So after all the hype it has finally arrived. The reviews have been excellent, the toys have been prepared, its Christmas and its time for the renewed Star Wars, The Force Awakens. I was genuinely quite excited about going to see this – especially since it was on at our favourite cinema, the DCA, and was delighted that Mrs R. agreed to go and see it with me, although I was sure it would not be her kind of film. Ever since Lord of the Rings becoming a Christmas tradition I have been looking for a replacement….did The Force Awakens justify my expectations?
In several ways it is a good film. I loved the cinematography, the music, the action sequences and the return of some of the old characters. It was a reasonable nights entertainment. However, (and here I feel as though to Star War devotees I am committing blasphemy), it was not a great film. I won’t be rushing to see it again, or buying it on video. Sorry if this goes against the general hype but I was somewhat disappointed.
Clean – The Force Awakens is clean. There is no mess. Every thing is neat and tidy – including the plot. It is clean also in the sense that there is no swearing, no sex and the violence is largely cartoonish. But for me the whole thing was sanitised.
Childish – Disney are brilliant at making films for children that also appeal to adults. The Force Awakens is more like a film for adults that appeals to children. It is simple. The good guys win, the bad guys lose. There is little character development, the plot is totally predictable (I have not put any spoilers in here – but suffice it to say if you know the Star Wars films I doubt anything will take you by surprise), and everything is seen through the eyes of a disneyfied gnosticism. The worst thing for me is that I found it quite boring….it could have easily been 30 minutes shorter and lost nothing.
Commercialised – Someone in Disney described Star Wars as the biggest licence to print money in toy industry history. That is why this film is so safe. And boring. The advertising and trailer teasers have been superb. The marketing wonderful and the film itself does not disappoint those who are looking for a rerun of the first three Star Wars films. But the commercialism of the whole thing leaves me with an uneasy feeling.
To be fair, most of the other reviews I have read have praised The Force Awakens. And much to my surprise, Mrs R loved it! (perhaps because the previous week we had sat through the depression of Sunset Song). Maybe I’m getting old…or maybe its just a world weariness. I prefer things with a bit more depth. I know that many Christians will be able to get ‘spiritual’ lessons and analogies out of it (mainly because almost all good human stories reflect the great biblical themes of darkness vs light, good vs evil), but I will stick to the greater depth and beauty of Lord of the Rings. This is certainly not LOTR – the storyline is shallow and predictable, the characters pretty much the same. Perhaps the Force just was not with me.
Thanks for the review. I won’t be bothering with it for now. I love Tolkien but reading the books not the films.
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
Is it the new Lord of the Rings?
I would suggest, perhaps there is not like for like between the two. Yes Star Wars has become something formulaic with little surprises (however *spoiler alert * with what happened to Hans solo how could they?!). But then the same could be said for James Bond so why was it for me that The Force Awakens was OK and I got thrilled with Spectre?
Both have the fight between good and evil where who is good and who is evil is prescribed, and our heros/heroinies facing life threatening challenges involving winning light sabre fights and throwing baddies out or moving trains while the forces of evil are defeated.
So what is it about it for me that is the difference? The only thing I can think about is that in one Aston Martins are involved and a 47 yeah old hero gets to be with a 30 year old heroine. For this single 51 year old guy it gives hope.
Having said that, perhaps a comparison between the recent offering of Sar Wars to it’s 70’s original counterpart is also not a like for like comparison. Yes the special effects have moved on from then and one might say the acting has improved but it is impossible to recapture that first moment of encounter with the Millennial Falcon and the love interest between an intergalactic smuggler turned good and a princess.
So a replacement for Lord of the Rings as a Christmas tradition with depth, beauty that is not boring and with character development in it? Maybe one could do worse than going for one of the classics – It’s a Wonderful Life perhaps?
I have just been reading a number of fascinating – and sometimes disturbing – quotes from George Lucas that give some insights into his beliefs:
SCHELL. What do you mean “the primary word is romantic”?
LUCAS. In terms of stories, I think the word suggests a humanist perspective on things — an emotional point of view. That’s really the primary focus of everything I do.
****
SCHELL. So where did all the strange characters and ideas come from?
LUCAS. I took off from the folk side of things and tried to stay with universal themes apart from violence and sex, which are the only other two universal themes that seem to work around the world. My films aren’t that violent or that sexy. Instead, I’m dealing with the need for humans to have friendships, to be compassionate, to band together to help each other and to join together against what is negative.
SCHELL. You sound awfully Buddhist to me.
LUCAS. My daughter was asked at school, “What are you?” And she said we’re Buddhist Methodists. I said, well, I guess that’s one way to describe it [laughs].
****
LUCAS: But there’s probably no better form of government than a good despot.
SCHELL. And, in a sense, is that what you’re trying to be here at Lucasfilm?
LUCAS. Possibly. Yeah, at least in my little kingdom. But I rule at the will of the people who work for me.
SCHELL. But let’s say you have a leader who’s only pretty good and does some shady things. Do you think that the media should be more discreet about investigating and looking into what he is doing? Basically, do you think certain things should be off limits in order to maintain the heroism of a leader?
LUCAS. Yeah, I do. I think that the media should look at the situation in the larger sense — at what is necessary for the culture as a whole rather than exposing and tearing everything down all the time. That will not bode well for people’s confidence in the institution. After all, a society only works on faith. If you lose that faith, then your society will crumble and it will be hard to get a consensus on anything.
SCHELL. But isn’t that a slippery slope, one that quickly leads to what we have seen in countries like the Soviet Union and China, where in the name of positive role models it becomes unacceptable to criticize the leaders or the country?
LUCAS. That’s sort of why I say a benevolent despot is the ideal ruler. He can actually get things done. The idea that power corrupts is very true and it’s a big human who can get past that.
SOURCE: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/film/032199lucas-wars-excerpts.html
*****
In a letter to the makers of “Lost”:
Congratulations on pulling off an amazing show. Don’t tell anyone …but when ‘Star Wars’ first came out, I didn’t know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you’ve planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories — let’s call them homages — and you’ve got a series.
SOURCE: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blogs/live-feed/george-lucas-sends-letter-lost-53645
*****
What George Lucas’ version of “Apocalypse Now” would have been like if he had stayed on the project:
“The film would take a pro-war, action-oriented approach while at the same time while at the same time supporting and clarifying the “unconventional warfare methods” of the U. S. Army Special Forces… What Milius and Lucas was thinking about is suggested by the first scene… The idea is that American troops will have fun and win the war by adopting, Green Beret-style, guerilla methods. Milius later noted that he and Lucas were “great connoisseurs of the Vietnam War”; one imagines young boys with an enthusiasm for all things military.”
SOURCE: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=UmPdEg5fVkQC&pg=PT117&lpg=PT117&dq=“george lucas” pro-war “star wars”&source=bl&ots=9gOp8926QM&sig=GKA6_35GJ-ELeuyN3zHsc7W77WY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mwsrVY7eNovgao7fgcgL&ved=0CEkQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=”george lucas” pro-war “star wars”&f=false
****
Lucas mentions his anti-pacifist ideology when discussing the Episode 1 soundtrack:
“… His [John Williams’] music had to help tell the story of a pacifist Queen who confronts the need to fight for the survival of her people, a mother who must give up her son so that he might achieve his true potential, and noble Jedi faced with the rise of an unimaginable evil. Once again, John has exceeded my expectations and produced a lavish, rich, moving and thrilling score. Every fan of Star Wars – and of great music – is in his debt.
George Lucas, Director”
SOURCE: http://www.jw-collection.de/scores/episode1.htm
******
Very disturbing discussion with film-maker James Cameron, particularly in light of all those people who put “Jedi” as their religion on census forms. I am sure 95% of them are doing it tongue-in-cheek but here Lucas really seems to be actively encouraging this kind of thing. Starting to believe in his own publicity/delusions of grandeur?
Lucas: Everyone hated it when we started talking about midichlorians in The Phantom Menace. A whole aspect of this film is about symbiotic relationships. It’s about recognizing that we’re not the boss. There is a whole ecosystem there.
Cameron: There’s a whole ecosystem called microbiome inside that we’ve just started getting to know.
Lucas: The next three Star Wars films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. But there’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.
Cameron: You were creating a religion, George.
Lucas: Back then, I used to say it means we’re just the cars, the vehicles of the Whills they’re traveling around with. We are the vessels of Whills. And the connection is via the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones who communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in the general sense, are the Force.
Cameron: But in fact you’re just drawing a surface, a facade of science around an idea that is timeless, namely, the mind, the soul, the sky, the cause of all being. In your world, you’re accessing the basic archetype, the mind, a deity, and all that.
Lucas: I worked this whole concept with the Force, the Jedi, and everything from beginning to end. I just never had the chance to finish it and tell people about it.
Cameron: It’s a creation myth, and without a creation myth you can not build a world. Every religion, every mythology is based on it.
Lucas: If I’d held on to the company, I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course a lot of fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would have been told.
SOURCE:
https://www.millenniumfalcon.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2024&t=10134
****
There are many more interesting quotes on this three-page thread, including more on George Lucas pro-war/anti-pacifist views/glorification of the military and his politics, including the fascist overtones of the films (the final medal ceremony of the original 1977 Star Wars film was inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s techniques).
https://boards.theforce.net/threads/george-lucas-quotations-regarding-the-sequel-trilogy-no-discussion.50018339/
For whatever it’s worth, here are some more interesting quotes from George Lucas about his religious views:
***
MOYERS: Is one religion as good as another?
LUCAS: I would say so. Religion is basically a container for faith. And faith in our culture, our world and on a larger issue, the mystical level–which is God, what one might describe as a supernatural, or the things that we can’t explain–is a very important part of what allows us to remain stable, remain balanced.
MOYERS: One explanation for the popularity of Star Wars when it appeared is that by the end of the 1970s, the hunger for spiritual experience was no longer being satisfied sufficiently by the traditional vessels of faith.
LUCAS: I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people–more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system. I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery. Not having enough interest in the mysteries of life to ask the question, “Is there a God or is there not a God?”–that is for me the worst thing that can happen. I think you should have an opinion about that. Or you should be saying, “I’m looking. I’m very curious about this, and I am going to continue to look until I can find an answer, and if I can’t find an answer, then I’ll die trying.” I think it’s important to have a belief system and to have faith.
MOYERS: Do you have an opinion, or are you looking?
LUCAS: I think there is a God. No question. What that God is or what we know about that God, I’m not sure. The one thing I know about life and about the human race is that we’ve always tried to construct some kind of context for the unknown. Even the cavemen thought they had it figured out. I would say that cavemen understood on a scale of about 1. Now we’ve made it up to about 5. The only thing that most people don’t realize is the scale goes to 1 million.
MOYERS: The central ethic of our culture has been the Bible. Like your stories, it’s about the fall, wandering, redemption, return. But the Bible no longer occupies that central place in our culture today. Young people in particular are turning to movies for their inspiration, not to organized religion.
LUCAS: Well, I hope that doesn’t end up being the course this whole thing takes, because I think there’s definitely a place for organized religion. I would hate to find ourselves in a completely secular world where entertainment was passing for some kind of religious experience.
MOYERS: You said you put the Force into Star Wars because you wanted us to think on these things. Some people have traced the notion of the Force to Eastern views of God–particularly Buddhist–as a vast reservoir of energy that is the ground of all of our being. Was that conscious?
LUCAS: I guess it’s more specific in Buddhism, but it is a notion that’s been around before that. When I wrote the first Star Wars, I had to come up with a whole cosmology: What do people believe in? I had to do something that was relevant, something that imitated a belief system that has been around for thousands of years, and that most people on the planet, one way or another, have some kind of connection to.I didn’t want to invent a religion. I wanted to try to explain in a different way the religions that have already existed. I wanted to express it all.
MOYERS: You’re creating a new myth?
LUCAS: I’m telling an old myth in a new way. Each society takes that myth and retells it in a different way, which relates to the particular environment they live in. The motif is the same. It’s just that it gets localized. As it turns out, I’m localizing it for the planet. I guess I’m localizing it for the end of the millennium more than I am for any particular place.
MOYERS: What lessons do you think people around the world are taking away from Star Wars?
LUCAS: Star Wars is made up of many themes. It’s not just one little simple parable. One is our relationship to machines, which are fearful, but also benign. Then there is the lesson of friendship and symbiotic relationships, of your obligations to your fellow- man, to other people that are around you. This is a world where evil has run amuck. But you have control over your destiny, you have many paths to walk down, and you can choose which destiny is going to be yours.
Source: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,23298-2,00.html
***
TB: Here’s an oddball question: This exhibit plays off the science of “Star Wars” and its physical underpinnings, but what’s your stand on “intelligent design”? After all, you’re the god of this particular universe.
GL: (laughs) It’s obviously a very hot-button issue. I find that it’s a matter of definition. The way I define “intelligent design” is that when people started out we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked. The end result, obviously, was to create spirits or gods of one form or another that functioned beyond our knowledge — that would explain why the sun went down at night, why babies were born, and that sort of thing. You didn’t have to explain it yourself. You just had to say, “Well, there’s something there that explains all that, and if you just have faith in that, you’ll be fine.”
That’s always the way it’s been. But I think that God gave us a brain, and that it’s the only thing we have to survive. All life forms have some advantage, some trick, some claw, some camouflage, some poison, some speed, something to help them survive. We’ve got a brain. Therefore it’s our duty to use our brain. Because we have an intellect, part of what we do is try to understand the “intelligent design.” Everything we don’t know is “intelligent design.” Everything we do know is science.
In other words, evolution is a product of “intelligent design.” There’s absolutely no conflict between Darwinism and God’s design for the universe — if you believe that it’s God’s design. The problem for me is that I see a very big difference between the Bible and God. And the problem they’re getting into now is that they’re trying to understand intelligent design through the Bible, not through God. Our job is to find all the “intelligent design,” and figure out how He did everything, and I think that’s consistent with science.
All we’re doing in our own fumbly, bumbly, human way with our inadequate little brains is trying to figure out what He did. And once we figure it out, we say “Ooh, that’s great!” And then we just continue on. Will we ever figure out everything? I don’t know. There’ll always be that faith there that there’s something more to figure out.
TB: When you’re in there creating the nitty-gritty of the “Star Wars” universe, figuring out how an inhabitant of a given planet might evolve a given way, do you feel like you’re playing god?
GL: Well, I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest. Which is where mythology comes from, where religion comes from, where social structure comes from. Why are these things created? Now we’re getting into more of the social sciences side of the things, but the biological side is starting to float into that. I’m looking forward to the evolution of neuro-anthropology, because I want to see our genes affect how we build our social systems, how we develop our belief systems in terms of our social beliefs and cultural beliefs. We’re at an exciting time.
Source: http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/lucas_interview/
***
When George Lucas was 8, he asked his mom, “If there’s only one God, why are there so many religions?” He’s been fascinated by that question ever since, and has come to the realization that when you strip all religions and mythologies down to their very basic level, it’s really all about compassion.
And that, Lucas says, is what “Star Wars” is really all about. Sure, there are also larger themes like what makes someone a hero, what is friendship, and what makes people sacrifice themselves for something larger, but really, it’s about compassion, and loving people.
“It’s still…you know…basically [just] don’t kill people, and be compassionate,” Lucas said in an interview with Charlie Rose at the Chicago Ideas Festival earlier this month. “Love people. That’s basically all ‘Star Wars’ is.”
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/whats-star-wars-about-in-a-word-george-lucas-explains/
I should add that I have been trying to find a good Christian-themed science fiction television show or film for a while, without much success.
Star Trek had some Christian themes, most notably and overtly in the episode “Bread and Circuses” and some of the episodes written by Gene Coon had strong pacifist themes but the whole series and its various subsequent spin-offs were overshadowed by Gene Roddenberry’s secular humanism.
Space: 1999 was more overtly spiritual than Star Trek but a lot of its episodes seem to trend more towards erotericism/the occult/New Age mumbo-jumbo.
Battlestar Galactica (original version with Lorne Greene – I haven’t seen the remake) was slightly closer to Christianity as its creator, Glen A. Larson was a Mormon and imbued the show with Mormon themes so insofar as there is some overlap between Mormonism and orthodox Christianity we can maybe relate to it.
The Prisoner, created by Patrick McGoohan, seems to be the closest match as McGoohan was a devout Roman Catholic although those who knew him said his beliefs were closer to Calvinism to the extent that his nickname was Puritan Pat. His beliefs are reflected in the show.
Other than those, I cannot think of any other options. Blake’s Seven was more nihilistic. Some Dr Who slightly touches on religion in a positive way, mainly in the earliest days under Hartnell and, in the new show, Tennant’s Doctor was sometimes symbolically Christ-like.
Tarkovsky’s version of Solaris is probably the most Christian big screen science fiction film. Tarkovsky managed to slip in a huge amount of Christian (specifically Eastern Orthodox) symbolism into his film, under the noses of the Soviet censors. He ended up creating one of the best films – of any genre – in the history of cinema thus far.
I really wish someone would one day make movie versions of C. S. Lewis’ trilogy of space novels though (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength). It would be fascinating to see them adapted for tge big screen.
Bad typo: for Space: 1999, I meant “esotericism”, not erotecerism!
Another honourable mention is the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is strongly pacifist and alludes to a creator deity with power over death. Other than those examples, screen science fiction isn’t really notable as a genre in which overtly Christian themes have been explored to any great degree.
Sigh… This is only a rumour at this stage but a gent named Jason Ward who runs a website called MakingStarWars.com which has a good track record for reporting accurately on upcoming Star Wars films is claiming today that Star Wars Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker (due out in December) will feature a lesbian kiss between two female Rebel soldiers.
“The kiss that Jason knows about in this film is between two unnamed female Resistance fighters. “It’s not a big deal. It happens, and it’s just there.””
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsLeaks/comments/dirdgf/leaks_updateclarification/
I know there was some controversy about the recent Han Solo film too with hints that Lando was “pansexual” so it seems that, if the allegation true about the latest film, Disney is really pushing this agenda to be trendy.
As you can imagine, I am personally opposed to this on multiple levels: I am strongly pacifist in general but I generally turn a blind eye to the warfare in things like Star Wars and LoTR because they are so entrenched in fantasy and removed from the realities of war, the human suffering it entails such as refugee crises and the true nature of soldiering.
However, I am especially opposed to females in the military and I am obviously opposed to glamourization of homosexual activity, especially from a company like Disney that has reputation for being a trusted brand for children.
The Star Wars fanbase is apparently traditionally quite conservative, too, so I wonder if this move will backfire on Disney and alienate a large chunk of the series’ core following?
Sounds like the rumoured lesbian kiss may be happening. It is hinted at by the film’s director, J. J. Abrams:
https://mobile.twitter.com/councilofgeeks/status/1202462760799494144
🙁 🙁 🙁
More discussion of lesbianism in the upcoming new Star Wars:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsLeaks/comments/ealccm/jj_on_use_of_cgi_story_over_spectacle_and_lgbtq/
Sigh. The lesbian kiss in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” has now been confirmed by people who have seen the film’s red carpet opening in Los Angeles tonight. 🙁 🙁 🙁
Spoiler-free review – mentions the lesbian filth. Film overall doesn’t sound very good. They think it is very superficial (but you could probably say that about all the Star Wars films):
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-19/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-review/11809394
I just came across this YouTube video warning about the “Satanic” side of Star Wars.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xsoBd5toY-s
In my humble opinion, a lot of the claims are hysterical nonsense:
1. Luke is nothing to do with Lucifer but is a play on Lucas’ name (“Luke S”). Besides a Luke wrote one of the Gospels.
2. Stormtroopers do not have white armour to represent a twisting of light and evil. Rather it was to symbolise the fact that the military, blindly obeying orders, saw the world in black and white terms. I do grant though that it is interesting that the Christ figure, Anakin Skywalker, who is even prophesied and has a virgin birth, is the character who is “resurrected” as the epitome of evil. I wondered about that a long time ago, before I even saw this video. I do wonder exactly what George Lucas is trying to say there. It seems distasteful, at best.
3. Rebelling against empire is not always evil. Christians should not follow commands that go against Christ’s teachings. Surely the churches learned that lesson the hard way from the mistakes made in Nazi Germany. Maybe this guy thinks the story of Robin Hood is Satanic, too, on that basis.
4. I cringed when Joseph Campbell mixed up the Tower of Babel and Flood stories.
That said, there are some really interesting things in there that make the video worth watching: the Jewish symbols on the original Vader costume, the comments on Gnosticism and more insights into Lucas’ own worldview. He really does seem to believe in the “Force”.
Anyway, I hope some readers find the chap’s video interesting and thought-provoking, even if you have to take large chunks of it with a grain of salt.
Yes, I just watched a video of Joseph Campbell mixing up Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel, too. Strange that such a mam has developed a small cult following. He also refers to the Christian God as a “trickster god” in the interview. 🙁
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JM10AvJ3bsM
I grew up loving Star Wars though I do think it has glamourised rebellion and has done more for the current woke anti-imperial sentiment than an army of post-colonial Marxist scholars could hope to do. We are now reaping the rewards of a couple of generations of kids who jave been influenced to believe that empire automatically equals evil.
It is a shock to me that George Lucas was a disciple of Joseph Campbell as the guy is obviously a crank. Besides conflating Babel with the Flood he spews forth new age ideas in these other videos.
Here he says “Heaven and hell are in us and all the gods are in us.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rArBJ2fOJMU
God is just a personification of the “experience of the eternal”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qX8j9TE7P38
You should “follow your bliss” as your path in life.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v_TB3Ii8Qc
As I said, I love Star Wars but the fact that Lucas was influenced by this guy’s anti-christian new age claptrap really does ruin it for me. 🙁 I am surprused more people dodn’t call Joseph Campbell put for it.
Yes, I’ve gone right off Star Wars over time. We know now there are a lot of occult references in the films like the planet named “Geonosis” being a reference to gnosis.
Now this week we learn this about Lucas’orihinal plans for the sequel trilogy:
“Hardcore fans will know that Lucas originally meant for the saga to be a tale from a fictional bible known as the “Journal of the Whills,” but we never got an explanation of the Whills in the film. Lucas says he originally would have explained more about them in the prequels, but decided not to after the poor reception over the midi-chlorians lore. Simply put, Whills are “a microscopic single-celled life-form” that have a symbiotic relationship with the midi-chlorians and who feed on the Force. They gave the command to the midi-chlorians to make Anakin, with Lucas stating he was touched by God, who in this case “happened to be one-celled animals”.”
https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2020/11/10/21558304/darth-maul-sequel-trilogy-george-lucas-princess-leia-star-wars-archives-prequel-book
So God is a bunch of amoebas in the Star Wars universe?! Very pantheistic (and downright daft!).:(
By the way, I also went off Star Trek when I learnt that in Roddenberry’s proposed film, “The God Thing”, it would be revealed that Jesus was an alien machine who had posed as the various gods throughout earth’s history and that Captain Kirk would ultimately punch out Jesus on the bridge of the Enterprise. Thankfully, a Catholic studio head at Paramount Pictures vetoed Gene Roddenberry’s proposed film due to its blasphemy.
There are many sources for this story on the web. Here is just one of them:
https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a800341/star-trek-the-motion-picture-nearly-featured-kirk-vs-jesus-fight/
Good, moral science fiction and fantasy can be VERY hard to find but there are examples like the original version of the Day the Earth Stood Still, 1960s-era Doctor Who, Tolkien and CS Lewis and some of the Christian actor Kevin Sorbo’s stuff.
Regarding the pantheistic, god-as-amoeba weirdness, I’ve been reading the script of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which is available here. Quite a lot of telling dialogue was edited put of the final film, which reveals just how much of a New Age hippie type George Lucas really is. It is quite eye-opening. Refer to page 94:
https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/star-wars-episode-i-the-phantom-menace-1999.pdf
So the midi-chlorians are one universe spanning entity that is split into infinite pieces and reside in living beings. So it is not like the Christian God, who is distinct from His creation. This is something in creation, spanning all of it and dwelling in the living so yes it is pantheistic. Also, it is not Triune, one God consisting of Three Beings, but infinite small pieces.
The way George Lucas equates the Midochlorians speaking to people as the way in which we have intuition seems a bit New Age as well or maybe the whole thing is like the Quakers’ inner light? Either way, you can tell George takes his make-believe religion way too seriously.
