Ge0ffrey

Fiction writer and poet now living in Mexico. Geoffrey Smagacz aka Geoffrey Walters

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@IranArmySpoofX If only the Mexican people could have the same level of protection.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@NightSkyToday

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@WolfgangRichtEU Thou shalt not steal.
Du darfst nicht stehlen.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

💕

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@JamieBonkiewicz Can you give us some examples to buttress your argument?

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@malcolmkenyatta Why did it take you three years to finally condemn the topless transvestites on the White House lawn?

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

📽

[Steve Deace @SteveDeaceShow]

MY REVIEW OF DISCLOSURE DAY -- A DIRECT ASSAULT ON CHRISTIANITY (AND SPIELBERG'S WORST MOVIE)

Because of how intentional I believe this film is in attempting to deconstruct Christianity, and because I want to warn people about not seeing it, this will be a very spoiler-filled review. You have been warned before proceeding further.

This review will be done in two acts: 1) the worldview of the film, 2) the quality of the film. Neither will be positive.

Disclosure Day's Worldview
This is a rather blatant attempt to evangelize into a new religion. In many respects, the transition Steven Spielberg makes from his 1970s classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to now Disclosure Day, is very similar to what you see from a lot of the prominent UFO/alien obsession proxies like Dr. Steven Greer. At first they start off in wonderment about what else is really out there in the cosmos and whether we're alone in the universe (or Close Encounters), but they always eventually end up at the aliens are really our saviors to show fallible human beings the way to salvation (or Disclosure Day).

If you only see people like Greer or Luis Elizondo on cable news networks, you'd think they're just scientifically inquisitive and want "the truth to be told." But if you watch their documentaries, as I have, it becomes increasingly obvious they are really selling a religion. Greer is basically just a wannabe prophet of the non-human intelligence phenomena as deliverers at this point, and Elizondo is on his way there by angrily dismissing the possibility this is all just a demonic spiritual deception (as he did in last year's The Age of Disclosure documentary).

Here are some examples of how this film head-on intends to deconstruct Christianity (in chronological scene order):
--The main character's love interest, who is now his admitted fornication partner, is a former nun. She specifically tells him early in the film she left the convent behind because "I lost my belief that God is divine." Hold on to that language later, because it's going to put everything else I point out next in its proper context.
--When the shadowy agency conducting the decades-long coverup attempts to use alien technology to subvert the former nun's consciousness and turn her into a traitor, she grabs her crucifix and tries to invoke its power to resist the alien tech -- to the point she essentially stigmatas herself. However, the crucifix is rendered powerless in the face of the superior alien technology and thus she is given over to it.
--The entire story is unfolding under the backdrop of pending nuclear war and planetary annihilation (between the US and Russia, of course, because apparently it's still 1985). In other words, we are in the end of days and lost as a species unable to save ourselves. We need a salvation we cannot acquire on our own.
--We learn the aliens specifically chose a male and a female to be the "vessels" at the vanguard of this next step of our evolution. Which the aliens are here to guide for us, of course. It is eventually revealed the male is given mathematic revelation (or logic) and the female empathy (or nurturing) -- with the female's gift depicted as superior in its intensity. Or a divine feminine.
--The climax of the disclosure broadcast occurs when the largest of the aliens is brought in by several humans in what is basically a gestatorial chair, which he emerges from to pronounce blessings upon the new Adam and Eve with a priestly whisper in his native tongue of clicks and tones (I guess Latin would've been too on the nose). The whisper is translated for all of humanity into the final line of the film: "Listen." Some might say sort of like, "Let those with ears to hear let them hear."
--Though the film makes it clear the climactic day of disclosure is being felt globally, the only religion wrestling with it is Christianity. At the convent we see several of the nuns desperately clinging to their Rosaries looking for guidance, while the Mother Superior lets out a wry smile in approval of the coming syncretism. No other religion is even depicted, let alone shown to have to grasp with the significance of all this. Why is that? All the potential answers to this question are bad. Though I'd love that to be the case, Christianity is not the only global religion on this planet. Furthermore, the only Christianity depicted in the movie is Catholicism.
--Now, back to the smiling Mother Superior at the end of the movie, and the former nun saying she lost her belief that God is divine in its opening act. The movie says this at the same time it makes it clear humanity needs saving, and the former nun also makes the case that even though she doesn't believe in God anymore the world needs that belief to maintain any form of order. Enter the aliens, who check all the boxes of what is required. They are sinless, while we are not. They have knowledge kept secret, that we do not. They are the only ones who can share such revelation with us, we can't acquire it ourselves. And by embracing this singular truth mankind can be saved, because we can't save ourselves.

