God Told Me To!- A Film of Space Alien Jesus

            I ran across this little gem back in the old days of VHS tapes. It was at the bottom of a bargain bin at my local record store. The tagline read “The only man alive who can make the choice to help or destroy a mysterious force which has begun to unleash its dread power upon the earth!” A bold statement. Even back then I was lover of obscure films, so I snapped it up and about a week later popped it in (I love films, but also am rather lethargic). I loved it! Sure it had a low budget and was uneven at times, but overall it was a wild weird ride that has stuck with me over the years.

            The film opens with a man on a water tower in New York City firing into the crowded streets below, eventually racking up a kill count of fifteen. The protagonist Peter, a devout Catholic NYPD detective, manages to approach to sniper and they talk. The gunman is perfectly calm and when asked why he’s shooting at people, states that Gold told him to, before jumping off of the tower.

Tony Lo Bianco in God Told Me To

            After that the floodgates open and an entire slew of murders occur, all done by perfectly calm normal people, all claiming that God told them to. Eventually Peter discovers a link. Each of the people had contact with a bizarre underground cult leader by the name of Bernard Phillips.

Peter goes public with the God angle and the city goes into a panic mode, with even more copycat killings occurring. Some of the cult members contact Peter, and a brief meeting between the two occurs, where the detective discovers that the cult leader’s power does not affect him. He also uncovers that a similar set of events took place some 35 years prior.

Now here is where things get weird. His investigation eventually leads him to an old woman who is his birth mother, having found herself impregnated by a strange orb of light while walking home from the New York World’s Fair in 1941, and giving up the child for adoption. He confronts Bernard and discovers the truth - both he and Phillips are the result of "alien abduction/virgin birth by an extraterrestrial (This is beginning to sound more and more like Mormonism). Also here it is alluded to that Heyzeus himself was another such alien birth.

Richard Lynch in God Told Me To

Peter is the result of his human genes being dominant, which is why he is unaware of his true nature, while Bernard is more like their unseen progenitor. Bernard reveals himself to be a hermaphrodite and wishes to spawn a new species with his brother. He further states that all of Peter’s previous attempts at children had died because Peter subconsciously willed them to, but Bernard is strong enough to ward him off. Peter refuses and attacks Bernard, which results in Bernard using his powers to destroy the building and commit suicide. Peter is arrested for murder, and responds to a question as to why he committed the deed with "God told me to”.

Andy Kaufman in God Told me To

            A few other things to mention here. This was the film debut of Andy Kaufman who plays a madman police officer who goes on a shooting spree during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Apparently during the filming, Kaufman, while dressed up in costume, began antagonizing and making insulting gestures to the crowd watching the production. He was so provocative that several of them tried to jump the barricades to beat up Kaufman and had to be held back by the director.

            Additionally the music for the film was originally supposed to be scored by the legendary Bernard Herrman, who was also doing music for Taxi Driver at the time. Apparently Herrman saw the film without music and came up with a few ideas, but died later on that day. The film was dedicated to him. The director then approached another veteran movie composer Miklos Rozsa who refused, stating “God told me not to.”   

Alternate title and poster

            While I love this film, critical opinion is very divided on the idea. In fact Roger Ebert in his book I Hated Hated Hated this Movie only gave it one star. Stating, “there were times when I thought the projectionist was showing the reels in random order, as a quiet joke on the hapless audience. But, no apparently the movie was supposed to be put together in this way, as a sort of fifty-two-card pickup of cinema… As I left the theater, dazed, I saw a crowd across the street. A young man in a straightjacket… was preparing to be suspended in midair hundreds of inches above the ground, and to escape, Houdini style. At the moment he was still standing on the sidewalk- but, believe me, it was still a better show.”

       My suggestion. Watch for yourself and make up your own mind. Caveat Emptor!

                                              The entire film is here.
   For more weirdness try Across the Wounded Galaxy by Rex Hurst

Mormons- The World's First UFO Cult.

            With the recent controversy in the Church of Latter Day Saints, with several thousand people leaving it due to the current demand that parents of homosexual children denounce them and vice versa, I decided to look into the cosmological roots of the Mormon church and … well what I saw sure looks like a UFO cult. Now most religious origin stories, at its core, comes across like a badly scripted D&D adventure. The Mormon religion however comes across like a badly written science fiction story. There are claims that the Book of Mormon is the world’s first science fiction story (Unfortunately that is untrue, the first universally accepted sci-fi novel being Somnium by Johannes Kepler written in 1608). Still I will postulate that Mormonism is the world’s first UFO cult. Allow me to offer some examples to back up my statement.

            Let’s get to the meat of the matter. The God of Mormonism did not create everything ex nilio as did the Hebrew Deity, but instead constructed the world from existing celestial debris. In fact the Mormon God was born a regular guy like you, me, Ghandi, and Hitler. He eventually rose past his mortality through a processes called “eternal progression” and became a divine being. And later on his Jewish son Jesus, or Heyzeus, or Yeshua ben Yoseph (take your pick) followed suit here on Earth.

            This concept of “eternal progression” or “exaltation” is a key element of the Mormon proclamation. That if a person strives for purity and righteousness (as defined by the boys in Salt Lake City) and to be “one with Heyzeus as Heyzeus is one with God”, then a mortal man might become joint-heirs with Heyzeus and become a God of a world. Now this part does sound a lot more like old school D&D, but it gets more sci-fi real quick. All of this happens after you die, naturally.

            The requirements for “exaltation” have changed over time. Originally you had to be white- as the Mormons’s proscribed that dark skin was the Mark of Caine and a sign of damnation. Thus it was forbidden to marry a dark skinned person, and they could never rise up to be even a low level cleric in the Church’s hierarchy. This requirement was changed in 1978 after Jimmy Carter threatened to remove the Church’s tax exempt status.