There are a lot more hippie-derived pieces of dialogue in this script that were evidently edited out of the final film. It is quite eye-opening actually to read some of the scenes with the additional dialogue that gives a lot more context to the Jedis’ ideology and faith.
One thing that did make it into the final film is the hypocrisy of the hippies’ pacifism, unlike the genuine, faith-driven peacemaking conviction of Christian pacifists I know: Padme Amidala is a pacifist character until it is no longer pragmatic and then she is quite prepared to use the simple, technologically-primitive Gungan villagers as cannon fodder in a battle they cannot possibly win purely to serve as a diversion for her.
There have always been other thibgs I haven’t liked about the series too – the glamourisation of rebellion, not just in terms of the literal Rebel Alliance but also with regard to Luke’s rebellios attitude and disrespect and lack of gratitude towards his foster parents and his maligning of their farming lifestyle. Also there is the propaganda against the concept of Empire in general without any counterbalance presenting the good Empire can bring (the British Empire was a mixed picture after all) and then there is all of the Yoda and Force Ghost occultic stuff and glamourisation of warfare without showing its true cost.
To summarise, learning more about just how New Age/eastern mysticism-infused Lucas intended Star Wars to be, even above and beyond what ended up in the film, really puts me off the series actually. I join the chorus of people here calling for more Christian sci fi and I would especially love a cinematic adaptation of C. S. Lewis space trilogy.
There is an interesting discussion about gnosticism in Star Wars here:
http://decentfilms.com/articles/is-star-wars-gnostic
This CNN piece talks about how SW reflects religious fashions from New Age to mindfulness meditation and how Yoda was deliberately created to evangelise for Buddhism:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/01/26/us/star-wars-religion/index.html
Occultism in Star Wars from some Christian academic journal:
https://www.equip.org/article/may-force-bewitch-evaluating-star-wars-worldview/
There’s more about Star Wars’ explicit Buddhism and Taoism in these articles.
https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/2019/12/13/21012853/the-last-jedi-luke-skywalker-buddhism-star-wars-philosophy
https://theconversation.com/the-buddhist-and-taoist-influences-that-underpin-the-star-wars-universe-195597
The planet name “Dagobah” is based on the nane of a Buddhist place of meditation yoo so yes Star Wars is a whole bunch of religious traditions Buddhist, Taoist, Occult, Witchcraft, New Age and a little bit of Christianity mixed together. Best for Christians to avoid, sadly.
One more, from a Christian film review website:
“Much can be made about how the “Star Wars” films touch upon New Age concepts and covert occult-like symbolism, and I do not deny their existence. However, I believe that the themes that resonate most with people are those that touch upon undeniable truths, and the most powerful one addressed in the film is that of our ‘sinful nature.’”
https://christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2019/starwars2019.html
This next article is a bit extreme – the author thinks science fiction is evil because it is not real and therefore a violation of Philippians 4:8! He apparently has no understanding whatsoever of how writers think, or of literature or art!
However, he does make a few good points about SF’s relatively frequent use of occult elements.
He notes:
“The popular Star Wars trilogy is a prime example in which much of the occult and Eastern mysticism can be seen. By using the ‘Force’, one is able to see the future (similar to occult divination). One can also jump higher, dodge laser blasts and perform other supernormal feats. And those who are ‘strong with the Force’ are able to supernaturally move inanimate objects (psychokinesis). Writer and director George Lucas sums up the applications of the Force: ‘If you use it well, you can see the future and the past. You can sort of read minds and you can levitate and use that whole nether world of psychic energy.’30 Also occultic are the metaphysical phenomena such as the after-death appearances of Obi-Wan Kenobi. All the above phenomena are somehow made possible by using the Force—a universal, impersonal energy field which surrounds, permeates and binds all things. Thus, the religion of Star Wars might be described as Western occultism with an Eastern pantheistic twist. Philip H. Lochhaas, an authority on religions and cults, comments:
‘The entertainment industry must be seen as a primary vehicle for promoting occult New Age views. Films are powerful instruments for influencing millions of minds. The Star Wars trilogy was only the first among many films to make statements about a pantheistic “Force” that represents deity, intuitive communication with “the other side” and “ascended masters” that form a hierarchy for bringing humanity into the New Age.’”
https://answersingenesis.org/culture/science-fiction-a-biblical-perspective/
There is a bit of chat about Geonosis/gnosticism on Star Wars forums. Of course, one more very odd name choice is Endor. I wonder why Lucas chose this name, so associated with the occult and necromancy in the Bible, yet depict it as a beautiful forest world? Of course, in Star Wars, it is the “good guys” who commune with the dead. 🙁
With all this talk of creating a new religion, depicting the “Whills” as a “god” and drawing on gnosticism and Campbell’s muddled New Age comparative religion claptrap, I feel like George Lucas is taking his own kid’s story far too seriously. There seems to be more than a little of L. Ron Hubbard to him in his attempt to create a new religion. 🙁
It has really put me off Star Wars and I grew up as a huge fan of the three original films, especially Empire Strikes Back, in the 1980s. There always did, however, seem to be something that made me uncomfortable about a few elements of it as a Christian kid, especially the Force and the ghosts. Once I became a cynical teen, I was more annoyed by the poor artistic merit of the films (bad dialogue and acting, glamourisation of war) and the extremely commercial nature of the project (like all the merchandising). Now, on returning to the films as a nostalgic adult, I am concerned to see how the very dubious “spiritual” elements have taken more and more precedence in the later films and these bizarre quotes by George Lucas, where he seems to be taking these hokey kids’ films of his far too seriously and has sought to create something downright idolatrous as a result. 🙁
I am really uncomfortable about these films now. If I had kids, I think I’d have to refuse to let them watch them, which is a shame as children deserve to have a fun, innocent, escapist space opera to watch and act out with their friends. 🙁 What a tragedy SW is so sullied by its occult elements.
Okay, one last post on Star Wars. Someone on a Star Wars discussion board has the new book already. Here is what he says about Lucas, one-celled “gods” and spirituality (this is really long):
========
“Symbiosis is key. Everyone is comprised of lots of tiny lifeforms that make up your body and soul. Likewise, everyone with everyone else is just a tiny part of a universal being/soul. Be it all life that makes up Earth (the Gaia hypothesis) or even larger, the galaxy and entire universe and God herself. That is what I called in my other posts, before Archives even, a fractal universe. Macrocosm and Microcosm are very much alike. Or for religious folks, as above, so below.
The Biology:
We know from science that lots of bacteria and other micro-lifeforms are essential for our body and that lots of cells have to come and work together to create us and keep us alive.
The Spirituality:
Not just our physical body follows that principle but also our soul and spiritual makeup. We are the sum of many parts working together. If every lifeform has a soul, then every microlifeform comprising us, has its own soul. Thus if we are the sum of all the biology within us, likewise their souls kinda in summation are what we are, our soul and very being.
Likewise, each human has a soul, so all human, anima, planet, etc. souls together may inform and shape the planetary Gaia soul, or the galactic soul, or the universal soul some do call God.
This basically is the micro to macro scale of how we, life, the universe works.
The other division is between Life and Death:
Since birth the Biology transforms energy for our Life purposes and upon Death that energy is released back to the universe. Life is short, just a period of time, before and after it religions claim heaven and hell or a netherworld to be. Others claim rebirth being possible or even that a soul can choose if it wants to be reborn or not and the ideal is to reach a state free of the rebirth cycle.
Now, if there is a plane where souls come from and return to, and if rebirth or a physical life in general is optional for them, then we can surmise that not every soul chooses to be born into a body. Therefore there maybe are a lot more bodyless souls than incarnated/embodied souls. Likewise if that plane of existance as religions clame has all those that died and are there now probably outnumber the living any day.
Head spinning already? Have some quotes:
George Lucas:
“This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart.
The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknoweable. But behind it is another metaphor, which fits so well into the movie that i couldn’t resist it.
Midi-chlorians are the equivalent of Mitochondria in living organisms and photosynthesis in plants – I simply combined them for easier consumption by the viewer. Mitochondria create the chemical energy that turns one cell into two cells.
I like to think that there is a unified reality to life and that it exists everywhere in the universe and that it controls things, but you can also control it.
That’s why I split it into the Personal Force and the Cosmic Force. The Personal Force is the energy field created by our cells interacting and doing things while we are alive. When we die, we lose our persona and our energy is assimilated into the Cosmic Force.
If we have enough Midichlorians in our body, we can have a certain amount of control over our Personal Force and learn how to use it, like the Buddhist practive of being able to walk on hot coals.”
(…)
“The Jedi will train you to connect to your Personal Force, and then to connect to the Cosmic Force. You don’t have much power to control the Cosmic Force, but you can make use of it.”
(…)Now we move on to the Whills finally, I promose!
George Lucas:
“The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There’s something like 100.000 times more Whills than there are Midichlorians, and there’s about 10.000 times more Midichlorians than there are human cells.
The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midichlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midichlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midichlorians and the Midichlorians effectively work for the Whills.
It is estimated that we have 100 trillion microbes in our body and we are made up of about 90% bacteria and 10% human cells. So who is in service to hom?
I know this is the kind of thing that fans just go berserk over because they say, “We want it to be mysterious and magical”, and “You’re just doing science.” Well, this isn’t science.
This is just as mythological as anything else in Star Wars. It sounds more scientific, but it’s a fiction.
It’s saying there is a big symbiotic relationship to create life, and to create the Force, but if you look at all the life-forms in the universe, most of them are one-celled organisms. I think of one-celled organisms as an advanced form of life because they’ve because they’ve been able to travel through the universe. They have their own spaceships – those meteorites that we get every once in a while. They’ve been living on those things for thousands of years, they’ve been frozen, unfrozen, and can survive almost anything.
The once-celled organisms have to have a balance. You have to have good ones and bad ones otherwise it would extinguish life. And if they go out of balance, the dark side takes over.”
(…)
Well there you have it finally…
Some comments from me before I let your brains process it all for a while:
While he talks about tiny once-cellular lifeforms he describes the physical side of his cosmology, the biology. At the same time, underlying this concept is a spiritual one, that mirrors lots of religious and esoteric concepts about souls, Gaia, etc. This one is more evident in TCW and his other works. In that regard I think, the Whills/Midichlorian relationship is more like the one between the Celestials/Ones/ForcePriestesses. There are many, only some become these special ones and interact with other lifeforms via incarnation in some shape or body temporarily.
George Lucas is a man loving his esoterics, even Indiana Jones is based on that side of his reading instead of proper hard science archeology. And I notive plenty of esoteric currents and works he must have studied but tries to reframe and rephrase for general audiences in more understandeable or accepteable versions, distilling them down like he did with history and mythology in his Modern Myth Saga.
The OT is the Modern Myth, where he distilled history, mythology and many old works, be it fiction or based on real events for modern audiences.
Likewise he intended the PT to continue the trend and include way more than previously science and spirituality, especially esoterics too distilled down for general audiences to make the stuff more accessible and spread the truths.”
======
The more I learn about Star Wars and George Lucas, the more disturbing his esotericism/spiritualism becomes. This is a long way from his early days of creating a mock-up , pulpy pastiche of Flash Gordon, fairy tale, western and samurai films. Something has gone very wrong in Lucas’ life for him to want to expose children to spiritism and esotericism in what are, essentially still kids’ films. 🙁
I forgot to add that the huge quote I cited above came from this page:
https://boards.theforce.net/threads/star-wars-archives-episode-1-3-the-prequels.50055016/page-5
Yet more discussion on the occultism, astral projection, etc, in the Star Wars films:
https://www.equip.org/article/last-jedi-star-wars-movie-era-nones/
https://www.movieguide.org/reviews/star-wars-viii-the-last-jedi.html
This occultist is even using it as a teaching primer!
https://ultraculture.org/blog/2015/03/23/star-wars-magick/amp/
🙁 🙁 🙁
Another aspect I haven’t mentioned yet that was discussed above is that Anakin Skywalker is obviously modeled after Jesus with the prophecy of the coming of the chosen one, his virgin birth, miraculous powers, etc, yet he is the character who ends up becoming corrupted and the epitome of evil in these stories. He is a “Messiah” who is corrupted by the “satanic” Emperor.
Since George Lucas obviously takes this stuff way more seriously than most fans do with the comments about starting a religion, I am starting
to see him as an L. Ron Hubbard-type figure of a hack SF writer turned guru, with the difference being that Hubbard’s religion was more of a money-making scam whereas Lucas has already made more money than anyone could ever possibly spend in a single lifetime. The most disturbing thing is this is all marketed at young kids. 🙁 🙁 🙁
I think if I had children who wanted to see a space opera, I’d direct them towards Filmation’s (animated) New Adventures of Flash Gordon series which I also loved as a child and is very innocent compared to the New Age/spiritualist/occult stuff so obviously promoted in the latter films of the Star Wars series.
Okay, that is enough obsessing over this topic from me now. I won’t post on this again unless more evidence comes out about Lucas’ plans for the sequel trilogy or his religious opinions.
These are good comments. No, I don’t think you are reading too much into it or anything hiven Campbell and George Lucas have openly expressed their interest in gnosticism, eastern teligions, etc.
I also read something else the other day that was interesting: Anakin’s first words to Padme are the rather odd line, “Are you an angel?” which must have been chosen deliberately and his last words to her are, “You brought him here to kill me!” They were pointing out tge occultic meaning of this and how Padme is an angel of death for Anakin. Of course, she brings about his doom while they are on the hell-like volcano world, Mustafar yet Anakin’s death is also his rebirth there.
There is a lot of material in Star Wars that makes me really uncomfortable as an adult too. 🙁 I think Lucas believed in his own piblicity way too kuch and he lost sight of the story’s roots as a Flash Gordon parody. If uou read the very earliest draft of the first Star Wars film (readily available onljne), the Force is mentioned in it a few times so it is vaguely present as a religion but the Jedi and Sith do not have any supernatural powers and there are no Eastern or gnostic concrpts at all except for the fact that a recurring motif is that characters sacrifice themselves to save others so there is a strong theme of the noble suicide for the good of the collective which didn’t feature in any of the films until the Last Jedi with Holdo and Luke’s deaths and Finn’s (prevented) suicide run at the laser.
Anyway, it is clear from the early draft that Lucas didn’t really start out intending to build up a religion in his films around occulyic and gnostic ideas, despite what he claims now.
Yes, there is a lot of occult and gnostic stuff in Star Wars. George Lucas was influenced by Joseph Campbell who had some gnostic ideas.
George Lucas also opposed using a piece of merchandising, the Star Wars Christmas album “Christmas in the Stars” to evangelise fans:
“So now the album’s done, it’s over. Why? George has serious concerns about any mixture of the metaphor of the Force with Christianity. I said, so, the problem is my song, “The Meaning of Christmas.””
https://www.cbc.ca/music/read/the-first-ever-oral-history-of-christmas-in-the-stars-star-wars-christmas-album-1.5051210
A Christian would surely leap at the chance to evangelise to a worldwise audience like Star Wars had garnered by that time. Lucas grew up in California in the 1960s so there is a lot of spiritualism and New Age hippie ideals in his thinking that I am afraid permeate Star Wars from necromancy/communing with the dead to soothsaying to a planet named Endor to a fallen Christ-figure in Anakin to the Manicheasm of the Force to name but a few examples of many.
As for Battlestar Galactica, in an interview on Youtube the show’s creator notes he was as much influenced by Erich von Däniken’s “Chariot of the Gods?” pseudoscience – which he takes seriously – as he is by the Mormonism of his youthful upbringing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mnrg5heoUA
“Space 1999” does allude to a deity but it is full of occult and metaphysical/spiritualist themes as well.
Truly, the only two Science Fiction shows that area truly Christian in my opinion are The Prisoner with Pat McGoohan and the original 1980s version of Quantum Leap. Both are thoroughly permeated with a Christian worldview.
Neither show featured space travel which is interesting to me given that real life space exploration had deeply occultic roots:
https://www.tsiolkovsky.org/en/the-cosmic-philosophy/konstantin-tsiolkovsky-and-the-occult-roots-of-soviet-space-travel/
https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/the-occult-history-behind-nasas-jet-propulsion-laboratory
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/jpl-jack-parsons
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/24/5646272/jack-parsons-rocket-engineer-occultist-scientology
I know it has a reputation for being very woke and promoting the LGBT movement but apparently the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who has been much more respectful of religion than any other era since the show’s relaunch in 2005. Here are some articles discussing the phenomenon:
https://thinkchristian.net/doctor-whos-benediction
patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/03/the-doctors-respect-for-religion.html
https://scifi.radio/2018/11/30/chibnall-who-church/amp/
I agree that real life space travel’s occult roots are disturbing.
Some Christians, including myself, believe that Psalm 115:16 and Genesis 1:28 implicitly firbid humans from venturing into space. Also C. S. Lewis praised God for the “cosmic speed limit” of light speed that prevents us from spreading our sinfulness to other worlds.
Here are some more of my thoughts. First of all, I can understand the Pastor’s enthusiasm for the Force Awakens from a theological perspective. To me, it was almost Calvinistic in places, such as when the evil Kylo Ren complains about the Light Side calling to him. That reminded me of the notion of irresistible grace.
It is a pity that the Last Jedi saw a return of the necromancy of early Star Wars, along with the introduction of new occult elements like out of body experiences/astral projection and the lesbian kiss at the end of the Rise of Skywalker.
If George Lucas had had his way, the sequel trilogy would have been even more eccentric with God revealed to be “one celled animals” (ie, some kind of amoebas):
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/star-wars/2020/11/10/21558304/darth-maul-sequel-trilogy-george-lucas-princess-leia-star-wars-archives-prequel-book
Far too weird and blasphemous for me. 🙁
On a happier note, judging from this evidence, the original version of Quantum Leap spunds great!
https://discover.hubpages.com/entertainment/Quantum-Leaping-to-God-Religion-in-Quantum-Leap
Finally, if people are desperate for a Christian spaceship-based science fiction show, I do have a possible suggestion but I am not going to formally endorse this since I haven’t watched it. It just might be worth investigating.
According to a user comment on this Star Trek forum discussion thread, season 5 of the show, Andromeda, is as close to “Christian scifi” as you can get:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/im-doing-a-rewatch-of-gene-roddenberrys-andromeda.309715/page-3
Andromeda started out as a typical sci fi show, infused with some spiritualist/occult themes. In fact, it was probably worse than most because demons were presented as the “good guys” while “angels” were the villains, so it was calling good evil and evil good. 🙁
However, the head writer who was responsible for all of these ideas was sacked half way through season 2. It went through myriad staff changes and, by Season 5, the well-known Christian actor, Kevin Sorbo, was exerting the most influence over the show’s direction. If the Star Trek forum comment is to be believed, he must have taken the show in a much more Christian direction.
The good news is, from what I gather, Season Five of Andromeda is functions as a standalone “add-on” to the main series, so you don’t have to have seen any of the previous seasons to be able to follow it.
If any Christian is willing to investigate Andromeda Season 5 further and let us know if Kevin Sorbo really did turn the series around and make the last season into a Christian-themed science fiction show, I and many others on here I am sure would be very grateful to know.
God bless.
I found out a bit more about Andromeda from someone’s (hostile) IMDB review. Here is an abbreviated quote:
“clannagh
20 February 2017
1/10
The first season and a half actually shows promise. The original premise of the show is based in a fascinating Gnostic/Cathar cosmology. Basically we are fooled by a powerful-being/god who we are tricked into thinking is good and loving but is actually a fascist rule obsessed control freak. The entities fighting this control freak (like Trance) are persecuted and labeled as “devils”. Very little of this actually emerges on screen though we get tantalizing hints about this fascinating back story throughout season one…
Sadly Christian-nutter Kevin Sorbo is horrified by the meta=plot and manages to take over and remove the long term story-line…”
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0213327/reviews?ref_=tt_urv
I still can’t find put why someone would describe Season 5 as an extremely Christian piece of sci fi though. I cannot find any discussion on the web of the themes, symbolism or narrative of this season that indicate why the poster on that Star Trek forum thought it was so. Most discussions of Season 5 are mainly about technical aspects – the smaller budget, at-times weak writing and the fact it is tacked on to the main series as a kind of addendum or reboot, making it quite separate in terms of both its story from the narrative that had gone before and in its style which is apparently also distinct from the rest of the series.
I am curious about it now, so I would like yo find out more.
To change the subject back to real-life space flight, no discussion of the disturbing roots of both the American and Soviet programmes is complete of course without mentioning their roots in the Nazi V2 programme and the use of slave labour by the Nazi scientists which led yo horrific deaths. 🙁
After Werner von Braun was brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip, he claimed to become a Christian and even a kind of creationist, no less. I only hope, for the sake of his soul, his claim was sincere.
Regardless, I do maintain my belief that human spaceflight is sinful and that we have no mandate from God to venture beyond the Earth given the two verses I cited above. I realise the number of Christians who hold this view are seemingly in the minority though. I don’t know where I stand on unmanned missions and Earth-orbit satellites at this stage. At the very least ee can say that, like all technologies, they have brought great advantages in terms of satellite communications, GPS systems and the like but also new terrors (spy satellites and the possibility of orbital weapons and who-knows-what classified military technologies currently up there.)
God bless.
I finally found out a bit more about the supposed Christian link with Andromeda from an old Reddit exchange:
A person writes:
“Andromeda wasn’t very good, as a show. It had way too many religious undertones. Dylan, in his flying Bible, brings back “light” to the galaxy after sleeping for 300 years. They liked to say “In Dylan we trust”. They even had a race called the Nietzschians, one of who “comes around” to Dylan’s side. They had a mystery character who could really only be described as an Angel (sorry, a “star”)… they fought the Magog…”
[Another person mentions a staff of some kind they use on the show.]
The first person responds again:
“‘Though I walk through a valley of deepest darkness,
I fear no harm, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff—they comfort me.’
Darkness. Staff/rod. So much religious imagery…”
https://www.reddit.com/r/sciencefiction/comments/5oa3dv/farscape_vs_andromeda/
If they use the religious imagery in a respectful way and do not twist the theology to make good evil and evil good as they evidently did in tye furst two seasons, ot might be worth checking out, irrespective of how cheesey or poorly written it is. Beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to Christian sci fi. There is such a paucity of it out tyere we will just have to take what we can. If the message is there, I might be able to overlook the lack of artistry in the sgow or at least cringe my way through it if it is as bad as they say. Failing that, I’ll have to stick to the Prisoner, Quantum Leap, William Hartnell-era Doctor Who and maybe, just maybe, Jodie Whittaker-era Doctir Who for my fix of Christian television science fiction.
God bless.
Ironically, having posted the above about science fiction shows and real life space flight, I just learnt the line berween the two is now going to be blurred as the first feature film shot in outer space is about to be released:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/03/08/europe/the-challenge-movie-russia-space-scn-intl-scli/index.html
The Russian government is sponsoring it. While they are butchering the Ukrainians, they are also putting this material out. Ostentatious propaganda for the Russian state? An extravagance while people suffer and die on earth?
With regard to real life space flight, I just found this article about William Shatner’s recent experience as a space tourist. I had never heard of the “Overview Effect” but perhaps it is God’s way of telling us space is His domain and we don’t belong up there:
“”I love the mystery of the universe,” he wrote, according to a book excerpt published by Variety. “All of that has thrilled me for years…but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold…all I saw was death.”
The now-91-year-old, who made history as the oldest person to travel into space during the flight, described seeing a “cold, dark, black emptiness” unlike anything on Earth.
“My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral,” he wrote. “It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.””
https://www.businessinsider.com/william-shatner-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-spaceflight-funeral-2022-10
I also recently learnt that L. Ron Hubbard was also a friend of Jack Parsons (the guy who founded NASA’s JPL, as discussed in the comments above). Both were open about being directky influenced by Aleister Crowley. 🙁
I haven’t watched Andromeda either but I’ve just been researching it. Apparently it was based on a few scant notes that Gene Roddenberry left behind when he died that just outlined the premise so he didn’t exert much influence on it, thankfully.
