quarta-feira, julho 20, 2005
The new testament
What if the Bible were happening right now?
"In every moment, every day, I am Cain, discouraged by the way someone else (some Abel) gets credit and attention for doing the same thing I did.
We are still living in a world where the monetary system invented by Joseph and Pharaoh enslaves us in lifetimes of debt, where we lose track of our most core desires and disconnect from our compassion. We’re moving into a new kind of fascism that it has its roots in some very old patterns of thought and behavior.
“Testament " takes place in a world that looks very much like ours, except for the fact that corporate interests run the government, the draft is being reinstated, terrorism is being used as a pretext for population control, the medias has become a highly controlled propaganda space, all university research is funded in one way or another by military interests, citizens are being tracked by implants, money has become a kind of thought virus that people actually believe in and...wait a minute, that is pretty close to the way things really are!
The main story follows a group of renegades who refuse to submit to the cultural program. They use alchemy, computer networking, media hacking, and a bit of sex magic to see behind the illusions and fight against the powers that mean to eliminate novelty and free will from the human equation. What they slowly come to realize, however, is that these battles have been fought before.
Each of their trials has a corollary in the narratives described in the Bible. Does this mean the Bible really happened? Or what?
The bible exists in this world as well, but it´s relationship with the characters develops slowly. I begin by telling parallel stories. Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac becomes a parallel for whether or not Alan Stern will implant his son with a tag so he can be tracked for the military draft. Both are examples of father’s sacrificing their sons for false gods. And in the telling, I hope to reveal the real Bible stories that have been suppressed for so long. Most people think God told Abraham to kill Isaac as some kind of test. If they read the actual Bible and other ancient texts, they’d see that people sacrificed their first sons all the time! It was the normal thing to do. There are still remnants of giant altars in Israel with furnaces into which the babies were dropped. What made Abraham unique was not that he was willing to sacrifice his son, but that he was willing not to sacrifice his son. But the whole story got changed around during the Crusades, when people were supposed to feel okay about sending their kids off to war, or letting their children die rather than being converted. So if people see the real story, it’s so much more horrible and exciting, and so much more relevant to what’s happening now. It is precisely what’s happening now. People sacrificing their children to war in the name of false gods to whom they’ve been literally programmed to pay allegiance.
One of the reasons for playing with the Bible is to break everyone of the notion that the Bible is filled with all this holy stuff. It’s so not! It’s filled with people killing each other with rocks, men raping men, fathers having sex with their daughters or offering their daughters to strangers in return for stuff.
And there’s tons of sex magic in there, too, that no one likes to talk about but is completely apparent to anyone who bothers to read the words on the page. Abraham’s wife is a Temple Prostitute. Lot has sex with his daughters—and every messianic character comes from the offspring of that union. Moses has man-to-man sex up on Mount Sinai. God has fights with other Gods. There are monsters and giants praying to Astarte (basically Kali). There’s aliens having sex with the human women. I mean, you actually read the stuff and your jaw just drops. Abraham did what? And he’s a hero?!"
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(Douglas Rushkoff, writer)
// posted by A @ 8:24 da manhã 