I just finished watching the documentary Zeitgeist...OK, I'm lying. I just finished scanning through it. I watched the first 25 minutes then started skipping through.
They definitely got off on the wrong foot with me by making several disprovable assertions and claiming certainty about some things that are based on card-houses of unlikely or unprovable assumptions. For example, they start out by implying that most, if not all, mass violence is the result of religion and patriotism (aka tribalism). The religion claim has been thoroughly debunked repeatedly over the last hundred years or so, most recently and possibly most thoroughly by Vox Day in The Irrational Atheist. On the contrary, religion is a moderating influence that helps to contain the natural agression of mankind. The irony of the movie's claims against religion is that they are perfectly in line with the zeitgeist of today's "intelligentsia" yet are at least as false and manipulative as the move claims are religious institutions. That doesn't mean that religious bureaucracies are necessarily benevolent or honest, of course. They are still made up of people after all, and people are the real problem.
That takes care of the disprovable assertions. On to the house of unprovable cards.
Another irony of the movie is that it begins with a quote decrying the reliance on authority over truth rather than authority out of truth, but then it shows our supposed evolution from bacteria and the supposed evolution of all theology from astronomy through astrology. The theory of evolution, whether correct or not, is an unprovable set of speculations based on other speculations based on assumptions stemming from the a priori disbarring of even the possibility of divine intervention in natural history. In other words, complete acceptance of TENS (the theory of evolution and natural selection) is a complete acceptance of authority over truth rather than authority out of truth.
The same is true regarding the evolution of religion. The movie adopts some historical revisionism as well as a huge load of historical speculation and labels it TRUTH. There is some truth to be had, however. Here's what I think happened: God knew exactly what was going to happen on earth from the moment he created the universe. He designed things into that creation so that certain truths could be gleaned from careful observation. People way back when were smarter than us and managed to combine oral tradition, divine revelation, and astronomical observation to arrive at those certain truths regarding the nature of mankind, God, and the future course of history. They understood something of the nature of blood in our relationship to the divine (certainly more than I do) and the need for divine intervention and in order to bring about a full restoration of that relationship. Satan was able to use their smarts against them in building counterfeit theologies that incorporated a lot of truth into a lot of B.S. (Kind of like politicians, theologians, and movie makers.) Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian gods were killed and resurrected because the really bright people of those days knew that had to be part of any true theology. They drew certain stories out of the movements of stars and planets because those stories are actually there.
That's when I skipped ahead a bit. The rest of the movie seems to point out several examples of the masses being manipulated by clever politicians and marketeers. There is a lot of good information in there that people need to know. I probably would have watched more intently if I hadn't already learned most of it from other sources. I already know that people are violent, greedy liars, and that we all want to believe otherwise. We're prepared to swallow any amount of b.s. to maintain our belief in the essential goodness of humankind. Blech. At some level we're all murderers. We're all thieves. We're all gullible lemmings.
There is really only one source of completely reliable truth. I don't mean human translations or interpretations of ancient revelations. The Bible would be totally reliable if we still had it in its original forms, but people have gotten in the way. It's still pretty darn good and the closest thing we have to absolute truth in written form, but there might be a corrupt word or even a paragraph here and there. The only reliable source of truth is God. Our big problem is that we are corrupted receivers, hence the hundreds of different religions and the thousands of denominations within them. The problem is us, not God.
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