The original writer was sacked after two seasons, the reasons for which vary according to the internet from claims his stories were too convoluted to a need to give the show more commercial appeal to Sorbo’s ego running amok so it depends on who you choose to believe. However, the original writer wrote a short piece later on simply entitled “Coda” showing how he had intended the show to end which would have revealed the good, noble alien heroine was from a species called “Luciferians” who had provided a resistance against an evil god. Obviously this would be deeply troubling for Christians.
When the lead writer was sacked the show apparently went in a much more Christian direction. Here are some interesting discussions I’ve found online about the direction it took.
There is a lot about the show’s religious imagery here including Magog, the Abyss, the chain that binds the devil or false god and the millennium:
https://www.tumblr.com/theweeklyansible/21020978630/the-gog-magog-and-the-abyss-by-ben-jenkins
Part Two of my post on Andromeda.
Some Christian kids’ reviews of
the show.
https://christiananswers.net/spotlight/tv/2002/andromeda.html
The hero is presented in messianic terms in seasons four and five, according to this interesting discussion about the show’s background.
https://andromeda.fandom.com/wiki/Talk:Nietzschean
With Artemis 2 scheduled to launch next week and comprising the first step towards permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, it is interesting that there is no mention in scripture of humans on these bodies in the End Times. The pouring out of God’s wrath in the Tribulation is focused on the Earth. There is no mention of humans “living amongst the heavens” to use Biblical language.
I also just found this interesting argument on a website:
“God leaving out confirming creation on day two with regards to outer space to be good is not without reason. It is because the heavens are not clean in God’s sight.
Job 15:15: Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight.
This evidence is as clear as day. Everything was good before the fall of man but heavens were already unclean.”
https://kjv-asia.com/colonize-outer-space/
At any rate, if nothing else, I do think the colonisation of outer space is immoral when that money can be used to alleviate suffering here on Earth and -let’s be real – the new space race is ultimately about which superpower controls space both militarily and in terms of the alleged resources up there such as the hypothesised frozen water at the Moon’s poles as well as the soft diplomacy coup that will come in terms of the prestige accorded on Space Race 2.0’s victor.
Regarding Artemis 2, so much hubris and greed here:
“”So many countries right now are realizing the value in what we can bring back by going to the moon: the industry gains, the knowledge gains, the scientific gains, the inspiration gains,” Koch said. “There’s so much to gain that I’m happy that we are leading the way back.”
During his December confirmation hearing, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stressed the significance of NASA’s lunar missions.
“We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including in the high ground of space. This is not the time for delay, but for action, because if we fall behind–if we make a mistake–we may never catch up, and the consequences could shift the balance of power here on Earth,” he said.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/artemis-ii-moon-mission-space-race-60-minutes/
Not at Tower of Babel levels of hubris yet but on that path, I fear.
I just watched a lovely documentary on Foxtel about Christian science fiction.
The narrators noted the genre is often hostile to Christianity as it frequently exhibits a materialist or scientist worldview but there has always been a subversive sub-genre of Christian SF which engages with theology in a thoughtful way.
The writers discussed were:
* Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)
* Victor Rousseau (The Messiah of the Cylinder)
* C. S. Lewis (The Space Trilogy)
* Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time). [L’Engke faced some criticism when her book was first published for being too universalist in her Christian views.]
* Tolkien was also encouraged by Lewis to write a sci go book but it was never completed. It would have apparently involved time travel.
Opponents of Christian S. F. included the Fabian socialist, H. G. Wells and the materialist, George Orwell.
The documentary was well worth watching.
I agree with the comments about George Lucas. The more I learn about his New Age religious beliefs and how he was consciously trying to promote these to youth in Star Wars, the more I dislike the series. (The same may possibly be true about the Gaia-themes in Janes Cameron’s Avatar films but I have nkt seen these.)
Why make Vader a Christ-like fugure with a virgun birth, evil? Why call a planet Endor of all things? Why, unlike in Tolkien, do the good guys practice necromancy? There os a lot of Buddhist and Manichaean thought on there too.
To change the subject somewhat, the latest Syar Trek spin-offs, Star Trek: Discovery abd Star Trek: Picard are both very woke and promote same-sex couples and transgender characters. Even some hardcore Trekkies are being turned off by them:
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/star-trek-discovery-woke-controversy.html
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek-picard-seven-of-nine-queer/
Also, the Transformers now have a nonbinary character and characters in gay relationships too (even though they are robots!) in both the comic books and a cartoon series aimed at children:
https://www.cbr.com/transformers-lgbtq-characters/
https://www.ncregister.com/cna/nonbinary-characters-in-kids-transformers-show-raise-concern-backlash
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/254338/nonbinary-characters-in-kids-transformers-show-raise-concern-backlash
All this without even mentioning how Doctor Who constantly promotes homosexuality these days and how this is likely to actually *increase* now that Russel T. Davies has creative control of the show once more.
Sigh. I can remember the days when the biggest concern was that the character of Wilma in the 1979 Buck Rogers television show was making a career in the military appealing to women. As bad as that propaganda was we never dreamed of a flood of media aimed at kids would be promoting homosexuality within just forty years’ time. 🙁
New Star Trek is very woke but even the old show had trans themes with the “skant”. There were also some anti-religious episodes, including the TNG series pilot, which dismissed the Reformation-era conflicts such as the French Wars of Religion as fights over “tribal god images” and an episode called Who Watches the Watchers in which the series hero derides religion.
Yes, I remember the skant. Disgusting. Maybe Star Trek was ahead of its time since who would have thought this would be normalised in western society fewer than forty years later?
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-tng-miniskirt-skant-dress-uniform-men/
By the way, it wasn’t just Gene Roddenberry that was the problem. One of his successors, Brannon Braga, was also a militant atheist and gave a speech at an atheist convention in Iceland where he said he felt Star Trek was a new mythology for an atheist world, akin to the Bible as ‘mythology’ for Christians:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927231320/http://www.sidmennt.is/archives/2006/16/08/every_religion_has_a_mythology.php
Talk about delusions of grandeur!
One final one. Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks, Blake’s Seven and Survivors) was vaguely Christian, according to his biography:
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=kMEEAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&dq=%22terry+nation%22+%22religion%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjM2_aK8d2AAxUUmlYBHZaKDFIQuwV6BAgMEAc#v=onepage&q=%22terry%20nation%22%20%22religion%22&f=false
Star Trek The Next Generation also did an episode about queer aliens who were opposed to the concept of gender. One of the show’s heroes, naturally, falls in love with the gender-bender.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outcast_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
Gay/gender propaganda aimed at kids. Disgusting. The media has onky got wirse sinxe those days but Roddenberry and Trek were the trailblazer there. Pure evil.
In an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tasha (played by Bing Crosby’s granddaughter, Denise Crosby), has a physical encounter with the robot, Data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Now#Plot
I also heard an old interview with Gene Roddenberry once where he discussed the likelihood of people having physical relationships with robots. The Trekkies are right, he was a prophet: a prophet of all the perversion and filth we are seeing emerge in our society today.
Re: Star Wars, I heard it claimed I am fairly sure by George Lucas himself that the idea was to find balance (an Eastern idea), so it is not about the light side defeating the darkness but each person finding the balance of good and bad within themselves, hence Darth Vader is evil only because he is unbalanced. Again, this is the antithesis of Christian thinking of light conquering darkness.
Additionally Gene Roddenberry wrote the pilot for an ultimately unproduced occult show called Spectre.
There was also his elleged brief involvement with the occult group Lab Nine with their Council of Nine. This makes me think he was a very dubious character that Christians should avoid.
I agree that the original versions of The Prisoner and Quantum Leap are the two most blatantly pro-Christian sci fi shows ever made.
In terms of Hollywood films, there is also the Divergent series, based on a trilogy of books by a Christian author named Veronica Roth. I haven’t seen any of these films myself but apparently they reflect the kind of Christian apocalypticism and militantism favoured by the Religious Right in America so they won’t be to the tastes of all Christians. They might be worth investigating though.
Notably, neither the Divergent films from what I can tell, nor the original Quantum Leap nor the Prisoner feature any space travel.
Kevin Sorbo wasn’t the only devout Christian involved in making Andromeda.
Brandy Ledford had a dark past in ‘adult’ modelling but she turned her life around and was a born again Christian by the time she starred in Andromeda, thankfully. Praise be to God.
https://www.moviefone.com/celebrity/brandy-ledford/1928206/main/
https://www.gateworld.net/news/2006/02/tokra-to-terranian/
Inspired by this discussion, I watched the first four episodes of Andromeda Season Five last night, not having seen it before. Dipping into the show at this late point in its run, it was reasonably easy to work out what was happening for the most part.
I didn’t see much that was overtly Christian, apart from hints that Kevin Sorbo’s figure is to fulfil some kind of messianic role. In the recap from season four at the beginning of the first episode, they showed how the evil Magog had been defeated by the forces of good but the evil of the Abyss still existed so I expect there is more Christian apocalyptic imagery in future episodes.
In terms of objectionable content for Christians, there was quite a bit of mild bad language. Many of the females wore tight leather costumes. There wasn’t much viopence and what there was wasn’t too graphic (bar-room brawls and laser gun battles mostly). There is no overt militarism or glorification of the military although we are told the Andromeda Ascendant is a former warship and it has been involved space wars, namely against the Magog. There were no blasphemous ideas or anti-Christian ideology or theology which makes it a welcome relief from the shows we have discussed above.
For those Christians uncomfortable with space travel, there is little depicted as the ship, the Andromeda Ascendant, is essentially trapped in orbit, out of power, so the crew spend most of their time marooned on the various planets of an alien solar system.
Andromeda Review Part Two.
What struck me the most was how many of the major characters are based on their Blake’s Seven equivalents.
Beka is a female Han Solo, just like Jenna in Blake’s Seven.
Harper is a cowardly thief, like Vila.
Doyle, though an android, is an ice-cool gunslinger like Soolin.
Trance, though I did not see a lot of her in the episodes I watched, seemed to be an enigmatic, somewhat naive, empathetic alien like Cally.
I think it would be reading too much into it to call Dylan a Blake equivalent (although he appears to be a disillusioned political idealist as well so there are some similarities) or to compare the Andromeda AI to the ships’ computers in Blake’s Seven.
The scripts and acting were mediocre but it was most definitely watchable. It did not try to take itself as seriously as the various po-faced Star Trek shows, which is a big saving grave and which made it a much more pleasant viewing experience. It was not as tongue in cheek as the old Gil Gerard Buck Rogers or the Sam Jones version of Flash Gordon so it struck a nice balance of humour and seriousness, in my humble opinion.
I could definitely watch more of it despite its limitations. It would be a good show for kids for a Saturday afternoon timeslot and remains quite watchable for adults.
Also Steve Bacic is apparently a Catholic but I could not find a good source to confirm this.
Laura Bertram is a lapsed Catholic.
However she is interested enough in Christianity and Protestantism to write her thesis on French Huguenot culture, according to this interview.
“I’ve been working on finishing my degree, a perpetual effort for me, so I’ve been concentrating on schoolwork. I’m actually studying history, early modern history, sixteenth century. I wrote my thesis on Huguenot culture in France, and I’m in the last three courses of my honors, so I’m doing that instead of auditioning.”
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/24426/
I wonder if she has any Huguenot ancestry herself. I wouldn’t mind reading her thesis since I am interested in that era of church history!
Let us pray she and the rest of the cast are saved.
Blessings.
Yep, apparently I was right! Other people have picked up on the links between the characters in Blake’s Seven and Andromeda too.
I also had aother interesting thought. The original Star Trek series was full of allusions to the Genesis Garden of Eden story. They crop up all the time across many episodes. Gene Roddenberry, being an atheist though, subverted the story constantly though. His take on it was that it was good for mankind to be expelled from the Garden of Eden (by the God that Roddenberry didn’t actually believe in) because it forces us to grow and mature as a species.
It sounds like he and the guy who started to write Andromeda after his death wanted to subvert the Bible some more. Instead of using imagery and themes from Genesis like Star Trek though, they have used Revelation instead. We see the idea of the rebellion by the Luciferians against God being ‘good’. (Note that the idea of devils being somewhat good also appears in the atheist sci fi writer Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Childhood’s End, by the way so that might have inspired them too.)
Discussion part two
With the sacking of the showrunner it sounds like Sorbo, as a Christian, has used his power as executive producer to have the team of writers thankfully turn the show around to be more traditionally Christian. Hence the Luciferian stuff has never made it onto the screen and we still have all of the Revelation allusions with the Magog, the evil ‘god’ in the Abyss, the chain binding him, the use of prophecy and so on. Also, the Nietzscheans are presented as another treacherous enemy and, in real life, Nietzsche of course wrote ‘The Antichrist’.
So both of the main baddies in the show, the Nietzscheans and the Magog, are named after real self-proclaimed enemies of God.
Discussion part three
Based on their past behaviour, I suspect Gene Roddenberry and his show runner intended to subvert this too and present them as good guys in the end as well but Sorbo has kept the story straight instead after he has taken over. Now there are no references to Lucierians and the enemies of God remain the unambiguous enemies of the show’s hero.
These enemies must be defeated to restore the Kingdom of God or, in this case, the Space Commonwealth to its pristine state. Thus no subversion takes place and the show ends up becoming a kind of Christian eschatalogical parable.
Good discussion. I am keen to check out Andromeda, Quantum Leap and maybe Divergent after reading this.
I was never a fan of the original Star Trek as a t. v. series with its awful acting and dated, 1960s vibe, let alone its anti-Christian themes but I have watched all of the Trek movies. Gene Roddenberry’s “utopian” future always seemed more like a dystopia to me with its one-world government, which at times is hinted at being a benign dictatorship. Also, the Cold War between Russia and America might have been over but it had merely been replaced by an intergalactic stand-off between the three major powers of Starfleet, the Klingons and the Romulans do Roddenberry’s universe was an ambiguous one – peaceful but with a high threat of mutual annhilation at any time.
Speaking of which, I was never sure uf Starfleet was meant to be a military or not and the writers seem to change their minds from film to film. They have uniforms and ranks at the very least and the Enterprise acts like a warship. In Star Trek I, Dr McCoy laments being “drafted” back into Starfkeet. In Star Trek II, Starfleet is unambiguously a military force. However, in Star Trek IV, Captain Kirk clearly declares “We’re not in the military”, but in Star Trek VI they are a military organisation again. In Star Trek: First Contact, the crew makes it clear to Lily that, once the captain makes a decision, it can no longer be debated so there is an implication of military obedience. In the modern, 2009 film, Starfleet is rather ambiguously referred to as a “peacekeeping armada”. In Star Trek Into Darkness there is a major ethical debate as to whether they should be undertaking a military mission or not and then, finally, in the last film to date, Star Trek: Beyond, they clearly and unambiguously declare that Starfleet is not the military. Indeed, in this film, the villain is a former military officer who feels alienated from the modern world and thinks he does not belong in the peaceful organisation of Starfleet. Confusing! Like the rest of you, I yearn for more wholesome Christian sci fi but effects budgets mean only big Hollywood studios can produce sci fi films and we know Hollywood has an antipathy to Christianity at best.
The original Star Trek of the 1960s was definitely military in space. Roddenberry wanted Captain Kirk to be like a real life military commander but toned down somewhat so as not to alienate the audience.
By the time Star Trek The Next Generation was made, Roddenberry had grown much more pacifist and idealistic. There is this exchange in an episide in Season Two:
“PICARD: Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.
KOLRAMI: Then why am I here?
PICARD: With the Borg threat, I decided that my officers and I needed to hone our tactical skills. In a crisis situation, it is prudent to have several options.
RIKER: I prefer brains over brawn as well. I think it’s a waste of effort to test our combat skills. It’s a minor province in the make-up of a starship captain.”
So they do fight when necessary but Starfleet is no longer a military.
After Roddenberry died, The Next Generation and other StarTrek shows like Deep Space Nine became somewhat more military focused again but not to the extent that it was purely military Sci Fi like Star Wars.
Yes even the newer Star Trek shows are very atheistic.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/new-series-star-trek-discovery-confirms-no-god-trek-universe/
🙁
The secular humanist, Gene Roddenberry, depicted the devil positively and God negstively in Star Trek. According to a GameRant journalist:
“The Devil, or Satan, however, gets a much better treatment from Roddenberry, ranging from subtle to downright overt. The mind-melding, logic loving Spock is a good example of this. Roddenberry specifically designed his appearance (and choosing the very Slavic-looking Leonard Nimoy) to be reminiscent of satanic depictions, to the point where he even wanted the Vulcans and their distant cousins Romulans to possess a tail. The most overt… example backing up Roddenberry’s positive portrayal of the Devil is from the Animated Series episode “The Magicks of Megas’s-Tu,” in which the actual Lucifer is written to be the hero of the story. During the episode, he explains that he was the only one of his species who actual cared for humanity and wanted the best for them… For Roddenberry, Satan is much more of a heroic figure. He represents humanity’s freedom of choice, and the only notable figure to stand against the all-powerful, controlling voice of god. His Satan wants to lift humanity up above the god fearing people they were, and allow them to grow and evolve by themselves.”
It sounds like Roddenberry intended to develop this theme further in Andromeda had he lived, but Kevin Sorbo derailed those plans and turned the show on its head reorienting it as a Christian-themed series.
Yes, Andromeda is good! It is indeed probably the closest you’ll find out there to a Christian space adventure.
Look up the clip called the “Mathematics of Divinity” on YT for an example of one of the show’s thoughtful moral and theological debates.
Some episode titles are taken from Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”, too.
https://andromeda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Second_Coming
Yes, I am torn on the Star Wars films. I just watched the entire Sequel Trilogy in one go for the first time and I have a few thoughts: The first one, The Force Awakens, seems almost Calvinistic at times, which is ironic given it was written by a Jew (J. J. Abrams) and a Buddhist (Lawrence Kasdan). Anyway, the fact that Kylo Ren tells Vader’s helmet he is trying to fight the call of the light sounds like the doctrine of Irresistible Grace to me.
Of course, it is the Last Jedi where the real problems begin with the dollops of Buddhism and New Age in Luke’s teachings on the island. Added to that we have the occult astral plane nonsense discussed by other commentators above. I felt really uncomfortable watching some of those scenes, especially Luke’s first teaching where he explains the nature of the Force.
Of course on top of that, we have a huge dose of Woke in The Last Jedi in the form of the character of Rose (To say nothing of the third wave feminism in the almost infallible Rey in The Force Awakens and the same-se kiss in The Rise of Skywalker.)
Apparently the novelisation of the Last Jedi is more interesting though (I haven’t read it myself). There are some scenes involving the character of Maz that did not appear on the film where she discusses the Force’s will as something that will inevitably unfold. Again it seems to draw on Calvinistic ideas of predestination and God’s sovereign will.
At its heart, though, isn’t the sequel trilogy a Prodigal Son fable? Kylo dishonours his parents and does terrible things only to see the light in the end and repent of his evil deeds. Han is the father who will do anything to forgive him and bring him home-with the twist that the Prodigal Son murders him. His facial scar and then his patched helmet hint at how split he is as he battles his inner guilt over his evil doings.
Kylo’s Force Sister, Rey, treads the good path and is horrified and disgusted by his actions while battling her own constant temptations and inner anger and dark leanings. (Of course her name symbolises the ray of light she brings, although she is tempted over and again to become dark, just as the sun went out to power Starkiller Base.) At the end of the Last Jedi, she closes the door of the Millenium Falcon on him, seemingly cutting off any hope of reconciliation. Eventually, though, right at the end she does come to accept him and reconcile with him.
Her final symbolic act of reconciliation at the very end of the trilogy is creating a yellow light sabre out of his red one and Luke’s blue one, finally reuniting the Solo/Skywalker family in harmony.
In the third film, the Emperor’s ritual seems purely occult in nature but then we have the central contradiction of Star Wars where the good guys also indulge in occultic practices like more astral projection, talking to the dead and being possessed by all the Jedi.
I also noticed quite a lot of crucifix imagery in the films. Kylo’s lightsabre is like a burning K lan cross and, of course he sometimes holds it up and sometimes down, like a Christian cross and an inverted occult symbol, again showing his split nature as he wrestles between good and bad.
In the rebel base on the salt planet in the Last Jedi, the lights are like bright, shining white crosses. Hux, who will betray the First Order in the next film and help bring about its demise, is framed between them at one stage.
Another example is the red cross on the computer behind Pryde when he talks yo the Emperor about destroying a planet.
Finally, Rey is the Emperor’s grand daughter. Throughout the entire Star Wars series he is a Satanic figure, tempting, corrupting, manipulating and ultimately destroying people in his quest for power. In the final film, Rey heals a serpent in a cave. With the help of her now redeemed Force Brother, who gives his own life to resurrect her, Rey later overthrows her evil satanic serpentine grandfather. The galaxy is healed.
She renounces her legacy, the opportunity to be empress and even her grandfather’s very surname, in order to take the name of the good Skywalkers instead. The wound in the galaxy has been healed by the defeat of the Emperor.
In summary, there is to me, a real mixture of
positive Christian messages in these three films, marred by some very disturbing Buddhist, New Age and occultic elements and a big smear of Woke. I think though if George Lucas had made them instead of Disney these elements would have bern even more pronounced.
By the way, I just found out that Rian Johnson who write the Last Jedi, is a laosed Christian who grew up listening to Christian rock and was involved in youth groups. He now believes there is no god except that which we find within ourselves which seems to ecplain a lot about the worldview we see presented in the Last Jedi with its pseudo Buddhist New Age elements as they are all about tapping the power within and personal development.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/star-wars-director-reveals-he-was-a-youth-group-kid-names-favorite-christian-artists-as-teen.html
Just a few more thoughts that occurred to me.
There is a weird glorification of su icide in the Last Jedi from Paige releasing the bombs knowing she will die, to Holdo’s kamikaze attack and Finn’s attempt to replicate her deed to Luke’s astral projection at the end that he presumably knows will kill him.
Less worrisome is the effective use of hellfire symbolism for the villains. Phasma falls into a burning abyss to die, the wayfinder is on a burning planet, Kylo’s sabre has a volatile, burning appearance, Snoke’s throne room burns down, Starkiller opens up with yawning chasms as it erupts and produces a gulf between Rey and Kylo, to the burning dreadnaught and so on.
In light of David Grusch’s sworn testimony on UFOs making large waves in the USA, I’ve been reading a bit about the subject. Goodness knows what to make of Grusch but lots of people, including allegedly a sizeable faction in the Pentagon, believe UFOs are real and that they are a manifestation of demonic activity, not space aliens. If you Google
UFOs demonic pentagon
you will find plenty of articles about this.
One very good video I found online providing arguments for this viewpoint is entitled “Are Aliens and UFOs…Demonic_ Astrophysicist Reveals Why UFO Claims Aren_’t What They Seem”, by Christian astrophysicist Hugh Ross. It is about five minutes long.
In terms of SF films, a clergyman who thought UFOs were demonic years ago
“even warned the Queen that she should not attend the premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because it featured mind control and ungodly aliens.'”
All too weird for me. 🙁 Signs in the sky in the end times? Who knows.
Here is a good video response to David Grausch’s Congressional claims from a Reformed perspective. Search for:
“Haunted Cosmos, Aliens, Demons, UFO_’s, and Congress”
The whole thing is worth listening to fir a discussion of UFOs from people with a Biblical worldview but the Grausch specifuc material start about half an hour in.
Another good video from the same folks is entitled:
“Why should Christians care about the supernatural_ With CULTISH!”
Scary stuff but with Jesus we overcome the powers and principalities of this world.
My late father grew up in rural Victoria. He sometimes saw ball lightning, which moves in an erratic manner and is still a little-understood phenomenon. He thought it probably accounted for many unexplained UFO sightings.
I heard Grusch interviewed and he sounded unconvincing to me but I later learnt he has Asperg er’s so that might explain his mannerisms. However it might also mean he is an obsessive in this area so I guess the jury is out.
Back on topic yes Star Wars contains occult and New Age elements.
“for the question of whether or not Star Wars and The Clone Wars have occult/New Age ties, the answer is yes.
According to his biographer, Dale Pollock, Star Wars’ creator George Lucas was heavily influenced by New Age books such as Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda and The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
This could explain why there are so many pantheistic elements in the movies, such as how Luke Skywalker prays to a “force” rather than to a person. You’ll also notice that many of the episodes contain the occult practice of communicating with the dead, such as in the 1977 film when Luke is told by the deceased Obi-Wan-Kenobi “Use the Force, Luke.”
