Me, Myself and UFOs

I was surprised by the mention of UFOs in the readings this week, and I was especially surprised by the prevalence of how these things affected the religious landscape of America during the late 1940s and 50s.

Checkmate UFO deniers... From ufoevidence.org

When I was younger, I had a small fascination with UFOs that manifested itself in watching many terrible documentaries and hunting for really spotty/grainy videos at the video rental store (this was before the Internet). Do you remember that "Alien Autopsy" they showed on Fox back in the 90s?

Yeah, I was all over that as a kid.

I even went to Roswell, New Mexico on a trip with my Dad. To the UFO museum, specifically. I even got a blow-up green Alien toy. It was a pretty fun vacation.

Found it. Thanks Amazon!

Okay, maybe a "small" fascination doesn't really accurately cover what I was doing.

Anyway, I never really believed any of it, I was just a nerd who thought this was a fun time and a funny way to spend the night joking around with "documentaries," but now with a little bit more background knowledge on the context of the UFO movement, so much of what I thought was strange as a child makes much more sense.

A lot of the UFO community seems to have an underlying influence of New Age philosophy that tends to blend in well with those who frequent related conventions or message boards. I always thought there was something quasi-religious about the whole thing, even as a kid, what with people talking about how UFOs tend to show up on powerful ley lines, or that they (the aliens) were coming to help the world solve its problems. I also wondered why these books were lodged in the metaphysical section of the bookstore, next to books on crystal healing or Tarot cards. As a kid, not really being familiar with the "New Age" movement, it led me to believe that this knowledge was somehow "hidden" or "forbidden," and that there must be some connection between all of these things. There also seemed to be a correlation between non-traditional lifestyles and a belief in aliens, a type of idea that I now know is heavily inspired by various New Age and Neopaganism philosophies.

Nowhere is this more prevalent now than with the Ancient Aliens Theory. I'm sure you're familiar with the theory: Aliens visited the planet early in mankind's life and helped genetically create modern humans while building various large structures across the Earth. This theory seems to take what was hinted at or semi-talked about in previous UFO movements and expands it into an overtly religious and mythical context. In the past, I would hear things such as "Aliens are here and want to help;" today, the Ancient Alien Theory seems to say "Aliens were here, we worshiped them as gods, and we are created by them." Needless to say, this spoke to the young Eric in me, and I'd be interested to see if there are any anthropological studies or religious studies done about the connection between this particular subject and our current society.

The History Channel constantly plays these shows. From an academic standpoint, it's an infuriating and fascinating choice. What is it about this show and this theory that speaks to people? I know this is not a novel concept: H.P. Lovecraft talks about aliens creating mankind all the time, and that was back in the early 20th century. UFO cults are not new... What is going on today that makes people tune in to the History Channel and watch this show over and over?

I just checked... This has been on for NINE SEASONS. THERE'S BEEN NINE SEASONS WORTH OF MATERIAL FOR THIS... From Whatculture.com

Perhaps it is the growing number of people willing to "try on" different religions and different traditions. As we discussed in class, perhaps the loosening of the societal norms kicked off by feminism movement in the 60s is still being done today with people wanting to find something that personally speaks to them and their desires for religious experiences.

Or maybe people really just like aliens.

Why not? Aliens are cool.

JFK and Religion

Something in the readings this week affected me in a surprising way, and in this particular post, I think I’d like to be a little more personal than I’ve been before. Now, I have always been a fan of John F. Kennedy and the whole Kennedy family… I don’t really feel like I should, to be honest; I was born way after their political influence was at its peak, the family is incredibly wealthy and they can’t possibly relate to me in any significant manner, but I do admire JFK and Bobby Kennedy in a strange almost unexplainable way. 

Like John F. Kennedy, I would identify as a Roman Catholic. Growing up Catholic, there were always pictures on the wall of Pope John Paul II, sometimes (in other families) I’d see a Pope John XXIII picture, and I’d usually see a picture of JFK. As a kid and a young teenager, I would think: He was a Catholic, yeah, that’s cool but whatever. This week, for some reason, the reading of his speech struck me in a new way. For a long time, I never thought being Catholic was such a "heated" topic. I was raised as an Italian Roman Catholic, not because my family was particularly devout, but because my mom and my dad immigrated to America from Italy and being Catholic, for a lot of people, is just… Well, what you do over there. No one truly seemed that “into” it, except for Catholic holidays, but it was a foundation for an identity especially when they moved here. To make things a bit more specific, however, my mom is a Lutheran from Germany, but somehow the Catholicism was more pronounced growing up (although my Italian Grandmother had much to say against my mom, a divorced German Lutheran single mother, marrying her son… But that’s another story). 

Anyway, I never grew up thinking that being Catholic was not an American “thing.” I thought everyone was Catholic, except my Jewish friends - there certainly was a lot of people at the church after all. It wasn’t until later that I realized that Catholicism wasn’t exactly the “majority,” when people began to ask me questions about eating people, drinking wine, rosaries, why I had a St. Christopher’s medallion, and then later on, being the resident Catholic, defending against the child abuse scandal - something that is and forever will be indefensible. 