            Nowadays a Mormon adherent has to undergo a series of sacraments into order to become “perfect”. One is that a man has to have a “celestial marriage” to an opposite sex partner (the opposite part is explicitly stated) via an ordinance of sealing ritual, which goes not only unto death, but well beyond. So be careful, you will be stuck with whomever you marry until the heat death of the universe! The celestial marriage can occur in person, via a proxy strand-in, or even after the person has died. Under Brigham Young multiple celestial marriages for men were required to continue on the road to “eternal progression”. This naturally coincided with the Mormon’s former bigamous practices, the great legal sticking point of their religion. This, along with the murder of Joseph Smith in 1846, caused the Mormons to exile themselves to Utah in 1848, which at the time was outside the borders of the United States. The necessity for a pluralistic marriage was later rescinded in 1890, but the practice continued for some time after and still is in some isolated communities.

            That is how a regular Joe becomes a God. A bit nebulous I know, but the reality is that it is a simple step-by-step process of sacraments, similar to the Catholic Church’s first communion and confirmation. A route by the numbers procedure.

            But what about the Big Man himself? Mormon doctrine teaches that the Earth is not a unique place, but simply one of many planets where human beings live (like Star Wars), all of whom meet in God’s joint after they die. Each of these Earths were crafted by Jehovah and his boy Heyzeus, who shows up and dies on every one. Jehovah himself was born a dude on an unnamed planet where people like us live and eventually rose to become the God that we all know and blame our problems on.
             Where this unnamed planet is has never been stated, but the suggestion is that it is in a parallel universe, as none of the worlds were created until Jehovah showed up. He establishes himself in a place called Kolob, which is either a star or a planet (the word “star” is used interchangeably in The Book of Mormon). One day on Kolob is the equivalent to 1000 Earth years. Where this star or planet is has been up for speculation ever since the idea was written down. Theory’s range from it being the planet Mercury, to being at the center of the Milky Way, to its being a star outside of our galaxy entirely... Or of course it could just be made up.

            Moving onto the birth of Heyzeus, to the Mormon’s: God literally came to Earth, fucked Mary- despite her claims to not be worthy (is this the beginning of rape culture?)- and inseminated her with himself, which overrode her DNA. Thus he created a clone of himself (I assume Jehovah was Jewish in his past incarnation). He does this in order to die and ascend, showing people the true path to immortality, but unfortunately this wasn’t picked up on until over 1800 years after Heyzeus’s execution by the state.

             All of this is very science-fictiony. There are several other cosmological and doctrinal elements which mirror Christianity (regarding Satan and the fall of the Angels, and so on), but they are best summed up in the cartoon below. Enjoy and caveat emptor.

For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

The Wedding at Cana- What a Lousy Miracle!

            Have you ever wondered about the wedding at Cana? The one Heyzeus and his boys crashed around 31 CE. The actual location of Cana, if there ever was one, is unknown. It may have been any one of a dozen little villages in Galilee, or it may have been lost to time, or it may have been completely fictitious.

Reflect upon it for a moment and I will set up the scene. Heyzeus and the boys are hanging out at a wedding party in the town of Cana. The party then runs out of wine. His mother runs up to him and says, “They have no wine.” And Heyzeus snarkily replies (I assume that he had had a few, so it’s excusable), “Oh woman, what had this to do with me? My hour is not yet come.” Meaning don’t bother him, it wasn't time to be nailed to a cross yet.

He then relents to his Jewish mother’s nagging and then orders the servants to fill the wine containers with water and then draw it out again. The servants pour out wine and take it to the head waiter, who tastes it and claims that it was the best served all evening. This miracle is regarded as the first sign among his followers that Heyzeus is the messiah and is walking the road to an impending crucifixion.

I’m going to ignore the fact that it sounds like he just mixed water with the sediment collected at the bottom of the gourds and produced a light version of the vintage. Additionally I’m going to put aside that this story is not written about  in any of the synoptic gospels, only making an appearance in John, which was written much later than the other three - about the second century CE. This act has always struck me as a very odd miracle. It doesn’t really show off much of a compassionate nature or intent- as does the other miracles. It doesn’t involve bringing people back from the dead or curing them of leprosy. It’s not even on par with the feeding of the multitudes, because that was a very public forum and regarded people’s very real need to eat. It was a show of generosity.

The Wedding at Cana comes across as more of a drunken frat trick. “Hey look at me turn water into wine dudes, it’s fucking awesome. Party!” What is the point of it? Is there one, besides him looking cool at a party? Granted I’ve often found this miracle useful is justifying my alcoholism to Christian types, but it serves no real purpose. The Wedding at Cana is the miraculous equivalent of going for a beer run.

Personally I feel that it was thrown into John from a different gospel attributed to a different messiah (there were several other contenders for the position at the time swimming around in Judea), or perhaps from a different religion entirely, maybe a Bacchanalian cult. 

But why staple this new miracle in? What was wrong with the one listed. The answer is simple and deals with numerology. There weren’t enough miracles already listed. John added one in order to reach seven. In ancient numerology, including Kabbalist lore, the number seven represents completeness and perfection in both a spiritual and physical sense. As opposed to the number six, which mankind, human weakness, and the manifestation of the Adversary. Thus man was created on the 6^th day and given six days of labor. God and Heyzeus are one better, Man +1.  

The writers of the Gospel of John needed an extra miracle in order to prop up their notions of Heyzeus’s messianic claim. Thus we have the Wedding at Cana.  So sayeth the word of Rex Hurst!

 For more fun try books by Rex Hurst