The Christian MovieGuide lists the Star Wars films as having a “strong pagan worldview where mystical soldiers have special occult powers to move objects, leap and jump great distances, and sense the presence of other mystical soldiers . . .””
https://www.womenofgrace.com:8443/blog/?p=111
“The next time you need to explain the basics of magick, the occult and esotericism to your friends, use Star Wars. Here’s seven lessons any budding magician can learn from Lucas’ cinematic masterpiece.”
https://ultraculture.org/blog/2015/03/23/star-wars-magick/
“Many Christians have found this celluloid deity unnerving. The Force is too eastern, they complain, and cannot therefore teach Christians anything theologically. Some even believe it to be a ‘mythology … perfectly adapted to the spiritual confusion of post-modern America’ that constitutes an advert for post-Christian neo-paganism.
Star Wars, in fact, seems to resonate with something of a pluralist ethos, perhaps learned through mythology scholar Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomythic’ approach to the world’s religions: all share a common essence, an essence that may be identified without the guidance of any particular religious system.
Suggestively, the Force is portrayed in quasi-pantheistic terms as ‘an energy-field created by all living things’ that ‘surrounds us and penetrates us’ (Obi-Wan to Luke, ANH). By the time of The Phantom Menace (1999), the first of the ‘prequels’, this pantheistic imagery is conveyed in quasi-biomechanical terms – what many critics complain of as ‘bio-babble’ – in Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn’s teaching to the youngster Anakin Skywalker about the composition of The Force: ‘Midi-chlorians are a microscopic life-form that reside within all living cells … inside your cells … And we are symbionts with them.’
John Caputo suggests from this that ‘The basic religious schema of Star Wars is rather more Eastern than Judeo-Christian.’[4] And, of course, there are indeed numerous noticeable eastern images and themes pervading these movies – for instance the Jedi Knights are Samurai-like (‘jidaigeki’ are samurai period drama movies). However, the presence of numerous Christian images should not be obscured – Darth Vader and Darth Sidious’ temptations, for example, echo Satan’s temptations of Adam and Christ (Empire Strikes Back, Revenge of the Sith, respectively, and together in Return of the Jedi). Moreover, while it is true that the Buddhism of ESB’s director Irvin Kershner cannot be unimportant to Yoda’s characterisation, the Jedi Master is designed more as a representative of a wider universal wisdom, and the deliberate Einstein-like touch in his facial design testifies to that.
This, among other things, suggests that Lucas’ borrowing is more eclectic and post-modern than specifically eastern as such…”
https://www.bethinking.org/culture/feeling-the-force-star-wars-and-spiritual-truth
Some final resources. Make what you will of these claims.
https://m.facebook.com/wakeupcry/photos/a.1481204398813285/1653763168224073/?type=3
There is also this yt video. It is a mixed bag. Some arguments in it are more plausible than others:
Occult Mysteries of Star Wars
Yes George Lucas was a disciple of Joseph Campbell, whose tgeiries heavily influnced Star Wars. Joseph Campbell, in turn, was an occultist according to the Concise Dictionary of Religion:
‘CAMPBELL, Joseph
(1904-1987)
American OCCULTIST and college teacher whose prolific but confused ideas about MYTHOLOGY made him a CULT figure for the COUNTER CULTURE of the 1960s and later the NEW AGE MOVEMENT.’
https://religion.en-academic.com/334/CAMPBELL%2C_Joseph
He was also apparently a lapsed Catholic. A former fan of his writes:
‘I’ll never forget hearing him call Christ’s Second Coming “the great non-event” and hearing the snickers and giggles of the audience. He reduced the Church’s teaching on the economy of salvation to simple accounting and bookkeeping, attributing such a shallow and mistaken view to the Church herself instead of to his own childish and inadequate religious education. He taught that the Church’s insistence upon the historicity of Christ was a misunderstanding of His true metaphorical nature.’
https://catholicheartandmind.com/2009/05/15/joseph-campbell-was-once-my-hero/
‘His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: “Follow your bliss.” He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell’s work as influencing his Star Wars saga.’
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/the-mythologist-joseph-campbell-and-his-comparative-myth-theories
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Campbell. You can see where George Lucas gets the idea of ‘The Force’ from.
‘BILL MOYERS: But is divinity just what we think?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: What does that do to faith?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it’s a tough one about faith.
BILL MOYERS: You are a man of faith-
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’m not…
BILL MOYERS: You’re a man of wonder and…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.
BILL MOYERS: What kind of experience?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I’ve experience of the wonder, of the life [snip]
For instance, when I was a little boy and was being brought up a Roman Catholic, I was told I had a guardian angel on my right side and a tempting devil on my left, and when it came to making a decision of what I would do, the decision would depend on which one had most influence on me. And I must say that in my boyhood, and I think also in the people who were teaching me, they actually concretized those thoughts.
BILL MOYERS: They did what?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It was an angel. That angel is a fact and the devil is a fact, do you see; otherwise, one thinks of them as metaphors for the energies that are afflicting and guiding you.
BILL MOYERS: And those energies come from?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: From your own life. The energy of your own body, the different organs in your body, including your head, are the conflict systems.
BILL MOYERS: And your life comes from where?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, there you are. From the ultimate energy that’s the life of the universe. And then you say, well, somebody has to generate that. Why do you have to say that? Why can’t it be impersonal? That would be Brahman, that would be the transcendent mystery, that you can also personify.
BILL MOYERS: Can men and women live with an impersonality?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, they do all over the place. Just go east of Suez. In the East, the gods are much more elemental.
BILL MOYERS: Elemental?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Elemental, less human and more like the powers of nature. I see a deity as representing an energy system, and part of the energy system is the human energy systems of love and malice, hate, benevolence, compassion. And in Oriental thinking, the god is the vehicle of the energy, not its source.’
https://billmoyers.com/content/ep-6-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-masks-of-eternity-audio/
In that interview above, Campbell then goes on to talk about Jesus – leaning, of course, on the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. 🙁 Anyway, you can see there is a straight line from Campbell’s occult and New Age theories to the belief system George Lucas actually presents on the screen in the Star Wars films. 🙁
Yes, Joseph Campbell’s work was
“dismissed as scholarship” until the counterculture picked up on it the 1960s. He was also an anti-semite.
https://medium.com/belover/joseph-campbell-was-a-right-wing-racist-and-anti-semite-eeb13d07515e
George Lucas himself does not appear to have copied this trait of his mentor since his films have featured Jews like Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Natalie Portman. It is interesting that Indiana Jones is specifically referred to by some other characters as an expert in the occult in Raiders of the Lost Ark though. This is even more explicit than the occult themes on Star Wars. Anyway, it seems from the article above that Joseph Campbell had a deathbed conversion to Christianity thankfully. Let’s hope Lucas does too.
With all of the UFO allegations in the news this week and the congrssional debate on the disclosure clause, I decided to spend some time on the UFO subreddit forum. My goodness, there are some very strange people in the world airing their beliefs and hypotheses there. It is a disconcerting place. 🙁 Anyway, the Christian videos on UFOs above are proved correct by what these people are saying on that forum. Ufology is an intersection of science and the occult. They believe in interdimensional being and that UFOs can be manifested through seances, remote viewing and the like and that thoughts can manifest themselves as a kind of reality. It is like old school occultosm dressed up with scoentific explanations for some of the phenomena. Also, it is like a religion for some in so far as they believe disclosure of government UFO knowledge might lead to the discovery of things like free energy leading to a utopian future for the human race and transcendence that will help humanity grow beyond its current limitations and they believe it will spell the end of old “mythologies” that have held people back like Judaism and Christianity (shades of Campbell again).
Furthermore some of these people advocate the use of psychedelic drugs like DMT to cross the spiritual plane and contact these beings. I read once that the NT Greek words for “pharmaceutical” and “sorcery” had the same root – that is, that sorcerers used mind altering drugs in the NT period in their occult rites. If UFOs are real and they are from another dimension then it stands to reason they are demonic entities from the spiritual plane since that is the only other dimension acknowledged in the Bible, possibly even from the abyss mentioned Luke. 🙁 No wonder even some Pentagon types recognise this stuff is demonic.
I’ve had a look at the subteddit. That place is scary not because of the idea of aliens but the strange, strange people who are posting. They seem to be the extremes of humanity. Interesting that manu self-identify as woke too if you read the conversations and are very hostile to traditional religion, especially Christianity, but have no problems believing in aliens from outer space or other dimensions, contacting them via seances and mind-altering drugs, grand government conspiracies abd so forth. I wonder how their ‘religion’ handles the problem of evil: if aliens exist and are more technologically advanced than us and have been visiting our planet for a long time why haven’t they intervened to srop events like the holocaust, the two world wars, and the current Ukraine and Gaza situations. It works both ways. They have to be prepared to answer the hard questions about their ‘religion’ too. It seems to be a Utopian impulse for both a better material world delivered to them on a platter from alien technology (free unlimited energy, the ability to travel to other workds, dimensions or through time and, of course, the downfall of capitalism) and self improvement through transcendence to a higher state of mental being (like all that other New Ahe human potential stuff). Mix in pantheism, multiverse/quantum physics and Gnosticism and, voila, a new belief system.
Secondly, many of the ideas they speculate on come straight from science fiction stories. The possibility of a peaceful Galactic Federation just waiting for us to become advanced enough to join is straight from Star Trek and the idea that all of reality is a computer simulation is from the Matrix. The scary thing is they posit these ideas seriously. Of course none of them on there acknowledge the Hollywood pop culture sources of their ideas. A very strange and very paranoid group of fantasists indeed.
I agree though. If, by some very, very slim chance, there is a non-human intelligence behind some UFO sightings as these Congressional whistleblowers are alleging, then it is almost certainly demonic. The Bible indicates there are spiritual powers and principalities we may sometimes encounter and the fact these people allege to contact them in ways God explicitly forbids, indicates they are evil. Dabbling in seances, trances, mediumistic experiences and taking hallucinogenics is a conduit to demons. The only question remains that of the physical wreckage these whistleblowers allege Lockheed and co have obtained. Are spirit beings able to construct physical objects? I guess one way they could is if they possessed people to do so. I don’t often praise America and certainly not the US military but if the whistleblower testimonies are truthful and non-human intelligences are behind a tiny minority of UFO reports , and there really are people in the Pentagon who believe these things are demonic, good on them for restraining their colleagues. At this stage I am assuming Grusch is a fantasist though and Ross Coulthart is a hack until we see more substantial evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof as the old saying goes and Occam’s Razor dictates the simplest solution is these people are lying under oath to Congress either because they are unwell or to distract from something else.
Thinhs become even weirder and more scary when you consider this. 🙁 There is an American Roman Catholic theologian named Diana Pasulka, apparently a well respected scholar, who has studied ufology as a religious and cultural phenomenon. Go to You Tube and search for ‘Diana W. Pasulka – Encounters – Part One’ on ‘That UFO Podcast’, for an interview she recorded a fortnight ago. At the forty six minute mark and again at fifty six minutes she claims that people (I presume she means NASA staff) perform full rituals invokong the old pagan Roman gods before they launch rockets. She says she has witnessed this with her own eyes but was hesitant to talk about it because it seems so crazy. If these claims are true then indeed this whole real of space research is indeed occultic. 🙁
I feel physically sick now just thinking about it. This stuff is getting crazier and crazier.
I watched Pusalka’s video. I cannot tell if she is for real or very eccentric. At the very least, she doesn’t describe these rituals in any detail or say why they perform them. Maybe we are meant to buy her book to find out. It is all so strange. When I was younger, I just assumed rocket scientists and astrophysicists were all cold, rational, materialist people intent on exploring the natural world. Now I am learning that many of them are apparently spiritualists, mystics and New Agers, just as interested in spiritual transcendence and higher planes as they are in outer space and, judging from what the poster said above, this has beem going on since the earliest days of Tsiolkovsky and Jack Parsons. The entire history of space exploration seems to be intertwined with this stuff. 🙁
Yes, this is the website of NASA senior systems engineer for the Artemis mission, Shehnaz Soni, and it is full of weird, New Age stuff:
https://www.shehnazsoni.com/
I don’t think I’d ever want to work at NASA as its culture seems to attract all these occultist types.
I found a new interview with the Catholic theologian, Pasulka. At 1 hour 2 mins she talks about the alleged occult culture at NASA and the occult beginnings of both the American and Russian space programs.. Make of her claims what you will.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aa9Xx5wI8Rw&t=3748s
I have a bit of info to contribute, just when you thought this couldn’t become any more bizarre. A lawyer named Daniel Sheehan is representing Grusch and co. He is apparently a major figure in US government whistleblower cases including Watergate and Iran Contra. However, that is not all. He has links to the Jesuits and set up a legal instutute at one stage and is influenced by Teilhard de Chardin’s teachings. He also represented the UFO seance cult guy, Steven Greer, mentioned in the Hugh Ross video. Sheehan also claims to have briefed the head of the Vatican Archives and Gorbachev on aliens and once wanted to hold a US ecumenical conference on the subject decadees ago when he first claimed to see evidence of their existence. (He is also one of those claiming there is some kind of Galactic Federation out there.) He now says he is putting out the feelers for such a conference again, this time worldwide through the WCC. He has also established a religious institute for theology in the new paradigm once alien life is revealed to the world: https://newparadigmproject.org/
Yes Pusalka and Sheehan both appear to be unwell to me. Paranoia can strike anyone I suppose. In America tonight NBC covered the story for the first time so it is starting to appear in mainstream free to air media now. I still think the whole area is demonic but if by some tiny chancealiens are real and they are not we must ask questions about whether aliens are made in the image of God, do they have souls, are they monotheistic do they have domain over their worlds, do they need need missionaries and so forth? Huge questions.
Today, a member of the US Congress UFO committee, the appropriately named Congresswoman Luna, spoke to Elon Musk on Twitter and, with regard to non human intelligent life, told him to go and read the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Luna self identifies as a Christian so perhaps she thinks any hypothetical aliens are Nephilim.
Secondly, I looked up UFOs on Sermonaudio and the Northern Irish pastor, Ian Brown, has debunked the notion in some sermons in his usual acerbic style.
Thirdly, the Sydney Morning Herald reports Ross Coulthart has been given a pseudoscience award by the Skeptics Society. Far worse, Coulthart was a spin doctor used by Ben Roberts Smith of all people so clearly he can be bought and is willing to write whatever people are willing to pay for, even to the point of defending a war criminal, so his credibility as a journo is in tatters as far as I’m concerned.
Sheehan and a number of other people promoting UFO conspiracies allegedly have links to Scientology. He was exposed on the UFO Reddit today.
The Prince of the Powers of the Air?
They may well be. I liened t some more homilies SermonAudio, this time by some American pastors. One was part five of a series by a chap named Pastor Billy Crone and the other one was by a Pastor Roland Hammett. They both expressed much the same view as the Christian astrophysicist Dr Hugh Ross in the video mentioned in a comment above that these things are demonic and, in alleged alien emcounters, abductees are told a New Age message that is specifically anti Christian and focused on undermining Christ’s deity. Roland Hammett’s sermon in particular is very concise and well worth listening to. I highly recommend it to readers of this discussion. In other news, the UAP disclosure bill is facing strong opposition in Congress and may be gutted before it is passed. On that note, I am going to give this subject a rest and refrain from posting for a while since it is such a dark subject. We will see how things unfold but I want to focus on Christ’s purity and light after having raided awareness of this subject and shared my thoughts and apprehensions. God bless.
Today, the Jesuit Sheehan has been exposed as a Luciferian. These people are all crazy:
https://twitter.com/MiddleOfMayhem/status/1732467335846654195#m
So reading through the source code of Sheehan’s website, he wants to blend the Jesuit thinker Teilhard de Chardin’s theology with Luciferianism and bby “seeking the source of “Infinite Being” to re-experience the original LUCIFERIAN TEMPTATION and, this time, succeed where Lucifer and his followers originally failed by overcoming the temptation. This will be accomplished by being able to love every other human being and every other sentient Being, no matter how evil (or “Fallen”) they appear to be (i.e., how attached they appear to be to asserting their power over created reality) because we can continue to perceive within them Infinite Eternal BEING no matter how masked this BEING is from us in our apparently separate state…” What a kook.
view-source:https://newparadigmproject.org/
I will pray fir him and any deceived adgerents he has.
Thanks for that. I’ve been reading the source code of Sheehan’s website for myself. Crazy stuff. With Greer, Sheehan and Ross Coulthart discredited to varying degrees, that leaves Grusch and his testimony under oath.
By the way, I’ve been looking at the lives of some of the astronauts who set foot on the moon. There were some strange people among that group too. Neil Armstrong was taken in by some Erich von Daniken pseudoscience nonsense and was hoaxed to the extent that he went on an expedition to Ecuador.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_de_los_Tayos
Edgar Mitchell was into all kinds of spiritualist and occult ideas too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell#Post-NASA_career
By contrast Buzz Aldrin is a devout Presbyterian.
We can add Gerry Anderson to the list of odd sci fi show creators. He claimed to have been abducted by aliens in real life: https://www.ufoinsight.com/aliens/abductions/alien-abduction-gerry-anderson
There is some more about tye Christian astronomer, Doctor Hugh Ross, here and his study of the correlation between UFO activity and occultism:
https://www.toledoblade.com/news/religion/2003/01/04/Astronomer-links-UFOs-to-occultism/stories/200301040017
The really big news, though, is that Grusch was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News, yesterday. Again Grusch did not produce any concrete evidence to support his extraordinary claims but Tucker said he had convinced him by the end. Tucker also claims he has heard other whispers about UFOs in the Washington political bubble. From our point of view though, the most interesting part comes at about forty five minutes when Grusch declares the aliens could be angels and demons and that this could ultimately strengthen people’s faith. Towards the very end of the interview , Grusch also touches on the Book of Ezekiel.
Yes Hollywood is a madhouse on this topic right now: https://deadline.com/2023/10/ufo-nonprofit-brings-together-hollywood-storytellers-phenomena-researchers-1235586705/
I read an online discussion about Grusch on a US Air Force Forum. Opinions there vary wildly from him being fed disinformation on purpose because Asperger’s people are more gullible to him being a typical ‘smug’ intelligence officer and such officers they claim sometimes apparently develop strange, paranoid ideas. A sizeable minority (around a third of commenters) were open to the possibility he is telling the truth though. I don’t know. Like you, I lean towards disbelieving his claims. His answers seemed a little too pat in the Tucker Carlson interview.
Tucker again. Thirty seven minutes in, believes aliens are probably demonic. He says he is only relying on conjecture and hearsay though.
Before that point though, he talks about how he repents of promoting Iraq War and how Conservatism is realigning itself as an anti-war movement. First half an hour is well worth listening to for any Christian.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=StIg17e3TKE
A much more grounded (no pun intended) take on the sudden interest in UFOs:
https://unherd.com/thepost/why-is-the-american-right-obsessed-with-ufos/
Regarding the original Battlestar Galactica, I only recently learned the founder of Mormomism, Joseph Smith, was an occultist. This has been discussed in credible, peer reviewed articles and an early letter on the matter has been confirmed as genuune, so even Battkestar Galactica is arguably tainted with the satanic.
I was curious, from the evidence prsented in the discussion on this page, about just how entwined SF, as a genre, and the occult are. The answer seems to be that they have indeed been very much connected from SF’s earliest days. These are some articles I found. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cole_03_20/
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781315745916.ch49
https://answersingenesis.org/culture/science-fiction-a-biblical-perspective/
https://www.dailygrail.com/2018/05/flying-saucerers-the-role-of-science-fiction-and-the-occult-in-the-birth-of-the-ufo-era/
Something may or may not have been found.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/have-we-just-discovered-aliens/
AussieGuy I liked most of your information but I reacted really strongly against the Answers in Genesis one. 🙁 The write, David Laughlin, is setting up his own arbitrary ideal as to the function of science fiction and as to what constitutes valuable literature, arguing that SF is only valuable if it predicts future technologies. He nowhere engages woth the more sophisticated literary criticism available on the subject, for instance Darko Suvin’s work.
More disturbingly, David Laughlin then attacks our God-given imagination with his criticism of unrealism. I wonder if he similarly despises Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, Narnia, Beatrix Potter and fairy tales. He evidently does if he holds them to the same yardstick.
Finally, his comments about the gkorification of the heavens are taking Scripture put of context. The verses he cites are clearly referring to idolatry, like sun worship, and astrology. There is plenty to criticise in SF like the occult leanings we have discussed above here but David Laughlin’s article is taking cheap, ineffective sgots and is frankly offensive to anyone who values literature and God-inspired creativity.
Yes, the Answers in Genesis article by David Laughlin is terrible. As a Christian I, like you CByers, was quite outraged by it. He is trying to guilt Chrostians into believing anything “unreal” in fuction is sinful. Even a lot of Shakespeare’s plays wpuldn’t make his cut. Let’s not forget “realism” as a literary movement only emerged on the mid-nineteemth century. David Laughlin seems to want every science ficrion novel to read like a physics paper or engineering blueprint. I think David Laughlin needs to be reminded that “Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial” and “woe to those who call good evil”.
Anyeay back on topic, unfortunately the Scotsman David Lindsay is partly to blame for the occult in SF. His early SF novel, Voyage to Arcturus, with its deeply gnostic philosophy. Fortunately, the prose is so bad it is almost inrradable. Another blessing is its philosophy was so repugnant to C. S. Lewis that it spurred him on to write his Chrostian SF trilogy.
David Grusch is beginning to sound more and more deluded. He is now claiming one UFO is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a la Doctor Who’s Tardis! Grusch claims he “was told about a UAP that was in our possession that had a diameter of around forty ft, but once you went inside, it was the size of a football field. They believed that the object was somehow able to manipulate both space and time.” Grusch seems to be a very unwell young man, conflating fantasy with reality. 🙁
On the other hand, leaving Grusch aside, the former head of French intelligence, Alain Juillet, seems to be backing up the more general American claims. It could of course all just be disinformation though, given how nutty these agencies can be. He says, “We’re being visited by non-human intelligence with technology we really don’t understand and with intentions we don’t understand either” and, “Everyone wants to recover pieces to see the alloys. Every country is looking for a disruptive weapon, one the others cannot stop. A country capable of building a UAP would have a tremendous advantage, as it would render all other aerial means obsolete. The hundreds of fighter jets that the major countries have – bombers, fighter planes – would be useless; it would be colossal, a revolution.” Perhaps the days of aeroplanes are over. They seem to have been a bit of a technological dead end since they haven’t really fundamentally improved in decades. https://www.uapcheck.com/news/id/2024-01-07-exclusive-former-dgse-intelligence-chief-alain-juillet-on-ufos-these-are-systems-against-which-our-armies-are-incapable-of-responding
A French person commented online that Juillet “also participated in a documentary about the UFO phenomenon quite serious, almost austere, but with credible sources where he expressed essentially the same views. However, when the journalist asked him about the true nature of UFOs, he went further in his reflection, stating, “I believe that anyone interested in the subject should look into hermetic theories, and there they will find many answers.”
Hence, just like everyone else, Juillet points to an apparent link between UFOs and the occult. That being the case, I think I will stop exploring this topic as it is probably not something Christians should delve into too deeply.
First of all, apologies for all the typos in my previous post. There is a bit of lag when typing which makes it difficult writing on this site. I agree regarding David Grusch. That is a perfect description of the TARDIS he has inadvertently given. It leads me to think Grusch is probably schizoid. That, in turn, makes these American congressional hearings seem farcical if their star witness is unwell and is just regurgitating what he has seen in pop culture.
I also agree that much SF seems to be permeated with the occult, even the old Quatermass serials and things like Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Childhood’s End. With so many links to darkness emerging in real life too, it makes me think the Welshman, Terry Nation, creator of Blake’s Seven and the Daleks for Doctor Who, was the most prescient science fiction writer when he remarked that he could only see “terror in space” compared to Roddenberry’s utopian daydreams and George Lucas’ adventure theme park vision of space to say nothing of the fanciful daydreams of all the other space fiction pioneers.