But, and I don’t mean to speak for every immigrant family or even every American Catholic, belief never really entered into the equation. I (and many others I know here in America) couldn’t care less about Jesus’s divinity or not, the nuances of Pauline epistles or the Book of Acts; being Catholic, to me and everyone I knew, wasn’t about that. Being Catholic was about connecting with a culture, with a family and a land that was thousands of miles away, separated by mountains, seas and oceans. Trying to “find your way” in America is difficult, and for the majority of Italians, Catholicism is such a central part of its culture that it became a way to feel connected to our home. It wasn’t what we believed as it was more of what we identified as that was the important aspect of the religion. We had pictures of the Pope because we are Catholic, and that’s what Catholics do because they've always done that and (probably) always will, and we were comfortable with the fact that our relatives back home were doing the same things. It became a touchstone, an important one especially when different languages within the generations are involved. 

It seems difficult to explain this to anyone who has grown up in a religious lifestyle that demands total belief with “all of your heart, all of your body and all of your soul,” but the priests, for us, never really seemed to care what we did, as long as we went to church or professed some sort of Catholic-esque belief in some round-about way. 

I understand that I completely got off the topic of JFK’s speech, but I think this all ties into the idea of what being an immigrant in America is like when viewed through the lens of religion. JFK’s speech resonated with me because it’s above the ideas of particular Catholic belief; it’s just a part of who he is, and it doesn’t affect his job or his performance. He, like so many immigrant families, understands that his religion, while important in helping to define his identity, does not disqualify him from an American life. His argument for the public's understanding of religious differences is beautifully stated, and one that I wish many people would consider before labelling or perpetuating incorrect beliefs and actions based solely on religious identification. 

Overall, I appreciate JFK a little bit more, even though he was a fatally flawed man. 

Anyway, I apologize for the lack of pictures and video, but here's a picture of a corgi that I wish was on every single bumper sticker.

Pictured above: Cool Corgi

The Dude Abides

While doing our reading for the week about Neopaganism and New Age philosophies, I was struck by how much of it I could relate to. I’m from Northern California, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area, and, just to get some extra street cred, I live a few blocks away from the Haight Ashbury. Growing up in this area, I had no idea how steeped I was in New Age ideas/philosophies and in the “Jesus Freaks” concept. Reading both sections of the texts felt like I was reading a training manual given to every adult and authority figure I’ve ever dealt with in this part of the country. 

Specifically though, I wanted to join together two sections of the reading that seem both complimentary and yet very exclusive to one another: The Buddhist and Eastern religious influence on popular culture, and the Jesus Freaks reinterpretation of the Bible. To put more of an interesting spin on it, I’ll relate a good chunk of it to one of my favorite movies, The Big Lebowski.

From highsnobiety.com

The Big Lebowksi is a hard to movie to analyze, but one of the consistent themes explored throughout the film is the portrayal of “The Dude.” He’s a burn-out, a hippie, a “slacker” if we were to use 90s terminology, but I couldn’t help but compare him to the Jesus Freaks in the Haight Ashbury and other hippie centers throughout America during the counterculture revolution. The Dude lives and dresses simply, has little money and seems to have little interest in sexual encounters (many times throughout the movie he responds to sexual advances with a disinterested observation about his surroundings), and much of his speech is influenced by the world around him. For intents and purposes, it seems as if The Dude is living a fairly ascetic Christian-style life, and especially with the “hip” ways the Jesus Freaks seemed to attract people with, The Dude seems to be their stereotypical "spiritual man in Christ." However, his day to day philosophy seems to be influenced by Buddhism and Taoism, keeping an even demeanor throughout much of the film’s “interesting” exploits. In the movie, the little backstory we get on The Dude is that he was a college revolutionary and helped write and form various radical groups; otherwise, he is a blank slate for the audience to put their perceptions upon.

Compare this with the treatment that Hunter S. Thompson gives himself and his friend in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In that book, he seems to mourn the passing of this counterculture's momentum, which he describes as a “great wave” that ultimately failed, a momentum that you could pinpoint where it finally had  its "high-water mark, where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” As a quick aside, it’s a wonderfully beautiful book that I believe is overshadowed by people’s focus on its drug use, ignoring the whys of the drug use and what it means to that group of people locked in that mindset. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson is in the thick of the dying of the counterculture movement, and he rarely ever explicitly mentions the various religious philosophies of the time, but he does remark often about this “vibration” and “wave” that seems to have infused the culture with some New Age sounding rhetoric.

Misunderstood... from Fanpop.com

Compared with The Big Lebowski, there is quite a time difference with the approach to The Dude’s character and with it, more time to reflect upon which parts of that movement’s influences and effects seemed to have lasted in the modern world. The Dude is a perfect representation of that era’s philosophy, and it is a philosophy that I felt, quite surprisingly, at home with and intrigued me to academically study it further.