If all that's not a religion, I don't know what is. If all that's not a direct attempt to redirect Christianity, I don't know what is. Marcion, Arius, and Pelagius were more subtle.

Quality of Disclosure Day Itself
Thankfully, this movie is also not very good. Had it been executed better, we might really be in trouble as a people here. It's the worst movie Spielberg has ever done.

The film doesn't really have a plot, but is just one long chase scene of not believable things. Like we are supposed to believe a nerd who admits he was never in the field before this, is now able to suddenly drive cars at high speed through houses and evade the world's most effective private security firm that has successfully protected this secret for over 75 years. We are supposed to believe if you hide behind rocks just five feet from that same organization's operatives they won't look for you there, or hear you running away in the woods as you step on branches. In another scene the "good guys" use the alien's invisibility technology to escape, but for whatever reasons turn on the sirens of the firetruck they're in so now "the bad guys" know they're there. Finally, we are supposed to believe that same shadowy organization ejects and just angrily gives up at the end without a fight to permit disclosure day to happen, even though they could've just pulled out their guns and shot everybody there before the cameras went live.

You make these kinds of continuity and believability errors when you're more about the message than the movie. I recognize it, because it's why Christian movies were so bad for so long. More concerned with checking ideological boxes and shoehorning in favored tropes over telling the best possible story. Spielberg made mistakes with this film he would've never made before as possibly the greatest director ever. And we see a lot of left-wing Hollywood making this mistake nowadays. The industry has lost patience with subverting us with good stories over time, and it's now just knocking on doors and putting their pitch right in your face like the evangelists they are.

Consider it a blessing that America's greatest director cast his pearls unto swine by shrouding all this deconstruction and deception within a hot mess of a film -- otherwise we might've had a real birth of a dangerous cult on our hands. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@JoshReynolds24 Serenity now.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

🤔

[History Nerd @_HistoryNerd]

In a rare interview, Tolkien is asked why he spent 14 years building the world of The Lord of the Rings.

His answer reveals a philosophy of creation rooted in something deeper than storytelling.

When pressed on whether the hobbits and their world emerged from his unconscious, Tolkien pushes back. He describes himself as a "meticulous sort of bloke" who spent those years "finding time schemes and getting everything right."

The appendices, the languages, the social customs, and the histories all existed before the story itself.

In fact, the world came first.

The Hobbit was almost an accident:

"It existed in posy and in large scale plan before The Hobbit was written. The Hobbit was intact originally an attempt to write something outside it and drew into it."

The interviewer, surprised, asks why.

Why create an entire world before writing a single story within it?

Tolkien's response gets to the heart of his creative philosophy:

"Because being made by a creator, one of our natural factors is wishing to create. But since we aren't creators, we have to subcreate. Let's say we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases us, which may it isn't necessarily a moral pleasing. It's partly aesthetic pleasing."

This idea of subcreation is central to Tolkien's worldview.

Humans cannot create something from nothing, but they can reshape what already exists into forms that satisfy an aesthetic vision, not merely a moral one.

When the interviewer suggests that moral concerns should outweigh aesthetic ones, Tolkien disagrees.

He argues that an "aesthetic facet is as strongly to be predicated as a moral one in this world."

On the question of good and evil, Tolkien explains that the Dark Lord was not always dark. He fell, "several stages down of Lucifer."

The One Ring, he says, represents "a power so enormous that even if a good man were to use it against a bad it would corrupt the good man."

He emphasizes that this idea predates the atomic bomb. He had been developing these stories since his undergraduate years, long before modern allegorical interpretations could be applied.

Asked whether he would rather be remembered as a man who said something or a man who made something, Tolkien rejects the distinction:

"I don't think you can distinguish. The made things unless it says something won't be remembered."

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@Kulambq Decades later it's still hilarious.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@ITGeekCT The Horse and His Boy

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@alfie_t8 Plenty of parking!

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@RoxiR0633390 ¿Está segura...o...quizá Ud. odie los estados unidos? Debería mirarse en un espejo.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

I'm working on this.

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“The great thing in life, Jeeves, if we wish to be happy and prosperous, is to miss as many political debates as possible.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@mhdksafa My coffee is Mexican.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@JMWSPT @stthomashouston It was excellent.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@DogWhoReads It's funny all the way through. Great dialogue. A splendid novel.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@EricRSammons Using Christian controversy to sell a movie seems diabolical to me. Spielberg has sunk to a new low.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

@awamzzz Aguacates, cocos, mangos, papayas, chocolate, vainilla, café, y plata.

[Ge0ffrey @Ge0ffreyW]

"Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the
water; and maybe a spark--which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two--on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest. . ."

- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Original Illustration