I don’t know what to think anymore. Grusch’s claims are, on the face of it, ludicrous, as I indicated in my previous comment about his “TARDIS” claim but the Congressmen and women who had a secret briefing today, came out of it saying, “Based on what we heard many of Grusch claims have merit”. Also, Congresswoman Luna is continuing to push the idea that the alleged beings are interdimensional, not space aliens, and she has drawn links to the Nephilim of Genesis and the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Furthermore, serious news sites like the Economist and the New York Times are now giving the topic coverage while the Wall Street Journal talks about how belief in UFOs is going mainstream:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/ufos-aliens-classified-briefing.html
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/01/11/why-is-americas-congress-being-briefed-on-ufos
https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/ufo-clubs-uap-testimony-congress-bf84e885
Regarding Tucker Carlson’s comment about rumours of the truth about UFOs circulating in the Washington bubble, well, I definitely don’t move in those rarified circles but a relative of mine, now deceased, was part of the Canberra bubble decades ago. A few years ago I asked him about the conspiracy theory that the Americans were behind the Whitlam dismissal. He noted there were lots of wild and wonderful rumours like this among Canberra public servants at the time but there was a lot of paranoia running rampant in Canberra since this wasn’t that long after Harold Holt’s disappearance and all the other wild and wonderful conspiracy theories about him being kidnapped by a Chinese submarine, etc. I can imagine that Washington, having been in a state of perpetual disfunction since the George W. Bush years and Sep Eleven, would lend itself perfectly to all kinds of paranoia and wild rumours now.
That said, I definitely agree though with CByers that, as Christians, we should not delve too deeply into the UFO phenomena since it is so closely aligned to the occult. Best to leave it well alone so I’m going to stop reading about it too since IF there is any core of truth to all of this it is likely to be demonic.
This is just a guy on Reddit but he has formulated a (conspiracy) theory that provides a reason while Grusch’s nutty stories are allegedly being taken seriously. He argues it is all part of a disinformation campaign:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/195vxbv/is_this_all_just_a_massive_disinfo_campaign/
Elizabeth, yes I can see how everything from Bush’s Police State (Patriot Act), to the chaos of the Trump era, to the fact that Biden is seemingly in cognitive decline with his confused actions in various speeches and the fact he didn’t even know his Secretary of Defence had been out of action having been operated on for prostate cancer, would lead to a climate of paranoia and a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Robert, that Reddit item you posted is probably the most plausible of all the theories. They are likely just using Grusch with his ludicrous tales to cover something else while the man is really in need of a medical intervention. I also agree though that if there is any truth to UFO stories it is likely to be something satanic. There are too many parallels with other occult practices. Delving into ot is definitely best avoided to err on the side of caution.
Back on topic, George Lucas does strike me as a strange, shady charcacter. Let’s not forget it is well documented he wanted Indiana Jones to be in a romantic relationship with a child: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/indiana-jones-was-almost-a-sex-offender/
https://www.comicsbeat.com/indiana-jones-child-molester/
Another link with more analysis.
https://www.jeffcortese.com/post/jeffrey-epstein-and-the-temple-of-doom
George Lucas is mentioned in the Epstein files as well but only in the context of one of Epstein’s alleged victims denying having ever met him. I wonder what prompted the interviewer to even ask her about him though? (I’m not casting any aspersions on Mr Lucas. I am genuinely just curious.)
Also, the woke crowd over at the Guardian are taking the UFO stories seriously now too. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/14/what-happens-if-we-have-been-visited-by-aliens-lied-to-ufos-uaps-grusch-congress
I agree with the general consensus on here that the whole phenomenon sounds satanic. Maybe the nephilim return on the last days. Either way the whole thing sounds occultic.
A Nobel Prize nominee in medicine, Gary Molan from Stanford University, has waded into the UFO debate. Assuming he’s not a loon, the idea that non-human intelligent beings of some kind have been here since before civilisations arose can only mean angels/demons/nephilim from a Biblical point of view. As to whose planet it is, well God clearly gave us dominion. Anyway, make of this short interview clip what you will.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/196s3f6/professor_gary_nolan_explains_his_thoughts_on_the/
Should add, if satan is the “ruler of this world”, to what extent have his demons established a kingdom here? They have a corrupting spiritual influence and can possess people and satan can appear as an angel of light in order to deceive but to what extent can they interact with the physical world? These questions lead to a dark, disturbing place. I will focus on Christ’s light instead.
Fascinating discussion. I was looking at the Bible verses that mention signs in the heavens in the End Times. None really fit the purported UFO phenomenon except maybe Matthew 24:24. https://www.openbible.info/topics/signs_in_the_sky
The Nolan video seems to have been removed but I found an interview with him on YTube. Everything still seems to be heresay without evidence and most of the “leading figures” in this field come across as hucksters or people suffering from paranoid delusions at best. Agreed though if, by some tiny chance, there really is any non-human intelligence involved it is diabolical. The Hugh Ross video above gives the best sucvinct argument that the hypothesised phenomenon is demonic.
Nrws.com.au is the next mainstream news source picking up on the current interest in UFOs: https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/ufo-revolution-docuseries-shows-uap-flying-over-military-base-blows-up-decades-of-conspiracies-expert/news-story/dd96ab8f8da9c1b66c24533121955a63
On Reddit there is a poster who has supposedly been verified by moderators as a legitimate ex-US Navy and intelligence guy who has some limited information about UFOs. Regarding “aliens” is alleging that, “Honestly it wouldn’t be too off the mark to treat them as demons. Same difference” and with regard to contacting them via seances or meditation, “Being blunt, the way this “summoning” is currently viewed, is that you might be calling out to all creatures in the forest, but only the wolves will come running to you. I’d be cautious.” He also alleges war between the US and China is even closer than we think, that China is trying to build a completely autonomous AI defense system and that they are allegedly planning a “Pearl Harbour”-style knock out blow against America to remove them from the equation before taking Taiwan. “No one wants a US-China war. Neither us nor them. Yet they are actively preparing for Pearl Harbor 2.0 in prep for the coming Taiwan invasion and we have to do what we can to make them consider, “today’s not the best day to attack”.”Who knows if any of this is legit so don’t lose any sleep tonight but it is at the very least one more voice equating UFOs and “aliens” with the demonic.
Great discussion! Some links on Star Wars and Buddhism: http://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/star-wars/2019/12/13/21012853/the-last-jedi-luke-skywalker-buddhism-star-wars-philosophy https://writerbuddha.tumblr.com/post/655761886122475520/george-lucas-buddhist-methodist https://thecord.ca/breaking-down-the-religious-roots-of-star-wars/ https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/01/26/us/star-wars-religion/index.html https://www.artofspirit.org/matthew-bortolin-explains-the-buddhist-themes-of-star-wars/ https://www.kindamindful.com/post/kinda-force-is-with-you https://www.ipl.org/essay/The-Influence-Of-Buddhism-In-George-Lucass-PCWJN2T5Z26 https://voegelinview.com/the-birth-of-yoda-manichaeism-and-the-jedi-religion/
This crazy subject has gone a bit quiet now but I have dug up an interview with the theologian, Diana Pasulka. Don’t know if she is genuine, mad or a grifter but here are a few interesting answers from her. “There is no doubt in my mind that we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of religion, not a new religion. We already have UFO religions… The new form of religion is a decentralized belief that encompasses technology, as in the belief that these beings are technologically more advanced than us. And it utilizes myths of which we are already familiar… Additionally, this belief is supported by entertainment media. All of us alive today have been brought up with a beloved “space alien” narrative, Star Wars, Star Trek, “X-Files,” “Space Invaders.” “
“Finally, one researcher who has spent years on this topic told me that I should not go down the UFO rabbit hole, because it leads to very dark places. Based on this person’s background, I took the warning seriously. Still, I think most Americans have this idea that if and when the aliens reveal themselves to us, it can only be a glorious, life-affirming event, like a Spielberg film. How do you see it?
I didn’t come into the study of the field with a preconceived notion of whether extraterrestrials were good or bad. I didn’t believe, so the interpretations didn’t matter to me. As I went through the years interviewing and working with scientists who study this topic, I came away very disturbed, as there seems to be a lot within these experiences that one would call unsavory. And worse.”https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/ufos-and-aliens-are-probably-not-what-you-think-an-interview-with-diana-walsh-pasulka/
I think we can dismiss Pasulka too based on this post about her course.
https://t .ly/97AAU
Total New Age crank.
New article on UFOs discussed from an American Christuan conservative point of view:
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/conservatives-ufo-phenomenon-justin-naylor.html
Balanced article. Well worth a read.
Regarding George Lucas, as per the discussion above, he wanted Indiana Jones to be in a relationship with a minor and he was mentioned in connection with Epstein. He also apparently raised eyebrows among fans by personally designed the skimpy outfit worn by a teenage girl cartoon character named Ahsoka in one of his Star Wars spin offs.
Now I read this:
https://www.cougarboard.com/board/message.html?id=20256932
It is just an internet rumour by an anonymous source so I hope it isn’t real. Take it with a huge grain of salt but it is here for posterity just in case anything ever does come out about Lucas. 🙁 🙁 🙁
If, on the other hand, it is false, I hope Lucas takes legal action against whoever instigated this rumour. Lucas was the hero of my childhood. 🙁
The person on that message board who made the allegation against Lucas also said this on another occassion:
https://www.cougarboard.com/board/message.html?id=3372722
Again, just for reference. The person may well be bearing false witness. I have no idea. It grieves me though.
The ABC picked up on the story too a few months ago so the mainstream is definitely keeping an eye on this story: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/rear-vision-ufo-uap-flying-saucer-us-congress/102960830 I found that man you mentioned on Reddit. Yes, they have confirmed he is who he claims to be. There are a few other news sites mentioning the possibility of China doing a Pearl Harbour on America. In addition, he says fears of the Chinese integrated AI defence system, which includes nuclear weapons, prompted the Pentagon to issue this opinion piece: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/15/pentagon-artificial-intelligence-china-00101751
Someone asked him some more about why he thonks the hypothetical aliens are demonic and if he has any evidence to support his claims. This is what he said in response. “Direct evidence no, sorry. The only “real” direct evidence I’ve ever had are videos. The rest are all emails and conversations… I actually have heard this sentiment [about them being demonic] before from folks in the IC [intelligence community].” If he is to be believed then there is more than one person in US intelligence who thinks the hypothetical aliens are in fact demonic.
Here in the States, Fox News is running a story on it now so it has definotely gained mainstream media traction now: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/close-encounters-congressional-kind-lawmakers-struggle-grasp-alleged-interdimensional-nature-ufos
Maybe what Grusch is saying is a mixture of the real (black programs, missing money, even something alien) and fantasy (the tardis UFO). I agree with all of you though. If there is something to this alleged phenomena than it sounds like demonic activity. Or maybe it even has something to do with the strong delusion God will send to unbelievers in the last days?
I agree. I have personal reasons to think this is likely to be demonic activity.
A couple of U. S. Republican politicians who were privy to the secret conferences are convinced U. F. O.s are ‘intrrdimensional’ beings synonymous with Biblical angels and demons.
https://mol.im/a/12974671
The DM is running another story today, talking about the weight of evidence in favour of there being something, not necessarily alien, there. https://mol.im/a/12985433 Why aren’t we seeing more clear photos and videos and other tangible evidence if they are real though? I agree with the consensus here – there is probably nothing or at best secret military tech – but on the slight chance there is something that presents itself as alien or interdimensional, aspects of the alleged phenomena point to it being demonic activity.
Congresswoman Anna Luna, who is on the UFO investigation committee and part of the secret hearings, has previously argued in favour of the phenomena being caused by interdimensional beings and hastold Elon Musk to go and read the (non-canonical) Book of Enoch. Now today she has tweeted a video about the Archangel Michael, so yes she is thinking in terms of angels and demons. https://twitter.com/realannapaulina/status/1748897287865008349?s=20
yes I have no idea if there is a core sliver of truth to all of these current ufo stories or if they are just baseless rumours fueled by paranoia. This conversation has prompted me to think more about the nephilim though, based on what is said about them in the Biblical account in Genesis (I haven’t read Enoch).
It seems to me that they might be a type or foreshadowing of the antichrist as what is said about them seems like the antithesis of Christ. Unlike Christ, who is conceived when the Holy Spirit comes over Mary, these creatures are created when angels or demons marry human women. Is this intended as a pre-emptive mockery of the divine plan? While Christ lives a life of non-violence and humility these beings are described as warriors of renown. While “only God is good” and Christ is, therefore by definition, good, there is evil in the world at the time of the nephilim. The Bible talks about the wickedness of humans so it doesn’t explicitly link the nephilim to the wickedness, it indirectly implies it since only Noah and his family are righteous or faithful enough to save. None of the nephilim are counted among those saved. Also, since the violence in the world is one of the reasons for the flood and the nephilim are warriors it sounds like they are partly to blame. The nephilim and all men and beasts on the earth perish at God’s command during the flood and the antichrist perishes by Christ’s breath in Thessalonians.
On a somewhat related note, I wonder if the Great Deception mentioned by someone abovd that God allows is linked to the deceptions described in Thessalonians. “The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.” I agree with the speculation above that, if, and it is a huge if, there is any truth to the current rumours then ufos might just possibly be one of these demonic signs or deceptions.
In light of Matthew , it sounds like the angels or demons were possibly defying the Lord’s divine plan for them simply by marrying. I once thought Jesus was implying that angels are aseual in this verse but based on the nephilim story they can evidently feel lu st and procreate. The Genesis account also answers the question in the earlier comment about whether demons can interact with the physical world.
I haven’t seen this new Star Wars series but it is more overtly occult than past iterations these news report from some pentecostal organisation claims.
https://www.charismanews.com/culture/93516-star-wars-ahsoka-steeped-in-witchcraft-and-the-occult
I don’t know. If these witches are villainous it might warn people off the occult. It depends how it is all presented. Likwise, the fears about satan in Hollywood come across as pure paranoia. The part about Filoni’s wife is eye opening though.
I found some more information here.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/10/star-wars-spoon-feeds-paganism-to-kids-in-live-action-ahsoka/
I am really glad to see Christians on here have worked hard to debunk most of the charlatans who have been driving the current wave of the UFO fad.
Back on topic, I think Endor is a disturbing choice for a planet name since this is where Luke meets the ghosts of his father, Obi Wan and Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi yet this necromancy is presented as a happy reunion and not as a sin as in the story of Saul and the witch. It is a disturbing inversion of Biblical truth as is the story of a virgun birth leading to the evil of Darth Vader. I found some interesting articles on the Star Wars workdview:
https://www.epm.org/resources/2017/Dec/27/star-wars-biblical-worldview/
https://www.equip.org/articles/may-force-bewitch-evaluating-star-wars-worldview/
Even more damningly, a real life witch says she finds Star Wars is a great tool for teaching her beliefs too:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/betweentheshadows/2015/12/ten-pagan-ideas-that-i-learned-from-star-wars/
Yes!!! There is a lot of occult and eastern religion references in Star Wars. Even the name Padme: “Padme is a feminine name of Persian origin, meaning “lotus flower.” It comes from the Tibetan Buddhist chant, Om Mani Padme Hum, meaning “the jewel is in the lotus.” In Buddhism, the lotus flower is seen as a symbol of purity due to its graceful ability to grow from mud or murky waters without staining.”
Apparently the newest Star Wars show The Acolyte has jumped right onboard the LGBTQ agenda. The show’s writer is an “L” herself and formerly worked as an assistant for… Harvey Weinstein. Disney should be ashamed.
“Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content division, said in a leaked video in 2022 that she wants 50 per cent of all Disney characters to be either LGBT or from an ethnic-minority background. Disney Television Animation executive producer Latoya Raveneau has similarly said she is ‘adding queerness’ wherever she can to the shows she oversees.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/19/disney-a-billion-dollar-casualty-of-woke/
Walt must be turning in his grave.
Also, the lesbian creator of The Acolyte, Lesley Headland, and the gay actress she cast in the lead role, are actively attacking fans who dislike the show as it plunges to 14% approval rating from fans on Rotten Tomatoes. Apparently the actress has even released a rap video blasting the critics. The whole situation has become farcical.
Shmi Skywalker’s name also has meaning in Eastern religion: “Shmi. Meaning:Of Lakshmi; Goddess of wealth, prosperity, luck, and beauty. Shmi is a girl’s name of Sanskrit origin”
Show creator Leslye Headland declares The Acolyte is the “gayest” Star Wars ever.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/06/07/the-acolyte-creators-joke-about-making-gayest-star-wars-series-and-lesbian-r2-d2-angering-right-wing-critics/
Apparently Elizondo once got caught presenting fake UFO footage he filmed in his own backyard.
More recently, he presented an image of a “UFO mothership” at some conference which was quickly debunked as a chandelier:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/pentagon-whistleblower-admits-photo-fake
(He claimed he was duped himself by it.)
I think the really major story here at this stage is not UFOs but why did the US Government put a self-proclaimed occultist in charge of Guantanamo Bay?!
I see what you mean about Star Trek. “For Roddenberry, Satan is much more of a heroic figure. He represents humanity’s freedom of choice, and the only notable figure to stand against the all-powerful, controlling voice of god. His Satan wants to lift humanity up above the god fearing people they were, and allow them to grow and evolve by themselves.” https://gamerant.com/star-trek-roddenberry-representations-god-devil-q-guinan/
Calling good evil and evil good.
I remember watching an interview with Roddenberry back in the 1980s where he was evangelising his secular humanist philosophy, saying mankind was essentially good and all the great things we would achieve as we progressed in the future-All of this while he himself was a drug-addled womaniser. Us fallen, depraved humans certainly have planks in our own eyes.
Come to think of it, showing mankind’s sinfulness and depravity is something the Star Wars sequel trilogy does really well, along with the scene of “irresistible grace” when Kylo has Darth Vader’s helmet as discussed above. Leaving aside the Jedi occult element, if we look at the major characters they are all largely broken under the burden of their own sins, as Han and Leia’s marriage has ended in duvorce and they have allegedly neglected their son, Kyko is a war criminal fails to honour his parents to the point of commiting patricide, Luke his haunted by the fact he nearly murdered Kylo, Finn kills his fellow former chikd soldiers, is fiekd with vengeful thoughts towards Phasma and nearly undertakes a suicide attack on the First Order, Phasma is a war criminal and workplace bully, Rose is a hypocrite in her self-righteousness caring more for horses than people and attacking deserters, Poe is a mutineer and former drug smuggler and Rey is filled with anger, attacking elderly Luke and murdering her own grandfather after being sickened by Kylo’s murder of his father. The Emperor has murdered his own son and daughter in law and intends to wither corrupt or kill hus granddaughter and bullies Kylo via Snoke. The First Order are rebels against the new government, just as the Rebel Alliance had once revolted against the Empire. All of the factions (First Order, Resistance and the Emperor’s Final Order) destroy at least one planet, killing vast numbers of people. In this sense, the Sequel Trilogy arguably has more depth than the earlier Star Wars films as people deal with the consequences of their past mistakes and sinful shortcomings. None of the characters are morally pure.
Agreed. If the Return of the Jedi ends with a promise of Camelot, the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy instead gives us the time of the Wasteland and the Fisher King as everyone’s sins catches up with them. We even have a Mordred-like figure in Kylo Ren, in that he is Luke’s nephew who betrays him.
People reading this would be aware by now that Doctor Who had a same-sex kiss in the recent episode, “Rogue”. Blatant sodomist propaganda at aimed at children has been a hallmark of Doctor Who since its revival and it is becoming more and more overt. William Hartnell must be turning in his grave.
I was also aware that there was a lesbian subtext in a few of the very last episodes in the final season of old Doctor Who in 1989 where it is implied that Ace is same-sex attracted. The episode that most overtly hinted at this was called Survival. Well, I just discovered the writer of Survival was into the occult and the episode features occult symbolism according to the showrunner from that era. He says another episode from that final year, Battlefield, also features occult scenes: https://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv40/andrewcartmel.html
William Hartnell and Peter Davison both very strongly opposed anything of a sexual nature in Doctor Who:
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=vk4aBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA15&dq=william+hartnell+for+children&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcj4HxovSGAxVWh68BHTWQAAoQ6AF6BAgJEAM#v=onepage&q=william%20hartnell%20for%20children&f=false
How has it come to the pint where we have an openly gay Doctor, battles against transvestites, lesbian (Bill) and bisexual (Clara and Jack) companions and episodes filled with entendres and sexual jokes, all in a show purportedly aimed at children and family audiences? Jesus warned us the End Times would be like in the days of Sodom. Wesyern society is well and truly heading down that path now.
Another quote: “A fiercely moral individual in his own right, Hartnell also objected to the increasingly dark storylines, a complaint likely brought about by the draining twelve-week battle with the Daleks. The Doctor himself, it seemed, no longer felt the series was suitable for children.”
https://www.thelogbook.com/logbook/doctor-who-the-william-hartnell-years-1963-66/
They really are ruining everything he stood for aren’t they, especially when we compare this to recent quotes:
“”I feel like anyone that has a problem with someone who’s not a straight white man playing this character, you’re not really, truly a fan of the show. You’ve not been watching! Because the show is about regeneration, and the Doctor is an alien – why would they only choose to be this sort of person?”
As for what he’d say to the people accusing Doctor Who of going “woke” simply because the franchise now has a diverse lead, Gatwa told the trade, “Don’t watch. Turn off the TV. Go and touch grass, please, for G*d’s sake.””
– new Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa.
https://comicbookmovie.com/tv/bbc-america/doctor-who/doctor-who-star-ncuti-gatwa-responds-to-racist-homophobic-backlash-turn-off-the-tv-go-and-touch-grass-a210699#gs.aqa2js
This is well worth listening to (ten minutes long). The lead actress from Star Trek: Discovery comes out as a Christian despite starring in one of the most atheistic, pro-LGBTQ versions of Trek.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-0kBVaXW5w
The same man has made a good video about Doctor Who’s decline into blatant sodomist propaganda. Again, it is around ten minutes long and well worth listening to.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tca3kMwiSVI
One last comment from me. Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies has admitted he is deliberately targeting a very young audience with this season of Doctor Who, so the transgender son/daughter of Donna in “The Star Beast”, the transvestite villain in the “Devil’s Chord”, the attack on faith in “Boom” and the Doctor’s same-sex kiss in “Rogue” were all very much aimed directly at kids.
Here is the quote:
“”In coming back, I wanted to make it simpler, and I wanted to make it younger. Those two things are often not discussed – you read reactions to it and people are missing that,” he explained.
“It’s simpler and younger – and it is working. The under-16s and the 16-34 audience as well is massive. It’s not doing that well in the ratings, but it is doing phenomenally well with the younger audience that we wanted.””
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/doctor-boss-defends-shows-ratings-223000128.html
New article:
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Doctor Who Actor Libels British Reform Party Supporters As Nazis
Doctor Who has been a leftist political nightmare this year, and it continues.
FANDOM PULSE
JUL 03, 2024
12
1
The new iteration of Doctor Who has been all about extreme leftist politics. Russell T. Davies and Ncuti Gatwa have made it clear in numerous interviews that they cared little for the show’s legacy and were far more interested in promoting their agendas than producing quality science fiction. Now, an actor for the new show and a writer/producer of Doctor Who official audio dramas and books is calling the British Reform Party Nazis.
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The lead-up to this season’s Doctor Who was filled with a circus of public relations from the show’s creators. The black, gay star of Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa, gave multiple interviews painting himself as a victim by constantly complaining how hard it was for a black man to get major roles—all while being given this role for seemingly no reason other than his race. He went so far as to tell viewers who are upset about the casting choice, “Don’t watch,” and when the ratings came out as terrible, he lamented that more people weren’t watching the show.
Showrunner and lead writer Russell T. Davies has been no better. He’s admitted several times that this season would be about his experience as a gay man, and watching as The Doctor abandons his heroism in the episode “Rogue” to leave his companion stranded all so he could dance and make out with another man shows exactly how depraved his lifestyle is.
In one interview, however, Davies went mask off for his grooming agenda, as Davies and the mainstream media who interviewed him tried to brand parents who are concerned with such nearly pornographic content being put in front of children as “homophobes.” Davies replied on the topic by saying, “I think if you’re 6 years old, you don’t care — not at all, but nonetheless, as the world darkens — and I do think the world is darkening around queer rights — there is a joy and a celebration, and there’s a community.”