Theseus Just Missed the Boat

Over the course of the week, I found myself asking the same question after reading many of our posted articles: At what point does a philosophy change and cease to be the “old” philosophy? Specifically, I brought this up in my readings of “Islam in America” and “Hinduism in North America,” where each of the religions discussed focused on how their traditions have been treated in America. A common thread that seems to occur with religions in the United States is the struggle of multiple sects or divisions within that tradition existing in a country with a strong Americanization force and limited financial or political support for those different groups.

In their so called “native” countries, these religions exhibit a wide-range of beliefs and different interpretations that can be very exclusive. However, in America, some groups have found that they are forced by the culture to be pushed together into a collective “American Islam” or an “American Hinduism” or an “American Buddhism,” sometimes with the unintended connotation from others that these faiths are “wrong” or “inferior” to the ones practiced elsewhere. Influenced by this prejudice, it is easy to see how traditions can be manhandled into a more monolithic bloc; those who practice these traditions in America often say that there is no difference between their forms of worship and their “native” counterparts. Some authors we read, like Sarma, believe that since these new and generally more inclusive, homogenous and unregulated traditions must “go back” to their more original divided and diverse form. 

However, I’d like to take a moment and explore some philosophical issues that arise from Sarma’s, and others’, assertion. 

DISCLAIMER: I am not a philosopher… Yet.  I don’t know everything about philosophical issues or religions. My hope in this blog post is NOT to answer any questions but to think about and explore some aspects of class discussions that interested me, or to question what I agree with in order to more fully understand a concept from both sides. Most of the what I found was found in my textbook: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy by Lillegard and Fieser, if one is so inclined to check them out. 

There is a philosophical paradox called “The Ship of Theseus.” Briefly, this paradox states that a wooden ship, which carried the Greek hero Theseus, was saved and over time its old wood was replaced with new wood. The paradox arises when one states: Is this ship with completely new parts the same ship that Theseus used? 

From science20.com

I would advance the question and ask: If new and different philosophical ideas are added to a tradition and accepted by it, is it still the same tradition? Also, can a religion ever “go back” to what it was before?

To answer this question, Heraclitus stated that while you cannot step into the same waters twice, you could step into the same river. The contents of the river, the water, constantly change, but the water is NOT what “makes up” the river. Our ideas, our perceptions of the river, this “form” of the river as a unit we can use to measure some change against is what truly “makes up” the river. The Mississippi River is the Mississippi River regardless of if the exact same water particles are in it every second of every day. More succinctly, Aristotle states that everything is made up of different causes, and that if something is fulfilling the same roles as the causes of the object (i.e., what the thing is used for/its ultimate purpose) then yes, it is the same thing. So in our Hinduism study and with my very limited knowledge of this particular religion, the different sects of Hinduism and American Hinduism seem to fulfill both of these ideas: They are used for pretty much the same purpose for their practitioners.

However, is the purpose of something its only defining characteristic? Broadly speaking, the “purpose” of many religions seems to be understand the nature of divinity and one’s role within that understanding, but there are many recognizable “differences” between the various religions. Are the different materials of things what makes something different? Are the interactions with those things what makes them different? Is the actual purpose of those individual things what makes it different? Is there even a difference at all? Is our perception of the differences what make something truly “different?” The world is made of atoms of mostly empty space, yet we cannot see that space, nor the jagged edges of when the atoms are at the edges of objects. We are made of the same atoms, the same stuff, as other humans, but our perceptions understand the difference between brown hair, blond hair, male and female. Fundamentally, our cells are the same, but their purposes are different. Our DNA is fundamentally the same, but what it tells the different cells to do, their purposes, are different. 

Contradictory? Probably. I’ve learned that philosophy is mostly just becoming adept at hiding your contradictions. 

On the other hand, our second question still remains: Can a religion or tradition “go back” to an earlier state? There are fundamentalist groups, yes, but do they truly represent a “going back” to an earlier philosophical understanding? Is a young person who grew up with a more “modern” understanding of a tradition able to shed those beliefs and start anew, to start with a blank slate? If you have an understanding of something, can you ignore it?

Going back to the Theseus Paradox, Thomas Hobbes later expanded the question by asking if the material that was used to build the ship was removed and then repurposed to build something else, would it still be recognized as the Ship of Theseus? This question seems to be not just Sarma’s struggle in the article, but many people’s struggle when looking at an “American Tradition.” Is “dismantling” and “rebuilding” pieces of a religious tradition and practicing them in a new country, with or without its original artifacts, a faithful re-creation of that tradition? If I take the Ship of Hinduism and then rebuild it to be the Coffee Table of Hinduism, is it still the same ship?

Like I said before, I didn’t intend to answer questions, but I did want to explore and ask questions about identity and the consequences of philosophical change. 

Anyway, enough philosophy. Here’s a picture of a corgi:

Slurms as a Corgi