The Religion of Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers IV finally came out on Redbox and I immediately rented it to watch at home. Well worth the wait. I enjoy action movies, for several distinct reasons.

1. They're creatively stimulating. Intricate CGI gives an active mind much to fantasize about.
2. You'll therefore get something out of it even if the plot or dialogue is terrible.
3. Because of the emphasis on aliens, robots, war etc, there's less unnecessary sexual content.
4. Because of dealing with very big themes and archetypes, the sparse dialogue is more significant. It can therefore be amazing (Jurassic Park, Dark Knight), or far off the mark.

In this case, with my senses highly attuned to detecting religious themes, I found several seemingly innocuous scenes which could, depending on a particular person's political/religious passions, be enormously significant, either as a slight or as an affirmation.

These go all across the board. Allow me, briefly, to show you where and what they are, to hopefully dazzle you with content you might not have noticed when you watched it.

Possible Theme: Diversity and Multiculturalism v. Conformity and Tradition

This is not an evenly matched equation, I grant you. But yet this is what gets bandied about in higher academia. Diversity is the golden calf and golden goose egg both, for universities these days. There is an unquestioned assumption that geographic diversity among students means better things for society. This has replaced the archaic notion that diversity of thought improves education by increasing students' exposure to a variety of ideas through lively discourse, that the most persuasive arguments may carry the day.

And why is this set in opposition to "tradition?" Because it's held in these circles that people who are "opposed to diversity" are religious hardliners who are all about following outmoded rules and such.

This is a portion of the cultural message from the left that I've been exposed to via student organizations in my college experience. That's why it stood out to me, when this line of dialogue occurred:

"All this species mixing with species, it upsets the cosmic balance. The Creators, they don't like it. They built you to do what you were told."

This is put in the mouth of the archvillain of the movie, and in one fell swoop, it ties the ideas of racism in with obedience to one's Creator. Subliminal promotion of the belief that the Bible and Christianity are/promote racist ideologies? Or do you disagree?

Next up,

Treatise: A Monument to All Your Sins

Transcribed from Journal Brown, late 2012.

The explanation for the Mayan Long Count:

20 days

18 times 20 days = 360 days, one Mayan Year.

20 times that,

and 20 more times that = 144,000 days, one b’aktun, if I recall.

A number of astronomical phenomena converge at a point in the past, roughly 3100 BC; the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic of the sun and bla de bla de bla. The significance and reverence the Mayans gave to astronomical things led them to peg the date as the date of creation. Close, but no cigar. Anyway, since the Mayans liked multiples of 20 (and may have used a ‘base-20’ numbering system, whereas ours is base-10), they invented a longer calendar for keeping accurate track of dates over long periods of time. This was called the Long Count. It lasted 144,000 days, as shown above. The 13^th round of that reckoning came to a close today (or started. I can’t recall). When you understand what the Long Count is, you realize it’s just a a calendar and not a prophecy of any sort. There’s no coincidence that the b’aktun came to a close on the Winter Solstice, either. The  solstice is directly tied to earth’s orbit and is one of the smaller, shorter cycles that made a circuit and converged today. The Mayans may have attributed religious beliefs to the conclusion of b’aktuns, because they, like many other cultures, had tied their religious beliefs to astronomical phenomena—attributed religious significance to conspicuous mathematical relationships in nature. In this way, they were very much like the Pythagoreans (Protagoreans?), who, though mathematically astute (supposedly), maintained many strange rules and basically worshiped the number 10 because 1+2+3+4 = 10 OMIGOSHITSMAGICK! Something like that.

So the astounding irony of all this is that the guys who made fairly noteworthy mathematical, astronomical, and engineering discoveries in earth’s past basically wasted their potential by directing all their energy into the babbling nonsense of false religion and foolish, vain spirituality. Much like how the Egyptian pyramids were built to serve as the tomb for one man! At least the Great Wall of China had a practical application. Stonehenge and Göbekli-Tepe were large stone structures for religious ritual/festival. If you think about it, the huge Roman temples are the same thing: huge concrete engineering feats, massive building expenditures, all to build houses for idols built by man’s hands. What. A. Waste. To be honest, huge Catholic Cathedrals and “evangelical” mega-churches also fall into this category. There seems to be something innate in Man, that he has a tendency to try to erect extravagant structures to impress weak-minded people into becoming followers, and really, to impress himself, also—and convince himself that his false deity must be right, because “look how cool this is!” It’s the age-old “dick-measuring” shtick. It’s the short man overcompensating with a big/expensive car. (Contemporarily, they even call it “short man syndrome.”) When you have nothing truly impressive or remarkable to be confident in, you try to hide that fact by outwardly making a show for others, lest they see you for who you really are, and you be ashamed.

Wikipedia image

Flickr image

 If this is true for individual men, why would this not be true for religions as well? After all, religions are made by men, and their following is made up of men. It’s the same insecurity, played out in equally sinful ways, on a much larger scale, compounding the effect….which is what makes it so atrocious. To borrow a phrase I heard in Halo 2, spoken by the Gravemind, “I am a monument to all your sins.” This is what all those construction marvels are. Chichen Itza. The Great Pyramid. The Temple of Jupiter. St. Peter’s Basilica. Notre Dame. Angkor Wat. Taj Mahal. Vertsailles. The Masjid Al-Haram, “Dome of the Rock.” Easter Island. Stonehenge. The Mahabodhi. The Kashi Vishwanath. The Church of the Nativity. The Forbidden Palace. The Sistine Chapel. The Hagia Sophia. The Vatican. The Mormon Temple. The Ka’aba. These variations on the Tower of Babel all have one thing in common: they were either built for ONE MAN (“idolatry of self-worship”) or they were built for the worship of a false deity (idolatry by other means). They are the rotten fruit of thousands and millions of individual sins, compiled and amplified, manifest in enormous man-made structures which echo Babel, both in its form, scope, and intent: Man-made beacons of idolatry for the glorification of man and idol. No wonder God is so furious with idols and idol worship throughout the Old Testament: “behold, you are nothing, and your works are less than nothing; an abomination is he who chooses you.” (Isaiah 41:24)  Good grief, I am angered, exasperated and frustrated by this myself! How much more so the Holy God of the universe, who has no tolerance for sin as I do?