He followed up by saying, “Whether you’re 12 years old and just beginning to work out who you are, 62 years old and you’ve never been who you are, or 61 years old like I am and beginning to worry about where we are in society — there is a hero out there cutting his way through the universe, looking damn good in his suits and doing it with a laugh and a smile.”
When talking about six- and twelve-year-olds in the context of LGBTQ fetishes, it’s clear that he’s trying to indoctrinate children, a scary factor for Doctor Who.”
https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/doctor-who-actor-libels-british-reform
By the way, in terms of Christian (sort of) S. F., I thought of a few more potential examples for your readers. Disclaimer: I have never read either of these myself.
The first is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card which has also been adapted into a Harrison Ford film. Card is a Mormon so the same caveats apply as to the original Battlestar Galactica mentioned above as to potentially unorthodox theology in the story. Card faced the wrath of the LGBTQ crowd some years ago who tried to cancel him for his anti-homo stance. Apparently the book and film deal with a lot of ethical issues though including war crimes, child soldiers and peacemaking versus warmongering.
The second book is Children of Men by P. D. James. She was an Anglo-Catholic so the same caveat about unorthodox theology applies but it might be worth reading too in a world starved of Christian SF where we beggars can’t be choosers.
By the way, if you can ignore the annoying cartoon fox woman, this video is exposing the latest corporate woke propaganda from BRIDGE, a business consortium focused on pushing ideological change in culture:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FNwyYXXU_Ig
About BRIDGE:
https://wearebridge.com/partners
Proves woke-ness really is agenda-driven by big business and not just a conspiracy theory.
There’s a list of Christian sci fi films here. If we ignore the Left Behind stories with their dubious theology there might be some gems here:
https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/10-groundbreaking-christian-science-fiction-films.html
Here’s an articles about Christianity and sci fi:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-science-fiction-found-religion
To quote from the latter on Star Wars The Phantom Menave.
“It’s as though Lucas, instinctively realizing the intellectual poverty of the new age, gave it up, exchanged it for something resembling science, and then turned, elsewhere in the script, to a far older, more powerful story… That story, though, he inverted. Anakin will be not the world’s savior but its destroyer, more Antichrist than Christ.”
@Fozzie, this is interesting. The reviewer on that Christian film site says he knew Gene Roddenberry personally.
“Gene Roddenberry and I, Ted Baehr, partnered on a project together. Although he began to drift after his divorce and remarriage, his Christian upbringing had a profound influence on the first STAR TREK television series. The good guys were good, and the bad guys were bad. Gene said the Enterprise was like wagon train in the sky. These were families exploring in space, not just a military outfit. The later STAR TREK programs became more earthy, eclectic and less focused on eternal biblical values.”
https://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movies/star-trek.html
I will check out somecof the films on that list they provide, thanks. I know the Christian film industry is notorious for its preachy, didactic scripts, hammy acting and cheesy productions but if we support it things will hopefully tmprove and mature and, as you say, there might even be a hidden gem or two on that list.
While George Lucas invented “The Force” for a generation without spirituality, it was his then-wife and film-making collaborator, Marcia Lucas, who really developed it. In a documentary I was watching, Marcia says she was raised as a Christian Scientist and the spirituality of The Force really resonated with her because of her upbringing in this sect. She saw a lot of parallels between The Force and Christian Science belief. The way she described Christian Science, it sounds somewhat Manichaean with a rejection of the material body in favour of the spiritual.
She also came up with the idea of force ghosts and the necromancy present in the series.
Here is an article about the documentary I saw.
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/marcia-lucas-killed-obi-wan-saved-star-wars
Good article about George Lucas from a Christian perspective:
“Additionally, Luke Skywalker’s decision to put down his light saber and attempt to redeem Darth Vader through loving sacrifice rather than destroy him via violence certainly has echoes of Gethsemane and Calvary. Still, those of us who both bow to Christ as savior and appreciate Star Wars should not try to cram the film’s spirituality into an exclusively Christian box. It just won’t fit.
Lucas simply does not have the theological clarity of a Lewis or Tolkien, but the message of Star Wars can still serve as a useful cultural bridge to theism, and that was very much by design. “I’m telling an old myth in a new way,” Lucas explained to Bill Moyers in 1999. He “didn’t want to invent a new religion” or displace the Bible and other religious texts but instead saw “the whole point” as creating “a tool that can be used to make old stories be new and relate to younger people.” Worried that the culture was losing its moorings, the self-described “son of a small-town businessman” who into the 1990s characterized himself as “very conservative, always have been” wanted to get people thinking and asking questions about the divine, as well as themes like friendship and loyalty. The brain behind Star Wars once summarized his goal this way:
Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God, and that there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side.”
Also:
“The usually media-shy and tight lipped Lucas has openly professed a belief in God. Even if that deity is not exactly the God of the Bible — “all the religions,” he says, “are true, they just see a different part of the elephant” — this level of theistic faith is still a rarity in Hollywood. Lucas told biographer Dale Pollock decades ago that he thinks about what will happen when he dies, worrying that he will come face to face with God and hear, “You’ve had your chance and you blew it. Get out.”
I, for one, pray that he does not blow it but can follow the path of C.S. Lewis, another student of mythology who journeyed through theism before he came to know Christianity as “a myth which is also a fact.” Even if he does not, by creating the world of Star Wars, Lucas has at least helped to keep the Great Conversation alive for many, and that alone is no small accomplishment. George Lucas, may the Force (and the Lord) be with you.”
https://stream.org/rediscovering-divine-vision-george-lucas/
Back on the topic of UFOs, you would have heard about the latest congressional UFO hearing by now. It is being taken seriously by the mainstream media worldwide so maybe there is something to this. Here is an Australian news report.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/us-congress-hears-claims-of-secret-uap-crash-programs-descriptions-of-alien-craft/news-story/adafa5b8c00a4e63ff283746182c93de
However, one of those called to testify, Luis Elizondo, is another very shady figure, to put it mildly, like those discussed above. He is a former CIA counterintelligence agent and was the person in charge of Guantanamo Bay when Afghans and Iraqis, were held and tortured there. He also has a book to sell. He recently published a work on UFOs. In it, Elizondo claims to be able to perform occult practices like remote viewing.
There is a follow up Senate hearing next week.
It gets even worse. Elizondo was allegedly nicknamed “the Czar of Torture” at Guantanamo Bay. Another of people that gave testimony at Congress, Rear-Admiral Tim Gallaudet, believes his daughter is a psychic medium:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/us-congress-will-hold-another-ufo-hearing-this-week-heres-how-to-watch
The Gallaudet family also believes their home is infested with poltergeists:
https://x.com/MiddleOfMayhem/status/1795866760098492739
Gallaudet was formerly the acting-secretary of NOAA.
How have the Americans let all these occultists and grifters into senior positions of responsibility? Why is Congress taking their testimonies on UFOs seriously? Any lawyer would rip them to shreds in seconds. Are most Congressmen and women really this gullible, wasting US taxpayers’ time and money listening to these cranks? People may complain about Trump’s bizarre picks for public office but the US has clearly been putting nutters in positions of major responsibility for far longer than his political career.
This article is interesting. It looks at the historical links between science and the occult, the close links between science fiction and occult fiction, UFOs, theosophy amd Jung.
A very sordid mix. 🙁
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cole_03_20/
As a fan of Star Wars and other SF films, this is enough to put me off the genre. 🙁 By the way, tye US is holding another UFO hearing tomorrow. This time it will be in the Senate, rather than the Congress. I wonder if their witnesses will be any more reliable than the last batch? 🙁 It is frightening that people like Elizondo and Gallaudet reached such high rank and held such power, especially in a self-proclaimed Christian nation like America.
I found an academic paper on the relationship between science fiction and the occult:
https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/45820/1/Roukema%2520%25E2%2580%2594%2520Early%2520SF%2520and%2520Occultism%25E2%2580%2594Final.pdf
“This dissertation examines engagements between early science fiction (SF) and the body of modern esoteric theories and practices often described as ‘occultism’. SF is often seen as an imaginative extension of secular, empiricist science — the cultural form furthest from magic and occult logic — but this research shows that science fiction shares many of the motivations and perspectives of occultism. It argues that SF developed some of its central tropes and stylistics from its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century engagement with magical, mesmerist,
Spiritualist, and Theosophical currents, particularly their attempts to legitimate the paranormal and supernatural by appealing to scientific discourse, methodology, and social authority. It also examines a reciprocal phenomenon of influence in which SF’s tropes, themes, and imagined worlds have been enfolded into occult traditions and other alternative religious movements.
Finally, this dissertation assesses how SF and occultism have been conjointly deployed to defend and communicate marginal scientific theories and religious systems.
This project develops a framework for analysing these intersections. It starts with case studies of three authors — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, and Marie Corelli — each of whom generated SF from earnest communication and exploration of occult scientific hypotheses in fiction. Each case study illustrates areas of intersection in which occultism and SF influenced each other’s development, including a mutual affectation of scientific verisimilitude,
naturalisation of the supernatural, a preference for hypothesis over fact, and projection of unknown forces and powers into the future.
The final chapter expands scope to consider the network of occult and science fictional engagement from 1860 to 1926, illustrating further areas of intersection including an instinct for re-enchantment and a mediation of binaries constructed along the lines of science versus religion.
Finally, it examines the esoteric heritage of several key tropes of science fiction: psionic powers, space exploration, and the extra-terrestrial.”
I’m about two-thirds of the way through that academic article and it is very interesting indeed.
The arguments make sense. Psychic powers, like mental telepathy, are normally considered occultic but when a character like Spock (via “mind-meld”) or Troi from Star Trek or Cally from Blake’s Seven exhibit such powers, it is presented as natural, not supernatural, due to their alien biology. Pseudoscience is used to frame what is essentially the occult in a way to make it palatable. It is interesting they specifically mention the long history of astral projection in SF too, given the that it has aggrieved people on here from its inclusion in the Last Jedi.
The part about vril is interesting too. Bulwer-Lytton invented it for one of his novels, early SF fans became obsessed by it yo the point that the beef stock, Bovril, was even named after it and then it was adopted by theosophy and ariosophy groups as if it were a real thing, so it is a two-way street with SF ideas feedong back into the occult. Ut seems more than a little reminiscent of how people sometimes declare their religion is Jedi on the census. Dismissing the people saying it for a lark, it shows how the ideas still feed back into the real world.
On that note, digging a little further this morning, I found a self-proclaimed with who wrote an article on Patheos, talking about how Star Trek helped her find her religious direction. To quote her:
“I set out to find the earthly philosophies which mirrored the fictions of Star Trek. I found them in neo-paganism, quantum physics, and the Western Esoteric Philosophies of Occultism. Thus, my religion of Hermetic Witchcraft was forged.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/witchonfire/2020/08/star-trek-witchcraft-prime-directive/
I also just discovered Roddenberry was friends with L. Ron Hubbard and allegedly boasted “that he, too, could have started his own religion if he wanted to” and that “Scientology is supposed to have been the result of a bar bet between Hubbard and Robert Heinlein. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is supposed to have been his contribution. (I heard this myself back in the mid 90s from several people who were big in the Los Angeles SF scene.)
Stranger did actually spawn its own religion, the Church of All Worlds. The Church was first formed in 1961 as a combination of Earth Mother paganism, SF, and Maslowian self-actualization.
The Church published a magazine called “Green Egg,”… “Green Egg” was one of the most significant publications of the Neo-Paganism movement.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4svbjj/til_the_original_creator_of_star_trek_gene/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_All_Worlds
I knew on the past that some SF writers, like Franz Leiber, were occultists but I had no idea how widespread the weirdness was. Learning all off this is putting me right off science fiction and I’ve been a lifelong fan of Star Wars, Blake’s 7 and Battlestar Galactica. 🙁 🙁 🙁
There is also a good discussion here on how New Age philosophy influenced Star Trek and how it ties back to the occultism in early science fiction:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/6ju2ep/lifeforces_telepathy_and_star_treks_grandfathered/
Gene Roddenberry wrote a pilot for an occult-themed show called Spectre at one stage:
https://trekmovie.com/2016/12/01/forgotten-roddenberry-spectre/
By the way, from that academic paper, this description of “ether” from occultism sounds just like The Force in the Last Jedi:
“Occultists joined physicists like Lodge and Crookes in theorising the ether as ‘an
all-pervading, universal, invisible substance, linking all the universe…”
I thought this quote was striking too:
“…we should not overlook the continuing, fertile relationship between science fictional and occultist methods of understanding, describing, and encountering the world. From the earliest conceptions of a fusion of science and fiction, magic and religion have nested comfortably in the SF mode — sometimes heavily disguised, like Star Trek replicators
transmuting base matter into exotic alien cocktails — at other times more transparent, as with the astral travel, telepathy, spirit aliens, and mediumship that populate early science fiction.”
Astral travel, telepathy, spirit aliens (Force ghosts) and mediumship (talking to aforesaid ghosts) also all populate Star Wars films today. It is eyeopening to see just how occultic Star Wars really is 🙁 and how these ideas have been in sci fi since the very beginning. The one exception in early sci fi I can think of is Jules Verne – so far as I know, none of his fantastic voyage stories have any of these elements. No more Star Wars for me then.
I found an interesting discussion about one of the Star Trek spin-offs, “Star Trek: Voyager”.
“… There are certainly aspects of this [liberal Californian] attitude to be found in Voyager, particularly due to the influence of creator and early showrunner Michael Piller. Like Chris Carter on The X-Files, Piller had a very strong interest in New Age philosophy. This attitude shone through in the character of Chakotay, a Native Americna character with a very hazy cultural background who frequently served as a gateway to plots about New Age nonsense like The Cloud or Tattoo. Even beyond Chakotay, Piller infused the series with a New Age sensibility, as demonstrated by episodes like Sacred Ground.”
https://them0vieblog.com/2017/09/12/trump-trek-how-star-trek-voyager-is-perfectly-trumpian-star-trek/
On a more positive note, I was reading a French Protestant theologian’s thoughts on Star Wars.
He likens the prequel trilogy to the Old Testament where Anakin is the Adam figure who falls into sin.
Luke is the new man, like Jesus, who undoes the failings of the old Adam and brings him to repentance.
The Sequel Trilogy, especially tye Last Jedi, he sees to be like the Reformation. Luke realises that there is no longer a need for a special caste of Jedi priests and the Force is available for all to access.
He doesn’t touch on the occult elements of the films we have been discussing here.
This is a very thoughtful article on Star Trek.
https://isaacyoung.substack.com/p/star-trek-a-leftwing-dream-in-a-rightwing
A short extract:
“First contact is an idea that you’ll find across the length and breadth of Sci-Fi. It’s treated often as a pseudo-religious awakening, necessary for mankind to realize our true potential. In fact, I would argue it is religious. It’s the atheist equivalent of the eschaton, the end of mankind’s ignorance and introduction into the stars.
Personally, I have always been frustrated that the opposite, the revelation of being totally alone, is never similarly explored. I know the reason why. There’s not much you can do with that idea beyond its shock value, especially if you embrace materialist presuppositions. And more importantly, if you remove the alien, how else are you going to lecture humanity about your political opinions?…
But most media on first contact is not interested in exploring the possibility of alien life. It’s about putting forward political/ideological ideas and using the alien as a vehicle for those concepts. You’ll find a disturbing trend that the aliens in these movies suspiciously have the same opinions as your average Leftist with just a dash of transhumanism. And I would say this isn’t too sinister on the face of it. It’s extremely difficult to grasp at what an other could look like. We have no real reference point for what the alien might be except what we can find on Earth. This is why whenever we conceive of the alien, it’s always merely a reflection of humanity at the end of the day. And if you hold certain political opinions you view as superior, well, it’s natural what happens next. But to use the alien as a vehicle for your politics is such a short-sighted use of the concept. It betrays a lack of imagination, and in Star Trek’s case, it also betrays a lack of wisdom.
There’s so much about first contact that makes it the ideal Leftist Founding Myth. It immediately undermines traditional thinking of mankind’s primacy in the creation, invalidating common Western piety. It allows the Left to attack any culture or belief that asserts itself as “correct” and not merely some cosmic accident. It lets the Left appeal to the closest thing they have for a God-replacement—one whose opinions will never veer too dangerously from their own. And they can use it to reinforce whatever activism they happen to be doing that day… It’s the easiest thing in the world to have a fake alien regurgitating your beliefs while lording its superiority over mankind. First contact is so perfect for the Left it became the real-life wet dream of many atheists. They just assumed fact would follow their fiction.
The only problem? It certainly won’t.
Star Trek’s (and the Left’s) conceit is that they believe the fundamental problem with mankind is a lack of their own example. Religion just needs to be deboonked with facts and logic, men need to learn their privilege, and we need to teach queer studies to kindergartners or else they’ll grow up sexual deviants. They think that if mankind were only shown “their way”, in essence, just another social and moral lens, we would immediately better ourselves. However, if I were to sit down and teach all the children in the world about aliens, I doubt many people would think mankind would be any better off.
Or maybe they would. The Left believe human nature is entirely malleable, that if they did have access to all the children of the world, they could, with the right indoctrination, solve the problem of moral evil. And let’s be honest, exterminating a few choice demographics to boot.
The fascinating thing is the continual moving of the goalposts on the part of the Left. When you look at Star Trek as a religious text—and I truly do believe it’s a religious text—it’s interesting that it leans on this pseudo-religious epiphany that seems to do all the heavy lifting. You would think the Left’s vision would have man achieve the utopia on our own, with liberalism and worldwide democracy and all that. But to do so would mean they would have to outline the specific political and religious answers such a vision would require. They would actually have to solve the question of how to get to utopia. Instead, the story excuses itself with some plausible deniability, after all, we don’t really know what would happen if we were to meet aliens. And that’s how they keep the suspension of disbelief intact.
I see this as the Left coping with the fact, on some unconscious level, that Man can’t do it on his own. He needs a religious revelation to bring about the utopia. It’s not enough to engineer the correct political order. They need their philosophy to spring from the foundations of the cosmos itself. They need to have the alien—their higher power—imposing on mankind. And that is how the Left see themselves—as the aliens in the story. They believe they’re fundamentally distinct from humanity, able to swap sexes and even species at a whim. They believe themselves wholly detached from mankind. Alone, they are the ones capable of emphasizing with the bugs and demons because those things too are separate from humanity. And because that’s not true, they simply wish it into existence with their fiction.
I think the Left are the only group in history that have ever staked their Founding Myth on a completely hypothetical future event. Sure, they have the Post-WW2 consensus, but that’s not the Founding Myth they want. They want aliens coming down in their spaceships and owning the chuds. They want to be the aliens. The Left believe utopia is always somewhere out there, in the murky mists of the future. How do we get there? Who knows. But if only we follow their prescribed politics, the vague plan, we’ll get there one day. And if we’re lucky, maybe the Left will allow us ignorant savages to grovel at their feet for being wrong.”
Another extract:
” We get at the contradiction of an egalitarian society producing aristocrats, an environmentalist culture founded on great works of industry, a hierarchical ethic in a civilization that proclaims personal freedom, a people who are always embracing new ideas yet never change, a race of explorers who want the whole galaxy to look the same, and I think it’s most glaring absurdity: pacifistic men who are masters of war.
Star Trek is a story about men who scorn violence and then regularly turn to deploy the most destructive weapons ever devised by mankind.
Now this is not saying the characters of Star Trek are evil for doing so, but it gets at the most fundamental and glaring inconsistency in the franchise. We’re supposed to view the violence of the past as backward, primitive. But it’s also totally justified when we do it. Because when we do it, it’s for the right reasons, and it’s to stop the bad people. Violence is okay when we do it because we’re the only ones in history who are smart enough to wield it properly for a good end….
Star Trek treats cleverness as the pinnacle of all virtues, raw intellect over strength. It wants itself to be so impossibly advanced, so far ahead, that we can’t possibly question it because it’s beyond our comprehension to do so. It wants you to think that it is through intellect that all other virtues are cultivated, and if only we can put aside all the things Star Trek doesn’t like about humanity, then we can have utopia.
And here we get to another conceit of Star Trek. The franchise sees intellect not as a Redemptive Principle for a particular problem; it sees intellect as a Salvific Principle for all mankind. It sees our IQ as solving all problems everywhere, establishing a world without sin (or at least progressing to one). Our intellects are the justification of our past evils, all a temporary embarrassment on our climb to ascend into a higher state of existence.
Christians get a lot of derision for the Problem of Evil. How could an Omnibenevolent God allow a fallen world? But at least the Christians don’t then turn around and say “the whole meaning of the world, the basis of history, the culmination of our species, the justification for every evil and atrocity and torture, is a future society with a few standard deviations higher on the IQ bell curve.
Q: By nature, all humans are ignorant, savage, and evil.”
Picard: “No, we’re not! We’ve changed! We’re smarter now!”
And that’s the game. An unfair accusation followed up by an absurdly dishonest answer. The accusation is unfair not because it charges humanity with being fallen, but that it’s a critique from nowhere. We the audience know Q is judging humanity through an atheistic/humanist lens, but that’s because we know what Star Trek wants us to think.”
Found a bit more on another site.
https://jimmyakin.com/2005/05/that_next_time_.html
“… meant to deflect charges that the episode is anti-Christian, because the truth is that Landru is a cipher for Jesus, the lawgivers are ciphers for priests, and the “Body” is a cipher for the Church, which Roddenberry (who wrote this episode) mocks by presenting us with a repressed, totalitarian, society of smiling fuddy-duddy zombies.
This was not the only time Roddenberry let his anti-Christian streak show. Multiple episodes (and the first Star Trek movie) are all based on the idea of going into space and symbolically finding God and finding out that he’s a fraud, or an alien, or a child, or a computer, or insane, or some combination of these. The two twin themes Roddenberry felt drawn to were “God is unworthy of worship” (for one reason or another) and “There ain’t no paradise except the Federation” (all other paradaisical societies having some horrible hidden flaw).
Paramount didn’t let Roddenberry go whole hog on these themes, so he had to mask them (with things like Landru), but they’re there.
Things got worse when Roddenberry got to do Next Gen, in which he had far fewer shackles on his secular humanism compared to what he was allowed to put on television in the 1960s. Not only were the episodes in which Picard gleefully proclaimed that humans are merely electro-chemical machines, there was also the awful “Who Watches The Watchers” episode in which the ship finds a planet of primitive proto-Vulcans and accidentally starts a religion among them, leading to a prime-directive violation in order to stamp it out. Secular humanism is in full force in this episode, and religion is treated very disrespectfully…
Roddenberry died, and afterward the franchise passed into other hands. These folks, whatever their flaws, tried to undo some of the conceptual damage that Roddenberry had done and loosened the ideological straightjacket into which he had put certain elements of the show.
The franchise then got more friendly toward religion. In fact, the next two series–Deep Space 9 and Voyager–both contain episodes that are extensively devoted to and positive about religious themes….
The current series–Star Trek Enterprise–has also touched on religion in non-dismissive ways.
In a first season episode the alien Dr. Phlox comments positively about his study of Earth religions, mentioning in particular his visit to India to learn about Hinduism and his attending Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
This season we got to see the Vulcan equivalent of the Reformation take place (though the differences are enough that there is no Catholic-bashing message here; it’s just a Reformation-like event on another planet), and afterwards the Vulcan first officer T’Pol is shown spending a lot of time reading a book that is explicitly referred to on screen as a “Vulcan ‘Bible.’”
Who’da thought we’d see a character doing the sci-fi equivalent of Bible study on Star Trek?”
I might check Star Trek Enterprise out.
Also from the page’s comments section:
“Thomas says:
May 9, 2005 at 2:15 pm
The book on TOS co-written by producers Robert Justman and Herb Solow mentions (if memory serves) that Roddenberry was an angry lapsed Catholic and recalls how he spoke ill of the Blessed Sacrament to them. Though they did not attempt explicitly to draw the connection, it seemed abundantly clear that his problem with the Church was more related to the teachings about chastity than anything else.
Brian Day says:
May 9, 2005 at 2:24 pm
I always liked the episode titled “Sacred Ground” from ST:V, season 3.
Janeway had to explore her “spritual” side to solve a problem. By no means a great episode, but I remember it as being the first one that I remember as being overtly positive to spirituality/religion.”
