it is made clear that the damaging effects of militant religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism is vested in their adherence to the ethic of exclusive truth and the status of believers as ‘chosen people’.

While the examination of the emergence and effects of militant religions in this piece is enlightening and well developed, the concluding indictment of Christianity, and therefore all religions [Being lumped together with crusading witch-burning Christians might strike a Hopi elder as unjust I think.] constitutes a disingenuous use of the evidentiary tools.

The case against profit is the most telling and most informative. The highlight is an interview with the author of a book titled Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which I am absolutely going to read, if it has not been buried by the Patriot Act. The explanation of the debt dollar, theoretical liability, scarcity-based economics, and our Fractional Reserve Banking System was well done and pointed enough to make Andrew Jackson roll over in his grave. If, like I, you can’t stand the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, and are uncomfortable with the fact that you are no longer a citizen of the United States, but of a North American Union, then don’t eat any popcorn while you watch this—you might choke.

The case against politics is compelling, troubling, and presented with more emotion than the other aspects. Too many loose political threads are thrown at the viewer to do more than insight curiosity or confirm already held negative opinions of our rulers. Overall the film makers do a compelling job explaining how social mechanisms converge in the hands of a few as power over the many.

Toward the middle of Addendum a small balding elder of fierce and penetrating intellect makes his appearance, along with a ‘ditzoid’ of a brunette dish who undermines the old man’s case with her vacuously naïve side commentary. The man is a self-proclaimed ‘social-engineer’. That proclamation marks him as a man with huge intellectual balls after the tens of millions who have died in the 20th Century at the hands of social engineers. Let me put it to you this way. If these two, I, and a plane load of people were stranded on a desert island, and this guy announced at our contingency meeting that he was a social engineer, and had a plan, I would immediately beat him to death and drag his brunette off to the nearest cave.

My own anarchist Paleolithic proclivities aside, I like this guy a lot. He is spot on with all of his social criticism. In my mind he is just as far wrong with his assessment of the answers. Of course, I do not believe in answers to social problems, so this part might be what other viewers really get into. In my opinion ‘Big Head’ and ‘Ditzoid’ and their Venus Project to save humanity is a non-starter that would be doomed even if it got off the ground. As a science-fiction author I love it, and plan on using it as a setting; perhaps as the home of an aberrant child; the first serial killer born to mankind in 1,800 years of bliss, destined to become the first dictator to attain power in 1,835 years!

I have really enjoyed this couplet of courageous iconoclastic films far more than my criticism of some aspects may indicate. I like them so much, and would like others to share it so meaningfully, that I am not going to watch the last half hour until after I post this online. I really want to see where it ends up and won’t take the chance of spoiling the ending for you here.

Also, Mister Big Head, concerning the desert island ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario I invoked above; I would not, contrary to me initial impulse, beat you to death, but just break your feet. You could manage my water supply and fabricate ingenious tools to aid my rise to dominance over our island paradise. Also, as cute as your lady friend is, I wouldn’t want to be the one that actually had to have conversations with her. You could continue in that role while I sallied forth from our cave to battle those bad people I would be protecting you and your lady from…