This proto-science fiction by Johannes Kepler has occult elements too so, yes, the genres were intertwined from the beginning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somnium_(novel)
🙁
Also, I read some “Star Trek: Enterprise” season one scripts last night and found them enjoyable. Nothing about a “Vulcan Reformation” so far but the show seems to have been far less overtly hostile to religion than other Trek spin-offs. When asked about his religious views in one script, the captain of the Enterprise says he is “open-minded” about religion. The ship’s doctor (an alien) indicates he has been exploring Earth religions during his stay on the planet, including Buddhism and Roman Catholicism.
It is better written from a dramatic point of view than other Treks as well as it focuses more on narrative and less on philosophical ideas and there are far fewer weird or childish elements then in other Star Trek shows and also an absence of overt-left wing political preachiness. Apparently Trekkies didn’t like the show and it flopped at the time but I think it is a much more accessible and “normal” Trek show for mainstream audiences who want a solidly-written space exploration adventure series without all the weird elements normally associated with the Star Trek cult. I am guessing this is what the writers were aiming for in order to broaden the franchise’s appeal but it seems like they only succeeded in alienating (no pun intended) their existing niche audience of Trek fanatics.
There are no occult elements at all so far, not even telepathy from the Vulcsn. The only things that some Christians may dislike are references to evolution and one discussion about whether humans will one day mate with aliens.
For whatever it is worth, I read some more Enterprise series one scripts.
In one episode, when a character thinks he and a colleague are going to die, he concludes a log entry with, “May God have mercy on our souls.” That is only a little thing but given how stridently secular humanist Trek can be, it felt like a significant step forward.
Another episode has the crew visit a Vulcan monastery. At the end of the episode we learn the monks are corrupt (but their actual religion is in no way invalidated by this revelation) so this is probably a step towards the “Vulcan Reformation” storyline mentioned in the article above.
I have also encountered a few episodes featuring telepathy but that is the only occult element so far. There are a few corny episodes but overall it is surprisingly strong and consistent for a Trek series. Overall I’d recommend it to Christians so far. It is a big improvement on the preceding Star Trek shows from a Christian perspective. Hopefully the later seasons will maintain this good standard.
Some people will be aware that a NASA-sponsored podcast, “Beyond Conventional Physics Episode 69”, went viral a few days ago with all kinds of weird and wonderful claims about UFOs, zero-point energy, cold fusion and the alleged presence of “trillions” of alien-engineered objects on earth.
Unfortunately, the co-host of the podcast, Hal Puthoff, is a pseudoscientist, former Scientologust, Uri Geller supporter and occultist/paranormal researcher:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff
The fact that NASA sponsors this kind of material lends a lot more credence to the conjecture in the discussion above that there is something very wrong – antichrist even – about that organisation’s culture.
I would have thought an organisation like NASA would want to distance itself as much as possible between itself and someone like Puthoff in order to maintain its credibility. It is strange.
Meanwhile, here is a Southern Baptist’s timely reminder of the Tower of Babel story and a warning to NASA not to go down that hubristic path.
https://davidschrock.com/2008/05/31/nasa-and-the-spirit-of-babel/
This counterbalances my previous comments insofar as a lot of Christians worked at NASA, at least in the Space Race era but
“religious faith was rarely an inspiration for the project of spaceflight; it was salient mostly as a source of validation….
The space program, for all of the Christians in its midst, for all of its evocations of transcendence, was a product primarily of profane, sometimes prosaic, ambition…. It was mostly left to those outside the program, if they so wished, to reflect on the relation between exploration of the cosmos and cosmological tradition, to judge whether the space age would be friendly to faith.
To the frustration of observers like Norman Mailer, who couldn’t understand how so transcendent an ambition inspired such mundane reflection from its participants, NASA was filled with engineers. And their model was “not so much the monks of St. Benedict, conceiving their labor to be a prayer to God, but the Zen Buddhist with his quiet, careful reveries: the engineer, utterly absorbed in his machine and in the rational, ordered process by which he will make it work.” So Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra evaded questions about religion at a 1959 press conference: “I think I should like to dwell more on the faith in what we have called the machine age. All of us have faith in mechanical objects.” Even a practicing Presbyterian like Buzz Aldrin, who famously asked his pastor to provide him communion elements for the moon landing, had “elements of his personality that conformed more to common typologies of the engineer…. Aldrin immersed himself in the theoretical and technical content of his work and achieved a measure of genuine mastery.”
To the extent that Oliver’s subjects were religious, faith seemed to have little to do either with each man’s choice of career or “how, day to day, that man went about his work.” But that is not to say that Christianity was unimportant. On the contrary, many NASA employees and their families found church participation to be essential. Christianity did not necessarily give them motivation or meaning for their work, but it did provide the social cohesion and moral support of religious community.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/10/religious-history-nasa/
There is also a “praise club” for Christians at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre:
https://www.nasa.gov/starport/jsc-praise-and-worship-club/
I still maintain that it definitely seems like there is a subculture of New Age and occultist oddballs at NASA based on the evidence myself and others have cited above. I wonder how the Christians at the organisation feel about interacting with the fringe thinkers there. I personally would find it challenging. I guess I lack the people skills.
For whatever it is worth, I’ve read a lot more Star Tek: Enterprise scripts and I am now about half way through season three. Here are just a few very brief thoughts.
While season one was the most enjoyable Star Trek I’ve ever encountered, there is a big dip in quality in Season Two. There were quite a few tired old ideas recycled from other Star Trek series and the ham-fisted allegories are back, the most heavy-handed being an episode called “Stigma” which was a thinly-veiled discussion of homosexuality and HIV.
There was a more interesting one however about an alien species with a third gender. An Enterprise crewman attempts to liberate a member of the third gender through educating it only to be rebuked for interfering in another culture and his attempt goes disastrously wrong so that was quite a subversive ending.
An increasing number of episodes have telepathy as a theme but that is the only “occult” element of the series. Overall, there are still a number of gems among the weaker episodes.
There is a complete shift of focus in season three. A sudden, devastating attack on earth by an alien species leads to the Enterprise being refitted as a warship and a battalion of space marines being added to the crew as the ship goes to hint down the enemy in a season-long arc that is a thinly veiled metaphor for Sep 11.
I was worried the series was going to turn into a militaristic, excessively patriotic, pro-American show at this pont and there are definitely elements of that but it in fact there are also strong elements of a horror as the Enterprise is searching for the aliens’ homeworld in an area of space where the normal laws of physics don’t exist.
Perhaps this is meant to be a metaphor for an America turned upside down by Sep 11 and the Patriot Act and the disorientation that followed.
As a result, the episodes in season three I’ve read thus far are as much about coping with the disturbing and dangerous environment as they are about hunting down the enemies so it is nowhere near as militaristic as it might have bern. There are scenes of torture and threatened torture though which are not examined from an ethical or philosophical viewpoint but are just assumed to be a necessity which is a disappointment coming from Star Trek.
All of these changes in tone make it seem like a series that was searching for an identity in a rapidly changing America post-Sep 11 and might also account for the show’s ultimate failure. It is a shame because the foundation established in season one showed a great deal of promise for bringing Star Trek into the mainstream and establishing Enterpruse as a family-friendly sci fi series.
Koo Stark claims George Lucas was a Quaker at the time he made Star Wars. I’ve never heard anyone make that claim before, so I don’t know if her recollection is accurate:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/prince-andrews-ex-koo-stark-sues-star-wars-producers-for-421-million/FRG67OLSEJEBFGN3NSDADHBCCY/
It would be ironic if a Quaker made a movie about space warfare. Also Lucas claimed that the original Star Wars films were, in part, intended to criticise the Nixon Administration. Nixon came from a Quaker family himself so interesting if true.
Saw something else that compared Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy to Christ – she can perform healing miracles with her touch, resurrect the dead, is resurrected from the dead herself and performs a symbolic sign of the cross (crossing her lightsabres when defeating the Emperor). Christ is the light of the world = Rey is a ray of light?
There is an rxhibition on in Los Angeles about the overlap between the occult, sci. fi. and queer communities: ☹☹☹
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/sci-fi-magick-queer-la-one-archives-2568509
““While the exhibition is physically divided into ‘occult’ and ‘sci-fi’ rooms, we wanted to emphasize that the figures involved in these communities were deeply intertwined and inspired each other,” the curators told me in a joint interview over email, “whether that is directly within their shared social networks, or indirectly through the production and circulation of films, magazines, photographs, and artworks.””
I found a bit more:
https://www.jwfan.com/forums/index.php?/topic/35430-essay-the-influences-of-the-star-wars-series-film-and-score/
“Gary Jenkins’ biography of Lucas says he “read Grimms’ fairytales and CS Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, JRR Tolkien, Frazer’s Golden Bough. He also read Greek, Islamic and Indian Mythology and the works of modern mythologists like Campbell and Castaneda.” Many of these claims are dubious at best. While sketching Episode I, Lucas had on his shelf several books loosely on the subject of Folklore: The Gnostic Gospels (1981 edition), Peasant Customs and Save Myths (1968), Landscape and Memory, Bullfinch’s Mythology, The Study of Folklore (1965), Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1958, last volume), but they’re not a discernable influence on his film.
Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power
Before the third draft, Lucas read some works by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, which led him to more mystical writings by Khalil Jibran and Carlos Castaneda’s Road to Ixtlan and Tales of Power. It is exactly around this time that Lucas started exaggerating his academic interest in anthropology – he merely took a couple of sociology classes in community college – not unlike Castaneda, who submitted his novels as his anthropology thesis and dissertation.
Castaneda’s hermit, Don Juan, is an antecedent to the more hermit-like Yoda (who quotes Don Juan verbatim) on Dagobah, and perhaps the idea that Luke simply leap down the chasm and be miraculously rescued in The Empire Strikes Back is indebted to Tales of Power, in which Castaneda makes a similar death-defying leap only to end-up in a separate reality. In truth, however, the influence of Castaneda is mostly as a 1970s New Age “text”: The Force, inasmuch as its a superpower in the style of the Cosmic All, is also equated with 1970s spiritualism, a worldview that Lucas would pastiche increasingly in the prequel trilogy.”
More:
https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/6-dune-the-hermetic-order-of-the-golden-dawn-and-occult-eugenics
“… its interesting to consider how this Golden Dawn meme of occult eugenics influenced later fantasy fiction, like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, Frank Herbert’s Dune, George Lucas’ Star Wars, or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, all of which feature a world-saving avatar who has been magically bred to save the world (and who often has to fight off a lodge of black magicians to achieve their world-saving goal). Herbert’s idea of the Bene Gesserit, a magic order of priestesses who work over centuries to match families and breed a superbeing, seems to owe a lot to the ideas we find in the followers of the Golden Dawn and its off-shoots.”
Also there is a new UFO documentary out that is supposedly making waves.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/12/age-of-disclosure-ufo-documentary
From what I can gather, it mainly consists of claims by the same people discredited in the discussion above like Elizondo and Gallaudet. Of course, they provide no proof for their claims.
In stark contrast to all of this occult stuff, in addition to the original Battlestar Galactica and Ender’s Game, a series of books/films called the Maze Runner trilogy, which is apparently extremely popular with young folks, was also written by a member of the LDS, so perhaps Mormons do write the most wholesome science fiction!
More on Roddenberry and the Lab 9 group:
https://allpropastors.org/star-trek-and-the-nine/
So many strange, evil people dabbling in the occult. ☹
I think I’ll stop digging into these sci. fi. figures here. Good Christian men would not be messing around with occult groups like Roddenberry, or be reading occult books like Lucas, and allow these to influence their output. It is all bad news. ☹
Another NASA oddball was Dr Norman Bergrun who thought alien spaceships were hiding in the rings of Saturn:
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/alien-ships-near-saturn-exnasa-scientist-claims-of-their-existence/news-story/5eee94fa965d2f6c27e47f2ab4ea97fe
Whereas before NASA had covert links with the military, Trump has signed a new executive order changing its primary purpose to intelligence gathering. Part of the reason for this is to hinder collective wage bargaining by employees but it seems like its unofficial role hjas just become a lot more overt too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250828201211/https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/further-exclusions-from-the-federal-labor-management-relations-program/
For whatever it is worth, this guy has just published an hour long video summarising all of the NASA and Soviet space program conspiracy theories. It is a mixture of proven, factual information (like Jack Parson’s occult dabblings and Operation Paperclip bringing Nazi rocket scientists to the USA) and more wild-eyed speculation (esoteric rituals at rocket launches, Townsend-Brown’s supposed anti-gravity and time travel experiments, UFOs, etc). Taken with a huge grain of salt it is good overview.
At a minimum we can say some space pioneers dabbled in the occult and this should be troubling for Christians:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zjpvfDFc4fg
More oddballs in the space/aeronautics field (it certainly seems to be rife with them!):
“A statement attributed to one of the founding fathers of astronautics and rocketry, Hermann Oberth, is thought-provoking: “We cannot take the credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone. We have been helped.”
When asked by an interviewer: “By whom?” Dr Oberth’s reply was a frank: “The people of other worlds.”
Former deputy Nasa director Albert M. Chop was another believer.
“I’ve been convinced for a long time that the flying-saucers are real and interplanetary,” he said.
Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of RAF Fighter Command from 1936 to 1940, seemed equally persuaded. “I am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by any nations on earth,” he said.”
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-20450379.html
I have undertaken a bit more exploration. Besides Joseph Campbell, it turns out George Lucas was influenced by another major occultist and New Age figure named Carlos Castaneda. ☹ In fact, Castaneda is considered the father of the New Age movement by many. ☹☹ The influence Castaneda had on Lucas and the concept of “The Force” in Star Wars is discussed in a number of reputable sources, including a biography of Lucas (Empire Building by Garry Jenkins).
Here are some pages on Castaneda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda#Related_writers_and_influence
https://www.ranker.com/list/occult-history-of-la/christine-aprile
Influence of Castaneda on George Lucas and Star Wars:
https://www.womenofgrace.com:8443/blog/?p=111
https://www.angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/force.html
http://www.theforce.net/rouser/essays/castaneda.asp
https://www.slashfilm.com/1388368/star-wars-jedi-controversial-inspiration-don-juan/
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/crazy-history-star-wars
So we can say, in summary, that, yes, there definitely was a lot of occult influence on Lucas and Star Wars from Castaneda and Joseph Campbell. What a way to ruin my childhood favourite films. ☹☹☹
Doctor Who’s descent into wokeness continues apace with the start of a new season. Lots of criticism in the comments here:
https://www.reddit. com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1jxmbvj/from_the_new_doctor_who_episode/
I found an interesting scholarly paper on the links between science fiction and the occult:
https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/45820/1/Roukema%2520%25E2%2580%2594%2520Early%2520SF%2520and%2520Occultism%25E2%2580%2594Final.pdf
I just pulled out some key quotes from various parts of the dussertation:
“This dissertation examines engagements between early science fiction (SF) and the body of modern esoteric theories and practices often described as ‘occultism’. SF is often seen as an imaginative extension of secular, empiricist science — the cultural form furthest from magic and occult logic — but this research shows that science fiction shares many of the motivations and
perspectives of occultism. It argues that SF developed some of its central tropes and stylisticsfrom its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century engagement with magical, mesmerist, Spiritualist, and Theosophical currents, particularly their attempts to legitimate the paranormal
and supernatural by appealing to scientific discourse, methodology, and social authority. It also examines a reciprocal phenomenon of influence in which SF’s tropes, themes, and imagined
worlds have been enfolded into occult traditions and other alternative religious movements. Finally, this dissertation assesses how SF and occultism have been conjointly deployed to defend
and communicate marginal scientific theories and religious systems.”
“Science fiction’s engagement with the metaphysical is exemplified by —
and may be the result of — early science fiction (SF) texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries motivated by an urge to reconcile science and religion, growingly divided by epistemological battles over evolution and its ramifications, the limits of the natural world (and therefore of scientific inquiry), and the boundaries of the human self — its life after death, its possession of a soul, the potential psychic powers of the mind. Science fiction of this nature
frequently engaged with a group of traditions which I will refer to as ‘occultism’, including mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, ritual magic, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Drawing on these traditions, early SF imagined astral travel through a galaxy populated by spirit beings and humans reincarnated as extra-terrestrials; envisioned the evolutionary potential of psychic
powers like telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis; developed alternative scientific
methodologies based on occultist challenges to empirical science; and conjured new combinations of matter and spirit which allowed creative ontologies and bizarre new worlds. In turn, the novels, stories, and eventually plays and films that resulted from this esoteric influence
played a reciprocal role in shaping new occultist hypotheses and mythologies.
As this dissertation will illustrate, the engagement between science fiction and occultism in the period was frequent, sustained, and mutually informing. Moreover, it had lasting impacts on
the rhetorics and tropes of science fiction and the development of new concepts in occultism. Yet, it has gone largely unobserved. Several dominant narratives within both academic criticism
and wider perceptions of SF and occultism appear to be factors in this oversight.”
“Adam Roberts has developed the most sustained theorisation of SF as a genre determined by its relation to magic. Roberts’s ideas exemplify the quality of insight that can be gained from
carefully situating science fictional texts within historical and philosophical context. For Roberts, science fiction is generated from a tension between magic and science that arose in Western culture as a result of the Protestant Reformation. SF is thus the result of ‘a cultural dialectic between “Protestant” rationalist post-Copernican science’, which Roberts also calls a ‘de-
magicked deism’, and ‘“Catholic” theology, magic and mysticism,’ or ‘magical pantheism’.Crucially, Roberts does not align SF solely with a non-magical, rationalist pole; rather, he places most SF texts between this ‘crude binary’ (p. xii). ‘SF texts mediate these cultural determinants
with different emphases, some more strictly materialist, some more mystical and magical’ (p. 19). Following from this important identification of the continuing importance of magic to SF,
Roberts makes two more crucial points. First, this dialectic is no mere historical object. Rather, ‘present-day SF is still being influenced substantively by the determining cultural dialectic out of
which it arose four centuries ago.’ Second, without awareness of this dialectic, ‘many aspects of the tradition of SF are incomprehensible’ (p. xv).”
“Responding to Adam Roberts’s argument that SF excises the pre-Reformation
and pre-Enlightenment worldviews of Catholicism, Brian Baker has shown that the dialectic between hidden, esoteric knowledge and exoteric science has proven a generative tension in subgenres like steampunk and the Lovecraftian Weird, while even the figure of Satan, and
demonology in general, has been useful for authors like James Blish and Gene Wolfe.38 A number of scholars, focusing on twentieth-century authors including Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Ray Palmer, and Philip K. Dick, have observed that while SF does tend to reject organised, dogmatic
religion, it is persistently attracted to more alternative currents, including pantheism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and New Age spirituality.”
“The dissection and reconstitution of past generic acts can very productively interrogate the intellectual and cultural binaries that have formed perceptions of the SF mode: religion, it is found, informs science as often as it competes with it; the supernatural is a fey place of dream
and enchantment, but can also provide a location for naturalistic conceptions of spiritual phenomena and experiences; imagination clashes with the ordering of enframing, but in both science fiction and occultism it also embraces it, decorates it, elevates and worships it, while
simultaneously stripping bare its pretensions. The fact that many SF fans, writers, critics, and authors have relied upon such dichotomies to form their perceptions of the genre cannot be ignored. Conversely, however, we should not overlook the continuing, fertile relationship
between science fictional and occultist methods of understanding, describing, and encountering the world. From the earliest conceptions of a fusion of science and fiction, magic and religion have nested comfortably in the SF mode — sometimes heavily disguised, like Star Trek replicators
transmuting base matter into exotic alien cocktails — at other times more transparent, as with the astral travel, telepathy, spirit aliens, and mediumship that populate early science fiction.”
“Early SF and occultism thus participated in shaping approaches to the problem of space travel that continue to influence both science fiction and the wider public imagination. In upgrading already extant spirit- and mind-based space travel motifs in response to the demands of enframing, they made exploration of the solar system and surrounding galaxy seem possible.
Thanks to occult scientific efforts in Spiritualism and Theosophy, astral travel seemed verisimilar in the period, in the same way that the entirely unproven technology of consciousness uploading
can appear technoscientifically legitimate to us today. This enabling of space exploration brought SF and occultism together in a further area of intersection — the encounter with the alien and its
civilisations.”
“As I have illustrated throughout, some of science fiction’s central tropes and narrative modes have continued to emerge from, and be sustained by, occult scientific concepts and hypotheses proposed within this generative spectrum. Psi powers, instantaneous travel, and extra-terrestrials
are examples of concepts that appear to be imaginative extensions of scientific thought and culture because of how we have been prepared to receive them, but which also continue to contain the occult elements which were genetically embedded in their process of formation. While most SF texts do not acknowledge this heritage, occult elements can be found explicitly
included in science fiction, even in some of its most canonical texts. Frank Herbert’s approach to incorporating occult concepts is actually quite similar to Corelli’s, as he introduces the Bene Gesserit of Dune, practitioners of an ancient science of magic and psychical power, as a secretive
order of ‘witches’. Arthur C. Clarke takes a similar tack in his presentation of a rapid evolution of humanity in Childhood’s End (1953). A race of aliens called the Overlords has been entrusted by an entity they
call the ‘Overmind’ with the task of shepherding humanity through a phase of rapid psychical advancement. Humanity will transcend ‘the tyranny of matter’ to join with the ‘many races’ that make up the Overmind (p. 177), similar to the telepathically amalgamated entity of Stapledon’s
Starmaker.”
“Just as stage magic developed its tricks, techniques, and marketing strategies in dialogue with the Spiritualist séance and the public display of mediumship, SF writers adopted the methods of scientific legitimation deployed by occultists. The prestidigitation which they have proceeded to perform has presented supernormal phenomena from telepathy to astral travel with a verisimilitude that connects the reader to knowledge acquired through the methods and assumptions of science, and expressed with its particular discursive techniques. Science fiction writers continue to perform this magical obscuration to this day, but its methods were developed
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as occultism and science fiction grew up together out of older forms and established themselves as modern forms of expression and creativity. Yet, the way people of twentieth- or twenty-first-century industrial societies have thought
about the superhuman, or psychic powers, or the extra-terrestrial has become dislocated from its roots in occultism and psychical research. It has become science fiction. As such, for many under the influence of the swiftly globalising narrative power of SF, perceived encounters with unknown entities, strange mental powers, hallucinatory experiences, and transcendent spaces or realms are encountered through the lens of specific SF narratives or the general myth set of science-fictionality, rather than understood as religious experiences with occultist implications. SF has even colonised the human encounter with the future. Where the science of prediction used to belong to soothsayers, astrologers, and Tarot readers,industrialised societies now tend to see divination as the job of the science fictional imagination. Just as the texts I have discussed in this project — and many others besides — contributed to the science fictionalisation of occultism, so conversely, have occult elements been enfolded into SF, thus affecting the very way that moderns approach instances of technological unease, future horror, and epistemological fracture.”
More on SF and the occult and their links to socialism:
https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/10-hg-wells-and-the-new-world-order
“Wells is rarely associated with New Age spirituality — he’s the epitome of techno-utopianism, or what today we would call transhumanism, a word popularized by Julian Huxley, Wells’ onetime disciple.
Yet the transhumanist worldview is not so far from New Age spirituality. Both emerged in the late-19th century, as a response to Darwinian evolution. Both are attempts to inject meaning and purpose back into evolution, via the dream of humans evolving into superhumans. Both suggest humans can become gods, capable of astonishing feats like telepathy, immortality and astral travel.
The two worldviews have different ideas of how we become gods — technology versus magic. However, as Arthur C. Clarke noted, the line between magic and technology can be blurred. Are psychedelics a technology, for example, or a magical sacrament? Is Elon Musk’s Neural-Link a new technology or a ‘wizard’s hat’?
These two worldviews lead to two different genres of ‘weird fiction’ — fantasy, and science fiction. But they share affinities and one finds spiritual eugenics in both. For example, HG Wells wrote a sci-fi book called Starbegotten, in which Martians send cosmic rays to Earth to influence our evolution and create a new race of superbeings…
Although Wells was a secular Fabian socialist, he believed in telepathy and radical life extension. And socialism, in the early 20th century, overlapped with New Age spirituality more perhaps than it does today…
Socialist ideas circulated in the same progressive ‘occulture’ as other new ideas or interests — vegetarianism, psychical research, magic, mind-altering drugs, eugenics — and these ideas overlapped and cross-fertilised with these other ideas in surprising ways.
For example, if we look at the Fabian Society, the left-wing think-tank of which Wells was a member, we note that one of the founders, Frank Podmore, was also a leading researcher in the Society for Psychical Research. The Fabian Society itself was a splinter group from an earlier spiritual collective called the Fellowship of New Life, whose members believed in humanity’s spiritual evolution into god-like beings.
Wells himself had no interest in seances, the afterlife, or magic. But he was interested in devising a post-Christian, global spirituality, and he thought eugenics had a central role in that…”
2. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/347/article/820603/pdf
“H.G. Wells is sometimes credited with a stylistic rupture that separated science fiction from other fantastic genres, eschewing magical elements in favor of empiricist and rationalist knowledge. While there is merit to this narrative, this article argues for a more complex genre heritage by evaluating the fiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton as an indicative example of a competing nineteenth-century strand of occult science fiction. This form, quite popular in the period, drew on methods of scientific legitimation used by esoteric traditions such as Theosophy and Spiritualism, as well as theories of the mind such as clairvoyance and telepathy, producing fiction that was in dialogue with scientific currents of the day but that did not reject magic. Indeed, noting that Wells consciously exploited the narrative value of esoteric science in a number of his early short stories, the article argues that the fiction of authors such as Bulwer-Lytton is distinguished from the form championed by Wells not by an exorcism of magic but by a productive occlusion of it. The article concludes by outlining the methods and continuing influence of this occlusion, arguing that esoteric sciences have continued to influence and generate the tropes, novums, and stylistics of science fiction.”
🙁
I don’t know what to make of this. Apparently some occultists are now trying to use AI tools like a ouija board. Others are divining with blockchain like this self-proclaimed witch:
https://decrypt.co/230135/how-blockchain-and-ai-are-recasting-ancient-occult-practices
Elsewhere, some software engineers have been trying to build their own AI god(!)
Anyway, this Christian IT article is a very long but thoughtful and non-hysterical look at AI and the occult through the prism of C. S. Lewis’ sci fi novel, That Hideous Strength.
I don’t know what to make of his arguments but the article is absolutely fascinating:
https://epimethean.substack.com/p/paul-kingsnorth-was-correct
He also wrote this follow-up:
https://robinmarkphillips.com/ai-magic/
This video about Gene Roddenberry’s many misdemeanours has been making waves. The part at 6 mins 30 where we hear him salivating over his own daughters is especially disturbing. Sickening. 🙁
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zt6syi6ZHQ
The *ghosts* of Yoda, Obi Wan and Anakin appear on the planet *Endor* at the end of Return of the Jedi. Of course the film frames this encounter as a happy reunion in contrast to the real life evil of the witch’s sinful necromancy and Samuel’s damning indictment of Saul.
Interesting article from a professor of religious studies:
https://voegelinview.com/the-birth-of-yoda-manichaeism-and-the-jedi-religion/
Some excerpts:
“Lucas openly acknowledges that Yoda’s Force Religion (“Jediism”) blends Buddhist and Christian esoteric lore… Yoda’s esoteric roots are ancient. Yoda’s very name may in fact be derived from an obscure Christianization of the name “Bodhisattva” (lit: “Enlightenment Being” a.k.a. one who will attain Buddhahood), distorted in transit to Christian Europe on the trade routes, and preserved among the various Buddhist and Christian scriptures sacred to a different ancient religion: Manichaeism…
… George Lucas’ homage to Tolkien is clearly Gnostic, not Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant. (“Gnostic”, referring to esoteric knowledge, is a somewhat controversial umbrella term for various early Judeo-Christian heresies most of which can be characterized as “anti-materialist”). At the conclusion of Return of the Jedi, the luminous resurrection of three deceased Jedis (Yoda, Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker) differs from mainstream Christianity’s tenet of material/bodily resurrection. It instead conforms closely to Gnosticism’s non-material/spiritual resurrection. The Force Ghost is pure light/energy, not “crude matter.” The overtly Gnostic implications of Jedi resurrection have been known to trouble Christian apologist Star Wars fans. The similarity between Jediism and Gnosticism runs deep…
Mani considered himself the direct successor of the Buddha and an Apostle of Jesus Christ in the mold of Saint Paul, following the radical Paulinist orientation of many Gnostics. Like some modern critical religion scholars, he regarded Paul’s early vision of Jesus’s resurrection as purely spiritual, not physical (in contrast with the explicitly physical resurrection described by the author of the Gospel according to John). This and other differences with normative Christianity marked Manichees for persecution when state-Christianity arose in Europe and North Africa. Over roughly a millennium of proselytization on global trade routes, the Manichees (like the Jedi) were systematically hunted down and destroyed by agents of various theocratic empires.
Manichaeism was chameleonic by nature. It swiftly morphed into crypto-Buddhism and crypto-Christianity… Manichaean missionaries harmonized Western and Eastern religious texts in ways that presaged George Lucas’s creative “Buddhist-Christian” projects…
Call it a hunch. I strongly suspect Lucas read an old standard source. Joseph Jacob’s 1896 edition of Barlaam and Josaphat which plainly illustrates the Manichaean-Arabic etymology of Yodasaph. Did Lucas uncover this name when he studied anthropology and literature as a community college student in Modesto in the 1960s? Or did he encounter it later when he was doing research while writing the screenplays?…
I could be wrong about Yodasaph (the Christianized Bodhisattva) being the direct paternal ancestor of Grogu and Master Yoda. If so, it is a spooky coincidence. Psychologists might be better than historians at assigning meaning here. The enduring impact of science fiction is more than the sum of its esoteric parts.”
The director of “Barbie”, Greta Gerwig, is making a woke Narnia film with a gender-swapped Aslan. 🙁
https://archive.md/157z1
Some interesting comments from two articles on a creationist site that mirror the arguments people have been making here regarding SF and occultism:
https://creation.com/en/articles/evolution-and-the-science-of-fiction
“How many science fiction stories do you know of that glorify God? Many subtly portray aliens as spiritual beings with a belief system, or with an all-powerful ‘force’ controlling their destiny. Others depict ‘highly evolved’ civilizations in a positive light for having rejected the supernatural beliefs of their ancestors.
The Genesis account of God as the Creator is completely incompatible with evolution-based science fiction beliefs, many of which are just plain ‘occultic’ in their portrayal of spirituality…
Although through science fiction we can marvel at (and enjoy) the imaginativeness of mankind, and its ability to ‘transport’ us to strange new worlds, we need to be mindful that science fiction, with its constant evolutionary overtones, undermines the witness of Creation (remember to wear your Biblical glasses).”
https://creation.com/science-fiction-a-biblical-perspective
“The exaltation of man in science fiction through his achievements gives the impression that God is redundant and that faith in Him is obsolete. Also contributing to this reasoning is the promotion of evolutionary philosophy. Naturally, with God eliminated, His laws become meaningless and a new system of ethics will prevail. Science fiction has always been a very effective medium for promoting humanistic values….
the genre is permeated with unrealism, humanism, occultism, New Age philosophy, Eastern mysticism and evolutionism which are of no value in the real world and are condemned in the Scriptures. It is because science fiction has its roots in evolution that the false belief systems mentioned have emerged and thrive in the genre.
The promotion of humanism, however, does not mean that all supernaturalism is excluded from science fiction—just Christ-honouring supernaturalism. The occult and Eastern religious thought, on the other hand, open many doors to the eerie and bizarre…
The popular Star Wars trilogy is a prime example in which much of the occult and Eastern mysticism can be seen. By using the ‘Force’, one is able to see the future (similar to occult divination). One can also jump higher, dodge laser blasts and perform other supernormal feats. And those who are ‘strong with the Force’ are able to supernaturally move inanimate objects (psychokinesis). Writer and director George Lucas sums up the applications of the Force: ‘If you use it well, you can see the future and the past. You can sort of read minds and you can levitate and use that whole nether world of psychic energy.’30 Also occultic are the metaphysical phenomena such as the after-death appearances of Obi-Wan Kenobi. All the above phenomena are somehow made possible by using the Force—a universal, impersonal energy field which surrounds, permeates and binds all things. Thus, the religion of Star Wars might be described as Western occultism with an Eastern pantheistic twist. Philip H. Lochhaas, an authority on religions and cults, comments:
‘The entertainment industry must be seen as a primary vehicle for promoting occult New Age views. Films are powerful instruments for influencing millions of minds. The Star Wars trilogy was only the first among many films to make statements about a pantheistic “Force” that represents deity, intuitive communication with “the other side” and “ascended masters” that form a hierarchy for bringing humanity into the New Age.’
Star Trek entertainment is also saturated with the occult as can be seen with the telepathic abilities of Spock, Tuvok and other Vulcans, and Counselor Troi to name a few. Telepathy involves the communication of two minds by means other than the five senses….
is easy to shrug our shoulders to this aspect of science fiction. After all, these strange wonders occur ‘in a galaxy far, far away’, or ‘where no man has gone before’. What is the harm, many may reason, as long as these things happen at a great distance? Also contributing to this attitude of indifference is that the words the Bible uses with regard to the occult are rarely used in science fiction, but are exchanged for modern, ‘scientific’ terms. This is deceptive and can even mislead Christians. Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon warn:
‘What the secular world calls “mind power” many Christians confuse for “faith”. Likewise, the impersonal “Force” that occultists also refer to as Universal Mind or Nature is naively accepted by large numbers of both Christians and non-Christians as just another way of referring to God, when in fact it is a substitute for Him. Consequently, what often passes for “the power of the spirit” in the church can scarcely be distinguished from the alleged “mind powers” of psychics. Parapsychologists have been conducting scientific experiments with psychics for years and the idea of “psychic power” is gaining credibility.
These New Age techniques are not new at all, however, but are the same old sorcery under new labels. Many modern practitioners, including leading Christians, seem unaware of the true nature of the dangerous mind-game they are playing. Sorcery called by any other name is still sorcery and it is everywhere in today’s space-age society, seeking to hide its true identity behind scientific or psychological terminology and success/motivation and self-development labels.’
… H.G. Wells, a political philosopher and sociologist who opposed Christianity:
‘None of [Wells’] contemporaries did more to encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of behaviour, especially as regards sex, in which, both in his books and in his personal life, he was a persistent advocate of an almost complete freedom.’
Wells studied under Thomas H. Huxley (Charles Darwin’s ‘Bulldog’) and throughout his life was a firm believer and promoter of evolutionary philosophy. He was also a Fabian socialist for a time. Regarding his views on the implications of evolution, he wrote:
‘If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which the current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house of cards.’
The Time Machine was one of the early works of science fiction which depicts the evolution of different life forms on Earth.
His writings naturally reflect his philosophy. In his classic The Time Machine, for example, the time traveller journeys to the year AD 802,701, the setting in which man has evolved into two species—the passive, child-like Eloi and the monstrous, ape-like Morlocks. Marxist themes can be seen in the division of the ruling and working classes of these races…
Although science fiction has predicted a number of useful technologies, the genre is permeated with unrealism, humanism, occultism, New Age philosophy, Eastern mysticism and evolutionism…”
I also found a quote from George Lucas that gives more insight into his religious views:
“I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people … I think there is a God. No question. What that God is or what we know about God, I’m not sure.”
🙁
This discussion is good too. The links between science fiction and the occult run even deeper than I thought. Charles Fort, Joseph Campbell and Bram Stoker all have links to that world:
https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1iqlfif/resources_on_the_intersection_of_the_occult_and/
“…the threads of rapidly advancing technology, the history of the occult and esoteric in sci-fi, and radical politics (as respectively embodied by the three editors), coalesced to form what we now call cyberpunk, as evidenced by its best known practitioner, self-proclaimed Fortean William Gibson. More broadly, the technological, the occult, and the political might be seen as the major ingredients that comprise nearly all of modern science fiction.”
I found another academic paper on the issue:
“H.G. Wells is sometimes credited with a stylistic rupture that separated science fiction from other fantastic genres, eschewing magical elements in favor of empiricist and rationalist knowledge. While there is merit to this narrative, this article argues for a more complex genre heritage by evaluating the fiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton as an indicative example of a competing nineteenth-century strand of occult science fiction. This form, quite popular in the period, drew on methods of scientific legitimation used by esoteric traditions such as Theosophy and Spiritualism, as well as theories of the mind such as clairvoyance and telepathy, producing fiction that was in dialogue with scientific currents of the day but that did not reject magic. Indeed, noting that Wells consciously exploited the narrative value of esoteric science in a number of his early short stories, the article argues that the fiction of authors such as Bulwer-Lytton is distinguished from the form championed by Wells not by an exorcism of magic but by a productive occlusion of it. The article concludes by outlining the methods and continuing influence of this occlusion, arguing that esoteric sciences have continued to influence and generate the tropes, novums, and stylistics of science fiction.”
I also thought I’d see what ChatGPT would say when I asked it about the relationship between science fiction and the occult. This was its response:
“AI Overview
Spiritualism, occultism, and science fiction share a complex and intertwined history, particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Science fiction, while often seen as an extension of secular science, actually drew inspiration and developed some of its core tropes from occultism, especially Spiritualism, and their shared interest in the paranormal and the supernatural. Conversely, occult traditions also incorporated elements of science fiction, particularly its imagined worlds and technological advancements.
Here’s a breakdown of their relationship:
1. Spiritualism and Occultism as Influences on Science Fiction:
Shared fascination with the unknown:
Both science fiction and occultism explore realms beyond the ordinary, whether through futuristic technologies or supernatural phenomena.
Seeking to legitimize the paranormal:
Occult traditions, particularly Spiritualism, often sought scientific validation for their claims, leading to a blending of scientific and esoteric ideas.
Development of SF tropes:
Concepts like telepathy, clairvoyance, and other paranormal abilities, as explored in occultism, found their way into science fiction narratives, often as novums or plot devices.
Examples:
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: His works, like “The Coming Race,” blended occult themes with scientific speculation.
H.G. Wells: While known for more straightforward science fiction, some of his early works incorporated occult elements, like spirit mediums.
Arthur Conan Doyle: A strong believer in Spiritualism, his “Professor Challenger” stories, especially “The Land of Mist,” explored the subject directly.
2. Science Fiction’s Influence on Occultism:
Adoption of SF tropes:
Occult traditions sometimes incorporated science fiction concepts and imagery into their own narratives and belief systems.
Theosophy and Theosophical Society:
This movement, influenced by both Eastern religions and Western occultism, embraced ideas of cosmic evolution and interplanetary beings, which resonated with science fiction themes.
Flying saucers and the space age:
Some occultists interpreted the emergence of UFOs and the space age as evidence of a cosmic spiritual hierarchy, influenced by science fiction’s depictions of space travel and extraterrestrial life.
3. Thematic Overlaps:
Religion and spirituality:
Many science fiction stories explore religious or spiritual themes, often in unique ways that reflect or challenge established beliefs.
Human evolution and transformation:
Science fiction frequently grapples with questions of human potential and the impact of technology on our species, mirroring some of the transformative ideas found in occultism.
The nature of reality:
Both fields delve into the nature of consciousness, the limits of human perception, and the possibility of alternate realities, blurring the lines between the material and the metaphysical.
In essence, the relationship between science fiction, spiritualism, and occultism is one of mutual influence and cross-pollination. While science fiction often presents itself as a product of scientific rationalism, it has deep roots in the occult and esoteric traditions, and these traditions, in turn, have found inspiration and validation in the imaginative worlds created by science fiction. “
One of the latest Star Trek spin-offs is a cartoon aimed at children called Lower Decks. It features a bisexual character who has a same-sex romance over the course of one of the seasons. 🙁
https://lgbtqia-characters.fandom.com/wiki/Beckett_Mariner_Freeman
Things maybe coming to a head with tye assassination in tye USA. God, in His Ptovidence, gave western culture over to its sin to run amok and we have reached this point. 🙁
This is interesting, too. Even as early as the original Star Trek, Roddenberry was promoting soul annhilationism, which upset a Catholic writer on tye series:
“Writer John T. Dugan wrote the original script of this episode after he had read an article about highly sophisticated robots. In his original draft, Sargon and Thalassa continue their existence as spirits without bodies, floating around the universe. However, Gene Roddenberry, who did an uncredited re-write on the script, changed the ending to the aliens fading out into oblivion. This led to Dugan using his pen name John Kingsbridge in the episode’s credits. [1](The Star Trek Compendium)
Dugan (a devout Catholic) stated: “That line totally went against my philosophy and cosmology, I didn’t want to be associated with it. The oblivion idea is Roddenberry’s philosophy, not mine. (…) That might be a small thing, but I have a reputation and a philosophy and everybody who knows me knows what I stand for; I certainly don’t stand for oblivion in the afterlife. (…) When you write a script, you don’t expect to have your “world view” changed by a producer. The rest of Roddenberry’s changes were all trivial (…); the big thing was the change in the episode’s philosophy.””
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Return_to_Tomorrow_(episode)
Just to update my previous comment so that I’m not bearing false witness, Star Trek Below Decks is apparently classed as an “adult cartoon” so young kids are not necessarily going to be exposed to it, thankfully. Some sites are saying it is suitable for a 12 years plus audience though so they are possibly targeting the teen market as well as adults. Apparently it contains a lot of crude humour on top of the bisexual stuff, according to various reviewers online. 🙁
I’d like to think a lot of these kind of shows will feel badly dated very, very quickly in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the growing backlash. Praying it will be so.
On Arthur C. Clarke
“Let me follow up my previous post by arguing that CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C. Clarke has a Gnostic attitude toward God, and I mean one God in particular. Gnostics are not heretics of Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Shinto or Hinduism, after all, but of Christianity.
That the good guys in CHILDHOOD’S END look like cartoon Devils has already been mentioned in my previous post. Gnostics love the idea that good guys are bad guys, and bad are good: one Gnostic sect, for example, are Cainites, who think Cain was right to kill Abel. That the good Devils lead mankind out of their false world into the Pleroma, where we are all gods, has already been mentioned, albeit in Clarke’s book, the godhead is called ‘The Galactic Overmind’ — as if that change in terminology would fool anyone. The earth is not remade into a new world, as St. John of Patmos holds, but is destroyed by hidden fire, the arson of an abandoned prison, as Valintinus holds.
Gnostics take as their prime dogma the idea that the world as we know it is a deception, and that God is the Deceiver, that matter is evil, the human body a trap. In a science fiction setting, God cannot come onstage as a supernatural being and shown to be a liar, since science fiction properly so called stays within the bounds of the natural setting. (Any supernatural events, telepathy or reincarnation, are explained away as being psionic or superhightech in an SFF background, phenomena as subject to natural laws as biology or ballistics, not noumenal reality.) In a supernatural setting you can kill God, and throw Him into Tartarus. In a natural setting you can destroy His lies, but there is no Him”
and
“Clarke is clearly not a Gnostic. For one thing, he scorns religion, orthodox and heretical alike. But his famous book CHILDHOOD’S END clearly is Gnostic, for the same reason Robert Heinlein’s famous book STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is clearly Gnostic. Both heed and repeat the lie of Satan, that old serpent, that red dragon who deceiveth the whole world: and his lie is that by eating of the forbidden fruit we shall become as Gods, or, as Michael Valentine (or Valenitus?) Smith might say, Thou Art God.
Western humanist transcendentalism always reflects a Gnostic theme, because there is no other rebuttal to Christian thought available to any man who accepts non-Oriental and non-pagan assumptions about destiny, eschatology and transcendence; there is no other, aside from Gnosticism. Either you glorify Man with the Gnostic and call God a liar, or you glorify God with the Christian and call Man to repent.”
https://johncwright. livejournal .com/243283.html
There are also a number of people on the internet such as Peter Troyer – an alleged victim – who claim the allegations about Clarke and little boys were indeed true. 🙁 🙁 🙁
https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-asked-people-what-childhood-moment-shaped-them-the-most/
At any rate, Clarke isn’t here to defend himself.
I just learnt something interesting: the production widely considered to be the world’s first space opera feature film is the 1918 Danish production, “A Trip to Mars” (“Himmelskibet”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_Mars
I watched it last night and it was wonderful for its age. In some ways, the cinematography and special effects were more impressive than those in many science fiction films from the 1920s and 1930s.
It is also a film full of overt Christian references, showing just how much our culture has changed in one hundred years. I could never imagine a big budget film with such a blatant Christian worldview being made now, neither in secular Denmark nor in Hollywood nor anywhere else in the western world.
As this discussion thread has examined occult and non-Christian elements on science fiction, I will mention those aspects of this otherwise thoroughly Christian film:
1. when the Earthlings land on Mars they find the Martians can communicate with them via a universal basic language. This is left vague but it might be a reference to telepathy.
2. the way a Martian leader dies is left vague. He willingly has a drink from a “cup of eternity” not long before he passes away which that might have contained poison. If so, it is an act of euthanasia. I tend to think it is because it then parallels a later scene on Earth in which a guilt-ridden character tries to take poison, only for his daughter to intervene and save him.
3. When the Martian leader dies, his voyage to the next world is depicted as a boat voyage across a river with ghosts or spirits beckoning him to join them so it is reminiscent of the voyage to the Egyptian underworld or the Greek mythological journey across the River Styx. Furthermore, all the Martian priests have Egyptian ankhs on their robes.
Those items aside, it is a thoroughly Christoan space opera as these viewer reviews testify:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0008100/reviews/?ref_=tt_ururv_sm
God bless.
“Dr Woke and the Daleks of Diversity”:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LM-U9bXkrsM
I am only a year late catching up with this news but a Disney Star Wars show called “Skeleton Crew” aimed at a younger audiences, features a lesbian couple, who are married to each other and raising one of the programme’s teen protagonists:
https://www. reddit .com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1h60rfj/chris_gore_spoils_star_wars_skeleton_crew_goes/
There is now a sequel to the “Daleks of Diversity” entitled “Soviet Star Trek: The Motion Picture”:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4W5BQTzKF-4
I saw this reader comment on occult influences on SF a blog post about Space: 1999:
“… Most science fiction series or books that have free energy devices, most notably STNG (the replicators) are directly or indirectly indebted to Theosophy (which got the idea of vril from the Victorian sci-fi novel The Coming Race, which, along with Theosophy’s own teachings, is the Ur text for most Hollow Earth, lost continents, mystical societies in Tibet sci-fi literature, etc.). Theosophy is a fairly obvious influence on Space 1999 given the revival of occult\Western esoteric beliefs in the 1960’s and 1970’s (Spiritualism and Parapsychology, as you guys also note, also influenced the series). The book Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier is another likely reference point here, as it influenced both Theosophical and Nazi Occult circles in the 60’s and 70’s and was very popular in the counterculture. It’s quite possible, even probable, that the writers of Space 1999 were familiar with it. Unfortunately, one can find white supremacist sites online who see the reference to the Black Sun in this episode as a tacit endorsement of their beliefs. Obviously, given Gerry Anderson’s promotion of racial diversity, that’s rubbish, but it just goes to show you how far people will go sometimes to promote pseudoscientific and bigoted beliefs.”
https://fusionpatrol.com/2016/02/01/246-space-1999-black-sun/
🙁
Elon wants to start building a “self-growing” city on the Moon.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-09/spacex-building-lunar-self-gowing-city-moon-elon-musk/106322472
On a happier note, I read that the original 1951 version of science fiction film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, was deliberately written as an allegory of the life of Christ by its scriptwriter, so that’s another one we can definitely add to the list of Christian sci fi as per the discussion above. 🙂
Regarding NASA’s Artemis programme and whether Moon/Mars colonisation is sinful or not, I am wondering if Jude 1:6 might be relevant too:
“And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.”
To be balanced, I just read some more of the blog about Space: 1999 and they emphasise that there are a lot of religious themes in tye series: the hand of God guiding the characters, predestination, characters with the intentionally-Biblical names Luke and Anna discerning God’s will, the planet Terra Nova being a metaphor for heaven, etc, so as always there is ambiguity as to how to interpret these old sci fi shows.
George Lucas’ friend, David Filoni, has just replaced the retiring Kathleen Kennedy as head of Star Wars at Disney. Here is a lengthy panel discussion from a few years ago on his wife’s witchcraft/satanist beliefs as she has expressed on her social media posts:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GC9dZOo-2UA